NYLON Research Network: Social science research in real time

Goldsmiths economic sociology conference

2006-12-07T10:32:00.000-08:00

A Goldsmiths colleague and I are organising an economic sociology conference for 6th March of next year. It's going to explore some of the recent cultural approaches to markets that have followed the work of Michel Callon, and a call for papers is currently out. Keynote speakers are:

- Dr. Fabian Muniesa, Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation, Ecole des Mines de Paris
- Professor Philippe Steiner, IRISES, Université Paris-Dauphine
- Professor Nigel Thrift, University of Warwick

The full programme and details of call for papers is here. Email me for more details or if you want to come/speak.

Giddens on the demise and rise of sociology

2006-11-27T00:55:00.000-08:00

Anthony Giddens has an article on the Guardian blog today, asking the question - why is sociology not closer to the centre of public debate? He argues that the rise of free market thinking and the demise of utopian politics are two prominent reasons. The solution may look as follows:

The answer for me is a return to the style of thinking that originally drove the sociological enterprise. A little bit more utopian thinking might help too - well, why not? Politics in some ways has become deadly dull. We need more positive ideals in the world, but not empty ones - rather, they should be ideals that link to realistic possibilities of change. Most of all, though, we need to confront the big problems that face us, and provide a field of debate for helping us understand them better.

Pod-cast of joint NYLON - Young Foundation seminar

2006-11-05T09:54:00.000-08:00

On Friday afternoon, we held a joint NYLON -Young Foundation seminar in London, entitled 'Sociology in the Public Sphere: What role should it play?'. The discussion began with contributions from Richard Sennett and Geoff Mulgan, Director of the Young Foundation (more on him here), and was chaired by me.

You can listen to the various bits of the seminar below:
- Geoff Mulgan (15 mins, 4mb)
- Richard Sennett (10 mins, 3mb)
- Exchange between Geoff and Richard (7 mins, 2mb)
- Discussion first half (40 mins, 11mb)
- Discussion second half (31 mins, 9mb)
- Closing summary (2.5 mins, .7mb)

Any participants (or non-participants) who would like to continue the debate, please do so in the comments below.

Don't Go Postal

2006-10-31T13:40:00.000-08:00

Donna Haraway gave the Nelkin Memorial Lecture at NYU Law School on October 16 and encouraged us not to be post-humanists or post-feminists. She said that although we may be able to think beyond categories like "human" and "woman," there is still plenty of work to be done under the sign of those categories. So just in case anyone doubted that gender is more than just conceptual category, I came across the following study which neatly illustrates how gender matters in the real world:

In "The Importance of Women’s Status for Child Nutrition in Developing Countries" by Lisa C. Smith, Usha Ramakrishnan, Aida Ndiaye, Lawrence Haddad and Reynaldo Martorell, the authors find that "a mother’s ability to make decisions at home and in her community not only affects the care she receives and thus her own nutritional well-being but also enables her to provide better care and nutrition for her children. In South Asia, where women’s status is particularly low, the report finds that improvements in women’s power relative to men’s, both within the household and in the community, strongly influence children’s nutritional status."
Basically, the report shows that although overall poverty may appear more severe in Africa than in South Asia, in fact there is more malnutrition in South Asia than in Africa because of women's comparatively low status there.

The study is published as Research Report 131 of the International Food Policy Research Institute, at http://www.ifpri.org/

capitalism's self-image

2006-10-30T00:35:00.000-08:00

If there is such a thing as doing sociology 'in the wild', as there is for economics, then one of its manifestations may be the vast industry through which capitalism attempts to represent itself. As Nigel Thrift argues in Knowing Capitalism, academia no longer has (and in truth, never did have) a monopoly on theories of capitalism, for we now live in an economic era in which seminars, books, theorising, lectures and all the other techniques of intellectual enquiry are now part of the process of capitalism itself. Business thinkers, gurus and business schools now produce rival representations of capitalism. The system has become self-conscious.

I'm very aware of this right now thanks to some freelance work I'm just embarking on, in which I've got to assist the client develop their qualitative understanding of how the structure and mood of the economy is changing. It is certainly not economic advice that's expected of me (I can't do economics), and if there is one academic specialism that it comes closest to, it would have to be sociology. Dig beneath the commercial brief, and the question I'm being asked to answer is 'what is British capitalism like for those involved at the sharp end of it?'.

Except I'm not being asked to answer that question as such. Certainly I have to produce answers, but not the answer. What is curious is that capitalism needs and devours representations of itself, but these have to fit a certain mould, which I would define as follows:

- It cannot be reassuring: business does not like being told that everything is going to be fine. Instead, it demands a form of consultancy S&M, in which it pays to be told that the future is very uncertain, that only the most innovative companies can survive, that the future is far riskier than the past, and so on. In particular, the notion that technology is about to wreak havoc in entirely unpredictable ways is a threat that they demand to receive, even if - by definition - the prediction is entirely vague.

- It cannot be depressing: the story that must be fed back to business about itself must focus only on those areas where change is fastest, and excitement is highest. Anyone who were to tell a business that the future of capitalism consists of a small section of the population growing even richer, and a large low-wage underclass developing to serve them, would simply be telling the 'wrong' story. I doubt they would be viewed as politically threatening, nor even as empirically misguided; they would simply have missed the point about what is a useful story to tell. In all liklihood, they may be accused of being somewhat old-fashioned.

These two necessary characteristics make for a strange self-image. Capitalism does not want sociological news of what is really going on - it gets its truth via its accountants, lawyers, McKinseyites and experts. But nor does it want sociological optimism or quietism. It feeds off self-representations that are frightening but not demoralising.

Ultimately this is a symptom of the reflexivity that accompanies any attempt to theorise oneself. The more it becomes established that the 'future is uncertain' and that 'change' is ubiquitous, the more it becomes necessary to commission studies of the rapid changes that are affliciting our economic environment. These studies uncover very little, and so inevitably come back with the worrying response that 'the future is uncertain', but will be nothing like the past. A study that came back with the response that 'the future will contain many of the same relationships of exploitation of the past' would be simultaneously far too ambitious (for having deigned to specify what is going to happen next) and way too cautious (for having ignored the whirwhind of change that is around the corner).

But this leave one open question: can capitalism survive indefinitely without ever confronting sociological truths, and if so, why can it? If it is the case - and I'm sure it is - that changes in the structure of capitalism are recreating the geography and class structure of the UK (not with the huge speed that consultants see everywhere, but with gravitas nonetheless), one would think that a knowledge-hungry business culture would want to know about this, in addition to the more blinkered account it consumes endlessly. OK, perhaps it wouldn't want a fully Marxist version of events, given the doom that this would spell, but perhaps something akin to Saskia Sassen or Manuel Castells's explanation of how technology and capital are recreating social relations. If business wants a self-representation, why does it not at least flirt with a truthful one, and see what happens?

Specialised Research Training in Sociology

2006-10-28T01:50:00.000-07:00

Goldsmiths College (University of London) is running a series of workshops on "real time" ethnographic research using new media.

Details can be found here (there are some great images on the Goldsmiths site):

http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/livesociology/index.htm

(Summary)

http://www.jobs.ac.uk/jobfiles/EL059.html

Parties for the Public Good

2006-10-27T06:00:00.000-07:00

A report from the Young Foundation about the decline of political parties...

Over the last 20-30 years political parties have lost members, voters and trust. Some celebrate parties decline. This report argues that parties continue to have a vital role to play in making democracy work – and that neither voluntary organisations nor the media can adequately fulfil these roles. It shows that the big parties took a wrong turn in the 1980s and 1990s by adopting a model that is more centralised, more centred on marketing and advertising, and more dependent on a small number of very wealthy donors. And it unveils a major new survey of public opinion which shows that the public continue to see parties as vital channels for shaping the future.

Download it here: http://www.youngfoundation.org/Parties_for_the_Public_Good.pdf

I was involved with the research that went into it and it was interesting seeing some of the more sociological explanations (i.e. consumerism, the rise of the choice agenda in public service provision) getting sidelined partly because there was little practical or realistic policy recommendations that could be made plus the fact it also highlights the incompatibility of trying to merge democracy with market-consumerism as it effects, quite fundamentally to my mind, the way people see (and relate to) the state and the function of politics (the rise of citizen-consumer). This is not necessarily a message that wants to be heard nowadays by some politicans.

Public Value

2006-10-20T01:40:00.000-07:00

I've been working on a paper with my colleagues Richard Naylor and Kate Oakley about the current fascination in policy circles (particularly in cultural and media policy) with the notion of 'public value'. It's called "Giving them what they want: the construction of the public in 'public value'". Our paper explores the routes of transmission of this voguish idea from Harvard (Mark Moore) to Broadcasting House via Geoff Mulgan when he was at the Strategy Unit.

Our argument essentially is that public value, whilst it has inherent potential as a way of developing public services, has become bogged down in a consumer-citizen ideology (around choice, personalisation, etc) that is particularly associated with the current neoliberal hegemony, and that its use within the BBC's strategy for future services is far more rhetorical than anything else. In fact we argue that there are fundamental dangers for the BBC in adopting this strategy. I'd be really interested to know what you think about the paper.

How We Live Now...

2006-10-17T00:31:00.000-07:00

Social History in the Making

Similar to the Mass Observation studies of the 1950s and 1960s (http://www.massobs.org.uk/), this is an interesting project that encourages people to record one average day in contemporary history and is simultaneously an excercise in social history, everyday ethnography and public sociology.

Worth a look!

http://www.historymatters.org.uk/output/Page1.asp

the tests that define worth in britain

2006-10-13T05:08:00.000-07:00

A terrifying sociological portrait of British norms emerged in the news this morning, with these two monstrous and entirely unrelated reports of how we set about attributing social worth:

- By 2020, the government wants 70% of the UK population to be engaged in sport five times a week (sic), in order to cut £2.3bn off its health budget (here's the research underpinning this). Can one even imagine how this Foucaultian apocalypse will actually work? After all, this is not just children, but the whole population. Is our era's equivalent of the Victorian rail and postal networks to be a vast outlay on public gymns? Worse, the rugby authorities are making plans to try and gobble up some of this investment (for non-British readers, rugby is low-tech american football), and - according to reports on the radio this morning - expect to be able to tackle endemic problems of social exclusion and poverty through getting a larger number of people to jump on each other in mud.

- The Guardian reports today on the types of interview questions that are now fired at applicants to Oxford and Cambridge: "are you cool?", "how might you argue that what everyone says is a banana is not a banana?", "here is a piece of bark. Talk about it". How terribly amusing! So the gatekeepers of the British establishment have decided that they will revel in their reputation for unimaginative eccentricity, rather than do anything about it. A shame, because for a while they looked like trying to rethink this approach.

Both sport and interviews are examples of what Boltanski calls a 'test' in On Justification, that is, an agreed way of distributing worth in society. Politics, for Boltanski, is the battle between different mechanisms for justification, which themselves are not ways of creating consensus, but operate as broadly acceptable rules of disensus. In a world governed by the test of rugby, the physically weak individual will do what they can to avoid being pummelled into the mud, but will accept the reasons given for it happening. In a world governed by the test of clever-clever interview questions, the person devoid of smug debating skills may have a strong desire to attend Britain's elite universities, but will understand that this is not possible. Put the two together, and you have a dystopian science fiction. Unfortunately for us, it's not fiction, but dominant policy.

sociology exiting the academy

2006-10-03T02:40:00.000-07:00

One of the potential uses of this blog is to explore ways of connecting sociology to contemporary events, politics and news. A conversation I keep having with people concerns why sociologists rarely seek or attain a public voice. Why, for instance, do economists work as policy advisors and newspaper columnists, but not sociologists? This was something we discussed in New York in March, and will no doubt do again at the joint seminar on the topic with The Young Foundation next month.

In July, some of us Goldsmiths sociologists spent some time at Cumberland Lodge discussing our work, and I presented a short, embryonic set of ideas on this same question, specifically what are the possible exit routes from the academy that are available to sociology? Here were five options I came up with:

Rational choice/evidence-based policy: sociology mimicks economics to produce quantitative (and some qualitative) evidence that excludes sufficient complexity as to be useful for decision-makers. See James Coleman, Robert Putnam et al.

Critical theory/mourning: sociology mourns its uselessness, and focuses on its own alienation from mainstream political discussion, but does nothing to remedy this, remaining obscure and deliberately difficult. See Adorno & Horkheimer

Intellectual terrorism: sociology dresses itself in clothes that are likely to shock, and determines its output according to aesthetic criteria, rather than scientific or normative ones. As Foucault argued once, his books should be seen as molotov cocktails, chucked into the public to explode and provoke activity, rather than doctrines expressing stable truths. See Foucault, Baudrillard et al.

Investigative journalism: sociology reports the particular as the particular, and not as an exemplar of something else. This way, stories and politics can come to light that would otherwise have remained hidden, especially those in quite technocratic areas of public life, or in the private sphere, that are not often deemed political at all. This was something that Andrew Barry once argued at Goldsmiths, when defending his investigation of a pipeline in Georgia.

The Chameleon approach: sociologists maintain various identities in and out of public life, capable of giving policy advice or writing for broader audiences, while also retaining the ability to stand back and criticise that same advice or journalism. This can backfire when different audiences become merged, different identities become confused, and the sociologist risks appearing two-faced, but I don't think that should discredit this strategy. Maybe this is what Foucault was trying to do after all? Perhaps in order for sociologists and social theorists to become more engaged in contemporary debates, we need to stop valorising consistency and integrity so much, and stop expecting people to be sure of what they really think, or expecting them to be able to connect theory and practice too conveniently. In Arendt's terms, it is truth and not (as Plato argued) opinion that is the real enemy of politics.

It's the last two of these that I think are least understood, and where the greatest potential may lie in future. This is obviously a rather crude list, but I wondered if it might provoke some discussion.

The Skinny on Skinny

2006-09-29T14:57:00.000-07:00

On the way to the shows in London just hours after stepping off the New York Fashion Week catwalks, I had mixed feelings about Madrid’s move to ban ultra skinny models with a BMI of 18 or less. This could, potentially I thought, be good news for the likes of those “healthier” models like me. With a medically defined 'normal' BMI and a hip measurement that screams liability to designers, I’ve always found Fashion Week to be a torturous experience – everything from public attempts to squeeze into a size 4 to sitting backstage with teenage waifs. But early on it became clear that London would not take Madrid’s lead. What follows is a field report of London Fashion Week with some thoughts on why skinny is still in, and why I’m okay with that.

On my first day in London I met with 14 designers in last-minute castings for their fashion shows, to be held in the next couple of days. The show casting process is usually quite formulaic: there’s a greeting and light conversation, the client will flip through the model’s portfolio, ask to see her walk the length of the room, have her try on an article of clothing and see how she walks in it, and lastly, the client will take her picture, then send her off with a pleasant valediction. If any step in the process is omitted it’s a sign of the client’s disinterest, for reasons rarely made explicit. Things usually start going wrong for me the moment I’m asked to try on something, as happened last week when one casting director for a major British designer handed me a pair of trousers. After ten minutes of struggling, I stood before her eyeing me up and down.

“How do they fit?” she asked, and then asked to see me walk across the room.

“Like a glove…on O.J. Simpson!” It’s a little ice breaker I like to save for such embarrassing occastions, but it doesn’t seem to go over too well among the English, so I teetered tin-man style as best I could under her cold gaze, then struggled another 10 minutes to get the trousers off.

A few years ago such acts of humiliation may have sparked an eating disorder. But here’s where sociology comes to my rescue. Fashion modeling should be thought of as an institutionalized production system, where the goods produced – the models – are embedded in a historically-shaped and market-driven network of agents, designers, and editors. Every actor in the system is trying to match as best she can what she thinks will complement the demands of cooperating actors, and they must make these rapid decisions based on past records and experiences. Agents are trying to supply what they think will go over well with designers; designers produce shows they predict will appeal to magazine editors; editors reproduce the kinds of images they think their readers will appreciate. The London press sounded a circular blame game in the skinny model phenomenon. Ask a designer why they book skinny models: because that’s what the agents are providing. Ask an agent why they promote skinny models: well that’s what the designers want. And around we go.

In fact the only thing that did seem any different backstage in London was simply the amount of skinny models talking about skinny models. At one casting, clients and models quickly came to the conclusion that the issue was a ludicrous and lame attempt to sell papers, and that the matter will soon die down, in the words one casting director, “They’ll just go back to normal and the girls will continue being thin. They have to, for the clothes. It has to be a certain size.”

He was partially right. Designers cut samples based on standardized measurements of size 2 or 4, and when they’re in a pinch days before showing a collection, alterations are the last thing they want to deal with. But sample size clothes are not born out of thin air; they are measured, cut, and manufactured. When you ask a designer why they make their samples in those particular dimensions, they do it because that is “the way things are done.” Like the QWERTY keyboard, we end up with a certain way of doing things because over time conventions get locked-in, and it becomes easier to not change them, even if we don’t like them.

The people who reproduce the modeling system aren't bad people. Take Melissa Richardson, co-founder of London’s Take 2 Model Management. Being the mom of a teenage girl, she isn’t keen on recruiting 14-year olds into the business, though their bodies are often well-suited for sample sizes. Yet she still does it, she told the BBC: “Because other people do, and if I don’t, I lose out of it.”

Of course it’s possible to imagine a more just world of fashion modeling, where pre-pubescent girls with bony limbs are not used to market adult women’s wear. That world exists; it’s in your everyday mail-order catalogues and commercial advertising, and in posters for designer’s diffusion lines, which are aimed at the mass-market. London casting director Lesley Goring frankly told the London Times that full-figured models “wouldn’t sell collections at this level.” In other words, there’s something kind of cheesy, a little too attainable, and too cheap about curves. It’s at the couture and high-end level where sub-zero sized models are put to work. The high-end stuff has a relatively small profit margin, but it creates the image that affixes to diffusion products like sportswear and perfume, where the real money is made. In the commercial world you are more likely to see the healthier, 18-and-over models. (It is also, by the way, where you’re more likely to see some ethnic variety in models, for anyone interested in launching an affirmative action campaign next season.)

Designers report having a personal aesthetic vision, one that just so happens to loosely hang on a thin woman. In the words of one London casting director, who said to the laughing amusement of slender models at his casting, “you know, it’s really hard to find size 12 to 14 girls that are fierce, I mean they’re all just...” and here he puffed out his cheeks and raised his eyebrows, vaguely resembling the Stay Puffed Marshmallow Man. “It doesn’t look good,” he concluded.

Indeed, not when you're operating in an institutionalized aesthetic of female beauty that is an ideal of unattainability, one that will drive sales further down the totem pole in the mass market. Should anyone seriously want to address the issue of thin youngsters modeling, multiple components of the system will need adjustments; that will take far more than one minor fashion center restricting the supply of skinny girls. As for my part, I’m less worried about the small group of people who take the fantasy factory too seriously, and more concerned about those who are left entirely outside the tastemakers’ concerns – the obese, the poor – the ones who could really benefit from some of the media hype.

Thick and Thin

2006-09-26T18:50:00.000-07:00

The recent effort in Madrid to ban excessively thin models makes me wonder about an old feminist line of reasoning about thinness, media and culture.

A certain line of feminist argumentation has described anorexia as the crystallization of our culture, in which women's chief value is in their sexual desirability, images of thin women predominate in popular media, and women and girls therefore go to great pains (literally) to become thin (see Susan Bordo 1989 "Anorexia Nervosa as the Crystallization of Culture" in Feminism and Foucault). I know that this line of argumentation is a strawman, and likely a poor representation of the work of Bordo and others, but it seems awfully persistent. Not only does it promote an overly simplistic understanding of the relationship between people and the images they view, but it seems to miss a much bigger picture, namely obesity as a crystallization ofculture, economics, class, race, and other dynamics.

According to figures reported in the September 11, 2006 Food Issue of The Nation, one fifth of white women are obese, one third of African-American women are obese, and many, many women and girls are overweight. The morbidities associated with overweight and obesity include diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, arthritis, and sleep apnea; diabetes is associated with loss of limbs, loss of vision, loss of feeling in the extremities, renal failure and early death. The painful and costly conditions associated with obesity likely affect vastly more women than anorexia, which seems to disprove the notion that seeing images of thin models on a runway in Madrid would have any bearing on the health outcomes of most women. Am I wrong to think that feminist arguments about thinness and the media still persist in the literature? If so please correct me. But if these arguments do persist, why is that the case? More importantly, is there a feminist theory of obesity? How would such a theory account for obesity's various dimensions, including race, class, politics, economics, gender and power? And how could feminist theories of obesity be deployed in the analysis and development of public health efforts?

Foreign rapists at large?

2006-09-25T18:12:00.000-07:00

“A unit set up to trace dangerous foreign criminals has been closed by the Home Office, despite seven remaining at large” begins a report on the BBC website this morning, informing us of the latest twist in the so called foreign prisoners scandal in the UK. In April of this year a moral panic had broken out, when it emerged that more than 1000 foreign prisoners had been released into the community rather than being considered for deportation.

What has rarely – if ever – been clarified in all this talk about foreign rapists, murderers and child molesters being “at large”, is that these people had served time for their crimes as ordered by the courts. They had been punished for what they did. How is it possible that this fact matters so little? What is the rhetorical and institutional basis of the moral panic and what does it tell us about the vision of the law held by journalists and politicians?

The modern state reserves the right to deport those who are not its citizen. If certain crimes are considered to warrant a review of immigration status, the home office may have failed to follow its own procedures. But what has happened substantially?

The headlines about “dangerous criminals” evoked a threat to the public and many commentators evoked the severity of the crimes committed. But presumably severity of the crime, danger to the public, and risk of re-offending were all taken into account when the initial punishment was determined.

Whether talking about citizen or foreigners, there is something very problematic about naming as the essence of people one has never met one act, one moment of their lives, and be it a crime. The mere evocation of people as criminals and murderers is an abstraction that threatens o dehumanize. Sometimes leftists need reminding that this also applies to “rapists” and “sex offenders”.

It is a virtue of the law that it restrains the victim and the punisher as well as the offender. At least one of the released prisoners has since re-offended but re-offending is a risk we take in relating to criminals as people. The case first needs to be made – and it would need to be made explicitly- that non-citizen do not deserve relating to as people.

After serving a sentence for rape a foreign rapist is again just a foreigner.
The whole scandal is a matter of immigration policy alone, not a matter of criminal justice.

The people the Home Office has tracked down since April and detained or deported are punished not for what they did, but for what they are: non-citizen. Or rather, not so much for what they are but for what the state turns them into - with its own distinctions between citizen and foreigner.

'The New Spirit of Capitalism'

2006-09-16T09:40:00.000-07:00

I've just finished Boltanski and Chiapello's hefty The New Spirit of Capitalism, and found it one of the most stimulating and original books I've come across over the course of my PhD. The 'spirit of capitalism' in question is not Weber's protestant ethic, but its grand-child, expressed via management theory, with the industrial ethic based upon the notion of a secure career coming in between. In each case, a 'spirit' is required because "to make commitment to it worthwhile, to be attractive, capitalism must be capable of being presented to them [its participants] in the form of activities which, by comparison with alternative opportunities, can be characterised as 'stimulating'". There's an important recognition that capitalism is not a game that people will necessarily want to play, indeed they periodically cease to do so. The bulk of the book is an examination of how the current spirit of capitalism operates, through the celebration of flexibility, networks, inclusivity, self-fulfillment, with a critique threaded through that is very close to that of The Corrosion of Character.

There are two particularly striking aspects to their argument. Firstly, they suggest that capitalism achieves its requisite spirit by absorbing the indignance of whatever dominant critique is pitched against it. Critiques of capitalism tend to fall into two camps: social critiques and artistic critiques. The first call for greater equality, security, and fairness, with socialism the most obvious manifestation of this. The second calls for greater fulfillment, authenticity, and autonomy, with Baudellaire being the prime exponent. The authors' central claim in the book is that capitalism absorbed the artistic critique of the post-68 radicals, the result being that it now promotes those very values that the artistic critique holds dear - authenticity, autonomy and so on. Management theory (as has been pointed out by people like Thomas Frank and others) is therefore a close descendent of the hippy movement. But in absorbing the artistic critique, capitalism ceases to engage with the social critique. Unlike the period of 1930-68, in which capitalism legitimated itself through redistribution and job security, now it legitimates itself through the freedom it offers, but makes no promises with respect to social justice. The implication is that for critique to be most effective, it needs to advance on both fronts at once, to attack both capitalism's oppression of the human spirit and its social iniquities at the same time.

Secondly, this is a form of Marxism that accepts non-Marxist ideas on their own terms, and respects the agency and culture of people, as they attempt to cope with capitalism. Perhaps one could term it 'compassionate Marxism': it doesn't belittle people, or deny them their comforts. This is perhaps analogous to how the regulationist school opened up a space for political agency in Marxist theory. It shows sympathy with reformist goals, and looks at all intellectual movements as worthwhile attempts to either express outrage with capitalism, or to reach some vaguely manageable pact with it; it doesn't dismiss them as ideology. There is something strangely touching about this.

Making collaborative work work

2006-09-12T11:32:00.000-07:00

At the end of August, I spent a long weekend in Utah as one of eight social scientist observers on a Social Science Research Council project called the Snowbird Charrette. Diana Rhoten of SSRC and Ed Hackett of the National Science Foundation and Arizona State University designed the project, with funding from NSF, to study how interdisciplinary teams of graduate students in the environmental sciences solved research problems collaboratively. The teams had three days to design and propose a research proposal to address a real-world environmental problem that had been outlined by a panel of experts. It was an opportunity for them to interact with experts in their fields and to practice developing the type of large-scale collaboration that is typical in most branches of natural and environmental sciences.

As an observer, my job was to collect ethnographic data on one of eight teams of environmental scientists. I observed them collaborating intensely, negotiating disciplinary boundaries, and getting a sense of how to design a huge, long-term, expensive project that drew on their diverse strengths. Frankly, I walked away feeling very jealous of the participants' opportunity to collaborate in such a supportive environment. Social scientists may promote the idea of interdisciplinarity, but is interdisciplinary work rewarded with publications and job offers? Are social science departments and academic institutions conducive to long-term, large-scale collaboration? Are we rewarded for doing problem oriented research or are we chiefly rewarded for making contributions to the discipline? Why (and do?) epidemiologists, economists, and psychologists have more success in influencing policy debates than qualitative sociologists?

These are big questions – perhaps you, dear reader, would like to challenge my assumptions, attempt some answers, or pose some questions of your own.