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.

Writing an essay for Gore Vidal reminds me of picking up a guitar after Segovia passed — any attempt pales in such close proximity to the master. But I’ll offer a few notes in hopes of drawing some new readers to Mr. Vidal’s exemplary writing and powerful social critique and analysis.

I encountered many of Mr. Vidal’s essays long before encountering sociology, so my mind was effectively pre-blown before entering the field. Just as early exposure to The New Yorker opened new worlds to young Gary Keillor, those wicked-smart essays brought this Minnesota kid a new vision and perspective on American society. He made historical and literary allusions that were new to me, but the writing was richly rewarding and accessible to any 10th-grader with a little patience and a lot of dictionary.

I inhaled the entire Vidal collection in the public library, but today I’m recalling two basic insights. He wasn’t the first to make them, of course, but he made them so clearly and elegantly that they quickly took root. First, he offered a sharp-eyed insider’s analysis of how wealth and power might really operate in the United States. Now, I can’t say I ever swallowed this vision hook, line, and sinker, but it did seem to comport with the evening news about as well as the facts I’d been taught in my history and social studies classes (Dems versus Republicans? That’s splitting hairs, my boy. Think: who’s pulling the strings?). And by the time I got to college and discovered sociologists like C. Wright Mills and William Domhoff, I could approach their arguments with some degree of familiarity and preparation.

Second, Mr. Vidal’s sensitive (and, at times, hilarious) writing on sexual diversity convinced me that the putatively fundamental categories I’d taken for granted were surely oversimplifications. Here too, Mr. Vidal’s perspective provided a better fit to the social facts I was encountering as a high school student and music writer. Here’s a passage touching on both power and sex, from a 1979 Playboy interview that I likely read behind Ralph’s grocery at Charlton and Wentworth:

Today Americans are in a state of terminal hysteria on the subject of sex in general and of homosexuality in particular because the owners of the country (buttressed by a religion that they have shrewdly adapted to their own ends) regard the family as their last means of control over those who work and consume. For two millennia, women have been treated as chattel, while homosexuality has been made to seem a crime, a vice, an illness.”

Some of Mr. Vidal’s obits hint that his essays are too historically specific to stand the test of time, but I’m guessing that  Bernard Shaw’s obit writers said the same things about his remarkable prefaces. The excerpt above suggests that either American society has not changed all that much in 33 years or that, like a good sociologist, Gore Vidal’s analysis transcends the particular moments and controversies of his research sites. Judge for yourself, perhaps starting online or with United States: Essays 1952-1992.

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.

 I went to a rock concert the other night and a cello recital broke out. It was a standard summer festival, but the three bands I saw (Avett Brothers, Lumineers, and Lucy Michelle and the Velvet Lapelles) all featured more cello than ELO. While I made some pretty outlandish predictions as a music writer — pegging Stan Ridgway as the Dylan of the New American West, to take but one erroneous prediction — I never foresaw so many beer-drinking twentysomethings whooping it up over a cello solo. 

Sarah Lageson’s Office Hours interview with Jennifer Lena is helping me puzzle through the mystery. Professor Lena’s Banding Together offers a rich sociological account of musical communities and Ms. Lageson is an especially knowledgable interviewer. That’s why we’ve paired her KFAI radio documentary on Minnesota’s Bluegrass Revival — from Bill Monroe to Trampled by Turtles — with this podcast. Sarah plays banjo, rather than cello, but she’s an active performer and radio producer who knows a lot about musical genres (and, I might add, as of 2:32 pm she’s also ABD). If this one whets your appetite for a sociological discussion of music and culture, you might also check out Dave Grazian’s two-part podcast with Chuck Klosterman.

While we’ve yet to launch TSP-TV, we’ve always envisioned The Society Pages as a multimedia project. Office Hours, Improv and New Books listeners have been especially supportive of TSP — and vocal in their requests for more podcasts. We’ll do all we can to feed the need in ways that connect social science with the social world.

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.

At first I demurred — and I was such a pretentious little dirtball that I might’ve actually said, “I demur.” I’ll get to the context in a minute, but today’s hot summer wind calls to mind a July day that taught me something about opportunities.

Another epic post-church Sunday rush had finally wound down at the pancake house. Stuck over a hot grill since 5:30 in the AM, I couldn’t wait to scrub off the grease and collapse on the naugahyde couch in the cool of my parents’ basement. As I walked out of the kitchen, I saw a couple of the twentysomething waitresses outside, making plans. Terry said her band was playing at Kaposia Park that afternoon and invited me to stop by and sit in on a few songs.

I liked Terry. She was too serious for some of the cooks, but even as a kid I respected people who took their work seriously. And, when we weren’t swamped with orders, I noticed she used the same tone of voice with everyone from the shift manager, to the cops drinking coffee, to the busboys working the carpet sweeper. That made her a good egg in my book. Somewhere along the line, she told me she sang in a country band and I’m sure I must’ve yammered on about my rock star aspirations.

Out in the parking lot by the walk-in cooler, I said, “It sounds like fun, but I’m just not into that kind of music. No offense.”  I’m sure it was the “no offense” that did it. For a second, Terry flashed me the sort of look I’d get if I’d dropped a plate on the floor. Then, with just a hint of a smile on just half of her face, she said, “Well, you must be one heckuva musician if you can afford to be so picky about opportunities to play.”

A direct hit – and totally disarming. She knew I was a 3-chord wonder, more scared of the stage than averse to the genre. But instead of calling me out on it, she was offering a face-saving invitation: C’mon, man, are you serious about this or not? I said I’d try to make it.

By the time I got to the park, there was a big joyful noise coming from the pavilion. I don’t recall much after that, except that the band was fast, loud, and awesomely sloppy and that Terry (who’d literally let her hair down) was an engaging frontwoman on stage. Eventually, I sang along on some sing-alongs, including Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys and Good Hearted Woman. My guitar stayed in its case and I had to freestyle-mumble the verses, but I stomped my feet and shouted along on the choruses. Though I didn’t make much of a contribution, I felt more happy, relaxed, and energized than I’d been in weeks.

I never grew into a real musician, but I still think of Terry when confronted with new opportunities. I say no sometimes, but I try to make sure my knee-jerk negative reactions aren’t driven by the fears and insecurities I felt at 17. Now that I’m more “senior,” students are starting to ask me for career advice. Often, where I’ll see tremendous career opportunities they’ll just see a bullet to be dodged. I’ll gently suggest that it might not be so disastrous to take that research assistantship or collaborative opportunity or post-doc position, even if it doesn’t perfectly align with their current career interests. And when I’m feeling especially bold or the summer heat just summons my own travails, I’ll offer half a smile and say, “Well, you must have one heckuva lot going if you can afford to pass on an opportunity like this.”

photo courtesy Curtis Gregory Perry, flickr.com

I just finished a press briefing with a bunch of very sharp journalists. I love this part of my job, though I’m inevitably way more confident in the research than I am in my ability to convey it to others. Today it was the release of a Sentencing Project report, coauthored with Sarah Shannon and Jeff Manza, where we offer some new numbers on the people affected by U.S. felon voting restrictions.

Academics often feel tension between their research and public outreach activities, but the two can work hand in hand. A few suggestions when writing a report such as this one:

• Embrace description. To a much greater extent than academic audiences, journalists and their readers value our ability as social scientists to provide basic social facts about the world. We can still sneak in a little theory and analysis, of course, since it provides much-needed context for the data we present.
• Vet your methods. If your report is not peer-reviewed, it is critical to point to your peer-reviewed articles applying the same methods to the same data that you will be presenting publicly. Good journalists care about the academic integrity of the work they write about (and, these days, some will dig deep into the methods sections of those articles). At the outset, we could easily identify some particularly surprising and, hence, controversial numbers (sorry, Florida) and we did all we could to double- and triple-check them.
• Insist on caveats — but you don’t need to lead with them. Responsible social scientists are transparent about potential problems with their data or analysis, but a high “caveat to content ratio” will kill a press release. Editing this report we ultimately moved some caveats from the first page to the last — but we would not have cut them.
• Choose partners who respect research. Marc Mauer and the Sentencing Project have earned a great reputation for their non-partisan reform work. While some organizations are more oriented to deadlines or to spin than to research integrity, Marc and his colleagues were remarkably patient and understanding about our need to get it right before going public.
• Teach! Whenever I’m in doubt about how to present something to journalists or policy folks, I try to think about how I’d teach it. For example, Sarah, Jeff, and I realized that the felon voting story was increasingly “spatial as well as racial.” So, we made some cartograms like the one above to visually represent the concentration of disenfranchisement in the Southeast (arguing at length about whether it was appropriate to refer to certain states as “engorged”). We still present plain vanilla charts, of course, but the cartograms and our slider maps tested especially well in my lectures this spring, with students quickly picking up the story behind the numbers.
• Tough it out. Backlash is always a possibility, with people sending nasty comments or emails about everything from your research to your haircut — and they aren’t always as polite as our academic critics. Sometimes this is because the reporter got something wrong or because you didn’t express things precisely, but mostly it is because they simply disagree with the implications of your work. That’s just part of the deal, I think. If you’ve done the work in good faith and to the best of your ability, your career and your ego will survive the criticism.
• Don’t worry about cite count. To the extent that stories are written, some mention names and others won’t make any attribution. Either way is just fine with me. We pick up certain research projects because we’d like to encourage a public conversation about them — not to see our names in the paper. Often, I’ll only know they’re using my work because I recognize a number or two that came out of our shop.

Scott Jurek is a badass distance runner, but he’s also one silver-tongued persuader. The ultramarathoner’s Eat and Run lays out such a compelling case for a plant-based diet that this old-school marathoner suddenly found himself devouring baked tofu in lieu of his post-run steak n’ eggs. Countless others had suggested I work in a salad from time to time. Why would I ignore years of advice from my doctor but take dietary cues from a self-described Minnesota redneck?

Well, I guess Mr. Jurek just spoke my language. He begins his story as a “serious carnivore,” who grew up yanking walleye from Lake Mille Lacs. A skinny kid, he learned to run and ski cross-country, faring pretty well against the “cake eaters” on Duluth’s east side. He was introduced to “‘hippie food” by coaches and a college girlfriend, discovering that he felt stronger and performed better when he ate “plant-based” food (his diet is clearly vegan, but the “plant-based” label seems to come with less baggage). Oh, and I almost forgot: he regularly runs distances of 100 miles or more faster than anybody on the planet.  His recipes are thus interwoven with ripping yarns from some of the world’s toughest races.

Scott Jurek’s crossover success as a food writer might offer a few lessons for social scientists aiming to get people thinking in new ways. As academics, we’re often presenting our research in hopes of changing the hearts and minds (and votes) of politicians, publics, or policy makers. But we forget that it takes a lot to actually change somebody’s mind. In my career, it only seems to happen when folks (a) agree that my evidence is really powerful; and (b) somehow identify with me as a credible expert who knows and appreciates their own worldview. Mr. Jurek nailed me on both counts, overcoming my prejudices with evidence and answering my knee-jerk objections in precisely my own language.

Before I give public talks, I ask what sorts of evidence might change my mind about issues on which I’ve developed firm opinions (e.g., gun control, progressive taxation, public education). That’s a pretty high bar for most of us, right? I certainly wouldn’t be talked off my opinion by some dork from the university half-assedly opining on his “reading of the literature.” To get my attention (let alone change my mind), I’d want a supertight smoking-gun study along with some sort of richly textured first-hand testimony from people I trusted. So when I’m testifying, I never expect folks to accept my ideas uncritically. I might have real authority and legitimacy on the subject of crime, for example, but so too does the state legislator who served ten years as a district attorney. I’m not going to talk her off her position unless I’ve got something really convincing to say — and I can say it in ways that resonate with her own experiences.

Scott Jurek and his editors understand all this implicitly. While it is certainly easier to preach to the converted, overcoming disbelievers can be a rich and satisfying experience. Sort of like that post-race lentil-mushroom burger …

photo by Pete Aylward

And now, an analogy.

A little over a week ago, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne was in town touting his new book Our Divided Heart: The Battle for the American Ideal in an Age of Discontent. He gave an interesting little promo about how the tension between our desire for individual liberty and freedom has constantly butted up against the quest for community throughout the history of American politics. But what was really memorable for me—what I have found myself thinking about mowing the lawn and driving to pick up my kids over the past few days—was the story he shared when I was introduced to him as a fellow sociologist. (Dionne has his doctorate in sociology from Oxford.)

The gist of the story was how an economist he knew once told him that sociology was “the dentistry of the social sciences.” This economist apparently meant the phrase as something of an insult. Dionne, however, took it as a compliment. Turns out, his father was a dentist, and Dionne is convinced of the nobility of the profession. Almost instantly, one of the other folks at the table quickly chimed in to quip that recent research has revealed the under-appreciated importance of oral health and hygiene to all manner of health and wellness (particularly in terms of heart health).

I don’t remember exactly where the conversation went from there, but I can say that that idea that sociology is to the social body as dentistry is to the physical body is a great image and metaphor. The parallels, moreover, are rich—poor public reputation, second-class professional status, working behind the scenes sweating the small stuff, trying to convince folks to pay attention to things they’d rather ignore, etc. I should also note that I went ahead and scheduled some long-overdue appointments in the big chair for my son and myself. You can never underestimate the power of regular flossing.

The U.S. Senate is now deliberating a bill that will fund the National Science Foundation (NSF) and its research programs for 2013. Reports indicate that the Senate will finish its work by the end of June. What makes this legislative process of particular  import is that last month the House of Representatives passed a version of the bill that would eliminate funding for political science research. (The provision was offered by Representative Jeff Flake (R-AZ) who said the provision was “oriented toward ensuring, at the least, that the NSF does not waste taxpayer dollars on a meritless program.”) And, just last week Washington Post columnist Charles Lane called for the elimination of all NSF funding for social science research.

We don’t want to be alarmist, but this situation seems pretty serious and is beginning to be something of a pattern. Recall that last year we saw similar threats to defund the entire Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE) at NSF.

The American Sociological Association is urging its members to write their  senators in support of social science research funded by NSF. (Click here for more information or see the text of sample letter below.) We usually try to keep politics and advocacy to a minimum here at TSP, but the one thing we are unabashedly advocates of is the value and social necessity of social science. No matter what you do or don’t do, and whether you are a professional social scientist, this is one issue to stay tuned to.

The ASA’s Sample Letter

As a sociologist and member of the American Sociological Association, I am deeply concerned about the National Science Foundation’s FY 2013 funding level and the implicit attack on scientific peer review. I urge you to provide robust funding for the Foundation and protect the integrity of the scientific enterprise that has benefited this country for so long.

Research funded by the National Science Foundation is a critical part of the research infrastructure in the United States, providing approximately 20% of all federally supported fundamental research conducted in America’s colleges and universities. NSF is the only federal agency whose mission includes support for all fields of fundamental science and engineering—including sociology, political science, and economics. The agency identifies the most promising ideas for advancing science through a rigorous and objective merit review process that uses independent scientific review panels.

The U.S. House recently voted to eliminate funding for all fundamental research in political science. According to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), “NSF political science research grants have contributed to important research on democratization, radicalization and terrorism, disaster response, and voting behavior.”

I urge you to oppose any efforts to eliminate funding for particular areas of science NSF’s when the appropriations bill reaches the Senate floor. In addition, I urge you to encourage your colleagues to restore funding to political science programs when NSF’s appropriations bill moves to conference committee.

NSF-funded research advances the frontiers of knowledge that keep the United States safe and competitive. In addition its research provides our nation with an understanding of humans and human behavior, which is used as a foundation for all successful technologies.

Please vote to protect the integrity of the scientific process by ensuring that NSF’s independent expert panels determine the best scientific ideas. I look forward to your response.

Sincerely,