what if sociology does not really want to have a public impact? commentary on economics and sociology blogs

A constant point of discussion in the social sciences is the relatively strong position of economics. That profession has more institutional power, higher salaries, and more public visibility than related social science fields. If you ask sociologists who study academic professions, like our own Elizabeth Popp-Berman, Michel Reay, or Marion Fourcade, you will get stories about how economists have the support of the private sector or how their intellectual tools support various interests or state building projects.

I won’t dispute that, but I’d like to offer an additional simple hypothesis: economists want public impact harder than other fields and they actually take the effort to build the tools to allow you to do it. Here’s a few examples:

• If you take a standard graduate level micro economics class, you learn about social welfare theorems. That provides a simple template for defining and estimating policy impacts. Sociologists want you to know about  Max Weber.
• Economists have put a huge emphasis on identification of causal effects. It’s now front and center and it helps you determine what actions might be worth doing. Sociologists have long done experiments and they also worry identification, but it’s a second place subject in our methods training and the way we approach things.
• Economists created the National Bureau for Economic Research … in 1920. They publish papers and their online archive has papers going back to the early 2000s, if not earlier. We have no analog for NBER and SocArXiv started in 2016.

Here’s an example closer to home – blogging. Blogging is literally free and easy to do, and for a short while, sociologists were totally into it. Now? Basically, there is orgtheory, a newly revived Scatter Plot (thanks, Jess!), Soc images, Phil’s Family Inequality, and the Society pages. Norton also runs a sociology blog (Everyday Sociology). The only other very active blog in sociology I can think is Mobilizing Ideas. Randall Collins has a blog, but it runs posts a few times a year and most don’t notice it. If you look at the dozens of blogs listed on the side of this blog, most are defunct or rarely updated. Adding insult to injury, sociology blogs have dead comment sections.

Econ? There is a list of 100 (!) active econ blogs. And we aren’t talking about obscure people – blogs are maintained by folks like Harvard’s Greg Mankiw, Berkeley’s Brad DeLong and Piketty himself runs a blog. Libertarian blogs like Marginal Revolution and Econ Log are also active and draw a vibrant discussion community. These blogs are so active and vital to the informal discussion community in the academy that that Library of Congress (!!) has decided to permanently archive Marginal Revolution and other selected economics blogs as example of important early 21st century intellectual life. The only conclusion I can draw is that economists care more about their ideas and discussing them in public than other fields. Rather than drop blogs when social media became hot, they saw blogs as one tool in a public outreach arsenal.

This leads me to a hypothesis about sociology and its relationship to public impact. Sociologists are into policy and outreach if you can talk about it in the concluding section of a paper, or as a way to show you are cool because you know that DuBois was an activist. But if it involves the continual effort to reach the public, or the grinding work of building institutions to make the impact possible, or doing the messy work of interfacing with the state, non-profits, and other non-academics, they won’t be around. But you can find them retweeting the latest political outrage.

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