Happy New Year!  The “great books in sociology” post I did a few days back got a nice little response (not all of it online) and generated a number of new ideas for the graduate seminar I’ve proposed here in the old U of M Sociology department. And clearly some of you have more than just a book or two to add. So, inspired by these off-the-cuff suggestions, let me ask you a more serious, systematic question: What’s on your list? What books would you use?  Send in your Top Ten list of the greatest books in sociology. I can post some of those here on TSP and, if we get enough to make it meaningful, compile a list of the 10 greatest books of all time. Claude Fischer, for one, thinks there may be less consensus than you might think.

“Great Books in Sociology” is a new course I’ve proposed for our graduate curriculum here at Minnesota. I’m not sure I’ll get to teach it or not, but I’m having lots of fun thinking of the books I might include. Here’s my initial list.

1. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Max Weber)

2. Black Reconstruction (W.E.B. DuBois)

3. Stigma (Erving Goffman)

4. The Managed Heart (Arlie Hochschild)

5. The Culture of Public Problems (Joe Gusfield)

6. Weight of the World (Pierre Bourdieu)

7. Sidewalk (Mitch Duneier)

8. Ghostly Matters (Avery Gordon)

9. Religion in Human Evolution (Robert Bellah)

Reactions? Thoughts? Anything obvious I’ve missed?  The main criteria or principles I’ve been using so far are: it has to be a real book not a collection; the author has to be a sociologist; and it has to be a work that is actually worth reading, not just something that you should read or that represents some larger point or principle.

Also, if it is not obvious: I’m trying to think of the list as a whole set as well. My larger idea and goal is that this kind of list/course should help us not only think more about book-length writing and research projects, but also about what sociology itself is as an intellectual tradition and scholarly pursuit. Anyway, comments and suggestions–for books, authors, or topics–appreciated. This should be fun.

Before we get to the heart of the matter, let’s just put it out there: SocImages’ annual Christmas Roundup is ready and ripe for the readin’! Get it!

Now, rather than our usual Roundup, it’s time to announce this year’s fully unscientific, but fully entertaining TSP Awards! Hopefully these excellent pieces from our original content, our blogs, and beyond will keep you in reading material in the days of travel and food comas ahead. We wish you a wonderful New Year full of health, productivity, and ridiculousness, because every good year is a little ridiculous. more...

This week we played around with #socgreetings, got excited to see movers and shakers talking about the We Are All Criminals project, and mourned rabble-rousing change-maker Nelson Mandela while hoping those he inspired would continue bending the arc of history… and society. Here’s what else we got up to. more...

This week on TSP!

The Editors’ Desk:

“Sociology in Retired Football Player’s Past,” by Doug Hartmann. He makes it sound so sordid!

There’s Research on That!

“Olympic Flame Relay Goes Lunar,” by Amy August. Transnational ritual lifts off.

“Texas Abortion Restrictions Take Effect,” by Jacqui Frost. New laws change the mechanics, but not the incidence, of abortion.

Citings & Sightings:

“Redesigning Work to Find Balance,” by Erin Hoekstra. U of M sociologists tell the Huffington Post that flexibility increases productivity—they’ve got the research to prove it.

“Angry White Men and Aggrieved Entitlement,” by John Ziegler. Michael Kimmel on the defenses that go up when unrecognized privilege is challenged. The Real World: White Male America.

“Libraries, Coffee Shops, and Natural Disasters,” by Molly Goin. Eric Klinenberg on civic spaces and disaster response.

A Few from the Community Pages:

• Football! Sociological Images: Cliff Leek on hazing and masculinity in pro football and ThickCulture: “Gender Socialization and the NFL” and “Turning away from Football.”
• Feminism! Miley et al. with Girl w/ Pen!
• Cyborgs! WWIS, you don’t know me! Post-LOLcat lingo! Currency, privacy, and competing values!

Scholars Strategy Network:

“Are Job Training Programs a Good Way to Fight Poverty?” by Harry Holzer.

“The Value of Providing Continued Healthcare to People Leaving America’s Prisons,” by Emily Wang.

You may have heard the story about the NFL lineman, JohnMoffitt, who recently up and quit the game just months away from locking in the guaranteed pension and benefits that comes with being in the league for three years.  The New York Times story attributes Moffitt’s stunning decision to concerns about his health and well being, as well as his off-season reading of the Dalai Lama and Noam Chomsky. According to the Times, these intellectuals helped Moffitt conclude that “he was a pawn in a machine that controlled his life and that he no longer wanted to meet the expectations attached to that life.” But the report also also mentions that the “free spirited” Moffitt was a sociology major at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Do you think his sociological studies influenced his thinking and decision in any way? Seems like something that inquiring and aspiring sociologists might want to know.

The Care and Feeding of Co-Authors:

As Chris Uggen pointed out on the Twitters, it’s easy to disappoint your coworkers. Whether it’s producing actual Swedish Fish when a candy-mergency arises in a late-night writing session or dropping the ball when it’s your turn to write the lit review, there are just so many opportunities to co-write badly. Here’s my very quick editorial advice should you decide to undertake a co-authored project: more...

The life and work of a sociology professor was a topic of conversation in my senior capstone course this week. It started when I asked students to estimate what percent of my time was allocated to teaching, research, service, and public outreach/engagement—and then told them about how formal tenure requirements and departmental expectations compared with my actual hours worked on any given week. I was trying to illustrate competing pressures and demands, and I couldn’t help but laugh when one student sent along this cartoon (with no comment or analysis).

Perhaps I’d gone overboard  stressing the disconnections? I really do love my job.

But back to class: one of the biggest topics of inquiry and conversation involved the question of where outreach and engagement fit in the world of higher education? My students this semester have been fascinated with and actually kind of inspired by what we call“public sociology,” while also puzzled by its lack of recognition and reward in the big scheme of academia, especially in the context of a public land grant institution like we have here at the University of Minnesota.

Missing the Point

I was so struck last night to hear a little piece about the sociologist Clifford Nass on NPR (in a fun side note, I’d like to point out that Nass was also a computer scientist and professional magician… which is pertinent to the next sentence). Yes, he was known for his warning that multitasking was dangerous to real thought and real learning, but what caught my ear was how his colleagues spoke of his relationship with expanding technologies. Nass didn’t seem to have any antipathy for the tech—he saw its utility, of course—but he realized that all those blinky things were going to be attention sucks. Multiple distractions tend to be bad when you aren’t a good multitasker (to be fair, he didn’t think anyone was a good multitasker), but worse, he seemed to believe, the divided attention meant that his students paid attention to too much noise. Over time, he felt his students were getting worse and worse at understanding an argument and repeating it clearly. They weren’t good at finding the point or pulling out a specific nugget of information from a whole article. They had trained themselves (or been trained by their technologies) to see the forest, not the trees. I’m not wholly convinced, but I am intrigued—and I’m sad that the world has lost another great sociologist in the meantime. more...

My colleague Teresa Swartz (full disclosure: I’m also married to her) has this writing exercise that she does with all of her Intro students at the end of the semester. In a nutshell, she asks them to write a brief paper situating themselves in the social contexts that have most profoundly shaped and determined their lives and identities. The exercise, which she calls a “sociological memoir,” is inspired by C.Wright Mills‘ famous definition of the sociological imagination as becoming aware of the intersection of one’s personal biography with larger social and historical forces. The book she often has the class read as an illustration is Dalton Conley’s wonderfully idiosyncratic early life narrative Honky. In the last couple of days I’ve read another couple of pieces I think I’m going to recommend to her as well.

Andrew Lindner’s “Epilepsy, Personally and Sociologically,” on TSP’s ThickCulture blog, is one of them. more...