ASA Conference, Days 3 and 4

I went to a number of sessions over the last two days of the conference, but I’ll only mention a few.

1. The very last session I attended at the conference was on Cultural Sociology and Disciplinary Change, chaired by a very droll and funny Jeffrey Alexander presiding over a standing-room only crowd who came to listen to presentations by Ron Breiger, David Grusky, Julia Adams and Isaac Reed, and Richard Swedberg. Ron Breiger’s presentation urged us to start thinking about integrating culture into network analysis and especially the still-emerging concept of ‘cultural holes’; David Grusky’s approach to assessing culture and its impact on inequality, by differentiating between ‘big class’ (e.g., service industry) and ‘micro-class’ (e.g., food servers) levels of analysis, was really quite intriguing, but I need to read his paper to get a better sense of what he’s trying to do.

2. I only attended one theory section discussion, on ‘Extreme’ Systems Theory, which was largely devoted to the work of Niklas Luhmann. Luhmann’s writings have been vastly influential in Europe, but have hardly made a dent in American sociology, and this panel won’t do much to change that. Discussions of Luhmann are invariably difficult given the source material, but there were curious absences in the papers, none of which really provided us with an understanding of Luhmann as a social theorist. There was also a curious bifurcation between the presentation by Rudolf Stichweh, of the University of Lucerne, and those of Stephan Fuchs and William Rasch, of the American academy. Stichweh’s paper was more resolutely sociological and I think Stichweh had the most to say of interest to sociologists, while Rasch and Fuchs focused on certain philosophical and metalogical impliciations of Luhmann’s later writings, in which he labored on integrating the logic of the English thinker George Spencer Brown into his autopoietic framework, derived from the work of the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. (One member of the audience - I think it was John Boli - objected that you didn’t even need a concept of ’system’ to understand the Fuchs and Rasch papers, which wasn’t entirely right, but not unfair either). I find autopoiesis interesting, but none of the presenters even mentioned the word until the end. However, the work of Spencer Brown contains a calculus that uses a difficult and idiosyncratic system of algebraic notation and as such is not particularly accessible (my attempt to master Spencer Brown was probably the shortest-lived endeavor of my so-called academic career).

All of this is unfortunate. I don’t know of many partisans of Luhmann’s writings here in the U.S., although I’d count myself among them - with the qualification that I don’t advocate attempting a ‘pure’ Luhmannian approach or elevating him into the master-thinker that he was in Germany for a long while - which is not likely in any case, especially since he’s been dead for almost 9 years. The density of his writings isn’t a barrier, however, given that we’ve worshipped at the feet of a number of authors who are even more difficult to read. But his writings - a body of literature that I won’t pretend to have mastered - include a number of fascinating conceptual essays and contain assets that ought to be exploited (as Stichweh, a student of Luhmann’s, has himself demonstrated): but this isn’t going to happen until we in American sociology get a basic education in his approach. For instance, I don’t know how many people would have understood from the session that for Luhmann autopoietic social systems are systems of communication rather than action (though not in a Habermasian sense, of course); thus, for Luhmann, everything from individuals to cells to rocks are ‘outside,’ or more precisely, belong to the ‘environment’ of the social system - but includable only insofar as they are observed and incorporated into communicative structures. This is still an exceedingly counterintuitive way of doing sociology (even Habermas has his ‘communicative’ action), however accustomed we may be to talking about ‘discourses’ thanks to the post-modernists (with whom Luhmann had an interesting engagement). In any event, to go on about ‘paradox’ and ‘crossings’ is not likely to attract a wide sociological readership to Luhmann’s work (parenthetically, this is perhaps why philosophers and literary critics have been among his more ardent admirers here). A number of the questions, which seemed peculiarly to want to defend Parsons against Luhmann’s very different version of systems theory, reflected the bafflement that continues to surround him in the U.S. More on Luhmann in a separate post, and perhaps on Stichweh too, given his increasingly important work in the sociology of science.

3. Tuesday morning’s 8:30am slot (argh) had multiple presentations I wanted to attend, but I ended up dividing my time between the forum on blogging and public sociology and HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. The blogging forum was useful; I got to put faces to a number of names I’ve come to know as a reader of various blogs. Chris Uggen’s informal survey tells us that sociology is doing better than anthropology but trail not only economics and political science, but also history in terms of # of hits/cites. Kieran Healy was right to note, I think, that the self-confident disciplines tend to blog more (although history?); the disciplines that are worried about their legitimacy, less. I would mention that that this applies to people as well: I became attracted to blogging because I noticed some very smart and confident people were doing it, and I wanted somehow for their intelligence to rub off on me through cyberspace, ha ha.

Law blogs are growing exponentially - perhaps due to the media/public’s need for rapid, real-time commentary on unfolding cases - and everyone agreed that pain-in-the-ass, even threatening commenters, especially anonymous ones, are a threat to the utility of blogs as a public forum for sociology or any rational endeavor. Nobody said that blogging ‘hurt’ them professionally, although of course everyone has to be careful; my impression from Kim Lane Scheppele’s talk and from the discussion in general is that if you’ve a formidable intellect with palatable/tolerable political views (or no political views), blogging may even enhance rather than diminish your employability. I appreciated was Ezster Hargittai’s comment that blogging makes you think and write differently - it’s certainly made me into a faster, although not necessarily better, writer. I’m more willing to assert my own views when I blog, and I think there’s been a slight carryover effect into my academic work, where I’ve suffered from a tendency to be cautious and to hedge my bets.

4. Regarding the HIV/AIDS talk, I went to yet another session on this primarily to hear Ann Swidler’s discussion of the NGO effect in HIV/AIDS relief work in Malawi. I was a tad late, but it was fascinating, exhilirating even - and contained a very significant critique of the way we in the international ed and international development fields go about teaching and training students for development work. We in the international NGO community ‘target’ populations that need ‘our help,’ develop ‘training’ workshops that focus on ‘empowerment’ (especially gender empowerment) and ’sustainability’ and so on. But, then, we find out that our projects fall apart at the local level due to corruption, misunderstandings, and so on. Why? Local corruption? Sure, but perhaps the main problem is the fact that these projects do more to project our own moral needs and moral imagination onto a devastating social situation. We won’t fund projects unless they are gender-empowering, democratic, and so on, regardless of the fact that these principles and tenets bear little reality to what’s on the ground. And as for sustainability, when we find out that local corruption, local misunderstandings, etc., undermine the utility of the project, we apply stringent criteria of efficiency and withdraw the aid.

Swidler points out that international development and aid projects are for people on the ground important but unstable sources for securing resources: projects, personnel, and funding come and go like the unpredictable rains, and the rational thing to do is to use these to get food, money, help when you can. ‘Training’ projects are popular, not simply because people have signed on to ‘empowerment’; the projects provide transportation, lunch, per diem, etc., that can be funnelled back to their communities and families, allowing them to help protect and preserve what matters most to them.

This isn’t necessarily a new sociological insight taken by itself, but in the context of modern development work it poses a serious challenge. I don’t know how many classes in international educational development, for instance, end up by asking their students to develop a ‘training workshop’ for gender empowerment, youth empowerment, democratic community participation, etc. What Swidler is suggesting is that there is a complicated international network that selects themes, problems, values, etc., that have as much to do with the organized and organizational projection of the western moral imaginary than it does with solving problems on the ground. Thus, when one person in the audience asked whether or not we should be ‘targeting’ youth education rather than adults to make inroads into the HIV crisis, Swidler asked: on what evidentiary basis do ‘we’ make this claim? Isn’t this just a supplanting of women, or whatever group, for another?

What was truly fascinating however was the discussion of the stratification effects that international NGO work has. In addition to NGO workers and the members of the local communities they serve, there are both national elites and what Swidler calls ‘interstitial’ elites. National elites are the people you meet in the capital, working for the government or NGOs; they adhere to a certain kind of institutionalized ethos of careful planning, rational values, etc. As Swidler points out, their work is sustainable, primarily because it is salaried, while the efforts of those in the community are usually not. What’s even more interesting are the ‘interstitial’ elites, who adopt and are passionately committed to training, education, rationality, etc. - in part because they are extremely smart people and see this as the best way of making a leap upward in social mobility so that they can escape the dire circumstances in which they are in.

This makes me thing that the worlwide institutionalization of western modernity talked about by John Meyer, et. al., has its decoupled, uninspected, and ‘dark side,’ exposure of which would cause a loss of confidence within western development work. In international ed, we frequently talk about problems on the ground, poor planning, donor aid imperialism - and the antidote to this is more local participation, more democratic participation, more ‘training’ for ‘local sustainability’ and ‘local needs.’ Is there a circularity, a double-loop, in all of this?

Ok, enough for now.