{"id":1591,"date":"2013-01-07T15:58:59","date_gmt":"2013-01-07T20:58:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/?p=1591"},"modified":"2013-01-07T16:00:40","modified_gmt":"2013-01-07T21:00:40","slug":"parking-wars-public-soc-and-professional-thinkers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/2013\/01\/07\/parking-wars-public-soc-and-professional-thinkers\/","title":{"rendered":"Parking Wars, Public Soc, and Professional Thinkers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Parking was the ostensible focus of a fascinating, revealing exchange on our Community Page Cyborgology last week. In it, Tim McCormick\u2014a research consultant (at\u00a0Stanford Media X<\/a>) who works in scholarly communication, new media, and publishing\u2014took one of our most regular and prolific TSP bloggers, Nate Jurgenson, to task for his critique of \u201csmart parking.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his original post<\/a>, Jurgenson suggests that, in stark contrast to its laudable intentions, smarter parking could actually create more parking problems by encouraging people to drive around even more, since the annoyance of parking won\u2019t be quite the disincentive it is currently. Jurgenson bases his critique on what he calls the \u201cRobert Moses Mistake\u201d\u2014the unintended consequences of creating more and better freeways. McCormick, in turn, argues<\/a> that Jurgenson doesn\u2019t really know much about the impetus and ideas behind smart parking, its realities as a social policy innovation, or the actual research on parking and driving among urban planners and policy makers.<\/p>\n

We love Jurgenson\u2019s sociologically-inspired, counter-intuitive critique of smart parking, as well as McCormick\u2019s careful point-by-point, empirical rejoinder. Without taking sides or giving away the details, let\u2019s just say it was a great exchange, typical of the best of sociological research and thought.<\/p>\n

But what really caught our attention was how McCormick took the opportunity to launch into an extended consideration and commentary about the whole idea of public sociology and public intellectuals. Basically, he characterizes Jurgenson\u2019s post as an example of everything that goes wrong when poorly informed, isolated, ivory tower intellectuals venture into social domains about which they have little empirical information and understanding. And his springboard for this commentary was a \u201cdeconstruction\u201d of our own TSP mission statement. To quote the relevant passage:<\/p>\n

For example, to apply a bit of the old deconstructionist<\/a> close-reading, I note The Society Pages\u2019 mission statement<\/a>:\u00a0 \u201cThe Society Pages\u2019 mission is to bring measured social science to broader public visibility and influence.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Seems straightforward enough. Yet note that it expresses a dissemination from discipline\u00a0to\u00a0<\/em>public, rather than an engagement between them. Presumably, \u201cmeasured social science\u201d is not what public lag-abouts and workers in the coal-mines like me are up to our spare time, but what professional social scientists<\/em> do. The truth, the work, the core, evidently happens inside the discipline, non-publicly, to then be brought to \u201cvisibility\u201d outside, for \u201cinfluence\u201d over the public.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Much to his credit (in our humble view), McCormick develops his critique by drawing upon sociologist Michael Burawoy\u2019s landmark definition and call for public sociology in the first part of this century. He takes Burawoy to be arguing for a closer engagement with and dialogue between professional or scholarly sociology and the sociological knowledge and understanding in the real world\u2014what we might call organic knowledge.<\/p>\n

<\/div>We here at TSP have obviously been tremendously inspired and informed by Burawoy\u2019s vision for public sociology and his insistence on the need for dialogue between scholars and practitioners. Indeed, it could be fair to say that there wouldn\u2019t be a TSP without Burawoy\u2019s call to arms. We\u2019ve even tried to capture that in the next<\/em> sentence of our mission statement, the one about \u201ctalking about<\/em> society with<\/em> society.\u201dThe Society Pages\u2019 mission is to bring measured social science to broader public visibility and influence. That is to say, we\u2019re talking about<\/em> society with<\/em> society.<\/span><\/p>\n

At the same time, we remain convinced that there is such a thing as social science and expert knowledge, and that there is a real need for and public service in providing a clear-headed, publicly accessible reading of this body of work. Such knowledge and expertise, we think, can help avoid the traps of partisanship or extreme relativism (dueling experts) while also taking down some of the fallacies and misconceptions that too often appear in the mass media, public discourse, and everyday folk wisdom. Take my colleague and co-conspirator Chris Uggen\u2019s recent piece on mass shootings as example: Uggen reviews real data and information on guns, crime, and violence and puts them into broader sociological context and perspective. Not surprisingly, his post found a wide audience, even beyond The Society Pages. This point about the need for and value of concrete, social scientific knowledge and information is one that Herbert Gans (also cited by McCormick) made in his own call for public sociology a decade or so before Buroway\u2019s\u2014albeit one that we and our colleagues sometimes forget when we get a bit too abstract, ambitious, idealistic, or simply disconnected from the social worlds in which we live.<\/p>\n

None of this is to suggest that McCormick is wrong about the challenges of public intellectuals, civil reflection, or the value of real-world, organic knowledge. Nor is it to suggest that we disagree with his defense of smart parking. (Indeed, without really knowing much about parking of any variety, McCormick\u2019s concrete, empirical knowledge about traffic, infrastructure, and parking seemed to carry the day against Jurgenson\u2019s essentially theoretical\/conceptual critique\u2014an example of the importance of empirical information and real-world knowledge and experience over abstract sociological critique). In fact, the point is that there is real, empirical knowledge and insight in the world and that it can come from many different places. The trick is to find it and help it to circulate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Parking was the ostensible focus of a fascinating, revealing exchange on our Community Page Cyborgology last week. In it, Tim McCormick\u2014a research consultant (at\u00a0Stanford Media X) who works in scholarly communication, new media, and publishing\u2014took one of our most regular and prolific TSP bloggers, Nate Jurgenson, to task for his critique of \u201csmart parking.\u201d In […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":1595,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[209,17667,836,26],"class_list":["post-1591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-academia","tag-burawoy","tag-gans","tag-public-sociology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/files\/2013\/01\/Parking-wars-featured-image.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1591"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1591\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1599,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1591\/revisions\/1599"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}