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April 10, 2013
33 notes

Too Much Sociology…or Not Enough?

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“I haven’t read this yet but I feel like you will have an opinion on this,” said Becky, posting an article to my Facebook wall. She was right—you don’t need to read an editorial titled “Too Much Sociology” to correctly guess that the guy who wrote Sociology for Dummies will have something to say about it.

The n+1 editors bemoan the fact that the sociology of culture, originally used to expose the structures of power that govern cultural production and consumption (in other words, why Gossip Girl gets made, why we watch it or don’t, and why we admit watching it or don’t), is now winning popular acceptance and being used to justify those structures rather than question them.

“In sociological living,” the n+1 editors write, “we place value on those works or groups that seem most likely to force a reevaluation of an exclusive or oppressive order, or an order felt to be oppressive simply because exclusive. And yet despite this perpetual reevaluation of all values, the underlying social order seems unchanged; the sense of it all being a game not only persists, but hardens.”

Well, first off, it seems a little rude to shoot the messenger. As the n+1 editors point out, scholarship in sociology and critical studies has indeed gone a long way towards explaining the ways in which we produce and use cultural products (including memes, in both the general and Tumblr senses of the word); just because that knowledge is now spreading and has not yet caused the upending of the cultural apple-cart doesn’t mean it hasn’t done any good. Marx was wrong about the coming global revolution and the feasibility of communism, but he wasn’t wrong about capital and exploitation. Sociologists have learned to be a little more modest about their predictions, and I don’t think Pierre Bourdieu (inventor of the concept of “cultural capital”) would be shocked to see that here it is 2013 and the bougies are still bougies, the proles are still proles. Such is the way of things.

Marx called religion the “opium of the people,” a mythology used to justify the world order and quell revolts with promises of eternal reward. Echoing the much-bandied idea that science is our new religion, the n+1 editors suggest that sociology itself has become the people’s new opiate: cultural inequality (in other words, I flash my expensive education via my cultural repertoire), linked to structural inequality (in other words, the money it cost to buy that education), makes perfect sense. We all (or at least the “English majors” who the editors are surprised to hear spouting critical theory) see how much sense this inequality makes, and we tell ourselves that it’s inevitable—thus, we don’t work to change it.

The n+1 editors have done their reading and make many accurate observations about society and sociology (not the same thing), but ultimately, their argument hinges on one erroneous assertion buried near the end: “sociology cannot provide us with internal reasons for its ever-rising prestige.” Au contraire, mes frères et sœurs: sociology has provided many explanations for the rise of sociology, among them Émile Durkheim’s theory of functional differentiation and Max Weber’s theory of rationalization. Durkheim and Weber both predicted that as a society, we would increasingly come to see ourselves in rational—that is, scientific—terms. In other words, we would increasingly come to understand our society in sociological terms. Unlike Marx’s predictions, that one has come true.

So if we understand ourselves so (relatively) well now, in such (relatively) scientific terms with such (relatively) comprehensive data, why haven’t we fixed everything? Why—ask the n+1 editors—are the cultural sociologists themselves, rather than fighting injustice, justifying their own privileged positions?

Well, a short answer is that fighting injustice isn’t their job. To quote the great parapsychologist Peter Venkman, “Back off, man…I’m a scientist.” A longer answer would point out that if the world’s sociologists aren’t quite throwing themselves at the walls of power, they’re hardly conservative: sociologists are among academe’s most dogged fighters for social justice. The sociologists I know didn’t take the job because they find it abstractly fascinating that African-American culture has been historically stigmatized, they took the job because, through research and education, they can make the world a better place.

An even longer answer would question the n+1 editors’ assumption that “the relentless demystification sociology requires” has been without profoundly positive effects on social justice. Sociology is rising in popularity and (I’ll happily take the n+1 editors’ perspective on this point) prestige because we live in a world where facts about human nature are valued over assumptions about it. That sounds cold, and it is, but it’s the kind of cold that puts the freeze on notions like “a superior race” or “the proper roles of the sexes” or “manifest destiny.” Yes, economic inequality in the U.S. is growing—but sociology has been growing for over a century, and it’s hard to see the social changes that have happened since Durkheim published his Rules of Sociological Method (1895) as mostly bad.

Yes, as Bourdieu and other sociologists have pointed out, a cultural elite who rule by listening to Arnold Schoenberg and Big K.R.I.T. (versus the non-elite who exclusively listen to pop music) are still an elite—as they were when they listened only to Beethoven and turned up their noses at jazz—but sociology not only explains that change in elite tastes, it’s an integral part of a world where those tastes are changing to become more inclusive, less rigidly hierarchical, and more open to cross-pollination.

In short, the world isn’t getting worse, or even staying the same: it’s getting better, and sociology is making it better. Sorry, English majors—you have to keep reading Bourdieu. It’s good for you, and for everybody.

- Jay Gabler

Tags: sociology

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June 19, 2012
17 notes
In 1972, sociologists Michael Cohen, James March, and Johan Olsen threw up their hands and published a paper titled “A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice.” A lot of companies, they argued, are “collections of choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they might be aired, solutions looking for issues to which they might be an answer, and decision makers looking for work.” Their prime example was the organization nearest to their own experience, the modern university. A university’s mission is clear: it’s in the business of education. But it’s in a lot of other businesses too. Most universities have research labs and hospitals, run private police forces, act as landlords to on-campus residents, operate elaborate dining services, run gyms and libraries, publish books, and field a number of athletic teams. What should a university not do? Who knows? When I was in grad school at Harvard, then-president Larry Summers was excoriated by the student body for cutting back on the university’s procedures for investigating allegations of sexual assault. Rape is a crime, argued Summers, and therefore investigations of alleged rape should be conducted by law enforcement professionals, not by college deans who were hired for their knowledge of Shakespeare and molecular biology. Many students disagreed, saying that Harvard was sending a signal that it didn’t take sexual assault seriously—that the police should investigate allegations of rape, and so should Harvard, simultaneously. Summers, a number-crunching economist who prized efficiency, didn’t last long in that job. Summers had a hard time with the garbage-can aspect of Harvard’s organization: that the university was effectively conducting criminal investigations not necessarily because it made rational sense for a university to police criminal activity, but because a lot of people just wanted the university to do so. That’s not a very rational way to run a business—but that’s how all businesses, to some extent, operate. From the gargantuan Harvard University to my tiny nonprofit, companies are full of choices looking for problems, feelings looking for outlets, solutions looking for issues, and decision makers looking for work. “Rationality,” in work as in love, is in the eye of the beholder. Is your company an organizational garbage can?

In 1972, sociologists Michael Cohen, James March, and Johan Olsen threw up their hands and published a paper titled “A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice.” A lot of companies, they argued, are “collections of choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they might be aired, solutions looking for issues to which they might be an answer, and decision makers looking for work.”

Their prime example was the organization nearest to their own experience, the modern university. A university’s mission is clear: it’s in the business of education. But it’s in a lot of other businesses too. Most universities have research labs and hospitals, run private police forces, act as landlords to on-campus residents, operate elaborate dining services, run gyms and libraries, publish books, and field a number of athletic teams. What should a university not do? Who knows?

When I was in grad school at Harvard, then-president Larry Summers was excoriated by the student body for cutting back on the university’s procedures for investigating allegations of sexual assault. Rape is a crime, argued Summers, and therefore investigations of alleged rape should be conducted by law enforcement professionals, not by college deans who were hired for their knowledge of Shakespeare and molecular biology. Many students disagreed, saying that Harvard was sending a signal that it didn’t take sexual assault seriously—that the police should investigate allegations of rape, and so should Harvard, simultaneously. Summers, a number-crunching economist who prized efficiency, didn’t last long in that job.

Summers had a hard time with the garbage-can aspect of Harvard’s organization: that the university was effectively conducting criminal investigations not necessarily because it made rational sense for a university to police criminal activity, but because a lot of people just wanted the university to do so.

That’s not a very rational way to run a business—but that’s how all businesses, to some extent, operate. From the gargantuan Harvard University to my tiny nonprofit, companies are full of choices looking for problems, feelings looking for outlets, solutions looking for issues, and decision makers looking for work. “Rationality,” in work as in love, is in the eye of the beholder.

Is your company an organizational garbage can?

Tags: sociology Harvard Oscar the Grouch

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May 28, 2012
15 notes
In a recent New Inquiry post, George Scialabba agrees with author Morris Berman’s argument that America is the new Rome, that our shallow hubris has led to a free-fall that shows no signs of stopping, that “the monastic option” may be our best bet to preserve our progress—our intellectual progress, at least—while our cities inevitably burn. Whoa. I’m not going to get into all that, but I was a little surprised to find that when it came time to cite social failures in the litany of doom, Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (2000) still represented the state of the art. I was a grad student in sociology when Putnam’s book came out, and I remember it receiving immediate popular acclaim—such as weighty and heavily-sourced proclamations of apocalypse tend to attract—but skepticism among academics. Putnam argued that “social capital” (in other words, meaningful community connection) in the United States was in steep decline, with potentially dire consequences for all. No one doubted Putnam’s facts—the title refers to the decline of bowling leagues, held up as exemplars of the sort of rich social ties Americans used to have before we shredded them all to watch TV and go online—but his interpretations were seen by many as going a bridge too far. One type of organization, for example, held up by Putnam and others as an example of what’s been lost was the fraternal organization: the Lions and the Elks and the ilk. Certainly, local Rotaries are not what they once were—but my academic advisor, Jason Kaufman, published an entire book arguing that fraternal organizations are not to be mourned. For one thing, Jason pointed out, the decision to join one of those organizations was often as much about pragmatics (they provided early versions of health insurance) as about any sort of desire to build social ties. More damningly, Jason demonstrated how deeply segregated those organizations were by race and ethnicity (in many neighborhoods at the turn of the century, Italian immigrants didn’t just, you know, hang out with Irish immigrants) and by, of course, sex. Americans weren’t bowling alone in those supposed glory days of yesteryear—they were bowling with other Americans who were of the same class, ethnicity, and sex they were! Scialabba also cites other facts from Putnam that sound terrible until you take a second and think about them. “Frequency of having friends to dinner dropped by 45 percent” (now, we eat out), “card parties declined 50 percent” (God forbid), and “reported incidents of aggressive driving rose by 50 percent” (even if we take this to be an actual per-capita increase in aggressive driving rather than just the reporting of aggressive driving, consider that America has been rapidly urbanizing, so you’re less likely to know personally that driver you’re cutting off). But then we get to the crux of Putnam’s argument: the supposed consequence of this declining social capital. “Americans’ declared readiness to make new friends declined by 30 percent. Belief that most other people could be trusted dropped from 77 percent to 37 percent.” According to Berman via Scialabba, this rush to disconnected individualism has always been embedded in the national DNA, in America’s “innermost principle, its animating Geist. What he finds at the bottom of our culture’s soul is…hustling; or, to use its respectable academic sobriquet, possessive individualism.” If that’s been America’s “soul” from day one, why have we seemingly hurtled so far towards our dark destiny in the last 20% of our national history? I think Putnam, Berman, and Scialabba tell too tidy a tale. Just as humans want to believe in gods, we want to believe that nations have “souls” that shape destinies. We love Freud’s idea that preverbal conflicts seal our individual fates, and we’re all ready to sign on to an argument that somewhere in the genesis of American society is the master key that unlocked our intemperate response to the challenges of recent decades, thus insuring our decline and fall. America has certainly fucked a lot of things up in recent years, but a naive nostalgia for the golden years of card parties and bowling leagues will not help us solve any of our problems. Urbanization is a reality. Advances in communication and transportation technology are also real. An increasing need for an educated workforce and the challenge of adjusting to that new economy are real. Those are challenges faced by countries around the world, and blaming America’s hollow “soul” for its failure to respond as well as it might have is a neat rhetorical trick, not a statement of fact. Look around your American community, if you’re in America. There are still community meetings, and parties, and bars and restaurants bustling with patrons. Dating sites are bursting with singles striving to make connections, and social media are tying us ever more closely to our local, national, and international neighbors. And don’t tell me that tweeting with an interesting friend in another country via my damned “flickering screen” is by definition an inferior sort of social connection when compared to joining a bowling league with the other white guys in the neighborhood. Scialabba’s dismissal of “idiot deans, rancid rappers, endlessly chattering sports commentators, an avalanche of half-inch-deep self-help manuals; a plague of gadgets, a deluge of stimuli, an epidemic of rudeness, a desert of mutual indifference” is a poetically written but profoundly condescending and reactionary appraisal of American social life that would crumble to bits if tested against actual anthropological evidence about the ways people navigate their daily lives. The world, America included, is alive with social connections, with promise and possibility. The average American is less likely to want to make friends—well, how many friends does the average American have these days? It’s hard to believe the number is less than the corresponding number for someone living in a 1950s suburb. Maybe we have enough friends. As for trust…well, yes, our communities are less homogeneous. I don’t trust the guy across the street as much as my parents trusted their guy-across-the-street, but I hardly feel that’s because I’m isolated in my studio-apartment bunker, afraid to go out and bowl or play cards or whatever. I live in the big city now, and so do most people my age and younger. You’ve got to watch your back—but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re selfishly and fearfully turning it. Unless, of course, you think it’s time to give up on America and become a monk. - Jay Gabler

In a recent New Inquiry post, George Scialabba agrees with author Morris Berman’s argument that America is the new Rome, that our shallow hubris has led to a free-fall that shows no signs of stopping, that “the monastic option” may be our best bet to preserve our progress—our intellectual progress, at least—while our cities inevitably burn. Whoa.

I’m not going to get into all that, but I was a little surprised to find that when it came time to cite social failures in the litany of doom, Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (2000) still represented the state of the art. I was a grad student in sociology when Putnam’s book came out, and I remember it receiving immediate popular acclaim—such as weighty and heavily-sourced proclamations of apocalypse tend to attract—but skepticism among academics.

Putnam argued that “social capital” (in other words, meaningful community connection) in the United States was in steep decline, with potentially dire consequences for all. No one doubted Putnam’s facts—the title refers to the decline of bowling leagues, held up as exemplars of the sort of rich social ties Americans used to have before we shredded them all to watch TV and go online—but his interpretations were seen by many as going a bridge too far.

One type of organization, for example, held up by Putnam and others as an example of what’s been lost was the fraternal organization: the Lions and the Elks and the ilk. Certainly, local Rotaries are not what they once were—but my academic advisor, Jason Kaufman, published an entire book arguing that fraternal organizations are not to be mourned. For one thing, Jason pointed out, the decision to join one of those organizations was often as much about pragmatics (they provided early versions of health insurance) as about any sort of desire to build social ties.

More damningly, Jason demonstrated how deeply segregated those organizations were by race and ethnicity (in many neighborhoods at the turn of the century, Italian immigrants didn’t just, you know, hang out with Irish immigrants) and by, of course, sex. Americans weren’t bowling alone in those supposed glory days of yesteryear—they were bowling with other Americans who were of the same class, ethnicity, and sex they were!

Scialabba also cites other facts from Putnam that sound terrible until you take a second and think about them. “Frequency of having friends to dinner dropped by 45 percent” (now, we eat out), “card parties declined 50 percent” (God forbid), and “reported incidents of aggressive driving rose by 50 percent” (even if we take this to be an actual per-capita increase in aggressive driving rather than just the reporting of aggressive driving, consider that America has been rapidly urbanizing, so you’re less likely to know personally that driver you’re cutting off).

But then we get to the crux of Putnam’s argument: the supposed consequence of this declining social capital. “Americans’ declared readiness to make new friends declined by 30 percent. Belief that most other people could be trusted dropped from 77 percent to 37 percent.”

According to Berman via Scialabba, this rush to disconnected individualism has always been embedded in the national DNA, in America’s “innermost principle, its animating Geist. What he finds at the bottom of our culture’s soul is…hustling; or, to use its respectable academic sobriquet, possessive individualism.” If that’s been America’s “soul” from day one, why have we seemingly hurtled so far towards our dark destiny in the last 20% of our national history?

I think Putnam, Berman, and Scialabba tell too tidy a tale. Just as humans want to believe in gods, we want to believe that nations have “souls” that shape destinies. We love Freud’s idea that preverbal conflicts seal our individual fates, and we’re all ready to sign on to an argument that somewhere in the genesis of American society is the master key that unlocked our intemperate response to the challenges of recent decades, thus insuring our decline and fall.

America has certainly fucked a lot of things up in recent years, but a naive nostalgia for the golden years of card parties and bowling leagues will not help us solve any of our problems. Urbanization is a reality. Advances in communication and transportation technology are also real. An increasing need for an educated workforce and the challenge of adjusting to that new economy are real. Those are challenges faced by countries around the world, and blaming America’s hollow “soul” for its failure to respond as well as it might have is a neat rhetorical trick, not a statement of fact.

Look around your American community, if you’re in America. There are still community meetings, and parties, and bars and restaurants bustling with patrons. Dating sites are bursting with singles striving to make connections, and social media are tying us ever more closely to our local, national, and international neighbors.

And don’t tell me that tweeting with an interesting friend in another country via my damned “flickering screen” is by definition an inferior sort of social connection when compared to joining a bowling league with the other white guys in the neighborhood. Scialabba’s dismissal of “idiot deans, rancid rappers, endlessly chattering sports commentators, an avalanche of half-inch-deep self-help manuals; a plague of gadgets, a deluge of stimuli, an epidemic of rudeness, a desert of mutual indifference” is a poetically written but profoundly condescending and reactionary appraisal of American social life that would crumble to bits if tested against actual anthropological evidence about the ways people navigate their daily lives.

The world, America included, is alive with social connections, with promise and possibility. The average American is less likely to want to make friends—well, how many friends does the average American have these days? It’s hard to believe the number is less than the corresponding number for someone living in a 1950s suburb. Maybe we have enough friends.

As for trust…well, yes, our communities are less homogeneous. I don’t trust the guy across the street as much as my parents trusted their guy-across-the-street, but I hardly feel that’s because I’m isolated in my studio-apartment bunker, afraid to go out and bowl or play cards or whatever. I live in the big city now, and so do most people my age and younger. You’ve got to watch your back—but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re selfishly and fearfully turning it. Unless, of course, you think it’s time to give up on America and become a monk.

- Jay Gabler

Tags: America sociology history

Text
March 27, 2012
48 notes

Marilyn Hagerty’s Habitus: Cultural Capital and the Sociology of the Olive Garden

All of us should be so lucky as to be inspiring wide-ranging national debate at age 85, which is what Marilyn Hagerty of North Dakota has been doing this month with her gloriously non-ironic review of the Grand Forks Olive Garden—a review that’s become the biggest thing to happen to North Dakota in pop culture since the Coen Brothers’ Fargo (and, unlike Fargo, is actually set in North Dakota).

The debate over the Hagerty review has opened a hornet’s nest of debate over culture and class in the United States. A lot of us writing online tend to assume, most of the time, that we’re writing only for and about people like ourselves; Marilyn Hagerty’s review has crossed the online tracks, forcing people to explain and defend their positions on the Olive Garden. Pro or con? Why? That’s not a question that people typically spend a lot of time thinking about, but suddenly each writer’s answer seems relevant.

The U.S. in the 2010s is different in many ways from France in the 1960s, but nonetheless, Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological classic Distinction—based on research conducted in France from 1963 to 1968—is useful in understanding the Great Olive Garden Debate, and why it’s more than just a simple class conflict.

According to Bourdieu, your upbringing instills you with what he calls a “habitus”: a way of looking at the world, of understanding and placing value upon things. Depending on what your parents did for a living and where you go to school, you’ll grow up thinking some things are more true, more important, more valuable than others.

Part of your habitus, says Bourdieu, is the amount of cultural capital you have. Cultural capital is a way of understanding and valuing elements of privileged culture, and it tends to accrue to people with an overabundance of education. If you have cultural and economic capital, you rule: these are the world’s doctors and lawyers. If you have a lot of cultural capital but not a lot of money, you’re a bohemian—in this case, a hipster blogger with a Ph.D. who’s living in a studio apartment (cough, cough).

The point of cultural capital is that it’s a form of privilege that’s associated with economic capital (the time and education it takes to acquire are not luxuries that people working two or three simultaneous jobs tend to have)—but it’s different. Cultural capital is one of the many forms of capital you can take advantage of as you claw your way up in society. People with cultural capital want economic capital (I wouldn’t mind owning a car, for example), and people with economic capital want cultural capital (they don’t want to be seen as unsophisticated). The reason the Olive Garden brings the claws out is that it sits right at that hinge between cultural and economic capital.

The Olive Garden’s core constituency is people with enough money to afford a $10+ entree—that’s not a lot in the white-tablecloth realm, but it’s a real luxury if you’re working a minimum-wage job—and the desire to enjoy a meal in sophisticated-seeming surroundings. The pro-Hagerty writers who champion the Olive Garden as a People’s Restaurant are missing the point: it’s not. McDonald’s is a People’s Restaurant. A no-frills lunch counter is a People’s Restaurant. For most of its patrons, the Olive Garden is where you go when you want a touch of class, a whiff of Europe, a validation of your desire to spend your hard-earned money on at least a few of “the finer things” in life: wine, bread in a basket, chicken Alfredo.

But of course the Olive Garden’s “sophistication” is just a light veneer, nothing like what you’d encounter if you went to a five-star Italian restaurant with a changing menu. What people with cultural capital find laughable about the Olive Garden is the unjustified pretension: they (we, not to be disingenuous about my own habitus) can see right through the Olive Garden’s faux sophistication, and they don’t appreciate the claim to the kind of cultural knowledge and sophistication that they have a more legit version of. The Hagerty review has been set upon with such astonished delight because Gawker readers rarely come across such a detailed, well-written restaurant review authored by someone who chooses to completely ignore the question of whether or not the Olive Garden’s sophistication is “authentic.”

The cultural capital factor is why the Olive Garden debate is more than simple class warfare. As a counterexample, consider Doe’s Eat Place. It’s a steak joint in Greenville, Mississippi, but don’t wear your dinner jacket: the Doe’s interior is frankly shabby. For about twice what you’d pay for dinner at the Olive Garden, you can go to Doe’s and eat a truly amazing steak. The walls of Doe’s are covered with plaudits from all those cultural elites who disdain the Olive Garden. They appreciate that Doe’s manifestly knows what it’s doing when it comes to food, but has no pretensions to being a “fancy” restaurant. You can go to Doe’s and feel good about yourself as a cultural elite, because you know where the real sophistication is—behind Doe’s unassuming door, not beneath the Tuscan farmhouse veneer of a suburban Olive Garden.

What’s forgotten in the Olive Garden Culture War, though, is the rest of Greenville. There’s no Olive Garden in Greenville: with a median household income of $26,000, most of Greenville’s residents, most of the time, couldn’t afford to eat at the Olive Garden or Doe’s.

Hagerty’s now-famous rejoinder to her critics was, “Get a life.” But of course they have a life: exactly the life their habitus dictates that they value, a life so soaked in cultural analysis and knowing irony that Hagerty’s lack of it astonishes them. And Hagerty has her own life, a life that includes regular dining out at restaurants that, yes, include the Olive Garden. But as the residents of Greenville can attest, those are not the only two lives to live in America. If there’s class conflict in this country—and there is—it’s much broader and deeper than a saucer of olive oil.

- Jay Gabler

(Source: thetangential.com)

Tags: Olive Garden Marilyn Hagerty sociology Greenville Mississippi Grand Forks North Dakota