Social Theory – Holley Sociology

How Students See the World: Inequality or What?

I’ve noticed that, when my students get the chance to write, they don’t focus on inequality, even though their professors understand this as ‘the dominant research paradigm in sociology’ (fabiorojas orgtheory.net April 28, 2020).

Recently, the topics freely chosen by undergraduate students got me thinking about this again. Asked for their own experiences of youth, students in a recent class chose to write about such topics as popular culture, consumer objects, strict parents versus more modern ones, and the transitions between phases of life such as between middle school, high school and college life. These should have given scope for identifying unfair and difficult aspects of their lives. But their papers really didn’t complain about anything they faced.

Those students who did talk about difficulties – for example having been forced to parent younger children, deal with the death or divorce of parents, or having very strict parents – saw these as factual realities which could be dealt with. Adapting to a different sequence of phases in their life, having foreign born parents, being first generation college, or having sports injuries, were all seen as conditions which could be overcome, balanced with their own personal needs, and understood as aspects of personal identity. Children of foreign parents or strict ones just saw this as an opportunity to possess both a foreign and an American identity, and to balance their own needs with the expectations of their parents. There wasn’t a problem here; nobody saw themselves as, in essence, different from other students. All the features they described were seen as the general pattern by which all people grow up.

Looking at these answers, I had to ask whether students were expressing their true feelings. Was it possible that my presence as the instructor was preventing them from complaining? Alternatively, are students generally suffering from some nation-wide ‘false consciousness’? Were they unable to discern the reality of the world around them or recognize the kind of suffering they are living under? These thoughts suggested a ‘hermeneutic’ problem here. How do people learn to understand the world correctly? But the complexity of any hermeneutic analysis is deciding on which side the misunderstanding lies. Which people need help here? Could it be that students are simply occupied with more important concerns than the inequalities that sociologists worry about? Are our students showing us that the real world has different priorities, things more important than the inequalities professional sociologists stress?

It seems certain that somebody is understanding the world incorrectly. But is it the students or their professors in the universities? The hermeneutic says that one of these two sides needs re-educating, but which one is it – the students in their papers or the sociologists in their professional thinking? Definitely, there is a problem here; in this case I cannot see how both sides of this can be right.

Are Sociologists People?

When they are dead they are. Even persons who are men and Marxists can speak touchingly about a deceased colleague’s personal qualities. Consider a recent newsletter obituary in a sociology sub-field. On Twitter, the serious challenges of work-life balance are presented through the sociological head, and the private side remains voiceless.

The rest of the time, what should we consider sociologists to be? Are they personal life deficient mouthpieces spouting structural concepts? Sociology speakers cannot talk about love; it’s non-admissible in our professional vocabulary. What other essential features of life are prohibited when sociologists talk?

For a sociologist, does it matter who you kiss? Does it make any difference who you commit to marrying, how you bring up your children, and what jobs you won’t take because they’re not where you want to live? Do people ‘compose a life,’ evaluate opportunities, and have long term goals? A visitor from another planet reading our published sociology would conclude that these personal activities do not exist or are not relevant to our collective life.

At what cost to our profession do we ignore private life? Is this the reason we leave non-marriage, fertility, and stratification to other professions – economists, demographers, and IQ hunters, for example? Ultimately, is this why sociologists cannot define society? Without love, without marriage, and without society, how much of sociology’s subject matter is actually left?

It is paradoxical that a profession which prides itself on helping others cannot talk about what matters most in people’s lives. Sociology’s vocabulary gap is a huge problem. Are sociologists going to wake up to this any time soon? Or will they go on forever ignoring, what Harriet Martineau declared a hundred and fifty years ago was the core of ‘morals and manners,’ namely what people care about most but talk about least – which is what is in their hearts? Let’s create a sociology that starts with love and then moves on to the hopes and fears about these relationships. The woman founder of sociological methods long ago stated that this is where we should begin. Can we afford to wait another century before this work of reconceptualizing sociology gets started?

Do Sociologists Know what “Ghosting” is?

I teach a course called “Sociology of Romance” but I wasn’t familiar with the term “ghosting” until my students explained it to me. Class discussion quickly made clear that ending relationships by sudden non-communication was deplored by students; no one would speak to defend it. But for me that raised layers of problems about how sociologists explain courtship behavior.

Why do students continue to use a mechanism that makes them feel bad? A lot of easy explanations fall away when we look at this closely. For example, calling this ‘youth culture’ needs a lot of caveats because courtship changes every decade or so. It isn’t the same culture, indeed different generations find each other incomprehensible. Older people note today’s absence of dating and are suspicious of a “hookup culture” where there is no dinner and a movie Undergraduates today can’t believe older singles “dated people they didn’t know.” Each generation finds its own courtship familiar and acceptable while that of others is baffling.

Two further points on how we study this. First, the scant academic studies that do appear miss important aspects. Early discussions of the hookup dating scene missed the intense “talking to someone” by messaging and “Facebook stalking” which was going on. Young people were still getting to know each other, it was just being done though social media.

Second, the terminology sociologists use is inconsistent and doesn’t fit with broader explanations of society. Was “rating and dating” a tradition or a practice? Is today’s “hookup” best described as a culture, a script, an intimate tie, a fad, or even a social movement? Is a “group chat” something we should study as a formal organization? The difficulty of conceptualizing courtship suggests a broader problem. Perhaps sociologists aren’t much interested in romantic relationships because they aren’t prestigious in the profession. Ghosting cannot influence society; it just isn’t part of the conceptual framework. Sociologists generally dismiss private relationships because they are ephemeral, full of rapidly obsolete slang, and lack any sustained way to influence society. ‘Structural’ explanations have more prestige. So, with courtship outside sociology’s knowledge base, sociologists aren’t able to ‘know’ about dating in a serious professional and theoretical way.

But what if we can show that courtship matters? Does the way we date shape later life choices and indirectly create a cohort-wide understanding? Perhaps the speed with which courtship practices appear, along with universally understood rules, is a model of broader change in society? In this case, ghosting, and things like it, reveal a lot about society’s future.

Just being a professor and listening to undergraduates doesn’t change our profession’s concepts. Personally, we can acquire commonsense knowledge from many sources – as participants in dating, being parents and friends of young people, consuming media entertainment, and working as teachers in a classroom. But none of this theorizes ghosting or adds it to sociology’s professional knowledge. Without concepts, theories and cases that explain its importance, personal familiarity with current dating leaves the discipline of sociology without professionally “knowing” what ghosting is. Without concepts and a theoretical framework, none of us can use it in our writing, our lectures or in our critical assessments of the readings we assign. Hookups continue to be outside how we explain society.

In a recent paper I have tried to fill some conceptual gaps about courtship. I present this at ASA 2019 in New York in August. Please come. You will be most welcome and, with your help, we may all soon have courtship ghosting as part of sociology’s professional knowledge. Then we will truly be able to say that sociologists “understand” ghosting and we will all be able to write, teach and increase public understanding of it.

English Club Football Victory in Europe: A Story Mandeville Would Love

Today, English clubs dominate European soccer. If you ask why, the simple answer is they just buy the best players. The victor here is money. This is the opposite of the German Bundesliga strategy of each club cultivating its own players and slowly building up a pool of local talent. English club football does the exact opposite: it simply buys the best players from anywhere in the world and pays whatever huge sums of money it takes to snag them.

Is this an example of vice beating morals? It’s an old question. If he could travel from the early eighteenth century and see this today, would Bernard de Mandeville be delighted with this example? Wasn’t his whole point that vices like greed for fame and profit make the world a richer and more lively place? If this argument has been known to social science for so long, why is it still strenuously resisted?

Is it wrong that money should win? Are we witnessing here the evil of big business against a German model that is more honest and moral? How can social science answer this question? Big enterprises connect in complex ways. Does the German model only help Europeans whereas global purchases launch footballer’s careers around the world? Is the English model an economic imperialism, robbing developing countries of their best talent? Doesn’t English club football get the money to pay for all these talented players because the fans find their matches more exciting? After all, bigger audiences make Premier League clubs more profitable, while the German games are often boring. In this case, big money appears to express the world popularity of a genuinely more exciting style of game played by English clubs.

In the end, Mandeville isn’t acknowledged because his theory is harder to understand. It relies on processes we call the ‘invisible hand’ – complex unintended outcomes that are hard for social scientists to track through their particulars. And sociologists are not familiar with giving such processes credit for working out well; too often people are seen as victims in these circumstances. But when its only a game, the stakes really aren’t that high. Aren’t the play-offs of a sports tournament a moment to evaluate an important theory of this neglected social scientist? It’s my guess that many other good things result from Mandevillian ‘private vice.’ The challenge lies in specifying exactly under what conditions these things work out well.