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...

The rains came at mile 19. If I turned left, I’d face two hilly miles of trails. If I turned right, I’d be home and dry (apart from the post-run beverage) in 3 minutes. I’d wanted to put in 21 miles today, since I’ve got exactly five weeks to deflabulate before the Twin Cities marathon. I was definitely leaning rightward until I recalled a conversation with (grad student and TSP board member) Suzy McElrath, where she shared her enthusiasm for rain-soaked running.

So I headed left, plunged down the slippery trail, and staggered up the first big hill, hamstrings tight and calves aching. It was just me on the trail, aside from a gang of wild turkeys and a few rabbits. It wasn’t a hard rain and the cool water felt good. As I moved farther from the street, everything got quiet except for the steady patter of rain and reverberating footsteps.

I couldn’t see much through the rain and fog of my glasses, which seemed to accentuate the sound. I noticed that the rain almost hissed as it slid through the willow tree by the pond. The big oak leaves brought a crisper midrange sound, like the bite of an apple or a ’62 stratocaster. But then I turned a corner and hit a patch of broad leaves that looked like rhubarb, close to the ground. The raindrops played these deep and low like timpani drums, but tapped lightly by fingertips rather than mallets.

Suffice it to say that miles 19 to 21 turned out to be really beautiful, and that I wouldn’t have run them at all without Suzy’s encouragement. This reminds me that when a university brain mill is really humming, there’s a mutual-inspiration feedback loop between students and faculty, which surely ranks among the greatest privileges and joys of being a professor.

So after today’s rain-soaked training run, I wanted to add a special note of thanks to the TSP grad board as an addendum to Doug’s post about the community that came together in Denver. The grad board generally toils anonymously, though our editorial team and WW Norton take care to recognize their contributions. And, if all goes as planned, you’ll soon be hearing more about some new pages on the site to more properly introduce you to their great ideas, vision, and scholarship. 

Board members like Suzy (at right), Hollie Nyseth Brehm (at left), and their cohorts probably don’t know how much they inspire us to build and sustain The Society Pages. But when Doug, Letta, Jon and I confront a fork in the road, time and again our grad board pushes and inspires us to take the route that is both more challenging and more richly rewarding.

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.

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.