Combining the liberal and useful arts: Sociological skills in the global economy

The discipline of sociology remains vulnerable in an environment of economic uncertainty and global change. Constraints on higher education are likely to increase and recurrent pressures on traditional liberal arts programs will continue unabated. An older, more diverse, cost-conscious and career-minded student population will increasingly insist on clearer pathways to difficult and bewildering labor markets. But sociology’s weakness as a liberal art may be overcome by combining it with a more applied and practical orientation. The very forces that threaten the discipline’s institutional existence make it profoundly relevant and valuable in an age of social transformation. Based on a familiar Millsian conception of the sociological imagination, this article attempts to combine sociology’s liberal tradition with its role as a “useful art,” honed into the specific features of workplace change and the employment setting. It does so by suggesting five categories of emerging skills in the global economy and ways that sociology has a far reaching claim to their practice and development. The categories are: 1) the skills of knowledge workers; 2) skills in the learning organization; 3) skills in the technological context; 4) skills in the diverse and divided workplace; 5) change-making skills. The article concludes by urging those in the discipline to make sociology more of a useful art that has practical application in a changing world. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Sociological Practice Association 15th Annual Meeting, Denver, Colorado, June 11, 1993.     

Testing for state and local government job queues

Bivariate probit estimates with partial observability identify the factors influencing the worker’s decision to seek a state or local government job and the factors influencing the government’s decision to hire particular workers. The estimates routinely confirm the presence of a local job queue but confirm the presence of a state job queue only when the role of unionization is explicitly recognized. Our results suggest that the net benefits from local and state government employment are greater than those from private sector employment. The estimates also indicate that local governments disproportionately hire racial minorities relative to the local governments’ pool of applicants but indicate no such relationship for state governments. The authors thank Dale Belman, Jugal Ghorai, and Matt Higgins for help on this and related work. We also thank the referee and the editor for useful suggestions.     

Graduate education in sociology: What do we need to do differently?

Research methods should be the core of a sociology curriculum, but they need to be taught with more emphasis on application and with greater recognition of the importance of managerial and communicative skills. Participation in practicums or where feasible, internships in the private or public sector, should be part of that research training. Departments should select areas of specialization within sociology that reflect the faculty’s expertise, the university’s strengths or distinctiveness, and the social, economic and demographic characteristics of the area. But such basic sub-fields as history, stratification, theory, social psychology, demography and social organization must be included in every curriculum. How to go about selecting a worthwhile research problem and how to communicate results are skills that should be taught in a graduate program. She has been working on immigrants and U.S. immigration policy, and her most recent publication isInternational Migration: The Female Experience (co-edited with Caroline Brettell).     

Federal funding and its effect on criminological research: Emphasizing individualistic explanations for criminal behavior

The sociology of knowledge suggests that various influences can affect the development of any substantive area of science. Much discussion has ensued over the years on the impact of sponsorship on sociological research. This article examines the effect of sponsorship on theoretical criminological research. I hypothesize that research funded by the federal government is more likely to support research having individualistic as opposed to structural explanations of crime. To test this, 181 theoretical criminological journal articles from 1975 to 1993 were examined. The data support this conclusion. There is a relationship between the type of funding received and whether an article’s focus is individualistic or structural. Alternative explanations are discussed and areas for future research are suggested. Finally, the relevance of these findings to sociology are examined in terms of the development of theory.     

An empirical comment on the state of sociology

After a review of comparable degree productivity among several social and behavioral sciences, this paper concludes that sociology was uniquely affected by forces that lowered both the production of B.A.’s, M.A.’s, and Ph.D.’s and the quality of its graduate students. From the mid-1970s to the late 1980s, sociology suffered drastic declines in student numbers and quality. The increased careerism among students apparently accounts for a substantial portion of this decline, but through a very concrete mechanism: the expansion of business programs. The paper suggests that perhaps an absence of a serious commitment to teaching scientific sociology accounts for the loss of quality, since applied sciences have fared much better than has sociology. The recent ASA Task Force recommendations for curriculum redesign are reviewed, and a call is issued for revitalizing the scientific component of undergraduate sociology.     

Changes in the stratification structure of sociology, 1964–1992

Early sociological studies of the American higher education system noted that despite a widespread ideology of egalitarianism, both individuals and departments are highly stratified. Their main findings were that 1) the distribution of Ph.D. departments in any given field tended to cluster at the low end of the prestige hierarchy; 2) a few elite graduate programs graduated the vast majority of all Ph.D.’s awarded in the United States; 3) downward mobility for all but a handful of Ph.D.’s was inevitable; and 4) elite graduate programs protected their prestige through inbreeding. Since those studies there have been few attempts to document changes in the structure of stratification in scientific disciplines in general, and sociology in particular. I use longitudinal data on departments and individual data on recent sociology Ph.D.’s to study changes in the structure of the stratification system in sociology over the past 30 years. My results reflect a mixed picture of change and stability; while the distribution of departmental prestige, the production of Ph.D.’s, and inbreeding mechanisms have shifted since 1964, the pattern of placement of new Ph.D’s in doctorate-granting departments has changed very little. Portions of this paper were presented at the annual meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society, Baltimore, MD, March 1994.     

The logic of labor quiescence

In 1993, the government of Alberta embarked on an ambitious plan to eliminate the provincial debt by 2010 and balance the budget within four years without raising taxes. The major vehicles to the plan’s achievement were unprecedented budget cuts and pub-lic sector restructuring. Initially, public sector union leaders were defiant, promising an allout struggle to thwart policies that jeopardized the unions’ vested interests in job security and organizational survival. More than five years later, unions have failed to influence in any significant way policy development and implementation. I explore why public sector unions did not mount any collective action to influence the political discourse in Alberta between 1993 and 1998. I am indebted to Nicole Lyotier and Nancy Cranston for their excellent research assistance, Helen Lam for comments on an earlier version of the paper, and all the interviewees for their time and willingness to share valuable information. Financial support for this study was provided by a Nova Fellowship, Faculty of Business, University of Alberta.     

Charles A. Ellwood and the End of Sociology

Charles A. Ellwood was one of the larger than life figures of early American sociology. Into the 1930s he was recognized as the ‘father’ of sociological social psychology. His work theoretically and methodologically paved the way for Symbolic Interactionism. He also saw sociology as a means to an end, that is, to make the world a better place. True sociology could only be thought of in that light. By the 1920s however, sociology was changing. The advent of scientism and statistics amplified factions within the disipline. William F. Ogburn and his students began to push sociology away from the ideas of people such as Ellwood, Ross, Small and many of the early American sociologists. By 1930 a full scale battle was ensuing which Ellwood would lose. The following is an account of Ellwood’s fight with scientism through his publications and correspondence.     

Charles Tilly,German Historicism,and the Critical Realist Philosophy of Science

This paper examines Charles Tilly’s relationship to the schools of thought known as historicism and critical realism. Tilly was committed to a social epistemology that was inherently historicist, and he increasingly called himself a “historicist.” The “search for grand laws in human affairs comparable to the laws of Newtonian mechanics,” he argued, was a “waste of time” and had “utterly failed.” Tilly’s approach was strongly reminiscent of the arguments developed in the first half of the 20th century by Rickert, Weber, Troeltsch, and Meinecke for a synthesis of particularization and generalization and for a focus on “historical individuals” rather than abstract universals. Nonetheless, Tilly never openly engaged with this earlier wave of historicist sociology, despite its fruitfulness for and similarity to his own project. The paper explores some of the possible reasons for this missed encounter. The paper argues further that Tilly’s program of “relational realism” resembled critical realism, but with main two differences: Tilly did not fully embrace critical realism’s argument that social mechanisms are always co-constituted by social meaning or its normative program of explanatory critique. In order to continue developing Tilly’s ideas it is crucial to connect them to the epistemological ideas that governed the first wave of historicist sociology in Weimar Germany and to a version of philosophical realism that is interpretivist and critical.     

Doing Public Sociology in the Field—A Strong Sociological Intervention Project in China

Through the in-depth analysis of the features of Huabei rural industrialization, the unique factory regime in Baigou, Hebei, and the resulting special workers, this paper reveals two dilemmas the migrant workers in Baigou and larger Hubei area face: Because of the interpersonal network of labor market, personalized trade, familial labor process, and patrimonial management, the workers are unable to become either industrial working class or citizens. Facing this special group of workers, we still believe in their power of self-liberation. Drawing on Touraine’s action sociology and sociological intervention, and Burawoy’s public sociology and praxis-oriented research, we modify “sociological intervention” according to the reality of Chinese society and propose the methodology of “strong sociological intervention” whose vehicle is “Baigou Migrant Worker Night School.” The night school provided workers with courses of labor law, English, and computer based on their actual needs. Labor law is the core to evoke the self-consciousness of the workers. Through communications in the night school and workers’ real living circumstances, we collected their true information and treated it as the source of sociological knowledge. After three sessions of night school training, workers showed changes in skills, social, and psychological aspects, laying a foundation for the growth of self-consciousness.     

The “Adventures” of the Sociology Course in Greek Secondary Education

This article reports the results of a study of the sociology course in Greek secondary education. The aim is to reveal under which circumstances the course has ended up becoming one of the most downgraded courses, and more importantly, how the specific rationale of the course’s structure has resulted in the (re)production of a distorted image of the science of sociology. For that purpose, the 25-year history of the course has been analyzed from the view of: (1) the sociology curriculum’s variations over the years, (2) the underlying rationale of the official documents and the sociology textbooks, and (3) the sociology teachers’ perceptions on the course of sociology. The findings have indicated that the downgrading of the course has resulted in the devaluation of the science of sociology inside the educational community, and that through the school’s rationale (curriculum and teacher’s) a specific interpretation of sociology is being reproduced, which presents it as an everyday and simple science that deals mostly with social problems and their solutions. The ultimate result is that the sociological imagination will possibly never become part of students’ views on life.     

Global-market building as state building: China’s entry into the WTO and market reforms of China’s tobacco industry

This article analyzes how China’s increasing engagement in the global market induced significant institution-building in China’s tobacco industry and enabled a power shift from the local authorities to the central authority in controlling this market. During this process of “getting onto the international track,” the central government reorganized the industrial tobacco system and broke up the “monopolies” set up by local governments in order to enhance the competitive capacities of China’s tobacco industry in the global market. Given such a concrete institutional change in China’s tobacco industry, I propose the theory of “global-market building as state building” to explain the interactions among the global market, the nation-states, and the domestic market-building projects. I suggest that nation-states strategically seek to engage themselves in the global market and that, under certain circumstances by taking advantage of their global market engagement, the nation-states can enhance their abilities to govern the domestic market.

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Prophetic versus priestly sociology: The salient case study of Arthur K. Davis

Arthur K. Davis was President of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association in 1975–1976 and in 1995 received the association’s Outstanding Contribution award. In Canada, he was particularly known for his article on “Canadian Society and History as Hinterland Versus Metropolis,” originally published in Ossenberg’s anthology of 1971. This article was frequently cited from 1972–1994 and was reprinted a number of times. Davis was also known for his articles on Thorstein Veblen, which continue to receive citation. Davis’ career merits careful study for at least two reasons. The first is that he was a Ph.D. product of the early Harvard sociology graduate program, which has received much less attention than it deserves from sociological historians (unlike the Chicago School). As such, Davis studied under of Talcott Parsons, Pitirim Sorokin, and Robert K. Merton. The second reason is that Davis’ career clearly illustrates the usefulness of Robert W. Friedrichs’ distinction between the priestly and prophetic roles that sociologists may fulfill. Davis’ career started under the influence of a priestly orientation (as symbolized by his doctoral supervisor Talcott Parsons) and then gravitated to a prophetic stance as influenced by Pitirim Sorokin, Paul M. Sweezy, and, more distantly, by Marx and Veblen. Since this transition took place just when the Cold War was falling, his career reveals some of the pitfalls that await the prophetic sociologist in times that favor security and conservatism rather than activism and change.     

Teaching, tracking, and marketing our product

Many sociology departments have faced difficult times in the past decade. This article examines how this crisis confronted two universities in North Carolina and the strategies which they used to strengthen their departments. Major emphasis is given to how state associations can assist departments in developing applied curriculum, publicizing their successful endeavors, and recruiting students. The article also provides insights about dealing with outcomes assessment as well as administering internship programs. Jan Rienerth teaching interests are in women’s issues, applied sociology, and experimental learning. Her research has focused on women and the elderly in prison. Martin Shultz primary research area involves the long term changes in the American family, especially divorce. In the past ten years, he has developed additional interests in applied sociology with an internship program. Richard Caston interests include socio-economics, health, and applied research.     

Sociology and the environment: An analysis of journal coverage

Many sociologists have suggested that the dominant paradigm in sociology ignores the environment, which accounts for the fact that environmental sociology is poorly represented in sociology’s mainstream journals. The purpose of this article is to test this assumption empirically by examining the coverage of environmental sociology in nine mainstream sociology journals from 1969 through 1994. The nine journals are separated into two tiers, representing higher and lower prestige journals. Each environmental article is categorized by its area (attitudes and behaviors, environmental movement, political economy, risk, and “new human ecology”) and whether it involves “sociology of the environmental issues” (the application of standard sociological perspectives to environmental issues) or “core environmental sociology” (the examination of societal-environmental relationships). We find that less than two percent of all articles published in the sampled journals in the twenty-five-year period of study were environmental, and that the higher tier journals were less likely to publish environmental articles than were the lower tier journals. Environmental articles were more likely to be part of “core environmental sociology” after 1981 than they were “sociology of the environmental issues,” which suggests a greater recognition among both environmental sociologists and journal reviewers that human societies are ecosystem-dependent. The number of environmental articles increased in the 1990s, portending a fruitful period for sociologists specializing on the environment. We argue that the broader field of sociology can benefit by recognizing the linkages environmental sociology has to other sociological specializations and that, ultimately, sociology needs to be able to address environmental variables in order to understand society. Naomi T. Krogman’s primary interest is in stakeholder framing of environmental disputes and natural resource policy change. She is currently a research sociologist at the Center for Socioeconomic Research at the University of Southwestern Louisiana and adjunct faculty in the Department of Sociology, University of Southwestern Louisiana, Lafayette, LA 70504-0198. JoAnne DeRouen Darlington is a research sociologist focusing on social change and community sustainability emerging from the disastrous interactions between society and the environment. She is currently employed with the Natural Hazards Research Center, Campus Box 482, Boulder, CO 80309.     

The challenge of training in applied sociology

This paper adds to the current dialogue in our discipline regarding the challenge of expanding nonacademic employment opportunities for sociologists and training our students for such employment. The argument is made that this challenge should be seen as an opportunity for us to demonstrate the relevance of our knowledge and expertise to society and to advance the intellectual development of our discipline. Moreover, the achievement of these benefits does not require sacrificing the distinctive intellectual core of sociology as a humanistic liberal arts discipline. To help bridge the gap between academic and nonacademic cultures, several interrelated strategies are suggested that address issues of marketing and public relations, as well as curriculum revision. The internship, as a key feature of “applied” programs, is crucial in terms of both training students and facilitating our contacts with potential employers. where he developed the department’s internship program, and has done consultation with religious and social service organizations. where he helped develop the Master’s program in applied sociology, and has done extensive consultation with business organizations regarding their needs for sociological skills and expertise. which is jointly sponsored by the College of Business and Management and the Department of Sociology, and which conducts studies in organizational design, entrepreneurship, and strategic management at the University of Maryland in College Park. has done extensive consultation and research with business organizations and the military on personnel and family issues. in Jacksonville and utilizes sociological concepts in courses on organizational management and design. a member of the ASA Ad Hoc Committee on Under- and Un-employment. where he recently completed a term as Head of the Department and a leave of absence to the staff of the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress.     

Barbarians at the Open Gates

Burawoy’s manifesto connects to a long series of debates on the role of science in society as well as on the myth of pure science. This paper argues that the gap between professional sociology and public sociology is far from being unbridgeable and that public sociology is not suppressed to the extent portrayed by Burawoy. In late modern societies a number of schools, including various scientific, public and intellectual movements have questioned the possibility, value position and social relevance of a functionally differentiated pure science by applying the sine qua non of modernity, i.e. critical reflection, to science. According to the argument developed here, also illustrated by a personal example, Burawoy could possibly prevent the gate-keepers of the empire of pure science from closing the otherwise open gates in front of his program and in front of critical reflection if only he used less harsh war-cries and were more careful in detecting the changes he himself urges.     

Scholarly ethics and courtroom antics: Where researchers stand in the eyes of the law

In 1993 the author, then a Ph.D. candidate in sociology, was jailed for 159 days after refusing to violate the American Sociological Association’sCode of Ethics provisions prohibiting the sharing of confidential research data with law enforcement authorities. This article discusses theCode, presents the facts of the case, answers critics of the author’s and the ASA’s stance, summarizes an attorney’s analysis of researcher’s rights in the eyes of the law, and concludes by urging sociologists to seek federal legislation protecting them and their work product from intrusions by public and private institutions. with emphases in environmental sociology, social movements, research methods, and science and technology at Montana State University.     

“It’s not rocket science!“: High school sociology teachers’ conceptions of sociology

Since academic sociology’s birth in this country, sociologists have not been shy about publicly praising and ridiculing the discipline. Though sociologists have been the primary participants in the seemingly endless debates about sociology’s proper subject matter, methods, and purpose, there is another group that has also struggled over the past 95 years to formulate a conception of the discipline—high school sociology teachers. At this point, we know virtually nothing about what the thousands of high school teachers who offer sociology each year, actually think about the discipline. This paper uses questionnaire and interview data collected from high school sociology teachers to examine their thoughts on four topics: (1) sociology’s strengths, (2) its weaknesses, (3) whether high school students are capable of understanding the discipline, and (4) appropriate course objectives. The results indicate that high school teachers view sociology quite differently from academic sociologists, and that their conceptions are based primarily on “textbook sociology.” I conclude by discussing the far-reaching implications of teachers’ current thinking about the discipline. I wish to thank Larry nichols for offering helpful comments on an earliar draft of this paper.     

Remembering reuel denney: Sociology as cultural studies

Selected writings from Reuel Denney’s work as a social analyst are reviewed in order to establish and highlight his often-overlooked contributions to sociology. Denney’s cultural studies of Americans at play, with specific reference to his writings on the subcultures of football and hot-rodding, and on television and the electronic media, advertising and architecture, are reviewed in examining some major themes emphasized in his sociology. These writings are discussed against the backdrop of Denney’s early life experiences drawn from his autobiography to better enable readers to gain an appreciation of his sociological thinking. The beginnings of a Denney postmodern are sketched as a conclusion to this paper’s major contention that Denney anticipated much of today’s sociology as cultural studies. As one of Reuel’s students, nearly forty years ago, I hope that this article serves not only to highlight Denney’s contributions and place within the discipline of sociology, but also that my personal recollections will serve to reveal the strong attachments we students felt toward him as our teacher, mentor, and friend. nt|mis|His teaching and research combine his interests in higher education and the professions, bureaucracy, social thought, mass media, and popular culture. His most recent book, Schooling As Entertainment: Corporate Education Meets Popular Culture, is available from Cedarreek Press.