what is philosophy? a status seeking answer

A few days ago, philosopher Colin McGinn wrote an op-ed in the New York Times demanding that his discipline drop “philosophy” as its name. The essence of his argument is that what used to be called “philosophy” bears little resemblance to what now dominates academic philosophy.

To understand this exercise in meaning construction and boundary work, it helps to understand what modern philosophy professors do. I think it might be described to outsiders as “using precise language to understand conceptual and logical issues.” So, a philosopher who looks at sociology might ask what we mean by “society” or “actor,” and then examine the meanings of these terms and their logical implications. If you want a great example on our blog, see Omar’s recent discussion of social constructionism.As you can imagine, that sort of intellectual work is a bit different than what used to be called philosophy, or what defines heterodox types of philosophy.

What’s at stake in this argument? I think this is an exercise in purity that uses the physical sciences as its claim for status. Consider the following passage:

Our current name is harmful because it posits a big gap between the sciences and philosophy; we do something that is not a science. Thus we do not share in the intellectual prestige associated with that thoroughly modern word. We are accordingly not covered by the media that cover the sciences, and what we do remains a mystery to most people. But it is really quite clear that academic philosophy is a science. The dictionary defines a science as “a systematically organized body of knowledge on any subject.” This is a very broad definition, which includes not just subjects like physics and chemistry but also psychology, economics, mathematics and even “library science.”

I am very partial to this argument. I think that sociology is a science in the common sense use of the term. Sociologists collect data, test hypothesis, and argue about the link between theories and observation. We just do it about people, while physicists do it about energy and matter.

But I am not about to let McGinn off the hook. I don’t think that the practice of philosophy is as pure as he makes it out to be. There are important chunks of the academic discipline that don’t fit into a physical science model. For example, there are quite a few people who do history of thought. And earlier types of philosophy are not completely divorced from the discipline.

Nor would I buy McGinn’s argument that being systematic is enough to make you into something like chemistry. Yes, philosophy is systemic, but falsifiability through logic is qualitatively different than falsifiability through experiment or observation. That’s why I’ve always thought that philosophy is akin to purely logical fields like math and pure statistics, more than chemistry and physics.

In the end, through, I approve of McGinn’s status seeking exercise. Systematic investigation of logical arguments is different than art history or music performance. As a member of a discipline whose mission is to discover what is correct, I can recognize that philosophy is also about “rightness” and less about judgment. But I am happy to let philosophy live in a sui generis position that is different than the physical and social sciences until they can show me that they are engaged with a reality that exists beyond our heads.

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gop primary reality check

You’ll see the media hype the GOP primary. They’ll point to the upcoming Southern primaries as evidence that the race isn’t over. Let’s do a reality check:

1. 23 states have already voted.
2. Delegates: Romney has 415 confirmed delegates. Other candidates have about 328 – combined.
3. Raw vote totals: Romney has about 3.1 million total votes. Santorum has about 1.9 million.
4. States won: 14 Romney, 9 for the rest combined.

Romney has some big winner take all/nearly all states coming up like California and New York. As long as he avoids blow outs in all the remaining big Southern and Midwest states, he’ll continue padding his lead in delegates, vote count, and states. The only question is when and how Santorum will end the race.

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child abuse and the catholic church

Remember a few years ago when we had that massive child abuse scandal in the Catholic church? What was the consequence of that? If you read the wiki, the answer seems to be that the Church lost a lot of money ($1.5bn by one estimate) and some priests had to retire or resign. Almost no one went to jail, and the Catholic church seems to have suffered few consequences aside from bankruptcy and losing properties. The Catholic church seems to have retained its legitimacy as an organization.

This raises a question for me: What does the child abuse scandal teach us about the resilience of organizations? For example, would other religious organizations be so resilient in the face of such serious charges? Is the Catholic Church unique? Or do religious groups have an above average ability to survive this sort of scandal?

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jim crow and immigration

Bryan Caplan asks: What is the difference between restrictive immigration policies and Jim Crow?

1. Under Jim Crow, there were many places in America where blacks were not legally allowed to live.  Under current immigration laws, there is nowhere in America where illegal immigrants are legally allowed to live.

2. Under Jim Crow, there were many jobs in America that blacks were not legally allowed to perform.  Under current immigration laws, there are no jobs in America that illegal immigrants are legally allowed to perform.

The goal isn’t to cheapen Jim Crow. Merely, Caplan points asks: why is it ethical to ban people from working and getting housing based on immigration status while it is unethical to prevent people from working and getting housing because of their race?

Some may say that immigrants did something illegal. The proper response is that current immigration law is immoral. The law requires potential immigrants to spend thousands of dollars in legal fees and wait years, possibly a decade or more, in line. That’s a de facto ban on activities, like getting a job, that are legal and legitimate for natives. Why should a man born south of the border be banned from mowing my lawn or going to school in America? If you come without papers, the punishment is expulsion. Expulsion from friends and family is cruel and unusual punishment for not getting some paperwork done.

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meet me in chicago!!!!

I will be in Chicago on Thursday and Friday for the causal inference & ethnography conference. Please email me if you want to hang out. Most of the time, I will be at the UoC. We can have heady discussions in the Sem Coop. Fri afternoon is flexible. Also, I will be live tweeting (@fabiorojas) the proceedings. Hashtag: #inferenceandethnography. Email/tweet your questions. Will see if I can ask them.

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Why strong social constructionism does not work I: Arguments from Reference

In this and a series of forthcoming posts, I will attempt to outline an argument showing that most of the time claims to have derived a substantively important conclusion from constructionist premises are incoherent.   By a substantively important conclusion I refer to strong arguments for the “social construction of X” where X is some sort of category or natural kind that is usually thought to have general ontological validity in the larger culture (e.g gender, race, mental illness, etc.).

In a nutshell, I will argue that the reason for why these sort of arguments do not really work is that they require us to draw on a theory of meaning, language and reference that is itself inconsistent with constructionism.  To put it simply: substantively important conclusions derived from constructionist premises require a theory of reference that implies at least the potential for realism about natural kinds and a strong coupling between linguistic descriptions and the real properties of the entities to which those descriptions apply, but constructionism is premised on the a priori denial of realism about natural kinds and of such a strong coupling between language and the world.  Thus, most strong claims about something being “socially constructed” cannot be strong claims at all.  This argument applies to all forms of social constructionism, whether of the phenomenological, semiotic, or interactionist varieties.

Here I will first do two things:  1) give a more “technical” definition of what I mean by a “substantively important conclusion” within a constructionist mode of argumentation (noting that my argument does not apply to “softer” versions of constructionism) and 2) nail down the point that constructionism (and any other set of premises designed to draw substantively important conclusions about the natural and social worlds) depends on an “argument from reference” in order to work.  Finally, I will lay out the argument that 3) because of this dependence, strong constructionist conclusions are usually not warranted (they follow from an incoherent argument).

The shock value in constructionism.-  In a constructionist argument, a substantively important conclusion is one that has “shock value.”  By shock value, I mean that the argument results in the conclusion that something that we thought was “real” in an unproblematic sense is shown to be either a) a fictitious entity that has never been or could never be real or b) a historically contingent entity endowed with a weaker form of existence (e.g. a collectively sustained fiction or even delusion).  This is “shocking” in the sense that the constructionism thesis upsets the “folk ontology” heretofore taken for granted by lay and professional audiences alike.

A useful analogue (because it makes the technical argumentative steps clear) comes from the Philosophy of Mind. There, the most “shocking” argument ever put forth is know as “eliminativism” in relation to the so-called “propositional attitudes” (Stich 1983; Churchland 1981).  Note that this argument is actually espoused by people who consider themselves to be radical materialists almost blindly committed to a traditional scientific epistemology and an anti-dualist ontology.  Thus, I am not claiming a substantive commonality between constructionists and eliminativists.  All that I want to do here is to point to some formal commonalities in their mode of argumentation in order to set up the subsequent point of common reliance on an argument from reference.

According to the eliminativist thesis, the denizens of the mental zoo that play a role in our ability to account for ours and other’s people’s behavior (such as beliefs, desires, wants, etc.) do not actually exist. The reason for that is that the theoretical system in which they play a role (so called “folk” or “belief-desire psychology”) is actually an empirically false theory, one that relies on the postulation of theoretical entities (mental entities) that have no scientifically defensible ontological status.

According to belief desire psychology, persons engage in action in order to satisfy desires.  Beliefs play a causal role in behavior by providing the person with subjective descriptions of how means connect to desirable ends.  Using belief-desire psychology, we can explain why person A engages in behavior B, by postulating that “Person A believes that by doing B, she will get C, and she desires/wants C.” A belief is a proposition about the world endowed with a truth value and a desire is a proposition that describes the sorts of states of affair that the person would like to bring about.   Both are conceived to be mental entities endowed with “intentional” content (they are about something). Their intentional content dictates how they can relate to other entities in a systematic way (e.g. because some propositions logically imply others). We can then “predict” (or retrodict) the behavior of persons by linking desires to beliefs in a way that preserves the rationality of persons.

Accordingly, if I see somebody rummaging through the contents of a refrigerator, I can surmise that this person is engaging in this sort of behavior because she believes that she will find something to eat in there, and she wants something to eat.  Relatedly, when persons are questioned as to why they did something, they usually give a “reason” for why the did what they did.  This reason takes the form of a “motive report.”  If I question somebody about why they are rummaging through a refrigerator, they are likely to say “because I’m hungry.”

According to eliminativists, the main causal factors in belief desire psychology have no ontological status.  Thus, neither propositional beliefs of the sort of “I think that p” where p is a proposition of the sort “there is food in the refrigerator” nor desires of the sort “I want q” have any ontological status.  As such, belief-desire psychology stands to be replaced by a mature neuropsychology, one in which “folk solids” such as desires and beliefs (to use Andy Clark‘s terms) will play no role in explanations and accounts of human behavior.  These notions, previously thought to be natural kind endowed with unquestionable reality, are eliminated from our ontological storehouse and into the dustbin of fictional entities discarded by modern science (such as Phlogiston, Caloric, The Ether, The Four Humors, etc.).

Constructionism and eliminativism.- I argue that most substantively important conclusions within the constructionist paradigm are actually modeled after “eliminativist” arguments in the Philosophy of Mind.

All of the pieces are there.  First, a constructionist argument usually takes some (folk or professional) system of “theory” as their target. This is regardless this is a system of theory currently in existence or from a previous historical era.  This is usually a folk (or sometime professional) “theory of X” (e.g the “folk theory of race” or the “folk theory of gender”).  Second, within this system the constructionist picks one or more central theoretical categories or concepts (X), which, within the system are endowed with an non-problematic ontological status as real (e.g. gender  or racial “essence”).  Third, the constructionist shows the folk theory of X to be false from the point of view of a more sophisticated theory (modern population genetics in the case of the old anthropological concept of “race”).  Thus X (e.g. race), as conceptualized in the folk theory, does not really exist, even though it forms a key part of certain contemporary folk theories of race. The title of the famous PBS documentary: “Race: The Power of an Illusion” conveys that point well.

The constructionist may also argue for the indirect falsity of the current theory of X, by simply using the historical or anthropological record to show that there are cultures/historical periods  in which X either was not presumed to exist in the way that it exists today or was part of a different theoretical system which radically changed its status (the properties that define membership in the concept were radically different).  Here the constructionist will agree that X “exists” in the current setting, but it does not have the sort of existence attributed to it in the folk discourse (transhistorical and transcultural) instead it has a weaker form of existence: social; as in “sustained by a historically and culturally contingent social arrangement which could theoretically be subject to radical change.”  Foucault’s famous argument for the radically different status of the category of “man” within the so-called “classical episteme” is an example of that sort of claim.  The category of man in the modern era has a meaning that is radically incommensurate to the one that it had in the classical episteme.  The implication is that therefore the category of “man” does not refer and we can thus conceive of a possible future in which it plays no actual role, follows.

The common element here is that a category that we take for granted (within the descriptions afforded by some lay or professional theoretical system) to be ontologically “real” (race, gender, the category of “man”, etc.) is shown instead to  “actually” have a fictitious status because there is nothing in the world that meets that description. More implicitly, insofar as a concept has undergone radical changes in overall meaning (with meaning determined by its place within a network of other concepts in the form of a folk or professional theory), then there cannot be a preservation of reference across the incommensurate meanings.Hence the concept cannot really be picking out an ontologically coherent entity in the world. I refer to this as the “strong constructionist effect.”  The basic idea, as I have already implied is that in order for the effect to be successful, we must already be working from within some theory of reference, otherwise the claim that “there is nothing in the world that meets that description” is either vacuous or incoherent.

Constructivism and arguments from reference.- What are “arguments from reference”? Arguments from reference are those that implicitly or explicitly require a theory of reference for their conclusions to follow (or even make sense), as has been recently pointed out by Ron Mallon (2007).  When this is the case, it can be said that the substantively important conclusion is  dependent on the (logically autonomous) theory of reference. It is striking how little most social scientists spend thinking about reference. They should, because even though it is seldom explicit, we all require some theory about how conceptualizations link up (or fail to!) to events in the world in order to make substantive statements about the nature of that world. I argue that in order to produce the strong constructionist  effect, and thus derive substantively important conclusions, the argument from social construction requires a particular theory of reference.

One would think that when it comes to theorizing about how conceptual, theoretical or folk terms “refer” to the world there would be various competing theories.  Instead, twentieth century analytic philosophy was long dominated by single dominant account of how concepts refer.  This was Frege’s suggestion that “intension” (the meaning of a term) determines “extension” (the object in the world that the term picks out).  Lewis (1971, 1972) formalized this formulation for the case of so-called theoretical entities in scientific theories.  According to Lewis, terms in scientific theories purport to describe objects in the world bearing certain properties or standing in certain relations with other objects. This is the description of that term.  According to Lewis, the terms of Folk Psychology are theoretical entities that gain their meaning from their relations to other entities and observational statements within a system of theory.  Eliminativists built their argument on this suggestion, by suggesting that there is nothing in the (scientifically acceptable) world that meets the description for a propositional attitude (a mental entity endowed with “intentional” content); ergo, belief-desire psychology is false, its terms do not refer, and we need a better theory of the mental.

In short, from the viewpoint of a descriptivist theory of reference, a given term or concept defined within a given theoretical system refers if and only if there is an object in the world that bears the properties or stands in the relations specified in the description.  According to this theory, terms refer to real world entities when there exists an object satisfies the necessary and sufficient conditions of membership in the category defined by the term (which in the limiting case may be an individual).  Descriptions that have no counterpart in the real world are descriptions of fictional entities and thus fail to refer (and the validity of the theoretical systems of which they are a part is therefore impugned).  When competent speakers use the terms of any theory (scientific or folk) they have a description in mind, which specifies the set of properties that an object would have to have for that term to be said to successfully refer to it.

The basic argument that I want to propose here is that “shock value” constructionism depends on a descriptivist theory of reference. This should already be obvious.  The standard constructionist argument begins by a painstaking reconstruction of a given set of folk or professional descriptions.  The analyst then moves on to ask the rhetorical question: is there anything in the world that actually satisfies this description?  If the answer is no, then the conclusion that the term fails to refer (and is a fictional and not a real entity) readily follows.  The standard criteria for satisfaction of these conditions usually boil down to some sort of semantic analysis. For instance, in Orientalism, Edward Said painstakingly reconstructed a Western “image” (read description) of the Middle East as a kind of place and of the Arab “Other” as a (natural?) kind of person. Said pointed out that this description of Arab peoples (menacing, untrustworthy, exotic, emotional, eroticized, etc.) was not only logically incoherent; it was simply false, there had never been a group of people who met this description; it had been a fabrication espoused by a misleading theoretical system: Orientalism. Thus, Orientalism as a culturally influential theory of the nature of the Arab “Orient” needed to be transcended. The main theoretical entity implied by such theory, the Oriental “other” endowed with a bizarre set of attributes and properties was thereby eliminated from our ontological storehouse.

Houston we have a problem.- It would be easy to show that essentially all arguments that produce the “strong constructionist effect” follow a similar intellectual procedure.  There are at least two problems with this (largely unacknowledged) dependence of social constructionism on a descriptivist theory of reference. First, constructionism denies the conditions that make a descriptivist strategy an adequate theory of reference, which is at a minimum the validity of a truth-conditional semantics and the capacity of words to unambiguously (e.g. literally) refer to objects and events in the world.  This is not a problem for Gottlob Frege and David Lewis, or most descriptivist theorists in analytic philosophy, most of whom subscribe to some version of propositional realism (propositions have truth values that can be unproblematically redeemed by just checking to see if the “correspond” to the world).  However, this is a problem for constructionists because they cannot accept such a strong version of realism.

Thus, if the very theory of the relationship between language and the world that is espoused by social constructionism (skepticism as to the applicability of a truth conditional semantics and unambiguous reference) is true then descriptivism has to be false. This means that social constructionism is an inherently contradictory strategy; to produce substantively meaningful conclusions (the strong constructionist effect) it has to rely on a theory of the relationship between meanings and the world that is denied by that very approach. Second, even if this logical argument could be sidestepped, constructionism would still be in trouble.  The reason for this is that there is a competing (and equally appealing on purely argumentative grounds) theory of reference in modern philosophy: this is the causal-historical theory of reference most influentially outlined by Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam.  The basic issue is not that this is a competing account of reference; the problem is that this account of reference actually denies a key link in the constructionist argument: that in order to refer, there has to be match between the description of the term and the properties of the object that the term putatively refers to.

Instead, causal-historical theories of reference allow for two possibilities that are seldom taken into account by constructionists:  1) that persons can refer to things in the world even though their mental description of the term that they are using to refer to those things those not at all match the properties of those things, and 2) that the description of a term can undergo radical historical change while the term continues to refer to the same entities or cluster of entities.  The first possibility undercuts the capacity of the constructionist to “correct the folk,” because reference is decoupled from the descriptive validity of the terms that are used to refer.  The second possibility undercuts the argument for social construction based on historical and cultural variability of descriptions. It opens up the possibility that there is “rigid designation” to the same set of social or natural realities across cultures in spite or radical differences in the cultural frameworks from within which these referential relations are established.

A reasonable objection is simply to point out that we simply do not have sufficiently strong grounds of picking descriptivism over causal-historical theories of reference, as equally respectable arguments have been put forth in defense of both. This is in fact the position taken by most philosophers who instead go on to worry about whether people are cherry-picking one of the two theories of reference to support their preferred argumentative strategy.  However, I believe that most constructionists in social science cannot be content with this non-committal solution. Instead, like other areas of Philosophy (e.g. epistemology, ethics, mind), there is a way to “break the tie” between various philosophical theories and that is to look to naturalize these types of inquiry by looking at what theories seem to be consistent with the relevant sciences.  Here we have good news and bad neews for constructionists.

Research in cognitive science, cognitive semantics and cognitive linguistics points to the inadequacy of descriptivist theories of reference from a purely naturalistic standpoint. This should be good news for constructionists because the upshot is that truth-conditional semantics roundly fails as an account of how persons generate meaning (Lakoff 1987).  The irony is that these theories redeem the original skepticism of constructionism vis a vis any form of truth-conditional semantics and propositional realism, but in so doing also undercut the ability of constructionists to engage in the sort of  argument that results in “shocking” or substantively strong claims for the social construction of X, because the rhetorical force of these arguments depends on descriptivism and descriptivism implies propositional realism and “objectivism” (that truth is the literal correspondence of statements and reality).  The resulting counter-intuitive conclusion is that it is precisely because linguistic meaning and natural categories meet the constructionist specifications that strong constructionist arguments are actually impossible.  In fact, it is precisely because language and semantics work the way that constructionist (implicitly) presuppose that they do that the norm in historical change may not be the radical transformation of reference relations in historical and cultural change (as implied by Foucauldian analysts), but rigid designation of the same (social, or natural) “essences” and relations even in the wake of superficial shifts in the accepted cultural description of those entities.

social theory undergrads

Why is social theory hard for students? After teaching many sections, I offer a few answers to this question. This is based on teaching a lot of public university students, many of whom postpone theory until the bitter end.

1. The difficulty level of the readings is far beyond what is normally encountered in other courses. Compare a passage from Durkheim or Weber with what you find in an intro text or an anthology of readings on race, and you’ll see what I mean.
2. Many students in sociology class don’t have an interest, or express an interest, in current events, history, philosophy, or other topics that would lead them to think a lot about the social world in a systematic way.
3. A lot of courses are topical in orientation. Thus, there is no systematic discussion of dependent/independent variables, social processes, and so forth. In a lot of big public schools, social theory is a weird stand alone course. It is not integrated with others.
4. Social theory books themselves present a problem. Finding a connection between empirical topics and social theories is hard.

One might interpret this post as a complaint against the buffet style sociology major, where students just take a bunch of disconnected courses. That is correct. At many programs, including my own, there is no logical sequencing of courses. Students take intro or social problems, then topics, and then a little stats and theory. Thus, there is no cultivation of systematic thinking.

Another interpretation is that sociology attracts the wrong kind of student. If there are not an appreciable number of students with a strong knowledge of current events, history, or other fields that would facilitate learning social theory, then it means we’re failing to attract these students.We have to do a better job getting the most engaged social science students.

Social theory instructors, please leave your comments.

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orgtheory poll – super tuesday 2012

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specifying the agency problematic II: implications for cultural sociology

In a previous post, I suggested that a useful way of (re)specyfying the agency problematic, requires us to understand that most of the time, talk of agency has nothing to do with “freedom to act” but actually pertains to the freedom to conceptualize the world in a way that is indeterminate in relation to objective reality: that is, agency usually means freedom to think (about the world in a way that is not determined or unilaterally constrained).  I noted that an advantage of specifying the concept of agency in this way is that it allows us to understand a bunch of quirks in the history of social and cultural theory, in particular the Parsonian conflation of “voluntarism” with the Weberian problematic of “ideas” and the subsequent projection of essentially the same debate in anthropological theory to the “cultural autonomy (from biology and conditions).”  Here I would like to go into greater depth into the reasons why it is useful to think of the agency problematic in this way, with an emphasis on implications  for contemporary cultural sociology.

One objection that you might have is that thinking of agency as “freedom of conceptualization” seems like a counter-intuitive, overly-convoluted, obscure or simply unhelpful way of specifying and dis-aggregating what we mean by agency. If that’s what you think, I think you are wrong. This way of thinking about the agency problematic makes a bunch of sense.  First, as I mentioned before, it makes sense of the way that Parsons thought about it.  Why should we care about making sense of Parsons?  Because a lot of the debates that we are having today are still Parsonian debate in code, this helps us get clearer about what we are talking about. To crack the code, all that you need to do is change the words.  As we saw, for Parsons the battle was between “idealism” and “positivism”; change “idealism” to “culture” and change “positivism” to either “materialism” or “structure/structuralism” and you have the modern version of the debate.  That’s why when we set up  culture to structure, or agency to structure, culture to materiality, agency to social structure, or ideas to the objective world, in an oppositional contrast, the corresponding terms of these interlinked dichotomies match.  Second, this way of thinking about culture and agency accounts for why is it that there will always be a conflation between agency and the mental and why is it that theories that deny that the mental (or the cognitive) matter are ipso facto theories that “deny agency.”  Third, this way of thinking about it explains the curious contemporary fate of cultural sociology.  This is a field that has actually been built on the ruins of the original debate that was had at the level of individual agency.

Culture versus structure.- For instance, cultural sociologists sometimes get made fun of by “structuralists” (let’s say in the study of inequality) because what they are peddling (the mental) seems like fluff in comparison to non-negotiable realities, especially when it comes to the big stuff (large, structured inequalities). That’s why in the agency/structure debate cultural sociologists have to be on the side of (some) agency. The reason for this is that, as I noted before, the “group” version of the debate is no different from the individual version.  Culture is just socially patterned conceptualization (or shared ideas).  So if we can ascertain that the “mental” matters because different people can conceive of the same “objective” situation in different ways, then when we aggregate individual cognition into the group cognition that we usually refer to as culture, a similar set of inferences follows (see any book by Zerubavel).  This is also why in the “culture and poverty” debate there is conflation between culture/agency and judgments of responsibility.  In our folk (Western) model, if you had agency, then you are responsible.  When the cultural sociologist then brings “culture” into the study of poverty, he or she is ipso facto saying that the poor were somehow (at least partially) “responsible” for their plight. This creates the odd situation in which only the pure structuralist who removes all agency from the poor can claim that he or she is not blaming them for their condition.

The autonomy of culture(s).- In the anthropological version of the agency=freedom of conceptualization formulation, culture is not reducible to (group) biology (e.g. genetic heritage) in the same way that the individual mental process is not driven by biology, culture is not reducible to the (physical) environment or to ecology in the same way that the mental is not reducible to the environmental; finally culture is not reducible to some sort of “rational” calculus, because if the neo-classical presumption was true, there would not be “cultures” in the plural. Instead all cultures would have the same set of beliefs about the world, and cultural variation would simply be a function of variation in the objective features of the world (e.g. the situation of “same worlds different culture” would not arise).  Note that I have essentially described the program of “cultural anthropology” initiated by Boas and sustained by such people as Sapir, Whorf, Mead, Kroeber, etc. during the early and mid-twentieth centuries.  The inference that agency is the “freedom to think differently” is extended to the group level in the form of cultural relativism: culture is not determined by non-cultural forces, therefore groups have the freedom to think differently in forging distinct cultures.  The “autonomy” of culture (from whatever) is formally identical to the autonomy of cognition from conditions.  That’s why it is so easy to navigate without conceptual loss, from a position of “voluntarism” at the level of the individual to a position of “autonomism” at the level of cultural analysis (see Wikipedia entry for Alexander, Jeffrey). The reason for that  is because they are the same substantive position, and even the bogey-men that Parsons cursed as positivism re-appear in aggregate form: environmental determinism, biologism and neo-classical rationalism. That’s why cultural anthropology fought valiantly against all three.  The first two were vanquished pretty early on, but the battle of cultural anthropology against the rationalist conception of the actor continues to this day (this usually happens under the heading of the “cognitive unity of mankind” or the “multiple rationalities” debates in economic and cultural anthropology).

Culture versus Rationality.- This explains an otherwise weird mystery: rational action theories (see e.g. Hedstrom, Goldthorpe) take ideas and beliefs seriously, but they seem oddly “a-cultural.” The reason why RAT has an a-cultural flavor, is because it has trouble accounting for structured variation in beliefs and ideas that is not traceable to objective conditions; by implication this also makes it a theory that denies agency.  Thus, you can believe that “ideal” stuff matters and still deny that “agency” (or the cultural) matters (that’s why Parsons understood neo-classical economics to be an incoherent mixture of idealism and positivism).  That’s also why rational-choice philosophers (like Elster) have to get into the belief formation problematic and in fact have been the only ones who have advanced the normative problematic of belief justification.  Finally, this is why people like Coleman simply don’t make any sense when they think that by bringing action, back-in they are in fact bringing agency. Insofar as they subscribe to a deterministic model of cognition (e.g. the constrained optimization calculus), then you can have all of the action in the world, without having an iota of agency.

The oddness of normativity in cognition.- It is astounding how much not a problem (or how bizarre) the notion that we can have a normative theory of the mental (essentially that we can pass judgment on ideas by looking at their causal history) is for cultural sociologists. Cultural sociology inherits the core irrationalism of German Idealism and Boasian anthropology. This is not a “bad” thing; it is just the thing: agency entails a loose-coupling between the world and beliefs about the world, and since the only way to get a “normative” theory of belief is to suggest an unacceptable strong coupling, cultural sociologists are happy to give up on this. In fact, I think that most cultural sociologists don’t even think that this normative question (vis a vis a belief: is it rational or not? is it justified or not?) makes any sense.  In this respect the rational action people and the cultural sociologist might as well from different planets. This is also one of the main ways in which we haven’t made much progress since Parsons.

Where do we stand?.- So we come full circle.  A lot of agency talk is really talk about the mental.  What we really mean by agency is really the capacity to conceptualize the world in different ways irrespective of objective reality and what other people mean by structure is really some sort of non-mental or non-cognitive thing that constrains your capacity to conceptualize the world in this or that way, so that in the limiting case a structuralist can predict what you think without looking into the black box that is your head. So you don’t have agency because you don’t have the freedom to impose your own construal on objective situations (or in the group sense, cultures are not autonomous because they are linked to non-cultural features of the world).

Does this mean that the world does not constrain conceptualization in any way?  The answer to this question is more complex, but I would say that the weight of the evidence points to no. So the unrestricted version of social constructionism goes out the window. The best work on comparative and typological linguistics, metaphor theory and cross-cultural studies of categorization overwhelmingly shows that there are objective constraints on conceptualization and cognition although these constraints show up at the level of structure and seldom at the level of content (except when it comes to the so-called basic level).  One hypothesis that can certainly be rejected is the unitary constraint hypothesis (e.g. naive reflection, “realist”, of truth-conditional theories of semantics).  There are very few features of the world that have a monolithic effect on conceptualization.  No domain (space, society, time, etc.) has been found that imposes a non-negotiable structure on our conceptualizations, although there are domains that leave less degrees of freedom than others.

But the job of “ranking” domains in this sense has only begun.  The more important point is that the obsession of cultural sociologists with simply making the case for social construction (and leaving the impression that they subscribe to the unrestricted—and ultimately irrationalist—account even though most don’t really) has resulted in a lack of attention to the “limits” of social construction.  Here limits should not be interpreted in terms of the traditional bogey-men (what about biology?) but instead in terms of the relation between agents and the world at a level that abstracts from this.  We know there have to be limits simply because we are embodied and embedded beings, and it is unlikely for instance that we can use conceptual resources that are not “grounded” in that fact. However, the relationship between embodiment, cognition and action is still something that makes cultural sociologists squirm a bit (because the body is kind of, well, biological), but it is clear that this is where these questions will be asked (and hopefully answered).

getting big stuff done: is this an organizational problem?

I’m a sucker for nutty futurist speculations.  So bear with me on this one.

A few nights ago I was watching Neal Stephenson’s talk on “getting big stuff done,” where he bemoans the lack of aggressive technological progress in the past forty or so years.  There’s obviously some debate about this, though he makes some good points.  He raises the question of why, for example, we haven’t yet built a 20km tall building despite the fact that it appears to be technologically very feasible with extant materials.  Nutty.  But an interesting question.  From a sci-fi writer.

Stephenson ends his talk on an organizational note and asks:

What is going on in the financial and management worlds that has caused us to narrow our scope and reduce our ambitions so drastically?

I like that question.  Even if you think that ambitions have not been lowered, I think all of us would like to see the big problems of the world addressed more aggressively.  (Unless one subscribes to the Leibnizian view that we live in the “best of all possible [organizational] worlds.”)  Surely organization theory is central to this.  This is particularly true in cases where technologies and solutions for big problems seemingly already exist – but it is the social technologies and organizational solutions that appear to be sub-optimal.  So, how can more aggressive forms of collective action and organizational performance be realized?   I don’t see org theorists really wrestling with these types of questions, systematically anyways.  It would be great to see some more wide-eyed speculation about the organizational forms and theories that perhaps might facilitate more aggressive technological, social and human progress.

I can see several reasons for why organization theorists don’t engage with these types of, “futurist” questions.  First, theories of organization tend to lag practice.  That is, organizational scholars describe and explain the world (in its current or past state), though they don’t often engage in speculative forecasting (about possible future states).  Second, many of the organizational sub-fields suited for wide-eyed speculation are in a bit of a lull, or they represent small niches.  For example, organization design isn’t a super “hot” area these days (certainly with exceptions) — despite its obvious importance.  Institutional and environmental theories of organization have taken hold in many parts, and agentic theories are often seen as overly naive.  Environmental and institutional theories of course are valuable, but they delimit and are incremental, and are perhaps just self-fulfilling and thus may not always be practically helpful for thinking about the future.

That’s my (very speculative) two cents.

spring 2012 book foum – jenn lena’s banding together

Spring is almost here – and it is time to announce our next book forum. We’ll be discussing Jenn Lena’s new book, Banding Together: How Communities Create genres in Popular Music. The book explains how musical genres are built from cultural boundaries, networks, and local scenes. It’s an honor to discuss Jenn’s book because she’s a former guest blogger and a leading sociologist of culture. So, please buy a copy (or two!) and we’ll get started in the first week of April.

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graber book forum part 4 – a theory of global domination

Part 1, 2 and 3.

Finally, we arrive at the end of the book forum on David Graber’s Debt. Here, I’ll summarize the last section and then wrap up with a few comments and critiques.

1. Debt has a few main goals. First, it is an attack on the theory that money is a necessary economic institution. Second, Debt tries to persuade us that money actually embodies violent forms of domination and is used to create servitude.The third section provides nothing less than a world history, with money and currency as its focus.

Before I get to a few of the empirical claims, it is worth noting that Debt’s last chapter is nothing less than audacious. It is ambitious for someone to argue that the world’s majors institutions – states, religions – are made possible by currency. One might say this is a monetized history of the world.

Ok, so let’s get the bottom line. Graeber’s big claim is that world history, as it played out in Europe and Asia, can be viewed in three phases. An early phase occurs when currency is invented to manage large temples. This currency is then expropriated by states, used, and expanded for war fare. That leads to empires. The second phase is when this system of currency-minting and empire building comes to an end. The system collapses, old systems of debt and currency are wiped away. Then we get to modernity. Where currency comes back, states create massive systems of debt to finance development and make sure that people can get locked into the system of debt.

2. So, is world history just the story of debt slavery? I think a lot of sociologists might agree, given the popularity of Tilly’s argument that state making, taxes, and war go hand in hand. Also, I think that Graeber is likely correct that coinage was the social technology that made empire building possible, and even necessary for early European and Asian empires to continue growing.

There are other parts of the story that don’t add up for me. For example, Graeber argues that the Middle Ages weren’t as bad as one might imagine. Slavery was abolished and there was a general skepticism toward debt. True enough, but the European Middle Ages had other forms of domination and repression as well. The Middle Ages have positive traits, but I don’t think I’d imagine it as a mass liberation from the debt systems of antiquity.

Graeber tries to make everything is debt related. In the last chapter, he tries to tie every problem to debt. For example, he rightly notes that college debt is now extreme. But is that really due to the sorts of processes of state building and debt issuing that Graeber talks about? I agree with Graber’s ethical point – college debt is a form of peonage, but I disagree with the explanation. I’m more likely to note that college financing varies greatly and the extreme peonage we see today is not endemic. I’m more likely to ascribe it to certain recent public policies than the system of exploitation described by Graber.

3. What should we take away from Debt? A few lessons. First, we should be highly skeptical of functionalist explanations of economic institutions. Generalized reciprocity is the “natural” state of economic interaction, other institutions are deviations. Second, and Graeber is not unique in this, debt is sticky and exploitative. Third, debt makes possible wars and other nasty state behavior. Even if we were to argue over specific cases, or even the overall thrust of the book, there remains a lot of value.

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braxton on body and soul

Bonus: Composition 23 H – great flute work.

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sociology of intellectual property?

I’ve been reading up on intellectual property of late.  Here are some sources worth perusing and reading (some of them can be downloaded for free), along with some interviews and clips.

• Boldrine, M. and Levine, D. (2008.) Against Intellectual Monopoly (you can download all the chapters on the website).  Cambridge University Press.
• Boyle, J. (2008.)  The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind.  Yale University Press.   (Here’s a short lecture based on the book.)
• Cohen, J. (2012.) Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code and the Play of Everyday Practice. Yale University Press.  Here’s the open version. (And, lecture at Berkman.)
• Johns, A. (2010.)  Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates.  University of Chicago Press.  (Here’s a C-SPAN interview.)
• Lessig, L. (2001.) The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connect World.  Random House.
• Merges, R (2011.) Justifying Intellectual Property. Oxford University Press.
• Zemer, L. (2007).  The Idea of Authorship in Copyright.  Ashgate Publishing.

Interestingly, there isn’t meaningfully any kind of sociology of intellectual property, that I am aware of (feel free to correct me).  Though several of the above scholars do call for increased dialogue between law and the social sciences (e.g., Julie Cohen), though this seems to be a relatively nascent area.

There is of course the “social construction” argument (e.g., that authorship or ownership is a myth)—a favorite argument of mine (e.g., see Beethoven and the Construction of Genius)—or the ubiquitous and tired references to “networks” (help!), but it seems that there is much opportunity in this space.

james q. wilson, rip

The political scientist James Q. Wilson passed away this morning.  Wilson was an important public intellectual, but he will be remembered within academia as a social scientist whose interests spanned multiple disciplines. In the very first organizational theory class I ever took we read his book, Bureacracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It.  The book is an evenhanded examination of government organizations, highlighting what they do really well and not so well and offering solutions for how to improve their effectiveness. I remember the book as bringing Weber to life and making bureaucratic theory relevant. Wilson was a political scientist by training but his greatest contributions may have been in criminology. He had a way of writing that grabbed attention and made you want to read more. Take for instance the first paragraph of his 1964 AJS paper:

The Irish cop, like the Irish politician, has long been a legendary figure. And like many legends, this one has been in great part the popular expression of a sound sociological insight-that the big-city police department, like the big-city political machine, has been an important avenue of upward mobility for a sizable American ethnic group. The difficulty with the insight is that it has not kept up with the legend: The police forces of many large cities have continued to be heavily Irish Catholic long after the great wave of Irish  immigration subsided and long after the spread of mass education, the collapse of anti-Irish discriminatory practices, and the growth of the urban middle class should have made police work a career of diminishing value to a group so long in this country.

The paper goes on to propose that an ethnic conception of “Irishness” had become tightly linked with “copness.”  The meaning around ethnicity had become tied to a particular career pathway. Although certainly not groundbreaking, the article highlights Wilson’s versatility as a social scientist. Certainly as his career progressed, Wilson became known for his conservative views, but categorizing Wilson as just another neo-conservative does not do his work justice.

whoa

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organizational musings

Henrich Greve has a blog!!  We’re happy to welcome Henrich, an ASQ editor and prolific organizational scholar, to the blogosphere. Henrich’s posts discuss the practical implications of papers recently published in organization theory journals. In this post he discusses an ASQ paper by Matthew Bidwell about the performance and pay of external hires versus internal hires. Here he draws on a paper by Elizabeth Boyle and Zur Shapira to assess how organizations manage risks through incentives and monitoring. And in this post he talks about the implications of his own research on corporate deviance and legitimacy loss to assess how Carnival’s CEO handled the recent shipwreck of the Costa Concordia.

If you’re an organizational scholar this is a must-read blog.

is there a global conservative movement network?

A few days ago, I was on the Ben Merens show discussing Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party (click here for the archive). A caller made an interesting point. Occupy Wall Street is a progressive movement that has many ties to activists around the globe who are interested in economic inequality. In contrast, the Tea Party seems distinctly American.

Here’s what I said: Yes, to the best of my knowledge, there aren’t many ties between the Tea Party activists and conservatives in other countries. But still, there is a version of right wing populism in other nations. Tea Party like movements exist in other nations, but they don’t share the same level of connectedness as their liberal counterparts.

Questions: 1. What would you have answered? Was I right? 2. If you agree with what I said, why isn’t there a global conservative activism network?

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the abundance of living alone

Eric Klinenberg is a sociologist who also happens to be a very good writer. Who needs a Malcolm Gladwell to popularize sociology when we already have good writers, like Klinenberg, in the discipline? His book Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago is an example of his ability to present empirical sociology in an engaging and lucid form.

Eric’s latest book, Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone, expands on a theme of Heat Wave: that living alone is a growing trend, especially in urban areas, that has changed the nature of community and relationships.  In his former book Eric showed that the people most susceptible to the negative consequences of a major environmental disaster, like a heat wave, were those who lived alone and lacked a social safety net to assist them during the crisis. Although in Heat Wave he focused on the deleterious effects of “living and dying alone,” this book takes a broader perspective by first trying to understand why more people are making this life choice and then by examining its consequences on life quality.

One of the interesting insights of Going Solo is that living alone has become easier for people to do because there are so many ways in which people can create and flourish abundant social lives outside the home. Facebook, email, texting, and other social media provide numerous points of contact that shorten the social distance between friends and family. Someone who lived alone 30 years ago might have felt isolated because it was much more costly and difficult to maintain close contact with friends, but now personal communication with friends and family has become so easy to do that it can almost be overwhelming.

One woman we interviewed, an attorney in her early thirties who works in politics, tells me: ‘Of my nine-hour day, I’m spending seven hours responding to emails’ – mostly job related, but many from friends and family too. ‘I also have, like, three hundred fifty people in my cell phone,’ she explains. It buzzes often, she checks it constantly, and she always tries to respond quickly, even if she’s out with friends and the call or message is from work.

This behavior is not unusual. Although we often associate living alone with social isolation, for most adults the reverse is true. In many cases, those who live alone are socially overextended, and hyperactive use of digital media keeps them even busier. The young urban professionals we interviewed reported that they struggle more with avoiding the distraction of always available social activity, from evenings with friends to online chatter, than with being disconnected. ‘Singles in the U.S.: The New Nuclear Family’ confirms this. The large-scale study by the market research firm Packaged Facts reports that those who live alone are more likely than others to say that the Internet has changed the way they spend their free time, more likely to be online late at night, and more likely to say that using the Net has cut into their sleep. Not that they are homebodies. According to a Pew Foundation study of social isolation and technology, heavy users of the Internet and social media are actually more likely than others to have large and diverse social networks, visit public places where strangers may interact, and participate in volunteer organizations (pg. 64).

If people used to seek domestic life in order to avoid social isolation, social technology seems to have weakened some of that need. People, especially those who can afford to stay connected and have a busy social life, may find pairing up and having kids less appealing than ever.

This book is full of fascinating facts and anecdotes about why and how people manage to live alone. This would be a great book for undergraduate courses in urban/community sociology, social networks, social problems, or even an introductory course in sociology.

did ron paul just save the republican party from self-destruction?

The results are in. Romney averted disaster by winning the Michigan primary. Santorum’s surge will soon come to a grueling end. The next contest is Washington, which should be Romney friendly. Then, a split on Super Tuesday would still leave Romney ahead in states won, total vote count, and delegates. Not a knock out victory, but enough to guarantee that a long slog will leave him ahead at the end of the day. Santorum’s money will dry up sooner or later.

So how does Ron Paul fit into this? There’s some evidence that Paul pulled his punches w/Romney and focused on the non-Romneys, especially Santorum. Paul’s campaign ran anti-Santorum adds in Michigan, a state where he’s clearly not a factor. Paul may have helped Romney get the extra points that he needed to get a win and close Santorum’s window of opportunity.

The reasons may be unclear, but the effect is not. By attacking Santorum, Paul has ensured that the next nominee will *not* be a guy who is opposed to birth control, thinks Satan runs our colleges, and trashes well regarded dead presidents. If the economy is improving, any Republican candidate will have a tough time. But Paul’s attacks on Santorum in Michigan may have saved the Republican party from a disaster of Goldwater proportions.

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who owns sociology?

Market Veteran wrote the following comment yesterday:

For example, there are virtually no hiring committees advertising for cultural sociology, despite it being apparently the largest section of ASA. By contrast, there are a tremendous number of jobs advertising for expertise in criminology, quantitative methods, health, etc. The reason is clear: because those tend to be popular majors and have wide availability of external funding.

So, who exactly owns sociology?

1. The senior faculty. They control the journals and the tenure committees. They like reproducing themselves.
2. The junior faculty. They are trying to impress the senior faculty.
3. The graduate students.  They are hatching tomorrow’s sociology.
4. The undergraduates. They want social problems and criminology.
5. Deans. They want interdisciplinary work because it sounds cools and gets you grant money.
6. The funders. They want to end poverty.
7. The professional schools. They already own some chunks of sociology, like orgtheory.

Currently, I think the balance of power is probably #1 and #3. Higher ranked programs tend to do as they will, which usually means hiring people that senior people think will be “hot” in the future. At most other programs, your budget depends on enrollments, and few programs are willing to be less popular by teaching non-social problems/crim.

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republicans fail the ron paul test

Politics is a chorus of dog whistles. Can’t say segregation, say states rights. Can’t say you hate immigrants, you just want them to “self-deport” and obey laws designed to keep them out.

That’s why I find Ron Paul to be a very telling politician. His candidacy reveals the true intentions of many Republican voters. Many voters say they want smaller government and Paul has voted in this way. He’s anti-tax, votes for program cuts, and against war, which grows government by leaps and bounds. How does he do among Tea Party, who claim they want less government? A telling summary of recent primary polling data from the New Yorker:

Polls have shown that voters who support the Tea Party are actually less likely to support Paul—some have gone for Newt Gingrich, whose denunciations of Obama are pithier, or for Rick Santorum, who is more forthright in his defense of “traditional American values.” In South Carolina, where Paul received thirteen per cent of the vote, behind Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and Santorum, he did his best among voters opposed to the Tea Party. [my italics]

When given the option between Paul, a social conservative, and a liberal Republican who actually doesn’t mind expanding social services, GOP primary voters rate Paul a distant third. Tells  you a lot about the rhetoric of limited government.

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call me in wisconsin!!!!

This afternoon, I will be a guest on At Issue with Ben Merens. The show is on at 4pm Wisconsin time (5pm EST) on Wisconsin Public Radio. We’ll be talking about Occupy, the Tea Party, and their impact on the elections. Call with a comment at 1-800-486-8655.

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planning your academic mobility

This post is about moving up in the academic system. A few disclaimers: First, I speak from the view point of someone who has been very lucky. But still, I think I can offer some insights because I’ve been hiring and grad school recruitment committees. I’ve also had my own successes and failures. Second, the current job market is very hard for people. Not only are we still in a recession, there is a backlog of applicants. Third, I’m a measured optimist. I don’t believe that everyone will magically get an amazing job. But I do think that hard work does yield results over your career.

Each stage of your career entails different mobility strategies. So let’s go through them:

1. Undergraduates: At this point, you can’t change where you went to college and you can’t fudge your GPA much. However, there is one low-cost strategy that boosts your chances – master the GRE. You can study for it and you can retake it. And yes, it costs money – but you should learn some cost-benefit analysis. Getting into a decent graduate school can lead to a life time of guaranteed earnings. $160 per test is a pittance. A few hundred bucks for tests, prep and reports in exchange for a career worth about three million bucks is a no brainer.
2. MA stepping stone: Students with not so great GPAs can spend a year or two in an MA program. Many have excellent reputations and placement records.
3. Graduate students: If you are at a low tier school, you can transfer should you be focused on mobility. Also, a relentless focus on publications is important. Most “move ups” in the job market go to students with published articles, often to those in top journals or primarily authored by the student. In most disciplines, dissertations don’t carry much weight.
4. Faculty: Once again, it really boils down to publication. Yes, sometimes people move based on personal connections, or luck, but the typical move up is due to spending the time to get articles through the review process. Key phrase: “What have you done lately?” Caveat: What counts as “good” depends a lot on subfield and personal trajectory.

In all stages, I strongly recommend the strategy of large N. Undergads should apply to many schools. Graduate students should apply to many jobs in many regions and in many fields. All scholars should produce a healthy number of manuscripts and send them to many journals/publishers.

If you have experience, please post your comments.

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tea party forum at mobilizing ideas

The movements crew at Notre Dame has a great new online resource for scholars and social movement activists. It is called “Mobilizing Ideas,” a web site with essays on social movements. This February they have a forum on the impact of the Tea Party on Republican politics:

• Neil Caren on Tea Party polling.
• Tina Fetner, an orgtheory favorite, claims the Tea Party already won.
• Richard Lloyd and Steve Tepper on what’s new in the movement.
• David Meyer, orgtheorista, on the unintended consequences of the Tea Party.
• Chris Parker on factionalism.
• Theda Skocpol on the gravity of the Tea Party.
• Jesse White, Tea Party activist, on the meaning of the movement.

Recommended.

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enter the crystal room – hiorn’s seizure (2008)

From Panorama photography (seriously, click on the link): “In late 2008 British artist Roger Hiorns created an artwork out of an entire apartment in South London by filling it to the ceiling with a strong copper sulphate solution, waiting for crystals to form, then pumping the solution out again. The result, called ‘Seizure’, was stunning and alien, and because of it the artist has been nominated for the Turner Prize 2009.

Sadly, it is no longer accessible to the public and the buildings will eventually be demolished, but in late April 2009 it was photographed by special arrangement.”

Here is a tour of the room on youtube. More photos here.

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was the financial crisis caused by corporate psychopaths?

Was the financial crisis caused by corporate psychopaths? Clive Boddy, writing in the Journal of Business Ethics, seems to think so.

These corporate collapses have gathered pace in recent years, especially in the western world, and have culminated in the Global Financial Crisis that we are now in. In watching these events unfold it often appears that the senior directors involved walk away with a clean conscience and huge amounts of money. Further, they seem to be unaffected by the corporate collapses they have created. They present themselves as glibly unbothered by the chaos around them, unconcerned about those who have lost their jobs, savings, and investments, and as lacking any regrets about what they have done. They cheerfully lie about their involvement in events are very persuasive in blaming others for what has happened and have no doubts about their own continued worth and value. They are happy to walk away from the economic disaster that they have managed to bring about, with huge payoffs and with new roles advising governments how to prevent such economic disasters.

Many of these people display several of the characteristics of psychopaths and some of them are undoubtedly true psychopaths. Psychopaths are the 1% of people who have no conscience or empathy and who do not care for anyone other than themselves. Some psychopaths are violent and end up in jail, others forge careers in corporations. The latter group who forge successful corporate careers is called Corporate  Psychopaths.

I have a complaint to make to the editors of the Journal of Business Ethics. Why is the term “Corporate Psychopaths” capitalized every time it appears in the paper? As if that’s not enough, why do we need the to capitalize “Global Financial Crisis” every time it appears in the paper? This combination leads to unattractive sentences like this:

The knowledge that Corporate Psychopaths are to be found at the top of organisations and seem to favour working with other people’s money in large financial organisations has in turn, led to the development of the Corporate Psychopaths Theory of the Global Financial Crisis. The Corporate Psychopaths Theory of the Global Financial Crisis is that Corporate Psychopaths, rising to key senior positions within modern financial corporations…..

Why not just capitalize and put in bold every letter and add blinking animation for emphasis?

professional advice from scatterplot

Over at Scatterplot, there have been some really helpful posts on academic issues:

1. Shamus on book contracts.
2. Olderwoman on ASA submission.
3. Jeremy on the oddly intrusive IRB policies at Northwestern.
4. Andrew on IRB mission creep.

Recommended.

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mormons vs. evangelicals: a question in the sociology of religion

A few weeks ago, I read this about the GOP South Carolina primary voters:

One of the biggest questions for Mr. Romney has been the impact of his Mormon faith in a heavily evangelical state like South Carolina.

Voters were not asked about that explicitly in exit polls, but among those who came to vote looking for someone who shared their religious beliefs, Mr. Romney did not do well.

This raised a question. Why do evangelicals not accept Mormons? Mormons  believe in Christ. It’s even in the official name of the main religious organization – The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Furthermore, most Mormons adopt the Christian label.

To resolve this puzzle, I asked three sociologists of religion if the Mormon faith is really that different what has traditionally been called Christianity. Surprisingly, I got a strong and uniform answer – yes. What I gathered from these conversations is that comparative religion scholars employ a definition that suggests that evangelical Christians and Mormons are very distinct.

How do the experts go about this question? The focus is on social practice. If group X and Y do the same things, then they are the same religion. In the study of religion, X and Y are similar if the employ the same ideas (religious beliefs) and texts. Also, religion scholars emphasize the role of spiritual mediation, ritual, and social practice. For example, Catholicism is considered different than Protestantism because the latter permits individuals a direct relation to god.

On these counts, Mormonism and Protestantism are considered quite different. Ideologically, Mormons have different beliefs about the after life, the nature of the soul, and other issues. Textually, they do not adhere to Biblical literalism and they have added a new primary text, the Book of Mormon. They are schismatic as well, in the sense that they do not accept the authority of earlier Christian or Catholic organizations. Finally, they have their own social organization (e.g., they are endogamous and have their own social groups).

Let me end with a note about self-identification. Why do members of the LDS use the term Christianity? The answer is simple – they are Christians. This is a truthful and accurate use of the term “Christian” because Mormons believe in Christ and still read the Bible.

Why the difference between the congregation and the experts? I think that’s simple as well. When Mormons say, “I am Christian,” they are saying that they share some of the same theology as Protestants, Catholics, and other groups that trace their lineage through Jesus Christ. The experts would also recognize that, but they have a different term for that. They would say Mormonism is “Abrahamic,” a term denoting monotheistic religions that have evolved from Abraham.

Sociologically, the emergence of a religion, like Mormonism, indicates social differentation. A group breaks off and establishes a new identity. Since the new group has retained traits from the old group, it’s fair to point to similarities. Also, there will be important differences which form the foundation of the new group, so it is fair to say that their different. Same branch, different leaves.

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politics is often irrational

Philosopher Michael Huemer’s TEDx talk on figuring out if you are biased in your political thinking.

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hey, foucault…

Check out the complete series at Hey, Michel Foucault.

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discussion on social movement research methods

The Society Pages is a project from the Soc Dept at the University of Minnesota. The website has a round table on social movement research methods. The organizers of the round table are Kyle Green, Sinan Erensu, and Sarah Lageson. A number of scholars  were asked a series of questions about social movement research. The contributors are Jeffrey Alexander, Neil Caren, Nathan Clough, Myra Marx Feree, Sarah Gaby, David S. Meyer (a guest blogger emeritus and orghead), and yours truly. Check it out. What else do you want to know about social movement research practice?

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solving the romney riddle

The puzzle for me is not that Romney is facing resistance. Nearly all non-incumbents face resistance in presidential primaries. But still, Romney’s problems puzzle me. His opposition is incoherent, underwhelming, and underfunded. Romney has the establishment backing, wealthy backers who can pour millions into Super-PACS, and he actually won 11 states in 2008. So why is now losing states that were slam dunks in 2008?

As usual, the story is complex. A lot of early primary states, like Michigan, have lost the moderate and wealthy Republicans that Romney relies on. Republicans from liberal states are decidedly unpopular for the Tea Party base. Evangelicals probably don’t tolerate Mormons.

But there is one factor that has yet to be mentioned – maybe Romney is just really bad at being a conservative politician. Until 2012, he’s never been forced to actually talk the talk in any serious way. During his 1994 battle against Ted Kennedy, he talked non-stop about how he wasn’t conservative, a theme he picked up as her ran for governor. In 2008, Romney won 11 states, but he only appeared conservative when compared to John McCain – the guy who thumbed his nose at the GOP base. In other words, a competent flip-flopper like Romney only appears conservative when standing next to someone who actively makes fun of the base.

2012 is the first time that Romney has had to run against other national politicians who are consistently to the right of him. Even though they are waging an uphill battle, they do have compensating factors. Santorum has always been hyper-conservative on social issues, Paul has the libertarian wing, and Gingrich … well … he’s special. Anyway, 2012 is the first time that Romney has had to fight for conservative votes with competitors who are, well, actually conservative. And the lack of experience shows.

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i’m mcbloggin

The orgtheory staff tries to keep it fresh with a mix of sociology, management, economics, and poli sci. We toss in book discussions, current events, and guest bloggers. We’ll even do requests. What do you think we should do more of? What social science trends need discussion? Professional issues? Feel free to use the comments section.

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zuberi @ dubois

Penn sociologist Tukufu Zuberi discusses the importance of DuBois’ seminal book, The Philadelphia Negro.

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