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.

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