Say, Can I Offer You Some Social Science?

As The Society Pages’ associate editor, I’m in a position to see nearly all of the fantastic content that comes across our transom every day, but it’s recently been pointed out that we don’t offer a super simple way for readers to do the same. To that end, I present the first of our (hopefully) weekly Friday Roundups.

This week, we’ve seen a lot of new work, much of it dealing with next week’s U.S. general election, but with some “palate cleansers,” too. Here are all of this week’s articles from across TSP’s departments, as well as a few highlights from our Community Pages. more...

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! more...

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).  more...

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.” more...

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. more...

I was delighted to read that Nick “The Feelin'” Mrozinski landed a spot on Team Cee-Lo on NBC’s “The Voice.” I was fortunate to share billing with The Feelin’ (a/k/a Nicholas David) on one of my all-time favorite research presentations a few years back.

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If you really love a small publication, I hope you’ll someday have the opportunity to visit its offices. Take a firsthand peek behind that impressive professional masthead and you might discover that the whole awesome shebang runs on the caffeine and good energy of a tiny crew with an even tinier budget. Stick around a bit longer and you’ll want to buy this crew lunch. And maybe an air conditioner and a few decent chairs.

Seeing the conditions under which your favorite magazine is produced would likely deepen your respect for its staff and your appreciation for its content. The only downside to visiting is that it might sting a bit more if and when the publication can’t make it financially — and you’re confronted with an editor’s letter that starts reading like an obituary. more...

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. more...

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. more...

Jumping Jim Brunzell is profiled in a fine where-are-they-now article from Debra Neutkens of Press Publications, offering nostalgia for Saturday morning wrestling fans and a useful first-day-of-school reminder for students and teachers.

Mr. Brunzell is only 5’10” and pretty much bereft of the macho swagger that characterizes the profession, yet he parlayed his secret advantage into three decades of professional wrestling success. You see, Jumping Jim could sky. A high jumper on his high school track team, Mr. Brunzell’s 36″ vertical leap was beautiful to behold in the ring. Possessed of the finest dropkick in the business, he earned a reputation as an athletic “high flyer” in an era of earthbound plodders.*  more...