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So, I’m sure by now you’ve heard about the controversy that has emerged over Newt Gingrich’s repeated use of the line that Barack Obama is the “greatest food stamp President.” If not, the main question is whether the phrase is racially motivated—that is, if it is a racial code designed to play upon white fears and resentments about African Americans in general and the President in particular. (Clearly, some of the invective hurled against the President has to do with his social difference—not just his race, but the fact that he is believed (incorrectly of course) to be an immigrant, a Muslim, and an egghead, as Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson report in their new book The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservativism.) You can read more about the current kerfuffle is a Sociological Images post by guest blogger Jason Eastman called “Newt Racism.”

Still, as this is something you’re likely to hear more about in the wake of Gringrich’s victory in the South Carolina primaries this weekend and it’s something that I do research on, it seems like a good time for me to bring a little social scientific research and perspective to bear.

First, some basic facts about food stamps and welfare from this weekend’s Chicago Tribune. One: more whites than blacks receive food stamps (34 percent white, 22 percent black, and 16 percent Hispanic, according to the Agriculture Department). Two: the racial breakdown for public assistance more generally is about 1/3 African American, 1/3 white, and 1/3 Hispanic. Three: funding for foodstamps actually started to rise under George W. Bush’s presidency, though it has increased under the current administration. And four: the percent of Americans receiving public assistance has declined dramatically since the welfare reform act of 1996 which imposed strict work requirements and a 5 year lifetime cap on benefits.

What the Tribune story didn’t say that is crucial is all of this is that welfare has long been and continues to be associated with race and with African Americans in particular. See Martin Gilens’s book Why Americans Hate Welfare. This perception is actually a key piece of information in itself—perhaps the key fact about welfare. It is, in short, racially coded.  So even if Gingrich doesn’t intend it, this is how such references are likely to be understood by the majority of Americans. It may not be the only reason Gingrich continues to reference and discuss food stamps, but it is obviously part of the conversation.

The real question, of course, is not intent but effect. Do such racially coded messages matter? Do they impact politics, policies, and campaigns? According to Tali Mendelberg’s The Race Card, one of the most meticulously researched studies of the phenomenon, they do. Racially coded words and phrases play upon white fears about and resentment against African Americans in order to implicitly or explicity shift public opinion on and support for various candidates, campaigns, regimes, and policy initiatives.

Mendelberg, whose initial research was occasioned by the Willie Horton ad that appeared during the 1988 Presidential campaign, based her work on a wide variety of techniques and data including simulated television news experiments, national surveys, content analyses of campaign coverage, and archival cases. Key to Mendelberg’s explanation for the phenomenon is that, in a post-civil rights era there are strong norms (of equality, fairness, individualism) that prevent overt radicalized and racist images to be referenced and mobilized; however, anti-black stereotypes and perceptions remain in place—and can be mobilized in subtle, coded ways to powerful political effect.  It reminds me of the old line by Malcolm X. “Racism,” he used to say, “is like a Cadillac: they make a new one every year.” In a country that is supposedly colorblind and race neutral, driven by individual opportunity and meritocracy, it can be almost no other way.

Mendelberg’s message has one ray of hope for those interested in combating radicalized political messages coded or otherwise, though:  implicitly racial messages tend to lose their appeal when their content is exposed. We shall see if this is the case in the days to come as the charges and defenses are waged.

Finally, there is another point I want to highlight: race cards don’t always work and it is not just Republicans who play them. Democrats do too, though often to different effect and for different purposes. Indeed, my own work on midnight basketball and the 1994 crime bill debates with Darren Wheelock revealed that “the race card” as it pertained to  midnight basketball was not played first or even most self-consciously by Republicans. Rather, that would be left to the Democrats under the leadership of Bill Clinton during the 1994 crime bill debates. And that wasn’t exactly a winner—indeed, Republicans kind of turned that against the Democrats, and it wasn’t long before Gingrich himself unveiled the “Contract” that made him famous.

One of the new features of our new and improved TSP site is “The Reading List.” Essential links to new and classic social science research, The Reading List should be a resource to inform your reading of the news, research in the field, and showing off at fancy cocktail parties (or on Twitter). It’ll feature short blurbs on research we believe to be timely, relevant, and interesting, and include classic books and articles, original new research in the field, and other exemplary studies on topics and stories in the current media and debate. The goal is to be kind of a screening service and gate keeper for students, the media, and the public at large for social scientific research and writing that is provocative, informative, and relevant.

The first official installments are a couple of pieces from Aldon Morris that remind us of the origins and impacts of the civil rights movement in honor of MLK day.

We hope you like it and will let us know if you’ve got ideas or suggestions to help build the list. Our goal is to supply new ideas every two or three days—which might not sound like a lot, but there are so many topics out there and so much great social science to choose from. As we move into tagging these, you should find a simple way to pull a reading list on a specific topic, too (a little something for those educators out there).

Here’s to an exciting set of changes, with more to come!

Edited to add: Chris and I talk through some of these changes—The Reading List and more—in a new podcast over on Office Hours. Hope you’ll take a listen!

Having spent much of the last week of 2011 out of town and away from my usual, everyday routine provided me prime time to ponder and reflect on things I often otherwise forget about or take for granted. In this unencumbered mindset, I happened upon the following line in a New Yorker piece by James Wood: “At present, the American magazine essay, both the long feature piece and the critical essay, is flourishing, in unlikely circumstances.” The comment caught my eye because it crystallized something I have kind of been thinking myself in recent years (though I didn’t have the audacity or reading range to actually say so).

Folded into a review of a recent collection by the writer John Jeremiah Sullivan,Wood’s central theme is to explore how a new generation of essayists and reporters employs the conventions of fiction writing honed in and usually reserved for “literature.” Indeed, the piece can be read as much as a commentary on the limits of contemporary fiction as of the creative applications of the journalistic, non-fiction essayist.  (Wood enlists Milan Kundera and others to develop the point.)

My thinking actually goes in the opposite direction.  I am more interested in the parallels and overlaps of the magazine essay with social scientific writing and analysis, especially in its more ethnographic and interpretive forms. I am interested, in other words, in the lessons and applications and provocations of great magazine writing and reporting for those of us working with the methods, conventions, and expectations of social science.

Three points that Wood makes about Sullivan’s representative body of work shaped my reflections. The third, on which Woods spends the most time, is about the nature of reality in contemporary life. (The piece is titled: “Reality Effects.”) Sullivan develops the theme in dialogue with David Foster Wallace’s “lost in the fun house” framing most directly and extensively in context of an extended treatment of the television series “The Real World,” the essay with which I was most familiar.  This is a deep and important theme—and has significance and consequence well beyond my end-of-year speculations. But my basic thought was this: we sociologists are both well positioned and absolutely obligated to make a contribution here (especially in connection with our notions of identity and authenticity). Still, we have only done so sporadically and in pockets since the founding of the discipline.

Nonetheless, it was actually the other two aspects of Sullivan’s writing, as rendered by Wood, that really set my mind ranging: his attention to detail and his serious, non-ironic engagement with the subject (and subjects) of religious belief and practice.

I received an e-mail from one of my colleagues at Minnesota State University-Mankato just yesterday, and couldn’t help but think of the current Office Hours episode in which our own illustrious Sarah Shannon (who seems to conjure more hours in the day than most) interviewed Walker Art Center curator Bartholomew Ryan about the recent “Baby Marx” run at the Walker (you can listen to the interview here or check out more on the Baby Marx project, including video of Baby Marx visiting Occupy Wall Street, here). Still, what Steve Buechler was writing about was actually the  one-man play “Marx in Soho,” written by Howard Zinn and currently being performed by Bob Weick in conjunction with Iron Age Theatre. Steve’s got a performance of the play scheduled–mark your calendars–for the MSU-Mankato campus on Oct. 23, 2012, and is hoping to both get the word out and let everyone know that, if you’d like to see Weick take the stage and bring Marx to your Minnesota (or Midwest) community, this is a great chance.

Writing about the production for the Iron Age website, Steve said in 2007: “This production does several different things with great skill, subtlety, and professionalism. The audience will encounter a Marx who remains passionate about injustice, critical of inequality, and combative with his rivals… but also a Marx who is loving toward his family, saddened by their poverty, and willing to rethink some of his ideas. Bob Weick is a gem of a performer, taking the audience on a whirlwind tour of different moods, attitudes, and ideas. Whether you’re a novice undergraduate, a Marxist scholar, a social justice advocate, or an interested citizen, you will find much of value in this production.” Steve can be contacted at steve.buechler@mnsu.edu.

Finally, in one last Marxist moment, I’d like to point readers to author Mary Gabriel’s new Hachette tome, Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution. While I haven’t tucked in, our associate editor Letta Page has been delighted thus far and seems pretty close to adding it to her list of exemplary books for social scientists who hope to reach public audiences (and be explicable to those audiences at the same time).

Academics feel narcissistic or anti-intellectual when we check citations to our work, but it isn’t just an ego thing. Citations tell us who is using our research and who we should be reading — a big help in making intellectual connections. If we really want people to read the work we spend so much time writing, then we need to figure out why some articles rise and others (ahem) drop from cite. Analysis can also reveal correctable mistakes. We may have written the right paper for the wrong audience or used a title or abstract that all but guaranteed our work would never be read or referenced.

I ran the numbers, but never looked much at citation indexes until seeing Google Scholar, which tends to be more inclusive and useful than other indexes. Editing TheSocietyPages.org, though, I’m starting to think we need new ways of measuring both scholarly and public impact. For example, I’m convinced that Lisa Wade and Gwen Sharp are having an enormous impact at Sociological Images, but it isn’t (yet) counted in ways that make sense to the Social Science Citation Index or Google Scholar. I’m not just talking about hit counts—increasingly, students and other scholars are adopting the site’s sensibility and and its application to the visual social world.

For now, though, Google Scholar represents a huge advance over the sort of citation trackers we had just a few years ago. Seeing Philip Cohen’s google scholar profile this morning, I made my own. A few observations:

1. Scale. Before constructing such a profile, you should know that some people and papers get cited a lot, but it takes most of us a few years to develop an audience. Nobody cited my stuff at all as an assistant professor, but folks began excavating the nuggets once a few pieces got a little attention. In Google, as elsewhere, try not to compare yourself against the standard set by the top senior scholars in your field (a.k.a. “Sampson Envy”).

2. Inclusiveness. Google scholar is indeed more inclusive than other sources. For me, at least, it includes three times the citations and twice the number of writings than SSCI (2,578 citations in Google to 84 “things” (articles, chapters, grant reports, committee documents) and 767 citations in SSCI to 35 journal articles). Some may find it overinclusive, but Google seems far more effective in bringing to light intriguing intellectual connections. For instance, I learned that a Swedish economist found use for one of my papers in a presentation on the “entrepreneurial life course of men and women”—which jazzed up my own thinking about a project on entrepreneurship and prisoner reentry.

3. Bias? For me, at least, the Social Sciences Citation Index seems to give a pretty misleading picture of scholarly impact. Since SSCI doesn’t count books or book chapters, it misses a couple more-cited pieces—a book with Jeff Manza and a popular chapter in an edited volume. [Junior scholars are often told to avoid writing book chapters, but some of them seem to find a pretty good audience.] Also, when I rank the articles by citation count, Google seems to have better face validity — it does a better job picking up the contributions that people ask me about than SSCI. As chair in a department that values both books and articles, the omission of books in any index is really problematic. I haven’t done a careful analysis, but my sense is that Google Scholar is also better than SSCI at tracking my criminological and interdisciplinary work.

4. Flagships. But still …. articles in the so-called sociology flagships get cited way more often than articles in other journals or book chapters. By either index, my 3 most-cited pieces (and 6 of the top 16) appeared in American Sociological Review or American Journal of Sociology.

5. Future. I expect that people will always want to assess the scholarly and public impact of academic work, and that these tools will evolve rapidly. Google Scholar offers a great set of tools already, but I suspect we’ll soon be able to run much more sophisticated searches that allow us to track impact across a broader spectrum of outlets. People are sure to debate “what counts” as a citation, but the really big honkin’ question concerns “what counts” as scholarly publication. My sense is that journal impact will remain important, but we’ll soon have the tools to identify and assess a more robust and varied set of impacts. And that’s a good thing for pages like these.

With the academic year wrapping up and Contexts winding down, I find myself thinking ahead to the project (on race, religion, and diversity in America) I said would be the basis of my sabbatical work in the coming year–what it will be, who it will be for, and how it will contribute to the discipline. So I was obviously intrigued when I heard that Sudhir Venkatesh, author of the sociological best seller Gang Leader for a Day and a Contexts board member, had written a review for Slate of Elijah Anderson’s The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life.

The review didn’t necessarily inspire me to read Anderson’s book. In Venkatesh’s description, the bulk of the writing and analysis (including the title itself) conveys an overly optimistic and superficial vision of race and race relations in America, one that fails to accord with common experience, other social scientific research and writing, or Anderson’s own interviews with African Americans who work in the corporate sector. (A “vein of distrust of whites and suspicion about racial progress” is revealed by these interviews, according to Venkatesh, which raises fundamental questions about the “celebratory canopy.”)

I can’t say that I agree (or disagree) as I haven’t yet read the book itself. However, Venkatesh’s review did get me thinking a lot about the state of sociology. Venkatesh frames the shortcomings of Cosmopolitan Canopy as “a symptom of the field… which is confused about its direction.”

Sociology, Venkatesh writes, “once gravitated to the most pressing problems,” took us into otherwise “foreign, impenetrable worlds,” and “examine[d] cherished beliefs and institutions… stereotypes and misguided policies.” In previous generations, “data-carrying” sociologists like St. Clair Drake, Herbert Gans, and James Coleman were some of America’s “most influential truth-tellers,” “important cogs in the civic wheel” who helped “end school segregation, ensure fair housing policies, [and] promote public sector accountability.” No more. Venkatesh worries that the “great American intellectual tradition” that is sociology is “weathering a troubled transition.”

Venkatesh may be accused of being an alarmist, and he is definitely more nationalist about sociology’s origins than I, but he has a point. Americans are, more than ever, in need of sociological research and analysis, but they are less and less likely to find it.

Thinking about what this all implies for me and my work on diversity in the U.S., I have been musing about the biggest challenges and deepest concerns of the nation as a whole. To Venkatesh’s list, I would add that sociology has not only data and information to contribute to public discussion and debate, but also broad, big-thinking perspective and synthesis—the kind of critical, creative work that Robert Bellah and his colleagues called “public philosophy” in Habits of the Heart, that classic sociological study of American culture and character. How this will help refine my next work remains to be seen, but as an aspirational impulse, I find it invigorating and hope others will too.