public sociology

New & Noteworthy

Our latest includes a new ‘There’s Research on That’ by me on union organizing in the United States. Check it out to learn about some brief history, tactics used by unions and employers, and some of the impacts of unions on workers.

From the Archives

It’s an election year (in case you somehow missed it). Read some pieces by us and our partners to learn more about voting suppression, nationalism, and more!

I recently visited a “Little Free Library” with my kids and found some interesting literature inside. Read this piece from Contexts about the now-well-established phenomenon.

More from our Partners & Community Pages

Contexts‘ latest includes:

Council on Comtemporary Families has a new piece:

New & Noteworthy

This week I posted a new Discovery, ‘Right to Work’ Laws, based on work by Tom VanHeuvelen. In his research, VanHeuvelen finds that workers living in states with ‘Right to Work’ laws, which limit union organizing and strength, are paid 5-12% less than states without ‘Right to Work’ laws.

Over the next several weeks I will also be posting our Best of 2023 pieces. Mallory Harrington’s piece, Defending Against Social Media in Criminal Trials, won our ‘Hook, Line, & Sinker’ Award with the opening line, “Your Tweets, pictures, and messages may be used against you.”

From the Archives

The Holiday season is right around the corner, and so is consumerism. Check out this piece from Sociological Images, 1/3 of People Say Commercialism is the Worst Part of Christmas, to learn more. Ugly sweater season is also here, read The Ugly Christmas Sweater: From Ironic Nostalgia to festive simulation to inform yourself before donning your ugliest sweater.

More from our Partners & Community Pages

Contexts has two new pieces to read:

Council on Contemporary Families a new read:

First Publics has a new Dialogue on Intro Soc Textbooks:

Sociological Images latest includes:

Image: A set of question marks lies scattered on a black surface, most are black but a few are red. Image via pixabay, Pixabay License.

The article “Community-Engaged Research: What It Is and Why It Matters” appears in the Winter 2022 issue of Footnotes published by the American Sociological Association

At least since the movement emerged in the early 2000s, I’ve been a proponent and practitioner of all things public sociology. I edited Contexts magazine from 2008 to 2011 with Chris Uggen, fellow sociology professor at the University of Minnesota, and together we built The Society Pages.org, host of the largest collection of sociology websites on the internet. I helped create a senior capstone course based on service-learning placements for undergraduate majors in sociology at Minnesota. I’ve written op-eds and collaborated with various advocates and organizations, policy initiatives, and media projects. When I was president of the Midwest Sociological Society in 2016, I chose the theme “Sociology and its Publics: The Next Generation” for meetings. But in recent years, the public-facing sociology I’ve found most intriguing and significant is community-engaged research (CER).

I learned most of what I know about CER while helping launch the American Sociological Association’s Sociology Action Network (SAN) and serving on its Advisory Board over the past few years. SAN is the initiative created by Council to help sociologists interested in community-based, pro bono work get connected with small, nonprofit organizations, agencies, projects, and initiatives looking for services, assistance, and support from professional sociologists. The driving idea was that large numbers of academic sociologists who have both the skills and the passion to contribute to concrete, on-the-ground efforts to address social problems and issues don’t always know how to get connected with appropriate organizations and groups, even those in their own communities who could benefit from their energy and expertise. It was almost like we needed a matchmaking service—a sociological Tinder—to help sociologists and organizations find each other. Indeed, one of SAN’s first projects was the creation of this service—thus, the “network” in our title.

In addition to our professional matchmaking work, SAN hosted special sessions at ASA’s Annual Meetings; worked to find and promote links and resources for community-based collaborations; and, thanks to the hard work of Carol Glasser of Minnesota State-Mankato, created an online resource page with links to webinars, best practices, and sample documents for those interested in doing this work. SAN also became the review panel for ASA’s long-standing Community Actions Research Initiative (CARI) grant program, which provides funding for sociologists who are collaborating with community organizations to address social problems.

I have learned a lot in the process. One of those lessons was about how many different organizations, programs, and community leaders dedicated to social problem-solving are out there in the world right now, and how much they need our assistance. Another was how difficult it is for a national professional organization to facilitate networking, connections, and the exchange of information at various local and regional levels. But much of what I’ve learned—from the sociologists I’ve met and worked with on and through my role on the SAN Advisory Board—is about community-engaged research itself, as a distinctive approach to research, knowledge-creation, and public engagement—what it is; who does it and how committed and skilled they are; and why it is such an important part of our discipline, its legacies, and its traditions. That’s what I’d like to share briefly with you here.

Definitions

Let me begin with the usual proviso that what we call “community-engaged research” can be defined in many different ways and often goes by several different names—community-based scholarship; participatory action research; research-practice partnerships; or collaborative social justice research. Some see it as a branch of applied sociology, others as its own distinct thing. But whatever we call it, this approach to research and sociology refers to initiatives that involve some kind of mutually beneficial collaboration among academic researchers and folks from outside of the academy who are collecting data, offering programs, or creating services that speak to the needs of specific communities and target populations on the ground.

The nature of these relationships and the kinds of contributions sociologists make to these collaborative projects vary widely. Engagement can range from consultation on vision and mission to data collection and needs-assessment using surveys, interviews, or focus groups. It can include advising on program design and policy development as well as conducting program evaluations and assessments. It also often involves some type of public or legislative advocacy or public communication (via op-eds, position papers, or formal reports). Community-based work spans the gamut of sociological methods and subfields, and can refer to policies, programs, and initiatives that are local and issue-specific, as well as those that are broader and more encompassing. Many sociologists who do this work operate at multiple levels and across a range of areas all at once.

Since I came to understand community-engaged scholarship in the context of public sociology, I find it useful to clarify the distinctions between the two as well. Public sociology, or publicly engaged sociology as I prefer to call it, refers to any sociological research, writing, and work happening outside of the academy. Among the characteristics and principles that distinguish community-based sociology from other forms of public scholarship are that it is oriented not only to the dissemination and application of general knowledge, but also to the construction of new knowledge, ideas, and approaches. In addition, the principles of relationship-building, reciprocity, and responsibility are far more “up front” and indeed imperative in this collaborative work than other, more standard forms of public engagement. And finally, community-based work can involve advocacy, but is not actually, or even necessarily, normative. Indeed, oftentimes participatory action research involves surprisingly basic and conventional social theories, data, and methodological approaches, albeit applied and adapted to unique cases and local contexts that help develop or improve programs that can make a difference in the lives of individuals and communities.

For what it is worth, the conception of public sociology that I have employed here is a bit broader than Michael Burawoy’s original definitions (Hartmann 2017) in that it includes sociology that employs instrumental as well as reflexive (or critical) knowledge—that is, it can be policy oriented or advocacy centered, or even both. The key thing for me is not what kind of sociological research and knowledge we are talking about, and not whether its politics are oriented toward reform or more radical change, or something else—only that we are talking about any and all sociology that happens outside of the academy, which is precisely what makes community-engaged research, with all of its various manifestations and forms, so compelling.

Significance

So, why should we care about this unique branch or brand of sociology? Why should those of us who don’t do community-based research ourselves be interested in any of this? There are many reasons that come to mind, and intellectual and scholarly benefits are at the top of my list.

Sociology is a discipline in need of constant reinvention and renewal. Working with concrete, community-based initiatives, organizations, and advocates provides academic sociologists with opportunities to put our theories and methods to the test—to assess how they vary in different contexts and conditions, to observe new developments in the world, and to identify underlying mechanisms and multiple modes of understanding and engaging the world. Community-engaged work helps us understand the applications and implications of our knowledge, and even develop new knowledge and theories about the social world. Even more, community-engaged work provides real-world, empirical cases from which to reflect seriously on some of the biggest and most fundamental questions of the discipline and on knowledge construction more generally: How is knowledge produced? Who produces it? How is it used? And who benefits—or doesn’t?

Working with concrete, community-based initiatives, organizations, and advocates provides academic sociologists with opportunities to put our theories and methods to the test

Community-engaged research requires us to grapple with these matters of epistemology and ontology. It forces us into needed reflection on the complexities of objectivity, positionality, and reflexivity, the constructedness of science, and the contextuality and utility of knowledge. Research that is fundamentally embedded in, and engaged with, communities also helps us to see how sociology can be complicit with power and privilege, as well as a source of social progress and change.

Framed as such, it is important to emphasize how many of the time-honored, ivory tower assumptions and conceits about our own work—our status as intellectuals and researchers and our role in the world—can be turned on their head by community-engaged research. In collaborating and coordinating with others, we realize that much of the work is not so much what we have to give (or “dole out”) to them, but rather how much we don’t know—that is, how much we sociologists have to learn from those doing the work of society right there on the ground, every day, without fanfare, recognition, or great reward.

There are practical and professional considerations here as well. CER is especially attractive to many graduate students in our discipline. For some sociology graduate students, community-based research provides a way to get started on research that can be personally rewarding, as well as lead to theses, dissertations, or other, longer-term projects. For others, it provides numerous and immediate opportunities for making good on their visions of using sociological theory and research to help solve social problems or address injustices—the very reasons many came to our field in the first place. Still other graduate students, when faced with the uncertainties of the job market and the changing nature of work in higher education, simply see better, more meaningful professional prospects in this work than elsewhere.

And it isn’t just graduate students. A large and increasingly diverse number of scholars in our field also care about this kind of work and do it regularly, even primarily. These are our colleagues, classmates, and students, our friends, and potential collaborators and coauthors. And there are more community-based researchers than those of us at elite doctoral universities with very high research activity may realize. This was one lesson I learned and a dominant theme during my time in the leadership at the Midwest Sociological Society. Action-oriented, community-based research was perhaps the most common and most meaningful kind of scholarship in which many of my colleagues at regional universities, liberal arts institutions, and community colleges were engaged. These are academic sociologists who do a lot of teaching yet are also committed to both scholarly research and giving back to their communities. In a world where time and energy are limited, community-engaged work provides an avenue to make good on all the goals, demands, and rewards of being an academic—organically and simultaneously.

Many questions about community-engaged sociology remain ahead:

  • What resources or support should ASA be developing and providing to our members interested in doing community-based work?
  • Do we need new outlets or venues, or even a journal, to better support, promote, and coordinate this work and sociologists doing this kind of work—and ultimately to bring that work closer to the center of the discipline?
  • What kinds of course work and resources are necessary to train graduate students to do this work?
  • How do we properly recognize and reward this work in our discipline and in the academy more generally when it comes to things like hiring, tenure and promotion, and merit?

Some of these questions will be addressed by other articles in this issue of Footnotes; others will remain unanswered for now. But there is no doubt in my mind that how we answer these questions—and the extent to which we support and facilitate and understand community-based research—is a crucial task for our discipline and its future.

I turned 50 this summer so maybe I’m feeling a little sentimental. Nevertheless, in this season of tumult, Trump, and 140 character tweets that pass for news, I have found myself sustained by the some of the most old-fashioned modes of media—weekly and monthly news magazines, and, more specifically, long-form journalism. Here are some of my favorites from the past few weeks, categorized in the ways that I think my sociology friends and colleagues would find meaningful:

Social movements: Nathan Heller’s analysis of the efficacy of collective protests “Out of Action: Do Protests Work? The New Yorker, August 2017.

Popular culture: “How American Lost its Mind,” a piece on culture and populism by Kurt Andersen in The Atlantic, September 2017. (Other solid treatments roughly in this category/vein: “The New Paranoia by Colin Dickey in July’s The New Republic; and “European Disunion: What the Rise of Populist Movements Means for Democracy” by Yascha Mounk, also in TNR, August/September).

Sociology of knowledge: David Session in The New Republic, “The Rise of the Thought Leader: How the Superrich have Funded a New Class of Intellectual,” June 2017.

Media studies: a trip down memory lane by my favorite television critic of how Donald Trump built his popularity (and personality) in and through the small screen, Emily Nussbaum in The New Yorker, July 2017.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Traditional journalism doesn’t (and can’t) solve all the problems of our fractious world, and indeed I sometimes worry that all of this great writing and reading can be its own kind of distraction or delusion. But the clear-thinking, the ability to put things in broader context, and the commitment to synthesizing social facts and cultural complexities—all qualities that us sociologists aspire to—displayed in these pieces is admirable and much needed. And I can only shake my head in awe for the way these writers, reporters, and critics are able to produce such great, insightful content in such timely and engaging fashion.

 

Happily, many of our fellow sociologists are showing off their spider-senses in public writing with big audiences and broad, synthestic ideas.
Happily, many of our fellow sociologists are showing off their spider-senses in public writing with big audiences and broad, synthetic ideas woven from rigorous research.

Sociologists are uniquely positioned to pull together research and provide perspective on almost any of the major problems that confront the human species today—from climate change to terrorism and war, inequality, food scarcity, human rights, criminal justice policies. Anything. You name it, there are sociologists working on it and writing about it and helping large public audiences to understand what we are up against. I’ve believed that at least since I was editor of Contexts, and probably long before that.

One example I’ve given numerous times over the past couple of years is an article Eric Klinenberg wrote for The New Yorker in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy. It called attention to how unprepared most American cities are for the effects of climate change. Klinenberg’s piece was big picture and beautifully written. It also synthesized research findings from other fields (including the natural sciences) and packaged them in a way that not only made the work coherent, but really highlighted its implications for citizens and social life (for an overview from our Clippings team, click here.)

This week brings a few more wonderful examples. One comes from the most recent class of MacArthur Genius Grant recipients, Matt Desmond, a sociologist at Harvard. Writing in The New Yorker (again!—it was only about a year ago that I christened the magazine “champion of serious sociology“), Desmond helps draw our attention to the crisis in housing and evictions that is so deeply implicated in the problems of urban policy, crime, and poverty all across the country:

For decades, social scientists, journalists, and policymakers have focused on jobs, public assistance, parenting, and mass incarceration as the central problems faced by the American poor, overlooking just how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty. Not everyone living in a distressed neighborhood is associated with gang members, parole officers, employers, social workers, or pastors. But nearly everyone has a landlord.

“For many poor Americans,” he writes with authority and conviction, “eviction never ends.”

And then there’s Adia Harvey Wingfield, professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis’s reborn sociology department. Drawing on the pioneering work of Arlie Hochschild (along with Minnesota’s own Jennifer Pierce and Millsaps College’s Louwanda Evans), Wingfield writes in The Atlantic about the consequences of the emotional labor done by women in the service industry, “How Service with a Smile Takes a Toll on Women.”

Writing—and writers—like this show off many things, not least of which is the synthesizing and contextualizing ability that characterizes the discipline of sociology, that enterprise I told my intro students last night is can be called the “big tent” of the social sciences.

 

Julian Povey//Flickr CC.
Julian Povey//Flickr CC.

This fall I’ve been working on the address I’m supposed to give as President of the Midwest Sociological Society in Chicago this coming March (23-26). Playing off of our program theme of a year ago, it is tentatively titled: “Sociology and its Publics: The Next Generation.” Among the themes I’ve been reading about and trying to think through are the social conditions and institutional infrastructures of public engagement—and very high on that list are all the new social media forms that began to appear just as the thing we call “public sociology” was beginning to be named and championed by Michael Buroway.

If you are interested in such topics, Kieran Healy has a great piece on social media and public sociology that you should take a look at. It is based on a talk he gave recently at UC–Berkeley.

Almost as if by ESP, Joel Best of the University of Delaware sent me this little reflection he wrote about the evolution of media coverage of his research on fear and Halloween over the years. It seems both timely and appropriate to share (with his permission).

“Experiencing the Death of Print.”

In 1985, I published my research on fears of Halloween sadism, first in a sociology journal and then in Psychology Today magazine. My principal finding—that I could not find any reports of children being killed or seriously injured by contaminated treats received while trick-or-treating—struck the press as newsworthy, and I wound up giving a couple dozen interviews that year.

That was the beginning of a seasonal job. For 31 years, I have fielded late-October calls from reporters at all sorts of media—a few hundred in all, I suppose. The great majority came from newspapers. Typically, a reporter would be assigned to write a story about Halloween safety and, not really knowing how to proceed, she’d often check LEXIS-NEXIS to see what other reporters wrote on the topic the previous year, find me quoted, and then give me a call.

This year had a normal amount of traffic—eight requests for interviews, which covered the usual topics. But there was one difference: I spoke to only one newspaper reporter. All the other interviews were for podcasts, websites, or other Internet-based media.

We hear a lot about the death of print: newspapers and magazines have declining circulations. Young people, in particular, prefer to get their news through electronic means. As a result, newspapers are publishing fewer pages of news and employing fewer reporters to write stories. The inevitable result is fewer feature stories about Halloween safety, and therefore fewer print journalists contacting me. Print journalism may not be dead, but it doesn’t seem that healthy. Once again, Mills has been proven right: the sociological imagination can link my personal experiences to larger public issues.

Images excerpted from New Yorker artists Simon Prades, Leo Espinosa, and Tony Rodriguez.
Images excerpted from New Yorker artists Simon Prades, Leo Espinosa, and Tony Rodriguez.

We sociologists tend to have a chip on our shoulder. We tend to think—not without substantial evidence, of course—that our research and ideas are not particularly visible or influential in the public realm, both in general and especially in comparison to our social science cousins. Maybe we should all be reading The New Yorker. It seems like we’ve got a few champions over there.

Exhibit A: A few weeks back, for example, the magazine ran an intriguing and insightful profile of Howie Becker. This was not a fluff piece. Inspired by Becker’s current popularity among a certain set of French sociologists in Paris (where the 86-year-old Becker now spends a great deal of his time), Adam Gopnik’s* article thoughtfully walks readers through Becker’s intellectual career and distinctive way of thinking about deviance, culture, and collective activity. This wonderfully written piece serves, I think, not only to introduce a broad, general audience of readers to one of the truly iconic (and iconoclastic) figures in sociology and his uniquely sociological worldview. More than this, it frames and situates Becker’s work in the broader history and current debates of the field in a subtle, sophisticated way that I believe proves provocative and edifying no matter how much we may already know and think about the discipline and Becker’s contributions to it. (For you insiders: Becker directs a zinger or two at Pierre Bourdieu along the way.)

Exhibit B: Last May, a review of recent books on office design by Jill Lepore was framed around a discussion of C. Wright Mills’s classic 1951 study White Collar. Although ostensibly about new studies of the new trends in office work, this review, at least in my reading, seems more fascinated with and driven by what Mills and his sociological perspective contribute to our understanding of life and work and contemporary work culture than anything written recently from more specialized scholars and fields. more...

The Star Trib keeps it general. We're hoping to get specific.
The Star Trib keeps it general. We’re hoping to get specific.

Welcome back! Wait, many of you never went anywhere. You’ve been reading TSP all summer. You guys have been great. It was me who’s been on hiatus, buried in book writing among other things. (One of those manuscripts, on migration with Syed Ali, is done; another, my long-suffering study of midnight basketball, is close… very close.) Anyway, with the start of a new academic year, I always feel a little like Mr. Kotter.

I am excited about the year ahead. On the teaching front, I’ll be offering—for the first time—a new graduate seminar on “great books” in sociology, a course that grew out of a few posts I did wrote winter, right here on The Society Pages. In terms of the website, we’ve got a great new graduate student board shaping up and we are just about ready to unveil a facelift for TSP (we think it’s pretty sweet).

One of our goals for The Society Pages this year, both online and in our social media, is to do a better job of covering the field of sociology taken as a whole. That’s no easy task. Some of this will involve bringing in more content on topics where there is a lot of great sociological research and writing, but that hasn’t been represented well on our site to date: for example, education, health and medicine, population studies. But doing a better job of covering the field also includes bringing in types of research that are also difficult to find on the web, but needed more than ever: basic social facts, emerging demographic trends, and empirical evaluations of public policy and conventional wisdom. For reasons that aren’t too hard to figure, there’s a lot of opinion and editorializing online, but not nearly so much accumulation and reporting of social facts and useful empirical information.

As fate would have it, our local newspaper ran two big pieces on the OpinionExchange page this very morning that seem to underscore these points and goals. One was about “the situation” in Ferguson, the other about the proliferation of flawed studies—what the author calls “pop-sociology and pop-psychology” in the news and in our social media streams. The former argued the need for more information before taking stands on Mike Brown’s death and its aftermath (though it didn’t have much to say about the broader social contexts and public policies sociologists have focused on in recent weeks). The latter was about how scholars in certain fields still seem to misunderstand the difference between correlation and causation. Specifics aside, both ran under the subtitle: “We need more facts.” We here at TSP couldn’t agree more—and will do our best to help provide those in the weeks and months ahead.

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A few resources for the interested reader hoping for a little social science around that “Ferguson situation”:

Reflecting on Ferguson? There’s Research on That!

Social Fact: The Homicide Divide.”

Social Fact: Death—Not the Great Equalizer?

Explaining and Eliminating Racial Profiling.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education: “How Professors in St. Louis are Teaching the Lessons of Ferguson’s Unrest.”

The Washington Post Wonkblog: “How Decades of Criminal Records Hold Back Towns Like Ferguson.”

The Average White American’s Social Network is 1% Black.”

What Are Rappers Really Saying About the Police?

The Role of Empathy in Crime, Policing, and Justice.”

Failing to Understand When Non-White People Distrust the Police.”

How Targeted Deterrence Helps Police Reduce Gun Deaths.”

Who Would You Shoot?

Roundtable: Social Scientists Studying Social Movements.”

Roundtable: The Revolutions Will Not Be Globalized?

Reading the Camouflage: ‘You Are Now Enemy Combatants’.

Photo via MarkShoots flickr.com CC. Click for original.
Photo via MarkShoots flickr.com CC. Click for original.

Nicholas Kristof called out professors today, saying we’ve “fostered a culture that glorifies arcane unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience.” While the snarkmeister in me is tempted to return serve — couldn’t one say the same thing about the Times? — I actually concur with Mr. Kristof on several key points.

To paraphrase, he cites dreadful writing, a lack of political and ideological diversity, a dearth of public intellectuals, obstructionist professional associations, little social media presence, “hidden-away” journals, and a reward structure that privileges technique and abstraction over relevance, clear thinking, and broad dissemination.  In truth, we at TSP make largely the same claims in pitching our li’l project to authors, readers, and potential partners. We use different words, of course, but the whole point of TSP is to help bring social science to broader visibility and influence. This mission drives all the choices we’ve made: to stay open-access, to put our resources into a best-in-the-business professional editor and site designer, and to partner with other groups who “get” our mission and vision — like WW Norton, the Scholars Strategy Network, and Contexts magazine.

While many academics feel marginalized by mainstream media and society, Mr. Kristof points out that we’re also self-marginalizing. As a scholar, an editor, and an academic administrator, I’d agree that at least some of our injuries are self-inflicted.  For example, I was gratified when Attorney General Holder used some of my felon voting research last Monday. We’d undertaken the project with both science and policy in mind, in hopes of doing good sociology that would also encourage the sort of  national conversation now taking place. When the Times wrote a characteristically smart op-ed on Tuesday, friends asked why they linked to an old working paper rather than the polished journal article. This is likely because the article remains “hidden away” behind a paywall. I suppose they could have secured permissions from the authors, the journals, and the professional association that owns the journals, but we all tend to work on timelines that are a wee bit more protracted than the speech-on-Monday/op-ed-on-Tuesday news cycle.

While we can’t solve all of the problems of academic self-marginalization, we can at least offer Nicholas Kristof a free subscription to TheSocietyPages.org. And we’ll continue to extend the same offer to every one of the million-plus readers stopping by every month.

Picture 2

 

 

Screenshot by See-ming Lee via Flickr CC. Click for original.
Screenshot by See-ming Lee via Flickr CC. Click for original.

“I’ve got a bone to pick with you!”

Such was the rather awkward beginning of a recent conversation I had with a friend in the social sciences—let’s call him “Norbert”—here at the University of Minnesota. Even more disconcerting, it turned out that Norbert (who is not a sociologist by training) was talking about my Editor’s Desk post from a week or so ago, the one trying to specify the distinctive elements of the sociological imagination. It’s not that I minded being challenged—I actually thrive on the thrust and parry of intellectual discussion and debate. It was more that I didn’t see it coming. Aside from a little kerfuffle about wholism and holism, the post had circulated fairly widely and had generated a number of complementary comments and supportive emails. more...