What's Wrong With Sociology
Nelson, Michael
What's Wrong With Sociology by Michael Nelson Articles about popular writers don’t ordinarily open with invocations of Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Johnson, but bear with me for a...
...Often enough their motive is sheer envy, as the ability to unearth something really interesting and to present it in a lively style requires a special gift and cannot be acquired by mechanical cramming, whereas anybody who is not a mental defective can learn to churn out the tedious door-to-door surveys which pass for sociology...
...Reading the early books of Vance Packard in a short period of time, as I did, is not an aesthetically pleasing experience-his writing style has not changed much since the “His Best Friends are Monkeys” and “Let’s All Go Fishing” days with American-but it is startling to discover that there is someone who has been, over the years, so right, so soon, so often...
...Packard is one of the few writers around who has made a point of challenging social scientists for their turf...
...For The Hidden Persuaders and The Waste Makers I had to do all original research because the academic literature didn’t contain much at all...
...But taking care of that is what editors and, at the book level, critics are for...
...Ivory-Tinged Qualities For all their claims to scientific objectivity, sociologists place taboos on certain subjects...
...For this contribution Packard has been heaped with abuse from the sociologistsabuse that, when examined, is more indicative of the shortcomings of social science than of the shortcomings of Packard...
...One sociologist found that on a typical page of The Sexual Wilderness Packard reported the results of a 13,000-student survey, an observation made by a college professor whose house overlooks a student beach, and the circulation figures for a magazine-“All appear,” the sociologist complains, “as if Packard believes they offer the same order of evidence...
...Mobility allows instead the development of ‘true communities’of interest, of relation, of affection...
...I got tips and bits of data the sociologists didn’t have from outfits like Welcome Wagon and AT&T and went out to interview people myself...
...Because of this, it is much harder for social scientists to convince the rest of the world that they are the only experts, and it seems much more necessary for them t o surround themselves with jargon and formulae that others can’t unravel...
...Packard,” writes Dr...
...Simple though the hypothesis may be, it poses some rather thorny measurement problems and an even more difficult task of applying suitable controls on the observation of a historical process...
...That’s much too harsh, but Petersen has a point: Packard really does hit you with such a barrage of anecdotes, casual observations, memories, statistics, and reports on academic studies that sometimes it is hard to tell what he considers important and what trivial...
...In 1959, for example, Packard explained in The Status Seekers that “America, under its gloss of prosperity, is undergoing a significant hardening of the arteries of its social system...
...Professor Fischer, for example, knocks A Nation of Strangers because Packard defines “community” in such a way as to include a common place, a neighborhood...
...In that same book Packard described a “real lower class” of poor people in the same terms that later won Michael Harrington plaudits for discovering The Other America...
...How is one to tell...
...Scholars have not only grouped themselves into specialized departments and disciplinesan inevitable division of labor in the modern age-but they have also started building walls of linguistic and statistical density around their subject areas, heaping invective on those so foolish as to try to enter without the proper advanced degrees...
...A Nation of Strangers was primarily a reporting book...
...Thus, sociologists do us a service when they point out the flaws in widely read books like Packard’s and offer their own special knowledge as a corrective...
...Jefferson and Johnson are of special interest here because they represent the last gasp of an age when it was possible-almost literally-to master human knowledge...
...That is not the easiest question in the world to answer...
...Thus Professor Petersen is horrified that Packard would quote a homebuilder to the effect that “Polish-Americans like their homes to be very garish, with loud, screaming colors,” as if reporting such prejudices were prejudice itself...
...Cf...
...studying social problems they should have been looking at but were not For this contribution Packard has been heaped with abuse...
...Over the past 40 years or so, sociology has become so jargonridden and statistically dense that it is just about impossible for the average ‘Mr...
...Professor Simon, on The Sexual Wilderness: “It reads very much like a rewrite of the best of Cosmopoliran...
...The young academician, whom one would expect to be boldest and most iconoclastic, quickly learns that the road to tenure is paved with bland inventions...
...Neighborhoods, says Fischer, are “artificial” communities-“associations founded on physical proximity...
...There had been a kind of moratorium on social criticism during the war and the McCarthy period, and 1 had a feeling that people were ready for some...
...That sociologists have so little to contribute to the discussion of rootlessness is thus elevated from oversight to virtue...
...is a journalist’s answer: “I go to the best sources...
...But were he to attend a convention of sociologists, he would be not only baffled, but also brushed off by those he asked to explain things...
...When...
...We all know that now, but 20 years ago hardly anyone did...
...I suspect that if Jefferson or Johnson were to turn up at, say, a physics convention, he would be baffled by what he was hearing, but could find a dozen or more Mr...
...Clearly Andreski is right about this...
...Packard has since shown great prescience in knowing which social forces people are going to be interested in a few years down the pike...
...But do sociologists at least deliver with their own studies...
...A Nation of Strangers is fraught with ‘relevance.’ ” Note that Hawley is not saying that Packard is right or wrong, or even that he may be on to something or may not...
...Andreski goes so far as to argue that “even a popular weekly like Time supplies a much better insight into American society than all the journals of sociology combined...
...Here’s what Professor Hawley had to say: “A rather plausible hypothesis might be phrased: The quality of life in a society is affected by the prevailing rate and character of mobility...
...He advanced proposals for “more democracy” in the workplace long before that became fashionable on the left...
...But to save you all that trouble, let’s just go back to the sociologists’reviews of Vance Packard, which, being written in relatively plain English, give us a peek inside the walls that sociological journals rarely afford...
...This, too, has changed in ways that are far less excusable...
...These disciplines deal with peop!e, the one subject that just about everybody knows quite a bit about...
...He has dug into their arcane journals and, in effect, translated their research into English...
...I t comprises an analytically independent sys tern...
...His answer to the social scientist’s “What is your methodology...
...These reviews, remember, are written ~ JsJoc iologists ,for...
...Another way to assess the value of modern sociology is to ask what discoveries, if any, have been made through the use of the highly sophisticated quantitative methods that are its basic tools...
...According to Professor William Petersen, writing in the American Sociological Review, Packard drew from “relevant studies [by sociologists] . . . ‘an executive of a $250,000 corporation,’ ‘a home-marketing consultant’ who had conducted 411 ‘depth interviews,’ ‘a Dallas builder,’ the Color Research Institute of Chicago, ‘interviewers for the Chicago Tribune in a motivational study,’ ‘Clare Barnes, Jr., Consultant Art Director,’ ‘a waiter (named Joe),’a cow named Gertrude-even Mr...
...Now if this means what I think it means, namely that people are alike in some ways and different in others, then we are probably safe in saying that we have wasted our time...
...As with gossip, it emphasizes whatever is sensational...
...He compared the American worker’s plight to that of the non-commissioned officer (although theoretically noncoms, like workers, are allowed to rise up the promotion ladder, very few actually can) and wrote of the great psychological pain consequently imposed on laborers “who have accepted the American dream of limitless opportunity” and thus blamed themselves for their failure to advance...
...But, using this kind of occasional misstep or wrong turn as their,excuse, sociologists have chosen to cast out everything about Vance Packard, from his competency to his worth as a human being...
...The current issue of the American Sociological Review, for example, contains articles on “A Third Interpretation for the Generating Process of the Negative Binomial Distribution,” “Formal and Substantive Voluntarism in the Work of Talcott Parsons...
...The great advantage of the university, after all, is that it is supposed to be a place where people can think bold thoughts unfettered by practical constraints or fear of reprisal...
...Besides his ability to see these truths before the rest of us, there’s one other important reason why Packard’s books are as good as they are (and, ironically, why they arc not as good as they could be...
...The Industrial Revolution accounts for the change, of course...
...Do they blow things out of proportion...
...What made it work so well was that he took an unknown bit of datathat every year 40 million Americans move (a figure he ingeniously arrived at by asking AT&T what its annual telephone disconnect rate was)-and fleshed it out by tracking down some of these mobile people in order to learn what rootlessness was doing to them and their communities...
...impress you, how about this warning, from Chapter 18: “As the United States becomes more dependent upon foreign sources for its supplies of vital materials, it becomes more vulnerable to a cutoff in case of war or in case a foreign government chose to hoard its resources...
...The world of the sociologist also has its ivory-tinged qualities...
...These books, all of them published during the second term of the Eisenhower administration, were remarkable for a number of reasons...
...Yet The Waste Makers finds Packard worrying about all this-about depleting natural resources, denuding the environment, and warping our values such that people “gain their feelings of significance from acts of consumption rather than from their meditations, achievements, personal worth, or service to others...
...But Mr...
...In nearly all instances,” he writes, “it is the case of a mountain giving birth to a mouse, as when, after wading through mounds of tables and formulae, we come to the general finding (expressed, of course, in the most abstruse manner possible) that people enjoy being in the center of attention, that they are influenced by those with whom they associate...
...What does that mean...
...I got fed up and left, and a year later 1 wrote The Hidden Persuaders, then The Status Seekers and The Waste Makers...
...Stanislav Andreski is equally realistic about the present, but less rosy about the future...
...The way to begin is to pick up the greatest book (Societies) by the most honored modern sociologist of all (Talcott Parsons), open to a passage, translate it into English, and see if you know anything you didn’t know before...
...But does it make any sense for the rest of us to think of neighborhoods and small towns as lesser things, and thus be indifferent to their decline...
...The fifties were the end of the road for general-interest magazines because television was drawing so much of their ad revenue away,” he recalls...
...The price a journalist pays if he devotes all his time to gathering information about what is happening now (and, if he is as good as Packard, deducing what sesms likely to happen in the future as a result) is that he doesn’t have time to be a social scientist too...
...Johnson singlehandedly wrote a dictionary...
...Paul Lazarfeld, the father of mathematical sociology, answers that none have, but promises great things just around the corner...
...To Packard’s credit, he began chafing at the bit...
...Q: “Buy what...
...I hired a private detective and spent three months learning from him at the start of The Naked Society...
...Actually, says Packard, he tries to use some blend of all these sources in every book: digging into scholarly journals, talking to the people who are actually doing the things he is studying, conducting interviews-but wait, here is a professional sociologist to tell far more lucidly than I could about the sources Packard uses, in this case for The Status Seekers...
...From 1937, the year he graduated from the Columbia School of Journalism, until well into the 1950s, Packard was writing articles like “Don’t Let Your Plumbing Problems Get You Down,” “How I Lost 15 Pounds in One Month,” and “I Had My Wife Made Over,” mostly as a staff writer for American magazine, a competitor of the Saturday Evening Post...
...Having claimed all of society as their land to work---trespassers to be shot on sight-do they bring in even a decent crop...
...the sociologist-reviewers’ own words are all the evidence one needs to be satisfied on that score...
...Perverse as it may seem, this condition is especially bad in the social sciences-economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and political science...
...For The People-Shapers and The Status Seekers it mostly meant talking to academicians and reading the specialized articles and books they had written...
...Not least was that they were all number-one bestsellers on the New Yovk Times non-fiction list, the first time ever that an author had scored with three in a row...
...So the magazines began prostituting themselves to attract ads...
...Let’s return to Professor Petersen’s review of The Status Seekers, not just because it was among the first reactions to a Packard book to appear in the sociological journals, but also because it established the formula of Packard criticism that practically every other sociologist-reviewer has followed-inadvertently, one imaginesin the two decades since...
...It is therefore essential to consider the personality system as not reducible to either the organism or the culture-what is learned is part of neither the ‘structure’ of the organism in the usual sense nor a feature of the cultural system...
...At the same time, his organism and its environment-physical, social, and cultural-are always in certain respects unique...
...As many people know from personal experience, there’s no sneer like the sneer of a modern professor who hears .a “layman” trying to tell him something about his subject...
...Every issue of American had to have a food article, a do-ityourself article, a travel article, and a kiss-ass-with-big-business article because the advertising department told us we needed them...
...Do they get in over their heads...
...Where does such an attitude come from...
...Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb won awards when they developed this same point years later in The Hidden Injuries of Class...
...Consequently the professional sociologist approaches such an investigation with considerable caution...
...once when I was writing a piece on some interesting things retired people were doing, marvelous things, they told the editors to ‘get that goddamned crap out of there’ because they were after a young audience...
...Well, it depends...
...1 came in at just the right time,” explains Packard...
...Packard,’ writes Dr...
...Professor Goldner: The Pvamid Climbers LLcan best be described as belonging to the same genre as after-dinner conversation...
...It wasn’t a perfect book, but its failures were the failures of one who shoots for the stars and settles for the moon...
...Those $ho doubt this example are invited to wade through the rest of Parsons’ many books and articles...
...Worshippers of Methodology Sociologist Stanislav Andreski, an in-house gadfly, notes in Social Sciences as Sorter,) that this is a general phenomenon...
...Sure...
...when President Eisenhower, asked at a press conference what citizens could do to fight the recession, replied, “Buy...
...Professor Murphy, also reviewing The Status Seekers: “Packard’s book, unfortunately, is written in the tradition of the tabloid science-fiction writer...
...Recall that this was a time when the word “consumerism” was used to describe a doctrine that favored consuming more...
...It is no surprise that the most interesting discoveries about America in recent years have appeared in newspapers and magazines...
...But taking care of that is what editors and, at the book level, critics are for...
...the conventional wisdom of the time was summed up in Life magazine’s proclamation that the United States finally had become the “most truly classless society in history...
...they will turn out to be something, by talking to everyone and reading everything that conceivably could get them closer...
...Worst, and most revealing, of all is the damnable cautiousness sociologists display in their writings, a reluctance to dare or tolerate the daring of others that is matched only in the most hidebound corners of bureaucracy...
...By the time tenure is bestowed, he is too far down the straight and narrow to start blazing new trails...
...They didn’t want anything that was outside those categories...
...Packard himself, who spent several weeks exploring the elite structure of a representative middle-sized metropolis.’ ” Professor Petersen, as you may have guessed, is not impressed by any of this...
...A Theoretical and 1 de o 1 o g i ca 1 Reinter p ret at i o n , ” a n d “Determinants of Juvenile Court Disposition: Ascriptive and Achieved Factors in Two Metropolitan Courts...
...What he is saying (in heavy-handed bureaucratese) is that this is a very difficult problem, that it requires further study, that discussion is premature at this time-in short, kindly ignore alarmists (like Packard) and allow calmer heads (like ours) to prevail...
...Is this gold or garbage...
...As a result, scholars madk it a practice to explain what they knew as clearly as possible and to demand that others do the same...
...Touchy about being unable to substantiate their claims, the worshippers of methodology turn like a vicious hunting pack upon anybody branded as impressionistic, particularly if he writes well and can make his books interesting...
...He has gone beyond them in some cases, studying social problems they should have been looking at but were not...
...A perfect example of the ills of social scientists-particularly sociologistsis their treatment of Vance Packard...
...A: “Buy anything...
...Wizards to try to help him understand...
...But that’s getting us a little bit ahead of our story, because Packard did not set out to do any of these things...
...Hence: “Within the limits imposed by the genetic species-type on the one hand and the patterning of the culture on the other, lies the opportunity for given individuals and groups to develop independently structured behavioral systems...
...Packard is much bolder...
...But as Mark Nadel showed in these pages (“The Trouble with Tenure,” The Wash ingt on Mom hili, J an u ar y 1978) the laws of preservation in the academic world require caution...
...Clearly, too, the kind of meanness sociologists display towards journalists who presume to write about society is indefensible on any rational basis...
...Because an actor is genetically human, and because his learning occurs in the context of a particular cultural system, his learned behavioral system (which I shall call his personality) shares Certain ’broad features with other personalities-e.g., the language he habitually speaks...
...Sure...
...As such, it tells us a lot more about the sociologists than about Packard...
...I had a scientific survey done for The Sexual Wilderness...
...second, equally important reason that Jefferson and Johnson were able to know so much was that they lived at a time when people who were learned in one field invariably tried to be learned in others...
...And if that doesn’t Packard has dug into social scientists’ arcane joumals and, in effect, translated their research into English...
...It really isn’t too much to say that Packard foretold the environmental, consumer (President Kennedy established the first consumer council in the White House after reading The Waste Makers), and small-is-beautiful movements...
...That’s all well and good for sociologists, who indeed define their own community in terms of those who attend American Sociological Association conventions in New York or San Francisco...
...What's Wrong With Sociology by Michael Nelson Articles about popular writers don’t ordinarily open with invocations of Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Johnson, but bear with me for a moment, because there is a reason why this one does...
...Hence, his own behavioral system will be a unique variant of the culture and its particular patterns of action...
...Take, as a not atypical example, the reaction to A Nation of Strangers...
...Sometimes...
...But a Michael Nelson is o contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...
...He also has shown an uncanny knack for tossing off insights that only years later will be hailed as revealed knowledge...
...needless to say, the titles are the clearest things about the articles, and the articles are usually clearer than the books they grow into...
...to their stories...
...Sometimes...
...the technological and social imperatives of mass production made life more complicated injust about every way imaginable...
...Journalists, on the other hand, can succeed by taking risks, by following leads and hunches on the chance that Do journalists get in over their heads...
...A Nation of Strangers was, by any standards, one of Packard’s better books...
...Jefferson read, and was read by, many of the leading philosophers, scientists, and other thinkers of his day...
...The formula requires that one begin by putting Packard in his place, which is distinctly outside the walls...
...He deals with it in a straightforward, no-scientific-nonsense manner...
...Well, “at today’s [Le., 196O’sl rate of consumption,”we’ll be most vulnerable on oil in “thirteen years...
...If anything, The Waste Makers, published a year after The Status Seekers, was even more foresighted in its anti -g r o w t h- f o r- growth’s -s a k e stance...
...You figure it out...
...sociologists (do you know anyone else who reads the American Sociological Review, or the American Journal of Sociolog~~?h)e;n ce, the air of “dirty business, chaps, but someone has to do it” that surrounds them...
...his tone suggests, in fact, that Packard is probably the kind of lightweight reporter who does most of his research by talking to cab drivers and bartenders...
...It was the kind of outfit, he says, where the editor thought you were “cheating” if you did any library research before writing a story...
...These failings, of course, are a journalist’s failings, and if that doesn’t make them defensible, it at least makes them understandable...
...Do they blow things out of proportion...
...Petersen, “is a journalist-a person, that is, with no necessary competence to discuss America’s social structure...
...and, my favorite, Professor Barry’s bizarre overture to his review of A Nation ofStrangers: “I can most easily liken Vance Packard’s analysis of the nature and consequences of an increasingly mobile American society to a 15-year-old beauty queen doing a dirty boogaloo: he is not quite sure what it is all about, but he shakes it in a way that turns the unsophisticated on...
...In part, Jefferson and Johnson could do these things because knowledge in their time was not nearly so vast or technical as it is today...
...Petersen, ‘is a journalista person, that is, with no necessary competence to discuss America’s social structure.’ educated person to read what sociologists write...
...But, as he also says, this “was certainly not the case before the onset of jargon-mongering and methodological idolatry,” and need not be the case today...
...how else could they share knowledge with literate people everywhere...
Vol. 10 • June 1978 • No. 4
