Ordinary Sociology

Some lunch hour rambling:

Fabio Rojas at orgtheory.net has a stimulating post decrying sociology’s poor standing and reputation within the social sciences. It’s a matter that concerns me, too – even though his co-blogger Kieran Healy’s clever riposte has a point. Which of the social sciences hasn’t had a serious attack of anxiety about its reputation, prestige, and legitimacy, or conversely gone through episodes of disciplinary amour propre?

In any event, the post prompted me to think about sociology as a discipline, and why I’ve always been attracted to sociology – and why, after many years and false starts, I took the initial steps to establish my sociological bona fides, even though I’m in as low-prestige a section of the discipline as there is, i.e., the sociology of education.

• I didn’t come up through an undergraduate sociology program; my major was Asian studies and my preferred disciplinary approach was history and, to a lesser extent, poiltical science. As such, when I did start on my graduate sociological studies, my training and background was marked by a historical and hermeneutic sensibility, but few of the ‘harder’ data-relevant skills that’s really needed to do good sociological research. I didn’t take a single sociology class as an undergraduate, a scandal perhaps, but then again I don’t think we had much of a sociology department at my school, when I was there. My lack of an undergraduate background in sociology is definitely something of a limitation to my abilities as a graduate student (which I’m trying to rectify). But at the same time, there’s nothing like going through a badly-run undergraduate program to turn you off of something. Not being familiar with sociology, I recall the sense of amazement I had when, as a master’s student, I turned to a series of texts in sociology and social theory and found a whole world of tools, concepts, theories, and ideas available for exploration. I’ve never regretted the turn since.
• My first attempt at a PhD was in political theory, and in retrospect the time I spent pursuing that degree was extraordinarily educational. I read widely in the ‘classics’ and contemporary political theory and it’s helped me to develop a perspective on a wide range of issues for my later studies. I withdrew from the program for various reasons – I was too young, my advisor and I didn’t get along, and so on and so forth. Also, I came to the point when I started to see limitations of viewing the world through a primarily political lens. Power, legitimacy, domination, conflict, consensus: you can get all of this, and much more, from a sociological angle. Why limit yourself?
• Guenther Roth. He was my first ‘real’ sociology teacher and an inspiration who counseled me well, even if half of the time I couldn’t make heads or tails out of his lectures. I took his class because I had been working my way through Economy and Society, and so of course one has to take a class with Roth if he’s available. Unfortunately, he spent the entire semester talking about (and condemning) Durkheim. But that too forced me to read a lot of Durkheim, and I’ve benefitted from it (paid for it) ever since.
• Anthony Giddens. I’m not always a huge fan of Giddens’s work (especially anything he’s done in the past 10-15 years), but Central Problems in Social Theory was probably the first book in social theory that I read front to back, and I enjoyed it immensely. It gave me a sense of what one could do if one read widely and argued confidently, and I think even his critics acknowledged that he became, at least for a while in Britain, the public face of sociology’s ‘relevance.’
• I choose to study the sociology of education not because it’s the most prestigious field (egads no it’s not!). Part of the reasons for applying to the program I’m in were circumstantial – I knew people in the field. But it’s also a field in which there are more questions than there are answers, and for that minor point I have to be thankful. Better that for me than a field in which everything important has been established and I’m just coloring in between the lines.

Sociology may not be the most prestigious of the academic fields – it’s not the 1950s - but it’s for me the most advantageous way of thinking in a disciplined and realistic way about social problems across a broad range of issues. I suppose it’s not entirely a surprise to me that it’s not always received well. Aside from the usual Mills-ian criticisms that its efforts and productions tend to veer between bloated ‘grand theory’ and mindless ‘abstracted empiricism,’ problems which I think are still apropos, it also suffers from two seemingly paradoxical problems: (a) sociology produces ’social experts’ in an age when the authority of expertise can no longer be taken for granted but in fact is often criticized as ideological and agenda-driven; but also (b) thinking about Giddens’s notion of the ‘double hermeneutic’ and sociology in general, sociology is also parasitic upon everyday common sense, and as such can be criticized as simply ‘dressing up’ what lay actors already know in a seemingly ‘hifalutin technical language that’s only designed to reinforce an unjustified and unearned authority.

Some weeks ago, also on orgtheory.net, Omar suggested that we test for lay actors’ knowledge about key features of our social world: how schools work or how the occupations rank in prestige. We could also extend the test to see if people understand what it means to be a member of a ‘class,’ if they understand what it means to be a part of a ‘culture,’ to be ’socialized’ or ‘brought up’ to see things in particular ways. Are these natural categories of social self-identity? Or are they examples of how much sociological knowledge has infiltrated back into the social world – would we find performativity, of a kind? I wonder what we would find if we could somehow test the sociological knowledge of lay actors from the 1890s, 1910s, and 1950s, 1970s, 1990s, 2010s, and so on. Would there be a case to establish sociology’s pervasive impact on social life?

It’s perhaps because sociology is so much a part of the social world that lay actors no longer see it as anything special – as ordinary stuff. That’s my hypothesis, in any event. It’s only going to break beyond the ordinary if it comes up with some neat theory or some good, empirical research that provides counterintuitive findings. Also, sociology also suffers from the lack of dominant public intellectuals who know how to communicate these results. Whether or not in the day and age of blogging and ideological small-mindedness such intellectuals are ever going to re-emerge is an open question.