The business of becoming a professional sociologist: Unpacking the informal training of graduate school

While one can be labeled a sociologist in name by fulfilling formal institutional requirements, that is only part of the necessary work involved in graduate training. What is also required is mastering the informal professional culture associated with academic sociology. In this paper, we offer practical advice about informal norms in graduate school—norms we know now that we wish we’d known then. Our reflections upon our own experiences in graduate school are guided by our common research and teaching interests in informal organizational culture. What is the potential salience of informal norms, such as particularistic relations with faculty and graduate students, ceremonial versus actual practices regarding research and teaching, and emotional labor around one’s work, for better understanding the professional socialization of graduate study in sociology? Our emphasis here is to offer advice on how to navigate the graduate school realities these norms present. We also believe that sociologists should turn a more focused eye on the profession, one in which the presence of such norms is readily acknowledged and more formally considered for the benefit of teaching graduate students.     

An accidental journey: Becoming a sociologist

This sketch describes how I accidentally became a sociologist. More importantly, it describes undergraduate sociology training at a private liberal arts university during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The University of Maryland began a Ph.D. program in sociology just before World War II began. I report on graduate training there, as well as the social and intellectual life of the department. C. Wright Mills began his academic career at Maryland. I consider his place in the department, my experiences with him as my dissertation director, and how he influenced my lifelong study on the bearing of social stratification to politics.     

I never had a mentor: Reflections of a chicano sociologist

By tracing the career path of a senior Chicano sociologist, this article attempts to gain insights into the problems and dilemmas faced by minority scholars in earlier stages of their careers. Tensions between the demands of a professional identity as a sociologist, on the one hand, and a personal identity as a Chicano, on the other, are isolated and discussed. It is suggested that this dynamic tension between professional and personal demands, coupled with expanding career opportunities and the emergence of Chicano Studies as an academic discipline, gave impetus to the development of an indigenous Chicano sociology that challenged traditional sociological paradigms and was grounded in Chicano culture and world view. His publications includeThe Age of Crisis (Harper & Row, 1975),La Chicana: The Mexican-American Woman (University of Chicago Press, 1980),The Chicano Experience (Notre dame University Press, 1985),Gringo Justice (Notre Dame University Press, 1987), and many journal articles dealing with race and ethnicity.     

Marginality,credibility and impression management: The Asian sociologist in America

A number of sociologists of Asian origin live and work in the United States. I use my personal experiences and impressions to illustrate the process of becoming, being, and being accepted as an academic sociologist. I find that perceptions of marginality, a quest for credibility, and efforts at impression management are important themes that run through this process. The positive and negative implications arising from these aspects of role performance for the Asian sociologist in America are identified. His current research focuses on cross-national studies of violence and the socio-legal processing of cases of child homicide.     

Surviving as a qualitative sociologist: Recollections from the diary of a state worker

In this paper I describe my experience as a qualitative sociologist on the research staff of a government policymaking agency. Using specific examples from my experience, strategies for survival as a qualitative sociologist in a quantitatively-oriented setting are presented. It is proposed that: 1) qualitative methods need to be promoted as a credible and valuable approach to research and the individual researcher must sell him or herself as competent in the use of such methods; 2) social support networks with similarly inclined co-workers and sociologists outside of the workplace need to be developed and maintained and used to enhance the status of qualitative methods and qualitative sociologists; and 3) as is true for all researchers working in a policymaking or applied setting, it is necessary to recognize the reticular nature of social research and to demonstrate how qualitative methods generate information that is useful to policy or other applied purposes. By application of this approach in my own workplace, qualitative research methods have become an acceptable and even desirable part of many research projects of the agency and I have been able to continue to practice and to maintain my identity as a qualitative sociologist.Thanks to Vincent D. Manti and two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Thanks also to Robert K. Merton for assuring me that the application of sociology is important and for giving me the word reticular. Nonetheless, opinions and points of view expressed herein are my own and do not necessarily reflect the positions or policies of any reader nor of the State of New York or any of its Divisions and no official endorsement should be inferred.     

Sexual trauma, spirituality, and psychopathology

This study assessed the association between spirituality and psychopathology in a group of sexual abuse victims and controls with a focus on whether spirituality moderated the association between sexual trauma and psychopathology. Seventy-one sexual trauma victims were compared to 25 control subjects on spiritual well-being, the Eating Disorder Examination, the PTSD Symptom Scale, and the SCID-I/P. The data showed that the two groups did not differ in terms of spiritual well-being. Sexual trauma status was associated with most of the psychopathology outcomes, but its impact on psychopathology was largely unmoderated by spirituality. Among sexual trauma victims, the level of spiritual well-being did not alter the probability of current psychopathology. However, increased spiritual well-being was generally associated with lower psychopathology for the entire sample.     

Becoming: Identity and spirituality

An individual’s identity answers the questions of who, what, where, and why the individual is. An overall identity is made up of multiple constituent identities. These identities may not be fixed over the life course, but may change as a result of conscious choices as well as serendipity or calamity—life transforming events which cannot be anticipated, which remove what had been the certainties and norms of life, and which can leave the individual disconnected from what had been her past and from her hoped for future. In this paper we develop a two-period behavioral model of an individual whose personal identity is an amalgam of N identities, one or more of which may be spiritual in nature. Some identities are actualized at a point in time and some remain latent. We model how individuals allocate resources among current and hoped for future identities, and how these resource allocation decisions and identity actualizations are affected by the interaction of choices and unanticipated external events. We argue why a spiritual identity may be actualized, how it interacts with other identities, and why, in giving context to an individual’s life, it enables her to define and to strive toward her overall identity—to become.     

Academic odyssey: The training of an African sociologist

This article describes my experience of graduate training in sociology at an elite American university. As an African, I faced cultural and intellectual pressures to adopt white middle class cultural norms and a Eurocentric worldview. The article critiques American sociology, including symbolic interactionism, the sociology of the Third World and the study of race and ethnic relations. I describe my personal encounter with American racism and the process that led me to conduct research on black immigrants. I argue that my exposure to American sociology and experience of American society transformed me into a black marginal sociologist, specializing in teaching and research on the African-American experience in the New World. His forthcoming book,Becoming Black American, is being published by AMS Press.     

An appointment with god: AIDS, place, and spirituality

This article describes how an African American gay man living with AIDS used his spiritual, religious, and cultural strengths to resist internalized dislocation because of heterosexism and homophobia. He was able to experience a relocation of God from places that rejected him to places that were conducive to his healing. By using these strengths, he was able to reject his physician's prediction of death and to call on God in response to an end-stage AIDS crisis. The development of spiritual agency is addressed.     

Researching religion: The vocation of the sociologist of religion

This paper reflects on the vocation or 'calling' of the researcher in the sociology of religion in the light of his experiences of researching transformations in English Catholicism in the last quarter of the twentieth century. It takes as its starting point Weber's two essays. A consideration of religious perspectives on the lay vocation leads to an evaluation of the advantages and disadvantages of insider research. The paper reflects on research mistakes, threats and attempts to co-opt the researcher, unexpected surprises and serendipity, and the need for the social scientist to retain control of his/her research. It concludes with inspiration from Havel that the calling of the sociological researcher is socially important and urges renewed commitment to seeking with integrity the extension of certified knowledge and the demystification of powerful institutional structures.     

An agent-based model of indirect minority influence on social change and diversity

The present paper describes an agent-based model of indirect minority influence. It examines whether indirect minority influence can lead to social change as a function of cognitive rebalancing, a process whereby related attitudes are affected when one attitude is changed. An attitude updating algorithm was modelled with minimal assumptions drawing on social psychology theories of indirect minority influence. Results revealed that facing direct majority influence, indirect minority influence along with cognitive rebalancing is a recipe for social change. Furthermore, indirect minority influence promotes and maintains attitudinal diversity in local ingroups and throughout the society. We discuss the findings in terms of social influence theories and suggest promising avenues for model extensions for theory building in minority influence and social change.     

Towards a critical spirituality of organization

In contrast to the current tide of literature which predominantly emphasizes the integrative potential of spirituality in the workplace, this article explores the possibility that spirituality can act as a force of resistance in relation to management through the development of a practice‐based morality. It focuses on two historical cases where a synthesis between Christianity and Marxism provided the basis for challenging organizational practice. The first involves the French worker‐priests (1943–54) and the second concerns the role of industrial mission in the British coal miners’ strike (1984–85). These two cases illustrate the potential for achieving a synthesis between Christianity and Marxism in the form of a practice‐based morality that involves a concern with the exterior, political and social aspects of religion in addition to the preoccupation with the interior search for meaningful existence which tends to dominate managerial approaches.     

The embodied becoming of autism and childhood: a storytelling methodology

In this article I explore a methodology of storytelling as a means of bringing together research around autism and childhood in a new way, as a site of the embodied becoming of autism and childhood. Through reflection on an ethnographic story of embodiment, the body is explored as a site of knowledge production that contests its dominantly storied subjectivation as a ‘disordered’ child. Storytelling is used to experiment with a line of flight from the autistic-child-research assemblage into new spaces of potential and possibility where the becomings of bodies within the collision of autism and childhood can be celebrated.     

Timing it right: Suspicious students,family bonds and becoming a woman in Quito,Ecuador

To improve access to education in Ecuador, state actors encourage parents and youth to think of girls’ emotional bonds to family as potential barriers to schooling. High schoolgirls and their mothers respond by synchronising their institutional and family responsibilities with the emotional norms of age grades such as ‘student youth’ and ‘mother’. Girls dedicated to embodying national progress find themselves trying to delay strong emotional commitments to family until after they have completed their schooling. Examining their construction as emotional suspects reveals the stakes of age expectations for female citizens in Ecuador.