Holley Sociology

Unpaid Work in the Future

Two interesting cases of unpaid creative work have recently come to my attention. CBS News reports that Steven Pruit has contributed three million edits to Wikipedia, all unpaid since he is not their employee. Around the same time, I read that 19 year-old Rachel McMahon has created hundreds of quizzes for BuzzFeed, also unpaid and largely unrecognized (intelligencer, 1 January 2019). For me, these cases highlight a puzzling contradiction about creative work and paid employment.

My first question was how these people manage to support themselves. Pruit is reported to have a day job and McMahon is still a teenager and presumably supported by public investment in education and her parents. My next thought was that surely millions of people also want to be creative, are inspired by voluntary action and can contribute enormously to society. So why is work currently organized in the form known to sociologists as the Weberian formal organization?

Today’s businesses want their employees to be enthusiastic; they search for this when they interview job candidates. Employers know they need the creativity and passion of those they hire. For their part, young people now talk about ‘their dream job,’ which means work they also want work that is interesting and pays enough. But the business firm coerces its employees, for example by bribing them with pay incentives and threatening them with dismissal. These produce internal distortions and inflexibility. For example, people hang on to their money and then cannot move to the work that most attracts them. Individual firms become less creative and society as a whole cannot use all its available talent. Beyond this, a large part of the population isn’t in the paid labour force at all.

Thinking about the future, how can society escape the limitations of the business organization? Can we do better than the ‘labour contract’ as a way of mobilizing people? Could people use other ways to express their creativity and aggregate their ability to cooperate? We sociologists should be able to imagine better ways to organize people’s work. Any solution seems to me to require the separation of livelihood income from the locations where people express their creativity. This is what both Pruit and McMahon do, by different means. Both sides of this problem need rethinking. Perhaps informal and transient associations can be more effective than formal organizations. And income sufficient for a decent living could come other than from wages – we need to think about micro-payments, ownership and taxation as possible sources of economic livelihood. The first society that can free creativity from subsistence will surely benefit everyone.

Preparing for Happy Sociology

Fabio Rojas (orgtheory.net what would happy sociology look like October 10, 2018) https://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2018/10/10/what-would-happy-sociology-look-like/ writes …

As I’ve noted before, there are lots of great developments in modern society, but they get much less attention than negative events What would “happy” sociology look like?

There would be a cultural sociology that asks about the cultural preconditions of the industrial revolution, the single event in human history that lifted the most people out of poverty.

There would be a similar cultural sociology examining the massive decline in inter-personal violence and war that has occurred over the last two or three hundred years.

There would be a cultural sociology examining the liberation of minorities, women, and LGBT people in many nations.

There would be an economic sociology that examines how modern economies support an insane level of cultural diversity.

There would be a sociology that explains how societies produce things that essentially wipe out many forms of infectious disease and drastically reduce child mortality.

There would be a cultural sociology that explains why individual freedom remains strong in a world with fascism, national socialism, communism, radical religious groups, and populist nationalism.

*****

Professor Rojas has, again, addressed the most important question facing sociologists. He challenges us to explain both what is good and what’s bad in society. I want to offer my own thoughts on what sociology’s next steps should be as we make our discipline happiness ready!

First, I have concluded that, as a whole, sociologists don’t believe that anything exists within society that can really be described as creating good. Our concepts and introductory textbooks show nothing but the forces of “inequality and oppression” which always seem to win. Individuals may have good motives and groups try to make life better but sociologists never identify endogenous forces within society that actually make people happier. If this is true, happiness in society will be reduced to a search for scraps of food during a famine. You cannot be ‘balanced’ when the reality of your society is truly horrible.

The evidence however points in the opposite direction. Rojas shows that society is getting better in important ways. If, as I believe, this progress arises from processes within society, it is clear that sociologists have neglected these. Studying society in a more balanced way means revisiting our sociological concepts and explanations and looking for what we have missed. My own view is that personal relationships and their chronology over our lifetimes is a sociological process that creates good. This offers a new approach that potentially links Rojas’ six good features of society. But this radically new analysis is in its infancy. Developing an approach that is capable of balance is a huge task – one that will involve our whole profession.

Anything new takes a lot of work. But isn’t explaining society in a balanced way the most important thing we can do? And isn’t understanding life in society why we all became sociologists in the first place?

How good are the social science disciplines? – 3 Psychology

My overview of social sciences concludes with academic psychology.

Lay people suppose that psychologists study human motivation. If they did, we would know a lot more about modern people. Lay people want to know how their future-orientated outlook will take them through their lifetime. Unfortunately for them and for social science, decades ago academic psychology turned instead to studying lab rats, then fruit flies and, currently, brain scans. Confining itself to short term effects, psychology has been criticized for small sample sizes, statistically non-significant findings and non-replicability. Its switch to natural science might be okay if psychologists had given up trying to explain society. But they still try to. Developmental psychology inexplicably stops studying children when they reach some unspecified ‘adulthood.’ Modern people assume that we all grow and continue to learn throughout life. But psychologists can’t study this because they are averse to ‘roles’ because those things are created by society. This leads to the absurdity that children and youth are studied without society but then, suddenly and inexplicably, it’s okay for adults to relate to the people and associations of society! The public, like other social scientists, aren’t going to learn from psychology where lifelong motivations come from. Academic psychology isn’t ready to recognize social time either biographically for individuals or historically as societies change.

In clinical psychology, doctors and therapists have to categorize people’s problems under the current version of the DSM. This handbook’s distinctions don’t inspire confidence when former mental disorders vanish from newer editions of the DSM. Were older diagnoses wrong, or did society change and turn formerly abnormal mindsets into useful features of society? Over the decades we have lost the neurasthenic, the neurotic and the narcissistic. Psychology cannot tell us why its own concepts later become obsolete. Here is an academic study that fails when it faces the problem of time. Professional clinicians have to change historically and healthy human beings continue to grow over their lifetimes. Clearly psychology is unable to explain aspects of its own subject. For social scientists it’s no surprise that human beings cannot be understood simply by natural science; they are actually and irretrievably part of society!

Envy of this discipline is unlikely for anyone who wants to explain our collective social life.

Overall, my review of three disciplines shows none of them to be better than sociology. Political science, economics and psychology are all baffled by some aspect of their own subject. Practitioners in their fields work with concepts that are unknown to their academic counterparts.

So overall nothing in these social sciences looks impressively good. There are no grounds for complacency here. I want a sociology that is able to define ‘society’ and no doubt the other social sciences should improve theirs. The work will be hard but isn’t isn’t trying to really understand the world the most important thing we can do?

How good are the social science disciplines – 2 economics

My second social science is economics. Sociology is not alone in having deficiencies. Economics is another discipline which cannot explain its own subject matter and leaves non-academic researchers to use the most effective methods. The deeper question I am addressing in these comparisons is why the social sciences today haven’t got their act together.

Economists do correlations. They are good at crunching data. They have now taken away what sociologists used to do in stratification. Economists like Raj Chetty publish on upward mobility in America today. But this is done utterly without theory; it is no help to people who need conceptual explanations. Correlations at the individual unit size cannot explain the big changes in society.

The big picture economists’ have is of macro economics. They discuss central bank and government policies and look for measures of how the economy is doing. This is lively and interesting stuff. (See Krugman’s recent https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/20/opinion/monopsony-rigidity-and-the-wage-puzzle-wonkish.html ). But this whole area exists without such theory as micro economics provides and is conducted without any pretense to explain big questions of social change. This is not a new deficiency; economists have never been able to explain how economic growth happens. How the first Industrial Revolution happened remains a mystery despite the efforts of economic historians (See McCloskey). Today’s courses in micro and macro economics won’t tell you how the economies of today grow or fail to do so. One thing economists don’t seem able to do is explain their own subject.

In the meantime, people whose job requires them to study the economy look at ‘industries.’ Researchers in finance and business divide the economy into different sectors, knowing that industries operate under different conditions. Academic economics won’t let economists do this; theoretically, its all one market and one economy. No theory exists of what an industry is or why industries should exist at all. To my mind, industries are probably created by sociological and demographic factors … and disciplines don’t like explanations from outside their own field!

So it turns out that sociologists don’t have to be envious of economists; they can’t answer the important questions in their field either.

How good are the social science disciplines?

This is the first of three posts I’m going to present comparing sociology with its rival social sciences. I’m arguing that, just because sociologists can’t define society and don’t believe that generations are real, they shouldn’t feel inferior to other social sciences. It turns out that those fields are silent about key features of their own subjects. And they remain silent when related fields use obviously important ideas that should be in their expertise.

The issue here is why social sciences today are all so deeply flawed.

Let’s start with politics.

At this moment of writing the buzz of political reporting can be summarized as “all things Trump.” This was not so previously and it will not be so again pretty soon. Will we be any wiser when things calm down? Does academic political science posses any theory that explains why political fervor pops up and disappears? Seen over the decades, politics never could. And as time passes it appears to have less and less to tell us. Studies of class, race and religious voting which were popular fifty years ago, and studied by sociologists, have largely disappeared – all without political science explaining why or knowing how they occurred in the first place. Society appears to have moved on. But are we any wiser about where voting behavior or activism comes from? Pollers take surveys and report public opinion but it’s bereft of all theory. Political science doesn’t claim to understand anything from one election cycle to the next.

Other social sciences, and the public generally, believe that it is political parties that rally people and the efforts of one party or another wins or loses elections. But political science has never liked party campaigning or the idea of party itself. Political parties are not part of any founding constitution and they are barely touched by political law. What would it take for political science to have an actual theory of how people vote? Do political parties lead or follow public opinion? And, in the end, how much does politics really matter in modern society? Do we even know? Academic political science clearly doesn’t! So sociologists have no reason to feel inferior to this field.

Gopnik versus Pinker: Sociology to the Rescue?

My thoughts on the recent critique of Pinker’s Enlightenment Now by Gopnik (The Atlantic, April 2018) come in a number of stages. As a sociologist of modernity, I am aghast that psychology and philosophy know so little about modern sociology. It’s completely absent from both Pinker and Gopnik’s analyses even though life in society is clearly a central sociological problem.

Second, I’m sympathetic to the plight of people expected to live in the utterly masculine world of Enlightenment rationality outlined by Pinker. Gopnik does a great job of spelling out the kind of pressing questions any ‘bright young woman’ would ask about life that do not show up in the Enlightenment model.

But third, I am frustrated by the fact that my own professional has so little in print that can show both these non-sociologists where they have gone wrong. Why aren’t we doing a better job of showing the public the real sociology that holds modern life together and makes it attractive?

If Gopnik is right that women are acutely aware that ‘particular connections’ are needed, which surely means ‘love,’ why is she so sure that these can only be supplied by the ‘family, community, place and tradition’ of the past? Sociologists know this as Durkheim’s terrain. He said that solidarity was necessary for both individuals and society, and he felt sure that the only bonds that kept people together were those of the ‘mechanical’ kind found in communities. While this still pops up in odd places, sociologists rightly accept the Enlightenment view that society needs progress. Pinker does a good job of reminding us of what ‘life getting better’ means. One might think this is superfluous except that sociologists have lost sight of society’s progress and need to be reminded that they should be optimistic (Holmes, 2016).

The message that all the parties involved need to get is that modern society supplies great personal relationships and more. Modern people form deep and meaningful bonds in ways that have, inexplicably, not been theorized by previous social sciences. Attraction relationships give people love, caring and excitement. [This paragraph has been edited. Ask me if you want more details.] … People want their celebrity, star quality and excitement as part of growing up and their shared sociology lets young people reshape society. There is collectively progress going on which youth is influential in creating. Any analysis of modern society which omits this sociology has a huge blind spot which makes its analyses obsolete.

How then, can we correct what is missing in the false antithesis between Pinker and Gopnik? First, it is clear that Gopnik’s bright young woman would not want to lose this youthful excitement – which she would if she were forced to stay in a small-town world. She will want the chance to participate in her own generation, make the best possible choices and find the best location for making her own friends, lovers and career. Young people know this activity is crucial. Small towns don’t provide it and young people dream of moving to New York, LA, London and the great cosmopolitan cities where things are happening. Durkheim’s small towns ain’t doing it for modern people. Moreover, parents know this too; they support their children in moving away. They are happy to sacrifice in order to let their children be successful, even when this means being away from their children and grandchildren. Parents understand that this is the only way children will grow up creative and ultimately happy.

Gopnik underestimates people’s connectedness. Facetime and Hangouts, along with air travel, bring families together wherever they live. Parents don’t need traditional community, small towns and neighborhood living to be proud of their children and to enjoy being grandparents. When they want to be, adult children today seem very connected with their parents. In contrast, those who do not want to let their children go or cannot separate from their parents are likely to be considered candidates for counseling. Physical distance works for people because we don’t live in a Durkheimian world; today’s sociology provides people with satisfactions and the infrastructure of communication and travel keeps them close. It is urgent that social science catch up with this. People have long distance relationships and pride in their grandchildren; these are as strong and loving as anything in the past – and possibly purer by being less conflicted.

Modern life isn’t the direct child of the Enlightenment. Our history took us through a romantic revolution that gave us repertoires of attraction relationships and provided sociological arrangements that support these. A modern young woman in a small town does not need to worry that her life won’t have fulfilling relationships; this part of Gopnik’s account doesn’t seem to ring true. Young people expect hard work but they know it will be rewarded with achieved mutual attractions, the excitement of making one’s own way in the world, and the satisfaction of reshaping society along with one’s whole generation. A world confined to small towns and solidaristic communities cannot do this and, in my experience, few people lament the disappearance of the past because modern life offers so much more. Social science could help us all by making clear what is good about modern life and a big part of this challenge surely falls in the lap of sociologists.

The Sociologist in Despair

At university as an undergraduate, I thought that since the founding fathers Marx, Durkheim and Weber said nothing about sociologically important topics like marriage (the family), society being sociological (as distinct from just political-economic), and because it didn’t yet exist, the popular-culture-using generation … because of these absences, I entered this profession believing that it was my job to provide sociological bases for all these things.

I set to work. I studied the economic and social history that created modern society. I theorized and conceptualized, fitting pieces to together and throwing out ideas that didn’t fit. And finally, I had what I considered a worthwhile contribution to the sociology of society – I wanted to talk about all the stuff that was previously missing from our explanations.

But when I lifted my head up from my work and looked around I found that none of my topics appeared in sociology at all. The American Sociological Association* has no sections on society or on generations. Introductory textbooks have nothing constructive to say about wedding and marriage, generations as popular culture are absent, and nothing can be found suggesting that society as a whole is sociologically constructed.

From the absence of these topics in the profession, am I right to conclude that sociologists really aren’t interested in these questions? Do academics not want to listen to something new or to consider what has been left out of the profession? If so, it rather looks as though I have wasted my time. Today, the profession sends the message that my work is irrelevant and useless. Intellectually speaking, this means logically that my work deserves to go unpublished and unnoticed and I should despair. The current anti-Trump and anti-Brexit concerns do not explain sociology’s professional avoidance of love, generations and big sociology. These weren’t discussed under previous presidents or in earlier decades either.

It seems one must despair of sociology. I should add that my personal life and career are going fine; I’m a grandfather and employed at a university. My despair is logical and confined to intellectual endeavours to change social science. Apparently, I was wrong to think that sociology knew it needed improvement. On the contrary, the profession evidently doesn’t want to discuss its own deficits; it certainly presents no forums for doing so.

I’d like to be proven wrong. I hope we soon see throngs discussing new areas of sociological understanding. But at this moment the evidence of our profession makes for despair and, if enthusiasm for new learning ever arises, this seems a long time off in the future.

*The British Sociological Association has no streams on these topics either.

Do We Live in the Dark Ages of Social Science?

Society holds a strange ontological status. People know it exists but no-one can define it.

Margaret Thatcher’s famous comment, that “there is no such thing as society,” appears to address the first statement but is actually an affirmation of the second. We cannot collectively explain anything, blame or praise, by using a concept we cannot define. The notorious student essay, that beings ‘In today’s society,’ we know is off to a bad start because it’s going to try to explain our shared life from a causal force, society, which lacks any agreed definition. So this attempt at explanation simply cherry picks some favourite attributes to explain everything … or, more likely, the phrase ‘in today’s society’ is a discursive way to avoid the fact that we know nothing about what our collective life really is.

This is a serious problem for everyone. It puts social science in its own Dark Ages, a place where academic studies go on but nobody can explain the past, act in the present, or predict the future. For studying society, current social science is the equivalent of living in a climate without having any weather forecasting service. We record past weather statistics; we report on what is actually happening; and we make guesses about the future. But in no way can current social science venture any ‘societal weather forecast’ – however close in the near future or unreliable. We currently live in a social science Dark Age because this kind of prediction cannot be attempted at all.

The reason for this is that we don’t know where to begin. With what facts could we start to build a model of social life? We don’t know what our subject matter is. Progress is confounded by the lack of any working definition of ‘society.’ Meteorology has air, humidity, temperature, pressure, and the surface of the Earth. These result in very complex effects but at least weather forecasters know what they are dealing with. It’s not magic being released out of a bottle; the problem of prediction is limited to forces they already know about. Weather scientists are able to move on to the next step which is lots of time-contingent data collection, followed by modeling of this data by computer algorithms.

I am perfectly aware that human beings are different from the planetary atmosphere and that modeling human behaviour is different from natural science. Human beings can do things that are entirely new; this makes prediction of social phenomena harder. On the other hand, social scientists get information from their subject matter; human beings communicate about what they are planning and this makes social prediction easier than that faced by natural scientists. So, overall, which is easier to predict, the natural or the social? Nobody today knows the answer to this question for one simple reason. Social scientists haven’t even tried to do their part.

The social cannot become a science until its subject matter is defined. Professional social scientists still haven’t discovered what society is. Data could be collected but we are not doing this on the scale and in time-sensitive speed needed because we do not know what we are looking for. And we aren’t continuously running predictive models on our computers because we haven’t collected the relevant data about society. So we truly are in the Dark Ages of social science. We haven’t reached the starting point of being a science.

This is not because nothing is going on. Social scientists are working hard at researching and publishing. The problem is that their work is scattered into various mutually incomprehensible disciplines. We do not know whether these various fields are the cause or the symptom of not knowing how to collect together the information from different academic professions.

Let’s return to the fundamental challenge of defining society. The professions cannot agree on what society is as a whole thing; but they do provide plenty of components they believe exist within society.

Everyone agrees that society has, within it, a ‘polity’; we can all see government.

And we know that society has an economy. We know this because we measure the GDP and we can add in government expenditures – all using money currency. So we can know that US GDP is a bit over $18 trillion and that of China about $11 trillion. The economy is an illuminating example of what social science can do. Collectively, we have put the money and effort into continuous collection of economic data and whole industries are devoted to analyzing this information and predicting the future. In contrast, it is clear that an equivalent effort has not been put into studying society’s non-economic features.

And third, we know that society contains other areas of life that are outside both polity and economy. These are various and lack any unifying feature. As a result, various academic disciplines look at them, usually with unique approaches. Psychology looks a feelings but typically ignores other people and rejects the idea of studying people’s social roles in society. Demography looks quantitatively at populations as defined by biology and institutions; this means reporting fertility, nuptuality, morbidity, mortality and migration. Ethnographers ignore this and describe small pieces of current living with lots of descriptive detail. Unfortunately, this ignores all the big features of society such as its historical evolution, polity, economy, demographics and popular culture.

So, in this chaos of non-communicating disciplines, academic social scientists live in little villages ignoring each other and occasionally vying for dominion over others … which is exactly what we would expect to find in the Dark Ages. Nothing has risen up to the level of a unifying civilization. This is how far social science is behind the times.

The fact is that I, personally, have, for many years, been working on a definition of society. I’ve created one now which could be neater and appears rather complex. This is because it describes society in term of four sub-concepts that themselves need explanation to sociologists and to other social scientists. These new concepts still need defining and a lot of explaining to others will be needed. I am still optimistic that I can provide a good working definition of today’s society.

Does this mean progress is near at hand? Other social scientists, in their various fields, are no more aware of the missing definition than are lay people in the general public. In fact, non-professionals are, in many ways, ahead of what academic social scientists are able to acknowledge. This is the problem of ‘academic professional lag’ by which professors, in their private lives, are doing things that orient themselves to society which they cannot acknowledge in their professional writing and teaching. Currently, much that is practiced as part of society is inadmissible as professional social scientific truth. Consider marriage. Most educated people do marry in their private lives but nothing about this exists in social scientific publications. Again, consider generations. Academics are as ready as any lay person to recall what it meant to be ‘a child of the 90s.’ And they identify their formative decade as using Myspace before Facebook existed. But none of this time-contingent object-based knowledge will appear in their publications. As yet, key elements of social life cannot be connected, by any disciplinary field, with social scientific concepts of society.

This is why, officially speaking, society still does not exist. Still today, no academic sociologist can give you a definition of society that could be recognized as ‘American society,’ for example. Here’s a checklist of what such a definition should include to distinguish it from cave dwellers or ancient Babylon; polity, economy, ethnography, demographics, media culture and all the other unnamed stuff that holds large complex societies together. The presence, in the mind of one isolated speculative thinker, of a plausible definition of modern society isn’t going to lift social science out of its Dark Ages any time soon. Something big will have to come along to shake up a lot of people’s ways of thinking – not least within the walls of academia where science is supposed to dwell.

Roundtable on Generations – ASA meeting 2017

Opportunity to Meet People Studying Generations

Do you want to know more about Millennials, Gen-Xers and Boomers? Are you currently studying generations or teaching about them? The ASA currently has no section on “Generations,” so scholars have no location for bringing together their ideas.

I am organizing an ASA roundtable on “Seeing Generations Sociologically,” meeting on Sunday 13th August (10:30 AM, room 517C). People interested in any aspect of generations should come along. Areas of interest include young people and new media, fashion, audience studies, changes in the workplace, urban revitalization, new consumption, youth mobilization, the life course and, most of all, the impact of generations on society.

This is an opportunity to bring together academics, researchers and professionals in various fields whose current work touches on generations. I am currently writing a book on generations and sociology – which I am happy to introduce to get the discussion rolling.

See you in Montreal in August.

On Watching “The Duff” as a Sociologist

Of the three recent films, “The Fault in Our Stars,” “The Hunger Games” and “The Duff” no critic today will likely take the last of these seriously. But as a sociologist, I must insist that “The Duff” is the only movie of the three that any thinking person should care about.

“The Fault in Our Stars” is a tear-jerker about teenagers dying from incurable diseases. This theme is neither modern nor conceptually plausible. Death rates in modern society have fall very low and teens are the group least likely to suffer an untimely death. What is more, nobody needs to be convinced that dying young is a bad thing; conceptually, this theme has zero challenge to it. On both counts, “The Fault in Our Stars” is an intellectual dud; nobody could learn anything medical or social scientific from it.

Superficially, “The Hunger Games” looks a better candidate for learning about society. But, sadly, it is not. The fact is that nobody can learn anything from this or any other picture of dystopia. Modern societies cannot be run as dictatorships – they just don’t work this way. The most recent round of authoritarian dictatorships, those of the first half of the twentieth century, all collapsed under the weight of their own violence and mismanagement. No elite-planned competition of violence could keep any modern society together. No one could plan it; no group of people could execute it. Consider how the United States, which has the world’s largest military, cannot create a health care system that works reasonably and covers all its people. How less likely is that, in a democracy, a market economy, and an open media, any group of people could plan and run a system of compulsory, competitive and destructive games? Today’s fictional attempts to conjure up a dystopia don’t begin to provide a plausible picture of society. The idea of a fully planned dystopian society is impossible for a social scientist to take seriously. “The Hunger Games” ignores social science as much as “The Fault in Our Stars” ignores medical progress. We know that dystopias cannot exist so, as an assumption behind an entertainment, this premise offers zero intellectual challenge. You won’t learn anything from Katniss about either real people or actual societies.

When the bar is this low, it doesn’t take much for “The Duff” to soar into the heights of social science. But it’s more than just another high school movie. “The Duff” poses an intriguing problem of friendship and social ranking. Bianca becomes troubled by being the least attractive one in her group of girl friends. Significantly, it is not her enemy, Madison, nor even the cyber bullying of her fellow students, which is the thread of her story. “The Duff’s” truly important theme is how Bianca learns to deal with her own, entirely correct, assessment that she is least attractive one, the “duff,” in her group of friends. Any social scientist will find Bianca’s journey of self-discovery well worth studying. Can you conceptualize any of the work she does on herself using the concepts currently available in sociology? When social science can grasp any of Bianca’s learning and self-improvement, it will be on the cutting edge of human knowledge. The human situation here is all too real; many of us will not find ourselves on the top rung of success. And it’s vitally important to society that people deal with this constructively. Working with, and sometimes without, her friends, Bianca rebuilds herself into a more proactive and creative person. She shows us human social progress being created. Bianca, a self-defined “duff,” is a pioneering explorer of social science’s terra incognita – socially adept and high functioning self-improvement. While “The Duff” may never be considered a truly great movie – its dialog and dramatic scenes could be better – it’s the sociologist’s only choice when it comes to learning something new and genuinely interesting about modern life.