I think I am. Part of the reason involves the usual, nearing-the-finish line fatigue of our once-every-four-years Presidential elections. Another reason for my weariness is that we’ve featured so much political content on the site in recent weeks that it seems like TSP has become the social scientific equivalent of Fox News or MSNBC! “All politics, all the time.” It’s all great stuff, mind you (see for yourself!), and in fact we are in the process of compiling the best of it into a special volume to be published with W.W. Norton, replete with website tie-ins and supplementary teaching and learning content. Nevertheless, I just don’t like to get pigeon-holed or hemmed in—and politics is still far from the only thing we do, or aspire to do.

Still, I think my ennui might go deeper. I guess I’m feeling kind of stuck, moored by a perverse culture of and attitudes about politics in the United States. On the one hand, I’ve got all of these intellectual colleagues, collaborators, and contributors—those I hang out with on campus, meet with at conferences, and work with as contributors  to TSP—who are so interested and passionate about politics. On the other, there are many other people in my life—from students and neighborhood friends to parents I see at youth sporting events, those I go to church with, family members, and even my own kids—who have no interest in politics. In this political season, they are kind of fed up with the topic and process altogether, and maybe they’re starting to take me with them!

In spite of all that would seem to be at stake in these elections, it is easy to feel down and disconnected when you see some of the ads, see so many ads, don’t see things going your way, or feel disappointed or betrayed by the performance of politicians, some of whom you worked for, contributed to, and voted for enthusiastically. But I think there is also something else, something deeper underlying the cynicism and malaise so many feel about politics in this country. It has to do with our strange, conflicted attitudes toward government or the State, as well as our deeper difficulties in really knowing how to live in community and work collectively toward a common good.

In trying to take a break recently, I found myself reading a review of Alan Ryan’s new, two-volume history of Western political philosophy On Politics. (Yup, this is a Norton book, and no, this wasn’t much of a break—more of an attempt for distance and perspective). Anyway, it sounds like there is a lot of a great food for thought in the book, but the line that caught my attention in the review (written by Adam Kirsch in the New Yorker) was that “Western political philosophy… exhibits a recurring tendency to imagine that a life without politics is the best life.”

This insight, I think, explains a lot about our ambivalent orientation toward politics in the U.S. It explains, for example, why we often put such high hopes on erstwhile political outsiders, on anti-institutional activism and organizing (be it of the Left or the Right), or single issue social movements or causes. That government is best which governs least. The problem is not just our political processes or institutional systems. Our individualism makes it so that we don’t really know how to organize around and commit to institutions and bodies in the first place. And a deep problem with collective commitment is only made worse by the fact that we also harbor such high hopes and unrealistic expectations for a moral world without the complexities, confusions, conflicts, and messiness of the real (political) world. We don’t really understand government or politics, but we deeply, fervently hope and expect a broader social good to emerge and organize itself.

This past Sunday was Reformation on the Protestant Church calendar. In recognition, the choir I sing in performed a Luther Cantata with a wonderful little line, both musical and rhetorical, expressing hope for “peace and good government.”  “That’s so partisan,” one of my fellow bass members scoffed at a break in rehearsal. “What do you mean?” I asked. “Come on,” he said, “good government? You are such a liberal.” As in, how can you really believe there can be good government. I think he was joking, but it spoke volumes.

We’ve found a friend! No, really, The Society Pages would like to formally introduce you (assuming you haven’t yet met) to the Scholars Strategy Network.

Let us explain. By now, our readers know a few things about The Society Pages (TSP, as we like to call it; social science that matters and all that):

• We ask scholars to share their knowledge in a way that’s publicly accessible, but never dumbed-down
• We give away our content for free online
• We’re non-partisan and our authors speak for themselves

Well, as it turns out, these are just a few of the things we share with Theda Skocpol’s big new initiative, the Scholars Strategy Network (of course, these are also a few reasons we signed on as SSN members ourselves earlier in the year). Not even a year old, the SSN now boasts over 100 members and has 8 regional chapters. What really makes the network unique is its goal of providing information not just for the public, but for policy makers who want to draw on solid social science and practical recommendations from leading researchers.

Through their policy briefs and “basic facts” pieces, SSN helps the evidence-based research of academia find its way into government in the most direct way possible: by informing citizens and their elected officials. These short, accessibly written briefs summarize key research findings, present basic facts on timely topics, and spell out policy options on issues of immediate public and political concern. Prepared by a stellar cast of leading scholars (folks like Jacob Hacker, Doug Massey, Ruth Milkman, and Suzanne Mettler), these are really great and useful pieces, and dozens of them are available—all for free—on topics ranging from jobs creation and economic growth to health and education reform, immigration policy, elections, and the environment.

To help SSN expand its reach, we’ll be featuring a number of their policy briefs and “basic facts” pieces in full-text in a special SSN area of our website in the coming months. We’ll also be pointing out particularly relevant pieces for you to go explore on their site (where you can always download a PDF of every article—and for free, did we say that?), highlighting SSN scholars on our Twitter account and in Office Hours interviews, and otherwise inviting you to learn more about the network.

In the meantime, we invite you to sneak a quick peek for yourselves. You’ll see that more than a few friends of and contributors to TSP are involved, including Minnesota’s own Larry Jacobs, one of the four featured scholars for the inaugural month of June. You should can also scroll through SSN’s brand new collection of original research briefs. Close followers of TSP will quickly realize, in fact, that over the past few months we’ve cited or linked to some of this great material already—on immigration policy (Kathy Fennelly), tax cuts and Republicans (Monica Prasad), and the role of government in economic innovation (Fred Block and Matthew Keller), just to name a few.

Anyway, this is all just offer a hearty TSP welcome to the Pages, SSN!

The success of TSP owes a great deal to the rise of public sociology. And no single individual played a bigger role in facilitating that rise than Berkeley sociologist Michael Burawoy who basically invented the term almost a decade ago and then made it the focus of the annual sociology meetings he organized during his presidency of the ASA back in 2004. In recent years, Burawoy has been devoting his considerable energies to another project: that of building a more truly global, international sociology.  To that end Burawoy, now President of the International Sociological Association, has launched a new online publication called “Global Dialogue.”

Global Dialogue, which appears 5 times a year and in 13 languages, is partly a professional newsletter that attempts to keep readers up to-date with events in the ISA, reports on international conferences and meetings, and announcements about journals, that sort of thing.  But Burawoy’s latest brainchild is also something of a journal/magazine. Drawing upon the extraordinary, ongoing research and dedication of editorial teams of sociologists from all over the world, Global Dialogue offers a sociological lens on current events, underlining the relevance of sociological research, writing, and insight to politics, current affairs, and other public debates far beyond the limits of our usual domestic emphasis.  Which brings me, finally, to Sesame Street.

It turns out that the latest issue of GD2.5 has a wonderful little piece from Tamara Kay at Harvard on how Sesame Street has been adopted and adapted in countries and countries around the globe.  In Kay’s skillful, sociological telling, the global distribution of Sesame Street is a story of how American cultural products circulate through transnational channels. It is also about how local cultures transform global cultural objects into legitimate, even authentic local forms.

Talk about timing! Just as American Democrats and Republicans squabble over funding for public television under the guise of Mitt Romney’s tough love stance toward Big Bird, Kay’s article reminds us Americans that even our culture and our politics, our seemingly distinctive and self-contained culture and politics, isn’t just about us. This wasn’t exactly Kay’s point, of course; indeed, she wrote the piece well before the Presidential debates brought the iconic kids show back into the media spotlight. But I have to think this is precisely the kind of international perspective and global lesson Burawoy had in mind in launching this new venture. Rest assured, I think we’ll make a point of keeping up with Global Dialogues in the weeks and months ahead. Maybe you’ll want to as well.

Have you seen or heard about this piece in the Chronicle on Higher Education last week calling (sort of) for a moratorium on doing peer review for academic journals published by big, for-profit companies?  I think I’ve lost count of how many people have mentioned it to me or sent me the link.

The piece is by Hugh Gusterson, a professor of cultural studies and anthropology at George Mason University. Gusterson is fed up with how much free labor we academics provide to the for-profit presses that publish so many of our peer-reviewed scholarly publications these days. Basically, according to Gusterson, we continue to do review prospective journal articles without compensation even as the presses that benefit from our labor are making huge dollars. For example, publishing giant Elseveier, according to Gusterson, recorded profits of 36% on revenues of $3.2 billion (yes, “b” not “m”) this past year. Their CEO’s salary was $4.6 million.  And we get nothing back. Talk about labor exploitation. Adding insult to injury, Gusterson was recently required by one of these operations to pay $400 for the right to reprint his own writing in a book of his own essays.

Food for thought here, to be certain, not only because we and our students all review for scholarly journals regularly but also (or perhaps especially) because we here at TSP use unpaid peer-review for all of our white papers (not to mention for some features and other content like our roundtables and podcasts) and have a publication deal with W.W. Norton, a for-profit operation.  The key for us, though, is our commitment to open-access, on-line publishing for the site.

Here’s how our deal works: We publicize and distribute all our articles and content on the site in a completely free, open-access model. We are committed to this model because our whole goal is public dissemination and circulation of our materials. In exchange for their help in supporting the site, Norton gets an exclusive commercial right to publish hard versions of our original work, but TSP and the authors retain non-commercial rights (they’re welcome to post their article elsewhere online or publish it in a volume of their own work). Norton will also pay royalties if a piece is published in a hard-copy volume, splitting them evenly between the authors and TSP. We don’t expect it to be more than “burrito money,” but we really like the idea that we can distribute the content without charging readers *and* return a little money to contributors.

So maybe we’re not the biggest, baddest, best capitalists of all time, but it seems to be working for the moment. Be curious to get your ideas and reactions. And maybe next time the subject of publishing and financing comes up, I’ll ask Chris to tell  you about how paywalls limit the public impact of our work.

Have you have seen the email floating around (see below) about a certain politician’s horse-theif ancestor “Remus,” “explained” by the campaign as a “famous cowboy” whose “business empire” included the “acquisition of valuable equestrian assets”? Though the bit was obviously intended to “out” the politician and his campaign for cynical spin, I was actually quite amused and impressed by the genuinely creative ways in which an otherwise nefarious past was repackaged, in particular the sentence that described the ne’erdowell’s death by hanging as having “passed away during an important civic function held in his honor when the platform upon which he was standing collapsed.” (The kicker of the email is a picture that purports to be the only known photo of the man standing on the gallows in Montana territory.) I liked it so much I was planning to write it up as an example of the brilliant use of rhetoric and writing—until, that is, I learned it wasn’t true.

According to snopes.com, the story has been circulated many times in the last decade or so—first (or at least in the first instance they document), the Montana swindler was a relative of Tipper Gore or Hillary Rodham Clinton, depending upon which email you received back in 2000.  Since then, the long-lost uncle has had a few name changes and been linked to George W. Bush (and of course H.W.), Alaska’s Ted Stevens, Canadian politician Stephane Dion, Joe Biden, and, in the version I received this weekend, Harry Reid. So suddenly the narrative—or, really, my narrative—had to change from political rhetoric to urban legend.

There is a lot to say about such legends or rumors and how they circulate both in social networks and electronic circles—indeed, Gary Alan Fine wrote a bit for us in Contexts on the topic not too long ago. It is curious how such ideas resonate and make their rounds, playing off of what we want to believe as much as anything else. To take hold, even rumors need to be framed correctly for their audience. Would I have dismissed this one immediately had the party of the politician in question been different, either springing to their defense or assuming it was 100% correct? Would I have taken it more seriously had it not been written with such glee and humor? Would it not have stuck had it been done up sloppily, a quick statement: “Harry Reid’s distant relative was a horse thief. His campaign has been really weird in acknowledging it, slipping around the facts to say only that the relative was a “famous cowboy” who maintained “horse assets” and died in a stage accident. Can we trust Harry Reid?” Given my own political leanings (and what my friends and colleagues know of them), it’ll be interesting to see who the next horse thief will be, and to whom he’ll be said to be related. Now taking bets on the next rumor!

The new, summer 2012 issue of Contexts magazine came out last week and we’ve got some of the best, most exciting content now at Contexts.org in our community pages section.

One is a piece from Michael Schudson on Rosa Parks. Schudson, an expert on media and communications who is known in particular for his work on collective memory, explains what we know (or think we know) about the civil rights icon and what we consistently get wrong.  Trained as a sociologist, Schudson, writes a regular column on social scientific research on the media for the Columbia Journalism Review, and is a shining example and inspiration of how to write well and bring sociological insight to broader public audiences and visiblity.  In fact, our podcast team interviewed him recently about the new second edition of his well-known and widely influential Sociology of News.

Also worth checking out are the sociological commentaries on the successes and failures of Obama’s first term as President. Taken as a whole, these pieces provide a rich, varied, and probably representative vision of how sociologists think about Obama and his Presidency to date—as well as fits well with the wide ranging collection of articles and exchanges on politics that have appeared in TSP in recent months. Some are predictable, others a little less orthodox. For example, Fred Block, an expert on innovation and economic develoment, says that one of the unrealized successes of the Obama administration are its achievements in funding clean energy technologies. Alejandro Portes, who works on race, ethnicity, and immigration writes about the failure to produce a new immigration policy even as unauthorized migration has dropped precipitously in recent years. Indeed, according to Portes, “the real threat at present is to American agriculture, with farmers’ organizations loudly complaining about crops rotting in the fields due to lack of migrant labor.”

And then there is Richard Lachmann’s fundamentally sociological analysis of the structural barriers that have stood in the way of the President making good on his agenda in realms ranging from health care and education to welfare and industry. What I found particularly compelling and insightful about Lachmann’s piece was his claim that success on these fronts in a second term would rely primarily on not so much on Obama’s political skills as on the administration’s ability to recognize and utilize the regulatory powers of the Presidency. I don’t know for sure that Lachmann is correct but it does give one hope if Obama is re-elected and it is certainly a fine example of the kind of institutional analysis that sociologists can contribute to our understanding of the political process.

And while I’m on the topic of TSP shout-outs: if you haven’t already, give a quick read to Phil Cohen’s “Should Every Sociologist Blog?” on FamilyInequality. A version appeared in the latest edition of the ASA’s Footnotes newsletter, and I particularly liked how Cohen compared blogging with C. Wright Mills’ famous prescription to “keep a file” in the famous appendix to his 1959 classic The Sociological Imagination, “On Intellectual Craftsmanship.”

Ritual Solidarity. Communitas. Collective Effevesence. Whatever sociological term you choose–and we’ve got a lot of them–it was on full display over the past few days at the annual sociology meetings in Denver, especially on Sunday night at the long anticipated TSP/Norton event.  I don’t know that Sunday’s was actually the “best ASA party ever,” but is the first time that any such words have been applied to any such event I’ve been associated with (though i suspect that a few of the folks who used such rhetoric may still have been a bit under the influence when they sent those emails).  Anyway, in addition to the sheer fun of hanging out, renewing old sociological friendships, and making new ones, the past few days provided a fabulous opportunity to celebrate all that we have accomplished in the past year and look ahead to more and more of our partnership with Norton and the indefatigable Karl Bakeman and his fabulous stable of colleagues. I’m going to try to write up a post to update everyone on all of our plans and projects for the coming year here shortly. But for the moment, this is just to say thank you to all of our friends and contributors–and keep it coming!  Our community of pages, family of contributors, and following of faithful readers. Since there is no good way to end a post like this, let me direct you to Andrew Linder’s reflections on the uses and abuses of the term “hipster,” a little commentary apropos of almost nothing except that it kind of grew out of the revelries and that captures the sensibilities that marked our event and help us all not take ourselves too seriously here at TSP: https://thesocietypages.org/thickculture/2012/08/21/away-from-a-sociology-of-hipsters/.

Have you been following all of the news about Southern fast-food giant Chick-fil-A lately? First, there was the company’s leader coming out against Barack Obama’s support of same-sex marriage; then, last week, Mike Huckabee (former Arkansas governor and current Fox News host) called for a national Chick-fil-A appreciation day (which apparently led to an unprecedented day of sales and profits, including a particularly high-profile meal purchased by former Alaska governor Sarah Palin). Last weekend in the New York Times, UCLA sociologist Edward Walker wrote a provocative op-ed to put all this into historical and sociological context.

The alliance between business corporations and moral leaders isn’t brand new. Indeed, Walker begins by harkening back to the unholy alliances between Baptists and bootleggers in the days of Prohibition. However, the relationships do seem to be becoming more typical and pronounced. Examples range from Harrah’s (the casino chain) organizing their vendors and employees into a coalition to promote for-profit colleges with Students for Academic Choice, described by Walker as “a seemingly grass-roots organization led by students promoting the benefits of ‘postsecondary career-oriented institutions.'”

As Walker explains:

Today, business interests are involved in many efforts to partner with citizen advocacy groups as a corporate tool beyond conventional lobbying. They hire consultants to help them to organize. I estimate, based on my studies of “grass-roots lobbying firms” since the early 1970s, that this subspecialty of corporate lobbying is now a $1 billion-a-year industry.

One billion dollars. That’s not chump change. Walker goes on to suggest that 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies use “grass-roots-mobilization consultants,” some of which are “independent agencies founded by former political campaign professionals,” others being branches of huge public relations firms. He notes, “Businesses hire these consultants most often when facing protest or controversy, and highly regulated industries appear to be some of the heaviest users of their services.”

This is not just about politics or public relations. “As business has become more politically mobilized and as the field of citizen advocacy organizations has expanded since the 1970s,” Walker explains, “corporations and industry groups have become much more active in financing pro-corporate activists.”

In a time when companies are particularly sensitive to protest groups, threats of boycott and accusations of corporate irresponsibility, corporations need grass-roots support, or at the least the appearance of it, to defend their reputations and ability to make profits.

If Walker highlights the economic side of these corporate practices in this piece, however, there is clearly a huge political aspect as well. In fact, in this election season what may be most interesting and consequential is precisely how politics and economics merge, the lines between them blurring and disappearing. Indeed, in talking with other researchers and practitioners about these developments, I heard a lot about the relationship between buying habits and political views. Apparently, they are so highly correlated that political operatives are now using consumer characteristics strategically to target campaigns and tap potential voters.  They do so, it is worth noting, using tools data and methods from the scholarly social sciences—standard Census demographic data and GIS packages—but what they have that academic analysts do not have access to is the market data supplied by private, for-profit firms.

There’s obviously a lot more to be said about all this. For more about Walker’s views, especially those on “Industry-Driven Activism,” listen to the podcast that our great TSP team did with him in July 2010.

As editors and publishers of TSP, we take more than a casual interest in open-source publishing debates. And though some form of open access seems a foregone conclusion for publicly-funded research, there’s still little consensus on the forms it will take and who will ultimately bear the costs of editing articles, administering peer review, and disseminating and maintaining scholarly work.

A new Economist article reviews open-access trends in Europe, foreshadowing some of the changes scholars are likely to see stateside. It describes three basic models for the future–a gold model, a green model, and a third way. In the gold model adopted by the Public Library of Science (PLoS), authors are charged $1,350-$2,900 to make their works available for free online. In the green model favored by the National Institutes of health, researchers continue to publish in traditional journals but they must also make their work available online within one year on the free repository site PubMed. A third model, exemplified by university-funded public repositories such as arXiv,  does away with “peer” review altogether. Scientists upload drafts of their papers into this public archive, subject to open review from all comers.

One tension in these models is balancing timely public access against traditional review systems for scientific discovery and dissemination. In trying to develop and sustain TSP, these issues are never far from our minds. Don’t get us wrong: we don’t see our site as a medium for adjudicating or releasing original research. Nevertheless, with our peer-reviewed white papers and other special features, we do offer striking original content that includes both new data and new arguments.  Moreover, our access policies allow us to quickly bring this research and writing to broader public audiences — which makes us the envy of our editor friends working for standard scholarly journals.

Thus far, we’ve been able to preserve access to our articles and sustain our small shop (with the collaboration and assistance of a terrific forward-looking publishing partner in WW Norton). As editors, we know that we could do more good work if we had the sort of resources that another business model might provide. But as scholars ourselves, we “get it” — open access is bringing exciting changes and, if we do it right, greater visibility and influence for our work. For example, opinion pieces in the New York Times and Washington Post linked directly to the full-text of one of our reports, with the Times also linking to a summary document written for the Scholars Strategy Network. We’re certain that the absence of a journal paywall made it easier for these newspapers to link to our work. Yet we’re equally certain that this work wouldn’t have been cited at all unless the underlying research in the reports had been screened and published through a traditional peer-reviewed journal system.

Green or gold, we’re just trying to build a sustainable model that works for TSP and our readers. With so many other scholars, editors, and publishers engaged in similar projects, we might see a whole new rainbow of publishing models in the very near future.

Over the past months, we’ve been trying to encourage our authors and contributors to turn their attention and expertise to politics, a top-of-mind topic for so many readers. A few days ago, Cyborgology author PJ Rey did just that, with a provocative post in our Community Pages on the marketing and public personae of Barack Obama: “The President as Brand.”

There’s a lot to like about and learn from this piece: the basic distinction between Obama the person versus Obama the brand; the way in which prominent individual politicians come to stand in for their parties, policy agendas, and political positions as a whole; and that none of this marketing, branding, and imaging is really new to politics. But there are two things that struck me as particularly useful and uniquely sociological.

First, I was struck with mediation, the party apparatus, and the representation of the collective. As PJ puts it:

Mediation—through the party, which acts both as organizational technology and medium of communication—transforms the president from an individual office-seeker into a brand. The purpose of branding is to turn the president’s performance of self into something that can be mass-marketed. But, as the layers of mediation increase, the individual official is subsumed into the brand. That is to say that the president cedes control over his individual identity to the collective.

He goes on to say that this is “an example of what Guy Debord called ‘spectacle,’ where what ‘was once directly lived has moved into a representation.'”

The other point that struck me was the underlying question/issue about identity: who is an individual? To be more precise, identity is a product of both action and representation, as well as of the interplay of self-construction and the labeling of others. Not sure I can or should go way into this here, I can’t help but think that our symbolic interactionist legacy serves us sociologists well in realizing these tensions and seeing them play out on a big stage in our political process. Thanks, PJ, for getting me thinking.