Tag: social theory

Best Writings on Girls’ Relationships: From Which Have I have Learned Most?

Recently I’ve been thinking back over the last 25 years about what has been most helpful to me in academic writing on girls’ relationships. Here are the most memorable and conceptual for me as a sociologist.

  1. Valerie Hey (1997) This founding study of schoolgirls’ relationships never grows old. The dynamics of Erin’s clique are unforgettable. And we are give a conceptualization of girlhood as a social space.
  1. Sarah Baker (2004) Fascinating look at different ages of girls as they learn, share and hide the ‘too grown up stuff’ from younger girls. ‘Performance’ as dancing on the tables is a most memorable moment.
  1. Martha Einerson (1998) First to emphasize centrality of media objects to girls’ groups. In this case ‘New Kids of the Block’ fall from fan idolization as girls deploy their moral judgement. Memorable are the hold-out girls, torn between abandoning their stars and keeping up with their girl peers’ changes.
  1. Monica Moore (1995, 2002) How tween girls learn body language and use it for attraction and rejection signaling. How teen and adult women use this ‘agentically’ as courtship signaling at dances and clubs.
  1. Sharon Lamb (2001) Young girls’ first group activities start with the ‘dare game.’ Madeline’s girl friends visit her house – and surprise her dad! What happens is most memorably described in 133 words.

Today, twenty five years after Val Hey’s classic study of girls in cliques, the original cases and concepts remain great. But never would I have imagined, back then, how little of this good stuff has become familiar in mainstream sociological thinking.

Sources

Hey, Valerie 1997 The Company She Keeps

Baker, Sarah 2004 “It’s Not about Candy” International Journal of Cultural Studies

Einerson, Martha J. “Fame, Fortune and Failure: Young Girls’ Moral Language Surrounding Popular Culture’ Youth and Society 30:2 (1998): 241-257

Moore, Monica M. 1995. “Courtship Signaling and Adolescents: Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” Journal of Sex Research 32(4):319-328 and 2002 “Courtship Communication and Perception” Perceptual and Motor Skills

Lamb, Sharon 2001 The Secret Lives of Girls

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.