Basic Concepts in Sociology

Everyone loves theory. Disciplines (at least those somewhat similar to Sociology) have Grand Theories Of Everything and little theories to explain specific outcomes and middle-range theories to satisfy everyone in-between. Theories for all occasions!

But beyond theories, disciplines also have basic concepts. Sometimes these concepts are so basic they defy definition in introductory textbooks. For example, economics rarely offers an explicit definition of a market or an economy – two central concepts. They do a bit better with supply and demand, two more basic concepts. These ideas are not pre-theoretical – as Kuhn reminds us, concepts are always theory-laden. But while these basic concepts bring with them certain ideas about how to see the world, they are often somewhat separate from the Big, Medium and Small theories we tend to argue about at great length. Most economists don’t quibble about whether or not it makes sense to think about markets at all, though they may argue about whether or not something “counts”.

This line of thinking led me to ask what the basic concepts of sociology are. Another way of asking this question would be, what do sociologists see the world as made up of? There are a lot of obvious answers, some of which overlap – race, class and gender, individual and society, agency and structure, social movements, states, nations, culture, norms, power, knowledge, etc. But I think there are three basic concepts that often go unremarked but are incredibly potent in contemporary (and early) sociological thinking: division of labor, definition of the situation, and taken for granted.

The Division of Labor is a concept most associated with Adam Smith, and secondarily with Durkheim. Smith’s famous theorem, “the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market” connects the size of a community connected by trade and the amount of specialization possible. Specialization, in turn, makes possible enormous increases in productivity and thus material welfare. Hooray! Smith does note, however, that specialization may have one huge downside: that generalists will become narrow, and thus unable to make improvements in their lot or switch to different tasks. One remedy to this problem is public education, to make sure that even though our jobs are narrow, our skills are less so (see Wealth of Nations, Bk V, Ch 1, Pt III).

Durkheim picks up on the DoL to make claims about what organizes modern society as opposed to traditional ones. While older societies were united by everyone having the same consciousness, forged by engaging in identical tasks in identical environments (“mechanical solidarity”), modern societies are unified by their interdependence, like the organs in a body (hence “organic solidarity”). We’re all different, but we’re all in this together.

I would argue that the division of labor is a basic concept in our understanding of how societies work. It’s a starting place for our understanding of how people are brought together, and what makes a society a society. For example, Wallerstein’s world-systems theory argues that since the 1500s, most of the world has been united in a single economy, as almost the entire world exchanged necessary goods. That is, the division of labor was global, thus we should think of a single world-system rather than nations.

On a much more micro-level, theorists have focused heavily on “definitions of the situation”. Classic examples would include the Thomas theorem, quoted in Merton’s famous essay on self-fulfilling prophecies: “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” This concept is at the root of all sorts of social constructionist theories, radical or not. Goffman and Garfinkel are two more recent theorists who relied heavily on the analysis of definitions of the situation.

Lastly, and in a similar vein to definition of the situation, “taken for granted” is a key concept in theories of culture, hegemony, etc. For example, modern neoinstitutional theories focus on how certain practices come to be taken for granted – often a synonym for legitimate, or having a ready-made explanation.

While these basic concepts occur in lots of different sociological theories, I wonder if we pay them too little attention. Or, more snarkily, I wonder if “division of labor”, “definition of the situation” and “taken for granted” are themselves taken for granted! While I’ve read many an article attempting to provide better and more coherent definitions of class, race or gender, I’ve seen relatively few that focus on exploring these basic concepts and what they tell us about how we understand our world. I don’t know that I could give a decent definition of “taken for granted”, for example. And that can be a problem when it comes to argue that a particular idea or practice has become taken for granted. On the other hand, I also think all three are incredibly useful and productive ways to approach that world – perhaps because, rather than in spite, of their relative under-definition.

Alright enough musing. A question for the audience: What are your favorite basic concepts in sociology? What concepts should we toss out as smuggling in with them theories that we don’t necessarily want?

18th Century Self-Help: Life Advice from Adam Smith

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m currently reading through Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith’s book at time reads like a shockingly modern self-help book, with good advice about how to deal with adversity and how unrealistic expectations are the source of much misery. Here’s a couple choice bits from a middle chapter, “Of the Influence and Authority of Conscience”:

The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life seems to arise from overrating the difference between one permanent situation and another. Avarice overrates the difference between poverty and riches: ambition, that between a private and a public station: vain-glory, that between obscurity an extensive reputation. The person under the influence of any of those extravagant passions is not only miserable in his actual situation, but is often disposed to disturb the peace of society in order to arrive at that which he so foolishly admires.
…
Examine the records of history, recollect what has happened within the circle of your own experience, consider with attention what has been the conduct of almost all the greatly unfortunate, either in private or public life, whom you may have read of, or heard of, or remember, and you will find that the misfortunes of by far the greater part of them have arisen from their now knowing when they were well, when it was proper for them to sit still and to be contented.”

I’m reminded of two things here. One is recent research in the psychology of happiness (see for example Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness). One of the findings from this work is that people consistently predict that permanent changes in their wealth (such as winning the lottery) or health (not all health changes, but things like losing a limb) will make them far happier or unhappier than they end up being.

In a totally different vein, Vonngeut said something similar but pithier, one of my favorite quotes of his:

And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ”If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

A second Smith quote from the same chapter gives explicit advice about what to do when you are feeling down. Smith emphasizes the role of “the impartial spectator”, a figure we summon in our minds when we try to judge our own actions, and which helps us act morally when we get lost in the moment. That figure is easier to summon when we are among strangers than friends – in interacting with strangers, we are forced to consider how another views us who is relatively impartial and disconnected. Smith turns this into a bit of advice for when you are feeling blue:

Are you in adversity? Do not mourn in the darkness of solitude, do not regulate your sorrow according to the indulgent sympathy of your intimate friends; return, as soon as possible, to the daylight of the world and of society. Live with strangers, with those who know nothing, or care nothing, about your misfortune; do not even shun the company of enemies; but give yourself the pleasure of mortifying their malignant joy, by making them feel how little you are affected by your calamity, and how much you are above it.

Self-help, ca. 1759!

The Smith-Nietzsche-Schelling Model of Rationality

Sociologists tend to have a lot of problems with rational choice models of behavior that emphasize the decisions of discrete, rational individuals. In a sense, the discipline itself can be seen as a reaction to liberalism* and its overemphasis of individuals, individuality and choice. The easiest place to see this is in Durkheim or Marx, both of whom explicitly argue that individuals are formed by society and not the other way around. In a way, the whole structure-agency debate (can we call it a debacle at this point?) stems from social theorists trying to grapple with the basic problem of reconciling a liberal belief in the self with a sociological belief in society.

Intended But Unrealized Consequences of Purposive Social Action

Sociologists often study unintended consequences. Robert Merton codified this habit in his oft-cited essay, The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action. As Merton notes in that essay, analyses of unanticipated consequences go back hundreds of years, to Adam Smith and before. Indeed, as Gavin Kennedy likes to point out, when Adam Smith uses the metaphor of “the invisible hand” in the Wealth of Nations, he is using it to discuss an unintended consequence (not a self-ordering market). Specifically, Smith notes that some merchants prefer to invest their capital domestically because they are somewhat risk averse, and think that investing abroad is more risky. These merchants, whose only intention is to safely make money, thus tend to promote domestic industry: “he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.”

So, unintended consequences are pretty cool. But Albert O. Hirschman notes that in their quest to uncover all the unintended consequences of purposive action, scholars often miss the very much intended, but unrealized consequences of action. Below is an extended quote from his fantastic essay, The Passions and the Interests. The essay in general examines how pre-Smith political economists argued for capitalism by emphasizing its civilizing and moral features rather than economic efficiency – that is, they argued that governments should promote trade because the love of money would restrain the love of power or other vices. “The passions” could be restrained by economic “interests”, and interests were seen as less harmful or outright beneficial. Of course, Hirschman notes, the civilizing features of freer trade do not seem to have been born out – it would be hard to argue that wars in the 19th and 20th century were less bad than those of the 17th and 18th, for example. Thus, the civilizing restraint constraint of “interests” was an intended but unrealized effect:

“On the one hand, there is no doubt that human action and social decisions tend to have consequences that were entirely unintended at the outset. But, on the other hand, these actions and decisions are often taken because they are earnestly and fully expected to have certain effects that then wholly fail to materialize. The latter phenomenon, while being the structural obverse of the former, is also likely to be one of its causes; the illusory expectations that are associated with certain social decisions at the time of their adoption help keep their real future effects from view.

Here lies one of the principal reasons for which the phenomenon is of interest: the expectation of large, if unrealistic, benefits obviously serves to facilitate certain social decisions. Exploration and discovery of such expectations therefore help to render social change more intelligible.” (130-131)

In other words, actors not only fail to see all the consequences of their actions, but they also foresee consequences that don’t happen (which is why they often bother to act in the first place). As scholars, we need to pay attention to both sides of this coin if we are to understand where actions come from and where they wind up.

Or, as Foucault pithily summarizes, “People know what they do; they frequently know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does.”

Sympathy QOTD

Guess who wrote the following quote:

“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.”

Mandeville QOTD on Sociobiology

Bernard Mandeville was an early 18th century physician and author. Famously, he wrote The Fable of the Bees, collection of a poem and some essays on the theme of how private vices (properly channeled by societal institutions) turn into public benefits. Mandeville was quite insightful – for example, in his essay “A Search into the Nature of Society”, Mandeville notes that “Intrinsick Worth” is a tricky concept, given that what seems valuable or good in one culture may be seen as worthless or evil in another. Mandeville punctuates this discussion with a passage that I very much enjoyed on socialization (not his term) and the dangers of connecting natural law and social law:

“What Men have learn’d from their Infancy Enslaves them, and the Force of Custom warps Nature, and at the same time, imitates her in such a manner that it is often difficult to know which of the two we are influenc’d by.” (334)

A nice summary of the problems facing research in sociobiology? You be the judge.

Why isn’t sociology funny?

Economists have it easy. Jobs in B-Schools and the private sector, not to mention the Federal Reserve, keep employment and wages high, and the CEA means that economics is the only profession with its own voice in the White House. But beyond that, economists seem to have it easy in one other key way: economics is just funny. I don’t know why it is – the overpowered jargon, the absurd simplifications, whatever it is, economics has a lot of jokes.

For example, the internet is full of funny economists. Yoram Bauman is the stand-up economist, who just released a cartoon introduction to microeconomics. Jodi Beggs runs the blog Economists Do It With Models, and was recently featured at the AEA’s humor session. Oh yeah, they had a humor session at their annual meetings! Economists are featured in jokes, such as the famous can-opener joke (featured on the cover of MacKenzie et al’s Do Economists Make Markets?). Paul Krugman even wrote a humor paper on the theory of interstellar trade. And so on.

What about sociology? There was a blog thread a few years ago on Sociology light-bulb jokes, but one blog post does not a funny discipline make. I made a bit of my own for last year’s Cabaret (an annual event in the Michigan Soc department where first-years are required to entertain the department with an evening of skits).

But still, I’m left puzzled. Why is sociology so lacking in humor? Or if it’s not, where is it? Is it just an issue of disciplinary size – economics is a bigger profession, and as Smith taught us, the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market. Are we simply Too Small To Laugh?

A disturbing thought indeed. Let’s hope this year’s Cabaret proves me wrong with some enduring sociological humor that we can contribute back. Perhaps the real problem is institutional – if we had some sort of sociological humor archive, we could improve the distribution and reproduction of sociological humor. Somehow, I doubt it’ll happen. Until then, I’m left spending my mornings in econ envy. For the laughs, of course, not the money.

MLK Rituals

As a sociology blog, it seems almost obligatory to have some kind of MLK Day post. Let’s call it a ritual. Thankfully, I have a few links and thoughts to share, including some of my own MLK Day rituals.

First, as I do most MLK days, today I re-listened to and re-read two speeches: “I Have a Dream” and “I Have Been to the Mountaintop”. If you haven’t read or watch them lately, go do so again. The first will remind you why MLK is our holiest civic saint, the second will remind you that sometimes life is better written than any work of fiction – how else could a man have said, on the eve before his death:

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!

It sends a chill through me every year. Listening to MLK also inspires me to ask of my own life, and my own research, what is this for? Not in the hokey, how do I sell this to the foundations and funding agencies way, but in the deeper sense of how does my work promote justice over injustice, freedom over tyranny, compassion over hatred. It’s a tough question, especially when so much of what I do feels like disconnected intellectual musing. But today’s as good a day as any to ask, why am I here?

Second, on MLK Day I usually recall the other philosophers and thinkers who have influenced me. The last couple years, I’ve thought of Vonnegut. Vonnegut, like myself and the high school I attended, was a humanist. Humanism, for Vonnegut, was a pretty simple proposition:

We Humanists try to behave well without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. We serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community.

As a not-religious sociologist, I find Vonnegut’s phrasing a lot closer to my heart (although decidedly less emotionally moving) than MLK’s rhetoric. But the differences pale compared to the similarities.

Lastly, each MLK Day brings new treats in terms of tid-bits about his life and work, or contemporary remixes of rhetorical classics. In the first category, I enjoyed a post by Ari about MLK’s turn towards more radical, less civil rights focused, economic activism (hat tip to Mark Thoma). Quoting at length from a speech MLK gave in Grosse Pointe (a rich suburb not too far from where I grew up), Eri argues that we have mostly forgotten MLK’s support of unions and his sociological analysis of the origins of violence. Here’s one of the excerpts:

“But at the same time, it is as necessary for me to be as vigorous in condemning the conditions which cause persons to feel that they must engage in riotous activities as it is for me to condemn riots. I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard.”

Ari goes on to retell how MLK Day became a national holiday, by eventually winning the support of corporations, and then asks:

I wonder what Martin Luther King would think of his eponymous day. Of the MLK lesson plan — long on heroism, patriotism, and feel-good rhetoric but short on violence, non- or otherwise — in my son’s classroom. Of the fact that his holiday’s roots in organized labor have been completely forgotten. Of the painful irony that corporate sponsorship proved key in passing the law marking his birthday.

More than that, I wonder what those sponsors would think if they were transported back to Grosse Pointe, on March 12, 1968, to hear King deliver his “Other America” speech, including the line, “a riot is the language of the unheard.” I suspect they wouldn’t recognize that Dr. King. I wonder how many of us would.

I think that my quote of the day, today, will be “A riot is the language of the unheard.”

Lastly, in the popular remixes vein, my favorite auto-tuning remixers have a new video out:

I hope you enjoy it, and the rest of the day.

Should Defaulting on Your Mortgage Raise Your Credit Score?

There’s been a lot of discussion recently on the intarwebs about the problem of strategic defaults – homeowners choosing to abandon a mortgage that they could pay because they owe more than the property is worth. The best example is a recent NYTimes piece by Roger Lowenstein, provocatively titled Walk Away From Your Mortgage! Lowenstein argues that consumers are being held to a higher moral standard than banks or other businesses. While businesses routinely walk away from bad deals (and suffer the contractual penalties for doing so – in this case, losing a building or home), consumers have traditionally stayed put. But times are changing:

Such voluntary defaults are a new phenomenon. Time was, Americans would do anything to pay their mortgage — forgo a new car or a vacation, even put a younger family member to work. But the housing collapse left 10.7 million families owing more than their homes are worth. So some of them are making a calculated decision to hang onto their money and let their homes go. Is this irresponsible?

Lowenstein notes a few common arguments against strategic defaults. One concerns the negative externalities – the problems faced by communities when many houses go into foreclosure. But, as Lowenstein notes,

[I]n a market society, since when are people responsible for the economic effects of their actions? Every oil speculator helps to drive up gasoline prices. Every hedge fund that speculated against a bank by purchasing credit-default swaps on its bonds signaled skepticism about the bank’s creditworthiness and helped to make it more costly for the bank to borrow, and thus to issue loans. We are all economic pinballs, insensibly colliding for better or worse.

A second argument that frequently pops up concerns the effect of such a default on the homeowner’s credit rating. And here’s where, to me, things get really interesting. Traditionally, defaulting on your mortgage was a big no-no that could have disastrous effects on your credit for years to come. But, I wonder, should defaulting on your mortgage hurt your credit score? I suppose for the purpose of determining whether or not you can get a nonrecourse loan, it makes sense to want people who are willing to pay off such a loan no matter what. But for other purposes – like determining whether or not to loan someone money to start a business – wouldn’t you rather loan money to the person with enough business sense (“calculative agency”?) to get out of a bad situation? That is, it seems economically rational to default on a mortgage worth far more than the value of the home. So, maybe defaulting on a bad mortgage should raise your credit score!

Ok, maybe that’s a silly idea reflecting my relative ignorance about what credit rating agencies are really trying to rate.

Relatedly, I’d be very curious to know how homeowners were modeled in the various forecasts produced by banks and other financial institutions leading up to the crisis. One of the many assumptions blamed for the current crisis was the belief that home prices always went up. Another assumption, but one that’s received a bit less criticism, was the idea that homeowners would pay on their mortgages if they could find any way to do so. What role did this sociological(!) assumption play in justifying all the practices that led to the current mess?

Last, the Economist blog post linked at this top of the post makes an interesting argument: why should we promote people owning homes so much in the first place?

Finally, I think it’s very difficult to make the case that a world in which it’s harder to buy a house is a world in which we’re all poorer. Houses are dangerous investments—leveraged and undiversified—and they reduce household mobility, which prolongs labour market adjustments. The government has been subsidising homeownership for far too long. The economy could probably stand to evolve to a place where homeowning is not the default, and where the risks of owning are better appreciated.

Should we interpret the rise of the strategic default as an example of people adapting to the new, postindustrial, post-local, whatever you want to call it, economy?

Paul Samuelson, Romantic Economist QOTD

Paul Samuelson just made my day. I just got his Foundations of Economic Analysis out of the library, in preparation for an independent study on the history of economics. A text intended for graduate students (I believe), Foundations was arguably more important than Samuelson’s best-selling undergraduate textbook, and it basically inaugurated the modern era of mathematical economics and won Samuelson the Nobel Prize.

In the preface, Samuelson first thanks Hicks (of Hicks 1937, “IS-LM” fame) for assistance with the book and then, as is customary, offers praise of his wife:

My greatest debt is to Marion Crawford Samuelson whose contributions have been all too many. The result has been a vast mathematical, economic, and stylistic improvement. Without her collaboration the book would literally not have been written, and no perfunctory uxorial acknowledgment can do justice to her aid. Nor can the quaint modern custom of excluding the value of a wife’s services from the national income condone her exclusion from the title page.

As many readers of this blog may know, I’m working right now on an ASA submission that discusses the reasons for the exclusion of unpaid housework from the national income statistics. Also, I’m a hopeless romantic, and a big nerd. As such, Paul Samuelson just made my day.