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.     

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.     

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.     

The organizational politics of the ASA

The American Sociological Association’s Report on Future Organizational Trends arose from worries that the ASA is disintegrating into a conglomerate of mutually oblivious specialities. The proliferation of sections was regarded as an aspect of this disintegration that the ASA might be able to control. But the committee charged with examining the problem of sections concluded that section expansion has become a major form of political mobilization within the association, and that sections act as a counterweight to the bureaucratic centralization of the ASA as a whole. On balance, the committee opted for the local vitalization going on in sections as against the more abstract concerns of the ASA central governing bodies. His books includeWeberian Sociological Theory (1986),Theoretical Sociology (1988), andSociology of Marriage and Family: Gender, Love and Property (third edition co-authored with Scott Coltrane, 1990).     

Advocacy and the SSSP: An analysis of research articles in social problems

This study examines the extent of advocacy in the research articles appearing in the journalSocial Problems from 1953–1992. The Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP) was founded in order to counter the mainstream scientism of the American Sociological Society. Becker’s presidential address to the SSSP in 1966 confronted the issue of advocacy and the consequences associated with research that does not explicitly “take sides.” The present study investigates advocacy inSocial Problems by means of a typology drawn from Becker’s address. The findings indicate that political advocacy has increased sharply over the duration ofSocial Problems. Implications of the findings are discussed in the context of value-neutrality and its relation to social problems research.     

Critical theory meets America: Riesman, Fromm, and the lonely crowd

A reading of David Riesman’s classic The Lonely Crowd is presented that emphasizes its links with the critical theory of German psychoanalyst and social critic Erich Fromm. The intellectual and personal relationship between Riesman and Fromm brings into focus Riesman’s adaptation of the insights of European critical theory as well as the strengths of American social science and social criticism. Riesman’s relatively neglected theoretical approach has much to offer a sociology concerned with retaining its links to public debate and empirical evidence. Thanks to Robert Alford, Linda Boos, Steven Brint, Scott Davies, Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, Louis Greenspan, Rhoda Howard-Hassmann, Lisa Kowalchuk, Bonnie Oglensky, Rolf Meyersohn, Stephen Steinberg, Alan Wolfe and Dennis Wrong for comments on earlier versions of this paper. A McMaster University ARB grant provided funds for a trip to German where I read the extensive correspondence between Riesman and Fromm housed in the Erich Fromm archives maintained by Rainer Funk. The paper was first presented at the American Sociological Association annual meetings in Chicago in 1999.     

Is the future of unionism in cyberspace?

V. Conclusions Cyber technology has been proposed as the panacea for the troubled Old Unionism, the expansion of the New Unionism, and to promote the political power of the Labor Movement. In furtherance of those objectives, the AFL-CIO created a web site on December 1, 2000, workingfamilies.com. The site is intended to provide 17 million union members and retirees access to the Internet; the Federation also offers them computers at low cost. The AFL-CIO’s web is intended to link the union’s members to each other, offer discussion forums, chat rooms, and e-mail networks which will allow workers to talk to each other regularly and mobilize their workplaces and communities for causes endorsed by the Federation (World Future Society, February, 2000). The new service is an extension of the Union Privilege Benefit Programs set up by the Federation during the 1980s as a way of reversing the unions’ faltering membership. Those programs include reduced attorney fees, lower cost life and accident insurance, participation in a motor-club, car-repair, and travel-club services, a Walt Disney World Hotel Discount, a parents’ college advisor, reduced cost for educational books and software, mortgage and real estate advice, and a dental program. The original package was offered to nonmembers for a small fee who become "associate members." It was hoped that the associate participants would become full members. A number of affiliated unions adopted similar programs. In 1995, the Federation added a credit card issued by Household International and for which it received $75 million each year for five years ending in 2000. The card has no annual fee and low monthly interest charges. How the Federation spent these sums is unknown.     

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.     

Optimal voting rules for two-member tenure committees

A tenure committee first votes on whether to hire a candidate; if it does, it receives an informative performance signal, and then votes on whether to tenure the candidate; rejection at either stage returns the committee to a candidate pool, endogenising the value of the outside option. A candidate’s fate depends only on the behaviour of two ‘weather-vane’ committee members. Committee members may vote against favoured candidates if the weather-vane is opposed; enthusiastic assessments by one of these weather-vanes may harm a candidate’s chances by increasing others’ thresholds for hiring him; sunk time costs may lead voters who voted against hiring to vote for tenuring him, even after a poor probationary performance. For two member committees that are patient and perceptive, the optimal voting rule is a (weak) majority at the hiring stage and unanimity at the tenure stage; when such committees are impatient or imperceptive, the double (weak) majority rule is optimal. Perversely, the performance of a patient, imperceptive committee improves as its perceptiveness further declines. Consistent with practice, falling threshold rules are not optimal. Results on optimal voting rules are also presented in limit cases as committee members’ beliefs become more correlated. Finally, we compare the model to a discrete-time European options model.     

Marital Stability in Sub-Saharan Africa: Do Women’s Autonomy and Socioeconomic Situation Matter?

One key hypothesis that has received considerable attention in recent family discourse is the notion that improvements in women’s socioeconomic circumstances (also called female autonomy) has a positive effect on familial processes and outcomes such as marital instability. Absent from this debate are cross-cultural research that test the applicability of these findings with non-U.S. data. We use representative data from Ghana to explore whether dimensions of women’s autonomy have the hypothesized positive effect on divorce processes in Africa. Consistent with findings from the United States, results from our African data demonstrate that women’s autonomy has a positive effect on divorce. This observation is true not only with the use of conventional autonomy measures such as work and education, but also with regard to institutional measures of autonomy such as matrilineal kinship ties.Baffour K. Takyi, Department of Sociology, Olin 266, The University of Akron, Akron, OH 44325-1905; e- mail: btakyi@uakron.edu.Christopher L. Broughton, Department of Sociology, Olin 266, The University of Akron, Akron, OH 44325-1905; e-mail: Christopher.L.Broughton@cmsdnet.net.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the North Central Sociological Society, April 13–16, 2000, Pittsburgh, PA. We are grateful to several anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.     

Communicating Research to Policymakers

This piece offers suggestions based on some things we expected to learn and from some things we did not expect to learn about communicating research to congressional policymakers. Some of these are insider discoveries from working as a professional staff member for a joint committee of the US Senate and the US House of Representatives. Other things we learned came largely as surprises from attempts to provide basic information and issue awareness about socioeconomic conditions in the Southern Black Belt directly to the Congress as well as indirectly through public interest and grassroots groups. One of the surprising discoveries, working professionally both on the inside of Congress and on the outside as social scientists, is how well social interaction actually works. And there were other surprises as well. This article is based on an August 16 panel presentation by the first author at the 2003 meeting of the American Sociological Association in Atlanta. The panel was organized by Larry Burmeister of the University of Kentucky. Material written in the first person singular in the first section of this article, “From the Inside,” is from the first author’s experiences. Later, portions of the text beginning with the subhead, “On the Outside,” and stated in the first person plural are by both authors.     

In Search of Legitimacy: Managerialism and Legitimation in Civil Society Organizations

In this article, we investigate the changes in the legitimating accounts used by Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), in the context of spreading managerialism—one of the most powerful institutional practices of our time—in the Third Sector. We first introduce the concepts of legitimacy and legitimating account, before showing how managerialism manifests itself in CSOs and presenting three managerialist accounts used to legitimate such organizations: efficiency and effectiveness (E&E), stakeholder’s needs, and innovation. We then examine empirically how the use of these accounts changed between 1995 and 2008. In order to do so, we analyze quantitatively the contents of a sample of annual reports produced by Austrian CSOs over the stated period, and apply discourse analysis to a smaller group of reports to reveal more fine-grained developments. Our results show significant changes: of our chosen accounts, the one most tightly linked with managerialism, E&E, had come to be taken-for-granted by 2008, whereas the more generic and subtle concepts of stakeholder’s needs and innovation featured more strongly than in 1995.     

The political economy of sociology: An interview with William V. D’Antonio,American Sociological Association

The Executive Director of the American Sociological Association discusses the many uses of sociology as a practical and knowledge-producing discipline, as well as a profession with many constituencies. While hailing gains in sociology’s relations with Congress, the media, and other social science disciplines, he laments that too few talented students elect to pursue social science degrees. D’Antonio concludes with thoughts on the certification of sociologists. His research has centered on the social and political dimensions of science and technology, especially research evaluation, public understanding of science, misconduct in research, and career patterns of scientists and engineers. His latest book (co-edited) isInterdisciplinary Analysis and Research (Lomond 1986).     

Robert E. Park reconsidered: The early writings

Despite Robert E. Park’s prominence in American sociology, his early writings (before 1913) have been neglected. This article argues that Park’s early writings illustrate an important transitional phase in twentieth-century sociological thought. As sociology moved out of German romantic philosophy and toward rationalism and positivism, it had to come to terms with the existence of evil in the world. Park’s essays on the Congo formulated a more complex perspective on modernity’s modes of evil. Along with the Congo essays, Park’s Black Belt studies form a comprehensive portrait of the double-sided moral character and socioeconomic effects of the Reformation. Park’s early writings adumbrate a Gothic sociology of horror, in which the civilizational process erodes the many folk cultures that it draws into its basic forms—civil society and urban life. This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association, August 1990. Adapted from Stanford M. Lyman,Militarism, Imperialism, and Racial Accommodation: An Analysis and Interpretation of the Early Writings of Robert E. Park (Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 1991).     

The impact of sociological orientation on pedagogy: A reconsideration of teacher training in sociology Ph.D. Departments

The emphasis in sociology Ph.D. programs continues to be on training researchers rather than teachers. This is a serious mistake, given the overwhelming proportion of students who go on to academic careers that require at least some time in the classroom. Departments that offer some type of graduate training in teaching focus almost exclusively on the students’ mastery of pedagogical strategies—tools, tips, and techniques for improving their instruction. But this approach neglects students’ assumptions about sociology as a discipline—or their sociological orientations—that underlie and inform their pedagogical choices. This paper explicates the relationship between sociological orientation and pedagogical practice, and asserts that graduate students need to consider their orientation to the discipline before stepping inside a classroom. This may be effectively accomplished through a required year-long seminar to be taken during the second year of graduate study. The first semester would be devoted to the issues, debates, and questions that currently characterize the discipline. The second would consider the “nuts and bolts” of teaching, and how pedagogical practice derives from sociological orientation. Students would also work as teaching assistants before, during, and after completing the seminar. They would then be required to teach at least one course of their choice before graduating. During this first teaching experience, each graduate student would work closely with a faculty mentor. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2003 annual meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society. I wish to thank Michael Lewis, Joya Misra, Afshan Jafar, Brian Kapitulik, and the editor of the American Sociologist for their help in improving this paper.     

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.     

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.     

Community College Participation in the Pacific Sociological Association

Sociologists have many organizations to choose from when making decisions about attending professional conferences. The Pacific Sociological Association provides an opportunity to attend a more personal venue that fits the needs of full-time and adjunct community college professors.     

Letters of recommendation in academe: Do women and men write in different languages?

The present study analyzes seventy-eight letters of recommendation sent to a department of sociology and anthropology for six replacement and two tenure-track positions. The sample consists of fifteen pairs of letters written for women and twenty-four pairs written for men. Each pair of letters includes one written by a woman and one written by a man for the same candidate. Men and women wrote letters differently, but their letters also varied by the gender of the applicant. The concept of tokenism, Gilligan’s theory about moral reasoning, and Acker’s discussion of gendered organizations are used to interpret these differences. This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the Eastern Sociological Society Annual Meeting, Providence, R.I., April 12, 1991.