Granovetter, Meet Foxworthy

These started as facebook status messages, but I thought folks here might enjoy them.

How do you know you’re an economic sociologist?

If you know the mean, median and modal number of director interlocks between Fortune 500 firms in 1990…

If you’ve added the word “embeddedness” to the spellchecker on more than 5 computers…

If your best paper ideas all come from NPR’s Marketplace…

If you’ve ever debated alternative measures of network centrality for more than an hour…

If you read OrgTheory and Socializing Finance and this blog…

… you might be an Economic Sociologist.
Add your own in the comments!

Social Theory Through Science Fiction

Yesterday, on my sister’s recommendation, I acquired The Dispossessed, a famous novel by Ursula K. LeGuin that tells the story of two worlds, one an egalitarian anarchist collective, the other patriarchal and “propertarian” (i.e. like us), and a physicist who travels from the first to the latter. The book is rooted deeply in social theory, and echoes of Durkheim (or Parsons) and Marx abound – all this language about functions and dysfunctions, critiques of property and fundamental assumptions about human nature (profit-seeking vs. intrinsic desire to be productive and creative), etc. Reading the book, I was struck by the core of a syllabus for a social theory and science fiction course. Here’s a rough sketch of some ideas:

First Chapter: Society and Stuff!
Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society and Rules of the Sociological Method
Marx, Capital (selections obviously, same for the above) and the Manifesto (probably). Oh, and some bits about alienation from the 1844 Manuscripts.
Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed

Second Chapter: The Disenchantment of the World/Industrialization
Weber, The Protestant Ethic, stuff on Bureaucracy maybe, not sure what else.
Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano

Third Chapter: Sex & Gender
Not sure which bits of theory to put here. I’m tempted to say some of Judith Butler, and maybe Iris Marion Young, and definitely Anne Fausto Sterling (probably Sexing the Body)
Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness (a book set in the same vague universe as the Dispossessed, which follows an anthropologist visiting a world where humans don’t have a sex, but rather become one sex or the other when they go into a mating period).

Ok, I thought I had more than three stellar examples, but I’m having trouble remembering them. I thought I had something to pair with science studies itself (perhaps Stephenson’s Diamond Age or Snowcrash and Latour’s Reassembling the Social? There’s got to be something better about the interaction and co-construction of the natural and the social, the human and the non-human. I mean, it’s what science fiction is all about!). Do you all have any ideas? Think excellent science-fiction and commonly taught or excellent Social Theory.

Rolling Back Quantification?

In recent days, I’ve discussed with a number of colleagues issues surrounding commodification, commensuration, valuation, etc. One question popped into my head while talking with a faculty member and I’m curious if any of you out there can think of a good answer or example. There are many stories in the discipline about the rise of standards, systems of valuations, metrics, etc. For example, Bill Cronon’s classic work on the implementation of grades for grain. Or Wendy Espeland’s recent work (with Sauder) on the US News and World Reports rankings of universities. There are plenty of examples of this sort – new metrics being imposed on a previously non-metric space*. Other examples, such as the Human Development Index (see Wherry 2004), show times when a group proposes a new metric to replace an old one – HDI as a better measure of welfare than GDP/capita. Ok, so far so good.

Do we have any examples where a metric or quantification scheme was successfully overthrown, but not by being replaced with a new metric? That is, where some set of things that had been ranked or valued quantitatively moved to a system where rankings were purely qualitative, and no formal order was used? E.g. if suddenly all the universities stopped filling out the US News and World Reports forms and people stopped buying their guide books, and nothing else replaced it. Has anything like that ever happened? If so, under what circumstances? If not, why not? Why does quantification seem to be a one-way process?

* Apologies for the topology language, it’s hard for me to resist here.

A Goffmanian Thought on the Climate Change Debate

One of the questions that plagues good liberals is, why are some people so resistant to the notion of anthropogenic climate change? There are many answers to this question, of course, and I certainly don’t claim to have a good handle on all of them. Naomi Oreskes has done some fascinating work on the subject, first showing that there is in fact a scientific consensus on climate change and then continuing to try and see how it is that so many people still think that the science is out. Some of that analysis focuses on how certain industries adopted the tactics used by Big Tobacco in its war against public health. Fascinating, and depressing, stuff.

Re-reading Goffman’s Frame Analysis, I was struck by another explanation rooted at a slightly different level (although compatible with the other stories floating around). In the first chapter of the book, after the fabulously reflexive and humorous introduction, Goffman introduces the notion of a “primary framework”: “[A] primary framework is one that is seen as rendering what would otherwise be a meaningless aspect of the scene into something that is meaningful.” (p. 21) Goffman goes on to suggest that there are two broad classes of primary frameworks: natural and social. Natural frameworks are defined by the lack of an agent: “It is seen that no willful agency causally and intentionally interferes, that no actor continuously guides the outcome…. An ordinary example would be the state of the weather as given in a report.” (p. 22)

So, following Goffman, one of the central problems facing climate change activists is to convince people that their primary framework for understanding weather itself is wrong – willful agents have been causally and intentionally interfering with it for hundreds of years, although not in a planned manner, and thus the weather needs to be in the “social” rather than “natural” primary framework. Either that, or we need to abandon the distinction entirely – humanity has gotten too big for its britches, and “‘Away’ has gone away”.

The Sociology of Memes: Auto-Tune Edition

In case you haven’t seen it, the website Know Your Meme is a handy guide to the intricacies of the crazy fads that “the kids these days” are into, from keyboard cat to the Numa Numa dance. In addition to being a potentially useful resource for the internet-savvy, but not too savvy, academic, the site also has a pretty robust understanding of the dynamics of memes. This week’s edition, on the auto-tune phenomenon, is a great example and features an extended cameo by Weird Al to boot! The video tracks the rise of auto-tune from Cher’s “Believe” through T-Payne and onto the web. The video notes that auto-tune has gone through 3 stages of meme-ness – introduction, overexposure, and parody and remix. This third stage is what makes a meme great – everything from T-Payne’s self-parody in the SNL digital short “On a Boat” [Note - Not Safe For Work]*, to the incredibly work of the Auto-Tune the News folks. Now we await the fourth stage of the auto-tune meme: equilibrium.

I don’t know this literature well, but does this analysis of memes track with the Diffusion of Innovation literature? What, if anything, is distinctive about internet memes? Is the parody/remix stage theorized in that literature? Or are memes just a nice example of an old phenomenon?

Here’s my favorite Auto-Tune the News:

* Also, there’s an amazing Anime Music Video of “On a Boat” using the recent Miyazaki movie, Ponyo, available here.

A Subfield in Four Articles

As part of our required introductory survey of the logics and methods of social inquiry, graduate students at Michigan spend a week each on a variety of methods (surveys, comparative/historical, field/observational, etc.). This week we are doing “network/relational methods” which translates roughly to economic sociology, the one subfield I’m certified to have an opinion about. I was talking with a more advanced graduate student, also in Econ Soc, about the choice of articles, and what we would pick given 4 articles to introduce economic sociology with a focus on networks to a general group of 2nd year grad students (all of whom read Polanyi as part of their required methods course). We quickly arrived at the same four articles:

Granovetter (1973) The Strength of Weak Ties

Granovetter (1985) Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness

Uzzi (1996) The Sources and Consequences of Embeddedness for the Economic Performance of Organizations: The Network Effect

Krippner (2001) The Elusive Market: Embeddedness and the Paradigm of Economic Sociology

It was a fun exercise, and a fun way to think about introducing your subfield to those not versed in it. So, two questions for the audience: One, what do you think of this list for network-y econ soc? Two, what four articles would you use to introduce your subfield and its major debates in a way accessible to someone totally unversed and potentially uninterested in it?

Michigan Social Theory Conference CFP

Dear (Grad Student) World,

Please submit a paper to our conference! It’s going to be wonderful! It’s a graduate student social theory conference with panels focusing on topics often treated poorly or ignored by social theory because they are a bit too material or whatnot: space, time, visuality, memory, technology and the body. For the full scoop, go to the conference website. The conference will be held March 12-13 at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. You can also email this address if you have any questions. We’re hoping to bring in people from all over the social sciences, and we have a bit of money to help reimburse students coming from outside of UM. Feel free to repost this call anywhere!

Thanks!