Animated Introductions to Three Sociologists: Durkheim, Weber and Adorno

by Josh Jones, Open Culture: http://www.openculture.com/2015/06/animated-introductions-to-three-sociologists-durkheim-weber-adorno.html

Is sociology an art or a science? Is it philosophy? Social psychology? Economics and political theory? Surveying the great sociologists since the mid-19th century, one would have to answer "yes" to all of these questions. Sociologists like Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Theodor Adorno conducted serious scholarly and social-scientific analyses, and wrote highly speculative theory. 

Though it may seem like we're all sociologists now, making critical judgments about large groups of people, the sociologists who created and carried on the discipline generally did so with sound evidence and well-reasoned argument. Unlike so much current knee-jerk commentary, even when they're wrong they're still well worth reading.

Having already surveyed Marx in his series on Euro-American political philosophers, School of Life founder Alain de Botton now tackles the other three illustrious names on the list above, starting with Durkheim at the top, then Weber above, and Adorno below. 

The first two figures were contemporaries of Marx, the third a later interpreter. Like that bearded German scourge of capitalism, these three—in more measured or pessimistic ways—levied critiques against the dominant economic system. Durkheim took on the problem of suicide, Weber the anxious religious underpinnings of capitalist ideology, and Adorno the consumer culture of instant gratification.

That's so far, at least, as de Botton's very cursory introductions get us. As with his other series, this one more or less ropes the thinkers represented here into the School of Life's program of promoting a very particular, middle class view of happiness. And, as with the other series, the thinkers surveyed here all seem to more or less agree with de Botton's own views. Perhaps others who most certainly could have been included, like W.E.B. Dubois, Jane Addams, or Hannah Arendt, would offer some very different perspectives.

De Botton again makes his points with pithy generalizations, numbered lists, and quirky, cut-out animations, breezily reducing lifetimes of work to a few observations and moral lessons. I doubt Adorno would approach these less-than-rigorous methods charitably, but those new to the field of sociology or the work of its practitioners will find here some tantalizing ideas that will hopefully inspire them to dig deeper, and to perhaps improve their own sociological diagnoses.

Note: For those interested, Yale has a free open course on Sociology called "Foundations of Modern Social Theory," which covers most of the figures listed above. You can always find it in our collection, 1,300 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.

Related Content:

6 Political Theorists Introduced in Animated “School of Life” Videos: Marx, Smith, Rawls & More

Nietzsche, Wittgenstein & Sartre Explained with Monty Python-Style Animations by The School of Life

Theodor Adorno’s Radical Critique of Joan Baez and the Music of the Vietnam War Protest Movement

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

VIDEOS: Hear Hours of Lectures by Michel Foucault: Recorded in English and French Between 1961 and 1983

by Josh Jones, Open Culture: http://www.openculture.com/2018/01/hear-hours-of-lectures-by-michel-foucault.html

Tucked in the afterword of the second 1982 edition of Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow’s Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, we find an important, but little-known essay by Foucault himself titled “The Subject and Power.” Here, the French theorist offers what he construes as a summary of his life’s work: spanning 1961’s Madness and Civilization up to his three-volume, unfinished History of Sexuality, still in progress at the time of his death in 1984. He begins by telling us that he has not been, primarily, concerned with power, despite the word’s appearance in his essay’s title, its arguments, and in nearly everything else he has written. Instead, he has sought to discover the “modes of objectification which transform human beings into subjects.”

This distinction may seem abstruse, a needlessly wordy matter of semantics. It is not so for Foucault. In key critical difference lies the originality of his project, in all its various stages of development. “Power,” as an abstraction, an objective relation of dominance, is static and conceptual, the image of a tyrant on a coin, of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan seated on his throne.

Subjection, subjectification, objectivizing, individualizing, on the other hand—critical terms in Foucault’s vocabulary—are active processes, disciplines and practices, relationships between individuals and institutions that determine the character of both. These relationships can be located in history, as Foucault does in example after example, and they can also be critically studied in the present, and thus, perhaps, resisted and changed in what he terms “anarchistic struggles.”

Foucault calls for a “new economy of power relations,” and a critical theory that takes “forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point.” For example, in approaching the carceral state, we must examine the processes that divide “the criminals and the ‘good boys,’” processes that function independently of reason. How is it that a system can create classes of people who belong in cages and people who don’t, when the standard rational justification—the protection of society from violence—fails spectacularly to apply in millions of cases? From such excesses, Foucault writes, come two “’diseases of power’—fascism and Stalinism.” Despite the “inner madness” of these “pathological forms” of state power, “they used to a large extent the ideas and the devices of our political rationality.”

People come to accept that mass incarceration, or invasive medical technologies, or economic deprivation, or mass surveillance and over-policing, are necessary and rational. They do so through the agency of what Foucault calls “pastoral power,” the secularization of religious authority as integral to the Western state.

This form of power cannot be exercised without knowing the inside of people’s minds, without exploring their souls, without making them reveal their innermost secrets. It implies a knowledge of the conscience and an ability to direct it.

In the last years of Foucault’s life, he shifted his focus from institutional discourses and mechanisms—psychiatric, carceral, medical—to disciplinary practices of self-control and the governing of others by “pastoral” means. Rather than ignoring individuality, the modern state, he writes, developed “as a very sophisticated structure, in which individuals can be integrated, under one condition: that this individuality would be shaped in a new form and submitted to a set of very specific patterns.” While writing his monumental History of Sexuality, he gave a series of lectures at Berkeley that explore the modern policing of the self.

In his lectures on "Truth and Subjectivity" (1980), Foucault looks at forms of interrogation and various “truth therapies” that function as subtle forms of coercion. Foucault returned to Berkeley in 1983 and delivered the lecture “Discourse and Truth,” which explores the concept of parrhesia, the Greek term meaning “free speech,” or as he calls it, “truth-telling as an activity.” Through analysis of the tragedies of Euripides and contemporary democratic crises, he reveals the practice of speaking truth to power as a kind of tightly controlled performance. Finally, in his lecture series “The Culture of the Self,” Foucault discusses ancient and modern practices of “self care” or “the care of the self” as technologies designed to produce certain kinds of tightly bounded subjectivities.

• Four Lectures on Truth and Subjectivity (1980)
• Six Lectures on Discourse and Truth (1983)
• Three Lectures on "The Culture of the Self" (1983)

You can hear parts of these lectures above or visit our posts with full audio above. Also, over at Ubuweb, download the lectures as mp3s, and hear several earlier talks from Foucault in French, dating all the way back to 1961.

When he began his final series of talks in 1980, the philosopher was asked in an interview with the Daily Californian about the motivations for his critical examinations of power and subjectivity. His reply speaks to both his practical concern for resistance and his almost utopian belief in the limitless potential for human freedom. “No aspect of reality should be allowed to become a definitive and inhuman law for us,” Foucault says.

We have to rise up against all forms of power—but not just power in the narrow sense of the word, referring to the power of a government or of one social group over another: these are only a few particular instances of power.

Power is anything that tends to render immobile and untouchable those things that are offered to us as real, as true, as good.

Read Foucault’s statement of intent, his essay “The Subject and Power,” and learn more about his life and work in the 1993 documentary below.

Foucault's lecture series will be added to our collection, 1,300 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.

Related Content:

Watch a “Lost Interview” With Michel Foucault: Missing for 30 Years But Now Recovered

Michel Foucault and Alain Badiou Discuss “Philosophy and Psychology” on French TV (1965)

Clash of the Titans: Noam Chomsky & Michel Foucault Debate Human Nature & Power on Dutch TV, 1971

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Two-Thirds of College Students Think They’re Going to Change the World

College Students (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

by Lisa Wade, PhD, Cross-posted at PolicyMic, Huffington Post, BlogHer, and Pacific Standard, Sociological Images: https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2013/05/20/college-students-aspirations-and-expectations/

Writer Peg Streep is writing a book about the Millennial generation and she routinely sprinkles great data into her posts at Psychology Today.

Recently she linked to at study by Net Impact that surveyed currently-enrolled college students and college-graduates across three generations Millennials, Gen Xers, and Baby Boomers. The questions focused on life goals and work priorities. They found significant differences between students and college grads, as well as interesting generational differences.

First, students have generally higher demands on the world; they are as likely or more likely than workers to say that a wide range of accomplishments are “important or essential to [their] happiness”:



In particular, students are more likely than workers to say it is important or essential to have a prestigious career with which they can make an impact.  More than a third think that this will happen within the next five years:



Wealth is less important to students than prestige and impact.  Over a third say they would take a significant pay cut to work for a company committed to corporate social responsibility (CSR), almost half for a company that makes a positive social or environmental impact, and over half to align their values with their job:



Students stand out, then, in both the desire to be personally successful and to make a positive contribution to society.



At the same time, they’re cynical about other people’s priorities. Students and Millennials are far more likely than Gen Xers or Boomers to think that “people are just looking out for themselves.”



This data rings true to this college professor. Despite the recession, the students at my (rather elite, private, liberal arts) school surprise me with their high professional expectations (thinking that they should be wildly successful, even if they’re worried they won’t be) and their desire to change the world (many strongly identify as progressives who are concerned with social inequalities and political corruption).

Some call this entitlement, but I think it’s at least as true to say that today’s college youth (the self-esteem generation) have been promised these things. They’ve always been told to dream big, and so they do.

Unfortunately, I’m afraid that we’ve sold our young people a bill of goods. Their high expectations sound like a recipe for disappointment, even for my privileged population, especially if they expect it to happen before they exit their twenties!

Alternatively, what we’re seeing is the idealism of youth. It will be interesting to see if they downshift their expectations once they get into the workforce. Net Impact doesn’t address whether these are largely generational or age differences. It’s probably a combination of both. 

Lisa Wade, PhD is a professor at Occidental College. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture, and a textbook about gender. You can follow her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Philosophy of Social Science and the Graduate Student

by Daniel Little, Understanding Society: http://understandingsociety.blogspot.com.au/2015/01/philosophy-of-social-science-and.html

Is there any reason to think that a course in philosophy of social science can be helpful for a graduate student in sociology or political science (or education, public health, or public policy)?

Is this part of philosophy a useful contribution to a PhD education in the social sciences?

I think there are several reasons to support this idea. I believe that a good course in this area can help the aspiring researcher extend his or her imagination and modes of inquiry in ways that can make the first years of research particularly fruitful. In what ways is this so? There are several, in my view.

First, though, I must confess that it wasn't always so. The courses I took in philosophy of science and philosophy of social science as an undergraduate were in fact stultifying and discouraging rather than eye-opening and expanding.

There was the idea that the nature of "science" had been settled by the Vienna Circle, that there was an all-encompassing model for explanation and justification (the hypothetico-deductive method), and that the significant problems facing young social scientists had to do with forming adequate concepts and finding ways of operationalizing these concepts to test them against the world of observable data.

Essentially, then, the work of the social scientist was simply to fill in the blanks in a schema that had already been prepared (I'm thinking in particular of two textbooks, Hempel (Philosophy of Natural Science) and Rudner (Philosophy of Social Science)).

And the anti-positivist reaction to this kind of philosophy of science wasn't much more helpful. Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend, and Hanson pointed out the shortcomings of the theory of science contained in logical positivism. But they didn't have much to say that was very specific or helpful when it came to the task of formulating theories and hypotheses that would serve to explain social outcomes.

So, I wouldn't have said that the typical course in philosophy of science in the 1980s was particularly valuable for the young researcher either. But the situation in this field changed in the 1990s and after.

Most important, many philosophers who took up the philosophy of social science embraced the idea that the field needed to be developed in tandem with the real problems of research and explanation that sociologists and political scientists grappled with.

PSS could not remain an apriori discipline; instead, the philosopher needed to gain expert understanding of the disputes and problems that were under debate in the disciplines of the social sciences (this switch occurred even a little earlier in the philosophy of biology and philosophy of psychology). Philosophers needed to work as peers and colleagues with social scientists.

And once philosophers began to step away from the dogmas of received formulations of philosophy of science, they began to ask new questions. What is a good explanation? How does social causation work? What is a causal mechanism in the social world? What kind of thing is a social structure? How do structures maintain their causal properties over time? How do individual actors contribute to social causation?

These are all questions that are intertwined with the ordinary reasoning that talented sociologists and political scientists are led to through their own efforts at theory formation. And philosophers found helpful mid-level locations from which to address questions like these in ways that made substantive contributions to the concrete work of social research and inquiry.

Here are some concrete results.

Philosophers have worked productively to help arrive at better ways of treating social causation. They have clarified the nature of social causal mechanisms. They have brought new clarity to questions about the relationships among levels of social and individual activity. They have highlighted the centrality of the idea of microfoundations.

They have helped to dissolve the apparent contradiction between structural causation and actor-centered social processes. They have problematized the assumptions we sometimes make about social kinds and social generalizations. They have directed new attention to the ways that we characterize the actor in the social world.

And it seems to me that each of these kinds of insights makes a difference to the researcher in training.

So, indeed, it makes good sense to offer a challenging course in the philosophy of social science to PhD students in the social sciences.

This isn't because there is a new set of verities that these young researchers need to master. Rather, it is because the nature of the current discussions in the philosophy of social science parallels very nicely the process of theory formation and development that we would like to see take place in sociology and political science.

We would like to see the exercise of intelligent imagination by social researchers, unconstrained by the dogmas of methodology or ontology that a discipline is all too ready to provide.

The social world is strikingly and permanently surprising, with novel conjunctions of processes and causes leading to unexpected outcomes. we need new ways of thinking about the social world and the social sciences, and philosophy of social science can help stimulate some of that thinking.

Here are the books I'll be discussing in my graduate course in philosophy of social science this semester:

5 Superstar Women Sociologists You Should Know and Why They Are a Big Deal

GraphicaArtis/Getty Images

by Nicki Lisa Cole, About.com: http://sociology.about.com/od/Profiles/fl/5-Superstar-Women-Sociologists-You-Should-Know.htm?nl=1

1. Juliet Schor

Dr. Juliet Schor is arguably the foremost scholar of the sociology of consumption, and a leading public intellectual who was awarded the 2014 American Sociological Association's prize for advancing the public understanding of sociology.

Professor of Sociology at Boston College, she is the author of five books, and co-author and editor of numerous others, has published a multitude of journal articles, and has been cited several thousand times by other scholars.

Her research focuses on consumer culture, particularly the work-spend cycle which was the focus of her research-rich, popular companion hits The Overspent American and The Overworked American.

Recently, her research has focused on ethical and sustainable approaches to consumption in the context of a failing economy and a planet on the brink.

Her most recent book, written for the non-academic audience, is True Wealth: How and Why Millions of Americans are Creating a Time-Rich, Ecologically-Light, Small-Scale, High-Satisfaction Economy, which makes the case for shifting out of the work-spend cycle by diversifying our personal income sources, and by placing more value on our time, being more mindful of the impacts of our consumption and consuming differently, and reinvesting in the social fabric of our communities.

Her current research into collaborative consumption and the new sharing economy is a part of the MacArthur Foundation's Connected Learning Initiative. 

2. Gilda Ochoa

Dr. Gilda Ochoa is Professor of Sociology and Chican@/Latin@ studies at Pomona College, where her cutting edge approach to teaching and research has her regularly leading teams of college students in community-based research that addresses problems of systemic racism, particularly those related to education, and community-driven responses to it in the greater Los Angeles area.

She is the author of a recent hit book, Academic Profiling: Latinos, Asian Americans and the Achievement Gap. The book is a thoroughly researched look at the root causes behind the so called "achievement gap" between Latino and Asian American students in California.

Through ethnographic research at one Southern California high school and hundreds of interviews with students, teachers, and parents, Ochoa reveals troubling disparities in opportunity, status, treatment, and assumptions experienced by students. This important work debunks racial and cultural explanations for the achievement gap.

Following its publication the book won two important awards: the American Sociological Association's Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award for Anti-Racist Scholarship, and the Eduardo Bonilla-Silva Outstanding Book award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems.

She is the author of 24 academic journal articles and two other books - Learning from Latino Teachers and Becoming Neighbors in a Mexican-American Community: Power, Conflict, and Solidarity - and co-editor, with her brother Enrique, of Latino Los Angeles: Transformations, Communities, and Activism. 

Ochoa recently spoke about her current book, intellectual development, and research motivation in a fascinating interview that you can read here.

3. Lisa Wade

Dr. Lisa Wade is arguably the most active public sociologist in the media landscape today.

Associate Professor and Chair of Sociology at Occidental College, she rose to prominence as co-founder and contributor to the widely read blog Sociological Images, and now is a regular contributor to national publications and blogs including Salon, The Huffington Post, Business Insider, Slate, Politico, The Los Angeles Times, and Jezebel, among others.

Wade is an expert in gender and sexuality whose research and writing now focuses on hook-up culture and sexual assault on college campuses, the social significance of the body, and US discourse about genital mutilation.

Her research has illuminated the intense sexual objectification that women experience and how this results in unequal treatment, sexual inequality (like the orgasm gap), violence against women, and the socio-structural problem of gender inequality.

Wade has written over a dozen academic journal articles, numerous popular essays, and has been a media guest across all platforms dozens of times in her still young career. With Myra Marx Ferree, she is co-author of a much-anticipated and just released textbook on the sociology of gender.

4. Jenny Chan

Dr. Jenny Chan is a groundbreaking researcher whose work, which focuses on issues of labor and working class identity in iPhone factories in China, sits at the intersection of the sociology of globalization and the sociology of work.

By gaining hard-to-come-by access to Foxconn factories, Chan has illuminated many of things Apple doesn't want you to know about how it makes its beautiful products.

She is the author or co-author of 23 journal articles and book chapters, including a heartbreaking and analytically shrewd piece about a Foxconn suicide survivor, and her forthcoming book with Pun Ngai and Mark Selden, titled Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn, and a New Generation of Chinese Workers, is not to be missed.

Chan teaches about the Sociology of China at the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies at the University of Oxford in the UK, and is a Board Member of the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee on Labor Movements.

She has also played an important role as a scholar-activist, and from 2006 to 2009 was the Chief Coordinator of Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM) in Hong Kong, a leading labor watch organization that works to hold corporations accountable for abuses happening in their global supply chains.

5. C.J. Pascoe

Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon, Dr. C.J. Pascoe is a leading scholar of gender, sexuality, and adolescence whose work has been cited by other scholars over 2100 times, and has been widely cited in national news media.

She is the author of the groundbreaking and highly regarded book Dude, You're a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School, now in its second edition, and winner of the Outstanding Book Award from American Education Research Association.

The research featured in the book is a compelling look at how both formal and informal curricula at high schools shape the development of gender and sexuality of students, and how in particular, the idealized form of masculinity boys are expected to perform is premised on the sexual and social control of girls.

Pascoe is also a contributor to the book Hanging Out, Messing Around and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media, and is author or co-author of nine academic journal articles, and seven essays.

She is an engaged public intellectual and activist for the rights of LGBTQ youth, who works with organizations including Beyond Bullying: Shifting the Discourse of LGBTQ Sexuality,
Youth in Schools, Born This Way Foundation, SPARK! Girls Summit, TrueChild, Gay/Straight Alliance Network, and LGBT Inclusive Curriculum Campaign Toolkit. Pascoe is working on a new book titled Just a Teenager in Love: Young People’s Cultures of Love and Romance, and is the founder and editor of the blog Social In(Queery).

Will All the Ethical Social Scientists Please Stand Up?

Emile Durkheim (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

by Mark Israel, University of Western Australia

Social scientists have to get better at recognising and responding to ethical problems.

Although economists, political scientists and psychologists have not been responsible for the same level of abuses that have occurred in biomedical research, the social sciences have witnessed their share of old-fashioned scandalous behaviour.

Social scientists were co-opted into American intelligence and military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Political scientists at Stanford University and Dartmouth College involved in experimentation on voter participation may have disrupted judicial elections in Montana. Harvard sociologists studying Facebook failed to protect the anonymity of their students.

Australian experimental psychologists at La Trobe University replicating Stanley Milgram’s studies in the 1970s were found to have caused long-term distress to some of their participants.

There are examples of American historians and Dutch social psychologists engaging in fabrication and falsification. Meanwhile, Chinese anthropologists at Beijing University have been censured for plagiarism, and economists became mired in conflicts of interest following the global financial crisis.

New-fangled complexity

It would be comforting to believe we can leave ethical dilemmas like these in the hands of university committees governing academic research ethics. But the sad truth is that in many places, the relationship between researchers and ethics committees is seen as adversarial.

Current regulations are not always fit for purpose, lagging behind in their understanding of the new kinds of complex work that researchers are doing.

New ways of working in our disciplines, as well as broader social, political and economic shifts in our societies, bring their own ethical dilemmas. Some issues are familiar. How do researchers secure sensitive data when their institutions use cloud computing - particularly as we learn more about the information-gathering capabilities of national intelligence agencies?

Other issues such as research connected to big data and human-computer interactions have brought up new ethical questions. These are also relevant for scientific disciplines that are gathering social science data as they study interactions between technology and people.

Problems with petabytes

For instance, the emergence of predictive analytics and the mining of petabyte-sized datasets (1,000 terabytes) containing billions of pieces of information - so called “big data” - threatens to undercut the concept of informed consent in research.

Political scientists studying everyday political communication in Scandinavia were able to gather over 100,000 tweets using just one election-related hashtag on Twitter covering a one-month period in the lead up to the Swedish national election in 2010.

It was impractical to obtain consent from all the people who tweeted and, even if it had been possible, this might have introduced a bias into the sample. So the researchers had to argue, ultimately successfully, with a research ethics committee in Sweden and a commission for privacy protection in research in Norway that publishing on Twitter constituted a public rather than a private act.

Problems with video

Other examples involve videoethnography, the video recording of everyday settings for research purposes. Following increased interest in videoethnography as a research tool, scholars now need to identify the potential uses for images.

They must ensure the anonymity of participants and obtain consent from incidental people who enter the frame. It’s also important to maintain data security and control any secondary use of the research videos.

This is particularly important for videoethnographers working in hospitals who also need to minimise the possibility of causing distress to families of participating patients.

Many education researchers are already familiar with having to protect students who opt out of research, but not necessarily with the social and educational consequences of making sure those students who do not wish to be filmed are seated in a “blind spot” in a classroom.

Scientists doing social science

New disciplines are also engaging in research using human subjects. Empirical research is growing in computer sciences, particular in those parts of the discipline that investigate human-computer interaction.

But the line between human and non-human data can be blurred. In some cases, field testing of these new types of technology can even place human operators and other people in the vicinity at physical risk.

Where information and communication technologies are used for development and to promote social good, some research may be interventionist, as new technology is trialled in locations targeted for aid. But researchers need to assess what impact their interventions may have in a disadvantaged community.

Who might be harmed and who might benefit from research? Where should they draw the line between coercive inducement and fair compensation? As researchers working in Bangalore slums reported, in poor communities even small gifts to children might compromise a family’s ability to make an autonomous decision.

Do the hard graft

Existing codes, regulations and even training materials may offer researchers little help with facing complex new conditions, as my forthcoming research documents.

Rather than helping social scientists to respond to such new challenges, regulation of research ethics in many countries seems to be underpinned by an unsettling combination of models that were originally designed for biomedical research or institutional risk minimisation.

Individually and collectively, researchers have little choice but to do the hard graft themselves. They need to get used to identifying and working through ethical issues, reflecting upon and standing up for their decisions in public as best they can.


Mark Israel acts as a paid consultant on research ethics and research integrity for a range of Australian higher education and research institutions, and for the European Research Council. 

He is part of a research team awarded an Australian Research Council. Discovery Grant (DP130104760 2013-15) on the expanding disciplinary scope of research ethics committees: an inquiry into need and resistance.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

How to Write a Good Sociology Essay (and not panic)

Essay Writing (Photo credit: kodomut)

by Milena Kremakova, The Sociological Imagination: http://sociologicalimagination.org/archives/14967

Dear stressed student, 

Here are a bunch of useful resources from yours truly, the Idle Procrastinator Ethnographer for writing essays and papers:

Start small: this is perhaps the most useful of all links posted here: a post about how to write an effective paragraph. Master this and you won’t need any of the others.

A sneaky guide for writing a decent essay really fast - some of the tips are quite good.

An article on how to focus when you’re writing your PhD or anything else (I’ve bookmarked the website, it’s really useful).

Forgodssake, stop checking your email! I know - easier said than done. Here are some more tips for getting a clearer focus on your work kicking your arse back into shape. Read this now. It will take you two minutes. It will save you countless hours.

I found this post about writing sociology papers without plagiarising on the Everyday Sociology blog three years ago and it doesn’t get old. If you are a student and have to write essays this year, read it.

Don’t (self)plagiarise! Cartoon seen at plagiarismtoday.com, an interesting website about online plagiarism.

Once you’re done (or almost done), here you can find an online word counter (useful if you aren’t using MSWord or Open Office but some more exotic word processing package … for example, I used it to see how many words there were in the final PDF version of my PhD thesis which I typeset in LaTeX).

Warning: it can also be a source of procrastination. But then, what can’t. The most important thing:

BOOK REVIEW: C. Wright Mills and the Sociological Imagination: Contemporary Perspectives, Edited by John Scott and Ann Nilsen

by Sarah Burton, Impact of Social Sciences: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/02/09/c-wright-mills-and-the-sociological-imagination/ 

This book is a collection of essays offering current perspectives on C. Wright Mills’ influence on the field of sociological research, specifically focusing on his most famous work - The Sociological Imagination. 

The collection seeks to explore the general issues around the nature and significance of the sociological imagination and includes a series of reflections from scholars on the impact of Mills’ writings in their sociological work. 

This collection certainly affords the reader a chance to consider the various legacies of C. Wright Mills - but from very particular and established perspectives, writes Sarah Burton.

This review originally appeared on LSE Review of Books and is reposted with permission.

The often-reproduced black and white image of C. Wright Mills on his motorcycle, the background blurred with speed, has become a touchstone for successive generations of sociologists.

It remains indicative of a fresh sociology, subversive and even dangerous, and plays upon Mills’ associations with the Americana of the Beat generation and the anti-establishment identifications therein.

Mills’ work is arguably obscured by the legendary status he has achieved in recent years and the extent to which several of his key phrases have become part of the lexicon of sociological thought but perhaps divorced from their writer.

This collection seeks to detail the ways in which Mills has influenced contemporary sociological perspectives and his ongoing relevance to sociological thinking and research.

It is split into two sections: ‘The Intellectual Legacy’ and ‘Reflections and Encounters’, and includes contributions from a range of European and North American sociologists.

One theme which emerges strongly, is the relationship between Mills’ work and research methods and methodology. This is most broadly tackled by Jennifer Platt’s chapter ‘The Sociological Imagination, “On Intellectual Craftsmanship” and Mills’s influence on research methods’.

Platt’s aim in this chapter is to discover the extent to which the content of this final chapter of The Sociological Imagination, regularly noted as stalwart advice for graduate students, is actually linked to the uses of some of Mills’ most famous phrases.

Mills can appear as both a presence and an absence in sociology - his terminology is widespread, but as Platt argues here, it is not always used in conjunction with substantial references to Mills’ work, and nowhere is that more pronounced than with The Sociological Imagination.

In preparation for a survey of journals, general textbooks, methods textbooks, autobiographies and The New Left Review, Platt attempts to define what Mills’ means when he employs the terms ‘classic’, ‘craftsmanship’ and ‘sociological imagination’.

What is curious here is that the conditions of Platt’s survey - the chapter’s most substantial section - leave one wondering why the attempts at defining terms themselves was ever relevant.

Firstly, the survey is geared towards ascertaining whether uses of the phrase ‘the sociological imagination’ are cited within the context of also citing Mills’ work itself - there is no use made in the survey of either ‘classics’ or ‘craftsmanship’.

Secondly, the results of Platt’s survey are given in terms of numbers of citations of the phrase and how many of those also cited Mills.

There is little consideration of whether citations of the phrase are using it in the context intended and as such hardly any instances of comparing uses of ‘sociological imagination’ to her own interpretations of Mills’ work.

The result is very little texture to the survey work which leaves the results rather flat and even predictable.

Platt notes of the survey that it provides an indication that ‘the sociological imagination’ has ‘entered into the general language of sociology’, that references to it are often ‘impressionistic’ (p.10) and further to this that, ‘however widely diffused references to The Sociological Imagination were, they did not necessarily indicate any serious uses of Mills’ ideas’ (p.19).

I am unsurprised that Mills is a sociologist honoured more in the breech than the observance, but I would question why, when attempting to uncover the relevance of Mills to methodology the search terms did not include ‘craftsmanship’ as well as ‘sociological imagination’?

Platt attempts to explain the lack of specific references to Mills in these sources, noting that ‘[Mills’] unusual focus on the development of research ideas, rather than the technicalities of how to collect and analyse data, made his methodological ideas hard to fit into the usual methodological discussions’ (p.19).

In light of this, perhaps a more incisive project would have been to consider what Mills’ notions of imagination and craftsmanship add to the distinctions between methods and methodology.

Considering the lack of engagement that Platt identifies with Mills’ actual work, Part Two of the collection potentially offers to fill this gap. It comprises much shorter reflections on individual aspects of Mills’ work and their impact on the author’s sociological thinking.

John D. Brewer in his chapter ‘The sociological imagination and public sociology’ notes that he encountered Mills as an A Level student and that Mills has ‘been the star by which I have since plotted my entire sociological career’ (p.219).

Despite arguing that Mills’ view of sociology ‘fits the mood of our epoch of engagement for a form of social science that addresses real world problems’ (p.219), Brewer is pessimistic regarding how useful Mills is to the normative questions that arise when we try to do ‘public sociology’.

Brewer notes, ‘it is no longer a question of which side sociology is on, as Mills might have put it,’ because ‘in late modernity there are no stark zero-sum answers’ (p.221).

In light of this, Brewer contends that Mills’ work is ‘increasingly irrelevant’ as we move towards ‘more liquid times’ (p.219).

That Brewer makes a distinction between the spirit of Mills’ work as still relevant and applicable, and the actual writing which is seen as out of step with modernity, is especially interesting in light of Platt’s chapter which essentially argues that we make too much use of Mills out of context.

Perhaps what this collection offers more than anything is the opportunity to adopt Mills’ thought as a spur to action - as a way of being a sociologist, which is arguably rather romanticised but nevertheless provides a fecund space in which to operate, particularly in environments where sociology is increasingly under threat.

This collection certainly affords the reader a chance to consider the various legacies of C. Wright Mills - but from very particular and established perspectives.

A more daring version of this volume would ask the ‘newer generations of sociologists’ that Brewer suggests will abandon Mills for their contemporary perspectives. 

Sarah Burton is a postgraduate student in the School of Social & Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow. Her research centres around narrative of the grotesque body, especially in relation to power and sexual citizenship.

Sarah is passionate about using social media in academia and her blog has been featured in the Times Higher Education and Guardian Higher Education Network. She is also Co-Convenor of the British Sociological Association Postgraduate Forum. Read more reviews by Sarah.

BOOK REVIEW: The Art of Sociological Argument: Review by @AcademicDiary

Max Weber (Wikipedia)

by Les Back, Sociological Imagination: http://sociologicalimagination.org/archives/14876

Graham Crow’s The Art of Sociological Argument (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) is a book about rhetoric and how sociologists have made their arguments and communicated with their readers.

Crow takes eight sociological writers from the classic founders to the present day.

Each sociologist is treated to a chapter on the biographical and historical contexts of their thought and writing.

 

The authors reviewed include obvious choices like the big three ‘founding fathers’ - Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, although Crows discussion of them though is far from obvious.

 

For example, I was surprised to realize how short their sociological lives were - Marx having greatest longevity at 64 years with Durkheim next at 59 years and Max Weber just 56 years.

 

Crow leads us through the ways in which they used metaphor, like Weber’s idea of bureaucracy as an ‘iron cage,’ or personification, as in Marx’s unforgettable ‘Mr Moneybags,’ to make their arguments.

Next Crow gives us a trio of American sociological writers - Talcott Parsons, Charles Wright Mills and Erving Goffman.  It’s no secret that I have a weakness for the writing of C. Wright Mills but reading this book I found myself having much more sympathy for Talcott Parsons as a person.

Parsons comes across as patient and even tempered, while Mills seems bombastic and imprecise by comparison. Yet at the same time, Mills is more lasting and alluring to his readership.

Goffman is presented as a sociological humourist with a brilliant eye for more analytical metaphors. However, the purpose of a metaphor for Goffman is to support an argument like scaffolding: “Scaffolds … are to build other things with, and should be erected with an eye to taking them down”.

Erving Goffman did more than any other sociologists to give us a way of understanding society’s back stage, while at the same time being very secretive about his own personal life.

The last part of the book features a chapter on Michel Foucault and another on Ann Oakley. Crow talks very thoughtfully about Foucault’s use of shock tactics and a kind of gothic style in his writing.

Foucault’s rhetoric insists on leaving things open, refusing to claim the final word on any given issue. For Foucault, those who claim knowledge pilfer the voices of their subjects and in the contexts discussions of crime this “shuts the prisoner up (in both senses)”.

Ann Oakley is the only female sociological writer to be included. The chapter dedicated to Oakley’s writing was this reader’s favourite. What Crow does so successfully is to re-enchant books that you think you know already.

It was a real surprise and revelation to be introduced to the range of Oakley’s writing from her classic The Sociology of Housework to policy reports, memoir, fiction and poetry.

The diversity of Oakley’s work is astonishing, she writes: “All writing is an invitation to the imagination … a matter of new arrangements of words, and thus of new forms.”

In a way Oakley’s work is a provocation to find new ways of writing sociologically. Crow quotes Oakley from one of her eighties poetry collections: “who would want a history of articles / typed and dissected, lost and uncredited.” By implication Oakley is challenging us to ask: will the books and articles we’ve written all too speedily for the audit culture inevitably have a short shelf life?

The Art of Sociological Argument is a wonderful and beautifully written book. It has cost me a small fortune in impulse purchases from Amazon.

Reading Crow makes me want to go back to the classics from Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd to Oakley’s Gender of Planet Earth. The book reads like an argument that has been rehearsed and honed through teaching the work of these great sociologists.

Crows conclusion is that there are ways we can improve the way we express our arguments. He offers ten points on how to write sociology more artfully. I have paraphrased them here as follows:

1. Care for your readers - invite your readers into a conversation with your problem, rather than preach to them by being overly didactic.
2. Challenge your reader’s presuppositions and surprise them, even if this means being shocking.
3. Don’t be afraid to use humour and irony to amuse and persuade.
4. Work with what is counter-intuitive and perplexing and it will open up new insights.
5. Metaphors and analogues can help get beyond descriptions of phenomena that are readily perceived.
6. Formulate imaginative questions that invite interesting sociological answers.
7. Foster a capacity for self-criticism.
8. Seek to persuade and do not assume that readers will share your agenda or understanding.
9. Avoid claiming too much in an argument but also be aware of the risks of claiming too little and not explicating its potential.
10. Literary style is no substitute for content but a good argument is all the better for being well presented.

In fifty years from now such a book will need to be written very differently. It has made me reflect on the transformation of Goldsmiths Sociology during my twenty years here, from a department with less than a handful of female colleagues to one where the majority of Goldsmiths sociologists are women. This year our department celebrates its half century.

Sociology has no future without feminist writers and the male domination of the discipline, as represented in the writers reviewed in this book, simply cannot and should not last. That’s not to mention the ubiquitous whiteness of the authors included in this book.

With this in mind it is interesting to think and perhaps hope for what the sociological pantheon might look like, and how different the discipline will be, when Goldsmiths Sociology celebrates its centenary.

Les Back has been teaching in the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths, University of London since 1993. His main areas of academic interest are the sociology of racism, multiculture, popular culture, music and sound studies and city life.

Hear Michel Foucault Deliver His Lecture on “Truth and Subjectivity” at UC Berkeley, In English (1980)

Michel Foucault (Wikipedia)

by Josh Jones, Open Culture: http://www.openculture.com/2013/12/michel-foucault-delivers-his-lecture-on-truth-and-subjectivity.html


Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness


NOTE: The following lectures on "Truth and Subjectivity" by Michel Foucault, are conducted in English, except for the first 9 minutes of the first lecture.

Michel Foucault first arrived at the University of California, Berkeley in 1975. By this time, he was already a celebrity in France.

He had just published his enormously influential history and critique of the penal system, Discipline and Punish, and he occupied a position at the prestigious Collège de France as chair in the “history of systems of thought,” a position he created for himself.

But when he arrived on the West Coast, writes Marcus Wohlsen, “few at Berkeley had heard of Michel Foucault.” Leo Bersani, then chairman of the French department, even had to call philosophy professor Hubert Dreyfus to help “come and fill out the ranks” for Foucault’s lectures.

After the publication of volume one of The History of Sexuality, Foucault would return to Berkeley in the fall of 1979, then again in 1980. By then, the scene had changed dramatically.

Foucault was invited to deliver the Howison Lecture that year, a distinguished invitation previously extended to such thinkers as John Dewey, Willard V.O. Quine and, the year previous, John Rawls.

By this time, Wohlsen writes, Foucault was, reluctantly, “an international academic superstar.” Filling the hall for his lectures would not be an issue. In fact, Wohlsen tells us,

Crowds crammed the 2,000-seat Zellerbach Hall so quickly that police had to bar the doors. Foucault fans milled around restlessly outside until [philosophy professor Hans] Sluga arranged for a live broadcast of the lectures to Wheeler Hall. Its 760 seats filled almost immediately.

According to Sluga, Foucault, increasingly wary of his fame, intentionally titled his lecture - “Truth and Subjectivity: the Stoic Practice of Self Examination” - to sound “learned, abstract, remote” in order to deter a large crowd. That ploy clearly failed.

In the first part of the lecture (at top), the presenter who introduces Foucault begins by gesturing to the philosopher’s fame, then comments that Foucault’s prominent post at the Collège de France was “very paradoxical, since Michel Foucault, although prestigious, is not a typical kind of academic. He is suspicious of all titles and claims to disinterested truth that has been [sic] associated with academia.”

After mentioning Foucault’s fierce criticism of every historical assumption and methodology (he was a guest of the History and French Departments), he breaks off his remarks to note that “there’s a mob of people all around, trying to get in.”

Foucault begins his lecture in French (at 8:08), then switches to English for the remainder (at 9:18). He quotes from a historical French psychiatrist’s account of a “cure” involving an “interrogation” and a coerced confession of madness.

Foucault calls this one among many examples of “truth therapies,” and it serves - as do such vividly specific archival examples in his books - as a harrowing introduction to the policing of capital-T Truth that is the essence of the humanist enterprise.

Despite the often profoundly unsettling nature of his investigations, and his attempt to scare off the crowd, Foucault is not dour or boring, nor does he seem at all unapproachable or forbidding.

He is patient and self-deprecatingly funny: in a cutting, rueful reference to the growing dominance of analytic philosophy in British and American universities, he says, “I confess, with the appropriate chagrin, that I am not an analytical philosopher. Nobody is perfect.”

Then he sums up his project succinctly: “I have tried to explore another direction. I have tried to get from a philosophy of subjectivity to a genealogy of the subject.”

Foucault is a very charming speaker, sprinkling his lecture with little jokes like “It goes without saying … but it goes better with saying …” and dropping in Americanisms like “Monday morning quarterbacking,” to the amusement of the crowd.

He shows himself to be very much aware of his audience - these are deeply serious lectures, without a doubt, but Foucault never forgets that he’s facing living human beings, with their own domains of knowledge and subjectivities - and he seeks to reach them where they are while reporting on his disturbing discoveries as an archaeologist of Western humanist discourse.

Foucault returned to Berkeley again as a visiting professor in 1981 and again 1983, the year before his death.

Alain Beaulieu, who has catalogued Foucault’s Berkeley archives, described his time in California as happy and productive, “while he remain[ed] critical of some features associated with the ‘Californian cult of the self.’”

In fact, “Cult of the Self” was the title of three lectures Foucault delivered at Berkeley in 1983 (listen here), along with six lectures on “Discourse and Truth.”

During his time at Berkeley in 1980, when he delivered the lecture above, graduate student Michael Bess interviewed the philosopher. Foucault spoke plainly and passionately about the impetus for his relentless critiques of institutional power and knowledge:

In a sense, I am a moralist, insofar as I believe that one of the tasks, one of the meanings of human existence - the source of human freedom - is never to accept anything as definitive, untouchable, obvious, or immobile. No aspect of reality should be allowed to become a definitive and inhuman law for us. We have to rise up against all forms of power - but not just power in the narrow sense of the word, referring to the power of a government or of one social group over another: these are only a few particular instances of power. Power is anything that tends to render immobile and untouchable those things that are offered to us as real, as true, as good.

Read the complete interview, first published in the November 10, 1980 Daily Californian, here.