With the new academic year underway, we’re starting to see an upswing of scholarly blogging and commentary on the web. One sociologist who has been particularly on fire is Jeff Weintraub at the University of Pennsylvania. I recently posted a quick aside linking to his views economic theory through the lens of Karl Polanyi and Richard Posner’s recent about-on face on Keynesian economics. This followed another recent post in which Weintraub drew upon Monty Python to “explain” rational actor models. And earlier in the summer, he  circulated a commentary on gender and sexuality in Buffy the Vampire Slayer that I found edifying, on point, and surprisingly entertaining. I don’t always agree with Weintraub’s choice of topics or conclusions (and when he posts, he often puts up more than I can read), but he is always well-informed. Andhe formulates and packages his thoughts in a rich, profound, and unrepentant social theoretical tradition.

That in mind, the post I’m highlighting today is Weintraub’s take on the recently released studies of the cost, inefficiencies, misperceptions, and outright misrepresentations of government contracts, contracting, and contractors in an age of neoliberal privatization.

Much of the piece is a repackaging of other reporting and commentary, but it’s also an important piece to call to attention. The material Weintraub gathers has a lot to say about the predictable problems and shortcomings of privatization as well as the crucial role of research, data, information, and scientific analysis and evaluation in bringing these realities to the fore. Indeed, what really caught my eye about Weintraub’s post–and, frankly, what cracked me up–was his re-appropriation of C. Wright Mills’s phrase “crackpot realism” near the end. The Mills term is, as Weintraub just wrote to me in a follow-up, “an absolutely brilliant formulation… for which the applications are, unfortunately, almost limitless.”

for a provocative meditation on the virtues of keynesian economics as rediscovered  by richard posner and put into social theoretical context by jeff weintraub, see: http://jeffweintraub.blogspot.com/2011/09/richard-posner-jm-keynes-karl-polanyi.htm

At Contexts’ editorial board’s annual meeting in Las Vegas last week, we had the pleasure of announcing the winners of our official/unofficial Claude S. Fischer “Excellence in Contexts” awards for the 2010 and 2011 volume years. The winners of the “Claudes,” as picked by our board from nominations determined by our graduate team here at Minnesota, included:

Best Feature: “Is Hooking Up Bad for Young Women?” by Elizabeth Armstrong, Laura Hamilton, and Paula England (Summer 2010).

Best Photo Essay: “Matrimony,” by Greg Scott (Winter 2011).

Best Culture Review: “Neoliberalism and the Realities of Reality Television,” by David Grazian (Spring 2010).

Best Book Review: “From The Music Man to Methland,” by Maria Kefalas (Winter 2011).

Best “One Thing I Know” Column: “Falling Upward,” by Dalton Conley (Summer 2011).

We’ve seen some wicked-good writing the past few years, so these authors faced some tough competition. Congratulations to all!

And while we’re on the subject of awards, one of the great preoccupations of any professional meeting, a word about the ASA’s award “Excellence in the Reporting of Social Issues,” which went this year to New York Times columnist David Brooks.

You might think this award presented an occasion to really recognize and celebrate the contributions of one of the few genuine public intellectuals who regularly reads and uses scholarly sociological research and writing. This, especially in recent months with Brooks’s courageous defense of NSF funding and the publication of the widely read The Social Animal. Yet the reception, which followed on the heels of several months of threatened protests, extensive bad-mouthing, and email attacks on members of the award committee, was underwhelming at best, even including a few scattered boos and catcalls. From our perspective, the reaction to the award was embarrassing, misguided, and deeply disconcerting.

Many in the field obviously object to Brooks’s political ideologies and affiliations–he’s simply perceived as too conservative to represent sociology. But this is troubling on several fronts. One is that anyone who has been reading Brooks lately would know that he is anything but a doctrinaire Republican mouthpiece. For another, the knee-jerk sociological opposition undermines our calls for broad-based public relevance and engaged scholarship — or, at least, recasts those calls as more narrowly partisan ideological projects.

At the root of this is the fact that Brooks–contrary to many erstwhile conservative pundits–actually believes in a real, empirical world and the importance of more or less objective social scientific facts and information. While some of us may disagree with how he uses our work, it would be tough to argue that he doesn’t take social science seriously.

But even to the extent he does represent particular ideological points of view (and who doesn’t?), we will step up and defend Brooks’s right to read, interpret, and mobilize our work. Anything less would be both elitist and a failure to appreciate our discipline’s genuinely conservative (not Republican) impulses and insights with respect to norms, solidarity, and the high ideals that support and sustain social order and democracy in the contemporary world.

The reaction of a small but vocal contingent of fellow sociologists to the presentation of Brooks’s award, we fear, not only contributes to the polarization of political discourse in this country, but compromises our ability as social scientists to play a productive role therein.

As is often the case for summers, I have been catching up on some reading lately. A fairly eclectic list both in subject matter and format.

Standouts on the book front include: The Hunger Games trilogy (highly and rightly recommended by my 13 year-old Emma); The Insiders by Craig Hickman, he of The Oz Principle fame (a guilty pleasure action story about the struggle for a more humane capitalism in America–global sequence sure to follow); and, As They See ‘Em (Bruce Weber’s insider’s look at baseball umpire culture and training, a topic I’ve been thinking about writing about myself sometime down the line).

The only academic book on the list (I’ve read others, they just weren’t particularly memorable) is Impure Play: Sacredness, Transgression, and the Tragic in Popular Culture. It is by Alexander Riley, a old grad school classmate of mine who I have inexplicably and inexcusably not stayed in touch with.

Lots and lots of magazine articles as well. As has been the case several times in the last few months, it was a New Yorker piece that made the biggest impression: Lauren Collins’ piece in the July 4th issue on the failure of British multiculturalism and the rise of the Islamophobic right “England, Their England.” Many great points on its own terms in this piece–about how fashionable it has become for European leaders to decry multiculturalism and separatism; about religion as a crucial dividing line in Europe; about how difficult it can be to disentangle liberal democratic rhetoric from racism and hysteria.  But what stood out to me was how central soccer and soccer fans have been to the whole right wing movement. Especially with the recent and ongoing riots in England, I want to hear more.

And finally, two recommendations. One is a book from a few back that I think would be a fun read for the ASA meetings in Vegas: James McManus’s Positively Fifth Street. Part crime trial reporting, part travel log, part poker tutorial, and all fun. The other, which I haven’t yet read, is Robert Bellah’s long awaited magnum opus, Religion in Human Evolution (for a great Q and A with the author, go to: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/08/where-does-religion-come-from/243723/).

I spent some time in court today, taking the stand to share some research on voting and disenfranchisement. I’ve done this sort of thing a few times before, but courtrooms, sworn oaths, and cross-examinations are still a little scary to me — more like heebie-jeebies scary than howling fantods scary — but scary nonetheless. Whenever I get anxious, though, I try to “do as I say” in my capacity as advisor, editor, or chair.

When my students are anxious about presentating their work, I tell them what my little league coach told me on his (frequent) trips to see me on the pitcher’s mound: trust your stuff. I remind them about all the preparation, hard work, painstaking research, analysis, and careful writing they’ve done on the subject. If they”re well-prepared, know what they’re doing, and have good stuff to present, there’s really little reason for anxiety. And, at that point, they can direct their energies into communicating effectively, rather than worrying about freaking out, melting down, or curling up in a fetal position before a room of stunned observers.

Social scientists are trained to be appropriately cautious in presenting our work to peers and to the public, but such caution shouldn’t morph itself into learned helplessness or defeatism. As editors, we’re often encouraging writers to trust their stuff — “We actually know a lot about that right? You don’t need to put “may,” “perhaps,” “preliminary,” and “exploratory,” in the concluding sentence. You’ve actually written some good stuff that’s quite convincing on those very points, right?” 

So, while it makes good sense to worry about “overselling” a particular study or finding, there’s also a danger in “underselling” the real knowledge we’ve gained on a topic of importance. When I see social scientists overselling or overreaching, it is usually because they’ve gotten away from their stuff and started popping off about things they haven’t researched or thought much about.

I was thinking of this after raising my right hand and striding across the courtroom to take the stand — just stay on your research and trust your stuff. And it seemed to work out okay today — I said “I don’t know” when I lacked the information to answer a question responsibly, but I also made clear that we have learned some information relevant to the case at hand.

Learning how to trust your stuff comes in as handy in the courtroom as it does in the lecture hall or on the pitcher’s mound. Of course, it won’t eliminate all sources of anxiety. While 95 percent of my attention may have been devoted to responsibly communicating the research, about 5 percent was still pretty anxious. So, however much I may trust my research, I’m still mortified that my fly may be down when I feel a cool breeze on my way to the witness stand.

One of the features we introduced in Contexts was the student column “What I Learned.” Kind of in that vein, I just came across a little commentary written for the undergraduate sociology newsletter by one of our own, Contexts research assistant Alex “Sweet Al” Casey. Perhaps we can’t take credit for it, but the piece is written with a certain flair and takes the kind of big view on the world and the field we are always looking for. So, without further ado:

“Is sociology ruining your fun?
By Alex Casey

You may have learned by now that Sociology majors don’t make the best movie dates, and odds are we Soc majors have probably annoyed our friends on more than one occasion. Those of us trained to think sociologically simply can’t accept anything at face-value, even when we desperately want to. Furthermore, we possess the annoying habit of explaining this fact to others.

You begin to notice times when your family laughs at a commercial while you’re debating the effects of its use of gay stereotypes. Your friends might be moved to tears during a heart-warming drama, but you’re busy identifying the replication of racial power dynamics. And when you get roped into playing dolls with your little cousin, you interrogate a five-year-old about why boy dolls can’t cook dinner, too.

Even if we spoil a friend’s favorite Disney movie, those things aren’t necessarily all bad – and thinking in a sociological style is important. No matter the field you ultimately end up in, there is tremendous value in questioning a presented “fact,” in understanding different viewpoints, and in recognizing the social assumptions existing within the seemingly mundane. Learning sociology shouldn’t be about memorizing solutions to social woes, but examining the world from a lens that aggregates each piece of the puzzle, and seeing the big picture when most do not.

So remain critical of the world around you. The beauty of the sociologically-enthused is that we aren’t know-it-alls with every answer, but we do know, before we accept anything, what questions should be asked.”

In editing Contexts articles, one of the first phrases we often cut from conclusions is the line “more research on this topic is required.” We do this because it usually is so obvious and trite, and because we believe that our readers are generally more interested in what we social scientists actually know than what we don’t know. Yet, in an increasingly angry, anti-intellectual culture, we cannot take the need for more social research for granted.

The latest to make this point is one of our favorite public purveyors of social science, New York Times columnist David Brooks. It comes in the context of a column chastising Congress for considering a bill that would eliminate funding for the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences.

“Today,” Brooks writes, “we are in the middle of a golden age of behavioral research. Thousands of researchers are studying the way actual behavior differs from the way we assume people behave. They are coming up with more accurate theories of who we are, and scores of real world applications.” Brooks goes on to provide a couple of fascinating examples of this kind of work. But the most important point of the piece is the basic insight that such research isn’t particularly costly and typically leads to much cheaper, more effective social programs and public policy. “Cutting cheap things that produce enormous future benefits,” as Brooks puts it, “is exactly how budgets should not be balanced.”

His closing line on this point is a doozie, aimed, I think, at erstwhile patriots and their contradictory economic principles and nationalistic pride. “Cutting off financing for this sort of research now is like cutting off navigation financing just as Columbus hit the shoreline of the New World.”

I went to a local production of the play Twelve Angry Men this past weekend. With its title and content as well as (in this staging) its all-white cast, I found myself thinking about a recent study from Michael Norton and Samuel Sommers (Harvard and Tufts, respectively) about white and black perceptions of racial bias and differential treatment. Given that their study has garnered a lot of discussion lately, I’d venture you’ve thought about it, too.

Based upon some experimental retrospective surveys, Norton and Sommers find (among other things) that white Americans believe that anti-white bias has increased dramatically since the 1950s, to the point that many whites now consider anti-white bias to be a greater social problem than bias against African Americans. (The original study appeared in Perspectives on Psychological Science 2011 6: 215)

On the face of it, as the study’s authors rightly surmise, these beliefs are absurd. African Americans continue to lag behind whites (and other racial-ethnic groups) in every domain that matters—educational attainment, income, poverty and wealth, health, encounters with the criminal justice system, etc. But the fact that these perceptions don’t accord with objective social patterns doesn’t make these beliefs any less real or potent.

One of my first reactions is: this actually isn’t a new phenomenon. White perceptions about “reverse discrimination” (a concept which emerged at least a generation ago in the backlash against the civil rights movements) have been on the rise in recent years, including some high profile examples such as the New Haven, CT firefighter case which was upheld by the Supreme Court. Indeed, when Joe Gerteis, Penny Edgell, and I fielded our American Mosaic survey back in 2004, we found significant evidence of whites claiming that they had been the victims of discrimination.

Another thought: one of the reasons this study and the media attention it has received have stuck with me is that I learned about them in the same week that I read about Ellis Cose’s new work, excerpted in Newsweek, which proclaims “the end of African American anger.” Cose, of course, is a journalist not a social scientist, but he is an acute observer and diligent interviewer and his 1993 book The Rage of a Privileged Class was a touchstone and a springboard for many who study race and racism in the academy.

Third: the authors interpret their findings to mean that whites “view racism as a zero-sum game, a situation in which one side’s gain automatically results only from the other’s loss.” This is provocative and compelling. After all, the finding isn’t just that African Americans experience less racism now than in previous generations. No, it’s that whites really seem to believe that they are now being actively discriminated against. There may be a bit of truth here (in terms of social policies designed to help people of color rather than whites), but I have a hard time equating that with reverse discrimination and anti-white bias. Rather, these anecdotal perceptions seem driven by more petty things like jealousy, greed, resentment and, yes, anger at the (relative) success of others than by systemic discrimination.

Finally, I can’t help considering how this contrasts with Richard Alba’s non-zero-sum mobility, introduced in his Blurring the Color Line which I reviewed recently in Contemporary Sociology. Non-zero-sum mobility, Alba writes, occurs when certain groups can advance in society without taking away from or posing a threat to the privileges and position of the existing majority group. This helps us explain how, for instance, the southern and eastern European immigrants of the previous century were able to successfully assimilate in the U.S. Alba also believes this framework may be key to better, more equitable race relations and outcomes in the U.S. especially  if economic growth combines with low birth and replacement rates among white Americans to open up new opportunities for recent immigrants and native individuals of color. I won’t recount my entire review and critique of Alba’s book here, but I was obviously struck by the contrast between his optimistic concept and the related (but opposite) concept Norton and Sommers put forward.

In the end, I find myself inclined to take Norton and Sommers’ data seriously; even if I think the perception of rampant discrimination against white Americans is factually incorrect, the fact that so many people have that perception at all is incredibly telling. And that’s not just because the contradictory notions individuals hold ring true to my vision of contemporary race relations, but  because I believe it’s often ideas—even those that don’t accord with objective social realities, indeed especially those—that are among the most powerful, potent forces in social life.

With the academic year wrapping up and Contexts winding down, I find myself thinking ahead to the project (on race, religion, and diversity in America) I said would be the basis of my sabbatical work in the coming year–what it will be, who it will be for, and how it will contribute to the discipline. So I was obviously intrigued when I heard that Sudhir Venkatesh, author of the sociological best seller Gang Leader for a Day and a Contexts board member, had written a review for Slate of Elijah Anderson’s The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life.

The review didn’t necessarily inspire me to read Anderson’s book. In Venkatesh’s description, the bulk of the writing and analysis (including the title itself) conveys an overly optimistic and superficial vision of race and race relations in America, one that fails to accord with common experience, other social scientific research and writing, or Anderson’s own interviews with African Americans who work in the corporate sector. (A “vein of distrust of whites and suspicion about racial progress” is revealed by these interviews, according to Venkatesh, which raises fundamental questions about the “celebratory canopy.”)

I can’t say that I agree (or disagree) as I haven’t yet read the book itself. However, Venkatesh’s review did get me thinking a lot about the state of sociology. Venkatesh frames the shortcomings of Cosmopolitan Canopy as “a symptom of the field… which is confused about its direction.”

Sociology, Venkatesh writes, “once gravitated to the most pressing problems,” took us into otherwise “foreign, impenetrable worlds,” and “examine[d] cherished beliefs and institutions… stereotypes and misguided policies.” In previous generations, “data-carrying” sociologists like St. Clair Drake, Herbert Gans, and James Coleman were some of America’s “most influential truth-tellers,” “important cogs in the civic wheel” who helped “end school segregation, ensure fair housing policies, [and] promote public sector accountability.” No more. Venkatesh worries that the “great American intellectual tradition” that is sociology is “weathering a troubled transition.”

Venkatesh may be accused of being an alarmist, and he is definitely more nationalist about sociology’s origins than I, but he has a point. Americans are, more than ever, in need of sociological research and analysis, but they are less and less likely to find it.

Thinking about what this all implies for me and my work on diversity in the U.S., I have been musing about the biggest challenges and deepest concerns of the nation as a whole. To Venkatesh’s list, I would add that sociology has not only data and information to contribute to public discussion and debate, but also broad, big-thinking perspective and synthesis—the kind of critical, creative work that Robert Bellah and his colleagues called “public philosophy” in Habits of the Heart, that classic sociological study of American culture and character. How this will help refine my next work remains to be seen, but as an aspirational impulse, I find it invigorating and hope others will too.

In graduate school at UCSD, I had a friend in biology (his name was Tom Langen–what’s up, Tom?, if you’re out there) with whom I shared a number of great conversations about the social nature of animals and birds and their implications (or not) for the analysis of human activity. I don’t remember many of the specifics of those conversations, but I do remember that one involving the famed E.O. Wilson ended with my buddy Tom saying, “Well, he did some great ant work.” That’s right: ant work.

I’m still generally not a big social biology guy, but I couldn’t help but think of Tom and be a bit more sympathetic to the whole Wilson crowd when I read a story in this weekend’s LA Times about how fire ants save themselves when threatened with drowning. Acting together is the key. On their own, individual ants apparently sink or drown in water—or, as they article puts it, they “flounder.” But what most do when so threatened is link themselves together into a floating life raft. The secret, according to researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology writing in the  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has something to do with the air pockets that are formed when the little creatures fasten their claws onto each other and allow the whole group to float to safety. I guess it’s “Sink or… clamp on!”

The researchers believe these findings could provide a useful model for building complex, cooperative robots. I, however, was thinking about more basic sociological lessons and implications. For one thing, there is the obvious point about the power of the collective: on their own, ants drown; together, they survive. (Just last week I was reminding my 60 graduating seniors that the success of the human species has less to do with our individual brain power or physical strength and far more to do with our ability to work together.)

Which brings me to another, broader set of implications about knowledge and rationality—the intelligence of the collective, the group, in this case the life raft itself. These points are nicely captured in the quote from a Princeton biologist named Iain Couzin the LA Times uses to conclude the article: “The individuals acting together create this awareness of the environment that no individual ant has, and that’s what I think we find fascinating.” How true–and how fundamentally sociological. A group or collective develops into a complex system that can achieve things that no individual member could have imagined or enacted. And while the fire ants don’t have the collective ability to reflect upon and synthesize this “knowledge,” they don’t drown. For our part, we can recognize that, beyond our ability to work together, self-conscious reflection is one of humans’ real sources of power and adaptability in the natural world. The complex social systems we make ourselves into can also be the source of tremendous blindness, inefficiency, conflict, and injustice as well, but I think that’s a story to save for another day.