2007 North Central Sociological Association Presidential Address: Teaching and Learning and the Culture of the Regional Association in American Sociology

Abstract

In this essay, I examine the role of teaching and learning in the culture of the regional association in American sociology. I analyze the programs of (1) the 2007 joint meeting of the North Central Sociological Association (NCSA) and the Midwest Sociological Society (MSS); (2) the 2007 annual meeting preliminary programs of the Eastern Sociological Society (ESS), the Pacific Sociological Association (PSA), and the Southern Sociological Society (SSS) along with the 2006 annual meeting programs of the MSS and NCSA, as well as the American Sociological Association (ASA); and (3) the 1991 NCSA and 1992 ASA annual meeting programs. I identify program trends with regard to teaching, professional development, undergraduate students, graduate students, and research on higher education. I conclude by identifying regional association annual meeting best practices regarding each of these areas.     

The “Peculiar Eclipsing” of Women in Sociological Theory: Moving from Nearly Total to Partial

This paper revisits the observation made by Ward and Grant (Current Perspective in Social Theory 11:117–140, 1991) that there had been a “peculiar eclipsing” of women in sociological theory. It provides longitudinal studies of women’s participation and recognition in three conventional outlets for sociological theorizing: the theory section of the American Sociological Association (ASA); sociological theory textbooks; and sociological theory journals. It finds that the percentage of ASA Theory Section members who were women increased from 12% in 1982 to 31% in 2008, but is not nearly as high as the 53% in all ASA sections taken together; that women’s recognition in sociological theory textbooks grew, more between the 1980s and the 2000s than between the 1960s and the 1980s, undoubtedly reflecting the increasing respectability of feminist theory within the profession; and that women’s relative participation as authors in sociology theory journals increased from the 1980s to the 2000s by about 33%, but nowhere near as much as their participation as authors in the American Sociological Review, where their relative participation in the 2000s was more than three times what it had been in the 1980s. We speculate that, given women’s increasing leadership roles in both the Theory section and the theory journals, women may be using less conventional outlets for their theorizing than is offered by either the section or the journals.     

The most critical issue facing the ASA

The ASA worries that it may be allowing organizational fragmentation to contribute to intellectual disarray in the discipline. ASA should recognize that the increase in the number of sociologists has made it easier to start new, economically viable organizations, with their own journals, prizes, and meetings. A serious problem facing ASA is that the American Sociological Review shows an editorial bias toward quantitative research. Sociologists need to strengthen alternative organizations-regional and specialty-especially among groups which differ politically from ASA, so that it will not try to speak for all of us. He is co-editor (wih Michal M. McCall) ofSymbolic Interaction and Cultural Studies (1990, Chicago: University of Chicago Press).     

North Central Sociological Association Presidential Address the Community College Conundrum: Pitfalls and Possibilities of Professional Sociological Associations

Abstract

This presidential address examines the “community college conundrum” within our discipline. Although it is reported that 44 percent of first-time undergraduate students attend community colleges, community college faculty are underrepresented in the American Sociological Association (ASA) and within our regional associations. This lack of participation has two roots: (1) our disciplinary lack of interest in studying community college education as a unit of analysis; and (2) the failure by sociologists to understand community college education as a social justice concern. Data for this study include an assessment of membership and participation in our disciplinary associations, content analysis of the journal Teaching Sociology, and a review of ASA syllabi sets. Findings reveal a common theme: community college sociologists are ignored and afforded a marginal status—a “less than” status—within our discipline. Recommendations include calling on the ASA and all sociologists to recognize the importance of community colleges in doing the work of “public sociology.”     

Fraud,ethics, and the disciplinary contexts of science and scholarship

This article argues that the disciplinary context is the locus of illegitimate—fraudulent and deviant—as well as legitimate activity in science and scholarship. It discusses the structural features of disciplines that condition variation in rates and types of malpractice. These features include levels of: research activity, replication and replicability, coauthorship, locus of creativity in publication (compared to the research process), and intellectual fragmentation. Her current work is a study of research productivity, funded by The National Science Foundation. She is a member of the publication committee of The American Sociological Association and past publication chair of The Society For Social Studies of Science. She is an associate editor ofGender and Society and editorial board member ofWork and Occupations.     

Fifty Years of the Southern Sociological Society: Change and Continuity in a Professional Society. Methodological Perspectives on Studying the History of the Southern Sociological Society

This paper revisits research procedures used to collect and analyze data for Fifty Years of the Southern Sociological Society: Change and Continuity in a Professional Society (1988) to comment on methodological issues. The fifty years of change were conceptualized as having shifted the Southern Sociological Society from a disciplinary to a professional mode of organization. The shift occurred both from evolutionary processes and from deliberate revolutionary actions of officials and members. Data for the study came mainly from the Society’s Archives. It included personal accounts by presidents, secretary-treasurers’ and committee reports, annual programs and newsletters. Evolutionary processes of adapting the association to the growth of membership, to differentiation of fields of sociological study, along with the rationalization and formalization of the Society’s governance and operation, were extracted mainly from annual programs, the most continuous and objective body of archival information. Revolutionary changes, including adaptation to societal challenges including racial segregation, from the Society’s founding onward were inferred from personal accounts, committee reports, and newsletters, and were confirmed from interviews with long-standing members.     

Recent ASA Presidents and ‘Top’ Journals: Observed Publication Patterns,Alleged Cartels and Varying Careers

It has been common for studies presented as about American sociology as a whole to rely on data compiled from leading journals (American Sociological Review [ASR] and American Journal of Sociology [AJS]), or about presidents of the American Sociological Association [ASA], to represent it. Clearly those are important, but neither can be regarded as providing a representative sample of American sociology. Recently, Stephen Turner has suggested that dominance in the ASA rests with a ‘cartel’ initially formed in graduate school, and that it favors work in a style associated with the leading journals. The adequacy of these ideas is examined in the light of available data on the last 20 years, which show that very few of the presidents were in the same graduate schools at the same time. All presidents have had distinguished academic records, but it is shown that their publication strategies have varied considerably. Some have had no ASR publications except their presidential addresses, while books and large numbers of other journals not normally mentioned in this context have figured in their contributions, as well as being more prominent in citations. It seems clear that articles in the leading journals have not been as closely tied to prestigious careers as has sometimes been suggested, and that if there is a cartel it has not included all the presidents.     

Sociology at UCLA

In a discipline in which departments are often characterized by irreconcilable controversies and factional disputes, UCLA’s department stands out as a pluralistic community that fosters interaction, communication, and mutual understanding. At UCLA the micro and macro meet: leading ethnographers and survey researchers work side by side; noted Marxists, functionalists and phenomenologists participate in the same colloquia, and persons with a variety of outlooks share membership on the same student committees. Ambitious students committed to obtaining the Ph.D. experience a stimulating educational career in a department that prides itself on diversity, but whose faculty understands that its program must be structured and coherent. He has writtenTheoretical Logic in Sociology (4 volumes).Twenty Lectures: Sociological Theory Since World War II, andStructure and Meaning: Essays in Sociological Theory. His most recent books includeEvaluation: A Systematic Approach (3rd edition, with Peter K. Rossi), and the forthcomingHandbook of Medical Sociology (4th edition) edited with Sol Levine.     

Sebastião Salgado and Visual Sociology

This paper links the work of Sebastião Salgado, recipient of the 2010 American Sociological Association (ASA) Award for Excellence in the Reporting of Social Issues, with the discipline of sociology. I reflect on Salgado’s biography, method, and concerns in order to demonstrate how his work contributes to the awareness and understanding of social issues. Toward this end, I summarize sociology’s record of involvement with visual documentation. Prior to 1915, the American Journal of Sociology regularly included photographs that provided visual documentation of environments under study. However, as sociology moved away from social reform activities and toward scientific investigation, the regular publication of photographs ceased. During the 1930s and 1940s, photographic projects in disciplines and social movements beyond sociology developed a variety of methods that would prove useful to sociology. During the 1970s, sociologists once again began to use visual methods in their teaching, research, and publication, putting sociology in the position to both contribute to and benefit from insights and social commitments that have distinguished Sebastião Salgado as a globally significant photographer and social activist during the late twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries.     

“Apathetic,active, or antagonistic”: A history of the American Sociological Association’s involvement in high school sociology

The role that the American Sociological Association (ASA) has historically played in reforming high school sociology courses has been alternately apathetic, active, or antagonistic. Apathy marked the time period between 1905 and about 1960, and again during most of the 1970s and 1980s. The Association played a much more active role during the New Social Studies movement of the 1960s, and has also been actively involved since the late 1980s. But even in its activity, the ASA has been antagonistic toward high school courses and teachers. During the 1960s, and again since about 1989, the ASA has pushed solely for the teaching of sociology as a scientific discipline. This approach has proven problematic for two reasons. First, it directly contradicts the traditional objective of the social studies curriculum—citizenship education. Teachers are much more concerned about molding good citizens than exposing students to the nuances of scientific inquiry. Second, it ignores the well-documented fact that high school sociology teachers typically have little training in, exposure to, or experience with formal, academic sociology. For that reason, they have had great difficulty satisfying the demands made by academic reformers. I conclude that the ASA must address these two issues and several others if it is serious about improving secondary sociology courses. This paper was awarded the 2004 Graduate Student Paper Award from the American Sociological Association's Section on the History of Sociology. I thank Larry Nichols and Afshan Jafar for their thoughtful feedback on an earlier draft.     

Book reviews

Books reviewed in this article: Essays on the History of British Sociological Research, M. Bulmer (ed.) Three Sociological Traditions, Randall Collins Macro Sociological Theory: Perspectives on Sociological Theory Vol. I, H.J. Helle and S.N. Eisenstadt (eds) Micro Sociological theory: Perspectives on Sociological Theory Vol. II, H.J. Helle and S.N. Eisenstadt (eds) Powers and Liberties: The Causes and Consequences of the Rise of the West, John A. Hall Talcott Parsons and the Capitalist Nation-State, William Buxton G.H. Mead. A Contemporary Re-Examination of his Thought, Hans Joas Language, Structure and Reproduction. An Introduction to the Sociology of Basil Bernstein, Paul Atkinson Measuring Culture: A Paradigm for the Analysis of Social Organisation, Jonathan L. Gross and Steve Rayner Food in the Social Order, Mary Douglas (ed.) Classes, Erik Olin Wright Annals of the Labouring Poor, K.D.M. Snell Beyond Employment: Household, Gender and Subsistence, Nanneke Redclift and Enzo Mingione (eds.) Women's Working Lives: Patterns and Strategies, Susan Yeandle On Women, Sexuality and Love, Georg Simmel, translated and with an introduction by Guy Oakes A Woman's Place, An Oral History of Working-Class Women 1890–1940, Elizabeth Roberts The Autobiography of the Working Class: An Annotated, Critical Bibliography. Volume 1: 1790–1900, John Burnett, David Vincent and David Mayall (eds) The Sociology of Law, Roman Tomasic Legal Systems and Social Systems, Adam Podgorecki, Christopher J. Whelan and Dinesh Khosla The Politics of the Police, Robert Reiner European Immigration Policy: A Comparative Study, Tomas Hammar (ed.) The Elementary Forms of the New Religious Life, Roy Wallis The Need for Religious Certainty: A Sociological Study of Conventional Religion, Robert Towler No Pope of Rome: Militant Protestantism in Modern Scotland, Steve Bruce American Journal of Islamic Studies, Volume 1, No 1, 1984, S.S. Nyang (ed.) The Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem, V. Azarya Islamic Sociology, I. Ba-Yunus and F. Ahmad Categories of Medieval Culture, A. J. Gurevich (translated by G.L. Campbell) Science for Social Scientists, John Law and Peter Lodge The Intellectual and Social Organization of the Sciences, Richard Whitley Framing Science: The Making of a BBC Documentary, Roger Silverstone     

Book reviews

Book reviewed in this article: Own or Other Culture John Okely, New Ethnicities and Urban Culture: racisms and multiculture in young lives Les Back, Consumption and Identity at Work Paul du Gay, Gender, Culture and Organizational Change: Putting theory into practice Catherine Itzin and Janet Newman (eds), Good enough Mothering? Feminist Perspectives on Lone Mothering E.B. Silvam (ed.), Citizenship Today: The Contemporary Relevance of T. H. Marshall Martin Bulmer and Anthony M. Rees (eds), Democracy and the Global Order. From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance David Held, Conflicts about class: debating inequality in late industrialism. D.J. Lee and B.S. Turner (eds), Medicine, Health and Risk: Sociological Approaches Jonathon Gabe (ed.), Scientific Knowledge: A Sociological Analysis Barry Barnes, War Stories – The Culture of Foreign Correspondents Mark Pedelty,     

Whatever happened to “bureaucracy”: Empirical studies of the 1970s

Problems with defining the structure of the organization are the topic of this research. At the beginning of the seventies Hage and Aiken wrote: “Characteristics of organizations do not occur randomly; they are found together in definite patterns.” The purpose of this paper is to begin to make these non‐random patterns explicit. Such a task involves three steps: (1) defining “the” characteristics of organizations, (2) examining the empirical relationships of these characteristics, and (3) summarizing the findings. This paper focuses on step one. The structural elements of organizations as they appeared in the empirical studies of the 1970s as published in the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Pacific Sociological Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, and The Academy of Management Journal are presented. Based upon these findings implications for steps two and three above are suggested.     

Voting in professional associations: The case of the American sociological association revisited

Who votes in ASA elections? This article examines data on voter turnout from two recent presidential contests of the American Sociological Association in an analysis of the determinants of election participation. Extending the 1981 Ridgeway and Moore study of voting dynamics in the ASA, we hypothesize that intraorganizational networks and particular demongraphic characteristics link ASA members to the discipline in a manner analogous to the way such factors operate in the national electorate. On the basis of data compiled from 1985 and 1986 ASA election returns, we find that network factors are the most salient determinants of voting behavior. We conclude that those organizational ties that effectively link members, however directly or indirectly, to the larger Association are the most predictive of propensity to vote.     

Ensemble instruction: A note on communicating sociology via computers

Computer software can manage intricate operations and complex data in order to make sociological ideas and methods concrete, animated, and relevant event to novices. This note describes how an approach called “ensemble instruction” makes use of such software in classrooms with personal computers for each student and a central projection system. A former editor ofSociological Methodology and ofSociological Methods & Research His current work focuses on the analysis of social interaction within the framework of affect control theory. Additionally he is developing methods for studying the logical structure of events in interaction sequences.     

Avoiding Aging? Social Psychology’s Treatment of Age

Population aging, in conjunction with social and cultural transformations of the life course, has profound implications for social systems—from large-scale structures to micro-level processes. However, much of sociology remains fairly quiet on issues of age and aging, including the subfield of social psychology that could illuminate the impact of these broader social forces on individual lives. This study examines the scope of research on age, aging, and the life course in the leading social psychological journal in sociology (Social Psychology Quarterly) and compares it with coverage in the primary social psychology journal in psychology (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) and two sociology journals (American Sociological Review and Journal of Health and Social Behavior). An analysis of articles published between 1977 and 2006 shows that approximately 7 percent in Social Psychology Quarterly or Journal of Personality and Social Psychology seriously considered age. In contrast, 11 % of articles in American Sociological Review and 25 % in Journal of Health and Social Behavior did so. Across the journals, examinations of age increased over time. However, studies reflect a limited range of methodological and theoretical approaches with few employing qualitative methods or a symbolic interactionist perspective. We discuss several under-explored sites for research on age, aging, and the life course that would enrich social psychological and sociological scholarship more broadly.     

Reframing Sociological Concepts for a Brave New (Virtual?) World*

The articles that make up this Sociological Inquiry feature emerged from the 1995 meetings of the American Sociological Association. The authors included in this issue were expressly solicited for a special session on “Technologically Generated Communities.” The authors were asked to individually provide their own perspectives on the intersection of technology, community, and social action. My essay attempts to crystallize several key changes that the new communication technologies demand of conceptual frames long embraced by sociologists. In particular, the pages that follow propose some necessary adjustments to the ways in which sociologists formulate and apply three key analytic concepts: social interaction, social bonding, and empirical experience.     

BOOK REVIEWS

Books reviewed in this article: The Uneasy Equilibrium. By Odin W. Andkrson . The Nature of Social Science. By George C. Romans . Social Class, Race, and Psychological Development. Edited by Martin Deutsch , Irwin Katz , and Arthur Jensen . Ideology and the Development of Sociological Theory, by Irving M. Zeitlin The Logic of Collective Action, by Mancur Olson, Jr. Comparative Perspectives on Marriage and the Family, edited by H. Kent Geiger Fatherhood: A Sociological Perspective, by Leonard Benson Psychology and Social Problems, by Michael Argyle     

The professional ideology of social pathologists transformed: The new political orthodoxy in sociology

In a landmark article published in 1943, the young C. Wright Mills roundly criticized early American sociologists who focused on the sociology of social problems. These “social pathologists,” Mills argued, were social conservatives with homogeneous viewpoints who strove to maintain the established social order. A review of recent surveys on the political attitudes of sociologists, an analysis of recent articles on social problems published by the American Sociological Association (ASA) and the Society for the Study of Social Problems, an examination of social problems textbooks, and a consideration of the proceedings of the ASA annual meetings reveal an extraordinary turnabout. An ongoing trend toward the politicization of sociology and the radicalization of the sociology of social problems has resulted in a diminished stature of the profession which jeopardizes its future.     

International Newsletter on Migration

The International Newsletter on Migration is a publication of the Research Committee on Migration (RC: No. 31) of the International Sociological Association. Address all correspondence to the Secretary‐Treasurer, Lydio F. Tomasi, Editor of IMR, E‐mail: < cmslft@aol.com >.