A guide to being a sociologist

Karl Marx Imagined

The social world is more complex and heterogeneous than most parts of the natural world, with diverse causal processes, different tempos of change, and multiple influences on a given outcome of interest. If we want to understand, say, why American psychiatry came to have the institutions and prescriptions that it currently has (as Andrew Abbott wants to do in The System of Professions), we need to consider —

• actors at a range of levels (local people, state officials, educational institutions and associations …) who have an interest in the definition of mental-health practices, institutions, and regulations
• the legal and educational context that affects the interests and strategies of various practitioners differently
• the ways in which other professions connected to mental health and behavior (such as nursing or street-level policing) have influenced the development of the profession of psychiatry

… and many other factors and processes that do not yield to the impulse towards simple answers or single-dimensional hypotheses.

So the intellectual process of sociological inquiry and discovery is itself a complex and obscure one. The reader of a rich sociological analysis of a complex institution like Abbott’s treatment of the professions will quickly understand that this research project could not have been drafted out in detail in advance. Rather, the researcher was obliged to discover his or her own questions and insights as they dig more deeply into the specific institutional and practical realities of the profession. And this leads us to ask, what kinds of intellectual and imaginative capacities are invoked in this evolving analysis? To what extent does sociological theory contribute to a researcher’s ability to understand a new and complex social phenomenon? What is involved in applying a “sociological imagination” to a sociological topic?

David Stark’s Practicing Sociology: Tacit Knowledge for the Social Scientific Craft is a contribution to current thinking about methods of inquiry and uses of theory in sociological research. Stark is an organizational sociologist who has devoted a great deal of attention to “how organizations learn”.

The title is deliberately thought-provoking: is the process of investigating the social world a “craft”, or is it a set of precise methods that can be taught in PhD programs? The difference in perspective on this question is important: a craft involves something like “tacit knowledge”, whereas a precise set of methods sounds quite a lot like an algorithm of discovery. Stark’s view, and the view of many of the contributors to the volume, is that there are important aspects of the practice of sociology that are indeed “craft”-like. They are features of the active lives of academic sociologists that need to be learned through concrete practice in the discipline.

Stark’s introduction to the volume lays the ground for the contributions that follow. He argues that important parts of the research process within the social sciences are almost never addressed within graduate education. Three activities in particular are important: the researcher must “(1) come up with a compelling research topic …; (2) develop a publication strategy; and (3) learn how to improve a manuscript while navigating the process of peer review” (p. 1). And Stark suggests that these topics are both crucial to impactful sociological research, and at the same time, substantially under-developed when it comes time to assist young sociologists to make the transition from learners to researchers and creators of knowledge. Stark’s own comments focus on what are somewhat epiphenomenal aspects of the process of research — deciding who your audience is, choosing a title, making productive academic relationships in fields different from your own. Notably, however, Stark’s comments do not connect at all to the problems of deciding how to proceed empirically, how to define the research questions of interest in one’s project, how to decide about the theoretical or explanatory ideas that might be relevant to this topic. And yet these are in fact closest to the problem of conducting innovative, illuminating research on a difficult sociological topic.

The book consists of short commentaries in which a number of established scholars attempt to formulate their own answers to these three questions. And the contributions are excellent, written by highly creative and productive contributors to a range of fields of contemporary sociology.

The book is presented as a series of discussions of how a range of accomplished sociologists have sought to better understand the social world. But that’s not really what we get. Instead, in line with Stark’s emphasis on the “craft” of sociology, the contributors are mostly inclined to reflect on their own practices of writing and publication through an extended career. And this often comes down to mundane questions about choosing a potential publisher (book or journal article), how to respond most productively to feedback on a piece of work, how to decide when an article or book is “finished”, how to balance conference invitations and ongoing work within one’s own well defined research program, and similar pragmatic questions that arise for working academics. But we don’t get much insight into the creative intellectual work in which the sociologist engages. The contributors are themselves imaginative and innovative sociologists; but none of them really addresses the intellectual and imaginative processes involved in sociological research. Rather, we get pragmatic reflections about which kinds of publication venues are best for pursuing tenure at a research university, or how much time to spend on reviewers’ comments on a submitted manuscript.

We could ask whether the figure in the AI-generated image above conformed to any of Stark’s recommendations. And the answer seems to be almost universally “no”. Marx’s titles were unintuitive and unrevealing about the material in his manuscript; he gave virtually no thought to his “audience”; he had little interest in interdisciplinary discovery and collaboration; and Marx’s own published work was only a tiny fraction of his total corpus. He seems not to have thought at all about the pragmatic challenges raised by Stark. And similar comments seem in order for other founders”and early contributors to the scientific discipline of sociology — Tarde, Durkheim, Weber, Simmel, or Merton. Of course there is a bit of “selection bias” here, but these figures all turned out to have great impact within their intellectual worlds.

Confronting race through Rawls's political philosophy

 Rawls believes that a just society must be a pluralistic society, and that means that it must be neutral across (reasonable) comprehensive conceptions of the good. Citizens must be enabled to pursue their own comprehensive conceptions without interference from the state. Does this imply that a comprehensive conception based on the idea of ethnic or racial superiority over another must be condoned? It does not, because Rawls is not in fact neutral across all comprehensive conceptions. He believes there is a background condition that is both morally and sociologically necessary for the maintenance of a just society — the requirement that recognizes equal freedoms, dignity, and opportunity for all groups of citizens and that cultivates citizens who share these commitments. This has a very powerful implication: Rawls’s theory implies the urgent need for finding means of developing citizens who embody respect, tolerance, and compassion for others. This means finding effective means of reducing and eliminating racism in our society.

Consider this short text from section 7 of Political Liberalism:

Think, then, of the principles of justice as designed to form the social world in which our character and our conception of ourselves as persons, as well as our comprehensive views and their conceptions of the good, are first acquired, and in which our moral powers must be realized, if they are to be realized at all. These principles must give priority to those basic freedoms and opportunities in background institutions of civil society that enable us to become free and equal citizens in the first place, and to understand our role as persons with that status. (Political Liberalism, 41)

This paragraph merits close attention. Let’s start with the idea of “forming the social world in which our character … as well as our comprehensive views … are first acquired”. This is an acknowledgement of the plasticity of character, conception of the good, and moral powers in real human beings. These features of the person must be acquired, and they are shaped and influenced by the circumstances in which the individual develops. This introduces a fundamental aspect of historicity into the question of justice: a society both shapes the individuals who constitute it and is the result of the moral identities of past generations of individuals. Moral development is a crucial part of the creation and maintenance of a just society.

This idea has an important implication: a society founded on “bad” institutions, practices, and principles will result in the creation of individual persons — the constituents of the next phase of the social order — who are morally flawed. And this implies that the society that they play a role in creating will itself be morally flawed.

As an example, imagine a society in which sons and daughters are treated very differently within the family, with sons having a privileged role and daughters being expected to behave in subordinate ways and to accept different kinds of opportunities (schooling, employment, sports). How will the institutions and social arrangements of adult society be affected by this feature of family behavior? The answer seems clear: privilege and subordination between boys and girls in the family will seem “natural” and this inequality will carry over into civil society. The institutions of a society consisting of individuals shaped within these family norms and practices will themselves reflect the domination and subordination associated with familial roles for boys and girls.

So what kind of principles and practices must a healthy just society embody? The final two sentences of the paragraph bring the point home. The background principles of a just society “must give priority to those basic freedoms and opportunities … that enable us to become free and equal citizens in the first place, and to understand our role as persons with that status.” Conversely, a society that does not give priority to equality and basic freedoms will result in generations of citizens who are unable to become “free and equal citizens”. Such a society requires reform before it can become a just and equal democracy.

So a just society over time needs to ensure the legal, normative, and institutional principles that establish basic (and equal) freedoms and opportunities. This means that social, familial, or cultural practices that are inconsistent with equal freedoms and opportunities must be altered. The practice of treating daughters as subordinate is toxic to the creation of a just society because it fails to embody the conditions required for creating men and women who understand themselves as free and equal citizens, and who respect each other accordingly.

This line of thought has direct relevance to the history of racism and racial discrimination in the United States and other countries. It is part of what Charles Mills is getting at in his critique of “the racial contract”. If racial subordination and discrimination are woven into the experience of childhood and young adulthood, then the ambient social institutions and practices fail the test Rawls is proposing. They fail to give priority “to basic freedoms and opportunities … that enable us to become free and equal citizens in the first place”. It is therefore a first priority that such a society, and the state that governs such a society, must make strenuous and sustained efforts at reforming the social environment in which citizens form their “moral powers” and develop their comprehensive conceptions of the good. That means finding effective ways of removing racial subordination and racist ways of thinking from society.

It is a fact that creating a just society is a process of “boot-strapping”, in which one series of improvements lays the basis for new improvements at the next level. Establishing legal and political equality for all groups — a basic tenet of progressive liberalism in the 1950s — was a pressing goal. It is not yet achieved. The next pressing goal is to find ways of changing the experiences that children and young adults have of inter-group relations. Forms of behavior and ideas of prejudice are formed through lived experience; so teachers, family members, members of civic associations and places of worship, and political leaders can provide powerful and transformative examples that cultivate mutual respect, tolerance, and compassion across groups.

But the point to emphasize here is that both activities — establishing equal constitutional rights and liberties, and changing the developmental environment so as to cultivate attitudes of respect, tolerance, and compassion for others — both these activities are mandatory for a “becoming-just” society, according to Rawls’s prescriptions here. The goal of both kinds of reforms is the same: to “enable us to become free and equal citizens” and to participate fully in a just and multicultural society.