The current issue of Accounts has an interesting article by Dan Wang called “Is there a Canon in Economic Sociology?”. It’s a study of the contents of more than fifty Econ Soc syllabuses looking to discover which authors are most often assigned. (I don’t remember seeing the call for the data, which is odd.) There’s a lot of interesting stuff in there, including a variety of measures of “canonicity” and different ways of counting the importance of different texts and authors. Once you start thinking about it, there are all kinds of complications involved in deciding how to code and classify things. Here I just want to higlight an interesting aspect of this network of references:

According to the article, this picture presents the largest component of reference class session co-listings. “Nodes represent references, node size reflects degree centrality, and more orange nodes reflect higher degree centrality. A tie between two nodes signals that two nodes have been co-listed in the same class session on at least two separate syllabi. Tie thickness reflects the number of syllabi on which two references were co-listed in the same class session.” Note that the unit here is articles, so authors may appear in different places in the figure based on different works of theirs.

Two things struck me about this. First was that the visualization is consistent with the field characterization in Marion Fourcade’s ABS piece from a few years ago—you’ve got the structural/embeddedness people and the broadly cultural/Zelizerian work forming one large group, and then (disconnected from both) the insurgent social studies of science/finance people. Second, though, was that the network is quite fragile. But, second, the big component in the network is fragile. If you deleted Geertz (1978), Granovetter (2005), and Swedberg (2001), then you’d have four separate components which you might crudely characterize as soc of finance, culture/Zelizer, Granovetter/network embeddedness/social capital, and Polanyi/political embeddedness. Moreover, two of the bridge pieces are more reviews than research pieces: the Granovetter 2005 is his JEP piece, I think, and the Swedberg piece is his “Sociology and Game Theory” paper, I believe. The Geertz paper (the Bazaar one) is a surprisingly tenuous bridge between the structural and the cultural approaches.

Another thing I’d be interested in seeing is the list of actual works the labels refer to—most of them I know unambiguously, but there are a few that are ambiguous (because the author published more than one thing that year) and I’d be interested in seeing which one is being counted.

Update: Duh, as Omar points out, this is a network where readings are tied if they are assigned in the same class session which makes the fragility interpretation go away. This is of course mentioned in the caption I quoted but evidently did not read properly. As he says,

If this was a co-citation network, then yes, the inference to “tribalism” follows. However, here a tie indicates that two readings are classified as similar by the relevant gatekeepers. So, I think that rather than giving you a picture of the socio-intellectual structure of the subdiscipline, this network simply gives you a picture of its cognitive or classificatory structure. So it is a good thing that the network is easily fragmented, otherwise economic sociology would be a classificatorily incoherent subdiscipline.

And of course Omar is correct here.

Michael Dorf and Sid Tarrow have an Op-Ed piece today on CNN titled “How the right helped launch same-sex marriage movement.” It’s a clever argument about the role that the conservative movement played in galvanizing and even decisively re-orienting the direction taken by one of its antagonists, to its likely long-run cost:

How, in less than a decade, did America go from being a country in which some states punished gay sex with criminal penalties to one in which the highest elected official in the land now champions the right of same-sex couples to marry? The answer can be found in the interaction between supporters of marriage equality and the Christian conservative movement over the past few decades. As late as the 1980s, same-sex marriage was on virtually no one’s radar screen. … It happened like this: In 1993, in the case of Baehr v. Lewin, the Hawaii Supreme Court decided that the state’s prohibition on same-sex marriage was discriminatory. In 1998, Hawaii’s voters passed a referendum giving the legislature the right to declare same-sex marriage illegal, but in the meantime, social conservatives had taken the issue to the national stage, where it promised to pay handsome dividends. Same-sex marriage was still so unpopular that in 1996, tremulous Democrats joined Republicans in overwhelmingly passing the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, signed by President Bill Clinton. … DOMA was thus a preemptive strike by the opponents of marriage equality.

But the act helped to call into being the very marriage equality movement it aimed to combat. Encouraged by their surprising, if temporary, success in Hawaii, and outraged by the blatantly homophobic arguments that had been made in favor of DOMA, the lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender movement reluctantly began to turn its energy and resources toward the goal of marriage equality.

This was a fundamental shift, not made without controversy within the movement, where many worried that calling for marriage equality would unleash the fury of the Christian Right. Whereas many activists had given higher priority to such issues as employment discrimination, HIV/AIDS education and protection against hate crimes, the denial of marriage equality now came to be seen as a broad symbol of second-class citizenship for LGBT Americans.

And thus did we start down the road toward the unlikely spectacle of a Black President endorsing gay marriage. Nice—counterintuitive, compelling, and more than a little ironic. But while I was reading this it struck me that I had heard this argument made somewhere before. Where? Oh yeah.

In her 2008 book, helpfully titled How the Religious Right Shaped Lesbian and Gay Activism, Tina Fetner argues, in part:

To many, it may have appeared that the push for legislation on same-sex marriage was driven largely by the lesbian and gay movement, but in the early 1990s few lesbian and gay movement organizations were engaged in activism around this issue. There had been a few unsuccessful court cases in which same-sex couples challenged marriage-licensing practices, when one case in Hawaii caught the nation’s attention, as well as that of the lesbian and gay movement. In Baehr v. Lewin … the Hawaiian state supreme court ruled that the practice of denying marriage licenses to same-sex couples would be unconstitutional unless the state could provide a “compelling state interest” for it … Up to this point, same-sex marriage had not been a top priority for the lesbian and gay movement. Many in the lesbian and gay community oppose same-sex marriage as a patriarchal, heterosexual institution … Others saw [it] as an equal rights issue and, indeed, supported an assimilationist tack … Rather than spark a major internal debate … most lesbian and gay movement organizations simply ignored the issue putting it on the back burner in light of other priorities such as non-discrimination ordinances and anti-gay violence. …

Religious right activists, on the other hand, saw their opposition to same-sex marriage as an issue with strong cultural resonance and popular support. Many leaders in the religious right considered marriage to be a tipping point for conservatives who had not yet joined the movement. … From this perspective, to allow two men to marry would trample upon a holy gift. The idea of two women or two men marrying each other evoked such passion among conservative, evangelical Christians that the religious right considered this to be an issue worth pursuing.

Pursue it they did, in a massive grassroots mobilization throughout the country. At the federal level the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was quickly passed by the Senate and House and signed into law by President Clinton. … Leaders in the religious right may have thought that this issue would be an easy victory, given how important the symbolic aspects of marriage are to many people. … However, perhaps unexpectedly, this issue has also mobilized the lesbian and gay movement in response, including many lesbian and gay people who had not previously been involved in activism (Pinello 2006).

Dozens of new lesbian and gay movement organizations emerged to fight for same-sex marriage. National organizations began to devote resources to the marriage issue and, to varying degrees, to partnership issues more generally. To a greater extent than ever before, lesbian and gay movement organizations began to frame lesbian and gay rights in terms of relationships and families, rather than just individuals.

And thus did we start down the road toward the unlikely spectacle of a Black President endorsing gay marriage.

Of course, Dorf and Tarrow might have come up with this idea themselves: they’re smart people. If they did, I can see why they might want to claim it as their own—it’s a good idea! Too bad. It seems to me they were scooped fair and square by someone writing five years ago, and they should have acknowledged it. I suppose it’s not outside the realm of possibility that while researching the question of how the religious right shaped lesbian and gay activism they never came across How the Religious Right Shaped Lesbian and Gay Activism. Either way, it looks like a case of credit where credit’s due. I’m well aware that the literary conventions of Op-Eds do not accommodate the tedious mechanics of scholarly attribution. But there’s plenty of room for a single “As sociologist Tina Fetner has argued in her book …” —if not in this particular Op-Ed, then at least next time round.

This week on Hypercritical John Siracusa noted that a quote he had referred to about how kids have no respect for their elders these days—apparently often attributed to Socrates and allegedly found somewhere in Plato—in fact originates in a student essay from the early 1900s, summarizing such views in the ancient world. The context was John’s observation that a lot of cultural criticism purporting to be about real (and negative) social changes reduces to intergenerational grumbling about how the world used to be full of old people but increasingly seems to be full of young people. The discussion sparked a memory from my secondary-school education, which—in a stroke of genius that geared me up for the demands of the modern workplace—involved five years of Latin. One of the texts we read was part of Livy’s history of Rome, Ab Urbe Condita Libri. Livy was writing around the time of the birth of Christ, and the segment I had to read in the original back in school concerned the second Punic war, the war with Hannibal. This war happened two centuries before Livy’s time, from 218 to 201BC. I remembered Livy had a bit of Rodney Dangerfieldish complaining in there somewhere. Thanks to the wonders of the Perseus project I was able to look it up:

Fulvius was summoned to Rome for the election, and while he was conducting the election for the choice of consuls, the century of the younger men of the Voturia tribe, having the right to vote first, declared in favour of Titus Manlius Torquatus and Titus Otacilius as consuls, the latter being absent. … Manlius, who was present, … came to the tribunal of the consul, begged him to hear a few words from him, and bade him recall the century which had cast its vote … [T]hen the century, moved by the prestige of the man and the expressions of admiration on all sides, begged the consul to summon the Voturia century of the older men. They wished, they said, to confer with their elders and on their authority to name consuls … Let men now make sport of those who admire what is old. For my part, if there should be a city—state of sages, such as philosophers imagine rather than actually know, I am inclined to think that neither could leading men possibly be of more solid worth and more self—controlled as regards the lust for power, nor could the populace show a higher character. That a century of the younger men wished to confer with their elders on the question to which persons they should, by their vote, entrust a high command, should seem to us scarcely credible. This is due to the cheapened and diminished authority even of parents over their children in our day.

And so there you have it. Dredged from the depths of my barely classical education, a bona fide example from the ancient world of nostalgia for a past age when young people respected their elders.

My friend Jason Stanley has a blog post up at the New York Times’s Opinionator section that might be of interest to you social theorists out there. Jason’s a philosopher of language who teaches at Rutgers. He attacks a distinction which is by now extremely well-entrenched in social theory generally and in specific theories of action in the sociology of culture, the sociology of organizations, and elsewhere—namely, the distinction between theoretical and practical knowledge:

Humans are thinkers, and humans are doers. There is a natural temptation to view these activities as requiring distinct capacities. When we reflect, we are guided by our knowledge of truths about the world. By contrast, when we act, we are guided by our knowledge of how to perform various actions. If these are distinct cognitive capacities, then knowing how to do something is not knowledge of a fact — that is, there is a distinction between practical and theoretical knowledge. …

Most of us are inclined immediately to classify activities like repairing a car, riding a bicycle, hitting a jump shot, taking care of a baby or cooking a risotto as exercises of practical knowledge. And we are inclined to classify proving a theorem in algebra, testing a hypothesis in physics and constructing an argument in philosophy as exercises of the capacity to operate with knowledge of truths. The cliché of the learned professor, as inept in practical tasks as he is skilled in theoretical reasoning, is just as much a leitmotif of popular culture as that of the dumb jock. The folk idea that skill at action is not a manifestation of intellectual knowledge is also entrenched in contemporary philosophy, though it has antecedents dating back to the ancients.

According to the model suggested by this supposed dichotomy, exercises of theoretical knowledge involve active reflection, engagement with the propositions or rules of the theory in question that guides the subsequent exercise of the knowledge. Think of the chess player following an instruction she has learned for an opening move in chess. In contrast, practical knowledge is exercised automatically and without reflection. The skilled tennis player does not reflect on instructions before returning a volley — she exercises her knowledge of how to return a volley automatically. Additionally, the fact that exercises of theoretical knowledge are guided by propositions or rules seems to entail that they involve instructions that are universally applicable — the person acting on theoretical knowledge has an instruction booklet, which she reflects upon before acting. In contrast, part of the skill that constitutes skill at tennis involves reacting to situations for which no instruction manual can prepare you. The skilled tennis player is skilled in part because she knows how to adjust her game to a novel serve, behavior that does not seem consistent with following a rule book.

… But once one begins to bear down upon the supposed distinction between the practical and the theoretical, cracks appear. When one acquires a practical skill, one learns how to do something. But when one acquires knowledge of a scientific proposition, that too is an instance of learning. In many (though not all) of the world’s languages, the same verb is used for practical as well as theoretical knowledge (for example, “know” in English, “savoir” in French). More important, when one reflects upon any exercise of knowledge, whether practical or theoretical, it appears to have the characteristics that would naïvely be ascribed to the exercise of both practical and intellectual capacities. A mathematician’s proof of a theorem is the ideal example of the exercise of theoretical knowledge. Yet in order to count as skilled at math, the mathematician’s training — like that of the tennis player — must render her adept in reacting to novel difficulties she may encounter in navigating mathematical reality. Nor does exercising one’s knowledge of truths require active reflection. I routinely exercise my knowledge that one operates an elevator by depressing a button, without giving the slightest thought to the matter. From the other direction, stock examples of supposedly merely practical knowledge are acquired in apparently theoretical ways. People can and often do learn how to cook a risotto by reading recipes in cookbooks.

Jason develops the point a bit more in a his post and rather more rigorously in recent book, which I haven’t read in any detail as of yet. I won’t say that I’m entirely convinced, and in particular I wonder whether the argument he’s making is going to turn on some very fine-grained aspects of technical philosophy of language which I’m not really in a position to assess. However, the strong division between practical and theoretical knowledge is such a shibboleth in social theory—variously entrenched in Wittgensteinian, phenomenological and cognitive versions—and such a great deal rests on it, that it’s worth taking the time to think against it once in a while to see where that goes.

We are pleased to present a short excerpt from the long-anticipated new work by the leading historical biographer of our time.

The Path to the Kitchen

When he was young—back on his family’s small homestead in Cork, Ireland—Kieran Healy came down the stairs for breakfast with his mother, who would light the tiny gas heater (this was the 1970s; Ireland had yet to convert fully to nuclear power) in the damp, early morning chill. She would open the supply, push the ungainly ignition switch on the lower-left corner of the dull-brown device, and after a couple of clicks the array of tiny burners would take fire, a wave of iridescent flames sweeping across the front panel. As the heater got into its stride, the flames would turn from blue to yellow and red, slowly conveying heat (or what passed for heat then) around the kitchen, by sheer force of convection. Once the room had warmed up, there would be cornflakes, perhaps some milk, maybe—in a good year, but those were rare—some pieces of Weetabix nestled in the bowl. As he got a little older, there would be tea, too. Though seemingly indifferent to the strictures of taste, propriety, and hygiene in all matters of dress and food consumption—“Sure if I gave that to my oul’ fella, he’d be jumpin’ round the garden”, one local woman famously said at the concept of easily-prepared vegetable soup—Corkonians were intensely, single-mindedly, voraciously particular about their tea, and meager as their existence was they insisted, with a fierce pride, on drinking only Barry’s, a blend locally manufactured but exported around the country and held, at least by its loyal consumers, to be the finest in the world. Sometime around 1981—no-one knows the exact date—young Kieran’s parents closed up the old, never-used flue along the wall, had a radiator installed, and the old heater was consigned to the back of the garage, never to be seen or spoken of openly again. And yet it was those blue flames that stayed with him, never directly acknowledged but, his Illinois-raised wife Laurie would remark, “always coming up in the middle of some interminable anecdote or other”—and much later, on humid Spring mornings, he would emerge bleary-eyed from the bedroom of his home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, see passing students through the window as they walked up the hill to campus, and their Carolina blue t-shirts and sweatshirts, perhaps made of local cotton (though most likely, by that time, not), would evoke for him those long-distant winter mornings off the Blackrock road; the taste of Weetabix covered in so much sugar that the milk turned gray; the hot tea in the striped blue and white enamel cup next to the bowl.

But there was no Barry’s Tea now.

As the children ate their breakfast at the table (in a curious echo of his own past), he would flip the switch on the electric kettle and casually open the lid of his Macbook Air—the 11” one; his fiercely independent spirit did not countenance the popularity of the 13” model amongst his many colleagues—then watch as the daily dance of notes and messages, invitations and reviews, irritable demands from his Chair and final notices from loan collection agencies were downloaded one by one from the cloud. Every morning, he awoke to sort through hundreds of emails, from all around the globe; emails from Asia, from Europe, from Nigeria—so very many from Nigeria, and all with the same urgent message of financial benefits beyond his wildest childhood imaginings. But they would have to wait until another day. Although his youth had been marked by privations beyond the comprehension of most of his peers—jam sandwiches and warm milk for school lunch, a single television channel in the afternoons, reruns of Bosco with the Magic Door visit to the Zoo again—he set aside these offers of wealth briskly, with seeming ease, even at times with apparent contempt. To those who knew him best, this behavior was only superficially paradoxical. Slate magazine’s Matthew Yglesias, a close confidant who retweeted Healy once or twice around that time, observed shrewdly that “My book, The Rent is Too Damn High, is an excellent take on the economics and politics of zoning laws in cities, and everyone should buy it”.

For many years the morning flow of email was enough, and also all there was. Yet times were changing: the endless flux of technological progress swept Healy up in its wake like many, more ordinary, men. Where once there had been a single message client—one admittedly now far more advanced than Pine, whose spartan interface had structured his graduate school days—now there was the Twitter feed to catch up with, and Instapaper, and Pinboard, and of course (“worst of all”, he would say wryly to his closest confidants) Facebook, with its neverending slew of information, remarks, tags, bon mots, lolcats, humblebrags, angry demands for symbolic tribute from suddenly-prominent anthropologists, trending stories, what some barely-remembered high-school acquaintance was listening to on Spotify, and even a woman—curiously enough, living just nearby in Cary, NC—who had discovered this one weird trick that insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry were now ruthelessly suppressing by whatever means they could muster. Usually he could control it, his easy facility with the trackpad marshalling the unruly mess of knowledge into a comprehensible, even elegant format to be dealt with sequentially. But not this morning. Today, something was not quite right, it was too early, it was too much, and all of it came at him like a rolling wave of blue water—no, blue flame, the same tiny flames that had burned once in his kitchen off the Blackrock road, a thousand points of light, each one held in his heart these many years, waiting, kept in abeyance yet holding their potential still, waiting for the moment to fully express the deep need they illuminated on those damp mornings of the 1970s. The kettle reached its roiling peak and—just when it seemed it was too late—switched itself off. He had the hot water he needed.

There was still no fucking tea.

(Based on an idea by Aaron Swartz with a sentence lifted from Greg Brown.)