Are you interested in the NBA, myths about Asian American success, or race relations in general? If so, we’ve got two great new pieces headed your way.
The first, which just went live, is an insightful exchange between experts C.N. Le, Rosalind Chou, and Ben Carrington on the meteoric rise (and recent fall) of professional basketball player Jeremy Lin. It is the handiwork of our fabulous “knights of the roundtable” team.
Coming soon, then, will be a new TSP White Paper from Jennifer Lee called “Tiger Kids and the Success Frame” which helps explain how ethnicity matters in educational outcomes. This is the first of a fabulous two-part installment.
We are extremely excited to have these two, timely new pieces on our site, and hope that you are inspired to add your comments and thus contribute to the dialogue.
UPDATE: “Tiger Kids and the Success Frame” is now live–and it even has a Glee clip! Looking forward to our second piece from author Jennifer Lee.
Professional editing is our “secret advantage” at TSP and this secret advantage has a name: Ms. Letta Page. Without her sharp-eyed and supportive editorial work, we’d be offering far less content on these pages — and what we could provide would be much sloppier and less readable. Together with web editor Jon Smajda, she’s also responsible for much of the elegant design work and illustration you see around the site.
Associate editor Letta Page usually toils anonymously in her behind the scenes role as self-described editrix and language maven. Today, however, she’s featured in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune style section. Letta’s style and positive energy shine through in her editorial work, but she’s also got killer fashion sense. Because her contemporaries are rarely so passionate about grammar, diction, and the (retro-cool) Elements of Style, she suspects that our authors tend to picture her as “the sort of editor who wears her glasses on a chain.”
Ms. Page is also passionate about intellectual property, ensuring that we don’t appropriate the work of photographers, writers, and artists without their permission. A shortened version of the article is online, but you’ll have to purchase the newsprint version of this morning’s Strib to see the full story and images.
Our authors don’t care so much about our fashion choices, of course (which is fortunate, in light of the crimes against fashion routinely perpetrated by professors Uggen and Hartmann). But they do appreciate an editor who can simultaneously sharpen their prose and bring their ideas to full flower. Great editing, like great style, never goes out of fashion.
This past weekend I came across a piece by Pulitzer Prize winner Gareth Cook in the Boston Globe about new research showing that spending time helping others can actually make it seem like we’ve got more time for ourselves. It sounded like a great, eminently sociological project in so many ways: its emphasis on the social meaning and variable experience of time, the importance of selflessness and interacting with others, the use of interviews and experiments, and, of course, the classic, counter-intuitive conclusion that the best solution for not feeling like you have enough time is to make time for others.
My first thought was to throw it over to our Citings & Sightings team as another cool case of how sociological research finds its way to public attention in and through the mass media. But a closer look made me pause. It turns out the research was produced by a team headed up by a professor in a business school (Harvard, no less). Scholars who teach future MBAs to make millions taking on questions of selflessness and the social experience of time? Suddenly I found myself getting cynical about the researcher’s claim that such activities give us confidence we can get things done and allows us to feel more in control of our own lives.
Lately, whether it is management professors, researchers in public health, or cultural studies critics, scholars all over the academy seem to be taking on topics and using methods and theories pioneered by sociologists. It is easy to be a bit skeptical or defensive, but rather than getting caught up in turf wars, I think it better to celebrate such insights and accomplishments as part of the structure and functioning of social life, claiming them as part of the big, broad sociological tent. It’s not important who is researching sociological questions, but that scholars of all stripes are calling attention to the importance and complexity of social life and interactions—a broad context that’s so often missing from the individualist, economistic, and biological visions of human beings and social life that are otherwise dominant in our academic culture.
Are you planning on watching the NCAA final four this weekend? Have you ever thought it unusual that we Americans put so much time and energy into college athletics? Have you ever thought about how strange it is that institutions of higher education in the United States field teams in the first place? (People from other countries and cultures sure do.) But no matter what your answers, take a look at this entertaining, little mock-advertisement featuring BYU math-letes and let us know what you think about why things are as they are (and they could be different).
With my interests in race, sport, politics, and the 1968 Olympic protests, how could this powerful, timely visual composition not catch my eye? (It was sent to me by Professor Ron Greene in the Communications department here at Minnesota.) Just last Friday, my graduate students and I were talking about the social consciousness and political voice of athletes in America, and I told them that I always think of the 1968 Olympic victory stand demonstration as a preeminent example of how athletes’ most effective mode of speaking is with their bodies and through their actions. In my book, I point out that Tommie Smith (the gold medalist who was at the center of it all) didn’t comment publicly about the gesture for almost 20 years—in effect forcing everyone else moved by his actions to talk on his terms. Kudos to the Miami Heat for following in this tradition (their image seems to be everywhere right now), and to Shantrelle Lewis for calling out the parallels.
Soldiers and citizens work together to fight flooding in North Dakota. Photo by Master Sgt. David Lipp.
Last spring a fascinating little story in the LA Times on the collective/behaviorial intelligence of fire ants put me in mind of the Harvard sociobiologist E.O. Wilson (“Fire Ants for Sociology”). I first heard about Wilson in high school (his paradigm-shifting book came out in 1979; I graduated in 1985), read some of his work in college, and talked about it a fair bit hanging out with biologists in graduate school, but I hadn’t thought a lot about him and his ideas since.
Wilson, I learned from a recent New Yorker piece on the genetics of altruism, hasn’t been hiding or anything. Though now over 80 years old, Wilson is still as busy as the ants (too bad, for alliterative purposes, it wasn’t bees) he’s spent his life studying. Indeed, among his numerous accomplishments of last 20 years is a massive, richly (and apparently hand-) illustrated, 800-page book on Pheidole, the “most abundant genus of ants.”
The article in the New Yorker is actually not about Wilson, though, so much as a whole debate that has taken shape within his field. It centers on natural selection and the existence of altruism and cooperation. More specifically, it is about the validity of William Hamilton’s “inclusive fitness theory,” which posited that the Darwinian concept of competitive fitness was driven not only by how many offspring an individual manages to have, but also about the reproductive capabilities of surviving relatives. At the core of the controversy is the validity and utility of the elegant mathematical formula from and upon which Hamilton derived his theory in the 1960s.
For several decades now, the equation—which which I won’t detail here—has held essentially biblical status for explaining genes and cooperation. According to the story, Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins called Hamilton “the most distinguished Darwinian since Darwin.” But a new generation of biologists are challenging the formula on mathematical grounds; they have joined forces with Wilson, whose own doubts stem from his voluminous knowledge and observations of insects. Wilson now says his embrace of Hamilton’s math was misguided: “I’m going to be blunt,” he told the New Yorker. “The equation doesn’t work. It’s a phantom measure.”
This article is a model of science reporting (and sociology of science type insight), with fascinating details about how an idea emerges and takes hold of a field, the relationship between mathematical modeling and empirical observation in the biological sciences, and the social nature of the development of scientific knowledge. The latter isn’t always pretty: the insurgents have weathered a storm of both public and private virulent criticism. It is, as reporter Jonah Lehrer nicely characterizes it, “science with existential stakes.”
Still, for my money, the Wilson parts of the story are the most compelling. Wilson, after all, is the one who helped make Hamilton’s equation famous; now he’s leading the charge against the theorem, and he seems to relish the attention and controversy. Perhaps I’m a sucker for the drama and intrigue of the renegade scholar. But at a more intellectual level, what I find appealing is Wilson’s insistence that “human generosity might have evolved as an emergent property not of the individual but of the group.”
“Group selection” is apparently dismissed by most evolutionary biologists, but Wilson believes it holds the key to understanding altruism. “Goodness,” as the article explains, “might actually be an adaptive trait, allowing more cooperative groups to outcompete their conniving cousins.” Wilson cites cases of cooperation the animal kingdom ranging from microbes to plants and female lions. “In all of these studies, many of which have been conducted in the controlled conditions of the lab, clumps of cooperators thrive and replicate, while selfish groups wither and die.”
Lehrer goes on to quote a wonderful, concise bit from a 2007 Wilson paper: “Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.”
I love those first two sentences. But as profound and compelling as I find them, the third gives me pause, reminding me of the difference between the straight biological sciences and the human sciences. My sense is that in the human domain it is precisely the tension between selfishness and altruism and the choices we make between ourselves and our collective commitments—Wilson’s “commentary”—that is most interesting and uncertain (not just theoretically, but in actual social life).
In my earlier post on Wilson and his ants, I wrote that a group or collective can develop complex systems to achieve things that no individual member could have imagined or enacted. In addition, I suggested humans have a unique ability and capacity to organize, structure, and reflect upon our collective activities. Indeed, in my view, self-conscious reflection is one of humans’ real sources of power and adaptability in the natural world. As both individuals and groups, we are constantly faced with choices about if and when to be self-interested or altruist, individualistic or cooperative. These are not easily summarized by mathematical equations. Nor, for that matter, are they fully structured and determined—which is why, as biological as we are and as much as the social sciences share with the hard sciences, important differences remain regarding what the significant questions are, how we act upon them, and what is only just commentary.
If you haven’t already, I’d encourage you to take a little time and read the new TSP white paper on religion and political culture in contemporary American life.
(https://thesocietypages.org/papers/religion-and-politics/) It is by our friend and Minnesota colleague Joe Gerteis who not only writes well and thinks big, but also has that rare ability to bring classic sociological theory and research to life and real-world relevance. We are excited how Gerteis uses Max Weber’s observations about religion in America over 100 years ago to frame an explanation for some of the cultural dynamics of our current political climate. Perhaps not surprisingly for those of you who have heard or read Joe’s previous work, ideas about social solidarity, trust, and exclusion figure prominently. And just so you know, we subjected Joe’s ideas to relentless double-blind review and our esteemed readers both agreed and offered a few observations and suggestions that made the piece even better. Suffice to say, it all fits together so seamlessly and flows so naturally you’ll may wonder why you didn’t put it all together this way yourself.
Goodmorning, dear readers! In case you haven’t noticed on our front page, a new TSP department has slipped into our site navigation bar: Changing Lenses. The first post will really tell you what we’re up to there, but the short version is that I will be teamed up with my frequent on-court foe, Wing Young Huie, to have a conversation about perspectives roughly every week. Please do check it out.
Obama's high school basketball team. Photo via senorglory, flickr.com.
In response to the sport and politics white paper Kyle Green and I recently wrote for this site, ThickCulture writer and loyal friend of TSP Andrew Linder emailed to suggest that although Barack Obama is obviously not the first “sports president,” he may be the first “ESPN President” or “SportsCenter President.” Andrew’s point (now up on ThickCulture as a more fleshed out post—jinx!) was that, although ESPN had become a cultural fixture under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Obama represented the core network demographic in its first two decades of its existence and it seems to have been formative for him. To the extent that ESPN has transformed sporting culture, then, Obama is the first President to be fully fashioned in and through that new culture.
This seemed plausible enough—and was definitely borne out in a recent interview the President gave to the star sportswriter/reporter Bill Simmons. At least two things about the interview should be pointed out. The first is why Obama chose this particular venue and reporter: “Simmons,” as one report put it, “is revered by the under-30 crowd” and “has more than 1 million—1,642, 522 to be exact—Twitter followers.” Indeed, his “B.S. Report” podcast, on which the Obama interview originally appeared, is said to be one of the most downloaded podcasts on the web. The second point is how this interview and exchange reveals what a great fan of sports and sports talk our President actually is.
Not only is his obsession with ESPN’s SportsCenter evident, Obama shows himself to be an extremely knowledgeable sports fan, gifted in the arts of sports talk and debate. Talking with Simmons, the President riffs on Linsanity (claiming to have been on the bandwagon early) and the joys and challenges of coaching his daughters, argues about the best NBA teams and players of all time (MJ and the Bulls figure prominently), revisits his vision for a college football playoff, and waxes poetic about his philosophies on sportsmanship and scoring in golf. Obama even brags a bit about the “solid” crossover move he threw on NBA All-Star point guard Chris Paul in a summer scrimmage. All this is to say, Obama doesn’t just talk about sports, he’s really talking sports.
Entertaining (and impressive) as I found all of this, I was even more intrigued by a follow-up Washington Post post that explained why the President would take time out of his unbelievably busy schedule to do this interview (as well as other sports related activities such as his sit-down with Matt Lauer during the Superbowl pre-game show in February or his annual NCAA/march madness picks). “Sports,” according to the WSJ, “is a universal language that can bridge ideological, cultural, and socio-economic gaps …you are much more inclined to like people who share that fandom regardless of whether you have anything else in common with them. You feel some sort of connection to them. They speak your (sports) language.”
The piece goes on to speculate that sport may be particularly a particularly important medium (and media outlet) for Obama “whose background—biracial parents, childhood in Hawaii, Harvard Law School, etc.—is somewhat unfamiliar to many of the voters he needs to convince to back him if he wants to win a second term in November.” While talking with sportswriters “isn’t going to convince on-the-fence voters that Obama is one of them,” the writer says, we shouldn’t “forget the connective power that sports holds in the world of politics.” The article concludes: “Obama’s ability to speak the language of sports is a major political plus for him.”
Perhaps. I definitely agree with the points about sport having tremendous connective potential and potential political value. Indeed many of them accord with the piece Kyle and I wrote. However, there is one subtler nuance or contingency that continues to pester me. It goes back to our American cultural conviction of the separation of sports and politics—that these are two domains that, for different reasons depending upon who you are talking to or the context within which they are posed, are believed to be separate (and separate for good reason).
In my research and reading, the political power of sport works best—perhaps even only works at all—when this cultural line or prohibition isn’t violated or disturbed. When it is somehow compromised, the political power and import of sport can not only go out the window, it can backfire terribly, being seen to bring politics in where it doesn’t belong. Thus, the trick and challenge for Obama—or really any politician hoping to capitalize on connections to sport—is to be seen as both an authentic and informed sports fan, but not deliberately, strategically, or intentionally political in his engagement with sporting culture.
To be clear: I think Obama’s interest in sport is genuine, and he generally does a great job of keeping his sports talk separate from his political agenda. (Look back through the transcript of that Simmons if you’re not convinced). But it’s a fine line to walk, there are plenty of folks not inclined to be sympathetic, and the more clearly the political uses and implications of his sports obsessions are made, the less effective and more dangerous I think they become. Thus, the irony of a sporting president (not to mention of any scholarly analysis of the political power of sport).
Whenever I get to teach a criminology seminar, I always assign a little James Q. Wilson in the very first week. Not his influential writing on policing, mind you, but his powerful 1975 critique of academic criminology in Thinking about Crime. With his death this week, I’m Thinking about Wilson. Though we came from very different places, his work reshaped my approach and orientation as a social scientist, public criminologist, and TSP editor.
In that book, Professor Wilson argued powerfully and convincingly that (a) we lacked strong evidence about the most critical questions about crime policy; and, (b) we then fell back on our views as private citizens when we were consulted as crime experts:
[W]hen social scientists were asked for advice by national policy-making bodies they could not respond with suggestions derived from and supported by their scholarly work … as a consequence such advice as was supplied tended to derive from their general political views as modified by their political and organizational interaction with those policy groups and their staffs (p. 49) … I am confident that few social scientists made careful distinctions, when the chips were down, between what they knew as scholars and what they believed as citizens (p. 68).
During my first heady days of graduate school, I was simultaneously encountering similar ideas from Max Weber. But the spot-on power of James Q. Wilson’s polemic hit me like a line drive to the chest. I immediately recognized myself as the sort of mushy-headed liberal who sought a Ph.D. credential as a bully pulpit for offering well-intended but baseless policy pronouncements.
After digesting Thinking about Crime, though, I resolved to conduct the sort of research that would provide a sound evidentiary base for policy. I cannot claim complete fidelity to this approach (nor, I suppose, could Professor Wilson), but it led me to research questions where I could make myself useful (e.g., employment and crime, felon disenfranchisement).
I’ve also taken to heart Professor Wilson’s admonition to distinguish the research-based opinions we present as experts from those derived from our private beliefs as citizens. My friends and students recognize this as the “hat” issue: I’ll offer a private opinion on anything from Tony Lama boots to the Fed’s quantitative easing policy, but I try to be a little more circumspect when wearing the expert hat (which happens to be a brown fedora).
While I’ll stipulate to some important “Yeah, buts” here (recognizing instances where we all stray from our high-minded ideals), Thinking about Crime still functions as both critique and call to action — for individual careers and for whole disciplines. Engaging pressing policy questions can give added meaning and purpose to our work. But such engagement is most legitimate and authoritatitive when it is founded on a real base of knowledge, interpretation, and analysis.
The good news is that “what we know as scholars” has changed much since Professor Wilson wrote in 1975. Social scientists are today assembling a more powerful, relevant, and solidly credible evidentiary base; we are thus better able to offer policy suggestions “derived from and supported by our scholarly work,” while also bringing much-needed global and historical perspectives to contemporary debates that would otherwise be framed too narrowly.
The ongoing challenge, for our careers and our disciplines, is to find new and effective ways to bring this knowledge and perspective to light. Hence, our mission at TSP: to bring social scientific knowledge and information to broader public visibility and influence. And regardless of your opinion on James Q. Wilson’s scholarship or his political inclinations, he stood as a highly visible and remarkably influential public intellectual.
