With the new academic year underway, we’re starting to see an upswing of scholarly blogging and commentary on the web. One sociologist who has been particularly on fire is Jeff Weintraub at the University of Pennsylvania. I recently posted a quick aside linking to his views economic theory through the lens of Karl Polanyi and Richard Posner’s recent about-on face on Keynesian economics. This followed another recent post in which Weintraub drew upon Monty Python to “explain” rational actor models. And earlier in the summer, he  circulated a commentary on gender and sexuality in Buffy the Vampire Slayer that I found edifying, on point, and surprisingly entertaining. I don’t always agree with Weintraub’s choice of topics or conclusions (and when he posts, he often puts up more than I can read), but he is always well-informed. Andhe formulates and packages his thoughts in a rich, profound, and unrepentant social theoretical tradition.

That in mind, the post I’m highlighting today is Weintraub’s take on the recently released studies of the cost, inefficiencies, misperceptions, and outright misrepresentations of government contracts, contracting, and contractors in an age of neoliberal privatization.

Much of the piece is a repackaging of other reporting and commentary, but it’s also an important piece to call to attention. The material Weintraub gathers has a lot to say about the predictable problems and shortcomings of privatization as well as the crucial role of research, data, information, and scientific analysis and evaluation in bringing these realities to the fore. Indeed, what really caught my eye about Weintraub’s post–and, frankly, what cracked me up–was his re-appropriation of C. Wright Mills’s phrase “crackpot realism” near the end. The Mills term is, as Weintraub just wrote to me in a follow-up, “an absolutely brilliant formulation… for which the applications are, unfortunately, almost limitless.”