A Journey of Discovering Sociology: What Sociology is in 20 Contemporary American Sociologists’ Eyes [1st ed.] 9789811566028, 9789811566035

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Long Chen   Editor

A Journey of Discovering Sociology What Sociology is in 20 Contemporary American Sociologists’ Eyes

A Journey of Discovering Sociology

Long Chen Editor

A Journey of Discovering Sociology What Sociology is in 20 Contemporary American Sociologists’ Eyes

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Editor Long Chen Department of Sociology Peking University Beijing, China

ISBN 978-981-15-6602-8 ISBN 978-981-15-6603-5 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6603-5

(eBook)

Jointly published with Peking University Press The print edition is not for sale in China mainland. Customers from China mainland please order the print book from: Peking University Press. © Peking University Press 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publishers, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publishers, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publishers nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publishers remain neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Foreword

When I first visited China 10 years ago, it was with great sociological excitement at the idea of seeing first-hand all of the dramatic social and economic transitions that were underway. China was undergoing the transitions that classical sociology had been built to study, and it was undergoing many of those transitions in rapid-fire, and at an unprecedented pace. Today’s Western sociologists, like myself, came of age when their own societies had already undergone these transitions. Now China was undergoing an industrial revolution of unprecedented speed. While farmers had migrated to cities for centuries, now rural-to-urban migration threatened to empty out the countryside and overcrowd the cities in short order. The 1978 economic reforms have brought huge changes that would leave China with more billionaires than any other country—over 800 at last count. These changes have transfixed sociologists around the world, for China not only underwent the changes with unprecedented speed, but on an unprecedented scale. Those of us who studied the history of industrialization in the U.S. when it took off in 1850 were studying a country of 20 million souls. China, in 1980, industrialized with a population 20 million short of a billion. Western sociologists of my generation interested in the major social transitions that had motivated the discipline’s founders—Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, W. E. B. DuBois, Jane Addams—had to satisfy themselves with studying history, or with studying developing societies that seemed to be stuck in the middle of these transitions. Those who studied Latin America and Africa, for instance, argued not that countries there were undergoing major, rapid, transitions like those the U.S. and England had undergone in the nineteenth century, but that those countries had somehow stalled. Thus, sociologists interested in the big questions of social change were stuck studying the nineteenth century, or trying to explain why countries in Latin American and Africa seemed not to be experiencing the same rapid social changes that earlier developing countries had experienced. Japan was the first of a string of smaller Asian countries to undergo some of these changes after World War II, but Japan’s changes were more incremental.

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China has a long history of scientific, scholarly, and military accomplishments, but it was an agricultural society in the 1970s. My undergraduate advisor at Oberlin College, J. Milton Yinger, was one of the first social scientists to visit China after Mao Zedong and Richard Nixon started down the path of normalizing relations between China and the U.S. in 1972. Milt and his wife Winnie must have visited in 1977 or 1978, and Milt returned to lecture to rapt audiences, accompanied by an elaborate slideshow, about this country that had been closed off to Americans for a generation. Americans knew almost nothing of what had gone on in China since the early 1950s. Nothing Milt saw there foretold the remarkable transformations that would take place as a result of the economic reforms that were instituted soon after his visit. American sociologists have been fascinated by China more than by any other country in the last few decades because China offers a view both of the past—a real-time perspective on the massive social transformations that take place when an agrarian society becomes an industrial powerhouse overnight—and of the future— the path forward for newly industrializing societies. For two decades now, no matter what their field of specialization, sociologists have not been able to look away from China. Have you been to China yet? For years that was the question on everyone’s lips. Have you seen what rapid industrialization, development, and social transformation looks like close up? For historical sociologists, the question was—is this what it looked like in England in 1800, in Massachusetts in 1830? Were the social and economic upheavals of the West during industrialization as dramatic as those we were seeing in China? For sociologists of the present and future, the question was—is this what the future looks like for India and Ghana and Peru? Will capitalist industrialization take off for future countries in the way it has in China? With the hand of a strong state steering the ship rather than, as we had been led to expect, under the reign of laissez faire? Led by huge firms rather than, as we had been led to expect, by small-scale entrepreneurs? Without a precipitating political revolution rather than, as we had been led to expect, after a revolution to wipe out the forces of traditionalism and install a regime bent on modernization? The irony for many American sociologists was that while a community of sociologists had emerged in China in the first decades of the twentieth century, between 1952, when China closed university sociology departments, and 1981, when it began training a new generation of sociologists, the discipline disappeared.1 Thus when the economic reforms of 1979 were put into place, triggering massive industrial, economic, and social transformations, China did not have sociologists of its own. This changed rapidly after 1981. By 2008, there were 6000 sociologists working in universities and research institutes in China, 74 bachelors programs, 87 masters programs, and 16 Ph.D. programs.2

Qi, Xiaoying. “Sociology in China, sociology of China: Editor’s introduction.” Journal of Sociology 52(1) (2016): 3–8. 2 Yanjie Bian, Lei Zhang, “Sociology in China,” Contexts 7(3) 2008: 20–25. 1

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In many trips to China over the last decade, I’ve been struck by how eager Chinese scholars are to adapt theoretical and methodological tools of Western sociology to the task of understanding social change in China. I was fortunate to be invited frequently over the years to lecture, teach, and observe social change—as were many of the American sociologists profiled in this volume. My hosts included Zhihong Zhen of the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Changcheng Zhou of Wuhan University, Yuan Shen of Tsinghua University, and Dian Yang of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (a former doctoral student of ours at Harvard). These were among the Chinese sociologists who most actively recruited Americans to visit and teach, and organize for the translation of the works of many of the scholars that Alex [note: the writer’s English name] interviewed for this book. As a result of their efforts, much of the contemporary canon in sociology is now available in China, in translation. Many students have now heard American sociologists lecture, or taken courses with them, or read their books. I met Alex on one of those visits to China—to Wuhan University, where I spent a summer five years ago—and he came to spend a year at Harvard during his doctoral studies. A couple of months into the visit, he came to me with an idea. At Wuhan and at Peking University where he was doing his Ph.D., he’d been steeped in American sociology as much as in Chinese sociology. Like others in his generation, he’d been exposed to courses by visiting Americans, to lectures, and to writings both in both English and in translation. He proposed to spend much of his visit to the U.S. traveling the country, interviewing the sociologists whose work he knew—to gain a fuller understanding of where the discipline had come from, where it was going, and the intellectual trajectories of the people whose work he knew. He proposed to do this not for his own edification, but to create a video archive and a book of interviews with those sociologists. This seemed like a terrific idea, and it seemed like a project that would be of interest not only to the growing ranks of Chinese sociologists, but to their American counterparts. I’d found two such interview projects, initiated by Richard Swedberg and Erhard Friedberg, to be incredibly useful in my own work. Swedberg had interviewed a core group of economists and economic sociologists for the book Economics and Sociology.3 He gave them the rare chance to make sense of their own contributions, and to describe how their work fit together with the work of others (or did not), what drove them, and what they saw as their most fundamental insights. Those interviews provided a much more thorough, nuanced, and contextualized picture of the two disciplines than you could get anywhere else. Friedberg had conducted interviews with the leading organizational sociologists of the 1960s through the 2010s, recording them, and similarly giving them the chance to make sense of their own work, explain their own motivations, and sketch their own ideas about their fundamental contributions.4 The video format was 3

Swedberg, Richard. 1990. Economics and Sociology—Redefining Their Boundaries: Conversations with Economists and Sociologists. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 4 Friedberg, Erhard. 2011. The Multimedia Encyclopedia of Organization Theory: From Taylor to Today, R&O Multimedia.

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riveting, for subtle nuances of meaning came through vividly. These interviews give the viewer a sense of the person in the discipline, and in history. When Alex proposed to spend much of the first two-thirds of 2017 traveling to interview a couple of dozen sociologists, I wondered whether it could be done. I was convinced, by the Swedberg and Friedberg projects, that if he just asked open-ended questions and turned on the recorder, he’d end up with fascinating material. But did he have enough time? Would people agree to be interviewed? Would the travel schedule and the budget work out? But Alex never had a doubt about whether this would work out, and thanks to his determination, we now have fascinating interviews that examine what motivated twenty of America’s most interesting sociologists to pursue careers in the field— what the burning questions were for them—and what they have discovered during their careers. Alex shows himself to be a talented interviewer and sophisticated sociologist—he knows what follow-up questions to ask. The power of the interview material comes, in part I believe, from the fact that Alex, like Richard Swedberg and Erhard Friedberg, was an outsider to American sociology when he did the interviews. Swedberg was a young Swedish sociologist who had done his Ph.D. in the U.S., but nonetheless his outsider status got interviewees to start from the beginning—explaining everything. Friedberg was an important Austrian/French sociologist of organizations, but his audience was clearly Europeans as much as it was Americans. Alex has achieved the same magic that Swedberg and Friedberg did, surely in part due to his outsider status. As you will see, the sociologists interviewed here do not take for granted that the audience knows the field. They explain things from the start—making all of their premises and presumptions clear. This makes for lucid and engaging reading or viewing, because interviewees don’t assume their audience already understands the intellectual universe they are describing. Sociology, more than most disciplines, is shaped by the challenges of the society it is embedded in. Like other disciplines, the goal is to develop general knowledge, using universal methods and epistemological principles. But as August Comte argues in A General View of Positivism and as Max Weber argues in “Science as a Vocation”, we choose our topics because of our surroundings—because of the challenges and changes we see in the societies we inhabit.5 Sociology would look different today if it had been practiced in China all along. So, will sociology as it is practiced today in the U.S. be of much use to the sociologists of China? I think so. The very transitions that are driving Chinese scholars back to sociology now are the kinds of transitions that have always motivated sociologists. So, while the theoretical and methodological tools that

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Comte, August. 2009 [1848]. A General View of Positivism. London: Cambridge University Press. Weber, Max. 2004. “Science as a Vocation” in The Vocation Lectures. Edited by David Owen and Tracy B. Strong. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. pp. 1–31.

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Chinese sociologists can find in American sociology may have been shaped by American experience, they were developed by people grappling with the very issues of industrialization, rural to urban migration, class reconfiguration, that China is trying to understand and manage right now. October 2018

Frank Dobbin Department of Sociology Harvard University Cambridge, USA

Preface

Stones From Other Hills May Serve to Polish the Jade of This One a Dialogue On Contemporary American Sociology A Journey of Discovering Sociology is a book that introduces American sociology and sociologists, however, as a medium of sociological exchange between China and the West, I always feel that the most missing point in this book is the voice from the Chinese sociology community because I am somewhat worried that Chinese readers will completely immerse themselves in the world depicted by American sociologists when reading this book and forget the most precious feature of sociology: criticism and self-reflection. So, before the manuscript is about to be published, I showed it to Professor Qu and invited him to write a preface. Professor Qu accepted my request delightfully, which makes me feel very grateful. In order to keep the style of the book, I interviewed Prof. Qu to talk about his thoughts and feelings after reading this book and found his interpretation of this book as an “outsider” very interesting and wonderful, so I believe through him Chinese readers will have a more rational and profound understanding of this book. Anyway, I transcribed the interview of Professor Qu to share with the readers, and I want to sincerely thank him for his contribution to this book. —Chen, Long I have never studied in the United States and I don’t know much about American sociology, but just because I am a “outsider” and I am not influenced thoroughly, it may be possible for me to see something different. Based on such considerations, I accepted Chen’s invitation to talk about my feelings about sociology and this book. I think there should be more people like Chen doing this kind of effort. Chinese scholars today especially need to have a deep understanding of the various disciplines and different problems of the world, the status of their research and their inherent limitation, rather than simply going abroad to imitate their system. I read the manuscript of the book very carefully and took many notes. I think his work is valuable. From this book, we can see that many American sociologists are reflecting

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and introspecting, and this reflection also provides us with a motivation to learn. We can not only learn what is available, but also learn their reflection and self-criticism. —Qu, Jingdong Chen: Professor John Campbell said: “When you asked what sociology is, 10 sociologists may give you 10 different answers.” Through this interview I find that many American sociologists believe that sociology is an open, inclusive and diversified discipline, so my first question is also what sociology is in your eyes? Qu: I would like to start from the interviews of this book—what American sociologists see the sociology. Not all of their viewpoints are same, but some points are basically similar. First, sociology is inclusive. We can understand the world we live through a complete social structure—connects between person and person, department and department and others. Second, frameworks must come with those connections, so does specific working mechanisms. In this point, the views from Chinese sociologists are almost same, which may due to the concept of sociology. But still I have a question—many sociologists mentioned the differences between sociologists and economists in this book. For example, Christopher Winship says sociology keeps studying personal actions under a backdrop of others’ actions. His words indicate that sociology starts form connections, but economics starts from a single framework and a single hypothesis. When it comes to connections and mechanisms, sociology can find things which are ignored by other disciplines. To against Alfred Ayer, Hochschild says Logical Positivism believes that all the expression of emotion is useless and we should delete them from description. That is interesting. It is the economists’ advantages that they can start from a single hypothesis, ignoring all other parts, and then find a clear logic and deduction process, which, I think, is the advantage of economists. However, Verfredo Pareto says that, to some degree, remainder is exactly the most basic part. The single hypothesis where economists start is more likely to be built upon that remainder. This point is what economists always ignored. Therefore, I think that sociologists have a big merit that is they are always exploring something unknown, as Randall Collins says. Sociology is an inclusive, interdisciplinary and diversified discipline, but from my point of view, sociologists never believe that a self-evident hypothesis can be found to study society completely. Therefore, we are always in the process of focusing and finding. I believe that sociology is very charming at this point. However, there is also a problem—when we are talking about the inclusiveness and diversity of society, sociology is less likely becoming systemic. As Christopher Winship says, there are too many branches of American sociology now, which comes with a lot of papers, but few of them are good. What comes with sociology’s advantages is a due problem—a discipline is destined to become fragmented when its branches become strong. Actually, many Americans have seen this problem, for today’s sociology, it is a terrible condition that every social phenomenon can be grabbed for study, because we cannot see a holistic question concern or an effort to make the society

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complete. Mary Waters says, as a complete discipline, the American sociology does not have a strong cohesion anymore; Andrew Walder says, the vision of many American sociologists is becoming narrow, as they only take care of what happened around themselves and within America, and things they care about are so limited that they cannot embrace the whole society and world. From my point of view, that is a very important point that the book wants to tell us, so we can learn something about what sociology is. If we compare contemporary American sociologists, including those you interviewed in the book, with sociologists in the early stage of sociology, such as Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Simmel, Tönnies, Sorokin, Parsons and Mead. From 19th Century to early 20th Century, sociology is totally not in a state of fragment. By a social logic, these sociologists have abilities to and still try hard to unite the whole history of human civilizations, of course, most of them are the history of western civilizations and comparison between different civilizations. However, I believe this kind of vision has been radically lost. Therefore, for one thing, we can learn a lot from the book. For another, we can know the limitation of American sociology. However, what is more important is will Chinese sociology follow America’s way? I would not comment on that. On the contrary, I think today we needs to go back to the way where sociology starts, for Chinese sociology needs more experience, and still, many things are waited to be found wholly. Therefore, I share views as well as criticism American sociologists hold towards nowadays sociology, but according to the direction where sociology will go in the future, my standpoints are not much as same as theirs. Importantly, we should introspect what problems of sociology are now, and there are two important ways—firstly, we should study the holistic changes in reality, and secondly, we should rethink what ancient sociologists were thinking in the classic period, for they are all the great historians and civilization researchers. What is sociology? From my point of view, the greatest of sociology does not lie in its inclusiveness and diversity in the surface, because the appearance of inclusiveness and diversity eventually will develop into a “fragmented” state. What’s really great about sociologists is, through open horizons and inclusive research, they can ultimately set up a series of systemic conception to understand universal unity, which is very essential and is the essence of this discipline. Perhaps this unity we talk about does not seem like the economists’ unity which can be defined through a theorem. As Philip Gorski says, when Rational Choice Theory was put forward, people thought they found a unified framework of sociology, but that hope did not last long. Nevertheless, I still believe that what is the greatest of sociology is each classic sociologist builds his or her own theoretical unity. That is my understanding of sociology. Andrew Abbott’s understanding of sociology in the book is most interesting. From his viewpoint, we can understand sociology from two aspects: the first one is the real sociology as a part of society (employment market), and the second one is the ideal sociology as a part of academy (ideal system). Today what we are facing is the employment market, and who cares about the ideal system? The ideal system he says is what I said the unity of inner thought established by classic sociologists.

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Therefore, we should see the shortcomings of the American sociology while learn its merits. Otherwise, if we just simply follow the way of American sociology, we will not only become a bad learner, but also ignore important issues amid time changes. I don’t think sociology is sensitive to the society by nature. When an issue becomes more and more small, partial and fragmented, sociology is also in the process of losing its sensitivity. As Zhao Dingxin says, modern sociology ignores intuition and tries to eliminate wisdom. It is difficult to understand sociology, why? Because the premise of each hypothesis or discipline is a great sociologist’s effort to research and define. It seems that each sociologist does his or her own business and each sociologist can make contributions to some small fields and find various social phenomena, but the fact is not. The common goal of sociologists is to set up a unity, which, I think, is the fundamental difference between sociology and economics. Chen: When hearing your views, I immediately think of Talcott Parsons. He used to try to establish the so-called unity. Therefore, can we understand in this way–when faced with the current fragmented state, we now need more sociologists like Parsons? Talcott Parsons actually has a complete set of judgments on American politics, on the humanity of Americans, on the internal social actions and meanings, on the logical mechanism of the internal structure of the entire American society, and even on American education. This is not understandable for sociologists who specialize in a branch of sociology today. Parsons is amazing. If we go back to the great changes in the overall social structure caused by the 1929 Great Crisis in the United States, we will find that Parsons is trying to integrate the foundation of the American civilization and the traditions of Western civilization while exploring a direction of the whole social structure. If you do not understand Roosevelt’s New Deal, or the transformation of the United States itself from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century, it is not easy to understand Parsons’ thinking. We criticize Parsons today from the perspective of the abstractness of his theory, but how can we understand the specifics of his abstraction without returning to American history? I am not here to defend Parsons, because we have criticized many things in his theory, but we also have to admit his efforts. If we want to understand Parsons, just like if we want to understand Durkheim, Weber, and Marx, we need to go back to that history, return to the specific process in that civilization, and return to the comparison of different civilizations in the world. In terms of whether we need more sociologists like Parsons, to be honest, I don’t think we should have so many sociologists like him. The key is that we need to constantly understand people like Parsons, then we can have a future in sociology and really understand what sociology is. However, since American sociologists became obsessed with the so-called Middle-Level Theory, such efforts have disappeared, and the situation is much worse today.

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Chen: How did American sociology develop into the form that it is today? In your words, why did the effort to establish unity disappear and why did they become obsessed with Middle-Level Theory? Qu: We can understand the reason from the perspective of life course. If we see the people you interviewed in the book, the oldest should be Randall Collins who is about 80 years old; the youngest may also be about 60 years old. Taking the year 1968 as an example, the period around 1968 is very important for both Europe and the United States. We can also define that period more broadly from the late 1960s to the early 1970s. During that period, as John Campbell says, American youth as well the youth in Europe engaged the anti-war movements, civil rights movements, anti-Vietnam war movement, etc. If they were almost in their teens around 1968, their academic growth was immersed in the atmosphere of various movements and influenced by their peers. As Frank Dobbins says, when he was a child, his parents would take him to various anti-war demonstrations. However, Alvin Gouldner published The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology in 1970 when he was already a sophisticated sociologist. The generation of sociologists he represents should be older more than one generation than the sociologists you interviewed in the book. The education background of that generation of sociologists must have come from World War II or even before World War II. Comparing those two generations, you will find that the generation of sociologists interviewed in this book should be affected by the following two aspects from their growth stage: on the one hand, the project system has been quite mature in the United States from the 1960s, American universities have undertaken a large number of national projects since World War II, which has led to the existence of a huge system driven by national funds and market capital in the so-called project system; on the other hand, the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s left these young people with traces of social movements. Therefore, many American sociologists in this book will mention Charles W. Mills and adore him very much. This is very interesting and paradoxical. Because from a system point of view, we can say that this is a system in which free research, free thinking, national resources as well as market resources are tied together. However, these American sociologists were immersed in an anti-system atmosphere when they were young, and their mentality bears a strong imprint of anti-system. About half of the sociologists in this book mentioned that they would work very hard to read Marx’s classics when they were young. This is probably something many young Chinese students did not expect. In a sense, Left Wing thoughts left a very deep mark in their hearts and sowed seeds. Therefore, they actually combined these two contradictory things. This influence made them eventually turn to the study of civil society, social issues, ethnic minorities, vulnerable groups, race, gender, inequality, so on and so forth. However, in terms of methods, they have adopted project system which is institutionalized and capitalized. Especially after the Cold War, the singular pattern of the entire world has further strengthened this internal contradiction: on the one hand, scholars seem to rely only on social movements and related research to trust their political ideals, even fantasy; on the other hand, they are more

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dependent on the one-dimensional evaluation system and research model created by the single system. What I want to say is that to look at a group of scholars and a set of research, one must look at its historical aspect. In terms of sociologists interviewed in this book, on the one hand, they have to fight against system; on the other hand, because of the large and stable political and social system in the United States, all their research must be done under the system. I have seen a duality in almost all of them, there is always a nostalgia and yearning in their hearts, hoping that society will be more equal and the difference will be shrank. But in the reality, under the real academic system, they cannot achieve this in their own lives. They must follow the system to do research. This is the most prominent and entangled feature of this generation of sociologists. If we continue to see the sociologists who were already sophisticated in the 1960s, such as Erving Goffman, Alfred Schutz, Alvin Gouldner, Randall Collins and Harold Garfinkel, why did these people react to Parsons’s sociology in the 1960s? For example, Collins put forward “radical micro-sociology”. I think this is an effort of sociology to enter a more thorough, holistic and micro form for sociological research. The education background of these people is classic theoretical education. In other words, they are not the result of the dual formation of system and anti-system. The education they received was around World War II, and World War II gave a strong worldwide stimulus. Therefore, in terms of the stimulus of the actual historical change and the classic education they have obtained, they are different from the generation of American sociologists interviewed in this book. It is for this reason that sociologists who were already sophisticated in the 1960s proposed such great innovations in theory and in methodological changes to observe the world. This also illustrates a common problem of the generation of sociologists interviewed in this book: the anti-system is in a sense synchronized with the anti-classic. Of course, this generation of sociologists have also been influenced by classics when they were educated, but I think that in their hearts, classics are not a sacred academic existence. Those who study in the United States have experienced the professional training methods including reading some literature texts, focusing on certain topics and methods, and abstracting and decomposing the theories of previous classic sociologists, however they read it instead of facing the whole thought system of a person or a book so as to enter their inner world and understand their overall vision. In terms of so-called professional training, they have deconstructed the integration of classics and social integration, together with the anti-traditional, anti-institutional, anti-classical internal emotions that have emerged in this period of history and shaped today’s America sociology. I think if a real sociologist is supposed to have overall social care and systematic humanity and scientific literacy, then this generation of American sociologists are obviously insufficient in the knowledge structure. Of course, this is not true for everyone. For example, Andrew Abbott is different. He is the current representative of the Chicago School. In the book, he recalled his high school teachers, including poets, authors of Greek textbooks; when he went to

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Harvard, he became an assistant to Roger Revelle; he read a lot of books while in college. He received a richer academic support. In today’s American sociology, we have rarely seen such knowledge-based researchers with such a vision of caring for the world, instead we see more tool-oriented and project-oriented talents. Randall Collins says that Parsons and Goffman are experts in Freud. Collins told these stories very vividly. He said Goffman was very tricky because if someone asked Goffman a theoretical question, he would say that he was only doing field research. It is not easy to understand what Goffman said since in his view only through particularly good classic training can we see that every step of the field is a theoretical problem. Collins also says that Herbert Bloomer is a real theorist. The theory here is that Bloomer can find unknown problems in real life. Isn’t this the same as Socrates? I think the real theoretical intrinsic capacity of Blumer is very high. But frankly, this is the generation that older than those you interviewed. By comparing those two generations of American sociologists, we can see that the essential difference between the two generations is whether to give enough respect to and inherit the ideological tradition and problem consciousness of classic sociology. Therefore, I feel that the more the world develops, the more closed the sociological research is, what is worse, it does not really develop to the far and the deep. It is precisely because American sociology has been in such a state for decades that its mid-level theory is very well developed. Sociologists can push local research, exquisite research, and branching research to the extreme and make small theoretical models very beautiful, but at the same time, they are increasingly lost in the question of what sociology is. From the perspective of the theoretical model, people like Robert Merton have made outstanding contributions. Contemporary American sociology follows this direction. However, the problem is that, from the perspective of true theoretical imagination, American sociology today is basically “imported goods” from Europe. The American sociologists interviewed in the book are all influenced by Michelle Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. They are no longer willing to conceive a complex and complete world, instead, they would like to turn those European theories into middle-level theories. The same is true of Chinese sociology today. Those theories that make people feel fashionable are actually filtered in the United States, and then fragmented. The entire American sociology has no theoretical innovation with great imagination and creativity in the sense. Many of their theories are borrowed. This is a serious problem in American sociology, and their academic imagination is not actually produced by themselves. The more they do so, the easier it is to immerse themselves in the method, ranking by method, and only by method. Any academic innovation and great development lie in a fundamental discussion of disciplinary premises, the inspiration of inter-civilization comparison and the promotion of tremendous changes in the times. But the Middle-Level Theory is completely different from these three points. Because the it was born in an era where the structure was relatively solid, and there was no particularly obvious revolutionary change in society, people would get used to a relatively routine life. Although many people study social movements, the more emphasis they put on social movements, the more they show that society is routine, and many movements

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are just projections of ideas. In my view, the social movements in the late 1960s in the United States were not big movements that could really change history, but intellectuals’ imagination or promotion that only occurred in local-social spaces, which will not produces a strong stimulus. If someone uses the American social movement model to study the Chinese revolution and the French revolution, I think it is inappropriate. Since the Middle-Level Theory is not in a sense to meet the huge changes that have taken place in society, it will naturally develop on the exquisite model of social research. The stereotypes in which we write academic papers today are all patches of existing research. This is the standard American “stereotyped essay” and American model. But there are also many aspects of Middle-Level Theory that are worthy of recognition. In fact, Merton put forward the Middle-Level Theory supported by an internal ideal of the American pragmatism tradition, but today many people forget this background. This is different from the system of European conceptualism and the system of British empiricism. Pragmatism is actually implemented in a view of time that Mead said. This is a substantial theoretical relationship that is very important for Middle-Level Theory. But the problem is that when it is formalized, everyone does not understand this. Chen: One of Professor Zhao Dingxin’s views in the book is that because of Middle-level Theory, American sociology no longer has wisdom. What do you think of his opinion? Qu: I just mentioned the difference between sociology and economics, but if we go to see those great economists, whether it’s Joseph Schumpeter, or the more recent Douglas North, Ronald Coase and earlier Adam Smith or David Ricardo, they are actually great thinkers. There is a basic hypothesis around them that everyone agrees on. All their efforts are to push this basic assumption forward so that not only the content of the social existence covered is more abundant, but also the way we view the world will change accordingly. Therefore, I always think that great economists must be great thinkers, and in their eyes, the entire world has not independently distinguished a so-called economic phenomenon. A real subject does not care about the differences between subjects. Sociology is supposed to be the same. The West started with Socrates and China started with Confucius begin to discuss what “learning” is. “Learning” is all things in the whole world, every stage of your life, every other person, even every place you travel in the world, is the object of your observation, thinking and query. Then you slowly connect these things spontaneously, and this is the essence of “learning”. So, if a person simply thinks he is a sociologist, and then thinks he is a branch sociologist, and is a sociologist who only does research in a certain field in branch sociology, how could he have wisdom? To be wise or intuitive, people first need a process of self-liberation, especially when the discipline develops to such a state of intensive suppression. I wrote in a paper called “Is academic life a gamble?” that a hundred years ago, Max Weber mentioned in his speech “Science as a Vocation” that this problem already exists in Germany and throughout Europe, but we have not solved it in a hundred years,

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what is worse, the problem he revealed become more and more serious. We must have a clear understanding of this. I want to say that it is not because the times are changing so that we can obtain more and more information through the Internet, libraries or big data, and our knowledge will be better and better. The most critical question is whether we can return to the natural state, as a specific person living in this world to face specific historical and social situations as well as various things that have happened in the world. This is first and foremost a kind of self-liberation, but also an emancipation of knowledge. Learning exists everywhere, so does asking. This is one of the most important ways in which sociology can continue to explore the basic truths of its existence. Many scholars today are in a sense a project manager. Because they only care about their research issues, and then continue to collect data and materials, just read the research literature related to the topic they care about, and then desperately repeat, every day is too busy to deal with. Is this different from going to work at the company? After finishing one project, just start another one. This is not a manifestation of intellectual wisdom at all. I personally think that the boss of any company is not thinking in this way. That’s why I said that it is necessary to return sociology to a kind of wisdom of discovery. To have freedom, we first need to liberate ourselves. Of course, self-liberation does not mean abandoning the past. We must constantly review the marks and opinions left by ourselves. Just like John Campbell said that he had read Herbert Marcuse’s book since he was young. In fact, all young people were reading Marcuse at that time. It’s just that at a certain stage, when deeply understanding society, a person must constantly reflect on his own experience. He did grow up from there, but he must be soberly aware that he also has limitations while receiving support from there. If Chinese sociology wants to have true wisdom, it must first break the existing boundaries and try more unconventional research. What I mean by convention refers to the routine research methods learned from various places. If a person does not input more in this society, does not have more knowledge, does not have a broader vision, and does not think harder, I think the wisdom of knowledge will not come to him. Wisdom cannot be achieved by only one or two people, because this is not a personal problem. In fact, it is difficult for everyone to exceed their own times. For example, in this era, the discipline or academic system is very complete, and everyone has conditions in every aspect. If they do not meet these conditions, they will not survive. The entire academic world has constructed a huge academic system similar to the capital system, constructed a set of systematic indicators in order to locate and index all the growth stages of a person, everyone is very cramped in this system. For example, many American students or Chinese students have realized “publish or perish” in their master’s and doctoral stages. If he really does not publish, he will not be able to graduate. But if a person puts all his thoughts on publishing, then I don’t think he can really read the classics patiently and systematically, no mention constructs a complete way of understanding or devote himself to the understanding of others and the whole world, as a result I think he will be far from knowledge. Therefore, forcing young people into an

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indexed and technological process prematurely is a fundamental problem of this academic-capitalist system. In terms of self-liberation, few people can do it easily. But it does not mean there is no space for self-liberation in current system. Self-liberation does not depend entirely on oneself, but also on opportunities, and awareness of self-liberation is necessary. Sociologists must be interested in all kinds of things and be able to think widely, like Weber and Simmel. In the process of constant thinking, he will construct his own perspective. It does not matter whether this perspective is sociological or of other disciplines. Once a person has this consciousness, there is no need to worry about whether he will work hard, he can be skeptical of many things, have his own unique understanding of reading, and have the possibility to build a systematic view. This is particularly important because he can let it go, he doesn’t care much. In this way, he does not have so much psychological burden and feeling of depression, and can think about whatever he likes. Chen: Professor Jeffrey Alexander says that sociology is somewhere between science and humanities, but he also says that the reality is sociology has to behave more like science to gain respect and recognition from other people or other disciplines. Hochschild says sociology is an art. She feels that people’s obsession with data has replaced people’s thinking. What do you think about that? Qu: First of all, we should not put science and humanity in opposition. For example, why can’t mathematics be humanistic? Mathematics can also be said to be humanistic and artistic. When I studied the theorem of large numbers as an undergraduate student, I thought mathematics was a very beautiful thing. It is very interesting, very wonderful, and beyond a person’s pure rational judgment. When I looked at the curve, I found it pretty beautiful. What I want to say is that sociology will not become more scientific because of more data, nor will research be more scientific because of more data. The key lies in how much wisdom and ability we have to experience the meaning of social connection and humanity when we face data. The most boring thing is that some people regard these data as a single material, as an essential requirement and a set of tools for his project. At this point, the data and the interview are no different from historical documents. History also has these problems. If a person only regards materials as materials, he must be a very boring historian in the end. He has neither the ability to discover nor the space for imagination like Tschen Yinko. To be honest, I look forward to quantitative research. Firstly, as Durkheim revealed in Le Suicide, the mathematical relationship in social phenomena is always intrinsically closely related to the human condition. In different social histories and cultures, these connections are different. Secondly, it can reveal what opportunities, troubles, and challenges people have encountered in a particular era and space. Then we need to return to some more basic questions: what is the specific composition of society? How does it exist? Where is the foundation of human nature? Because the modern world has constructed a set of particularly intensive methods of

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communication, exchange, and cohabitation, data is very important. What we are looking forward to is such kind of research, rather than emphasizing that data and methods is science, I think this is the lowest level of science. On the one hand, we need to learn more advanced data technologies, research methods, and their understanding of these from America. On the other hand, we need to return to our own problems. So, I agree with Alexander that sociology is somewhere between humanity and science. However, this science is not the science defined by Weber. According to the definition of science from Weber, science is science, humanity is also science, spirit has spirit science and culture has culture science. Hochschild says that sociology is an art in the sense of expression. This art is not an art that we narrowly understand, but a humanistic art that is understood in various senses, such as rhetoric, discourse, narrative, and thought structure. She says that even if it is a rigorous scientific research, sociology needs to be expressed by people, and ultimately it must be understood by people, so it must involve the feelings and reactions of people in the expression. This means that the expression of sociology must be inseparable from the humanity. I think Hochschild is right, and Alexander is right, because the unknown part that sociology really discovers must not be derived from the existing results and laws of science, but obtained through humanistic methods. If a sociologist faces the world with a relatively complete self-experience, his reaction will not be a so-called model reaction. Hochschild studies emotions, and she feels that we can gradually use scientific methods to explore ways to refine and logicalize emotions. At this time, research can be scientific, but to find emotions and discover this very important social composition that has been missed, we rely on the qualities given by humanity. When Frank Dobbin talked about Marx, Weber, and Simmel studying economic phenomena, he said that this kind of research reflected the unique imagination of sociologists, which was different from economists. What he means is that a person must first have a preliminary intuition and feelings about the economic phenomenon between people, in order to continuously analyze and systematize it. Another example is the Chicago School, from Robert Parker to Andrew Abbott, they all believe that the American community is the foundation of the unity of American society as a whole. Professor Tian wrote a paper (Tian, Gen: “Humanity, Ecology and Community: Revisiting Parker’s The City), which I think is enlightening. The Chicago School believes that when the United States enters a modern society, especially a very complicated social form, the community becomes an ethical carrier of American society. This is actually humanistic care. Without this care, the community becomes a purely objective research target. I always believe that humanity is the foundation of sociological discovery in a certain sense. If sociology only takes “narrow” science as its goal, it has no future. In the end, it will only become an imitation of mathematics, physics, economics and farther away from its own vitality. Therefore, according to the most fundamental purpose and results of sociological research, sociology must return to the humanistic world. The starting point of sociology is humanity, and the focus is also on humanity. Even if it’s big data

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research and model research, the ultimate goal is to answer where people are going and understand a lot of inherent contradictions in civilization. If he doesn’t care about these things, wouldn’t he eventually become the heartless expert whom Weber refers to? I think it is very inexplicable and terrifying to cut off the social sciences and the humanities and simply pursue a so-called scientific goal. Doing research needs a care that comes from the bottom of heart. The inherent motivation of sociology lies in caring for others and caring for the world. There is a kind of care and attachment in it, just like what Durkheim said. As a person, he must attach to somebody or something, which is an indispensable foundation of human nature. And the real science contains all of these. Chen: I also want to ask you a question about training. I asked many American sociologists about how do they view the differences between China and the United States on training sociology students. What is your opinion about that? Qu: The American sociology is successful from the point of its teaching system; however, we must know why it succeeds. Its success lies a set of methods established for systematically cultivating students’ basic qualities. For example, there are many small classes in the undergraduate level of American universities, and of course it is more obvious in many liberal arts colleges. When students begin professional study, there will be a set of systematic texts and educational methods, as well as mature academic seminar systems such as academic workshops and seminars that supplement the quality of teaching. When I visited the University of Chicago, I was very touched, because everyone was constantly studying, communicating, and discussing in a knowledge system. In this regard, the United States is indeed very remarkable. So, the students trained by the American education system are generally not too bad. But I don’t think that this system is the system to train the best scholars. In a sense, at the level where students must be academically trained, many professional studies are obtained through thematic texts, so that they lose the opportunity to explore freely through contact with the most classic documents, and the most important foundation of a discipline is precisely the degree of contact with the greatest thought that ever existed. I have always felt that this set of professional learning itself can be said to be a disciplinary process or a disciplined process. At this point, I agree with Foucault’s statement. However, the best sociologists in the United States must break through this process to gain the creativity of research. I don’t think there is an absolutely good system that will ensure the cultivation of the masters we talk about every day. The cultivation of masters is precisely how much space you can leave him, the space for grand imagination and free imagination. At this point, I think there are not many systems that can completely solve this problem. I can only say that these are the issues that we need to consider in the design of teaching and research systems. There are many advantages of American sociology that is worth learning. First, it still retains a long academic tradition. Second, when a person gets a tenure, he has a very large free space in a sense to do research that he is really interested in, and the

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evaluation system is not so rigid. Therefore, we need to learn from the United States, learn from their mutual promotion in the academic community, and the relatively flexible system of academic freedom, but at the same time we must also see where their limitations are. In the process of learning, a person can only truly learn something useful and require solid knowledge by study one thing upside down. I haven’t been in the United States for a long time, I just spent a year at the University of Chicago, and I am not qualified to talk about this issue, but from my observation and communication with American scholars, in general, on the one hand they are more professional on discipline norm and do very well on that, but on the other hand they are still restricted by grand ideologies and systems. As far as the long-term historical development of American sociology is concerned, I do not think that today’s sociology is in its best period and best form. Chinese scholars must pay attention to this point before they can truly use the stone from other hills to polish their own jade. Chen: In the end, what do you think of this book. Qu: I cannot say that it is a particularly remarkable work, however I think it is very valuable. Nowadays, one of the biggest problems that many people who go to study in America, especially those who are engaged in sociological research, have is that most of them do research on China after they go to America. I think that in this case, on the one hand, they did not have a systematic understanding and research on the whole world; on the other hand, because they are doing research on China, they are eager to find a method, but they lack attention to the overall academic, social, and political aspects of the United States, its position in the world, and some of its practices and challenges in various aspects. From this point, it is difficult for us to understand the academic efforts of American scholars, their creativity and their limitations. The difference in this work is that you are on the front line and really try to understand what American sociologists are thinking about. There is a certain degree of randomness on how to select interviewees, however, randomness does not mean that it is unscientific. As long as there are so many sociologists who talk about their ideas from different perspectives, it is rewarding. On the one hand, I read these interviews with a learning attitude. On the other hand, I could really understand the content of this book based on my understanding of the current state of American sociology and its overall layout, structure, and knowledge form. So, I think this is a meaningful work. To be honest, some international students have stayed in America for many years, but they may not necessarily do such kind of work and have such understanding. And in terms of interviews, although it is not comprehensive, and there must be deficiencies, these questions have already involved questions such as sociology as a discipline, the independence of sociology, the tension within sociology, as well as American sociologists’ learning experience, research experience, the relationship between teaching and research, what they are concerned about, what struggle they have, etc. Generally, the overall thoughts of American sociologists can be seen through the interviews.

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I think this book has several advantages, we can work hard in this direction to try to understand: The first point is let readers have a basic impression of the interview content from the internal and external sides of sociology and its essence. The second point is to structure a life course of the sociologist through interviews. This book involves a lot of content: What are the difficulties encountered by sociologists? What is the turning point in his research? What is the opportunity for this transformation? How has he been influenced ideologically and in reality? What is the relationship between teaching and doing research? The academic life course of a sociologist is, in a sense, a reflection of the academic life history of an era. Through these, we will not stereotype the current sociology. The biggest problem for young people today is that they think they have studied sociology in school and read the latest papers in journals, then they think this is sociology, and sociology should be like this. Sociology has various forms in the course of historical development. The American sociology has the era of Mead, the era of Parsons, the era of Middle-Level Theory, and the era of modeling today, and there are encyclopedic sociologists like Sorokin. How did American sociology happen? Andrew Abbott said that American sociology was originally a religious form mastered by clergy, why? And why did it change in the early 20th century? Why have the teaching positions of sociology been basically stable since 1975, but a lot of expansion has been done before that? Shouldn’t these be studied? This is only some situation we see in the local materials available in the United States, but other countries also have the same situations. That’s why I say that these are what we need to study, and it is also our way of introspection. This is the second characteristic of this book. It is the ability to see the form and course of American sociology from the life of a sociologist and his academic research. I think the third characteristic is very good too. It is to find the most important book of these sociologists to discuss. We can learn the way in which they conduct research from the concern of these sociologists, their caring, methods, theoretical inheritance, even from some ideological opportunities and inspirations that seem unrelated. Abbott was very interesting when he talked about the book Professional System. According to his research history, he did not do research as a pure sociologist at first, but slowly found a special perspective and method. This process is very important. Sociology has a unique stereoscopic structure just like the society they studied. This book provides us with a lot of space for research and self-reflection. What it shows us is not a template that is worth emulation, but an opportunity to promote continuous learning and self-reflection. Whether it is the current path of discipline development, the relationship between the discipline system and the history of the discipline, or the course and pulse of the history development of the discipline itself, and the kind of opportunity for the development of civilization at the beginning, these are major topics that require our research. Most of what we study abroad today is the method of studying China. Although this is not bad, it must not be our goal. Our goal should be to study the development of disciplines in various parts of the world, its history, the imagination it once produced, and how it constructed what Andrew Abbott called the ideal system of different periods. Only in this way will we become more and more clear

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about who we are, what our goals are, and what our direction of effort is. The broad vision and pattern that classic sociologists once constructed, the self-understanding formed from the depth of human nature, the overall society and the comparison of different civilizations, are the ultimate direction of sociology. Only by establishing such a double understanding based on itself and others can Chinese sociology have a bright future. Beijing, China November 2018

Jingdong Qu

Contents

Interview 1 Christopher Winship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Christopher Winship

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Interview 2 Peter V. Marsden . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Peter V. Marsden

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Interview 3 Mary C. Waters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mary C. Waters

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Interview 4 Ezra F. Vogel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ezra F. Vogel

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Interview 5 John L. Campbell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . John L. Campbell

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Interview 6 Frank Dobbin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Frank Dobbin

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Interview 7 Mario L. Small . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mario L. Small

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Interview 8 Jeffrey C. Alexander . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jeffrey C. Alexander

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Interview 9 James A. Evans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . James A. Evans

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Interview 10 Andrew D. Abbott . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Andrew D. Abbott

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Interview 11 Dingxin Zhao . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Dingxin Zhao Interview 12 Arlie R. Hochschild . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 Arlie R. Hochschild

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Interview 13 Peter Shawn Bearman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 Peter Shawn Bearman Interview 14 Michèle Lamont . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135 Michèle Lamont Interview 15 Viviana A. Zelizer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 Viviana A. Zelizer Interview 16 Annette P. Lareau . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Annette P. Lareau Interview 17 Philip S. Gorski . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 Philip S. Gorski Interview 18 Randall Collins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 Randall Collins Interview 19 Michael Burawoy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189 Michael Burawoy Interview 20 Andrew G. Walder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203 Andrew G. Walder Afterword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213

Interview 1 Christopher Winship Christopher Winship

Profile: Christopher Winship is the Diker-Tishman Professor of Sociology at Harvard University and a member of the senior faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He is the past chair of both the Departments of Sociology at Harvard and Northwestern University. Prior to coming to Harvard in 1992, he was a Professor of Sociology, Statistics, and Economics at Northwestern. He has a B.A. in Sociology and Mathematics from Dartmouth College (1972) and a Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University (1977). He has been the editor of Sociological Methods and Research since 1995. He received the 2006 Paul Lazarsfeld Award from the Methodology Section of the American Sociological Association, which recognizes outstanding contributions over a career to sociological methodology. He is an internationally recognized expert in the use of statistical methods for causal inference with non-experimental data. His book co-authored with his former student Steve Morgan Counterfactuals and Causal Inference: Methods and Principles for Social Research has sold over 15,000 copies. It is often referred to as the “Bible” of causal inference. Interview February 11, 2017 William James Hall, Harvard University Professor, what is sociology in your eyes? What would you say if you have to give it a definition? I would say sociology is the study of society. It’s important because there are many institutions in society and partly we are interested in how they interrelate with each other. So, it’s important to not just study separate institution, like the economy or the government, politics, but rather to understand it at all in terms of the whole.

C. Winship (B) Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA © Peking University Press 2020 L. Chen (ed.), A Journey of Discovering Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6603-5_1

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Do you think it might be hard to reach an agreement on the definition? It might be hard to reach an agreement, but I am not sure if that is important. You know one of the reasons I became a sociologist is because it’s so broad and I am interested in many things. So, what an opportunity it is to study many things over one’s career. It is exciting! What do you think make sociology an independent discipline to be different from anthropology, psychology, statistics, economics? You were a professor of sociology, statistics and economics at Northwestern University. I think you are much more qualified to answer it. Economics is the study of, kind of, one side of institutional structures, and sociology potentially is the study of all institutional structures and their interrelationship, so that makes them quite different. Psychology is the study of how individual thinks and behaves, but sociology strongly believe you have to think about individual behavior in the context of other people’s behavior. There are a lot of branches in sociology, like economic sociology, political sociology, historical sociology, etc., So what do you think about the divisions in sociology? I think we have too many divisions, and resulted in a case where you only have, depending on how you count, you could say it 30, you could say it 72, a small number of people in each division working on common problems, and I think that hurts the discipline because if you really want to push science forward, you should have dozens of people trying to answer the same question, disagreeing with each other and building on each other’s work. So, I think we have reached the point where it’s not very healthy for the discipline because we have so many sub-fields. In what ways might sociology be better, integrated or more diverse? I think it would be better if we had, say, a dozen of sub-fields. There were so welldefined questions. If we look at political science, why do people vote? Why do they vote the way they do? We know a lot about that and keep making progress on it because so many people, so many political scientists, work on that question, or if we are thinking about labor economics, sort of what is the effect of more schooling on earnings, we’ve gotten sort of thousands of papers on this topic. I think that is how science grows and how ideas are contested and built on. What do you think about the relationship between qualitative and quantitative methods and the relationship between researchers who focus on qualitative and quantitative methods? I do both and I trained students in both. And I think of myself sort of one of the important people who ended the methods’ wars in sociology. Certainly, if you went back to the 1960s and 1970s, early 1980s, there was only one right way to think about the world in elite departments. Of course, some people thought it was the qualitative way and some people thought it was the quantitative way. I think that’s a

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real misunderstanding of how epistemology works for me. It’s much more like there are different kinds of telescopes that can detect light at different frequencies, so all that matter is the problem you are studying. So, I have trained a number of students who are quite famous ethnographers now, Mario Small is now a professor here at Harvard, he was my student. Here is his book. And then I had a number of students who are very famous quantitative scholars. Do you think there is a qualitative-quantitative divide in sociology right now? Not in the top departments, as you go down to weaker departments, yes. Do you think it has some impact on sociology? I think all method wars have huge impact because, instead of worrying about doing good research, everybody was fighting with each other. And I think particular people were seeing that there were insights and perspectives from a different methodology, which will help them think about what they were learning. Throughout graduate stats course, even though it was an advanced stats course, I am always putting out how these issues are just as important for qualitative research as they are for quantitative research. What is the use of sociology? What would you say about that? We all concerned about where societies are going, and sociology provides a kind of more macro prospective to try to think about where they are going. Sometimes social science researchers, sociologists particularly, have useful insights to give people about phenomena that are important from a policy perspective, and I think, in a more general sense, sociology pushes people, generally non-sociologists, to think in a broader and bigger way. We all live in a very small circumscribed world. Because the worlds we live in are quite different from the worlds other people live in. We need to understand the whole and sociology, I think, is very good in that respect. What do you think sociology would be like in 10 or 20 years? I think sociology could go a lot of different ways. When there was more political turmoil in society, students are often much more interested in sociology, and sociology becomes sort of lens for which to criticize society, issues of inequality. So, if we see a lot more student activism and sort of more activities on the left, that could vitalize sociology in important ways. In contrast, I think there are efforts in Washington to end funding for social science research, and sociology may be the first in line to have its funding ended, which could have very dramatic effects. I think we are also looking at a period where there are people on the Republican side who basically want to undermine the whole government data collection system and if that happens, certain kinds of important research are going to be very hard to do. So, I think, particularly with Trump election, does he get re-elected is going to be a huge question? How much of the various things people in congress would like to do actually are able to happen? We think of Trump a backlash, is there going to be a backlash to Trump? It will be interesting to watch, but I think it’s extraordinarily hard to predict.

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I really want to start next question from the very beginning when you began to study sociology and mathematics in Dartmouth College. Why did you chose to study sociology at that time? I grew up in a family where everybody was a therapist. My father was a psychiatrist, my mother was a psychiatric social worker, two of my three sisters were psychiatric social workers, my parents got divorced, my mother married another psychiatrist. And I loved thinking about people. I thought people in my family were wrong because they focused too much on the individuals as supposed to the broader context. I was also very good at math, so taking mathematics and sociology together seemed like a very natural thing to do. I should also say, I am moderately dyslexic so no way in the world I was going to choose English major or something like that. Do you think your research interests have a strong relationship with your personal life experience? Well, certainly, important parts of it is. The work I am doing on with the Boston Police, or the work I do with the Fourth World Movement,1 the efforts to develop Boston Area Research Initiative,2 I think those are very personally motivated. I think the statistical stuff, I have believed very strongly in the idea that people should learn how to think rigorously, and part of the reason why it’s good for people to learn statistics is just that’s a way to learn how to think rigorously. Of course, it may be more useful to say philosophy which can do the same thing. But you are actually thinking about data in the real world and at that level it’s also fun! Now I need you to go back to your college days. Do you think your professors played a key role in cultivating your interest in sociology? I think ‘cultivating’ is kind of the wrong word, it was more ‘supporting’. I went to a private college, and in my senior year, a friend and I, we did a whole survey of all the students in the school, then I walked into the Sociology Department at Dartmouth with this bulk of data thing, and I would say “I am here, where is the computer? I want to analyze my data.” So, Dartmouth was a wonderful place to be. James Davis, I actually went to study with him when I was an undergraduate, he was extremely supportive. He was also bringing mathematics in sociology together. There were people like Bob Norman (Robert Norman) in mathematics who also crossed over. So, I pretty much decided to be a sociologist by the time I was 16. So, it was their support for me to do this.

1 Fourth

World Movement is a network of people in poverty and those from other backgrounds who work in partnership towards overcoming the exclusion and injustice of persistent poverty. For more information: http: //www.loyno.edu/community/fourth-world-movement. 2 Boston Area Research Initiative (BARI) is a program seeks to spur original, cutting-edge research in the greater Boston area that both advances urban scholarship and improves public policy and practice. Central to this mission is an overarching effort to forge active and mutually beneficial relationships between the region’s researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and civic leaders. For more information: https://www.northeastern.edu/csshresearch/bostonarearesearchinitia tive/.

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How would you comment on the courses you took when you were in college? I had great experience in college. Dartmouth students as a whole are very interested in their courses. They are very intellectual. So anytime I showed up in a professor’s office and said, “I want to talk about my idea.” They said, “Wow, that is great! Please sit down!” (But I still want to know did you skip class when you were in college?) No. I would say, sort to say this, if I need 16 recommendations from professors to go to graduate school, I think I could have gotten 16 recommendations. I mean Dartmouth is not kind of a very research-oriented place, so much more teaching, there weren’t graduate students in sociology, so if you were a very smart and interesting undergraduate, wow, you know, they stuck with you. What kinds of books did you like most when you were in college? No problem with math and statistic books, which is still the route today. When I go on a vacation, my wife always laughs at me because I have a dozen of math and statistic books, no novels! (Yes, I just wanted to know if you like reading novels, history or something else?) Well, I think part of my issue is I do research in so many areas that the amount of reading I need to just keep up with my research areas takes up all my reading time. So, I really do not have a lot of time, maybe when I retire, I will start reading novels. My wife keeps giving me novels, “You should read this one, this is very good.” Ha-ha… I never read. Do you think some sociologists in history, like Max Weber, Karl Marx or Emile Durkheim, influenced you? Dartmouth was not a very theoretically oriented department, and in fact when I came to take the GRE, I kind of had to go to the professors and say, “I need to take a little course by myself because I am going to take these exams, and you guys didn’t have me reading any of these stuff.” So, they weren’t very influential to me. I am part of a small group that interested in pragmatism and pragmatism is a new theoretical perspective of sociology. Pragmatism certainly goes back to Dewey, William James, the hall we are in, Charles Sanders Pierce, and so that is where I am putting in most of my sort of theoretical interest. It’s thinking about pragmatism. And pragmatism is in some sense a very important break from the original big three. Since you became a professor of sociology, what do you want to teach to your students? Or what do you want them to learn from sociology? I think I want them to learn how to think about people rigorously. I want them to try to think broadly. I certainly want them to think about the importance of data but at the same time be skeptical of data, continue to be a critical consumer of data. I also want students to realize that they can both wear a scholar hat and a political hat, but those are two different hats. And you should know which hat you are wearing at which time, which is not that those two hats can’t support each other, but it’s not the same thing. One’s research shouldn’t just be in service of one’s politics or one’s politics in service of one’s research.

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How do you balance your time of teaching and doing research? And how do you think these two connect to each other? Poorly. But certainly, when you can teach about things that you are doing research on, that is terrific. And you know some of the papers I have written over years come directly from my teaching. One of the things you learn when you teach is you think you understand something well, and then when you have to explain to other people, you discover you do not understand so well. It’s kind of like you only know one face, you have to see all six faces of the cube. So, teaching, I think, can be enormously helpful in that way. One of the wonderful things about Harvard is we have a teaching system, so professors do not do a lot of grading, so that really gives us more time for doing research. But I think for all faculty, research universities’ issue of teaching versus researching are a real tension. We all like more time to do research, but I think teaching is helpful for us intellectually. Excepting teaching and doing research, I know you also had a lot of administrative work, you were the chair of sociology department, the director of both undergraduate and graduate studies. So how do you balance your family and work. I don’t know, you work 100 h a week, ha-ha… (You have huge pressure, right?) Yes, I mean it partly depends on whether you enjoy it or not. Some of those administrative positions I enjoyed a lot, not all. (Which one do you like most?) I think when I was the chair of Northwestern, I got to a place where a third of the department faculty was hiring, so that was very exciting because we hired a lot of very good, young sociologists. What struggles have you faced during your academic career? And how did you pull through it eventually? Well, I had a very famous struggle. I went to Harvard from B.A. to Ph.D. in three and a half years, I had three sole-author articles, and when I was on the market, I interviewed at 12 places, but nobody offered me a job because nobody understood what I was talking about because there was too much math. In fact, the only person who got excited was a mathematical economist who was excited about my work. So that was the kiss of death. Anyway, I didn’t become an assistant professor after I got a Ph.D., I did three years of post-doctoral work. One was in Wisconsin and two years in Chicago. When I was in Chicago, I was with very famous economist James Heckman, Nobel Laureates, 2000. And something was almost a fluke. Northwestern was known as a very qualitative department. So, economists there had decided to start an undergraduate program called mathematical methods of the social sciences, and the dean said to the sociology department, “I am willing to give you a faculty position, but the person has to be able to teach in the mathematical social science program.” So, voila, I got a job at Northwestern ad three years later I get tenure. I always tell my graduate students this story because I think it’s important for people to realize that there can be points in your life where you think you are totally a failure. And, you know, looking forward is far from clear, but things will open up and change. When I was doing a post doc, the notion that I would be a tenured

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professor of Harvard was like beyond my dreams. I couldn’t ever imagine that, I was hoping I could be a professor someplace, ha-ha… Do you still remember how did you feel when you first published your article? I think it was in 1977, which was the last year of your doctoral degree. That’s right. The paper was accepted, I think, a year before that. (So, before that, you did not publish any paper?) Yes, the paper actually came out of my undergraduate senior thesis, (How did you feel?) I was delighted, I was very excited. (I want to ask you this question because in China it was not easy, so I want to know you’re feeling about that.) Well, it’s not easy here, either. The American Journal of Sociology spent two years with my article and they decided not to publish it. So, then I had to go and find another journal. That was very frustrating. So, the first one is always a big deal. You have been the editor of Sociological Methods & Research since 1995. Do you find any change in the quantitative research methodology in social sciences? One of the important things is Sociological Methods & Research did not have the word “qualitative” in it, so it used to be kind of exclusively quantitative journal. But I worked really very hard over years to make sure it’s broad, so it has qualitative methods of all different types, even historical methods. I think that was part of the ways that I fought against the methods’ wars. You know, here we actually look at the impact factor of the year, Sociological Methods and Research keeps publishing articles of all kinds of methodology. What advice would you like to give to sociology students? Well, unfortunately I think there is enormous amount of pressure to publish in graduate school. You know when I came out with three published articles, that was unheard of. Nobody was doing it. But today there are a lot of pressure. I guess my advice is try to not get caught up in the publishing rat race, try to produce very high-quality work, because part of the fun of being an academic is getting to think deeply for a long time about hard problems, and I think publishing must perish, or push against that, make that difficult. Certainly, you want to have a successful career, and when you come up for tenure, you can’t sit there and say “I am still writing the book, thinking hard about it.” But on the other hand, what most satisfying is publishing an article or book that has some real insight in it, publishing something that really change how people think about things. We’ve gotten in a crazy world where the number of journals just keep growing and growing. A huge difference between today and when I was a graduate student is when I was a graduate student, if you wanted to do research on something, you would literally decide you should sit down and read everything that had been written about that topic, but today you wouldn’t be able to start the research for ten years because stuff being published come out so fast that you would never get on top of that. So, I think in many ways that there is much, much, too much to get published really does not make any sort of important contribution.

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So how can we change this situation? Well, I think the internet has a lot of potential so I’ve been trying to get graduate students for years, maybe you want to do this, I want to have a trip adviser website that is for books and articles on sociology. I want things to have from one to five stars, so you could choose the topic and say, “Tell me all the five stars, I will go and read the five stars, I won’t go and read the one star.” I think we are in a position now where it’s a little bit like coming to a city, and you want to know which restaurant to eat, and nobody gives you any advice, and there are hundreds of restaurants, thousands maybe, and you can’t go and eat every one of them, so things like, the internet, I think, can be very helpful to tell us like you want to go to this kind of restaurant, here is the one that has five stars and here is the one has four, and you can even read the reviews. I would also like to see reviews of journals or issues, the same way that reviews are done of books, I think that would make editors a little bit more careful about what they published. Additionally, I think the process was allowed to happen really fast, and you know, we would have a lot of feedback about what is worth a piece of research, what isn’t. I published a comment on an article that was published in 2008 last year with some other people. So, nine years, you know, It should take nine months. I think there is a lot of potential on the internet. It’s going to take a while, and we need some entrepreneurs, intellectual entrepreneurs to sort of make that happen. My last question is how has being a sociologist changed or influenced you? Well, as I said I decided to be a sociologist when I was 16, it kind of came out of a crazy family where we started talking about people since I was five years old. I think it’s hard for me to say it’s changed my life. It was kind of almost like I, at a very young age, was already becoming a sociologist. So, an interesting question would be, what would happen if I didn’t become a sociologist. (Yeah, I would love to ask that too.) So, I would probably got into consulting companies like McKinsey, Boston Consulting or something, l love thinking about organizations and how they work and how to make them work better. When I came out of undergraduate, that was early 1970s during the Vietnam War, I had hair all the way along here, big beard, I will show you the picture later, so the idea that you will do anything that had to do with business was out of the question. but you know that would have been interesting. Do you think sociology makes you feel happy? Lots of time it’s very enjoyable, parts of it, they’re not, I mean like most people find reading hard. We have the expression that all research is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. The 10% inspiration is really fun, but the perspiration part, uh! Ha-ha… Right? Just like what you are doing now, you have a great idea, you love to think about it but now you have to churn it into a book, that is going to take you an amazingly long time. Good luck to you!

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Introduction of Related Characters Paul Lazarsfield (1901–1976) was an American sociologist, founder of Institute for Applied Sociology, Columbia University. Lazarsfield is considered to be an outstanding representative of empirical research because he has made tremendous contributions in statistical surveys, group interviews, and situation analysis. The famous person of the same period was Robert K. Merton. Lazarsfield and Merton were hired to Columbia University in the same year. The former became a famous method expert and the latter became a famous theorist. James Davis (1929–2016) was an American sociologist, he is a pioneer in applying quantitative statistical methods to social science research and teaching. In 1972, Davis, who served as the director of the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), established the National Data Project for Social Science Research and the General Social Survey (GSS), and subsequently co-founded the International Social Survey Project (ISSP). GSS is the most used data by sociology in addition to census data in the United States. In addition to teaching at the University of Chicago, Davis has also taught at Yale University, Dartmouth College and Harvard University. Max Weber (1864–1920) was a German sociologist, philosopher, jurist, and political economist. Weber is best known for his thesis combining economic sociology and the sociology of religion, elaborated in his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, in which he proposed that ascetic Protestantism was one of the major “elective affinities” associated with the rise in the Western world of marketdriven capitalism and the rational-legal nation-state. Weber is often cited, with Émile Durkheim and Karl Marx, as among the three founders of sociology. Karl Marx (1818–1883) was a philosopher, economist, historian, political theorist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist. His two most well-known are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and the three-volume Das Kapital. His work has since influenced subsequent intellectual, economic and political history. Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) as a French sociologist. His first major sociological work was The Division of Labour in Society (1893). In 1895, he published The Rules of Sociological Method and set up the first European department of sociology, becoming France’s first professor of sociology. In 1898, he established the journal L’Année Sociologique. He formally established the academic discipline and—with Karl Marx and Max Weber—is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science. John Dewey (1859–1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey is one of the primary figures associated with the philosophy of pragmatism and is considered one of the fathers of functional psychology. William James (1842–1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist who was also trained as a physician. The first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States. James was one of the leading thinkers of the late nineteenth century and is believed by many to be one of the most influential philosophers the United

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States has ever produced, while others have labeled him the “Father of American psychology”. Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist who is sometimes known as “the father of pragmatism”. Today he is appreciated largely for his contributions to logic, mathematics, philosophy, scientific methodology, and semiotics, and for his founding of pragmatism.

Interview 2 Peter V. Marsden Peter V. Marsden

Profile: Peter V. Marsden is the Edith and Benjamin Geisinger Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. He received his B.A. in sociology and history at Dartmouth College in 1973 and his M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Chicago in 1975 and 1979 respectively. He came to Harvard in 1987 after teaching for ten years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he also held administrative assignments as Associate Chair and Special Assistant to the Dean. At Harvard, he served as Chair of the Sociology Department between 1992 and 1998 and in 2002–03. He was Chair of the Program and Admissions Committee for the Ph.D. Program in Organizational Behavior between 2000 and 2003, and again between 2005 and 2010. From 2011 until 2015 he served as Dean of Social Science in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Professor Marsden’s research interests are centered on social organization, especially formal organizations and social networks. He has ongoing interests in social science methodology and in the sociology of medicine and involved in the ongoing data collection efforts of the General Social Survey since 1976. Interview February 18, 2017 William James Hall, Harvard University Professor, what is sociology in your eyes? What would you like to define it? Well, sociology at least as practice in the United States is a pretty broad field, it has a lot of different facets. My own effort to define sociology for students is that it’s the study of groups. Now some of us study very concrete groups, like organizations, someone, more diffuse ones, like social movements, and then others will study the behavior of aggregates of people, people who share common characteristics like country of origin or on gender and so forth. And I think what sociologists have in common is that they are, by and large, studying characteristics of groups rather P. V. Marsden (B) Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA © Peking University Press 2020 L. Chen (ed.), A Journey of Discovering Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6603-5_2

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than characteristics of individuals and what the group means for the individual. So certainly, sociologists are really largely concerned with questions of the relationship between the group and individual which are two-way relationships, individuals create groups but they are also shaped by groups. That is my take on what sociology is. What do you think make sociology an independent discipline to be different from psychology, anthropology or other social science? I think just distinguishing sociology and psychology is probably the most straightforward of the questions that you just asked. Psychology largely is about individuals, and increasingly in the United States, at least, psychology is really about the brain, and many psychologists are really studying physical properties of the brain and then how it shapes the mind within the brain. Now there are social psychologists and some of them are based in psychology departments, many of them are focused on questions of the way in which an individual’s mind and brain work in the context of group. But the emphasis is very much there on the individual. I think the distinction between sociology and anthropology is a harder one to draw and the fact that it’s a harder one to draw is evident in the fact that in many American universities, sociology and anthropology are part of one department. It’s not so at Harvard but at many colleges and universities in the United States, you will find one department of sociology and anthropology. I think there are some distinctions of practice between anthropology and sociology. So at least in the United States, anthropologists will typically use more qualitative methods of inquiry, sociologists use a whole raft of different methods of inquiry. My own work in sociology is primarily realized on quantitative methods. Many colleagues in sociology here do very important work using quantitative methods as well. And anthropology, I think, you have many more people who do exclusively qualitative work and many fewer who do exclusively quantitative work. I think it’s also a case that anthropologists, at least what we call social anthropologists in the United States, we often do cross-cultural work, they would often go and engage themselves, sometimes in small and isolated places, but now we can find many anthropologists who would go to African or Eastern Asian countries and get to know a community in depth through field work. And that is probably a less common research strategy in sociology and there are some theoretical distinctions too, but these are some of the distinctions of practice. I think sociology, with respect to other social sciences, sociology is, as I said, to begin with, has quite a wide span. In contrast to economics, economics has a particular model for thinking about the ways in which people negotiate social life with cost–benefit considerations being a principal, a central argument, whereas I don’t think there is any one sort of theoretical agent that is common to sociology. And with respect to political science, political science is about politics, so it’s largely, not exclusively, but largely confined to one institutional area whereas sociology spans many institutional areas or areas that are not particularly institutionalized. Social movement is certainly take and study of much non-institutionalized political behavior. And certainly, there are political scientists who study social movements, but I think the center of gravity of political science is the study of institutionalized political behavior.

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Is it because of its special subjects, perspective methods, and theory that make it different? All these are features of sociology. Few of the methods in sociology are strictly used by sociologists only. There are some methods that have gotten a lot of support from sociologists but now these are largely diffused across the social sciences. So, I think in the United States we see an awful lot of interdisciplinary work at this point where many of the disciplines are beginning to blend together in some ways. For example, one sub-field of sociology is political sociology, but political sociology intersects with some kinds of comparative politics and institutional and political science, and those two groups will go to different meetings, and sometimes they will cite different authors, but their perspective things overlap to a significant degree. I think many of the social science disciplines are still distinct disciplines, still distinct to institutional organizations but are growing together in terms of subject matter. And I think this usually enriches what people do. There are a lot of branches in sociology, like economic sociology, historical sociology, political sociology. What do you think about those divisions? And in what ways might sociology be better, more diverse or integrated? I am sure everybody has different answers about what would make sociology better. Sociology during the time which I practiced it, I am in my fortieth year of professional sociologist, so I have been doing this for a while. It’s become much more theoretical diverse, it’s become much more interdisciplinary and its subject matter has expanded a great deal. In the United States, in the 1950s and 1960s, there were sort of an ascendancy of theoretical paradigm known as functionalism, Talcott Parsons is a very famous sociologist who spent most of his career in this department here, was part of that theoretical view, and that wasn’t the only one in sociology at that time, but it was more of a dominant theoretical center than we have now. And now we have, I think I can’t remember, 51 different sections of the American Sociological Association and so forth, and some can critique that on the grounds that’s sort of too dispersed that sociologists don’t have any common language to one another. There is certainly some truth to that. I think there is sort of less theoretical unity. But trade it off against that we have sort of a lot of deeper research and studies of the particular areas. It’s not unusual, I think, in disciplines for them to become more specialized over time as they grow and as you develop in depth knowledge of an area that make it hard to specialize in several at once. What do you think about the relationship between qualitative and quantitative methods in sociology, and the relationship between researchers who focus on qualitative and quantitative methods? Do you think there is a qualitative and quantitative divide in sociology? If so, how does that affect the discipline? There certainly is a quantitative and qualitative divide in sociology. People talk about it enough that, at least, the socially constructive divide. I have always tended to think about qualitative and quantitative methods as different ways of learning about the world, that learn about different aspects of it and by and large contribute and inform one another. Now there certainly are partisans of each camp who think that their way

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of doing sociology is the only effective way of learning things. Certainly, if anybody looks at the work I’ve done, it primarily relies on quantitative material, and I think a lot can be learned in that way. However, I think there’s lots of different ways of learning and certainly the kind of things that my work has relied on surveys and other kinds of quantitative data don’t yield the depth of understanding that people who do in depth on structured interviews or extended field work in the community, they develop a level of texture on understanding that the data that one uses in quantitative work simply can’t yield. So, I think one of the most encouraging things in recent sociology is the development of sophisticated mix methods approach, just inquiry that, don’t just use both sides of methods but try to use them in a way that the qualitative work informs the quantitative work and vice versa, and this is designed into the research plan. And these are efforts I think not just to compromise, but to capture the best that both of these approaches can bring to us. And frankly it’s something that I think this department is pretty good at. This department was one of the first in the United States, may be not the very first, but one of the first to require a qualitative method course for all of the students who take graduate degree here. And one of the things we sort of aspire for our students is that they would make decisions about what methodology to use based on what question they want to answer and what the best way of assembling information about that question is. What is the use of sociology? And what sociology would be like in ten or twenty years? I don’t know what I can say about what sociology would be like in ten or twenty years. I am not sure I am enough of a forecaster to have a useful opinion about that. What’s the use of sociology? It used to be, I think, that sociology was really only suitable for people who wanted to be sociologists and teach other people how to be sociologists. I don’t think that is any longer a case in the United States. Certainly, a lot of people who become sociologists practice sociology in universities. But the sorts of skills that sociologists assemble, particularly for data collection and data analysis, but not exclusively for data collection and data analysis, are suitable for doing a large amount of different kinds of social research. Many sociologists will work for consulting companies or for research companies that will monitor trends, say, in illegal drug use or legal drug use over period time, monitor population trends, and how they bear on social, urban policy and things like these. So, capacity to conduct social research at a high level in a society that is largely centered around information and where information about the society is important is the place where lots of sociologists are engaged now. Why do you choose to be a sociologist? I want to start the question from the beginning because I know you studied sociology as well as history when you were in Dartmouth College. So why did you choose to study sociology at that time? Did your parents influence you? Or you made the decision all by yourself? I certainly made the decision by myself. Although in my family, quite a number of my relatives were teachers, not all of them, my father was not a teacher, my father

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worked in the business world. But many of my other relatives were teachers of one kind or another. So being involved in education is something that was not unfamiliar to me. But this was not anything my parents prompted me to do. I’ve talked about this recently with a number of students who asked me a similar question. I came to sociology in sort of a serendipitous way which I don’t think is an unusual path, which is not a pre-planned one. I was a high school student who very much enjoyed mathematics and succeeded academically with mathematics. I got to college and began taking mathematics courses, but I really was looking for opportunities to make what I consider to be meaningful applications of those kinds of skills, and as a second-year student in college, I found my way into a course on basic survey analysis, they required those kinds of skills but also engaged what in the early 70s in the United States were really important social issues, meaningful social issues, and I found that combination very attractive. I later thought it would be also good to have more of a grounding in history, and by the way, one of my history subjects happened to be Chinese history, so I learned a good deal of pre-70s’ China at that time. But sociology just turned out to be a good match for the things I was interested together with some the skills that I could bring. And I did very much like the idea of being inside in university as a type of place to work. Do you think some of your professors played a key role in cultivating your interest in sociology? Absolutely, no question about it. My most influential undergraduate teacher was a man named James Davis who later became a colleague when I join the Harvard faculty and so, but he had more to do with me becoming a sociologist than any other person. He was the teacher in the Survey Analysis course that I mentioned to you a few minutes ago. How would you comment on the courses you took when you were in college? Were they all very interesting, helpful, or sometimes boring? I am not going to say that anybody’s course was boring, but some were more interesting and helpful than others. (So I want to know did you also skip class when you were in Dartmouth College?) Well, yes, I would say from time to time, although I like school, I mean, I have been in school every year since I went to school at age 5, so I have been continuously in school for quite a few years at this point. I like school, and the classroom is an interesting and stimulating setting for me by and large. I would not say I went to every class I ever did but I went most of them and I paid attention too. Which sociologist’s book did you read a lot when you were in college? And why did you like reading his or her books? Well, the book that I read first, that I really retain and still have, is a book called Elementary Survey Analysis, that was an influential book. Another book by a Harvard sociologist George Homans called The Human Group was an important book for me and a second influential course that I took on Small Groups, and actually Small Groups was the course in the early 70 s where I first encountered what is growing

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into the field of social network and network analysis, and The Human Group was the sort of theoretical synthesis that George Homans wrote about in a number of studies in small groups conducted by sociologists and anthropologists, and some of the network imagery came out of that was very influential on me. Since You became a professor of sociology, what do you want to teach to your students? Or what do you want them to learn from sociology? Most of my teaching has involved conveying research skills. I teach courses in quantitative methods, I teach courses in social networks. In those kinds of courses, I’m concerned that people learn the skills and methods that will equipment them to analyze and answer the questions that they want to address. In other kinds of courses, I am teaching a course on organizational analysis now, I am teaching that course to undergraduates. One of my goals is simply for them to become familiar with things and the world that they all sometimes encounter, which would be helpful to know about earlier rather than later. I think most sociologists try to convey an appreciation of the importance of being in a group as opposed to being an isolated individual. Individuals are very observable, very concrete, groups are a little less directly on the surface of things, so I convey an appreciation for collective and group level phenomenon is a general objective. I think almost all sociologists have some stake to convey. Your research interests are focused on social organization, especially formal organizations and social networks, and ongoing interests in social science methodology and in the sociology of medicine, so how did you gradually build up your research interests? I don’t think all of that kind of thing is entirely planned. (But they are connected to each other.) Yeah, they are broadly connected to one another. But, if you told me 40 years ago that I would be studying the sociology of health and medicine, I probably would ask you why would you thought about that? Because it certainly wasn’t obvious to me at that time. So, in some fields, I deliberately sort out quantitative methods training. Network analysis in the study of social network was really a field that was information when I was undergoing my graduate training. It was an exciting place to be, and there were a whole bunch of unsolved problems that one could become involved in exploring and hopefully contributing to solutions for. So, I think some of that was somewhat deliberate and then other opportunities. The medicine sorts of things came up by virtue of the fact that I had some contacts and experiences here that put me in touch with people who were studying these and we discovered that some of my interests had something in common with some of theirs, and so we sort of undertook an experiment to see if that would be a useful commendation and it was for a while. So, some of them, I think Robert Merton, a very famous and important Columbia sociologist, spoke about the rule of serendipity and discovery and so forth, and there is certainly some serendipity in almost everybody’s career. It’s easy to look back on it and say there was a grand design to all but the truth is there is certain amount of contingency and opportunity that you just happen to capitalize on.

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How do you balance your time of teaching and doing research? And how do the two connect to each other in your opinion? When I am teaching, I prioritize teaching because I feel like I have a responsibility to the students who are spending a fair fraction of their life. So, for me at least during the time when the semester is under way, teaching is the priority. And then you fit the research in as best as one can around that. Of course, one has summers and sabbatical times and in those times the research emphasis will become more prominent. So that’s how I sort of said about balancing those two things. I think we are fortunate at Harvard in that teaching and research do intersect to a fair degree. We are often able to teach graduate level courses at which one wants to explore and work with students in exploring new areas, and so teaching and research certainly are not polar opposites for me anyway. I found that this is not an uncommon thing that one never understands something as well as when one teaches it because to try to explain something to another person, you have to understand it pretty well. And so sometimes one’s research is really informed by the close study of what one is doing in the classroom. Study something together with bright undergraduates, bright graduate students, and you come with it thinking about it in different ways. And it’s certainly been a case that from time to time I have an idea and I later develop it into a research paper that crosses my mind, clarifies itself in the course of teaching something. This is very fortune with the caliber students that I have been privileged to teach through my professional career. Except teaching and doing research, I know you also had a lot of administrative work, like the Chair of Sociology Department and the Dean of Social Science of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, so how do you balance your work and family? That’s actually a challenge for almost everybody whether they got administrative work or not. These are very privileged jobs because most people in college teaching really enjoy what they are doing, they are not doing it just because they get paid, of course not a bad thing that you get paid. But for most people, the boundaries between work and play are less clear than in other kinds of jobs. For me, I try to set fairly clear boundaries particularly in the evenings between any kind of work life and family life because I believe both are important, but it has to be somewhat deliberate. And I think some sociologists refer to different kinds of greedy institutions that will take all of you if you give it, you have to resist that a little bit. It’s also a matter of setting some personal priorities which people set it in different ways. But I do think that establishing some kind of boundary about when is enough is enough. Certainly, there are times of a year, particularly at the beginning and end of semesters at which the demands of the job just have a natural rhythm of being heavy. But fortunately, there are other times of the year where that balance is different, and one has to be conscious of that and sort of try to pay back some other time that has been stolen from family and friends during the heavy times.

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So what struggles have you faced during your academic career? How did you pull through it eventually? I have been pretty fortunate. It’s the truth. I mean everybody has struggles in the sense that you have problem that is hard to solve and everybody confronts personal crisis during life. But to be honest, I have been pretty lucky. I have worked at wonderful supported universities both here at Harvard and the University of North Carolina that really did a lot to support my career. I have had personal challenges with family around health and other kinds of things, but not an unusual number and by and large I have been pretty fortunate. Those are things that’s hard to plan for so you have to figure out how to deal with them largely in the moment because you don’t have a whole lot of notice when a lot of those things are going to come up, then they come up for everyone, we all have to try to cope. I think, by and large, I have been fortune because I have institutions that have tried to support me under those certain circumstances. Let’s talk about your book Social Trends in American Life: Findings from the General Social Survey since 1972, which was published in 2012 and won the American Association for Public Opinion Research Book Award. Why did you want to write a book like this? And what is the story behind the book? The story behind that book is the story of the General Social Survey1 in the United States. You kindly said that I wrote the book, but the truth is that I assembled the book. I wrote several of the chapters in that book, but it is a collective work. And the book celebrates, what I think of, as a remarkable research project in the United States that began in 1972, and is now in its 45th to 46th year of operation in which it’s an ambitious effort to track social trends prospectively instead of thinking about them by looking back, so the project has surveyed representative sample of Americans for this length of time, every year in the beginning and now every two years. And the important innovation is to ask the same set of questions by and large throughout that time. And this is a remarkable project. It was actually conceived and begun by the teacher I mentioned James Davis. And the reason that I put in the effort to assemble that book was that the project has supported an enormous amount of research over this period of time on a whole bunch of different topics. It studies race relations, gender roles, the way in which people use their free time, work, happiness, the topics are quite numerous, and there are over 20 thousand papers and articles that have drawn on the data the General Social Survey has assembled. There was no single publication that try to highlight the value of this work and particularly the fact that we can trace almost all these things systematically over when the book was published about a 35-year-period, and I thought it was a significant project for American social science and that there ought to be something that highlight its contributions, and rather than trying to write something like that as an individual which require a much 1 The General Social Survey (GSS) is a program that gathers data on contemporary American society

in order to monitor and explain trends and constants in attitudes, behaviors, and attributes since 1972 It is the only full-probability, personal-interview survey designed to monitor changes in both social characteristics and attitudes currently being conducted in the United States.

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broader subject matter knowledge than I have, what I thought to do was to assemble subject matter experts who have worked with the General Social Survey in these different fields over the years and asked them each to write something about the trends in their subject matter area over these time drawing on the General Social Survey data. I was really quite gratified when the American Association for Public Opinion Research recognized it in the way they did. What was the major problem you faced when you assembled the book? As book goes fairly smoothly, the big problem in assembling any collective work is getting the last contributor to finish and complete their contribution. One of the difficulties was that, I have done certain amount of editing of this and other works, one doesn’t want the last contribution coming so late that the first ones to arrive have to be rewritten, because they have been sitting around for five and eight years. In this case, everybody’s contribution arrives within about two years of one another, so we were pretty fortunate. But this is a real problem in collective work and I have to confess sometimes I am the last one to send in what I have been asked to contribute. So, I think that is the biggest challenge I ran into in that case. I chose people who knew their areas and who have successful written using the General Social Survey before and fortunately the General Social Survey database is well enough curated that there are no sorts of technical difficulties with the General Social Survey, so a lot of the difficulties that one confronts in a collected work were avoided for this one. Which, if any audiences beyond the academy, do you think sociologists should try to reach and why? And what’s the best way to do it? Well, I am probably not the best person to answer that question. Most of my writing has been oriented toward the academy. I think that is an important role, and it’s not the only role that sociology work does. But there is a lot of emphasis in the broader discipline of sociology now, I am writing for the educated public, and I think that’s well-placed. I have colleagues who are extremely effective in writing books that are written in accessible language, so there is no sort of private jargon that is used by social scientists alone. Jargon is not just to get in people’s way, but it certainly does serve a scientific function when the communication is to the professional group, but it’s not an effective way of reaching people who are concerned with sort of meaning and message of the research when it goes beyond the academy. I think there are certainly people who are communicating effectively in magazine type, blog type, publications, there are people who are writing books, who are orienting them to not just professionals but to the educated, to the educated public, and these all are effective. It’s not really the kind of work that I personally chosen to do, but it is, I think, being practiced with some substantial effectiveness by sociologists now. Something that I think we probably don’t give ourselves enough push toward is to really focus on the quality of writing, and it’s sometimes important to learn how to write something short, although it’s usually more work to write something short than to write something long, which is probably why more of us don’t do it.

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In your experience, do American and Chinese sociology students differ? And what advice would you give to sociology students from both countries to study sociology well in your experience? I don’t know if I know enough about the general Chinese student to have an opinion about whether the American and Chinese students are different. We do have a number of graduate students studying here from China and also from Chinese-speaking countries who I have not found them to be markedly different from students who are native to the United States. I think, it’s, to me, remarkable how effectively the Chinese students who study here can speak and write in English I could never make the comparable accomplishment in Chinese, so I really admire what these students do, but I really don’t have any firm distinction I would draw at this point between Chinese and American students. I don’t have any particular insights about what students should do except study hard. Life-long learning is really important, one must be ready, as a graduate student, to learn what you need to do to become a professional, but to be a professional means that you are going to have to keep learning, it’s not possible to just go to graduate school and get trained and then go practice for a few years. If you go to practice for a few years, you are going to be outperformed by the younger people very soon because they are going to be learning new things and so learning how to learn and learning how to teach yourself is, I think, a really important skill and really important disposition. The other thing I will say is that it’s really important to study things that really interest you that capture your attention. Some people try to study what they think is fashionable or popular, that’s fine if that is a subject that you can really devote yourself to. But if you are just doing it because you think it’s the profitable thing to do, you probably are not going to be very good at it. So, follow your heart in terms of choosing the topics that you want to study. My last question is when did you make the decision to be a sociologist and how has being a sociologist changed or influenced you? I don’t know I can really answer either of those questions. I think I told you some of the pathways that led me to become a sociologist, but I’d have a difficult time of doing psychoanalysis that would answer the question of why. I knew midway through college that I really wanted to stay in the university, and I could have perhaps found several different places to stay in the universities that would’ve been rewarding, but sociology has certainly been among them, so I don’t know that I have much more insights to put in beyond that. (But do you think sociology make you feel happy?) Sociology has always engaged my attention, and that’s a real privilege of working in the university that you are constantly stimulated and you are exposed to stimulating people and you are exposed to new work and you are really encouraged to do new things, so you don’t get bored, you shouldn’t get bored anyway because you have all kinds of opportunities to do novel things, some subjects that sociologists study are not very pleasant. I mean there are some pretty horrible aspects to social life. It doesn’t always make you feel good to learn the things that you learned. So, I won’t always say that I am always happy, but I am rarely bored and that is a wonderful thing, that is a real privilege in this day and age.

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Introduction of Related Characters Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) was an American sociologist of the classical tradition, best known for his social action theory and structural functionalism. Parsons is considered one of the most influential figures in the development of sociology in the 20th century. His students Robert Bella, Clifford Gertz, Edward Laumann, Robert Merton, Neil Smelser, Randall Collins, etc. all had a profound impact on the development of sociology in their fields. George Homans (1910–1989) was an American Sociologist, founder of Behavioral Sociology and the Social Exchange Theory. Homans is best known for his research in social behavior and his works including The Human Group, Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms. Robert Merton (1910–2003) was an American sociologist. He spent most of his career teaching at Columbia University. He is considered a founding father of modern sociology while also gaining a status for the work he contributed to criminology. Merton developed notable concepts such as “unintended consequences”, the “reference group”, and “role strain”, but is perhaps best known for the terms “role model” and “self-fulfilling prophecy”. In 1994 he was awarded the National Medal of Science for his contributions to the field and for having founded the sociology of science.

Interview 3 Mary C. Waters Mary C. Waters

Profile: Mary C. Waters is the John L. Loeb Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. She specializes in the study of immigration, inter-group relations, the formation of racial and ethnic identity among the children of immigrants, the challenges of measuring race and ethnicity, and the longitudinal impact of natural disasters. She received a B.A. in Philosophy from Johns Hopkins University in 1978, an M.A. in Demography (1981), and an M.A. (1983) and Ph.D. in Sociology (1986) from the University of California at Berkeley. She has taught at Harvard University since 1986. She was chair of the Sociology Department from 2001–2005 and acting chair, Spring 2007 and 2013–2014. Waters is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2006) and the National Academy of Sciences (2010). Interview March 7, 2017 William James Hall, Harvard University What is sociology in your eyes? And what would you define it? Sociology is the study of human societies, and it includes many of the topics that the other social sciences cover as well, but there is a belief among sociologists that society exists apart from the economy and the government and culture, it includes all of those things but society exists as itself. Do you think it might be hard to reach an agreement on the definition? I don’t know, I would want to hear the other people’s agreement. Sociology is a very welcoming discipline that it covers many different topics, so I think it’s gotten room for many different definitions as well. M. C. Waters (B) Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

© Peking University Press 2020 L. Chen (ed.), A Journey of Discovering Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6603-5_3

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What do you think make sociology an independent discipline to be different from anthropology, philosophy, psychology? I know you studied philosophy when you were an undergraduate student and then you studied sociology, so could you tell us the difference. Yeah, I think there is a perspective that sociologists bring to studying all of these different aspects of society that involves the relationship between the individual and the group, and believes that the group is more than just the sum of individual actions and decisions. So, I think that’s probably the perspective that sociologists have that’s somewhat different than other social sciences, but there is a great deal of overlap as well. There are lot of branches in sociology, like economic sociology, historical sociology, political sociology. What do you think about those divisions? And in what ways might it be better, integrated or more diverse? I think probably in recent decades there has been a splintering of sociology into different subgroups and different specializations. At the same time, I think some of the barriers between sociology and other disciplines are breaking down. So, it’s interesting that there isn’t as much coherence to the whole discipline of sociology as there was before, but I think that’s also true across all of the social sciences. What do you think about the relationship between qualitative and quantitative methods in sociology? I think both methods are very useful. I use both quantitative and qualitative methods in my own research. I think the method needs to match the question, and so I think they are very complementary. And I think most things we are interested in can benefit from using both methods together. What is the use of sociology? How would you say about that? There are many different kinds of uses. So, one is just to think critically and analytically about the world around you. The second is to inform social policy to understand how you might intervene society to make things better. And then I also think that sociological methods and understanding are useful in things like business and marketing and nonprofit organizations. I think students who study sociology as undergraduates can go on in their careers in very different kinds of settings and still use their sociological training. What do you think sociology would be like in ten or twenty years? Aha, predictions are not easy to make. I think the rapid growth of all different kinds of data and analysis techniques; statistical techniques mean that we will continue to learn new things we can’t even imagine what the questions are about collective social life. And I also think that sociological analysis will remain incredibly important for some of the major challenges facing mankind such as globe migration which is happening around the world or climate change. There will be issues that come out at the intersection between the natural sciences and social sciences. All of those will require sociological analysis to understand both why individuals act the way they

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do but how those actions come together to create constrains and opportunities at the collective level. How do you come to be a sociologist? I know you studied philosophy first at Johns Hopkins, and then sociology, demography at U.C., Berkeley, and then you got your doctoral degree of sociology. You didn’t actually study sociology at the very beginning, but you finally choose to be a sociologist. Could you tell me your story about that? Yes, I majored in philosophy in university because at that university it was the major that had the least number of requirements so that you could take courses in many different disciplines which I was interested in. But my job that I got to work my way through college was in the sociology department, doing research, so I learned on the job about how to conduct research projects and work just as a research assistant and became interested in sociological research in that way. When you chose your major, did your parents influence you or you made the decision by yourself? I made the decision by myself. I am the oldest of eight children. I was the first to go to college and to leave home, so my parents just thought whatever I did was going to be fine. But do you think their occupation has any influence on you when you were young and when you chose your major? My parents’ occupations? Probably yes. Because my mother was a college professor, and my father was a lawyer, so I knew about being a professor and I knew about what it was like to get a Ph.D. I knew that I was interested in either becoming an academic or doing something having to do with making the world a better place. Now I need you to go back to your college days with me because I want to know something about your student life. Do you think your professor played a very key in cultivating your interest in sociology? Yes, I had some excellent teachers when I was an undergraduate. I studied with a professor named Richard Pfeffer who was a political scientist who studied China actually. And one of the first courses I took was a course, it was in the 1970s and it was called Changing China. He had been one of the first people to go to China after it opened up. And we read some amazing books, and I think that eventually led to studying sociology because it opened my eyes to how a society could be very different from my own. My professor also spoke fluent Chinese and had studied it for a long time, so we learned a lot about the different history of the two societies, etc. What was your favorite course when you were an undergraduate student? Well, that was one of my favorite classes. I also took many philosophy classes that I really enjoyed on the reasoning and I think that helped me very much throughout my life in terms of thinking about how to reason through questions that were important

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and be logical about answering questions. I also took anthropology course with professor Sidney Mintz who was one of the experts on Caribbean societies and many years later I wrote a book on West India immigrants coming to the U.S., and his work, he was one of the first anthropologists who studied that field, so I got back to get in touch with him and talked about that with him. Did students who studied actually at Johns Hopkins also skip class at that time? Ha-ha, skip class, occasionally yes. In fact, I skipped class a lot when I was studying calculus because it meant very early in the morning and I would stay up very late in the night so I couldn’t get up for class, so my worst grade in college was that first semester, freshman year, because I slept and I didn’t go to class, which was very stupid thing to do. What kinds of books did you like to read? I like to read everything. I like to read novels, and also a lot of nonfiction books. (How about sociology? Can you name some sociology books?) Yes. When in graduate school, every sociologist read Marx, Weber and Durkheim, so I read everything by Marx, Weber and Durkheim which was very influential. I read some qualitative research by Arlie Hochschild who was a professor at Berkeley when I was there, and work by Neil Smelser who was a theorist coming out of Talcott Parsons School of sociology. I read work by Michael Burawoy who studied manufactory and labor, he is a Marxist sociologist. So, I read quite widely, I think. When You read Marx, Weber or Durkheim, was that easy for you when you first read their books? They were the books that were actually close to what I have been studying as a philosopher, so they were relatively easy for me. Because I had read a lot Marx in college and so I read more deeply in graduate school, but that work was easier for me than studying statistics and demography which I also did, but I think the reading of the theory came more easily. Since you became a professor of sociology, what do you want to teach to your students? Or what do you want them to learn from sociology? You were named as Harvard College Professor to honor your excellence in teaching. So, I really want to know your answer to that. I think the most important thing for students to learn is to think deeply and critically and to not just assume that what they’ve always thought is true is true. So, I’d like to teach the students to ask questions and to argue about evidence and to think about the difference between evidences and facts and opinions because a lot of times students come into sociology courses and they have strong opinions based on how they grew up. I think learning about things like probability, the representativeness of sampling, are important. Since students come from different kinds of backgrounds, and they think those backgrounds are very common to everyone, so I think breaking down some of those barriers and beginning to have them think about how the way they

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think and the way that they have experienced the world has been influenced by the particular milieu in which they grew up, and so trying to get them to ask questions that not take for granted everything they had thought before. Your research interests are focused on the integration of immigrants, transition for children of immigrants, and racial and ethnic identity, so how did you actually gradually build up your own research interests? My dissertation was on the racial and ethnic identities of third generation or later whose grandparents or before that had emigrated to America, and that was very autobiographical because all four of my grandparents were immigrants, and so I was interested, I think, in what it meant for people to have an ethnic identity when they were so removed from the immigrants themselves. So that was my first big project and then I got my job and had written about white immigrants and then started to think about black immigrants, and from there after I did my second book which was on black identities, I started to, even broaden out further than that, and start looking at immigration from a much larger perspective. You are now actually focus on the social, demographic and psychological impact of natural disasters, the Risk Project.1 I think those two are not connected to each other. This is a new area. Yes, there was a bit of connection. So, I was working with a group, MacArthur Foundation Research Network which is a network where they bring together people from different social science backgrounds to work together and the topic was the transition to adulthood which I was studying among children of immigrants and the people in the group were studying it from different perspectives. And one of the people in the group was doing a project on community college students around the country and he was an economist and his team were studying how to keep people in community college. And Hurricane Katrina hit one of the places they were researching in Orleans, and so I took over the study because they were no longer interested in it and I just thought somebody should study what happens to these people. So, I began the study and then have continued doing it with a psychologist, Jean Rhodes and I direct that and so we’ve been doing it now for 11 years. So, I started teaching classes on sociology of disasters and with climate change. I think it’s a growing issue. And there is a lot of intersection between natural disasters and immigration. So, I found things to focus on but it was all very much luck that it fell into my lap.

1 The

Resilience in Survivors of Katrina Project (“RISK”) Project (Mary Waters, PI, Jean Rhodes and Beth Fussell, co-PI’s) is a longitudinal study of low-income parents who lived in New Orleans at the time of Hurricane Katrina. Starting in 2003—before the hurricane occurred—1,019 lowincome parents from New Orleans enrolled in a study designed to increase educational attainment among community college students. The study measured participants’ economic status, social ties, and mental and physical health prior to the hurricane. Although Hurricane Katrina disrupted the study in August of 2005, it provided an extremely rare opportunity to study the consequences of a disaster for the lives of vulnerable individuals and their families.

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Since you have so many researches to do and you also have to teach, then how do you balance your time doing research and teaching? Not very well. I am always behind. Do you think the two are connected to each other? Yes, I try to teach classes that are related to what I’m researching and I get ideas about things to research from my teaching, and so there is a very much interplay there. Except teaching and doing research, you also have administrative work because you are the chair of the sociology department. How do you balance your work and family? I have a wonderful husband and three very forgiving children, ha-ha, so you know, you work on balance them and being a professor is a great job to have when you have children because even though there are many, many hours you have to work, you have a lot of flexibility about when you do your work. What struggles have you faced during your academic career? and how did you pull through it? I think everyone struggles as an academic with rejection because if you are doing it right you always get rejected as well as accepted, so you have to submit your work, you have to submit grant proposals and you have to develop a thick skin so that you don’t get too discouraged if people reject. If funding agencies or journals reject your work, you have to just keep going and eventually you will succeed. And then also I think it is hard to combine working so many hours with family, especially when children are very young, they get sick, or they don’t like you to be away. So it’s hard. You always feel like you are not doing as much at work as you should, or as much at home as you should. Let’s talk about your book Black Identities, which was published in 1999 and won five scholarly awards. What makes you want to write this book? What is the story behind the book? There’s an academic story and a personal story. So, the academic story is that I had written my first book on white ethnics and so there was a parallel research question about black ethnics and there had not been much attention to ethnic diversity within the black population. The personal story is that my brother at that time was working at a school in New York City, and he, as a white teacher, thought all of his students were African American. But then he realized through talking to the parents that some of them were immigrants and some of them were African American and so we had long conversations about that and I thought that was fascinating sociologically. So, I started doing the research in the neighborhoods where he was teaching. What was the major problem you faced when you wrote this book? It was very hard to get access to. I want to interview West India immigrants, African American and whites who work together in the same workplaces, and so I started

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trying to get into hospitals to interview hospital workers because I knew that there was concentration of all three these groups there, and I tried for months and months and couldn’t get permission to do research in the hospitals. So, I ended up doing the research in schools with middle-class people and then with food service workers. It was a restaurant actually that was in the World Trade Center, so the restaurant itself was destroyed on 9/11, and I don’t know whether any of the people that I interviewed were lost then too. In your experience, do american and chinese sociology students differ? I’ve had a number of graduate students from China, and a number of undergraduate students who either are themselves from China or their parents are from China. I would say the students were themselves from China and have gone to school in China are a little bit less likely to expect conversations in class, and find it very hard to get used to it first that I would like them to interrupt or to challenge things that I am saying, or that I’m interested in them telling me what they think rather than me just lecturing. They expect to just lecture. But they’re all my students and they are very brilliant and very adaptable, so after a little while I find no differences, everybody kind of jumps in. Do you have any suggestion to them if they want to be a sociologist in the future? I think the most important thing if you want to figure out whether or not you should be a professor is to do a research project to yourself because it’s very different to read about research and write about it and critique it than to actually do it yourself. And sometimes people who are very good at reading and writing are not very good at actually creatively coming out with the research project and doing the work. They find it too lonely or they find it too intimidating or they’re worried too much. So, I think the best thing, for instance, at Harvard, students write a senior thesis in their last year of college and that experience of doing independent research and a large project like that often will tell students whether or not they like doing that kind of research, and I think that’s an important thing to do. What is your secret to be a successful professor in sociology? Ha-ha, I don’t have a secret. I had a lot of luck and I had a lot of good teachers, a lot of help from people I worked with and friends from graduate school, etc., I think the other thing I tell people is it’s important to have a balance between work and life. I think sometimes people take their work too seriously and then they burn out because they don’t have the right balance so they work too hard. Oftentimes people will tell you the key to success is working hard and there’s some truth in that but you can work too hard as well and that can also derail you. How has being a sociologist changed or influenced you? That’s a hard one to answer because I have been doing this for a very long time now. I hope that it’s made me more open to new ideas and to thinking critically about the world the way that I’ve tried to teach my students to. I hope I know that it has been

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a wonderful job because I can study anything I want and I have a lot of freedom to think about things and investigate them in whatever way I want to. There is just a lot of intellectual freedom, so I enjoy that very much. Do you think sociology make you feel happy? Yes, I have a very great job, so I think in that way I chose the right job because my job still makes me happy even though I’ve been a professor here now for 31 years, which means I have been coming to the same building for 31 years, etc., every day is new, the students are always new, the topics that I work on are new, the classes that I teach are new, I get new colleagues, so I never get bored, it’s always something challenging and exciting to do. Even though sometimes you have to work on things you don’t necessarily want to, that’s a small part of the job. Introduction of Related Characters Sidney Mintz (1922–2015) was an anthropologist best known for his studies of the Caribbean, creolization, and the anthropology of food. His book, Sweetness and Power, is considered one of the most influential publications in cultural anthropology and food studies. Neil Smelser (1930–2017) was an American sociologist. His research has been on collective behavior, sociological theory, economic sociology, sociology of education, social change, and comparative methods. Among many lifetime achievements, Smelser “laid the foundations for economic sociology.”

Interview 4 Ezra F. Vogel Ezra F. Vogel

Profile: Ezra F. Vogel is the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus at Harvard. He was born to a Jewish family in 1930 in Delaware, Ohio. He graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1950 and joined the army for two years before he received his Ph.D. from the Department of Social Relations at Harvard in 1958. He then went to Japan for two years to study the Japanese language and conduct research interviews with middle-class families. When he came back from Japan, he was hired as an assistant professor at Yale University and from 1961 to 1964 he gained a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard, studying Chinese language and history. He remained at Harvard becoming lecturer in 1964 and professor in 1967. Professor Vogel succeeded John Fairbank to become the second Director of Harvard’s East Asian Research Center (1972–1977) and Chairman of the Council for East Asian Studies (1977–1980). He was Director of the Program on US-Japan Relations at the Center for International Affairs (1980–1987) and since 1987 Honorary Director. From fall 1993 to fall 1995, Professor Vogel took a two-year leave of absence from Harvard to serve as the National Intelligence Officer for East Asia at the National Intelligence Council in Washington. When he came back, he was appointed the Director of the Fairbank Center (1995–1999) and became the first Director of the Asia Center (1997–1999). Vogel retired from teaching on June 30, 2000. Over a productive career, he published dozens of articles, reviews, and conference papers, major books on China, Japan, and American-East Asian Relations, and organized scholarly and policy conferences on many topics. He is the author of numerous outstanding books, such as Japan as Number One, One Step Ahead in China, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China. As an old man who is going to be ninety years old, Vogel is still actively devoting to his beloved career without any tiredness.

E. F. Vogel (B) Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus, Harvard University, Cambridge, US © Peking University Press 2020 L. Chen (ed.), A Journey of Discovering Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6603-5_4

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Interview March 8, 2017. Professor Vogel’s Home, Harvard University. (Professor Vogel took the interview in Chinese, below is the English version translated by the editor.) Professor, why did you choose to study sociology? I want to know about society, initially I wanted to understand American society, the American family and the American environment, then I began to study Japan to know Japanese society, after that I began to study China, I want to learn about Chinese society, so I would like to learn all of them. What do you think make sociology different from the other disciplines? Well, this problem is quite complicated because the meaning of sociology is changing all the time. Some people say sociology includes economy, politics, and studies the whole society, when I went to Harvard, they put psychology, social psychology, anthropology, sociology together, so we studied in the Department of Social Relations, so we studied the whole society at that time, and I was influenced by that, I really want to know about the whole society, that is my goal. There are many students who just begin to study sociology, they would like to know “what is the use of sociology?” So, based on your own experiences, what would you say about this? I am a scholar, I just want to know more about society, however, what is the use of sociology? I think that is the problem of the government. I think in order to make policy, the governments need to know about the society, and in order to deal with the diplomatic relationship well with other countries, the government need to know more about other society. I think the American government is not doing very well in this regard, like the Middle East War, I think that was because we didn’t understand the society, and also Vietnam War, I don’t think the war is necessary, we should learn more about society, what is possible and what is impossible, we should learn more about that, I think that is very important, however the politician may not agree with that. Next question is about your college days, I know you went to Ohio Wesleyan University for your undergraduate and then received your Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University. I am curious about your major when you were studying in Wesleyan University, did you study sociology at that time? The Ohio Wesleyan University is in my town, I was born there and since I was very young, I knew some professors there, my friend is the son of one professor. I wanted to know more about social welfare, although I didn’t know much about those disciplines, my parents came from Europe, they immigrated to America, they were very happy to live in America and they lived very well, so I wanted to study social welfare, that was my initial thought. Since I began to study, I found my personality

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was suitable for being an academic, and I was eager to study, so I chose to be an academic. So, it was after you went to Harvard that you began to study sociology? No, no, no, I studied sociology when I was in Ohio, but I thought sociology was the study of social welfare, so I studied sociology at that time but my focus was on social welfare. After I graduated, I began to serve in the army where I spent two years working in a hospital, a mental hospital during the Koran War, I felt very fortunate because I wanted to know about the relationship between sociology and psychosis, and after that I went to Harvard and began to study the relationship between sociology and psychosis in American family and society, so that was the start. That was also the reason why you went to Japan, right? It’s a little complicated. When I received my Ph.D., a professor talked to me, “You have never been abroad, if you don’t understand the other countries, how could you understand your own country? You should study the other countries.” Because my dissertation was about psychosis in American family, so I went to Japan to study psychosis in Japanese family, but when I was in Japan, I realized psychosis was not a big problem through which we can fully understand the society. After I came back to work in the Medicine School of Yale University, in the second year, I got an opportunity from a professor who said to me, “If you want to study East Asia, why don’t you study China?” I said, “I am fine with it.” And he said, “You should study China first, we have an opportunity for you.” It was after The McCarthy Era that American government thought they should learn more about China in 1960s. Although America and China didn’t establish diplomatic relationship at that time, but these two countries would establish diplomatic relationship sooner or later, so we are supposed to know more about China. The McCarthy Era was gone, and a fund wanted to help more people to have chance to learn about China, people like John Fairbank thought we should study Chinese society in American universities, we need to train students to specialize in economics, political science and sociology respectively, not just study China, but also use our knowledge and method to study Chinese society, which is not only good for American universities but also good for understanding China. At that time, on one was teaching Chinese society at Harvard, so the professor said to me, “We would like to give you a chance to study China for two or three years, if you study good and work hard, we may give you a tenure at Harvard.” So, I began to study Chinese for two or three years, including Chinese history and so on so forth. So, do you still remember some professors who may influence you a lot when you were in school? and how did they influence you? Talcott Parsons, his idea of society, he proposed a social theory or social structure. In order to understand the structure, he considered very comprehensively, including the politics, the economy, the relationship between different people as well as tradition, so on and so forth. You should consider very systematically about the economy, society, the relationship between economy and politics, so I was influenced by his thoughts.

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Another guy is not a professor, he is a British and his family name is Ronaldo, he is 5 years older than me and he did research in Japan before me, his Japanese is very good and he is a very brilliant scholar, he devoted himself to study Japanese society, so I was kind of following him. Speaking of China, when I began to study Chinese, there was no way to go to China, however, there were some people who studied Russia at Harvard and they couldn’t get into Russia too, so they study it by talking to people who escaped from Russia, reading their newspapers and magazines. So, when I began to study China, I was inspired by their way of studying, since I couldn’t get into China, I decided to study it from outside. Sociologists prefer to engage in the society, talking to people face to face. However, if you could not get into the society, you have to come up with another way, that is to read their writings, sometimes people escape from their home country, they are refugees, so these are the ways that people who studied Russia used before, and we just took advantage of these methods. I thought they did very well in order to understand the Russian society, those were the methods they used. So, I went to Hong Kong, because Kwangtung was not open at that time. So I went to Hong Kong, people who moved to Hong Kong were mainly from Kwangtung, and I thought if I was going to study politics, I should start from Beijing, the capital city, to fully understand China, but China is so big and so complicated, I couldn’t study it systematically, so I decided to study Kwangtung specifically because there were many Cantonese as well as material resources, like newspapers, you could find Yangcheng Evening News, Guangzhou Daily, Southern Daily. In 1973 it was my first time to go to China. At that time, we visited Sun Yat-Sen University, and a professor talked to me, he asked, “Are you from Harvard?” I said, “Yes.” And then he told me he got a master degree from Harvard in 1947. Then I knew he was the vice president of Sun Yat-Sen University and his name is Xia Shuzhang who later became my friend, and thanks to him, I was invited to Sun Yat-Sen University again in 1980 and stayed there for two months. So, I think I am very fortunate because the first time I went to China was before Chinese reform and opening-up. I witnessed the Chinese reform and opening-up, and Shen Zhen, the Special Economic Zone in Kwangtung aroused huge influence in China in 1980, and the influence of Shen Zhen spread swiftly to the whole country, I am fortunate to witness it too. So, what do you think is the most challenging thing for you to study oversea research, no matter it is China or Japan? To some scholars, they may think language is a big problem, but apparently you don’t have such kind of problem. No, I do have problem, I do, I need to keep studying.

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But except language, what else do you think is hard for you to do oversea research? I think language is quite important. In China, people began to study English when they are teenage, I studied Japanese when I was 28 and when I studied Chinese I was 31, so my first year in Japan was spent on learning Japanese, but I still think that was not enough. Some scholars think they progressed very slowly, but I think I was too fast, so when I taught class, I could speak Japanese as well as Chinese, not very good, so I kept learning language, meanwhile, I continued studying and teaching, so that was really not easy. I thought I should introduce every aspect of China, so I had to keep learning about China as well as studying Chinese. When I began to write Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, I was retired, I could speak Chinese with ordinary people and understand them as long as they speak slow and had no accent, but in order to communicate with top leaders, I should improve my Chinese, so after I retired, I have kept studying Chinese. Speaking of top leaders, I really want to ask you a question, you spent 10 years writing your book Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, which was initially wrote for America audiences, but actually aroused huge impact in China, you interviewed a lot of people who were close to Deng Xiaoping, including his relatives, people who once worked for him and even our former President, so how could you interview so many important people as a sociologist? Harvard is prestigious and I take advantage of it. President Jiang visited Harvard in 1997. I personally promoted it. Some professors thought Chinese political leaders did not respect democracy, so they were against my proposal, but I thought they were wrong, so I persuaded our Principle to invite him. There was a Chinese friend who came from Wuhan and he knew some top leaders in Beijing, so we cooperated, he went back to China to help me on this. And during 1993 to 1995, I was invited to work for the federal government in Washington D. C., and Joseph Nye who is well known for Soft Power was leading the U.S. National Intelligence Office, and I served as the officer for East Asia, so during 1993 to 1995, I was working in Washington D. C, and my work was to write a general report based on the information supplied by governments, including military, economy and so on so forth. There was a young person who worked in the Chinese embassy, I always had lunch with him and gradually we became friends, and he helped on that visit too. And in Japan, I didn’t know why I became popular. I thought that in order to understand a society, with regard to professor Parsons’ idea of systematic society, I should study every aspect of it, so I should learn more about the government and commercial leaders, as a result, I went to Japan and stayed there in 1975 and 1976, I went there to study those aspects specifically, because I thought I should do that in order to understand Japanese society, and I was also very popular in Harvard, so some of my Japanese friends introduced some Japanese commercial leaders to me, some of them would like to talk to me, but some did not. But after Japan as Number One was published, things changed. I talked to a Japanese friend jokingly that I once wanted to visit a chairman so-and-so, and the chairman’s secretory asked me why

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did I want to visit the chairman and asked me to submit an application in which I need to write clearly the reason why I wanted to visit him. I submit the application and the secretory told me to wait. I called for several times, but there was no respond. However, after the book was published, the chairman called me directly, “Professor, what do you want to eat, I want to have dinner with you, when do you have time?” So, he responded very quickly. So, to be popular is also good. And at that time there were few American people studying Japan, I basically knew all of the professors who studied Japan in America, and I had a lot of Japanese friends in all walks of life, economic circles, political circles, and of course academic circles, so I was very fortunate and took advantage of being Harvard professor to make friends with these people. So, if you will say, I am good at taking advantage of relationship. How did we meet? How could I know so many Chinese people? My answer is “I am probably good at taking advantage of relationship.” (You are willing to make friends.) Ha-ha, making friends and making friends with their friends. that’s right. Introduction of Related Characters John Fairbank (1907–1991) was a tenured professor at Harvard University, a famous historian, the most prestigious observer of Chinese issues in the United States, a leader in the research field of Chinese modern history in the United States, the founder of Harvard Center for East Asian Studies During his lifetime, he served as the vice chairman of the American Far East Association, the chairman of the Asian Association, the chairman of the Historical Society, and the chairman of the East Asian Research Committee. Fairbank has devoted himself to the study of Chinese issues for 50 years, and most of his books have dealt with Chinese issues. Joseph Nye Jr. (1937-) is an American political scientist. He is the co-founder, along with Robert Keohane, of the international relations theory of neoliberalism and the concepts of asymmetrical and complex interdependence. More recently, he explained the distinction between hard power and soft power, and pioneered the theory of soft power. His notion of “smart power” (“the ability to combine hard and soft power into a successful strategy”) became popular with the use of this phrase by members of the Clinton Administration, and more recently the Obama Administration.

Interview 5 John L. Campbell John L. Campbell

Profile: John L. Campbell is currently the chair of the Department of Sociology at Dartmouth College. He earned his B.A. in sociology from St. Lawrence University (1974), and then he went to the Michigan State University and the University of Wisconsin at Madison to get his M.A. (1977) and Ph.D. (1984) in sociology. Campbell has taught in many prestigious universities. His first position was at the Washington State University, then he went to teach in the University of Wisconsin at Parkside before he moved to Harvard University in 1988. At Harvard, he was appointed as the John and Ruth Hazel Associate Professor of the Social Sciences in 1992. In 1996, he joined the faculty of Dartmouth College as a professor. Campbell is interested in economic and political sociology, comparative political economy, and institutional theory. He has written about energy and tax policy, the evolution of the US economy, transformations of post-communist societies in Eastern Europe, corporate social responsibility, globalization, the role of ideas and experts in policymaking. The thread connecting all of this is his interest in how institutions affect national political economics and how they change. Interview March 11, 2017 Silsby Hall, Dartmouth College Professor, my first question for you is what sociology is in your eyes? What is sociology? You can ask this question of 10 sociologists and get 10 different answers, I think. For me, sociology is the study of society and groups; small, medium, large and the institutions within which they operate, that constrain their behavior, that facilitate their behavior, that is my short answer, I think. J. L. Campbell (B) The Class of 1925 Professor and Professor of Sociology, Dartmouth College, Hanover, Germany Professor of Political Economy, Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark © Peking University Press 2020 L. Chen (ed.), A Journey of Discovering Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6603-5_5

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What would you say if i asked you to give it a very short definition? A very short definition would be the study of society and institutions that regulate it. You just mentioned that if I ask 10 sociologists, I will get 10 different answers. Why do you think it is hard to reach an agreement on the definition? I think it’s because sociology is a little bit unique among the social sciences in the sense that it overlaps with all of them. So, for example, you have a social psychologist, and a social psychologist approaches the subject matter in one way. Somebody in a psychology department, at Dartmouth for example, would approach that in a very different way. In the psychology department, they would put you in an MRI machine and ask you questions and see how your brain synapses fire depending on the questions. If a social psychologist of sociology asks the same kinds of questions, they might look at how you react to the asking of the question, what your facial behavior was and all that sort of stuff, it’s very different. But the point is there is a lot of overlap. The kind of work that I do which is more political and economic, obviously relates to political science and economics. So, it’s a very collective kind of discipline, I think, and that’s both a virtue and sometimes a hindrance. What do you think make sociology an independent discipline to be different from philosophy, psychology, anthropology? What is the unique feature of sociology? Because it’s very interdisciplinary, right? So again, if you look at what political and economic sociologists do, for example, which is what I do for the most part, there is a little bit organizational behavior in there, there is a little bit political science in there, there is a little bit economics in there, there are a lot more social theories in there then you will find in any of those other disciplines, I think, and the nature of that social theory will be different, the methodologies may be different and again this gets to the very collective nature of sociology, we have a wide pallet to choose from in terms of methodological approach, quantitative and qualitative, historical and so and so and so. And I think it’s that broad interdisciplinary nature that sets us apart and makes us a little bit unique. There are so many fields in sociology, like political sociology, economic sociology, historical sociology, what do you think about that, good or not? It depends on what the reference is. I think it’s good in the sense that, for me, the most interesting questions are always between politics and economics, for example, so in the sense of that interdisciplinarity facilitates interesting questions to ask, that is really a strength, that is really a plus. The downside is people will ask, “So what are you? Are you a political scientist? Are you an economist?” I said, “I am a sociologist.” They said, “Well, but it sounds like you are all those things.” So sometimes it is not entirely easy for a sociologist to define for other people what they are. And that sometimes is a problem when I come to publishing as well because people don’t know exactly what literature you are supposed to be in, do you really fit this journal? Maybe you should go to that journal. It’s that sort of thing.

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In what way do you think might sociology be better? more diverse or integrated? I really can’t answer it. I mean it’s going to be what it is going to be. One of the problems the discipline has, unlike economics for example, it does not have a core set of principles that it abides by, right? It doesn’t have a seminal set of theoretical principles that everybody expects, tremendous amount of epidemiological debate within sociology about the way to do sociology, or the right theoretical approach ought to be, and sometimes that leads to a lot of infighting within the discipline which economics doesn’t have. There is some of that in political science but not nearly as much as there is in sociology. So that is sometimes a problem, I think. What do you think about the relationship between qualitative and quantitative methods in sociology? I think you pick the method that works for the problem that you have. You know, I have done quantitative and qualitative work, sometimes separately sometimes together, I also have done a lot of historical work. It just depends on the question you ask. Do you think there is a qualitative and quantitative divide right now in sociology? I think there used to be. There used to be method wars. Some very famous that reach back actually to the late nineteenth century, early twentieth century, they got to be pretty vicious in the 1960 and 1970s. There was a very strong movement in sociology to move quantitatively in part because sociology wanted to become a science and in order to look scientific, you need fancy equations, computer models and all that sort of stuff. I think people finally figured out it’s a stupid debate to have. You have to pick the method that is appropriate. I will give you an example about this. When I was first starting out, a colleague of mine was a very sophisticated statistician and he was on a review panel of the National Science Foundation in Washington D. C. where he headed to go to determine whether you are going to get the money and so forth. And I talked to him when he came back after the result came out, I asked how did it go? And he sorts of shook his head and said, “It’s amazing what goes on these days.” This was when log-linear model was just sort of the hot thing in statistical analysis. He said, “You won’t believe how many applications for money had log-linear mode in them.” It was totally inappropriate to what they were doing, but it was the hot-trendy thing, so they got to do it, got to do log-linear models. People thought, “I can use this model because it’s the trendy thing now.” It’s totally inappropriate to the questions at hand, inappropriate for the data being used perhaps, but this is what they thought that they were going to, what they were going to be doing. Thankfully those days I think are gone away and people are much more sensible about that. Our department, for example, has quantitative and qualitative people, when we go to recruit and hire, we don’t fight about methods, we fight about the substance of what they are doing, is it good quality stuff?

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Many students who just start to learn sociology always ask what the use of sociology is. so, what would you say about that? I would say make sure that you take plenty of methods courses so that you have some skills that can be used in a variety of occupations. You don’t necessarily have to be an academic sociologist. In the United States, there are plenty of sociologists that do not work in academia, they work for government research agencies, Census Bureau being one of the most obvious, but Congressional Budget Office of the Management and Budget and so forth. They find jobs in the private sector, anywhere you need quantitative and or qualitative skills to do your job. Our students get jobs in top level consulting agencies, government jobs, social welfare organizations, nonprofit organizations. I am just sort of running a list of people that we have graduated. We have people who work for labor unions, for corporations, it’s a long list. One of the interesting things I can tell you is a little story about this. I spent quite a bit of time in Denmark, and last year, I think it was last year, I had lunch with a guy who had worked for a very big and very well-known international consulting agency, but kind of got sick of it, so he started up his own consulting firm. And he decided that it was going to be a multi-method organization. So, he hired statisticians, anthropologists, sociologists, economists, political scientists, and these teams then would go and do the consulting work. And the anthropologists would sort of, if you hire that firm for your company because your profits aren’t what they should be, the anthropologists would sit in on your meetings and examine what the dynamics were between you and people who are working for you, meanwhile the statistician is running models on your business models and so on so forth, the political scientist is talking to the people that you have. So, he tries to bring a lot of these things together. And when I asked him where did you get the idea for this model, he said, “I took sociology courses when I was in college.” Professor, you chose to study sociology at the very beginning. So why did you choose to study sociology at that time? Did your parents influence you or you made the decision by yourself? No, my parents were quite opposed to all the thing actually. My dad wanted me to be a businessman, and there is a historical context here. I grew up in the 1960s, which was a pretty turbulent, hot political time in United States, Civil Rights Movement, Anti-War Movement, Anti-Vietnam War movement, and all that stuff. Originally, I thought I would actually go into medicine. When I went to college. I was pre-med, which was my initial program, but I had to take some social science courses in order to graduate. It was one of the requirements when I went to school. I didn’t know much about social science, surely didn’t know anything about sociology and never heard of it, never taken a course in it, but took an Introduction to Sociology course, and I loved this stuff, so I thought, “I will take another one.” And I did and I loved that one too. Pretty soon I figured it well. Maybe this is what I really am interested in intellectually. The medicine stuff sort of fell by the way side and decided I will major in college in sociology, which I did. Graduated, I didn’t know what I wanted to do next, which was what really drove my parents up the walls. And so, I actually ended up being a bartender for about a year and a half. And I never forget this. One

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day very quiet in this small little bar, There were just a few regulars having a couple of beers, watching TV, we were talking, and one guy sitting near the bar said, “So John, what are you going to do when you grow up?” I said, “What are you talking about?” He said, “You are not going to be a bartender for your whole life, are you?” I said, “No, probably not”. He said, “What do you want to do?” And it was almost a religious experience at that point. And I don’t know where the words came from, but I started to think about it and I said out loud, “You know, I think I could be a good sociology teacher, I think I could probably do better than most of the professors that I had in college.” And as I said that out loud and heard myself said that loud, a little light bulb went on in my head, I thought, “Hey, that would be a good idea, maybe I should actually think about that.” You know if I can figure out a way to get paid for reading the stuff that I was already reading anyway, that would be wonderful. The great thing about being a bartender is you work at night and you sleep until about 9 o’clock in the morning, you wake up, there is nobody to play with because everybody else is at work. I happened to be in a college town where I had a great library, so I just continued to read sociology. So, I thought, “Maybe there is a way I can get paid for reading the stuff, graduate school and so on so no.” So that is my story, ha-ha… What did you like to read when you were an undergraduate student? Well again, this was 1960s, so I was reading some pretty radical new left stuff. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, just a story about alienation. When I was in college, toward the end of my college career, I had taken a theory course and became quite enamored with both Marx and Weber, and when I went to school, there was only one theory course, I wished that had more, so I went to the guy that I had taken the course around and said, “You know, it’s too bad you are not teaching another course next term.” Then he said, “Why did you say that?” I said, “Because I just like to read more of this stuff”, particularly interested in Marx at that time because it was the 60s and so forth. He said, “We will do an independent study.” I said, “What is that?” He said, “You and I are basically agreed, you start reading, we come up with a reading list.” I said, “Well, that sounds like a fine plan.” And he said, “I’ll tell you what we will do.” He continued, “I will give you an A for the course right now, so you get that out of way, now what do you want to do?” So, we came up with a reading list. Number one on the reading list was the first volume of Das Kapital, and that 600–700 pages is pretty heavy stuff. So, I just started to read that sort of stuff. So, I read a lot of theories, I was interested in psychology as well so I read some social psychology, and that is sort of how it all started, I guess. Did you find it hard to read their books, like max weber or durkheim? Yes, that stuff is tough, you know. Marx’s labor theory of value, it’s not easy to get your head around if you don’t have any previous experience with that sort of stuff. I actually found Marx fun to read though, because he would occasionally, even in his sort of scientific stuff, he would lapse into these polemics and the language got really hot, you could see that there was passion behind this. The most trouble I had was actually reading Weber, because that guy, his sentences are half a page long,

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translated from German, this is pretty heavy-duty stuff, although if you keep reading it, he is great, but it’s not easy, it’s definitely not easy. Do you think your professor play a very important role in cultivating your interest in sociology? Do you still remember someone and why do you think they influenced you a lot? Oh, sure. Well, there are 3 or 4 professors that I had that had a huge influence. First was this guy who gave me this independent study in college. He sorts of opened the door, you know, he kind of got me excited about the subject in the first place. Then when I went to graduate school, I actually had two professors, they supervised my master thesis, which was a pretty unorthodox master thesis, and I think a lot of people would’ve tried to discourage me from doing it. But these two guys, I think, I didn’t realize it at that time but I think I realize it now, they thought, “It’s unorthodox but let this guy give it a shot. We don’t want to sort of stamp out creativity here.” So, they sort of taught me taking a little bit risk every now and then, calculated risk, sometimes it can pay off. But then I actually was in a graduate program at one university, and after my master I transferred to another university. And at that point, I had two professors that were hugely important to my development. One is Iván Szelényi, he is a Hungary refugee basically, got a job in the university of Wisconsin-Madison which is where my Ph.D. is from. He was a brilliant guy and an extraordinarily generous human being. And again, I was in the dissertation phase doing some pretty unorthodox stuff for sociology. But he gave me the green light and encouraged me to continue with it. So that was a positive experience. And then I took several courses in the political science department in Madison from a guy by the name of Leon Lindberg who was a comparative political economist, and he is the guy who really sort of turned me on to the substance of comparative political and economic analysis which is pretty much what I have been doing in the rest of my life. So, I would point those guys as huge intellectual influences. There was a moment actually when I thought I should transfer from sociology into political science, but I passed most of my exams in sociology, I didn’t want to do that all over in political science. So, the way it played out was that my dissertation was actually more of a political science like dissertation than sociology, And Leon, the political scientist, was the true adviser on the project, whereas Ivan the sociologist, sort of the front man, but we had worked out a deal so that it would be okay on both sides. Since you became a professor of sociology, what do you want to teach to your students? That is a great question. Two things, I guess. One is to teach students the ability to think critically for themselves, you know, just because I don’t agree with what you think or say, I shouldn’t try to discourage you from thinking and saying it. We can have a debate about it, if you disagree with me and I disagree with you, that is fine, we can still go and have a beer at the end of the day. So that is the first thing—critical thinking. The other thing is because I do comparative political economy, I think it’s extraordinarily important for students to learn about other societies. The tendency in American sociology is the talk about the United States, it’s fine up to a point, but

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I do not believe you can really understand the United States unless you understand what is going on in other countries as well, both advanced capitalist countries and developing countries. So, in all my courses there was always some kind of crossnational component in there and I think history is important as well. It’s amazing to me sometimes how little history my students know, even in the United States. All that stuff I think is really important. Your research interests are focused on economic, political, and comparative and historical sociology, and comparative political economy, institutional analysis, globalization, how do you build up your research interests gradually. Yeah, that is a great question too. Part of it has to do with the tools I learned in graduate school. Remember that I grew up in 1960s, so I was always interested in social problems, what is going on at the moment, very much in the model of C. Wright Mills, if you know his sociological imagination. His thing was you need to understand the individual’s biography as it’s situated in a broader social context. So, I think it’s safe to say every single project I have been involved with has been sparked by current events. So, my PhD dissertation was about the collapse of the commercial nuclear energy industry in the United States and why it did better in some other countries than it did in the United States, that was sparked by the accident of Three-Miles Island1 in 1979. How could this happen in the country that invented the technology? So that was the first project. And next project was a volume called Governance of the American Economy. We put that together in the 1980s, late 1980s, a time when United States which in the immediate post World War Two era was the top dog in the world, they had power politically, economically, ideologically, militarily. And all of a sudden, in 1980s it looked like things were slipping, what’s wrong here? And so, the second project, Governance of the American Economy, was an analysis of the institutional trajectories of eight different industries in the U. S., rise and fall, try to figure out what’s going on. That project was followed by a big collaborative project on transformation of Eastern Europe, which is about institutional change, stimulated by the downfall of the Berlin Wall. I did some work on tax policy in the U. S. context, which was partly related to the Eastern Europe experience because they were trying to figure out how to reform their tax structures, but it was also driven in part by the fact that taxation became a huge issue politically in the United States around about that time and so on and so forth. So, I am always interested in whatever is happening outside. Let’s see if we can figure out why it is going on. So, there is also the institutional thread that run through all that you mentioned before. It looks like I had all these different, very unrelated projects, right? Except for one thing and that is there is an institutional thread that runs through it all. What is it about the institutions that contribute to the situation of the nuclear power? What is it about the institutions that facilitated the rise and fall of the American economy? What is it about the institutions in Eastern Europe and tax reform? And so on so on. 1 The Three Mile Island accident occurred on March 28, 1979, in reactor number 2 of Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station (TMI-2) in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, United States, near Harrisburg. It was the most significant accident in US commercial nuclear power plant history.

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So intellectually, for me, anyway, there is kind of new to all the stuff. Try to use that stuff, try to use those different empirical episodes if you will to better understand how institutions operate, how they get created, how they get changed, how they influence people’s behavior. That is always the question that is in the back of my mind. What do you think about the relationship between doing research and teaching? and how the two connected to each other? Just like that, totally intertwined. Do you think you are good at dealing with the balance between teaching and doing research? Well, you probably have to ask my students that question to see if it works. I obviously think that it works because I keep on doing it. But the connection between the research and the teaching for me is pretty important, and the influences cut in both directions. So, for example, I wrote a book some years ago about institutional change in globalization, and that was again driven by event when everybody started to realize the world is a global economy. I wanted to write this book, I knew it was going to involve couple of years’ worth of research and reading and writing and so forth. So I developed a course on the topic so that I would basically work my lecture notes up for the class, talk to the folks in the class about this stuff, get new ideas, and then the lecture notes eventually became book chapters, and the course got better as the book got better, so I have done several courses like that which are basically teaching what I am researching on, so my research affects the classroom and then what happened in the classroom feeds back onto the research. That is the only way to do it. Otherwise you fall sleep in the class, you will be bored with your own materials. That is just terrible for students. Except doing research and teaching, you also have a lot of administrative work, so how do you balance your work and family? For one thing, my daughter is grown and she is out of the house. So, kids are not an issue anymore, although they were on the front end of my career. My wife is a researcher, so she is pretty busy, I am pretty busy, and we both have an appreciation for each other needing space to get the work done. But sometimes I must say it’s a challenge. I mean the teaching and research keeps me busy, and then there is administrative stuff on top of that, finally I get a little bit overwhelmed, but it’s okay.

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Do you have any struggle in your career life? The front of my career was difficult. For some of the reasons that we have already talked about. And that is I came out of graduate school in a weak position in terms of the job market for a couple of reasons, part of them was my own fault, my sense of what I needed to do at graduate school was write dissertation which would then become a book, that is fine. The problem was while I was writing the dissertation, what I should have done simultaneously was peel off pieces of the dissertation and get them published as articles in journals, but I thought, “No, I will finish the project first and then I will do all that stuff.” So, I hit the job market along with nothing published on my C.V. and I did that at the time when the job market in the United States was terrible, so the competition was fierce. And even though I was coming out of one of the best graduate programs in the country, I didn’t have anything to show in a sense. So, I was at a disadvantage partly because I was stupid in terms of how I managed my career, but I was also a victim of a really lousy job market. Plus, my sociology adviser was unknown in the United States at that time. He had just come from Hungary. So, unlike some of my peers whose advisers were very well-known, then they can pick up the phone and say you should take a look at this guy, my adviser didn’t even know who to pick up the phone to call at that stage. So, he didn’t help, not his fault. But it is what it is. And the last thing was that I did this very interdisciplinary kind of work, which was a little bit political sociology, was a little bit economic sociology, was a little bit institutional analysis. This was back in the early 1980s when there really wasn’t anything yet in the United States called economic sociology, very few people were talking about institutional analysis. So, I was a little bit ahead of the curve so all those things conspired. So, my first a few years was sort of a struggle and jump from one job to the temporary positions and stuff like that. So, it was rough on the front end. What do you think make you pull through it? Stupidity, perseverance, I am not sure, I just liked what I was doing. I mean there were a few moments at a certain point where I thought maybe I need to get out of this entirely and do something else, but I really enjoy it, I like the teaching a lot, I like the research and the writing a lot, so I guess I just hung in there, kept working at it, finally I caught a break and turned all right. Let’s talk about your book Collapse of an Industry, which was published in 1988 and I think it was your first major book. Could you tell me the story behind the book? The story was about the Three-Mile Island. And so, I got very interested in this technology, the danger of it, the promise of it. My adviser, the political science advisor, had just finished up a big project, comparative energy policy project, I was sort of engaged with some of that literature. I just found the whole thing fascinating. I thought it was an important topic so I decided to write a dissertation about it.

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What was the major problem you faced when you wrote that book? Intellectually, there was a little bit of problem which I finally figured out but it took a while, and this had partly to do with me being one foot in sociology, one foot in political science. On the sociology side, I was in a program at Wisconsin called the Class Analysis and Historical Change Program which was very much a program, a kind of new left program, read a lot of Althusser, Marx and Poulantzas, and you know the French structural Marxist types, inspiring, interesting, pretty heavy reading. And the problem there as I discovered intellectually was it was all about modes of production for them, right? The analysis was pitched at the level of modes of production, capitalism versus socialism, which was fine as far as it goes. But the problem was when I started to take the political science stuff, I realized within the mode production, within advanced capitalism, there are all different types. United States is not France, France is not Germany, Germany is not Denmark and so on and so forth. So how can it be? How can I square the circle so to speak with this general mode of production analysis? Contradictions between capitalism and democracy that those guys were talking about, how can I square that and use that to explain why, for example, the commercial nuclear power industry in the United States collapsed at the same time it was thriving in France? They both were the same mode of production. One is a success; one is a failure. Now we have an intellectual problem. And that problem gets solved by bringing institutional analysis into the story which was more fine-grained kind of approach on the political science side than I was getting on the sociology side. So, the resolution of that problem was the key to the whole thing. It took me a while to figure this out. Finally, I figured it out. According to your observation, do you think there is some difference between chinese students and american students here? If I had to make generalizations based on just a small handful of students, I would say, and these are students from China, I would say that students from China tend to be a little bit more timid, a little quieter, a little bit less likely to challenge me in the classroom, which sometimes drives me crazy because I want students to do that, it’s the American style, it’s more aggressive. That’s a big difference. I would say that is the primary difference. The secondary difference would be, and again this is a small handful of students that I am talking about here, and remember that Dartmouth is a pretty exclusive elite school that attracts very good people, I would have to say the Chinese students that we get are better quantitatively than the Americans that we get. Just a little bit more polished, a little bit more advanced in their quantitative training that is the case, on average, for the American students. Do you have any suggestions to students who want to start a career in academia in the future? Sure, the advice is don’t make all the stupid mistakes that I did, ha-ha. If I was going to give a lot of advice, I guess I would say this. First of all, and this is such cliché, it’s ridiculous but it is true. Do something that you are passionate about, don’t get into this because you think somebody think you should get into this, definitely don’t get into this because you think you are going to make a lot of money, forget that! Do

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it because you really love it. Do it because it just gets you out of bed in the morning. And once you have decided to do it, I would say you need to go and get the best education you can for the best program you can possibly get yourself into and find the smartest people in that program and stay with those people and just work really hard. That would be my advice. It should not be the first time you are hearing this, I guess. How has being a sociologist influenced or changed you? Oh my god, it’s been huge. I mean it changed the way I think. I mean I think not just in this office, not just in the classroom, I think I really am a sociologist 24/7, and I think that is a good thing. I think it gives me a certain perspective, a certain objectivity that a lot people don’t have. I am not trying to sort of put myself above, I am just saying I think by virtue of the fact I’ve had this training, it enables me to critically evaluate what is going on in the world perhaps a little bit better than others with different training would have. So, I can’t think of anything more fundamental than the way you think has changed. My last question is do you think sociology makes you happy? That is a good one. On balance, yes, although sometimes I’m not so sure. I mean, the first three or four years, I enjoyed doing what I was doing a lot. I wasn’t sure that I was going to be able to keep doing it, that was kind of a bummer. But I enjoyed doing it while I was doing it. There is no doubt about that. It’s interesting supervising thesis and so forth. And I had learned this the hard way, and I think everybody has to learn this. You may have already learned it, but if not, I think you probably will someday. Any project that I have ever been involved with, it comes in ebbs and flows, ups and downs, ups and downs, there is always a point, it doesn’t matter if it’s a book or a journal article, whatever it is you are working on, things are going well, you think you pretty much nailed it then you hit a problem where you think, “Oh my god, the thing is falling apart, I got it wrong”. I always get this feeling in the pit of my stomach as “Oh my god, how can I not have foreseen this coming?”, like there is a train coming right down the track and it’s heading right towards me. It took me a while to figure out that’s normal, it took me a while to figure out that even when that moment comes, don’t panic, because you just keep thinking about it and you will figure it out. You may have to back up a step or two and take a slightly different direction, but it’ll work. And there are tricks that can help you sort of navigate those rough spots on the road, but when you are at those rough spots, sometimes it doesn’t feel so great, I found that going to the gym helps. Introduction of Related Characters Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) was a German-American philosopher, sociologist, and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. His best known works are Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964). In the 1960s and the 1970s, he became known as the preeminent theorist of the New Left and the student movements of West Germany, France, and the United States; some consider him the “father of the New Left”.

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Iván Szelényi (1938-) is a professor of sociology and political science at Yale University, member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He is devoted to studying the social and economic changes of the national socialism and post-communist society, and he is a well-deserved pioneer and leader in this field. In recent years, he has focused on tracking social inequality in Central and Eastern European countries and the “second transformation” in the social welfare field. Leon Lindberg (1932-) is an American political scientist, and Emeritus Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, known for his work on regional integration, political integration, and regional integration. His representative works include Political Dynamics of European Economic Integration and Governance of the American Economy. C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) was an American sociologist, and a professor of sociology at Columbia University from 1946 until his death in 1962. Mills was published widely in popular and intellectual journals, and is remembered for several books such as The Power Elite, which introduced that term and describes the relationships and class alliances among the US political, military, and economic elites; White Collar: The American Middle Classes, on the American middle class; and The Sociological Imagination, which presents a model of analysis for the interdependence of subjective experiences within a person’s biography, the general social structure, and historical development. Louis Pierre Althusser (1918–1990) was a French Marxist philosopher, professor at the Higher Normal College in Paris, France, member of the French Communist Party, founder of “structural Marxism” whose masterpiece is Pour Marx. Nicos Poulantzas (1936–1979) was a Greek-French Marxist political sociologist. He was originally a Leninist and eventually became a supporter of Europeanism. Planchas’s contribution mainly focused on the theoretical study of the country. He also devoted himself to using Marx’s theory to analyze the collapse of contemporary fascism and dictatorship in southern Europe in the 1970s. Together with Luis Althusser, Planchas is considered to be the representative of structuralist Marxism.

Interview 6 Frank Dobbin Frank Dobbin

Profile: Frank Dobbin is chair of the joint Arts & Sciences/Harvard Business School Organizational Behavior Ph.D. Program, director of the SCANCOR/Weatherhead Initiative in International Organizational Studies, and Co-Coordinator of the MITHarvard Economic Sociology Seminar. He received his B.A. in sociology from Oberlin College in 1980 and his Ph.D. in sociology from Stanford University in 1987, and took his first faculty position at Indiana University (1987–1988) and then he was appointed as the assistant professor, associate professor, and professor at Princeton University from 1988 to 2002. He moved to Harvard University as a full-time professor for sociology in 2003. Dobbin studies organizations, inequality, economic behavior, and public policy and is most well-known for his work in economic sociology. He won the Marx Weber Award twice for his books Forging Industrial Policy: United States, Britain, and France in the Railway Age and Inventing Equal Opportunity. Interview March 18, 2017 William James Hall, Harvard University Professor, what sociology is in your eyes? Sociology more than other disciplines studies all kinds of social institutions which makes, I think, the most fun field to be in because you can change what you study all the times, you can study social movements, that is institution, you can study, as I have organizations and business strategy and nation states, so whereas other social science disciplines tend to study one institution or another like the economy, the polity.

F. Dobbin (B) Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, US © Peking University Press 2020 L. Chen (ed.), A Journey of Discovering Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6603-5_6

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What would you say if i ask you to give it a definition? It’s the study of all kinds of social institutions above the kind of level of the psyche and individual. Do you think it’s hard to reach an agreement on the definition of sociology right now? I don’t think so. I think most sociologists see we’re doing the same way, more or less. What do you think make sociology an independent discipline? I think there are a couple of things that make it different from other disciplines. One is that we study all kinds of social institutions, not just one or another. I think one thing that makes it unique is that most of our work is inductive, so we look at the social world and we try to explain it rather than deductive, so we don’t begin with first principle as they do, for example, in economics or some branches of political science, or even to some extent, I guess, you would say they do in psychology and anthropology, so we’re inductive and also we are willing to consider lots of different theoretical mechanisms, for example, power, which for a long time dominated in political science, or self-interest which for a long time dominated in economics. As an expert on economic sociology, could you tell us the difference between economics and sociology? It used to be that we study somewhat different phenomena, so sociologists from the beginning have been studying the economy. Max Weber was studying the economy, Karl Marx was studying the economy, Simmel was studying the economy. Now we tend to study a lot of the same outcomes or a lot of the same phenomena. I think sociologists are considering a pretty wide range of casual mechanisms and the factors that can affect economic behavior whether it’s organizational behavior or the behavior of nation states. While economists don’t, they only have one kind of theory of the world, they study a narrow range of mechanisms, but they tend to study those mechanisms more intensively, like cost–benefit analysis. They tend to do a lot more, to go to a lot more depth on particular mechanism whereas sociologists, I think, we more often get the answer right when we were studying the same phenomena because we are not quite limited in the mechanism that could be at work. There are many branches in sociology, like economic sociology, historical sociology, political sociology and so on so forth. What do you think about the division in sociology? I think one of the things is that we’ve seen over the last a couple of decades, as a field sociology used to be more or less integrated around one paradigm for a long time, all sub-fields in sociology worked from the broad foundation of structural functionalism or most of the sub-fields worked from the broad foundation of structural functionalism, which was in some way centered here and not just in this department, but I am told that for a while this was the office of Talcott Parsons, and that made sociology fairly theoretically integrated. We now believe the structural functionalism

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was wrong, nobody is a structural functionalist anymore, but it meant that people were speaking the same language. With the decline of structural functionalism, something interesting happened, which is that we got more theories, but they tended to emerge at the sub-field level rather than at the field of sociology level. For example, in one of my fields, organizational theory, structural functionalism was on the decline at 1970s and by the late 1970s we had four new paradigms, resource dependence theory, network theory, institutional theory and population ecology theory, very dramatically different from what you found in structural functionalism, and these paradigms became very important in organizational sociology, but they don’t speak to social movements, they don’t speak to nation states, they don’t speak to educational institutions or to the family. But structural functionalism spoke to all those realms. So what happened to organizational sociology happened in each of those other realms. Now there are some theories that are kind of playing a role in multiple realms, institutional theory is one of them. But as a consequence, the sub-fields became kind of segregated with their own sets of theories and I feel like our theories became less integrated at the field level, like not everybody was dealing with the same set of theories, it depended on what your subsidence area was. So, I think that’s sort of unfortunate because it meant that the field has become more siloed. But at the same time, I think I see us moving back towards some integration. One thing that’s changed, for example, is we have the rise of economic sociology, and in that field, there are people who used to be organization theorists, people used to be historical sociologists, sociologists of the state, and as a consequence, um, people are bringing in different concepts from different theories, which I think has been exciting because it means that there is more of a reintegration. In some areas, we see a deliberate effort to integrate the theoretical apparatuses that have evolved, say, for example, there are a couple of edited books that bring together insights from organizational sociology with insights from social movement theory. Gerald Davis, Dick Scott, Mayer Zald and Doug McAdam1 edited a book a few years ago that try to bring those two together. And Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam wrote a book A Theory of Fields that try to bring those two together. So, I found that was one of the more exciting things about sociology these days. I would say that one of the disadvantages of the fact that we kind of splintered and developed different theories in each of these subsidence areas is that as a consequence of this, from outside of sociology, it looks like we don’t have a theory because it looks like we have too many little different theories. But I think if you look at what people are doing in different subsidence areas, a lot of what they are doing can be traced back to Weber, to Durkheim, to Marx, to Simmel, I mean we have a few core theoretical ideas that are still driving almost all of the research. It’s just that they sometimes go by different names and as I said before, unlike in a field like economics, we don’t pretend to have a single theory that everything else is derived from. So, in a way that is one of our challenges. I think, going forward to better communicate, actually ideas about power, ideas about how institutions reproduce themselves, ideas about how meaning is created in groups, these are generally ideas that come from Marx, 1 The book is Social Movements and Organization Theory, written by Gerald Davis, Doug McAdam,

W. Richard Scott and Mayer N. Zald and published by Cambridge University Press in 2005.

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Weber and Durkheim respectively, and they inform a lot what we do. Very often I review a paper or somebody says they have a completely new theory, and I will read them and think that is pretty close to what Durkheim was trying to say in Suicide. What do you think about the relationship between qualitative and quantitative methods in sociology? I think people have very different views of that depending on where they are located and very much depending on what department they are in. I was lucky to go to graduate school at Stanford where there was not a divide between the qualitative and quantitative people, some of the purely qualitative people like Ann Swidler collaborated with some of the pretty purely quantitative people like John Meyer. But I taught for a year and a half at Indiana University where there was a clear divide between quantitative and qualitative, and I could see why people were saying, “Oh, it’s us against them in some places.” But then I went on to Princeton for fifteen years and there just wasn’t a divide. Maybe I have seen less of the divide because my first book was based on qualitative archival work in different countries. At the same time in graduate school I was collaborating on quantitative projects with several different faculty members. So, I didn’t see I need to choose. But I feel like, among the leading departments, there is some qualitative and quantitative divide, but you know Harvard and Princeton have a pretty big impact on the field and those departments are not divided, so as a consequence, I think both places has been turning out students can do both. I think that’s a good thing if we are not divided on some false methodological line that really doesn’t need to be there. Many students who just start to study sociology or the public who want to know more about sociology would like to ask what the use of sociology is. What would you say about that? As I was saying before I think we provide some of the most accurate explanations of broad social phenomena because we take into account different mechanisms, different causal mechanisms in the world. So as a consequence, I think a lot of what we do influence the way people think about the world. when you think about concepts like peer groups or cohorts, when you think about even what it means for something to become an institution, a lot of the insights that have come out of sociology have affected how we think about the world. What do you think sociology would be like in ten or twenty years? I see it as moving in a couple of different directions, as I was saying, toward more theoretical agreement in that. If I take the field of economic sociology, you would argue that it comes mostly out of organizational theory, and as of the 1970s, organizational theory was pretty much structural functionalism and then there was some Marxists doing it, it was kind of divided into those two groups. And now I see in economic sociology, people in structural functionalism, there was some of Max Weber about how institutions reproduce themselves and how we choose them. And in Marxism, there were some of what Marx had observed about power relations. Now I feel like in economic sociology, the main people working in the field are not trying to

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do with only one concept or another. I kind of feel like generally in the fields people are using all kinds of concepts comparatively to try to understand. So, I see that as a real strength of where we are going and I think I could imagine sociology going forward where people use these kinds of mechanism-level processes very flexibly in different situations and take into account other possible mechanisms. I feel like in a bunch of sub-fields we are getting to the place where we are using these concepts more intelligently and less dogmatically, less narrowly in terms of the paradigm that we decide we want to start with, and I think that had been one, both from Marxists say when there was that old divide for Marxists and structural functionalists, people couldn’t imagine that the other side’s answer could be right to a question. And now I kind of feel like we have moved beyond that. And the other thing is I see other really exciting developments in my own work, the availability of data, just because so many organizations are collecting data at a very fine-grained level and nation states are collecting data at a very fine-grained level, most of the European nation states collect register data on individuals and can track their entire lives through schools, through different jobs, and they have annual observations on all kinds of things even down to the level of what probably wouldn’t happen in the US but down to the level of what drugs they are prescribed, I think it is violation of privacy, so I am not necessarily recommending that every country needs to do that. But we do have access to incredible data that could allow us to answer questions we haven’t been answering before. If you look across the sciences, the physicist, high energy physicist, would tell you that their problems require hundreds of millions of dollars of investment every year, but, of course, before we had nuclear program, they didn’t get that kind of money, and physicists operated with fairly small budgets. I feel like in sociology we could have spent the same kind of money collecting detailed data on everything about individuals over time, and it’s very easy for us to spend the kind of money that physics spend. We didn’t, partly because people thought it was not that important or we had other priorities but the NSF (Nation Science Foundation) budget for sociology has been a tiny fraction of what it has been for a field like physics. Earlier in my career, I often thought if only we had the resources of physics, what we could do would be amazing, but now I am encouraged that by chance a bunch of national governments have been collecting these registered data for many years and more and more sociologists are using them. And in my field, one of the things I study most now is the career paths of people in corporations and how corporations’ strategies and policies affect the livelihoods of men and women, blacks and whites, Asian-Americans and Latinos. Another source of data is a lot of corporations have incredible data on individuals, everything about their career while they are in the firm, very detailed data on where they come from, where they leave for, when they are promoted, what kinds of performance reviews they have had, how much money they made, what team they work on, and more sociologists are getting access to those data. So, I see sociology moving toward the kind of big data science that we’ve had from linear accelerators in high energy physics where they have billions of observations. I see it as kind of moving toward having a lot more data and being able to do a lot more with it, so I find that is very exciting.

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I know you studied sociology from the very beginning, so why did you choose to study sociology at that time? Did your parents influence you or you made the decision by yourself? That’s hard to say. So, to some extent, my parents didn’t have much input into what I was studying. I guess I was the child of the 1960 and 1970s which was a very free and open period. My parents were leftists, they were highly educated, they believed in letting us do what we wanted, so I guess they had an influence because they were both social workers and they were both interested in social problems and they were also very politically active, so I got taken to a lot of civil rights demonstrations when I was very small, there were a lot of anti-war demonstrations, and some feminist demonstrations, a lot of environmental demonstrations, and these are all issues that sociologists study. I think, in some way, my interest in diversity and inequality comes from talking so much about the civil rights movements around the dinner table when I was very small. But in terms of how I get interested, I basically didn’t know. I wouldn’t have known what sociology was because we don’t have it in high school here, right? I thought I was going to be in English major, or maybe a painter, and then maybe go to law school. But I had a couple of amazing professors as an undergraduate and just got sucked into it and changed my major. Do you think some professors played a key role in cultivating your interest in sociology when you were an undergraduate student? Yeah, and I think that is the way most people get into sociology because if your parents are pushing you into something, they usually push you into something that is practical or that they see as having a clear career trajectory, which likely make you become investment bankers or management consultants, say, economics. I don’t think parents think, “Oh, I want my kid to be investment banker, sociology?” So, because I think parents don’t push kids into it much and because it isn’t offered in high school as such social science, social science is more like history in high school. And then in high school, kids have history instead of social science. So, I think most sociologists are drawn in through teachers that who inspired them. And then a fair number of sociologists have parents who were sociologists. What’s your favorite course when you were in college? I had a lot of terrific sociology courses, I can’t think of one that I didn’t love to be honest, just because I found the materials so interesting. I had a wonderful gender course at Oberlin College, but the thing I like doing most was four independent reading courses, so that’s a great thing about the liberal arts college, you could get professors to do a one-on-one course with you, and I think I did four individual reading projects with faculty on Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Freud where I started with early works and then made my way through a lot of what each of them had written. And that’s kind of what I thought I want to do. I want to become a sociologist because I found everything fascinating when I read that stuff. What books did you read? In those courses I read all original sources, so I read the Communist Manifesto, I read Grundrisse, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, I just read a whole

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lot of things from Marx, kind of whatever the professors I was working with pointed me to read. I am very happy now I did that because it provided a kind of very solid foundation for later on and it was just fun. Many students think it is hard to read big three’s books at the first time, do you have the same feeling when you first read their books? Some of them are harder than others, right? I mean The Protestant Ethic is really easy to read, I think. And I think most of Durkheim is very easy to read. But I suppose I started with the stuff that my professor thought I could read easily, and then when I saw that was going okay, I guess that’s how I got ended up reading Grundrisse which was a little bit hard to get through. People know that you are a specialist on economic sociology, so how did you come into this field? My undergraduate thesis was on social movements, on religious movements, and to be honest, I chose to go to Stanford partly because I want to go to California, and also, I have been warned off. My undergraduate adviser was a recent graduate of Harvard and he said you may not apply to Harvard because he thought it was not a very good department to be trained in those days, so I didn’t apply here. I applied kind of four or five places just based on what my adviser recommended without doing much research. I had visited Stanford and Berkeley, but I did not intend to work on social movements. I chose the department Stanford because it was in California, not because of what they specialized in, and then I became very interested in where institutional theory was going probably because that was what was happening there, and well I would have said that organizational theory is a very boring part of sociology when it was structural functionalist in the 1970s, it was changing very rapidly in those days, so I first became interested in organizations and then in economic sociology. I think if I have gone to graduate school ten years earlier, I wouldn’t have thought there is anything interesting happening in those fields, so by chance. Since you became a teacher of sociology, what do you want to teach to your students? The things I have most fun in teaching are methods and I taught classical theory this past fall for the first time and I thoroughly enjoyed that and you can see why I would’ve enjoyed classical theory. I never had an opportunity to teach it before and it was my favorite thing as undergraduate so it was really fun to go back to it. I think everybody needs a foundation in it. If they come up with a new idea, you will understand whether it is actually new. If it is new, what is it connected to what we have done before? I know it may be unusual to say that I like teaching methods, but the reason I like to teach it, and for years I taught the kind of introduction to methods course at Princeton and then for years I taught the introduction to methods course here, is that I feel like the work we do from day to day, a lot of it is about just collecting the data, however you collect it and analyze it, so you develop a story and then figure out how to exclude other possible arguments, so a lot of what we do is informed by method, and it’s kind of like for a while I thought I could be a painter.

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That was a mistake, but I kept taking painting courses when I was a graduate student at Stanford, and it’s kind of like painting, you have to like to paint, you have to like what you are actually doing, like putting the paints out on the palette, figuring out what color you want, mixing them and putting it on the canvas, and if you don’t like that part of it, just wanting to be the artist, wanting the end product, you are not going to be happy, you have to like that part of it. So, I feel like one of the great things I got in graduate school was learning to like the research part of it, all of it. I mean some parts I like more than others. But one reason I like to teach methods is it’s a challenge, it’s kind of like you are a detective and you are trying to figure out who did this, and you know a lot of the work of being a detective isn’t that interesting, but that is kind of what we are, and then figuring how to do that well and in a way where you can convince the courts that you are right, that is where you convince readers that you actually figure out what is going on here. I kind of feel like that is one of the great things that I got from graduate school. I came to really enjoy the process, so that is kind of why I like to teach it. I mean it’s probably an unusual answer because I should say that I like to teach the things that the area I work in, and of course I love to do that too, I love teaching, I love teaching undergraduates, l love teaching graduates, but those of them I think that have actually given me the most pleasure. How do you balance your time of doing research and teaching? It is a challenge. As I said I really like teaching, so it’s never been painful, I have never thought, “Oh, I really don’t want to teach.” I mean earlier on, sometimes it was slightly panic like “I don’t have a lecture for today and it’s in an hour, what am I going to do?” But the main way I balance it is with a little bit practice. I think it is pretty easy to figure out how to be an efficient teacher so that you don’t have to spend 5 h preparing for a class that is only 50 min. And once you’ve taught that class a couple of times, you don’t have to spend that long preparing. And I have been lucky to be in institutions that don’t require me to teach a lot, like we teach sort of three and a half courses a year here. So, I don’t find that hard to balance, but you do have to tell yourself about teaching that another two hours will only make the course 5% better but it doesn’t need to be 5% better. Sometimes you have to tell yourself there is a limit to how much material undergraduates can absorb and if you have a good sense of what that is, you know kind of how much material it has to be on the lecture.

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What struggles have you faced during your academic career? I have been lucky. I can’t say I had a lot of struggles. But I guess I would say two things. One is I am married to another sociologist, Michèle Lamont. Because the job market in the US is quite random, Michèle was teaching at the University of Texas and I was teaching at Indiana University, and if you look on the map, they are far apart and there are no direct flights or at least there weren’t direct flights then. So I would say it was a struggle to find jobs together. But we were completely lucky, I mean at that time those were both top ten departments, we got our first jobs at top ten departments, and after I was in Indiana for a year and a half, we both moved to Princeton, which was not a great department then. But we were both looking for jobs for, I don’t know, three or four years, that was kind of stressful, we didn’t quite know how that would work out. I would say the other main period of stress was just in the couple of years before we came up for tenure because in graduate school there was some pressure to get some stuff published, but you can stay in graduate school for a year longer if you want, you can go on the market when you are ready. So if you don’t get stuff published in year 5, you can just wait for another year. Whereas when you’re on the tenure clock, it has to be published by a certain date or else you don’t get tenure. And Princeton was tenuring no more than 6 people in those years, they kept telling us that. So I did the math. The odds of us both staying there was 1 in 36, so we were both working very hard with a deadline. I think that was hard on us. I was looking at old pictures with our kids and one of them said, “Wait, this picture you look really old, but that is the house you had before we were born, right? And this picture 5 years later you have three small children, you look much younger.” And you know, I said, “Yeah, that’s right!” We both look like how the couple of years before we came up for tenure because we were working so stressed out, and most people look their worst when they have three toddlers. You have two books, Forging Industrial Policy and Inventing Equal Opportunity, which actually won the Max Weber Award. I want to talk about Forging Industrial Policy. What’s the major problem you faced when you wrote the book? And is that your dissertation? Well, the answer to both questions is the same answer. The main problem I had was that I was interested in why conceptions of rationality are different across countries. And I decided for my dissertation to write a book about four different episodes in three different countries, what happened in the railways, what happened in the auto industries, what happened in the great depression and what happened in the electronic industries. So the argument there was essentially that in the railroad industry, these countries developed an imagery of how to promote industry growth, and they kept replicating it, they kept doing the same thing over time, but when I got done and was showing it to people, most people said, “You know, the interesting question is not why did they keep doing the same thing, it’s why did they choose this strategy in the first place.” So I would say the most difficult thing was, I wrote this dissertation but then my first book was a different book, because it was not about how this first approach got replicated, it was about where this first approach came from. So, there was a little bit of the research I could use, I had to do most of the research anew, and

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of course I had to write it completely from scratch because I had a different problem. But I would say in those last couple of years before coming out for tenure, I was working a crazy number of hours to try to get the book out and some other papers out. At some point, I did think that was stupid because some people basically spend three months revising their dissertations and publishing them as books, maybe the stupid thing was I didn’t just publish the dissertation, I thought that I would later publish the dissertation and I published some parts of it in papers, but the scheme of things is not such a bad problem to have. As you have mentioned actually, the New York Times has an article today and the title is very interesting, and I just want to ask you the same question, that is, what if sociologists had as much influence as economists? What is your answer? And I read the piece, it’s interesting. I do think the world would be different if all of our insights about, say, how organizational processes reproduce gender inequality were taken seriously by policy makers. I think policy makers tend to have a kind of simplified model that comes from economists, it’s not that it’s wrong, it’s just that there is so much left-out. So I think we would have more effective public policies. So, for example, I just read a marvelous new book2 on the efforts of the government to produce the workplace equality for men and women, blacks and whites mostly by Ellen Berrey, Bob Nelson and Laura Nielsen and it’s coming out with the University of Chicago in a few months and I read it to write a blurb for it. And they show that our legal system does not help people who are disadvantaged to solve their problems of the workplace and in particular shows that people who failed discrimination suits almost always lose their jobs, and almost always end up poorer than they were before, and almost always lose the suits. And when they win the suits, because they have to leave their jobs for one reason or another, they got fired often, or they are subject to retaliation so they need to leave. And because they lose their jobs, those who win, on average win something like 30,000 dollars which is not enough money to make up for the fact that they lost their jobs. They have to pay the lawyer after they won and they usually lose more than 20,000 dollars in income. But before their book, we thought that this system which creates a disincentive for employer to discriminate by allowing employee to sue them, we thought this could solve the problem of workplace discrimination. I think if insights like that are just built into public policy, sociology come up with the insights like that and congress pay attention to it, we would have a very different role in society and more effective policies. I will say that in a lot of Europe, sociologists play a big role in policy-making. In the US, our political system is most influenced by economics, maybe England is a little similar, but France, Germany, Italy, the Nordic countries, sociologists play a big role, and it’s true for China. Sociologists there are, I think, much more often listened to by policy makers.

2 Ellen

Berrey, Robert L. Nelson, and Laura Beth Nielsen, Rights on Trial: How Workplace Discrimination Law Perpetuates Inequality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.

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What is your advice to students who want to start an academic career in the future? In some ways, I guess my advice is implicit in what I’ve already said which is that, to have an idea of how you can really make a contribution, you need a very solid foundation of theory, you need to understand what people have said before essentially, and what concepts they have come up with before, and then before you start, you need to have a solid foundation of methods and think, “Do I really want to do this?”, just like you need to think before you become a painter, not “Do I want to be famous and have a show in a big gallery in New York?”, but “am I going to be okay with sitting or standing alone for 5 h a day with a brush and oil paint and painting?” You need to think about whether the research part is what you want to do. But unlike painting, you can do this in teams, that is one of the most fun things about being a sociologist, the collaborative part. Introduction of Related Characters Georg Simmel (1858–1918) was a German sociologist, philosopher, and one of the founders of German sociology. Simmel is regarded as a pioneer in urban sociology, symbolic interaction theory, and social network analysis. His representative work is The Philosophy of Money. Gerald Davis (1961-) is an American sociologist, and Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan, known for his work on corporate networks, social movements and organization theory. His representative work is Social Movements and Organization Theory. Doug McAdam (1951-) is Professor of Sociology at Stanford University. He is the author or co-author of over a dozen books and over fifty articles, and is widely credited as one of the pioneers of the political process model in social movement analysis. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003. Neil Fligstein (1951-) is an American sociologist, and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, known for his work in economic sociology, political sociology and organizational theory, whose representative works are The Institutionalization of Europe and The Architecture of Markets: An Economic Sociology of Twenty First Century Capitalist Societies. Ann Swidler (1944-) is an American sociologist and Professor of Sociology at University of California-Berkeley. Swidler is most commonly known as a cultural sociologist. She is best known for her books Talk of Love, and the co-authored works Habits of the Heart as well as her classic article, “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies”. In 2013, Swidler was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. John Wilfred Meyer (1936-) is a sociologist and emeritus professor at Stanford University. He has contributed to organizational theory, comparative education, and the sociology of education, developing sociological institutional theory. He is best known for the development of the neo-institutional perspective on globalization, known as world society or World Polity Theory. In 2015, Meyer won the Du Bois Award, the highest honor of the American Society of Societies, in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the advancement of sociology.

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Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was an Austrian psychoanalyst and psychologist who is also the founder of psychoanalysis. His masterpieces is The Interpretation of Dreams.

Interview 7 Mario L. Small Mario L. Small

Profile: Mario L. Small is the Grafstein Family Professor at the Department of Sociology, Senior Research Associate at Hutchins Center for African and Afro-Am Research. He received his B.A. in sociology as well as anthropology from Carleton College (1996), a M.A. (1998) and a Ph.D. (2001) in sociology from Harvard University. Small went to teach at Princeton University in 2002 and moved to the University of Chicago in 2006, he chaired the Department of Sociology from 2011 to 2012 and acted as the Dean of Social Science Division from 2012 to 2014 before he joined the Harvard faculty in 2014. Small is the author of numerous award-winning books and articles on urban poverty, support networks, qualitative and mixed methods, and other topics. He is the person who won the C. Wright Mills Best Book Award twice in 2005 and 2010. His latest book, Someone To Talk To, is a study of how people decide whom to approach when seeking support, which is an inquiry into human nature, a critique of network analysis, and a discourse on the role of qualitative research in the big-data era. Interview March 24, 2017 William James Hall, Harvard University What is sociologist in your eyes? Sociologist is someone who from very many perspectives tries to understand some aspects of the social world and the structure of social relations, that can be the nature of decision-making in social world, that can be the stratification of society as a whole, that can be the change in society over time, all aspects of change, all aspects of society falling into what sociologists would be interested in studying. Could I asked you to give a definition of sociology? I think sociology is the scientific study of society, that’s it. M. L. Small (B) Grafstein Family Professor of Sociology, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA © Peking University Press 2020 L. Chen (ed.), A Journey of Discovering Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6603-5_7

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Do you think it’s hard to reach an agreement on the definition in sociology? Yes, sociology is a young field. There have been works of sociology or social science or something quite similar to sociology for centuries. In nineteenth century, there were many kinds of work that were sociological in nature in Europe. But in terms of a formal discipline, with roughly agreed upon ideas about what sociology should be, the field is a couple of hundred years old at best. As a result, it’s a young field and a field in which there is a lot of contentions about the right way to do certain things. And because of that, we are going to be in the stage where the foreseeable future is going to be disagreements about the right way to do social science. What do you think make sociology as an independent discipline? I know you studied anthropology and sociology, so could you tell us the difference between sociology and anthropology? I can describe some differences. I think anybody who tells you they know the single definition that everyone is going to agree with is probably wrong. But sociology at heart is concerned with society. The best way I can think about answering the question is to give you examples, sociologists sometimes study changes over time the way historians do, sociologists study economic process like economists do, they study demographic shifts like demographers do, and they study individual cognition and decision-making like psychologists do. The things that sociologists study that other fields don’t or that they rarely do are the study of institutions, the study of neighborhoods, the study of organizations, the study of contexts, in some respects, the study of cultures. Many other disciplines study some aspects of this issue, few of them study them as centrally and as deeply as sociology does. I should also say the study of networks, which is at heart a deeply sociological question. There are many branches in sociology, like economic sociology, organizational sociology, historical sociology. What do you think about the division in sociology? I think in one sense it’s inevitable and in that sense, it is also probably good, but in another sense, it’s unfortunate. The way in which it’s inevitable is that it’s just the natural production of specialization. And the reason that’s in some way good is that specialization has meant that we can study many things in far more details and with far greater precision and with far greater sophistication then we could otherwise. The best network analysis today we can do are deeply, deeply, deeply informative in ways that the best ethnographer couldn’t, and vice versa, the best ethnographer can observe aspects of the social world as it’s happening in ways that the best structuralist network researcher can only dream of. I think that’s good. I think the difficulty and the ways in which it’s unfortunate is that these divisions have proceeded to such an extent that sometimes researchers have difficulty understanding and agreeing on even common language, even things are as simple as what constitutes a proper study. When that study deviates from certain expectations that are common to mainstream social science, it becomes difficult to agree upon.

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What do you think about the relationship between qualitative and quantitative methods in sociology? Yes, this is something I’ve thought about a lot. There are people who will tell you that the quantitative research is there for establishing cause and effect and for determining whether the questions are representative, and qualitative research is good for generating hypothesis. I think this is a simplistic view that’s actually not accurate. There are branches of quantitative research that also in a sense inductive and generative just like many branches of qualitative research. A lot of what researchers call data mining in this context of computational social science is very much like what ethnographers do, which is you dig into your data and you try to uncover some patterns without any clear idea about what are you going to find. At the same time, testing ideas is something that happens both quantitatively and qualitatively. For sure you can test ideas with an experiment or with a survey, but you can test implications of ideas in the field, right? And you can use failure of one idea to hold in the field as we are generating new ideas. So I don’t actually think that is where the differences lie. I think quantitative and qualitative kinds of work are basically very broad categories that really capture a couple of very different things, one is ways of collecting data, another is ways of analyzing data, and another is literally just types of data. And because they can be quantitative and qualitative types of data and ways of collecting the data and ways of analyzing the data, a simple distinction doesn’t make very much sense. So I’ll give you an example. We did think about historical data as qualitative data. Well, historical texts, the narratives from a particular period from people’s letters or dairies or documents or other kinds, are in fact natural language, and we can analyze those qualitative text through quantitative techniques. You can conduct a large sample, a large natural language processing quantitative text analysis of those data, not just the traditional kind of work that historians have done. So we have data that we typically think are qualitative but are actually being analyzed quantitatively. You can in fact do more than that. You can take a historical text and identify actors in the text, and trace the connections among different kinds of actors into, and represent those in the form of a network structure, and then you can analyze that the way you would analyze a qualitative network data set. So I think the distinction within quantitative and qualitative data, and I can give many and many more examples of this, is broad classes of types of data, and types of data collection, types of analysis, but in the end, it doesn’t actually capture a lot of how actually much of the most interesting work today is being undertaken, much of which would have to be called some kind of mixed method even though that term was actually used that way in the past as well. What is the use of sociology? What would you say about that? There are many… Discovering what we don’t know about the social world, determining whether what we think about the social world is right or not, understanding change in the social world, understanding the causes behind change in the social world, understanding causes behind stability in the social world, determining the probability that ideas we have about improving the world would work, determining

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whether the ideas how we’ve had about improving the social world have had unintended consequence, there are more, but those are among the very a few that I finally find important to know. You studied sociology as well as anthropology, but why did you choose to study sociology at that time? Did your parents influence you or you made the decision by yourself? No, my parents didn’t influence me very much. I think, ideally, they would’ve been happy if I have become an engineer which is one of the most interesting things for me at the time. I thought I was going to be an computer engineer but I went to sociology eventually. It was because I went to Carleton and I had a great class with a sociologist named Nader Saiedi who taught a course in social theory that I found changed my thinking about the world in ways I had not expected, so very shortly after, I decided that I want to become a social theorist. Could you tell us something about the professor? Because I just want to do you think some professor played a very key role in cultivating your interest in sociology? Absolutely yes, that professor was Nader Saiedi who is a professor still at Carleton College. If I had not taken his courses, I would have not become a sociologist. Nader Saiedi is a scholar helped me understand that very sophisticated people can differ in the right way of understanding of the social world, but more importantly can offer an entire way of looking at the world that will let you see things in the world that you haven’t seen otherwise. When I first encountered Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Simmel, and later Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, all of these scholars had very broad and powerful ways of looking at the world that were different from how I looked at the world. But more importantly, their ways of looking at the world allowed me to see things that I hadn’t seen before, the operation of power, the operation of systems of closure and exclusion, stratification and inequality, the extent to which the mere number of people in the interaction context can affect the dynamics in it, the extent to which class can manifest itself culturally, there are many more ideas, it was just like a major eye-opening for me that altered my life permanently. Since you became a professor of sociology, what do you want to teach to your students? I try to cultivate my teaching in a couple of things. One of them is the sense that theory and sociological theory in particular can be especially powerful because it can provide a set of categories through which to understand the world that will force you to see things in the world you haven’t seen otherwise, or you wouldn’t see otherwise or you hadn’t seen it until that point. In addition, I try to cultivate a strong critical idea about our ability to assess whether those theories are right. So, a lot of my work since the starting point that sociology is a young discipline, it’s an exciting and important discipline, but it’s a young one. And we haven’t figured out the answers to a lot of questions about how do we know whether we are right about what we think about the social world. So many of my courses are devoted to debunking easy ideas as

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we understand things we actually don’t understand and promoting students to have strongly critical attitude about how they are seeing the world and how they are seeing theorists’ ideas about how the world is operating. How do you actually gradually build up your research interests like personal network and qualitative methods? I think you have a huge interest in these fields. Yes, I can tell you it was not planned. I was a very terrible strategic thinker when it came to my own research, most of the questions I have studied as a scholar, I studied just because I thought they were interesting, and as I pursued one idea that I found interesting, I found myself pursuit another and another and another and next thing, then I have a research career. So, my first book was a study of a housing project here in Boston, and I began studying that project in part because I went to that community one time to volunteer as a graduate student in an after-school program and it was a community that just looked interesting. It was a community that was almost entirely Puerto Rican, low-income, completely surrounded or almost completely surrounded by communities that were primarily white upper-middle class, so you had a housing project that was all Latino across the street from a condo in which two bed-room was selling for a million dollars. It was just perplexing. So, I thought it was interesting. Around the time I was studying a different neighborhood where I ran into a research assistant that was working for professor William Julius Wilson, and I was doing research in the neighborhood where I was asked to connect the neighbor organizations and I found myself in a child care center, and in this conversation, I learned that this child care center was doing a lot more for parents than I would have thought a child care center does for parents. So, I found myself curious and I started studying what was this thing, this child care center as institution, I wonder if in fact an entity that does far more than we think it does. When we were doing that project, I found myself surprised by the fact that some parents would be willing to trust their kids with people they barely knew. They didn’t even know their names, but they felt totally comfortable trusting them, even if they said they wouldn’t trust them, they did so. And as I progressed, I found myself be very curious about how people decide who to trust and how people who are looking for support among the other people decide who to talk to. So, then I found myself writing the book I am writing now, it’s almost finished, it’s called Someone To Talk To, which is about how people make decisions. So, it was certain one question to the other and to the other as I found myself in the field and I just pursued the questions I found were interesting. One of the powerful things about sociology is that it’s a field that literally composed of all society. Any question you find interesting is able to find a place in the field. How do you balance your time of doing research and teaching? And what do you think about this two connect to each other? Very poorly, that is how I manage my time. I think I would differ from other people on this question. There are people who think that the research function and the teaching function are largely separate functions, so according to these people, there are faculty who should be largely teaching faculty and faculty used to be largely researchers.

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And there is some of that that is inevitable, some institutions are largely research institutions in which most people teach, others are largely teaching institutions, for example, small-scale colleges in which people do research. To me, the research mission and the teaching mission are integral. I tend to teach the things I am currently interested in, and I tend to use my teaching as a way of reforming my thinking, as a way of allowing me to discover whether I am actually clear about the things I am studying in my research. So I teach a lot of very different courses and the courses I teach change a lot because my research interests change or evolve and as those evolve, my teaching evolves. I find them strongly connected. In fact, in my teaching, I often assign unfinished papers that I am currently working on both to graduate students and to undergraduates because I think incorporating students into the research process allowing them to see that, “Oh, we are struggling with ideas too”, and not every idea is already polished and try to figure out with researchers, with faculty how they work, is one of the best ways to discover for yourself how the research process actually works. I find the process of doing that to be the center to my philosophy of about teaching. Except teaching and doing research, I know you also had a lot of administrative work, you were the chair of sociology department when you were in Chicago University, so how do you balance your work and family? That is a great question. I was the chair of sociology department at University of Chicago, I was also for a while the Dean of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago, and the truth is the balance is difficult, and I don’t think I managed it any better than anyone else. When I was doing research and doing administration and doing teaching, I taught less but I still taught because I missed it. I also did different kinds of research, I dedicated more, I didn’t write my book at that time. But through all this process, I frankly neglected my social life and so what I did was re-balance. So, at this point I think I have a better balance, I am not doing administration now except I am the director of graduate study, I am doing more research, equal teaching, less administration but I am also now married a year and a half ago, so I would say that the balance issue is a constant juggling act in which something will get more attention at some time and other things will get more attention at another time. I think it’s one of the biggest crises in American academia and I don’t think we find a very good way of figuring it out yet. Do you have any struggles during your academic career? When was that? And how did you pull through it eventually? That’s a very good question. There are different kinds of struggles. When I was starting out, one of the things I struggled with is understanding what sociologists believe was a good work. Because sociologists differ so much, you sent your paper to a journal and one reviewer will love it and another one will think it’s the worst thing he has ever read, and this kind of thing happens a lot. And it took me a long time to understand how and why. And one thing that helped a lot was joining the editorial board, so I have been editor or deputy editor or associate editor of several journals including right now the deputy editor of Journal of Sociological Science.

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And one of the things I learned through the editorial process is that is actually very common in sociology reviews in which one person think it is the best thing that ever have read and another person think it is terrible. So it took me a long time to figure out. But what I eventually figured out is part of the issue we were talking about at the beginning which is that sociology is a discipline with many sub-disciplines within it. And any work, any part of your work, any idea, any paper really works best in a lot of the expectations of particular sub-disciplines. So historian, ethnographer and demographer within sociology are not going to like the same kind of things and they are not going to have the same ideas about what kinds of high quality evidence is. As a demographer might say that a particular study only has 15 people and how can it be worth anything while as a qualitative researcher says the issue is not the number, the issue is how deeply you understood the conditions of those 15 people. Both are very different standards. And it took me a long time sort of to understand the field enough to figure out where people fit, and doing a lot of reviewing and sitting on editorial boards help me understand the importance of placing your paper within the right kinds of hands. Your books, Villa Victoria and Unanticipated Gains, both won the C. Wright Mills Award, that was very outstanding. Could you share with us the story behind Villa Victoria? The primary answer is, I just thought it was interesting, this place was so unexpected, but it’s also the case that around that time there was a lot of research at Harvard and elsewhere about the importance of neighborhood effects. The idea that if you live in a poor neighborhood, your life chances were going to be undermined for a number of reasons and through a number of mechanisms we haven’t actually figured out very well yet. Villa Victoria seems like a great opportunity to look at a strange case. When I first looked at it, I thought, “Oh my goodness, this is a model community.” It’s quiet, it doesn’t seem very violent, it’s in the middle of everything, etc., I wonder how people are faring here. And I thought, “Maybe I can figure out something about how people are faring here, and if I can convince people that here are faring better and understand why, then it can help me understand how people are faring in the other kinds of neighborhoods.” That was the general idea. When I read and learned, when I went there, some neighborhood that was unique in some ways was very not unique in others, and trying to uncover that later become the point of the whole book, at the end of which I wrote to convince people that poor neighbors differ from one another more than what we think they do. What was the major problem you faced when you wrote this book? The most important problem I faced was I didn’t know what I was doing. Ethnography is the kind of discipline that you have to learn by doing. Some training would have helped. The sociology department at that time didn’t have excellent training, I would say, in certain kinds of methods. But I think learning by doing which essentially was among the biggest obstacles, but also a way that force me to really think about a lot of things in a much more seriously than I would have otherwise.

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In your experience, do American and Chinese sociology students differ? That is a good question. It’s hard to say generally. There are a few things that are different in our culture. But I hesitate to make broad generalizations because there’s a lot of varieties within both contexts. So, for example, many people do homologous question will tell you, “Well, American students are used to speak open in class, while Chinese students have deferential attitude about authority and in terms of authority they will speak less.” You know sometimes that happens, but a lot of times it doesn’t happen at all. I just met with a student who is a 17-year-old first year student of Chinese origin in my class, and she is one of the most vocal students in the class. And I had American students in the Midwest who were supposed to be highly engaged really had difficult time in getting engaged, so I think sometimes those differences are exaggerated. I think one thing that I have noticed among students who are Chinese both in the U. S. and in China is a great appreciation for the value of academic knowledge, a lot of respect and appreciation for it, so a lot of yearning for acquiring as much information as much knowledge as possible through as many sources as possible. Not everyone, but that’s one thing I have noticed I thought was interesting. Could I ask you to give some advice to students who actually want to start an academic career in the future in sociology? Yes, I would say probably the single most important thing to do in sociology is to pursue the questions you find personally interesting. Notice I said interesting rather than important. The reason I said interesting is because sociology is a field that thrives on originality. The best sociological work is original in the sense that it tells us something that we didn’t already know and we haven’t already expected. A lot of students when they start out, they think what they have to do is to do the research that’s most important, or the literature is already agreed is important, or it’s going to get them the job because it is the latest or uses the latest methods. And the truth is, when sociologists, if I read the work of students to hire them for jobs, to evaluate them for grants, we weigh originality a lot more than students seem to realize, and we weigh fads a lot less than students seem to realize. A second reason to do that is pursuing what is interesting is among the greatest gifts, and it is also the most important things for social science to grow and among the greatest gifts social science provides individuals but also among the most important things social science needs in order to grow. Creativity is at the heart of science and pursuing that creativity is essential. I think related to that issues, you will always over the long run study better and for a longer period and in more serious way that the things that you are interested in than the things that you are not, even if you think that the things you are interested in are not very important. I will give you a final example, the book I am writing right now, it’s almost done, it’s going to be published by Oxford University Press in the fall. The title of the book is Someone To Talk To. The question I am answering in that book is a question I was interested in it. The question was very simple, when people needs someone to talk to, they have a trouble, a worry, and they are looking for a confidant, how do they decide whom to talk to? That’s it. It was not a question that I decided based on reading of literature or policy recommendations

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or big social problems. But as soon as I started answering that question, it’s very difficult because you cannot observe people when they are confiding in people they are not close to. And in addition, people don’t always know why they do what they do. So, you can’t just ask them why they talk to whoever they talk to. And in addition, people are wrong about they do. People think they will only talk to people they are very close to. But if you follow their behavior, a lot of the time they will talk to people who are not very close to them at all, even about the deep personal things. So, I discovered that while writing the book, but it turns out that the reason those things are true are extremely important to how we study social networks, to how we understand social isolation, to how we understand marginalization in connection to people in society. But I wouldn’t have arrived at those conclusions, I wouldn’t have arrived at that knowledge if I had not pursued the question that I thought would be interesting. Anticipating what is going to be important is fine, but pursing what is interesting to you, I think, is essential. How has being a sociologist influenced or changed you? That is a very interesting question. I would say there are three ways in which the kind of work that I have been doing has had a very concrete impact. Some of the work I do is quantitative in nature. The quantitative work I have done has forced me to become a clearer thinker than I otherwise would be because formalizing social relationships require you to be very clear about what you think you are observing and about what your theories are. So that’s something I learned specially from being a sociologist. The ethnographic work I have done, like Villa Victoria, the observational work, that’s cultivated as something different. It’s not made my mind clear, it has made me a more careful observer. Forcing yourself to do ethnography well encourages you to observe more in the social world than you would otherwise. I noticed it far more than I did before. What people are wearing, what they look like, how tall they are, what the floor looks like, what an area smells like, whether it’s loud or quiet, whether it has signals of wealth or not, whether that place is in decay, what makes up that place decay, what places seem to be changing. All of those are visual cues that are everywhere but we don’t notice if we don’t force ourselves to pay attention. Doing ethnographic sociology has changed me in that way. The last way sociology has changed me is as a result of the interview work I have done. This last book I just mentioned, Someone To Talk To is a book in which a lot of the data are quantitative but a lot of the data are qualitative as in the sense that the interviews are qualitative. Doing interview work has made me a more empathetic listener. I spend far more of my time, not sociological time, trying to understand where people are coming from that I did before. Because cultivating that is essentially what you are doing when you are cultivating your skills as an interviewer. That is, I would say, the third way which sociology has changed me. Introduction of Related Characters Michel Foucault (1926–1984) was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, and literary critic. Foucault’s theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control

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through societal institutions. Though often cited as a post-structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels, preferring to present his thought as a critical history of modernity. His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in communication studies, sociology, cultural studies, literary theory, feminism, and critical theory. Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) was a French sociologist, anthropologist, philosopher, and public intellectual. Bourdieu’s best-known book is Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1979). The book was judged the sixth most important sociological work of the twentieth century by the International Sociological Association. In it, Bourdieu argues that judgments of taste are related to social position, or more precisely, are themselves acts of social positioning. William Julius Wilson (1935–) is Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor at Harvard University. He is one of only 25 University Professors, the highest professional distinction for a Harvard faculty member, whose views on race and urban poverty helped shape U.S. public policy and academic discourse. Past President of the American Sociological Association, Wilson has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Education, the American Philosophical Society, the Institute of Medicine, and the British Academy. In June 1996 he was selected by Time magazine as one of America’s 25 Most Influential People.

Interview 8 Jeffrey C. Alexander Jeffrey C. Alexander

Profile: Jeffrey C. Alexander is the Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology at Yale University. With Ron Eyerman, Philip Smith, and Frederick Wherry, he is Co-Director of the Center for Cultural Sociology (CCS). He has been recognized as one of the main proponents of Neofunctionalism, and a central figure in the contemporary school of Cultural Sociology. Alexander earned his B.A. in social studies from Harvard in 1969 and his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1978. He began to work at the University of California, Los Angeles, from 1974 until joining Yale University in 2001. He was the chair of Department of Sociology in UCLA and Yale. Alexander works in the areas of theory, culture, and politics, he has authored or co-authored more than fifteen books and a lot of his books have been translated into different language, produced a worldwide influence, such as Twenty Lectures: Sociological Theory Since World War Two (1987), The Meanings of Social Life (2003), The Civil Sphere (2006). Alexander has won numerous awards, in 2009, he received The Foundation Mattei Dogan Prize in Sociology by the International Sociological Association, awarded every four years in recognition of lifetime accomplishments to “a scholar of very high standing in the profession and of outstanding international reputation”. Interview April 3, 2017 493 College Street, Yale University I know you studied at Harvard when you were an undergraduate student, but was sociology your major at that time? No, I was in a major called social studies, you may have heard of that. It’s an interdisciplinary major, which includes political theory, social theory, applied studies, sociology, political science and history. I never took a sociology course until I was J. C. Alexander (B) Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology, Yale University, New Haven, USA © Peking University Press 2020 L. Chen (ed.), A Journey of Discovering Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6603-5_8

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accepted to graduate school, so at Harvard, my last course I ever took was my first sociology course. So why did you choose to study sociology when you went to Berkeley? While, it was a very political time, the 1960s, I went to Harvard as an undergraduate from 1965 to 1969, intensively political period and that made me a leftist, and that made me into an intellectual. After graduated from Harvard, you went to Berkeley. You once said that when you went to Berkeley in 1969, you were one of two or three students not given any financial assistance. I didn’t actually believe that when I first saw it, but immediately I was very curious about what happened in Harvard? I mean a very excellent student who went to Harvard and then went to Berkeley but had a very bad academic record, I think you mentioned that too, so what happened? I wouldn’t say very bad, I’d say that I had a mixed record and I certainly was not particularly interested in many courses, and I never thought about going to graduate school. I was very active in the students’ newspaper called The Harvard Crimson that took a great deal of my time and I learned to think and write not in my classes but in the newspaper, looking back and doing what I was thinking of as sociology. As a result, some grades were not very good, so when I applied to Berkeley, I said I wanted to go to graduate school to become like C. Wright Mills who was a famous radical, but I didn’t give them a good academic sense. So, they said, “You can come but we are not going to give you money.”, which is incredibly insulting because there were 40 students in those days, most of them got assistance but I didn’t. I was just curious how come a very excellent student and later an outstanding sociologist would have that experience. I think it’s a good example of how a person’s career has many different faces. I think there is too much emphasis in the United States and in China on being excellent all the time. You have to get good grades, be a brilliant student, get to Harvard, then you have to be a great student there to get the next phase, but are you creative, are you able to think of new problems, all those things, that is not really correlated with being a good student, I am afraid. It seems like Berkeley had a very huge influence on you because you met several important sociologists there, like you mentioned, Neil Smelser, Robert Bellah. Do you think they played a very important role in leading you to become a sociologist? How and what did you actually learn from them? Well, my graduate school consists of two very different parts, so when I went to Berkeley for the first two years, I’d say I was in a leftist, very activist, and very intellectual circle of people who were not interested in professional sociology that much, so I was involved with my own study groups of Marx’s theory, Maoism and I was a member of a student activist group, a leader of a group that involve faculty too, and we protested, I mean we were very involved in protesting the Vietnam War, that

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was to us a great evil and tragedy so we were trying to protest against Richard Nixon who was the president, and at that time I was involved more with a journal called Socialist Revolution, I knew many people there. Then for various reasons that were complicated that wouldn’t be a good place to go into, anyway I became less radical and less political science, and at that point, I made transition to Neil Smelser, Robert Bella, in a way via somebody named Leo Halloween who was a famous Frankfurt School sociologist, who specialized in literature and social theory and he kind of helped me to make this transition and it was only then that I really appreciated Weber, Durkheim, and Parsons, as I understood the greatness of those figures, I distanced myself from Marxism and realized that I wanted to write my Ph.D. thesis on the relationship between my earlier interest in Marxism and Weber, Durkheim and Parsons, in a way to figure out why I have moved away from a Marxist position and to help other people understand the merits of these other ideas. It was a very complicated time, but, Bella was a great scholar of Durkheim in addition of Japan, he really was an inspiration to me in terms of cultural sociology, and he helped me interpret Durkheim in a different way. And he was very involved with ideas outside of sociology, like Paul Ricoeur, a famous French hermeneutic philosopher and Clifford Geertz who was the most important American anthropologist and created cultural anthropology. So, with Bellah, I learned to be a cultural sociologist, I would say. And Smelser was a much different kind of thinker, but they were both equally important, Smelser was a very systematic, clear, macro sociologist. Since you actually began to have connection with sociology, it has been more or less 50 years. So, what’s sociology in your eyes? I mean sociology is a theoretically informed study and interpretation, a critique, and an explanation of society and there is no other discipline that has that broad of scope. Political science is concerned with politics and power, economics obviously was the market, or whatever is going on economically. So, sociology is the biggest theoretical discipline in principle, it has a kind of a big scope and that is why I loved sociology and why I still find it the most fun of any other discipline. Do you think it’s still very hard to reach an agreement on the definition? I don’t think it is hard to reach an agreement on the definition, but it’s almost impossible to reach agreement on the practice. I think there are many schools of sociology, there are many theories and paradigms, but it’s not that much different from many other human activities, that’s why for me I don’t emphasize the close connection between sociology and science. I think it’s a mistake to see physics or biology as a model for us, although there are some parts of sociology, like demography, which are very important and which you can be more scientific. I’ve tried to push sociology in a different direction towards humanities. Do you think we actually had or have a divide between qualitative and quantitative method in sociology? I was one of the people who created cultural sociology in the 1980s, so for me, sociology is misplaced insofar as it emphasizes on looking at social behavior from

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the outside instead of the inside. And a lot of times, quantitative measurement goes along with that materialistic or external viewpoint, but it doesn’t have to. Methods are not the same as theories, so there are some cultural sociologists who use statistics and I don’t have any problem with that, it’s the problem that what are you measuring? I am interested in, for example, public opinion, and I am also interested in statistics about public opinion so much so that I’ve used that in my work. But, yes, there is this tension, most of the people who do quant we call it are tend to have very scientific view, but at the same time the work that they do is very elegant and it’s very beautiful, and it’s often very intelligent, and it can be very helpful to think clearly, just like math is very helpful. Qualitative sociologists, more my interest, there are many different kinds of qualitative sociology in the United States as you probably know, there is a very large ethnographic methods and tradition which is unusual, I think the U. S. is, kind of, the founder of that kind of sociology from what we called the Chicago School and pragmatism, and it’s very interesting. But is that actually cultural sociology? I am not sure whether that method is better than quantitative method or not, I mean it’s a toss-up. For me, sociology has to be meaning centered, we have to find a way of focusing on the way people understand not just objective things, sociology is too focus on things that occur outside of people, which are very significant, like the economy going up or going down, or what position you are in stratification system, or racial stigmas, or oppression or population rates, these are extremely important, but they don’t have any effect on social actors by themselves in my view. They have to be mediated through cultural systems, or you could say, mediated through perception, through subjectivity, but subjectivity is collectively constructed, I believe. And then the problem is how does a social scientist wants to be objective, study something which is invisible, because subjectivity by definition is inside people’s heads, so how do you study in a way that’s object, that’s more objective, more responsible? I think that is why I try to develop theories about that, and I am interested in methods about that. Actually, except methods there are a lot of fields in sociology, like economic sociology, cultural sociology, organizational sociology. We also have a lot of different theoretical schools, so in which way do you think might sociology be better, more integrated or more diverse? I don’t think that’s a very helpful question really because everybody expresses a lot of alarm at the non-integrated quality, but I think that all humanistic fields have conflict and it’s not only that. For example, I am getting a hip replacement operation in the summer. I went to three doctors last week, and they are the best surgeons in this area, but they had complete disagreements, “What is wrong with the hip?” This guy said this, that guy said that. I showed them the x-rays, this guy writes this way, that guy writes that way, then I said, “What kind of operation are we going to do?” “I do this operation.” “No, I will do that.” So even when you get closer to science, there is also disagreements. So, I think that the disagreements in sociology are regrettable in the sense that I feel that I am right and I wish more people agreed with my perspective. And I regret the fact that so much of sociology is not concerned with internal meaning or with cultural symbols. At the same time, I see the conflict

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between schools is inevitable and productive because it is the way that progress was made in sociology. It’s wrong to think that progress was made only through integrated theory whether it would be accumulation. Sociology is integrated within schools, and then there is progress in kind of normal sense, but between schools there are conflicts which can be very productive because each critique put on the table something you didn’t think of and you have to answer to. What do you think make sociology an independent discipline? I think this topic has been discussed for many years. And I am very interested about what you just said that sociology is more humanity than science, is that right? I think sociology is between the humanities and the sciences, and I think it’s right in the middle. But we have not drawn much from the humanities in the United States, at least, just so much interesting, we have to be more like science to gain respectability, predictability, but I don’t think we should be seduced by that. I think we are in the middle, we want to be rational, we want methods, we want evidence, we have those aspects of science, we are very concerned with representability or sampling issues, you could say. Whereas in the humanities, they are not. The humanity is that I can study one book or one piece of art and they are not concerned in the same way as we would be with broader statements about all the kinds of paintings, etc., on the other hand, I am not sure this or that is much different because even when somebody makes a whole book about one author, one novel, they are still concerned often or typically with how do they justify their statements about this book, how do they prove what they are saying covers this whole book or this whole painting or this whole play. So, I am not convinced this issue that much. What makes sociology independent is that in a way we are the only discipline that covers the problems, that is devoted to the problems of industrial and postindustrial societies, everything you know, drug addiction, divorce, crime, poverty, inequality, wealth, globalization, ethnicity, race, religion, we study all of that and no other discipline really does that directly. I think sociology was produced in the nineteenth century with industrial organization, and it will always be an important discipline because it’s connected to the dark side of modernity. You once said, “Whether it’s a simple old wine in new bottles, or a new brew, is something history will decide.” It has been more than 30 years since you proposed Neo-Functionalism, so what would you say when you look back? Actually, I am not a Neo-Functionalist any more. I stopped that. When I went to China in 2015, I realized the only work of mine that people knew was Neo-Functionalism. But I stopped that in the mid-90s, and I wrote a book, I think in 1996 called something like Neo-Functionalism Beyond. My interest in Neo-Functionalism was the early part of my career lasted for about 20 years, it was an effort to not let go of the insights of Talcott Parsons because he was immensely criticized by my generation. But I felt and still feel that Parsons has some terrific ideas. The question is could those positive aspects of Parsons be saved while the bad parts of him be rejected? So that’s what Neo-Functionalism was about. But did it succeed? No, actually, I don’t think so. I think it made people think twice before just dumping Parsons, and it helped especially

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in Germany to influence Habermas and others to pay attention to, but they had this guy Niklas Luhmann. And I realized by the mid-1990s the idea I was developing about civil society and cultural sociology couldn’t be expressed that Parsons hadn’t developed these in the way that I wanted to, so I had to leave that behind. In addition, that nobody would listen to me if I attached, those ideas I’ve tried to claim they were related to Parsons. But the civil theory I developed and a lot of the early parts of cultural sociology definitely could not have been developed without Parsons. Since you became a professor of sociology, what do you want to teach to your students? Or what do you want them to learn from sociology? I have been teaching 45 years. For the early students, the young students, I just hope them become reflexive, critical thinkers, and that especially that they will feel comfortable with theories, having more sense of the whole, having a big picture, and in that sense, have a plurality of different fields. As students get older, I try to convince them that they should be cultural sociologists because I believe that’s the right way to do sociology. So, I teach a lecture course on cultural sociology. And I also teach a course on civil theory and on material symbols. I mean I love teaching because its engagement, and it’s extremely stimulating. Your research interests were forced on theory, like Neo-functionalism, and also cultural sociology, politics. So how do you actually build up your research interests gradually? I think our theoretical interests go out of our personalities, our characters and life experiences. So as a matter of fact, there is a lot, I would say, unconscious psychological reasons why people develop the theories that they do. But those are way too complicated for most people to write about or even understand, so basically, we have the sense of what seems interesting, what are we really interested in uncovering, and what experiences we have. Because cultural sociology developed really big, when I was very young, when I was a Marxist, because as you know there are different kinds of Marxism, right? And there are cultural tradition inside of Marxism that isn’t materialistic, and when I was a Marxist, I was part of some they called neo-left Marxism, and we were focused on culture, because we had a theory that in an affluent society like the United States that there would be no revolution that was related to material needs that Marx’s work was completely out of date and that we need a theory of emotions, meanings, and how would that relate to alien nations and that comes, so I continue that interest as my theoretical orientations change. So cultural sociology came out of that and then my encounter with Robert Bellah and other people. My interest in politics in democratic theory which was what civil theory was about was always there, I was always a political person of course, but specifically came out because of my month in China, that was almost 30 years ago, I had taught a course there in Nankai for a month on something like democracy, socialism, capitalism, and had assigned Weber and Parsons, I believe. Then I came back to a friend of mine at UCLA and he said, “Well, there is new attention to civil theory and you might want to read a couple of these books.” So, I read them right after I came back from China, and twenty years later, I published a long book about it.

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How do you actually balance your time teaching and doing research? I think every professor will tell you that’s pretty difficult. In the United States we teach a great deal, whereas in some countries professors don’t teach that much. But we have to teach and we always balance these things, and for me it’s about time management and not letting teaching be too time-consuming because you can really leave just to teach because it is so pleasurable and also so interesting, but I also have to stay at home and work on my own stuff every morning, and I am still struggling to balance both. Except teaching and doing research, I know you also had or have a lot of administrative work, so how do you balance your work and family? Yes, the center I started for cultural sociology takes most Friday. I mean we always in administration, I have been the chairman of two departments of Yale and UCLA, which is not related to teaching or research, it’s just a leadership, well, at a very low level in the university. I have enjoyed that, I loved doing that and I tried to build up a group of colleagues and hire people, that was very pleasurable. And then I have two children, they are in their 30s, it’s been great since they grow up. So, I think we all have to balance those and we have to realize that our lives are long and they have phases. There is a book, a famous book by Daniel Levinson, called The Seasons of a Man’s Life, so there are phases, sometimes if you are doing too much academic leadership, you feel “I am so out of touch with my work, am I going to be able to be creative again?”. Do you actually have any struggle during your academic life? When was that? And how did you pull through it eventually? I had two big crisis in my academic life. The first was when I made the transition from being a Marxist to a Weberian or Durkheimian, that was a terrible crisis for me. And it’s a personal existential crisis and an intellectual crisis because you lose your friends and you changed, it’s very very difficult. And then twenty years later, in the early 1990s, I made the transition from Neo-functionalism and the group of people I have been developing that for about ten to twenty years to my own theory basically to cultural sociology and working on the civil sphere ideas and politics. That was also excruciating crisis for me, it’s extremely difficult. (So how did you pull through it?) I went to spend a year in Paris, I had so many problems doing this, but again that turned out to be an immensely creative crisis for me which lasted about five years and when I came out of that, which was in the late 1990s, I had twenty years of great work in front of me, of being very productive, writing many new books, being reintegrated. I mean I think you integrate and then you become constricted, and then you become a boring intellectual, or you’ll have a crisis, try to do something new, and then go on, so I’ve had very productive crisis. So the crisis is an opportunity because you need to reach out to new ideas, new groups, you have to keep yourself alive, just like in life, you need new things, you get bored, and you need to challenge yourself. It seems like you have an experience that you feel increasingly like you are closed in a cage and you have to break out.

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You have numerous outstanding books. I want to talk all them with you, but this time I just want to talk about the Theoretical Logic in Sociology because I think that is your dissertation. Could you tell me the story behind this book? I think I have told you the story behind it in a way. I think I wrote it between 1972 and 1976, it was when I left graduate school, 1976. And then I revised it from 1976 to 1980, and in large I think by thousands and thousands of pages. It was my effort to understand what was missing from Marx basically, but then it broadly became a problem of what I found was wrong with Marx was he was a materialist and reductionist but then I realized that that problem was very widespread way beyond Marx, Marx had particular version of that, but it was widespread throughout sociology, political science and so my interest became what is the key, what is the alternative to that, my focus was on the relative autonomy of culture, the significant meaning and subjectivity. And so, I examined Weber and Durkheim and Parsons and some contemporary sociologists from that perspective. I said that there was a theoretical logic which mental logic unrelated to empirical work, that was more of a sociological version of philosophy or epistemology that could be looked at independently and I call it theoretical logic, I want to articulate the theory that would allow people to see meaning as central to have a theory of culture, but it also be multidimensional and relate to other parts of social life so that is what theoretical logic was about, also the first one was about the philosophy of science, it was a critique of positivism, and I still have many citations to that first one, I just got a letter a couple of weeks ago from a biologist in Germany who said he was putting together a book and would he have permission to reproduce a diagram from that early book of mine in 1982. That’s very interesting. But what was the major problem you faced when you wrote your dissertation or the book. I had two problems, one was I felt isolated from my own generation because my generation had continued to be very leftist and Marxist, but in also doing other things besides that, and I didn’t feel connected and I stayed and I wrote this dissertation, so I wonder whether anybody would read this dissertation. My other problem was that I felt I would never finish it because it kept getting longer and longer and longer, and I was worried about that. Those were my two problems. Professor, I think you know China very well because you go there frequently. Could you tell me what is your opinion about the difference on the training style between American and China? I don’t feel qualified to talk about how China train students because while I have spent quite a bit of time in China, especially for somebody who isn’t a China expert and doesn’t speak the language. I’ve never spent a long time inside of a department looking at how they are trained, so I am not sure how Chinese students exactly are trained to do sociology, so I wouldn’t be able to say. I mean the problem is those 500 years of western imperialism, from 1500 AD to around 2000 AD and in that period the West became dominant at different times, maybe only in the nineteenth

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century for China, and its invented modernity in a certain way, as we understand modernity in terms of markets and science and things like that. And now that period is over and you have, for example, this extraordinary development where these nations are equal if not superior in many respects to Europe and United States, and that is happening to some degree in other parts of the world too. So, the problem is now what? You know, what would be, while we have an integrated global sociology, a globe science, in the natural sciences, that goes with outside, of course it has to be one. You can’t have a Chinese physics or a German physics, people have to publish, mostly increasingly in English, there is only one truth. In our sciences, the social sciences and humanities are much more ambiguity, I think. So, I am very concerned, I am very interested about that. Will there be a Chinese sociology? I mean right now most sociologists are very influenced by western sociology. I don’t think that’s bad, I think that’s inevitable. But it’s also inevitable that we will become a distinctively Chinese sociology in the next 50 years and it would probably happen, just as Swedish sociology, German sociology. I mean someday China will produce a Max Weber, someone as great as that, and then of course everybody will have to agree that person and that person’s ideas will become immensely influential. I don’t believe Max Weber is important because of colonialism, it’s because he was a genius, and because the West was very modernized, but his ideas are limited by the fact that he was a European, he didn’t really understand Confucianism, he didn’t really understand China. I mean this is the beginning of the very exciting future, I think. Could you give some advice to sociology students who want to start an academic career in future? The only advice I think is, students should be reading the classics and the old great ideas but don’t submerge your voices inside of earlier work, be able to become independent. I think all over the world in every discipline and in sociology there is a tension between learning from masters and becoming independent. I know in confusion countries; more deference is paid to teachers than in the United States. But it’s still the same problem, I mean whether it is confusion or individualism, you have to be trained by learning, you have to look up to people, and you have to externalize their ideas to form yourself, but then you have to grow and become independent. I’ve had very difficult experiences of that in my own life, so I understand that. How has being a sociologist changed or influenced you? It’s allowed me to keep, to be fascinated by everything going on around me, so for me, as I tell my wife reading the newspaper and watching television is work, it’s not just fun, it’s extremely exciting, it’s fascinating, for example, Donald Trump’s administration, I despise Donald Trump, I think he is a very dangerous figure, I have tremendous regret that Americans they made a mistake, the worst mistake in American history, but it’s incredibly exciting intellectually, it’s fascinating to see the stuff, so I think that is a change of my life, I don’t know, I guess I went into sociology because I was interested in these things, I’ve just been able to keep on doing it.

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Introduction of Related Characters Robert Bellah (1927–2013) was an American sociologist, and the Elliott Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was internationally known for his work related to the sociology of religion. Bellah was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1967. He received the National Humanities Medal in 2000 from President Bill Clinton, in part for “his efforts to illuminate the importance of community in American society.” In 2007, he received the American Academy of Religion Martin E. Marty Award for the Public Understanding of Religion. Leo Löwenthal (1900–1993) was a German sociologist usually associated with the Frankfurt School. After Hitler came to power in 1933, Löwenthal, as a Jew, moved to the United States and worked in the Washington War Information Office. After the war, he and Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School chose to stay in the United States and later became a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. His representative work is Literature, Popular Culture and Society. Paul Ricœur (1913–2005) was a French philosopher one of the most important contemporary interpreters. He has been a professor at the University of Strasbourg in France, a professor at the University of Paris, a professor at the University of Lentelle, and a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, Yale University, University of Montreal, Canada and other universities. In November 2004, he was awarded the Kruger Humanities and Social Sciences Lifetime Achievement Award, known as the Nobel Prize in the field of humanities, by the Library of Congress. Clifford James Geertz (1926–2006) was an American anthropologist who is remembered mostly for his strong support for and influence on the practice of symbolic anthropology, and who was considered “for three decades…the single most influential cultural anthropologist in the United States.” Geertz aimed to provide the social sciences with an understanding and appreciation of “thick description.” His often-cited essay “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” is the classic example of thick description, a concept adopted from the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle. Thick description is an anthropological method of explaining with as much detail as possible the reason behind human actions. Jürgen Habermas (1929–) is a German sociologist and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. He is best known for his theories on communicative rationality and the public sphere. Within sociology, Habermas’s major contribution was the development of a comprehensive theory of societal evolution and modernization focusing on the difference between communicative rationality and rationalization on one hand and strategic/instrumental rationality and rationalization on the other. This includes a critique from a communicative standpoint of the differentiation-based theory of social systems developed by Niklas Luhmann, a student of Talcott Parsons. Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998) was a German sociologist, philosopher of social science, and a prominent thinker in systems theory, who is increasingly recognized as one of the most important social theorists of the twentieth century. Luhmann is probably best known to North Americans for his debate with the critical theorist Jürgen Habermas over the potential of social systems theory.

Interview 9 James A. Evans James A. Evans

Introduction Profile: James A. Evans is currently the director of Knowledge Lab, director of the Computational Social Science program, senior fellow at the Computation Institute, professor of Sociology. He earned his B.A. in anthropology and economics at Brigham Young University in 1994, and M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from Stanford University in 1997 and 2004 respectively. After he graduated, he began to teach at the University of Chicago. And from 2005 to 2008, he served as the associate editor of American Journal of Sociology. He is especially interested in innovation—how new ideas and technologies emerge—and the role that social and technical institutions play in collective cognition and discovery. Much of his work has focused on areas of modern science and technology, but he is also interested in other domains of knowledge—news, law, religion, gossip, hunches and historical modes of thinking and knowing. Interview April 13, 2017 Social Science Research Building, University of Chicago What is sociology in your eyes, professor? To me, sociology is really about understanding and taking primary data dependencies between individuals but also between things. So, in the same way that economists, for example, focuses on decisions and choices that may lead the social structures, social dependencies. Sociologists often posit that these dependencies exist, and we are interested in their consequences, so I think there are kind of two classes of things that sociologists study from my perspective; one are those that they really take seriously particular kinds of social things, people would study social network, family, J. A. Evans (B) Professor of Sociology, University of Chicago, Chicago, USA © Peking University Press 2020 L. Chen (ed.), A Journey of Discovering Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6603-5_9

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state, organization, characteristic social entity. But then there are others who study really the consequences of those social entities for things often well beyond what we traditionally consider sociology. So, for example, I am interested in the sociology of knowledge, what are the consequences of dependencies between people, between ideas, between materials and machines, between methods in shaping what we know are certainty, how that ends up evolving over time, and its value for our work in understanding ourselves in the world. What do you think make sociology an independent discipline? I think these dependencies matter, the relationships between persons matter. And it constructs things that are larger than the sum of their parts, right? So, a state or organization is more than just a set of individuals pairwise interactions and contracts, and it creates a kind of complexity, a higher order phenomenon which we label as organization, as a state, but we don’t think of that just the simple accumulation of lots of individual relationships or decisions. We think of it as something that once it exists, itself changes the nature of the choices and actions. You studied anthropology as well as economics when you were in Brigham Young University, and then you began to study sociology in Stanford, so based on your experience, could you tell me the biggest difference between anthropology and sociology, as well as the biggest difference between economics and sociology? I think one of the biggest differences between anthropology and sociology is that anthropology is really interested in the system of culture, or at least it historically was. Now it doesn’t use culture so much, it uses discourse. But one version of culture that has been particularly influential in the second half of twentieth century, even in twenty-first century, is Clifford Geertz’s notion of culture that is a symbolic system. So, lots of people study in the social culture side of anthropology and this is very different from those who study early hominids, the emergence of humans, and even the emergence of tool-making. Those who study social-cultural anthropology are often interested in engaging within a symbolic system, and often the mode of engagement is really focused on discourse between the anthropologist, the ethnographer, and those that he or she is studying. While sociology is really interested, I would say, in social relationships and cultural relationships, but social relationships are some types, and they have a much more methodologically broad way of studying those interactions. So, anthropologists really focus around this particular mode of discovery, right? Through ethnographic interaction, this is social-cultural anthropology I am talking about. Whereas sociology, people come at their problem with multiple methods from the perspective of large-scale data analysis, from person analysis of social experiences and cultural institutions to very distant data traces that come through digital action online. So, I think the fact that sociology is really committed to the whole understanding of, kind of social situation, in all dimensions using all these different methods, makes it really focus on that topic rather than the method. And I would say economics is characterized by a theoretical commitment which ends of translating into certain methodologies, that theoretical commitment is

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to methodological individualism, and the idea that the individual agent and the decisions that agent makes compose the course of social life. By understanding those and influencing those then we can have the greatest power over market economy, states and all kinds of social institutions, so I would say each of them has a different relationship to method and theory, anthropology is really primary commitment to particular method, the ethnographic method, sociology is really about a primary commitment to social institutions and the idea of dependencies or linkages, and economics is a commitment to this idea of the individual as an decision-maker. There are many branches in sociology, like economic sociology, historical sociology, sociology of knowledge. What do you think about the division? And in what ways might sociology be better, integrated or more diverse? I would say a lot of my own personal research work has focused on the importance of independence for discovering phenomena. So, you have multiple people that focus on the same place at same time that are going to come to the same end and the same conclusion, but it’s not because that is the only conclusion they could have come, they could have come to, it’s that they are making the same assumptions and the kind of garden paths to the same conclusion. So, my sense is that, you know, I really like diversity fundamentally. There was a beautiful study that was recently done by an economist and innovation scholar named Karim Lakhani. The study shows how they ran a competition to see who could produce the most relevant code. This competition was run by a private entity called topcoder.com. And they set two conditions, one was a wiki-condition where everybody could see everybody’s contributions and their successes at every point of time. What happened is that everybody swarmed around the last person’s success and abandoned their own independent approaches. And then some made another advance, everyone swarmed around that next advance. And that is a very efficient approach if the problem is simple because it approximates hill climbing, but the problem is what if it’s a rugged landscape, you get to the top of the small hill, where do you go next? So, the other condition, not the wikicondition but the competition condition where people were independently asked to approach the solution of, kind of, ideal software to solve this problem and producing many more very independent answers, and with a sufficiently rugged landscape that independence ends up paying off dividends. So, I would say divisions, disciplines, of course, they have liabilities. But I think one of the things that is beneficial about them is actually that they keep people separated, they generate ideas that when they come to full maturity. So, I think as a discovery agent, for the long term, actually retaining some of these divisions actually increases the value of interdisciplinary if that makes sense. What do you think about the relationship between qualitative and quantitative methods in sociology, and do you think there is a qualitative-quantitative divide in sociology right now? I think certainly in America there is a quantitative–qualitative divide, but it’s decreasing and it’s decreasing for a couple of different reasons; more and more people are doing multi-method research, more and more people are recognizing that

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rather than the kind of linear move from qualitative assessment of some setting to a quantitative assessment because qualitative variables and information are so expensive that often it makes sense to do it the other way around, to do a cheap quantitative survey of some social studies and then understand mechanisms through qualitative investigation. And I think some of the things, the computational approaches that I am most interested in recently end up complicating this relationship because they appeal much more to qualitative assessments than the quantitative assessments. So machine learning and classification which just exploded in terms of their accuracy in the last a few years, and their accuracy in predicting very subtle assessments including the kind of subtle assessment that quantitative sociology make about complex data, those kinds of predictions that end up really fitting more comfortably inside the qualitative sociology research program than the sort of quantitative research program, which really focus on the statistics, the minimization of bias, these approaches are minimizing varies rather than bias or balancing bias and variance to get the best predictions, so I think there are a lot of forces that are complicating that division today. I know you are very interested in the computational science, and actually the world is heading to a new era of big data, so how do you think big data will influence social science, especially sociology? Do you think there is going to be a revolution in sociology because of big data? I hope so. I am of the mind that, when you have small data, you need really strong theory, when you have large scale data, when I say large, I don’t just mean high level but also low level, data that really penetrates the human experience that analyzes the nature of human dependencies, new resolutions we have never imaged before. We didn’t theorize about these things before. In the past, we can measure so little because data was so expensive that we really require enormous theories. Data mine was a dirty word because you had so little data that you have no ability to test anything, or in anywhere we can discover relationships in some data and then test on other data. And it would be interesting to see in the next a few years how receptive sociology as a discipline would be to the insights that generated from computer scientists who are scholarly barbarians, they haven’t read literature, they don’t have questions, many of the things they discover are things we already know. I think it would be a very sad mistake if sociology chose to be offended or chose to ignore the insights that came from that data in the possibilities as a result of that misunderstanding, because if they do, insights are going to become private insights rather than public insights. Facebook and LinkedIn, all these social media companies, they are doing the science, and they are making predictions, and they are generating value, and they are anticipating how people are going to move, and they are helping provide valuable social surveys that the people otherwise want, and if we ignore this, social insights become less and less relevant to the social technologies that have really brought so much value in the last twenty years. I mean social-tech, I would call it, tech is really built on fundamental social insights. If you think about the social insights behind the Google search engine, behind Facebook search and advertising, behind the values of the LinkedIn graphs,

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these are fundamentally social technologies. So, I hope sociology would be open enough to recognize the insights. What is the use of sociology? I guess many students want to know what are they going to do if they learn sociology in the future. Because it’s methodological and theoretical diversity. There are many different things that they can do. You could study one thing then be unable to do something else. I think because of its diversity, you could learn almost anything in sociology as an approach which then can become relevant to you in the outside world. So, for example people in my lab are actively using and learning machine learning tools, computer science, geometric topological approaches to data analysis as well as statistics, all these things are relevant. I mean any mode of quantitative problem solving, I mean from insurance to business, to analysis in government evaluation of programs, to profit and loss evaluation. And I would say it’s more than just relevant in the way that you have generic skills that relevant to these things. I think because of our commitment to these dependencies and the fact that dependencies, like relationships, between people, but also relationships between concepts, between methods, between institutions, because of challenging to take into account, they often get ignored by many of the models that would most benefit from them. So, I think sociology offers a fresh perspective. Someone’s buying insurance, that insurance purchase could take into account the whole host of dependencies that likely shape the kinds of activities that that person is going to engage in and even help imagine new business models that are helping or influencing the decisions people make, so I think the perspective added to those methods is a value proposition which has been very under-appreciated. Back to your college days, as we have mentioned before, you studied economics and anthropology at the very beginning, and then you changed to study sociology, so why did you choose to study sociology later, what is the story behind it? I didn’t really know much about sociology, I was interested in big, historical change, I am interested in where ideas come from. I studied anthropology because I thought it’s such an omnibus discipline which was so interested in things, enormous questions, like human origins, but also ideas, cultures, but I felt like it wasn’t tackling the understanding of those in ways that would be defensible to people who were already predisposed to agree with their approaches. So when I went to Harvard University in 1994, my wife was a law student there and I took a class on social networks from Peter Marsden, and I thought when I was taking that class, those dependency methods, those graph-based methods could apply to ideas as well as the people, and that really began my essentially use of those kind of technologies which started to take off, and still actively developing in sociology and related natural and social sciences, and also mathematics, these things has been taking off. I have always been interested in history and philosophy of ideas, and in the way in which social cultural force shaping those things, this ends up in a way trying to measure and model that in ways that would be defensible to people who were predisposed to agree with me, it allows me to persuade myself and others of the veracity of my conclusions.

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Do you think some teachers or professors have played a key role in cultivating your interest in sociology? Actually, lead you on the path to study sociology? It goes back a long way. I had a wonderful high-school history teacher who was really interested in large-scale historical movements and social-cultural dependence that are shaping society at large. He received a doctor degree at UCLA in history and he was a very smart fellow, was unusually curious for the kinds of people who were typically teaching in high school. So, I think that was inspiring. And I have always been interested in social study and social issues and processes, so several of my anthropology professors were influential, and so were many economists that I worked with who had aspirations to design systems, to take into account principles that they had learned. In terms of what I do now, though I would say some of the collaborators that I work with right now have been very influential. A colleague of mine, he is in medicine and biology sciences here, he is a Russian mathematician, but he is very curious, he is very curious about how social relationship’s dependence end up giving rise to the kinds of knowledge that we see in research papers and in experiments and in conclusions that people make. And one of the things that I really learned from him was, I was always interested in the social construction knowledge, but he really helped me see the next move, the next move after I identified what I purported to be or soon to be social construction was, if we took that into account, we should be able to discover things faster or make better knowledge, and if we can’t do that, then I’m dubious that we understood what we thought we understood in the first place. So I think that relationships have been very empowering for me, and I think the idea in general of using sociology and social insights to generate new social technologies or technologies and insights in other domains, that are enhanced as a function of understanding the social rule, that has been like a second order test, the principles that we have been studying, if we cannot do better by understanding them, then I am a little bit dubious we understand anything about them at all. Since you became a professor of sociology, what do you want to teach to your students? Or what do you want them to learn from sociology? I don’t just teach sociology students. Today I am teaching a class with science major students who would go into physics and chemistry, medicine, I am teaching them about how to understand social principles that allow them to think about the development of knowledge in a new way and hopefully will influence their practice. I teach MBA students in the Business School about how to apply machine learning technologies and social sensors and processors as well as computational ones to develop better organizations, so I think part of it is about teaching people skills that I think would be relevant to works that they do. I think there are so many interesting and compelling questions that would be enormously consequential for people far beyond sociology. So, I encourage my students to take risks and to fail because I think if you are set on the research program that doomed to succeed, what the point is it to do the research?

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How do you balance your time of teaching and doing research? Not very well, I think it’s just hard, it’s hard to do it all, but I would say that there is certainly mutually beneficial. I mean when you teach, you are integrating everything together, and when you do research, you are separating every all those different forces apart, so I think teaching is a really useful exercise because you bring things into a relevance, a knowledge, then sometimes you realize in your research that those hypothesis, the possibilities that you conceived of when you were trying to make a big claim in the classroom end up being something really worth studying. So, I think they are useful to each other. But I am teaching two classes this quarter, which is rare, this is my busiest quarter, and I also run a lab with several post-doctoral fellows and others, I literally have like four papers that are just waiting for me, for my input before they go on to be reviewed at various scientific publication outlets, so it’s a busy life, but it’s a good life. How do you balance your work and family? Most recently I moved on to campus. I became a house master, one of the houses in the University of Chicago, and it makes life wonderful. I could bring colleagues and friends home and bring my kids to the office, and I guess it gives everyone a little bit more of me and me a little bit more of everybody. So that is how I do it. What struggles have you faced during your academic career? What was that? And how did you pull through it eventually? Like everybody, I faced lots of struggles. I have a lot of opportunities, I am grateful for those. But I think initially in my graduate studies, one of my struggles came from the fact that we were working on a research project with an adviser who, I felt at that time, had kind of taken my ideas and went to publish a book based on my analysis and data that I collected, and that hurt my feelings and slowed my progress. But I think it had a positive outcome for me because it really force me to leave that project and go to start a project which really was fundamentally of my design and about my curiosity. So in the end I am grateful for that experience even though it didn’t feel pleasant at that time, and I think constantly certain things work out, and other things don’t work out, you know there were jobs that I didn’t get offered, I didn’t get out of the graduate school as fast as I thought that I would have liked to. Things always happen but then the choices that you make in that case you can do deeper, broader project, end up in my case paying dividends later on. I think most of the struggles that have occasion like failure of various research projects are good struggles because I feel satisfied that I know that those were unfruitful avenue, I couldn’t have known that before and I know it now. And I hope that I can learn profitably from lots of failures in the future. I feel like if I am not having like 50% failure rate or higher than that, I am just not doing something that is worth doing.

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Your dissertation is Sharing the Harvest: The Uncertain Fruits of Public/Private Collaboration in Plant Biotechnology. Why did you choose this topic at that time and what was the major problem you faced when you wrote your dissertation? The question really came out of the interest in where knowledge comes from. In 2000, there were a number of articles in Atlantic Monthly, in New York Times, on the front page of Economist, which were about the way in which industry has reached into science, and eliminate it, essentially made it more stupid, they captured academic science. And I was living in Stanford at that time, and Stanford was right next door to Google on the one hand and Genentech was publishing more and more acclaimed papers than Stanford biology department, which was the top biology department in the country, so the idea that the only thing that industry was doing to academic science was dumbing it down seemed kind of just implausible in that place and time, so I tried to understand it in a way that would be persuasive even to people who didn’t want to believe it, and, so I looked a long time for a case that had industry influence as well as academic influence, and plant biotechnology at its inception in the 1970s and 1980s was such a case, that had enormous potential both in its scientific appeal, also in its application oriented appeal, but was not commercial, so helping farmers in central latitude countries, you know, grow crops, but also its commercial appeal in generating new, you know, road crops and really revenue valuable crops outcome, so industry was interested in it and academics were interested in it, all of them faced the same frontier and so it provided a kind of a laboratory, their model organism Arabidopsis thaliana and the whole plant technology space became my model organism for studying the way in which industry and academic and the economy or universities, and thinking about problems in different way and structuring and investigating it in different ways. So that was the motivation. Challenges in writing ended up being managerial challenges, you know, how many to gather all those data, I need to hire a team which I have never done before, and to really build an infrastructure that made sense, but that also didn’t move too quickly to questions that were sub-optimal, allowing enough time and flexibility to really understand the patterns that I was discovering. So I found it a lazy experience but an enormously valuable experience. Based on your own experience, what advice would you like to give to students who want to start an academic career in sociology in the future? I would say learning a lesson from venture capitalists in the United States. However, you feel about capitalists, there are something that they do which is valuable, and that thing they do is they build portfolios, they expect most of the firms that they are going to start are going to fail, so they build enough of them, and enough diverse elements so that they can succeed based on the success of one really good idea. I think I see students sometimes really focus on one idea or one context, it may not look like it’s working out, may not look like it’s providing insight, and they just suck water out of a stone, and I just think that’s not good for the student and it’s not good for science. I think it’s good to have a plan B and a plan C, it’s good to have a portfolio of ideas to develop yourself, not just a very diligent analyst but as a generator of ideas, that’s

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your asset, it’s not you perform one particular project, it’s that you are kind of person who comes to be able to ask and answer questions, so I think developing the taste for risk is necessary, and questioning and exploration I think is critical. How has being a sociologist influenced or changed you? I think it’s influenced all kinds of other things that I do. I think it’s influenced the way in which I view the world, I am able to see possible dependencies in a whole host of settings. When I collaborate with scientists, friends in the natural sciences, biological and physical sciences, I find I have sometimes insights about interacting-complex system elements in those systems, they don’t have anything to do with sociology but they have to do with the pattern of connections that I think about when I think about social relations, so I think sociology is not only insight about the world, but it also develops a set of patterns that become valuable in looking at many different kinds of things.

Interview 10 Andrew D. Abbott Andrew D. Abbott

Profile: Andrew D. Abbott is the Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. Abbott took his B.A. (in history and literature) at Harvard in 1970 and his Ph.D. (in sociology) from the University of Chicago in 1982. During 1973–1978 he worked at Research and Evaluation Department, Manteno State Hospital. Prior to his return to Chicago, he taught for thirteen years at Rutgers University from 1978 to 1991. He served from 1993 to 1996 as Master of Chicago’s Social Science Collegiate Division and as Chair of the Department of Sociology from 1999–2002. He was also the editor of the American Journal of Sociology from 2000 to 2016. His research topics range from occupations and professions to the philosophy of methods, the history of academic disciplines, to the sociology of knowledge. In the book, The System of Professions, which has been considered an important contribution to sociology, he explores central questions about the role of professions in modern life and builds a general theory of how and why professionals evolve. Abbott has also been recognized as one of the leading theorists of Chicago School of Sociology. In 2009, He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Interview April 14, 2017 Social Science Research Building, University of Chicago What is sociology in your eyes, professor? Sociology, you can define it into two different kinds of ways. One is sociology as an existing social structure; the other is sociology as some kind of ideal form of knowledge. It’s easier to talk about the first sociology as a social structure at least in the United States, it’s a certain kind of job market, people get Ph.D., they are A. D. Abbott (B) Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago, Chicago, USA © Peking University Press 2020 L. Chen (ed.), A Journey of Discovering Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6603-5_10

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hired by sociology departments, sociology departments churn out Ph.D., they are hired by other departments, so it is a job market. But it’s also a very general form of social science in which many different kinds of work are done, rational choice, straight empiricism, historical sociology, ethnography, survey analysis, all different kinds of work. I think as an ideal system, sociology probably is best thought of the most general of the social sciences, the one that is willing to use all different kinds of methodologies in order to understand the social world best. I think other social sciences are excellent, but they tend to be more focused on a particular method or a particular set of ideas than sociology, sociology has the advantage of being broader. What do you think actually make sociology an independent discipline? The disciplines like everything else in social world have been built historically, and sociology was one of the original disciplines to emerge in the American universities when they turned into the disciplinary organization around the turn of the twentieth century. And sociology was one of those fields that was in that original structure. It was quite a different field in those days, it was actually in the United States more or less a form of applied religion actually dominated by people who were affiliated with a clergy, who were interested in social reform, it became more “scientific” in the interwar period and after the second world war, it has once again become much more reformist after 1970s. Like all disciplines, it’s changed considerably over time, but it has a continuity of traditions which is produced by the fact that since we have academic tenure, you tend to have the discipline instantiated in single individuals who have careers of 30 or 40 years, and you have a lot of those people tied together and they create a continuous tradition. I think in other countries it has evolved in other ways, but with a similar form of building of a tradition over time. You studied history when you were in Harvard, so based on your experience, could you tell us the biggest difference between history and sociology? Well, that you can in a sense state theoretically. The idea of history is that the past in somehow shaping the present. The fundamental idea of sociology or of all social science actually is that there are causes in the present which are making things happen. Now the problem is that both of those things appear to be true at the same time, and one has to come up with an understanding of the ontology of the social world which enables you to sustain both forms of inquiry at the same time. So, history has the problem that in fact the past is gone, there is no the past, it’s just here doing something right now. The past has to have its effect through the present. Social science or sociology has the problem that it’s very clear that the past does have an influence on the present, and that it’s not the case that all causes that are determining things that are happening right now are simultaneously existent and have no roots in the past. So, the other great problem of sociology is of course if you get one set of rules, laws of social life, forty years later there will be another set law of social life, and you don’t have any account for how they change. So, both problems, both ways of thinking about the world have severe limitations and so you have to figure out a way to put them together.

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There are a lot of branches in sociology, like economic sociology, historical sociology, sociology of knowledge. What do you think about the division in sociology? In what ways might sociology be better, integrated or more diverse? Well, that’s hard to think of sociology mean more diversity than it is. At present, there are lots of different kinds of topics that are investigated. I think more recently in sociology in the United States, you’ve seen an intensive focus on inequality, for example. But it’s inequality in many different settings, in science, in the family, in organizations and so on and so forth. So, the diversity is not a problem for sociology. The problem for sociology historically has been much more to try to hold a thing together somehow. But I think that’s actually becoming a problem for all of the disciplines at this point because at least in the United States as long as the discipline was expanding very rapidly, it was organized by the fact that there were relatively a few older people and relatively many younger people, that is what happens when you are expending rapidly, and because of that there was a real tendency to have a kind of focus, also because of that people published only when they needed to, so there was much less to read and because there was much less to read, people read many more of the same things. After 1975, when the system stopped expanding, all of that changed, we now publish much too much, it’s very hard to find important sets of things that can pull us back together. So, it’s hard to see where future unity is going to come from. You were the editor of American Journal of Sociology from 2000 to 2016, so based on your observation or experience, do you think there is a qualitative and quantitative divide in sociology? I do and I don’t. I think there is a divide, but I don’t think people take it that seriously. Yes, it is true that there are quantitative scholars who don’t think anything the qualitative people do is worth reading and there are qualitative scholars who think the same of quantitative work. On the other hand, most departments in the United States teach both and most departments manage to get along, certainly this department has always gotten along in spite of this. I think the funniest part of that is to realize in the 1930s the graduate students had quantitative and qualitative softball teams. So, they knew about this but they didn’t take it seriously. I think there will be a very new version of this coming because of new methods, computational methods on the one hand and biological methods and issues on the other hand. Both of those will be developments that are strong in the social sciences in the next 20–40 years and both of them will raise strong questions for both the quantitative and qualitative people of the current type because the kind of quantitative analysis that is represented by computationalism is much more descriptive and much less determinative than the kind of causalism that has dominated quantitative analysis in sociology in the past. These external events will mean that the whole relation of quantitative and qualitative methods in sociology will probably change considerably in the coming years.

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What do you think students are going to do with sociology in the future if they choose to study it? Well, what you are going to do is to think about the social world, that is all I care about. By comparison within majors, if you are thinking about undergraduate majors, should you major in political science, sociology, or economics, or whatever? We know that actually what you majored in a college doesn’t has much to do with what you are going to do in the rest of your life. There’re pretty good evidences about that. Although many people would argue today it’s not the same as it was twenty years ago. I am not persuaded that is true. I think in terms of what you major in a college, you should major in whatever interests you. And your mind will develop and then you can decide which you want to do with your mind. In terms of why should you become a graduate student, why should you get a Ph.D. in sociology as opposed to a Ph.D. in another field, it would seem to me that the reason for choosing sociology is that you are a person who has relatively broad tastes, methodologically you like to read ethnography, but you also like to read numbers, you like to read survey analysis, but you also like to read interviews. You are a person of broad interest. That is why I went into the field and I think that is what the field has that is the best. Historically that has meant that sociology is a place where very unusual ideas can get started. A good example of that is network analysis which basically and mostly has been a creation of the discipline of sociology over the last 60–70 years or longer actually, going back to the 30s and 40s. It’s also true of, for example, sequence analysis. You could do that in sociology, you could not do that in most other fields. So, the application of DNA sequencing algorithms to career data and so on, that’s something you couldn’t have done in another discipline, but you can do that kind of thing in sociology. So, I think that’s the advantage at the graduate level. Back to your college days, professor, you studied history and literature when you were in Harvard, but when you came to Chicago, you started to study sociology, why did you change to study sociology? Well it’s better to start earlier. So, I went to an extremely advanced high school, and mainly that high school focused on science, so I had done three years of college mathematics in high school and had worked a lot in science. When I got to Harvard because of all that work, I passed out of all of the basic requirements and skipped a year, and so I was able to take many different courses in many different areas, and I became really interested in the problem of social life. I majored in history and literature for an administrative reason. I wanted to have an individual tutorial, one on one with a teacher, and there are only two departments that promised that, one of them was history and literature, the other was social studies. At that time, social studies was a very small major that’s what I really wanted, but they took only 25 people a year and they would not take advanced sophomores, because I wanted it right way so I majored in history and literature of England from 1750 to 1850. But I took enough courses to actually have also majored in both sociology and political science.

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Do you think some professors have played a very important role in cultivating your interest in sociology? Or someone who influenced you a lot? I have been very clear about the people who influenced me. In high school, I had a number of teachers who were great intellectuals, one was a well-known poet, one was the author of the basic Greek text in the United States, one was a wonderful Frenchman. In college, interestingly since I was not in sociology, I wasn’t close to faculty. But the main thing I did in college that had an influence on this was that I had a job as a research assistant for professor Roger Revelle who ran the Harvard Population Center, and professor Revelle was not a population scientist, he was an oceanographer, and he is famous of course for having written the great modern paper on the greenhouse effect in 1957 with Hans Suess, I think. So, he is a person who said, you know, “We are conducting a giant geophysical experiment.” They show that the sea will not absorb all the carbon dioxide. And professor Revelle was a very general intellectual, he was running a population center and had people working on computational modeling of river basins, on birth control, on family planning, doing surveys and econometric models, it was a very diverse place. So, you know I got used to a very diverse approach to problems with professor Revelle. Once I came here, I was in sociology, I made decision to become a sociologist in my last year at Harvard and then spent a year in the military before going to graduate school. I made that decision because sociology was the most general of the social sciences, so I made that without being influenced by any one particular person except the example of professor Revelle who was a scientist, basically now being a social scientist, a natural scientist who had become a social scientist. Once I was here, of course, there were faculty who were influential here. What kinds of book did you read a lot in your college days or when you were in graduate school? I read very widely as an undergraduate. As I said, I was very interested in lots of areas, I read in psychology, I read in sociology, I read in anthropology, I read in social psychology, I read a lot of history, I just read a lot in college. When I started graduate work, I read a great deal, but I also went into the field very soon, studying the use of psychiatric knowledge here in a clinic nearby. And by the end of my second year I was working in the field in Illinois’ largest mental hospital. I worked there for about a year doing ethnography and then they hired me because the superintendent said, “You do as much good for the patients as anyone else around here.” So, they hired me and I became a staff member and did bed planning and special reports and that kind of thing. We did not have money to go to graduate school at that time, we had only two years scholarship, so by then my money had ran out, so essentially, I worked at that mental hospital to support being a graduate student more or less part time. That was also useful in that because I was working in a mental hospital, I learned something about social life and I actually grew up. That’s very useful thing. Lots of people go to sociology directly from undergraduate work, never having any real experience of the rest of the world, and I have been in the army and I also worked in this mental hospital that gives me experience of the real world.

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That is also something I really want to ask. Because I know you worked in the Manteno State Hospital 5 years, and your dissertation was actually a study of a large mental hospital, so I am very curious about your experience of that. To some extent, I think it’s very extraordinary. It was very unusual, yeah. But I had peers, you know, we didn’t have a lot of money, so Mike (Michael) Barnes who was a year ahead of me was a Chicago bus driver. Norm (Norman) Gevitz became a guy who placed value on ruined property at the Chicago Harbor. I remember he once had to place a value on an entire ship worth of damaged paper goods, toilet paper and other kinds of stuff that had become wet, what’s it worth? So we did many different kinds of things, you know, working in the mental hospital was interesting because it fit with my interest in psychiatry and it’s at the mental hospital that I began to see the conflicts between professions that would become the center of the book The System of Professions, but it was also at the end of the whole time of mental hospitals, they were beginning to be closed, actually they started in the United States to close in the 50s, and I’d grown up as a little boy in a town that had a mental hospital, Medfield, Massachusetts, so I was quite familiar with them. But it was a remarkable place to be, it was a giant warehouse, some of the people there really were insane, they were crazy, about a third of them were crazy, about a third of them were just old people who were senile and couldn’t get along and another a third is people who didn’t fit into the modern world, the poor people, they are on street now, begging for money, living under viaducts and so on. They were much better off in the mental hospital actually than they are now. It sounds like that experience actually had a huge influence on you. It had a big influence on me and it taught me something about the real world and made me skeptical about the highly scientific, the most explicitly scientific version of sociology because I had real sense of the distance between objective measures, what occupation is someone in and what was really going on in the mental hospital, so the people who were psychologists in the mental hospital were not really psychologists in some sense. So, it taught me something about measurements and so on that made me less likely to take up the quantitative work, which in a way was odd because I had really a quite advanced mathematical knowledge, I just didn’t use it at the time. I just simply became very interested in it. I wanted to do a dissertation on the hospital as a kind of a small town, just arguing that it really wasn’t a failed formal organization, it was really just a town where people live. I never did that because Mr. Janowitz, my adviser, didn’t think it was a good idea. So, I wrote a historical dissertation in the end. So, was that your major problem when you wanted to write your dissertation, your advisor didn’t agree with your proposition? Well, he was a forthright man. He told you if he thought something was bad. And those were different days, now we supervise people very differently, we try to be helpful and so on. It was a different time then.

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Since you became a teacher of sociology, what do you want to teach to your students? Or what do you want them to learn from sociology? There are two different kinds of students, there are graduate students and there are undergraduate students. Our job with graduate students is to enable them to become the best sociologists that they in particular can become, for each student, it’s a different task, it’s a different way, you have to figure out what’s unique about each student then allow that uniqueness to express itself, allow them to find themselves. It’s hard but you have to make them into a community as well so they can support each other but, for some students they need a lot of help and support, some people need very little support, some people need to be made more self-confident, some people need to be made less self-confident. I have served on over a hundred dissertation committees, and what impresses me most is the variety of it. At the undergraduate level, it’s very different and it changes because the students themselves change. So, in the last 10 years I have been overwhelmed by the change in the undergraduate students in terms of how they think just because of the internet. And there are simply less skilled at handling prose, they have much more difficulty reading complex prose, they have difficulty with highly complex syntax, and this is even students who are very smart. There is a bunch of thinking skills that we got because we were awash with print media, that they don’t get because they are so visual. Now they are very good at visual things, they are super good at visual stuff. But you can’t prove the fundamental theorem of the calculus with pictures, that is why Greek mathematics didn’t go anywhere, they tried to do it with geometry and you can’t do that. So, it’s different at the two levels. heard you lead a group called “random readers”. In the group, readers choose a book at random and they read it together silently for one or two hours, and present their readings to the group. Yeah, it’s not that we read the same book. So, we go to the library, we pick a range of the stacks, then each person pulls one book by himself, so each person reads for an hour, we read for an hour together in the room, then we drink wine and each person presents his book or her book. And it’s useful, you know, I did it originally because some students have real difficulty talking, being assertive in front of other students, and this creates a situation which you are the only expert on your book. So, it’s automatically that you are good, you are the authority. But it has evolved into just a very useful practice. I do that most of the school year and actually often in the summer as well. It’s a varied group and we have kept actually a list of all the books that have ever been read. So, it’s quite fun. It also gives you a chance to bind your students together and get them into support groups and so on. Professor, you studied at Chicago during 1970s and early 1980s, and came back to teach since 1990s. And you are, without no doubt actually, the leading theorist of Chicago School, which is a very important school in the history of sociology, so my question is how do you understand Chicago School

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of Sociology in twenty-first century and what has changed since it was built in 1920s or 1930s? I think I actually have a sort of secret history of the Chicago School which I’ll show to everyone in my papers. I actually think the Chicago School goes back to the very beginning at this department and I think the paper that I wrote in 1992 and then it came out in Social Forces in 1997 and then it’s in the book Department and Discipline which is about to come out in Chinese actually. You know, I wrote an essay where I said the main essence of the Chicago tradition was to talk about things being located in time and space, so the social life is always particular, and I think that still holds up. I think also the other idea that run through the Chicago School from the beginning is that social life is a process. Social life is a process in which the world is always being made anew, and that our job as theorists is to try to understand how that process works. So, if you go back to my remarks earlier about the relationship between history and sociology, that’s obviously a classic kind of Chicago School issue, you have gotten sociology which is talking about context in space and current social space and you have history which is talking about context in social time. And the notion of the Chicago School is that you have to put those things together, you have to figure out how they work together. Now you know there are various versions of that. The social ecologists focused on neighborhoods and ethnicity and other kinds of groups pushing around in the city and that what leads to the sort of ethnographic Chicago School as being about urban life. On the other hand, you also have a quantitative version of that in the criminologists like Shaw and McKamy, showing that certain neighborhoods, because of their locations always kept the same crime rates even as different ethnicity moved through them. So again, it’s an ecological approach, but you also have people like George Herbert Mead and the whole psychological tradition arguing that the individual life is a process where the self is generated at the same time as the social world is generated. If you go back to W. I. Thomas who was one of Mead’s very closest friends, you see that is really Thomas’ central idea. You have individuals and social groups evolving side by side and influencing each other mutually. Thomas wasn’t much of a theorist so he didn’t put all together, but that was the way he thought about the world. So, I think that’s the heart of the Chicago notion. It’s really a process approach to the social world. You know other people in the tradition have tried to put that together, Tamotsu Shibutani, he wrote a text on social processes and Anselm Strauss, these are both of people from mid-twentieth century. But there are also people like Louis Wirth who think about urbanism process as well, and of course the people back in the 20s. So, it’s always coming back various kind of ways, and one of the things that kept going is there is always being someone to pick up the tradition and try to refashion it. At this point it happens to be me. How do you balance your time teaching and doing research? Well, you don’t. You just worked hard. That is what you do. University of Chicago is a university where we work hard. Most of us live very close. I live about eight blocks from here, so I don’t have a long commute, if you come in here on a Saturday and Sunday, there is going to be four or five of us here. But it changes throughout the life

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course. When my son was younger, I spent a lot more time with my family. My son is now grown and he is away, so I spend a lot of time working. As between teaching and research, you know, there is graduate teaching and there is undergraduate teaching, so undergraduate teaching kind of limited within the quarter, some graduate courses are in the quarter as well. Those are the classroom thing, because we are in quarters rather than semesters, it is very intense, so you teach basically 14 weeks’ worth of stuff in nine and a half weeks, so it’s very hard, very hard work, classroom teaching is hard. But on the other hand, if you have a lot of graduate students, I have always had a lot of graduate students, it is always going a year around even in the summer you are not really off. So, in the summer I try to meet with graduate students like, you know, a day every couple of weeks, maybe every three weeks we get together, see all my graduate students in a single day. Because you have to have extended periods of time when you are just on your own. I also made a practice going to Oxford, for the last 20 years, I have gone to Oxford nearly every year for two or three weeks in the spring, just to say goodbye to the classroom teaching and start my mind up into the frame of thinking that I need for the summer. But it’s very much a function of the life course, you do this differently at different stages depending on what your family obligations are and so on. My wife has retired since 2009 and she has large volunteer obligations as well, so you just work hard, that’s what you do. So what struggles have you faced during your academic career? When was that? And how did you pull through it eventually? I do not think of my academic career as a career full of struggle, you know, that isn’t to say that I didn’t feel lots of time I am working hard and I hope something turns out, but it’s impossible to look at my career enough feel that I have been an extremely fortunate person. Yes, I may be talented, yes I may have work hard, but I had a lot of very good breaks in my life and I feel everyday like I won the lottery. I am paid a very nice salary to sit in this office and taught to some of the smartest young people on the planet about interesting things, things that interest me that interest them, how can you think this is a struggle? It’s just wonderful! I mean the work is hard work and in some sense it tires me in that sense, but I would do this, I would do exactly the same thing if we are in an absolute socialism system in which we got salary from the state for whether we work or not. I would still do ninety percent of what I do because I enjoy it, it’s fun. So it’s very hard to me to think about struggle, I was very fortunate to get this particular job, I have written a great book, bla bla… But you know the reality is I had a lot of lucky breaks in my life. And you know in a sense that creates obligation, you have to do the things not just sit around and enjoy, tell yourself and think of how wonderful you are, you have to do the obligations the goal with having that kind of good fortune. So for me, for example, writing those series of essays, pseudonymous essays in the American Journal of Sociology about past work of sociologists, that is something that I was in position to do and in a certain sense I was obligated to do, it was right for me to do it even if it hadn’t been a wonderful exercise and very good for me intellectually, just as it says in the Bible “To those many is given, much will be required” and that’s right, so you know many things that have been given to me and much is required, that’s right. But given what has

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happened to many other people that I have known throughout my life, for me to talk about my life as a struggle is not correct. Based on your personal experiences, what advice would you like to give to students who want to start an academic career in sociology in future? You know, I think, given, you know at this point it’s hard to know, it’s different in different countries. So, in the United States, given what is happening in academia, this is always being good advice but you should go into academia only if you really want to. Because in this society, what should we say, you could realize a great deal more income every day, you know, certain kinds of pleasure, monetary pleasures and stuff like that, if you have the ability that will enable you to succeed in academia, you could become a lawyer or finance person that make ten times than that if that’s what you want. So it’s essential to realize you need to go into academia only because you really want the thing that’s there which is the chance to spend your whole life sitting around and thinking about things, so I think that’s the main piece of advice, I have no idea what in, you know, what the equivalent advice would be in China or in Germany or in England or whatever, but in the United States at this point, um, academia is really changing quite rapidly, you know, certainly if I have undergraduate students who are thinking about going to graduate school, I am going to say, “Well, spend some time in the real world, think about whether you really want to do it and then after a couple of years in the real world then if you still want to do it, then you do it.” But it is I think often a mistake to go straight from undergraduate work to graduate work at least for American students, I don’t know it may be different for other students, but many Americans, they need to get some real experience of the real world. You have numerous outstanding books. The System of Professions, I think, is your first major book that has huge influence since it was published. So, what was the major problem you faced when you wrote it? I had the original idea from a job talk in 1982 at Harvard. I left here in 1978 without having finished my dissertation because my wife already had a job, she got a Ph.D. in physical chemistry, she had a job in Bell Laboratories, so we were going to move anyway, and at the last minute I got this job at Rutgers. And for various reasons there wasn’t a lot pressure on me to finish my dissertation so I kind of just went on, I ended up finally defending my dissertation in the fall of 1982, by then I had written a couple of articles that had attracted some notice, and Harrison White was very eager to have me consider going to Harvard to apply for a job. So I applied for a job and I had to do the interview, I had to do write a job talk. I thought about Harrison White, his main book at that time was a change of opportunity, it was about vacancy chain, and I thought what your profession really kind of like vacancy chain, somebody has to leave this area before somebody else can move in because that was my dissertation was about, it was about how this happen with psychiatrists, so I kind of wrote this talk which I called the system of professions, and it basically has the guts of chapter four which is the hard chapter of the book. And then when I came back, I got the job but decided not to go to Harvard because I would move with my wife. So, I

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said, you know, I should do a book, a short book about this because it’s more worth than an article, so the short book took me four years and turned out to be 400 pages, that’s what happens. And if I had just written a theoretical book and not add the big three chapters as examples, it might have been shorter, but you know one of them is based on my dissertation, it’s just basically a summary of the arguments, one of them is a paper I have done separately because I needed a paper for some purposes, the conference of the Organization of American Historians, and then the one chapter on the information professions was just done specifically for the book because those example chapters took me a year to write, finally the book took me four full years to write. But as far as what were the difficulties of writing it, I am a binge writer in the sense that I read, I think for a long time, and then I have a hard time to get started, and once I get started, as long as I am not disturbed, I can write enormous amount very quickly. So I wrote chapters two, three, and four of that book in about seven weeks, one summer, in a panic because I had written the first Chapter, I really like it, I kept adding it, I wasn’t just getting started and then I said “Okay, you got to do this, right.” So, chapters two and three had been made up and written, and chapter four was kind of an argument I already had sense of, the whole things put together very quickly, chapters five, six and seven are the exterior stuff, by then I had conceived of the system itself then what was within the professions, then what was beyond the whole system, so then the whole logic of the book gradually became clear to me and I just wrote the whole thing out. It was amazing. The most amazing thing to me actually is the tone of the book which I think is probably hard for people to read for whom English is the second language. The book is written in the tone of voice of a person who is at the age I am now. I was forty when I finished the book but it’s written in the tone of voice of a person who is sixty-five. It’s very magisterial, balanced, distanced. Interesting enough the note was not done originally, the whole book was written in the text without any note, and I wrote the notes while the press was evaluating the manuscript, and the notes are, as somebody pointed out in the review, the notes are essentially a separate book. And that is where all the wise remarks, kind of sarcastic remarks, not all of them, but of course the notes that make the book unassailable because the book just kind of answers everything. Apparently, the Chinese edition is doing very well, I am told, which just came out in September. My last question is how has being a sociologist influenced or changed you? You see in a Chicago way of thinking, it’s hard to answer that question because there isn’t some me inside who could have been this or that, there was a time when that me existed, you know, back in nineteen seventy-one or two, but since nineteen seventyone I have been a sociologist, the person I have become is indistinguishable from that being, so you cannot think about like, there is something in there, some homunculus that’s inside, that somehow is uniquely me that I could still think well differently, you know, I could say well what if me were an inside banker or something, no, the person I become is completely caught up with being a sociologist, that is it, that is what I have done, I become a sociologist, I live this as a way of life. It doesn’t make any sense to think about a me that isn’t that. It’s hard to say, you know, it’s obvious I could have done lots of other things, I could have married lots of other people, you know,

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this is life, but you know that is a long time since I took those kinds of decisions, undergraduate school in 1971 and I got married in 1978, I have been married to the same woman since 1978 and have been the same discipline since 1971. It’s no longer sensible to think about me independent of those things. The discipline has been very kind to me. And as I said, I am thankful every day for being able to talk to all these interesting people and sit around being able to read Durkheim’s letters over there. These are Durkheim’s letters from Marcel Mauss who is the only one survived, the Nazi threw out, they took over his daughter’s apartment in the Second World War, they throw out all of his correspondence, but Marcel Mauss who survived the Second World War, in spite of being Jewish and staying in the Paris, saved all of Durkheim’s letters and so they have been published. So, I now am reading very sad letters, he doesn’t know it yet, but in a month his son is killed in the war with a great tragedy. So, you know it has been a very fortunate life for me. If you look up there behind you, you will see the pictures of the four people who had this office, so on the top is Mr. Burgess, Ernest Watson Burgess, to his left is Everett Hughes, at the bottom is Morris Janowitz, my adviser, and on the right, Bill Wilson, William Julius Wilson, so there we all are. Introduction of Related Characters Roger Randall Dougan Revelle (1909–1991) was a scientist and scholar who was instrumental in the formative years of the University of California San Diego and was among the early scientists to study anthropogenic global warming, as well as the movement of Earth’s tectonic plates. Because he played an important role in the creation of the University of California, San Diego, the first college at the University of California, San Diego was named after him. Morris Janowitz (1919–1988) was an American sociologist and professor who made major contributions to sociological theory, the study of prejudice, urban issues, and patriotism. He was one of the founders of military sociology and made major contributions, along with Samuel P. Huntington, to the establishment of contemporary civil-military relations. He was a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago and held a five-year chairmanship of the Sociology Department at University of Chicago. Clifford Shaw (1895/1896–1957) was a professor of sociology and expert in criminal sociology at the University of Chicago. Shaw collected the life history of more than 200 criminal teenagers and published many related studies in collaboration with Henry McKay. George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) was an American philosopher, sociologist and psychologist, primarily affiliated with the University of Chicago, where he was one of several distinguished pragmatists. He is regarded as one of the founders of symbolic interactionism and of what has come to be referred to as the Chicago sociological tradition. William I. Thomas (1863–1947) was an American sociologist and professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, and former President of the American Sociological Association. Thomas developed a fundamental principle of sociology,

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known as the Thomas theorem. Through his theorem, Thomas contended that, “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences”. Tamotsu Shibutani (1920–2004) was a Japanese American sociologist working on the tradition of symbolic interactionism. He was deeply influenced by Mead, Thomas, Freud and others. He has taught at the University of Chicago, the University of California, Berkeley, and Santa Barbara. His representative work is Improvised News: A Sociological Study of Rumor. Anselm Strauss (1916–1996) was an American sociologist professor at the University of California, San Francisco, internationally known as a medical sociologist and as the developer (with Barney Glaser) of grounded theory. He also wrote extensively on Chicago sociology/symbolic interactionism, sociology of work, social worlds/arenas theory, social psychology and urban imagery. Louis Wirth (1897–1952) was an American sociologist and member of the Chicago school of sociology. His interests included city life, minority group behavior and mass media and he is recognized as one of the leading urban sociologists. Wirth’s major contribution to social theory of urban space was a classic essay Urbanism as a Way of Life, published in the American Journal of Sociology in 1938. Harrison White (1930–) is the emeritus Giddings Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. White played an influential role in the “Harvard Revolution” in social networks and the New York School of relational sociology. His most comprehensive work is Identity and Control. Harrison White also developed a perspective on market structure and competition in his 2002 book, Markets from Networks, based on the idea that markets are embedded in social networks. One of White’s most wellknown graduate students was Mark Granovetter, who studied how people got jobs, discovered they were more likely to get them through acquaintances than through friends and wrote The Strength of Weak Ties. Marcel Mauss (1872–1950) was a French sociologist. The nephew of Émile Durkheim, Mauss’ academic work traversed the boundaries between sociology and anthropology. Today, he is better recognized for his influence on the latter discipline, particularly with respect to his analyses of topics such as magic, sacrifice, and gift exchange in different cultures around the world. Mauss had a significant influence upon Claude Lévi-Strauss, the founder of structural anthropology. His most famous book is The Gift (1925). Ernest Burgess (1886–1966) was a Canadian-American urban sociologist. Burgess conducted influential work in a number of areas. In conjunction with his colleague, Robert E. Park, their research provided the foundation for The Chicago School. He collaborated with Robert Park to write a textbook called Introduction to the Science of Sociology (Park & Burgess, 1921). Many people at the time referred to this book as the “Bible of Sociology”. In The City (Park, Burgess, & McKenzie, 1925) they conceptualized the city into the concentric zones (Concentric zone model), including the central business district, transitional (industrial, deteriorating housing), working-class residential (tenements), residential, and commuter/suburban zones. Burgess served as the 24th President of the American Sociological Association.

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Everett Hughes (1897–1983) was an American sociologist best known for his work on ethnic relations, work and occupations and the methodology of fieldwork. In 1963, Everett C. Hughes was elected by his peers to serve as the 53rd President of the American Sociological Association. In 1964, he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Interview 11 Dingxin Zhao Dingxin Zhao

Profile: Dingxin Zhao is currently the Max Palevsky Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago and the Thousand Talented Professor at Zhejiang University. He earned his B.S. from Fudan University (1982), M.S. in entomological ecology from the Chinese Academy of Science (1984) and Ph.D. in entomological ecology from McGill University (1990). In 1995, he received his second Ph.D. in sociology from McGill University. After a two-year postdoctoral fellow at McGill University, he began to teach in the University of Chicago. Zhao is interested in political sociology broadly defined. His research covers the areas of social movements, nationalism, comparative historical sociology, social change and economic development. His interests also extend to micro-sociology, ecological sociology, sociological theory, and methodology. His research achievements in the field of sociology are mainly published in American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Social Force, Sociological Perspective, China Studies Quarterly. Interview April 15, 2017 Social Science Research Building, University of Chicago Professor, what is sociology in your eyes? I think sociology is a kind of language which tells the story that some kinds of social mechanisms or structures do matter, and it’s distinguished from history because history emphasizes importance of time. Historians usually start with a training with a clear knowledge of something, and sociologists start with the importance of mechanisms, importance of some structural conditions that shape the reality. Sociologists are also distinguished from anthropologists because they emphasize the importance of new understanding and new interpretation. D. Zhao (B) Max Palevsky Professor, University of Chicago, Chicago, USA © Peking University Press 2020 L. Chen (ed.), A Journey of Discovering Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6603-5_11

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What do you think make sociology an independent discipline? In my opinion, you cannot say any discipline is qualified as a called basic science, usually they need to have some unique logic or unique perspective, and that make it an independent discipline. So, for example, to me, political science is an applied science because they borrow everything, but sociology is the basic science because it’s really some kind of understanding of structural mechanisms, basic narrative, or put it in another way, human being has only three ways to tell a story; the first is, just like you go to Beijing University, some people will ask how could you go to Beijing University? You can say because I am from a rich family, my family allow me to get better education, go to Beijing No. 4 Middle School or go to a very prestigious school, and that actually is a sociological explanation. It explains that your success by some kinds of structural condition endowed in your parents. Secondly, you can say because I met a very good teacher at high school, and that teacher let me understand the meaning of study and since then I studied very hard. So, this implied that you have acknowledged that at high school you met a good person and it’s a turning point. Thirdly, you can say because I read a good book in a high school and then I have a new meaning of life. I want to study hard. So, you act almost like an anthropologist, giving a new understanding of life. So, these are the three-generic narrative that people tell stories. So, in my understanding, sociology, anthropology and history is three basic sciences like chemistry, physics and biology. There are a lot of branches in sociology. So, what do you think about the divisions? In what ways might sociology be better, integrated or more diverse? I think to me, it is just different branches have different research questions. In terms of positivistic language, it is just different dependent variables, but same independent variables, and they just act different domain of knowledge, economic sociology emphasizes the importance of certain structures, certain mechanisms and so in the end they are all the same. But on the other hand, if you are an economic sociologist, you start to emphasize the importance of certain mechanism on the formation of market. In these days everybody more or less is new Karl Polanyist because they all emphasize different social structural conditions that shape the market, not the market mechanism itself. But I think they should be connected because without connection, one major problem is that the expert becomes increasingly biased. For example, economic sociologists tend to think that social mechanism related to somehow supply and demand, but if you know history and you study the population, you will find that history is changed by Malthusian mechanism which means the diminishing return of labor input, or Smith mechanism which means the increasing population leads to division of labor. In addition, social change is also caused by change of demography, change of gender relation, change of diseases, class structures, war in natural state, so a good scholar never think they are separated, but if you become an expert, sometimes you are biased. But in order to have some deep understanding, sometimes we need some more bias specialists that dig into certain mechanism.

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What do you think about the relationship between qualitative and quantitative method in sociology? Is there a qualitative-quantitative divide right now? I think there is a divide, but this divide should end because I think it’s just two ways we practice sociology, I never think I am a quantitative or qualitative sociologist, I just consider about what kind of data I have. If I have more solid quantitative data, I use quantitative data, if not, I use qualitative data. But the leading scholars who develop statistics think there is just one way to account social reality, and with statistics developing more and more sophisticated, you need quite a few years to make yourself really good at it. In fact, statistics is increasingly divorcing from the beginners like Robert Hauser, Otis Dudley Duncan who develop statistics, so for example, in the nineteenth century they created the idea of stratification, mainly it’s a counterbalanced idea of class, but it’s really a concept which is practically not that meaningful. Because in order to analyze in reality, you need to analyze social groups with identity. Like in China, they divide China into seven layers or nine layers or five layers. So, what? In these layers, people have totally different identity, so there is no practical meaning. In nineteenth century people like Max Weber considered stratification as multidimensional, which includes taste, gender, economy, religion, but in the twentieth century, because of the U.S. taxation system, income became increasingly calculable, as a result economic stratification emerged because income data become available, and statistics became a dominant discipline and produced many scholars, and it became a self-fulfilled discipline. But increasingly they lead to several biases, and they no longer regard stratification as multidimensional. They forgot why people created a useless concept called stratification. Most importantly, everybody knows that social relation is interactive, but when you call something independent variable, something dependent variable, it’s artifact, it’s a construct result. You can see the young scholars increasingly put a dependent variable on the left, and a bunch of independent variables on the right, and try to predict that dependent variable, but the interactive side of social relation is lost. So, this really makes people who on the quality side mad. They will say what kind of science it is? But on the other hand, many people who attack quantitative scholars are often not good at numbers, so they are not able to appreciate the quantitative method. I think statistics can be used in many ways, and every a few years there will be good scholars that doing statistic work well, but on the other hand it must be highly theoretical, like my former colleague, Roger Gould who is a good example, I really appreciate his style of statistics. But on the other hand, those people are really rare. And another thing is do you know where statistics come from? Statistics really derives from biology, natural science where the data is really clean. But our data is dirty, sometimes you cannot even calculate the mean and variance. And our data cannot even satisfy OLS assumptions sometimes. So, you need a lot of assumptions, a lot of transformations, and those transformations either through the mathematical manipulation or through the linear transformation, or else you do it another way, it’s just like you try to design the “experiment” to satisfy the data. And any new method is actually good for certain type of design. And usually, the better the technique is,

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the narrower the range of usage covers, even for panel data that can account for timebased change. But on the other hand, how can you collect a panel data without a huge investment. People do survey for one or two times and then they will say, “Bye-bye, I don’t want to do that anymore.” So, I think statistics is useful, but you have to use it wisely as a supplement, not a major field, or else it will be really terrible. What’s the use of sociology from your perspective? Many students who want to study sociology want to ask, “What I am going to do if I learn sociology?” You can make any knowledge useful. If you do sociology well, you know that society is not driven by human intentions, but largely by unintended consequences, even though human intention sometimes matters to a certain degree. If you know this simple reality, that’s already enormous, because now you are not going to believe any so-and-so ism because society is not driven by those things but by unintended consequence. So, people grow much wisdom by understanding sociology. And I think sociology also in a way gives people who had power a sense of humility. And even though sociologists cannot predict like natural scientists, on the other hand, it’s not we cannot truly predict, for example, China was poorer compared to developed countries, Chinese people were so pissed because they think something was wrong with Chinese culture. But today China is rich, and Chinese people become so proud, the United States already decline, but if you know sociology, if look through the long track, the long rail, it’s just actually whenever you become weak, that is the time you catch up, you want to get confidence, and when you look stronger, what you should do is not proud but humility, because at that time you will meet new kind of problem, which is more difficult to solve. And at the mundane level, actually for students, sociology is useful because sociology is a kind of grammar, students who learn 20 classes or 30 classes are great, but for those students, they should learn more statistics, network analysis or large data mining for large data set, after that you can go to a company, become very rich and have a good life. So, sociology is useful in many ways. And also, sociology is useful, for example, for public police. One problem we know that lasts a few years is called earmarked money, which did not create much problem in the U.S., but why did it create problems in other countries? So, from sociological perspective, it becomes very easy because we know that there are only several typical ways to do this in sociology. If it is a routine job, bureaucracy is the best. If somebody trusts certain kind of knowledge, like doctors, lawyers, using expert is the best. If there is an interest group to fight, maybe use interest group politics is the best. But for this, putting this, if some public goods that market cannot supply, and the government actually feel that those public goods are in a very small scale and changes a lot, not like the welfare system, medicine, defense, peace, clean environment, those things are public goods and government can supply. But there are very daily public goods like student training for foreign language in the United States, and the United State government often creates a quasi-market because the United States government knows universities in the U.S. have huge resources, so they create quasi-market allowing different universities to compete for that money and help government train the student to learn foreign language, this is what American government did. But in other countries they

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failed because they manage this not by an open market, by a bureaucracy, by having had local leadership act like experts which they are not, plus deal with kind of public goods that the governments are not able to supply, that is why they failed. So basically, if governments have a little more respect of sociology, that will make the world much better actually. Professor, back to your college days, we all know that before you changed to study sociology, you actually studied entomology for many years. What do you think about the relationship between your previous study on natural science and your current study on social science? How do the two connect to each other? I think it’s connected in several ways. First, the natural science training gives me very solid broad knowledge. You know, I learned a lot, I remember at least 5 or 6 classes of physics, equally 7 to 8 classes on chemistry, and a lot of classes on math, on biology, and on history of sciences, now I know that actually belongs to discipline of sociological knowledge. So that gives me really solid knowledge. I also published a lot of papers in science. So, in a way I can practice American style of sociology, which I primarily regard as pseudo sociology, I called it pragmatism because they look at social problem at the same level that social problem emerges. If it’s an education problem, it must be some educational skills, so they do different quasi experiments called pre-test and post-test, and do some kind of control, and find some kind of education pedagogical methods better than others, so they believe this can solve the social problems, not racism, not actually American funding system which poor neighborhoods cannot get enough money for education. So, it’s very weird kind of American sense of knowledge. But in the U.S., I have to do the same thing. So, when I found it in sociology, I can use my left hand get tenure and this is real. And on the other hand, from biology perspective, another interesting question is what is the difference between monkey and human, so this is really increasingly bothering me, if I practice sociology that human is also animal, so in the end I come up with an idea that human is just monkey with ideas. And once I have this, I immediately think methodology, if people have ideas, people know how to justify their action, people denied the legitimacy of other people’s actions, what is the consequence? So, this gives me a clear understanding of what is the difference between natural science and social science. I wonder if you have read it or not, I wrote an article in Chinese called Difference Between Natural and Social Science and Its Consequence, I concluded at least eight major differences. Actually, once I understand clearly about those differences, pretty much all American leading scholars in sociology, history and politics, economics are more or less like children to me. I have interviewed a few sociologists in America, and I found that quite a number of outstanding sociologists have inter-discipline background, so I want to ask you, do you think inter-discipline training is important for sociology students? Inter-discipline usually is the hiding of superficialness, just like those called mixed methods, I hate those mixed methods papers. But on the other hand, inter-discipline is

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nature, the most important thing for scholars is always reflectivity, self-questioning. They not only learn sociology but also try to understand it’s just a kind of practice, but why we practice sociology in this way, it is not because this is the best way, just because some high powers become dominant, just like United States, the way we practice sociology in this way mainly because of American pragmatism. American cannot get used to European ideas of late nineteenth century, communism, socialism, fascism, nationalism, all those isms. But American elites before midnineteenth century, the enlightened generation, are liberal, they understand nationalism is also liberal. So, this is really American respond for European radicalism, creating ideas that don’t look at ism but solve the problem pragmatically. And that also makes American divorce from British Realism, they also look at things pragmatically, but on the other hand they look the largest construction condition that lead to this way of understanding. Given an example, like British international relations called British School, they believe international relation is constructed by important historical events, such as French Revolution, Rising Napoléon, First World War, Cold War, it’s some construct conditions that lead to certain style of diplomacy. But if you look at United States, without looking at those large construct conditions, so there is no need to understand macro conditions, as a result, they believe medium-range theory, so this is American aesthetics, it looks almost the same, but this way of understanding become universal language because the United States won First World War, and particular Second World War, so after Second World War, in the entire European countries, democracy become established, ideology become all go to middle, ism is no longer popular, and basically American style of knowledge become universal script. So, we certainly believe this is sociology. And every leading scholar in the U.S. more or less like this. But they forgot that actually what we do today pretty much like scholasticism did after twelfth or thirteenth century, or in China, Kao ju xue (the textual research) did in the Qing Dynasty. Today if you look at those kinds of scholarship, at that time we pretty much believe those are the way to get knowledge, to produce knowledge, but today we think it’s funny. So, the reason that I can understand this not only because I come from China but also because I come from biology. It does not mean I am not respectful for American subject things, but nevertheless I can do it quite well. Do you still remember any professors in sociology that actually influenced you a lot when you decided to study sociology? The first professor I remember is a professor I met at McGill. I think in his life, he only published maybe less than 5 papers, so he was an associate professor before he retired. And before he retired, the university gave him a full professorship, so he was kind of more marginal in the department, but he is really smart and he was one of James Coleman’s students, after graduation, he went to McGill and became an assistant professor, he published several quite good articles, but then he just did not publish anything. I remember when I went to his home, the size of his basement may be five or six times larger than this room, and books are all around and there are shelves in the middle, just like a library. I asked him, “How could you get so many books?” He said, “In my life, I only stay in three-star hotel for two nights.” So, he

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is a very dedicated teacher. And I remember when I shifted the major from biology to sociology and took one class he taught, it’s called “Social Change”, he almost coerced me to take this class, and McGill semester system is consisted of 14 weeks, normally students only do 3 assignments but I need to work on an assignment every week. So that class actually made my life a hell. And sometimes we studied on Roman history, sometimes on European history, and sometimes on Africa history, and almost every week he assigned one or two extra books for me to read. I read a book and wrote an assignment, and at that time I always pretended I was right when I produced a new theory on stratification, or new European theory, so on and so forth. And he always came back to me with two or three new books, and in those new books he clearly showed me either my theory was wrong or somebody else already mentioned it, they have produced a similar theory, which is more sophisticated, so in a way that class gave me confidence, but also gave me humility. Some classmates thought that he did not like me, he wanted to punish me because I was a biologist, I said, “No, he spent so much time on me, he must like me.” In the end, I think he is right, so I talked to him, “Why do you spend so much time on a single student like me?” He said, “You are almost 40, you chose sociology and it looks like you are really serious, you have a very logical mind and people with science training with such logical mind tend to be simpleminded, have very reductionist point of view, so you need to be training down, and you need to have intimate understanding of social complexity before you theorize.” So, I really appreciate him. Another one is John Hall, his impact is not that intensive but because he is from European country, he is British, he introduces me people like Tilly, Michael Mann, Bourdieu. Just because I know so many people from European side, I see the continental divide, which is the difference between American style of sociology and British, or you know old style of sociology, and this compare gives me a sense on what kind of language I should build for Chinese style of sociology. Since you became a professor of sociology, what do you want to teach to your students? Or what do you want them to learn from sociology? Quite a few things, you know, first and foremost is not methodology, it’s wisdom that learning from ourselves. I want students to be really serious when they go to field, collect data, collect quantitative/qualitative data and in the end what you describe, what you account for, is never about reality, instead it is about your own eyes, you describe your own eyes, not the reality, but somehow related to reality more or less. But if you are not serious to collect data, you produce a very simple-minded eye. This is the first and foremost important thing I want students to learn. But at low levels, I want students at your age learn everything you could learn. When I was young, I remember I took courses in Shanghai Jiaotong University on dynamic engineering, system theories, I took class on graduate level and undergraduate math in Fudan, so I took many different courses, I read almost everything, you know, I read almost everything. So, I want students to learn everything but grow wisdom.

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So what struggles have you faced during your academic career? When was that? And how did you pull through it eventually? Actually most struggles which I faced actually are not in sociology, but in biology. When I was an undergraduate student, I found out that biology is not a very beautiful discipline, there is only evolution theory, just like an umbrella under which there are hundreds of different kinds of mechanisms, and compared with physics, it is not beautiful. And even though I am no longer a Marxist, my mentality is still Marxist, so I really believe that in a way that any science if they cannot divorce from philosophy, or they cannot have a unified theory, is not a real science. So I think the reason why I want to study biology, and put almost 10 years learning physics and mathematics, was mainly because I wanted to become Newton in biology. So I spent lots of years doing mathematics modeling which predicts insect population, try to come up with what is the essence of some unified mechanism model. But in the end I remember when I was a master student, I produced a mathematics model for pink bollworm, a pest that eats up cotton. So I built this model and I am happy. But one guy from an agriculture college in China where those people are trained for practical matters, I showed him my model, he got excited and said, “I need to go to the field twice a week, every time three or four hours, back and side, your model sounds really good, can I use yours? So, I don’t need to go to the field anymore, and I can just predict the insect population using your model” But I said, “No, you can’t.” He asked me why, I explained, “Because I have only two years data.” But he said, “You can get more data, you can wait.” Then I told him, “Yes, but you still cannot because I built a set of ten tents in the cotton field to solve the problem of migration, so that pink bollworms cannot move in or out.” He said, “Yes, that creates some problems, but it’s not a big problem either. Because pink bollworms usually don’t migrate, if they migrate, they don’t go very far.” Then I told him I still can’t let him use it, he asked me why, and I said, “ I cannot predict the rain, the storm, and if the pink bollworms need to move to another place for five or six hours, and during that five or six hours period, if there is big storm, big rain, the larva drop to the ground, they die. So my model need to reformulated, re-initiated.” He said, “My god, that is true!” But then he asked me, “So what is the usefulness of your model?” At that point, I really hate this guy. They know nothing. But on the other hand, his question always comes back to me, yes, what is useful? So by my Ph.D. I did in Canada, I was always looking at my structure model, found there was a problem, my basic structure I built was still more or less like Malthus’ equation, like Lotka-Volterra equation. The more I practice, the more the sub-models I added, I increase the similarity but to certain extent, it cannot simulate anymore, and by time I can simulate to that detail, my model have no analytical value at all. So that is actually simulation, you can now simulate reality, but then there is no analytical purpose anymore, so I was just stuck in the middle. So this is what kind of narrative I should give. I am also stuck because I found out there are many ways to model, my model is just one kind of model, and just kind of model, you know, for successful scholars who can publish and celebrate their publication think their models matter a lot, actually it doesn’t matter. So when

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I come to sociology, one thing I want to make sure is I don’t make the same kind of mistake again. But then on the other hand, immediately by the end of the first year of being in sociology, I found out almost every sub-discipline in sociology, economic sociology, organizational sociology, educational sociology, they all like my silly old days, they stuck dead end in some places. Now I am almost retired, I am over sixty, I don’t mind offending my American colleagues, they are very smart guys with totally no wisdom. So this is American pragmatic sociology. Thomas Aquinas has said, “people need intuition, science and wisdom”, of course what Thomas Aquinas said is about ancient science, but more or less it is the same to modern science. So modern sociological practice is they took very light on intuition, they almost want to eliminate wisdom, and produce a bunch of knowledge called the middle range theory, but it’s useless and so narrow. So sociology no longer gains wisdom, sociology try to eliminate, treat so light on intuition, so that’s what we face today. Based on your personal experiences or lessons in sociology, what advice would you like to give to students who want to start an academic career in sociology in the future? If it is instrumental to be successfully, you won’t be successful in China unless your supervisor is famous and wants to bully you, exploit you and feel sorry for it. If you experienced this, they will guarantee you a good job. A professor who bullies you, exploits you but somehow don’t feel sorry don’t care. Or a professor who is very liberal like me usually does not want to exploit you, the personal patron relationship is not so tightened, so in the end, if you are not a good student, I don’t care and I really can dump you. But for those professors who exploit you for six or seven years, published a lot of papers with you, and in the end, they feel sorry and usually you get a good job. And that is pretty much like Chinese patron system. It’s not bad or good, you know? This is pretty much popular in many European countries. It is same in Japan. But in America it is much more like a market, if you are good, you are good, just like I got Ph.D. from McGill which is not a very top university, it’s really the second rank in the U.S., but when I applied a teaching position at Chicago, faculty here think you are good, then you are good, you know. It’s very different system. In the U.S., you need first and foremost learn American pragmatism, but if you are a student from China, you come from a poor family, or you don’t have much social capital, your English is not good, be sure to learn statistics, because this is the easiest way to do. There are still a lot of methods, you really need to learn a lot, but roughly it’s much easier. If you study historical sociology or any other sociology like that, you need to learn how to write, how to express, you need lots of lots of background knowledge. And it is so hard for you to be successful in those disciplines. How has being a sociologist influenced or changed you? It does not change me, but it makes me happy because I did not realize I was born as sociologist, for example, when I go to Ningxia from Shanghai as a young student, I immediately found out I should really cultivate different type of network in Ningxia, because in Shanghai, when I buy coal in the winter, I just go into a shop which maybe

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only 50 m away from my home. But in Ningxia, when I need buy coal in the Mount Helan, I need to use a truck. So I have to cultivate deep relation with three or four friends, and ask their friend who is a truck driver in factory to help me, you know, give him two packs of cigarettes, ask him to drive for me and then get all the coal from the coal mine, and then I can use those coal for several years. But before that, my parents in Ningxia had to save almost everything including coal in winter because they had to buy coal in the local store, they had coupon, but it’s not enough, so they saved coal. My home was so cold in winter, but my friends’ homes were so hot, I asked why and I found it was not because of money, it was because of network. So immediately I think of Shanghai, because it’s so marketized where I don’t need to cultivate strong tie, once go to Ningxia, I need to cultivate strong tie. So, I just began to cultivate a network, and in half a year, people come back to me, carried whole truck-load of coal for my family, and my parents used it for ten years. So, this is the difference. And I will give you another example, it was in 1960s, there was a book called Mayi Xiangmian, which was a Chinese manual book use for predicting your future through looking at your face, so on and so forth, in the book, they write this guy is very small-minded, that guy tend to be not trustworthy, and this guy looks very difficult to deal with, so on and so forth. Usually people think it is superstition, and that book actually dropped on the ground because some people actually think it’s a superstitious book. So, I just picked the book and took to my home, I started to read it. “Oh, my God, I don’t understand what they are talking about”, but on the other hand I remember the faces they draw, this guy is a small-minded, that guy is very selfish, this guy is very difficult to deal with. So, what is going on? One day, I was doing physical exercise, I found after a month some muscles start build up, I suddenly realized the mechanism. You have so many muscles on your face, and over time, over thirties, small-minded people built certain muscle, certain eye, certain eye expression, and simpleminded people built another kind muscle, and then actually over thirties, you cannot hide it anymore. Your muscle, your eye cannot hide anymore. So that is actually what the book wants to tell, although in a very strange language, I see very clear mechanism in those faces. So, I can give you endless examples, whenever I see things, I see patterns, see differences, see cause mechanisms, and I try to see why on certain conditions that certain mechanism become important. Say, for example, of facial expression, I see in China many old people’s faces are so ugly, so bad, I see those people are evil. But it is not because of Chinese culture, the young people who grew up in the 1990s, certainly their faces are all very simpleminded, all look nice and they all like to help others and don’t know how to bully people. So, the muscle structure is kind of a macro–micro linkage, it is certain structure conditions push people toward certain facial expression. But by nature, I did not realize that, it was after I became a sociologist. When I went into sociology, I started guessing, I found I kind of created lots of strange theories, strange terminologies, so by time I read Durkheim, Max Weber and other

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big figures, I found I actually created very similar things, sometimes I am better, sometimes I am not, but that gives me confidence, you know. Introduction of Related Characters Robert Hauser (Birth year unknown) is an American sociologist. He is a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he has served as director of the Institute for Research on Poverty and director of the Center for Demography of Health and Aging. Hauser is a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences (1984) and a fellow of the American Statistical Association (1978), the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Otis Dudley Duncan (1921–2004) was “the most important quantitative sociologist in the world in the latter half of the twentieth century”, according to sociologist Leo Goodman, for transforming mainstream American sociology into a quantitatively based empirical social science in the second half of the twentieth century. Duncan’s best-known work is a 1967 book that he coauthored with Peter Blau and Andrea Tyree, The American Occupational Structure, which documented how parents transmit their societal status to their children. Roger Gould (1962–2002) was an American sociologist who emphasized the importance of basing theories upon research into actual events. Gould earned his bachelor’s and doctoral degrees at Harvard University. And he was a professor at the University of Chicago for a decade and then a professor at Yale University until his death at age 39. From 1997–2000 he served as the editor of The American Journal of Sociology. James S. Coleman (1926–1995) was an American sociologist, professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, and former chairman of the American Sociological Association. Coleman’s main research areas are educational sociology and public policy. He was one of the first to use the concept of “social capital”. His “Coleman Report” changed the American education theory, reshaped the national education policy, and influenced the traditional views of the public and academia on the role of school education in achieving American equality. Charles Tilly (1929–2008) was an American sociologist, political scientist and historian. His main research area is the relationship between politics and society. Tilly has taught at Harvard University, the University of Toronto, the University of Michigan and Columbia University, and is an important representative of the New York School of Relational Sociology. Tilly’s writings are quite abundant. He published more than 600 articles and published more than 50 books in his life. Tilly is described as “one of the founders of sociology in the twenty-first century” and “one of the world’s leading sociologists and historians.” Michael Mann (1942–) is a British-born professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Visiting Research Professor at Queen’s University Belfast. Mann’s works include The Sources of Social Power, The Dark Side of Democracy, Incoherent Empire. Samuel Finer (1915–1993) was a British political scientist and historian. He once taught at Oxford University, and later served as a professor of political science at Keele University. In 1966, he became the head of the Department of Political

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Science at the University of Manchester. In 1974, he returned to Oxford University. Finer also served as chairman of the British Political Society and vice-president of the International Political Science Association. His representative works include The Man on Horseback: The Role of the Military in Politics and the three-volume The History of Government from the Earliest Times. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) was an Italian Dominican friar, Catholic priest, and Doctor of the Church. He introduced reason into theology and used the “law of nature” to demonstrate the “sacred monarchy” theory. He was one of the earliest advocates of natural theology and the founder of Thomas Philosophy.

Interview 12 Arlie R. Hochschild Arlie R. Hochschild

Profile: Arlie R. Hochschild is currently Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley and well known as the founder of the Sociology of Emotion. She received her B.A. in international relation from Swarthmore College in 1962 and then earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley in 1965 and 1969 respectively. Her first position in academia was at the University of California, Santa Cruz, after that she had been teaching in the University of California at Berkeley until she retired. Hochschild has long focused on the human emotions. She is the author of many notable books and four of them have been chosen as Times Notable Books of the Year and translated into many different languages, including, most recently Strangers in Their Own Land, which was chosen as a finalist for the National Book Award and is a New York Times best seller, and The Second Shift (Jessie Bernard Award), The Managed Heart (Charles Cooley Award), The Time Bind (Jessie Bernard Award). Professor Hochschild is also a public sociologist because her work has deeply influenced audiences outside of the academy. Concepts developed by Hochschild, such as emotional labor, feeling rules and the economy of gratitude have been adopted by scholars in a range of disciplines. Interview April 17, 2017 Through Skype at William James Hall, Harvard University Professor, you studied international relations when you were at Swarthmore College, and when you went to Berkeley, you began to study sociology, so why did you make this change and what was the story behind it? Aha, well, you know, it wasn’t exactly a change because I was always interested in sociology and international relation both, I don’t, didn’t see a conflict. But I think sociology because it allowed me to understand what was going on at a deeper level, A. R. Hochschild (B) Professor of Sociology, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, USA © Peking University Press 2020 L. Chen (ed.), A Journey of Discovering Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6603-5_12

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I am, yeah, so within each nation, and perhaps you know similar processes were at work underneath the surface of international relations, within each country. You studied international relation and then sociology, do you think it is related to your personal childhood experience? Because I know you spent a few years in New Zealand and Israel when you were very young. Do you think those are factors that influenced your choice? Yes, definitely, although even before that, my parents were very interested in international relations. When they were very young, before they knew each other, they were very interested in the League of Nations, which was the precursor to the United Nations. Although they lived in a community that opposed that, you know, they were kind of threatened by that because their perspectives were defending this idea that various nations really had to learn to get along, it’s important for us to realize that. So anyway, I think I grew up hearing conversations between my mother and father about what was going on in Africa, or China, and, so that was, that was in the ambience even before my parents, when I was age 12, began to live abroad, and I continued to visit them wherever they went. After New Zealand, they went to Ghana and I spent a summer there, and although I was in the university, and then they went to Tunisia for 7 years, and I spent actually half a year with them there doing my master thesis on the Emancipation of Tunisian Girls in French. So, yeah, at a young age I think I felt the desire, opportunity, obligation and even the permission to explore the world. Do you still remember any course in Berkeley you took that impressed you a lot? Oh, interesting! My first year at Berkeley was a very miserable one actually, and I didn’t know if I made mistake to enter the graduate sociology program. It seemed highly dry and I thought they were training people to work for the U.S. Bureau of the Census, so I don’t see a life for myself there. There were a lot of quantitative courses to take and a statistical analysis course; I did fine but I felt I will read and use findings derived from quantitative methods. But I don’t want to use them as a main way of finding out what’s going on. But I was extremely interested in the work of Erving Goffman because he was so different from everyone else, he was the oddball. His colleagues in the Department questioned whether he actually did sociology. To me, it was a more authentic search for the actual ground rules of social interaction, very close-to-the-ground. He drew on qualitative, novel-like verbs, and, so he opened the very boundaries of the discipline. I liked that very much. I read everything he wrote, forwards and backwards. I also studied with Herbert Blumer who taught symbolic interactionism and he was, in the mid 1950s, the actual founder of the sociology department. Before Blumer, there existed a department of social institutions, not very distinguished. He really developed the department by getting the best scholar in every sub-field of sociology—Kingsley Davis, the great demographer, and Seymour Martin Lipset, the political analyst, Erving Goffman, the ethnographic theorist, Reinhard Bendix who did historical sociology. He also hired Neil Smelser who was a Parsonian and system theorist, and my personal mentor who is very kind to me and supportive when others thought, “Oh, I was going to be another oddball

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out on the side.” So, I have always very much appreciated Neil Smelser’s support and I dedicated one of my books to him (Actually he is not feeling well just now, and so I just wrote to him to say I was thinking of him.)1 So those were the array of scholars teaching in the department when I arrived. But if I pick the ones that whose courses were influential to me, it would be Erving Goffman and Herbert Blumer. One of your central concepts is emotional labor, and I think because of you, emotion get more and more attention in sociology. And your article The Sociology of Feelings and Emotions launched a sub-field of sociology, the Sociology of Emotion. And you also said, “Emotion is the heart of what sociology is.” So, I want to ask, what is sociology in your eyes? What is sociology? The whole field? It’s a way of understanding institutional arrangements, that is states, unions, companies, churches. And for me the key insights come from the power of persuasion that each exerts. Social psychology, I see, is a subset of sociology and that’s where my work fits in. I am always looking at the individual, and then back over my shoulder at churches, states, and companies to see how the one influences the other. So that is I think the general premise of sociology and the importance of it, and emotion seems like a neglected “resource”—although I don’t like the word “resource”—it is the power, the fuel that makes the whole thing run. And we neglect it at our peril. Today across the world there are movements, nationalist, populist movements that stoke people’s sense of hoe and fear and resentment and desire for affiliation. People respond because they feel disconnected, discounted, and without alternatives, so populist leads “ring” their cultural symbols like bells. We need to understand the ringers of the bells, the bells themselves, the ears that hear them. Power is used and misused through these bells. But how could we study emotion scientifically? I think professor Goffman asked you the same question before. Yeah, right, you are right, you have done your homework. Yes, I should back up to say that I consider sociology an art. And you can have excellent art or silly art, trivial art, and careless art, but the art is to really comprehend fully and completely the experiences of a variety of people, and to look at the influence of institutions upon them and their influence on these institutions. So as we are trying to do that, we are, I think, engaged in the art of seeing and recording what we see. I think I used the word “art” because I think sociology has taken a wrong turn into a kind of pseudo scientism where that somehow the use of numbers is almost a substitute for thinking. Numbers are very important, I use them all the time, in the last book, you know, thousands of them, but I use them in an attempt to pursue a line of argument see whether a hypothesis, there are hypotheses in my books, and so, but what counts as evidences? When we think of art, we think the purpose is to express. In sociology, the purpose is to analyze or interpret. If we look at the most important theorists in sociology, we look back through time, they are people who are very good at the art 1 Professor

Neil Smelser passed away on October 2, 2017, which Professor Hochschild noted later in the email written to the writer of the book.

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of pursuing a theory, first developing it and then seeing if it is true under what certain circumstance, does X happen or Y. If you look at Weber, I don’t think of him as a scientist in a white suit, but I think of him as a brilliant reasoned. He reasons about feeling. What is it about the Protestant or the Chinese, let’s say, worker, that make them work so hard? What fantasy do they have about God? What does success mean? It’s a quest to elucidate meanings in people’s minds. And that has to be done, I think, as artists do their art. There are rules for doing social analysis or interpretation: I don’t mean to get us off the hook by saying “oh sociology is just an art.” But it’s not physics, in which the subject matter has no interior consciousness, and behavioristic approach can work. Human beings are not protons. It takes an artist’s interpretive skills to find out what plausibly goes on inside the human mind. I remember my first year of sociology, I was asked to look at the ethnography by Conrad Arensberg, it’s on an Irish farming community, and the description is very carefully behavioristic so that was to say, the farmer’s wife took the pot of food from the stove and placed it on the table and then sat in the chair, got up to get a spoon, came back, and without anything about how she thought or the expression on her face even, and I thought ‘I can’t do that,’ ‘ I don’t want to do that, I was being taught to avoid feeling, as not the proper focus for sociology. It expressed the logical positivism of Alfred J. Ayer which throws away feeling. That approach doesn’t lead us into sociology. It leads us around and away from it. I think you have interviewed many different interviewees and I can see that they all like you so much and trust you so much, so the question I want to ask is how could you do that? How to deal with the relationship between researchers and interviewees from your perspectives or your experiences. Wow, you are right that it’s not extrinsic to what we bring and create in sociology. I don’t know, honestly, an answer to that except that I do like people. They trust me and they are right to trust me. I told them exactly who I was, what I was doing. I also said, “I think it’s good for us to know each other. Why be enemies. Can’t we do better than that? Wouldn’t you like us to, at least to discuss our differences in a friendly trusting way?” And they would say, “Yes”. I said, “Well, then that’s the project, and you are helping me with it, I greatly appreciate this more than I can say. And this is what I promise you, I will try to do, I’m not sure I’ll be able to but let me try.” So, they took me on good faith and I feel they were right to do so. And after I went back, with the book handed out to them, put on a dinner for them in Lake Charles, they said, “Yeah, you got me right.” So, it was a tacit promise fulfilled I think. I didn’t promise more than I can deliver. I never said I agreed with them about anything, you know, it was a big divide, I came from my progressive political bubble in Berkeley, California, and so they knew that about it immediately. I guess for an upcoming sociologist who wants to do this kind of inquiry, it’s very good to like people, imagine that they wish you well and to be really interested in them, to feel like it’s golden, everything they’re saying is gold, it’s really interesting. I do feel that about that, sometimes when I am driving home from the interview, I just, “Aha, wow, I love interviewing, I really do.” And it feels like a very important occasion, it

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isn’t just evidence, it’s something I live with and think about and feel, I feel them, keep their gift to me. And I feel I owe something back as a result. I know you have trained a lot of sociologists in America and when I interviewed professor Mary C. Waters in Harvard, she also mentioned you because she told me that you also influenced her a lot. So, when you became a teacher of sociology, what do you want to teach to your students or what do you want them to learn from sociology? Yes, well, much along the lines we’re talking now, but I should back up to say that when I first became a sociologist, first taught, I thought to myself, “Oh, this is fun! I am learning a lot.” Because I have to feel responsible for the knowledge I am passing on and what these five, ten authors really meant, how they relate to each other, how they relate to data we know from the world. I love teaching, I love the students, and I love the process, and I never thought about writing books, not at first. And then I would, actually what I wanted to convey to them is the joy of doing sociology, doing research. And I would get them out interviewing people. And for example, at Berkeley we have many disabled students who are in wheelchairs going around to their classes. And in one sociology class, I got students to go around in wheelchairs to see what it felt like, how did people talk to you, did they ignore you or were they too kind to you. In another class, I was lecturing on The Outsourced Self , and, for his term paper, one student went around trying to sell a service. He very cleverly made up a big sign, you know, “I am a first-year in the business school and I want to start a service, there are many people who are very lonely on campus and only for 25 dollars an hour” kind of thing. Well, and then he did all these interviews and people would say, “No, I have a plenty of friends, no.” But then some people would say, “Look, I’m really sorry for you and you’ve got a project, okay, I will help you a little or…” It was fascinating and I love that experience of inquiry in a, kind of testing, we don’t take anything for granted, it’s all fascinating, it’s all, so anyway I loved teaching and what I wanted to convey is a fascination and a passion. The class began asking: isn’t this a contradiction? Is this wrong? Is this sad? What form of human relationship is this? Are there two principles of human connection in conflict with one another? Or do these two principles blend? How does a materialist model of social relations, test a cultural boundary we try to maintain? How do people do boundaries of this moral sort? How do you balance your time of teaching and doing research? And how do the two connected to each other from your perspective? Oh, I think very related. Now I am retired from teaching, so I am speaking about the past, although I see a lot of students; they come to the house. But when I am working on a project, I am thinking about it a lot, I don’t turn it off, so when I am talking to students, I am sharing with them kind of the process of figuring something out and they will say something, and I will learn from it. Students are amazing, they are future great theorists, and I in no way feel I don’t learn from them, I learn a lot from my students. I share with them the experience of being confused, baffled, so I

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introduced them to the emotional moments—the emotional labor—required in doing research. Your books The Second Shift, The Time Bind, The Commercialization of Intimate Life, and So How Is the Family like these, all these I think connect to one problem that is work and family. So, I’d like to ask you one private question but it’s also very important that is as a sociologist how do you balance your work and family? And what is your personal secret to that? Well, how do I balance it? I am not always sure I have balanced it. I, it’s something always try to do. There are numbers of ways that I tried to do and I have to say I had a lot of privilege, I should say in this, because when I was first offered a job here at Berkeley, I asked if I could take it half time because I wanted to have children and had not begun that yet. This was unheard of at that time. A professor could share a teaching job with a research institute, but you couldn’t share it with family. So, this was the moment of feminist revolution, and it wasn’t I, but a group of women went to the dean and asked that half time ladder-rank (i.e. not temporary) appointments should become available, to allow professors to balance work and family. At first the dean said, “Well, okay, just for women.” And the women said, “No, no, actually men are fathers too and they should be able to balance work and home too.” So finally, the dean said okay. But this didn’t stop me from working very hard, I have to say, and it was very important when my children were young. But what I should mention first is my wonderful husband, I have an extraordinary soul mate throughout my life and, he’s really been fully involved in raising the children. We’re both writers; we work on each other’s. He is a human rights historian and very gifted and wonderful, but he’s been with me in this thing. So, people will sometimes say, “Oh, you must have really worked hard to get your husband to share work at home.” The implication was: you had to make him do this. Not at all, not at all. I found and bonded with a man who wanted to do this in this way, so he understood in a very basic way, he is very empathic, so it’s not something he was forced to do and so it feels wonderful. In The Second Shift, I talked about the economy of gratitude (who thanks to whom for what and how grateful they feel well) I feel very rich in gratitude but I think he is too. So that’s because of the understanding we have, has not always been easy, but those are the two secrets I have. Did you have any struggle during your academic career? When was that and how did you pull through it eventually? I would say there are several kinds of struggle and one was to work out my ideas when they were not mainstream, and to have them not be ridiculed was a struggle. And then I had a career struggle for tenure here at Berkeley, it was okay to be a woman if you were a woman doing exactly the kind of work the men did, okay. But if you were then also trying to do something weird like introduce emotion as a subject, oh God, that was too much for them. so that was a big struggle. I think to those who are still alive, they are now happy with the result, but yes so that was a struggle for my life to be here at Berkeley. Then there was a struggle of how to speak to two audiences—an academic audience and general reading audience. I wanted to speak to sociologists,

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but I also want to speak to issues of the day and to a larger audience, and do what now is called public sociology. So, I give thanks to the excellent work of Michael Burawoy (former president of the International Sociological Association as well as ASA). He has invited the entire discipline to look outside of itself, to speak in plain English, to really become engaged in the issues of the day. This doesn’t mean to write in a way that makes complex things simple. It means to make complexity clear. So, you don’t simplify what you have to say, it’s just as complicated as is for this audience, but you are writing in a clear English which we should do anyway. I worry about academia that it can become too much a world unto itself, a self-sufficient church in which students worship. There’s a balance we spoke of work-family balance but there’s also profession-real world balance, we can do both. What advice would you like to give to students who want to start an academic career in sociology in future based on your experiences and your lesson? Go for it! Take on the big questions. Draw on all that people have written within sociology, and history, psychology, all of it, old masters and new ones, and consider them the bricks, the planks, the nails for building your own house. Maybe you plan a house that’s too big. Okay plan three smaller ones. And find joy in it. if you are not in joy, talking to people and figuring things out, and questioning yourself, then something is wrong. Even a difficult topic, it should be if not a joyous satisfaction that you’re contributing, you are making it a better world by deepening our understanding of why people may be doing what they’re doing, maybe people are doing things that aren’t helping them and you get to hold up a mirror and say, “Is there another way to achieve what are your goals?” And don’t be afraid to be confused, don’t pick a topic so small that it’s actually not very interesting, pick something that challenges you, and don’t beat yourself up if you are stuck, that’s okay, getting stuck is part of the journey. And don’t be afraid to seek help from professors, from fellow students, friends. Find someone to talk out your ideas with—and you help them talk out their ideas too, of course—so your friendships and your personal life fuse to some degree. How has been a sociologist influenced or changed you? Interesting! It’s funny my son said, “You have just a job that fits your personality”. It’s like, wasn’t a big push. The coat fit. My husband told me one time, “you never stop being a sociologist, you don’t, you are always turning things over in your mind.” It’s a perspective one lives with. And sociology has broadened me, has opened the world to me, helped me climb many empathy ways. It has helped me live a bigger life. I recommend it! Introduction of Related Characters Erving Goffman (1922–1982) was a Canadian-American sociologist and writer, who is considered as “the most influential American sociologist of the twentieth century”. Goffman was the 73rd President of the American Sociological Association. His best-known contribution to social theory is his study of symbolic interaction. This took the form of dramaturgical analysis, beginning with his 1956 book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.

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Herbert Blumer (1900–1987) was an American sociologist whose main scholarly interests were symbolic interactionism and methods of social research. Believing that individuals create social reality through collective and individual action, he was an avid interpreter and proponent of George Herbert Mead’s social psychology, which he labelled “symbolic interactionism”. Blumer elaborated and developed this line of thought in a series of articles, many of which were brought together in the book Symbolic Interactionism. Kingsley Davis (1908–1997) was an internationally recognized American sociologist and demographer. He was identified by the American Philosophical Society as one of the most outstanding social scientists of the twentieth century, and was a Hoover Institution senior research fellow. Davis led and conducted major studies of societies in Europe, South America, Africa and Asia, coined the term “population explosion,”, and played a major role in the naming and development of the demographic transition model. He was also one of the original scholars in the development of the theory of overurbanization. Seymour Martin Lipset (1922–2006) was an American sociologist. His major work was in the fields of political sociology, trade union organization, social stratification, public opinion, and the sociology of intellectual life. He also wrote extensively about the conditions for democracy in comparative perspective. A Socialist in his early life, Lipset later moved to the right, and became one of the first neoconservatives. Reinhard Bendix (1916–1991) was a German American sociologist, who has taught at the University of Chicago, the University of Colorado, and the University of California, Berkeley. Bendix has been working hard for academic exchanges between American and European sociology throughout his life. In 1969, Bendix was elected President of the American Sociological Association. His representative works include Work and Authority in Industry. Conrad Arensberg (1910–1997) was an American anthropologist, who helped establish the American Society of Applied Anthropology and was elected as its chairman from 1945 to 1946. In 1980, he became chairman of the American Anthropological Association. In 1991, Ahrensburg won the Malinowski Award from the Society of Applied Anthropology. From 1970, Ahrensberg began serving as Joseph L. Bertenweiser professor at Columbia University until his retirement. His representative work is The Irish Countryman. Alfred J. Ayer (1910–1989) was a British philosopher. He is famous for his Language, Truth, and Logic published in 1936. In this book he put forward a main argument of logical positivism, thus becoming the spokesperson of logical positivism in the English world. From 1946 to 1959, he was a professor of spiritual logic philosophy at University College London and a professor of logic at Oxford University. In 1970, he was knighted.

Interview 13 Peter Shawn Bearman Peter Shawn Bearman

Profile: Peter S. Bearman is the Director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theories and Empirics (INCITE) and the Cole Professor of Social Science at Columbia University. He earned his B.A. in sociology from Brown University in 1978, and his M.A., Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University in 1982 and 1985 respectively. He worked on the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies at Harvard University for a year after he graduated and then joined the faculty at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 1986. In 1996, Bearman moved to Columbia University. He chaired the Department of Sociology from 2001 to 2005 and the Department of Statistics from 2007 to 2008. Bearman is also the External Faculty at University of Oxford, Centennial Professor of Methodology and Sociology at London School of Economics. As a specialist in network analysis, he co-designed the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. He is the author of Doormen. He is an editor of the Handbook of Analytical Sociology and edits with Shamus Khan the “Middle Range” series at the Columbia University Press. Bearman was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008 and American Academy of Sciences in 2014. Interview May 23, 2017 Knox Hall, Columbia University Professor, What is Sociology in Your Eyes? Sociology is a discipline that allows you to study anything that has to do with human action and human behavior. And it’s a beautiful discipline because it’s so wide that is similar to other disciplines, historical problems are part of what we do, very micro level phenomena, the interaction of neural processes with subsequent behavior, are part of what we do. So, the discipline focuses on the world that we made, and P. S. Bearman (B) Jonathan R. Cole Professor of the Social Sciences, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA © Peking University Press 2020 L. Chen (ed.), A Journey of Discovering Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6603-5_13

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it’s a way of thinking about the world that allows you to interrogate and make sense of the incredible richness of human life. And in that sense sociology is a “garbage discipline”, unlike economics where you have a very simple agreed on set of paradigms and ways of doing things, unlike political science which has three different kinds of things they do. Sociology is so open to ideas and ways of thinking that anything goes and that means it’s a very rich field and full of people who have kind of artistic desire to make sense of their world. What do you think makes sociology an independent discipline? That’s a tough one because we do so many things, we do history, then we do historical sociology, and so how are we different from history, and we do economic sociology, why is that different than economics, and we can do neural sociology. So I think what we are doing is always trying to, within the framework of the other fields that we’re bumping into, think about socialization in terms of what is happening inside an actor’s head, what is motivating them to do things, how the social relations that they are embedding are shaping and constraining what they can do. Do historical sociology for example, we wouldn’t just tell the simple story which is sort of that’s the history part but we would try to understand how to structure relations in which the people who are playing a principle role in that story are tied into and how that shapes, limits, constrains and makes possible the things that they do, then reflect as outcomes in history, or if we are studying the way in which our social environment is influencing our aspirations and our hopes and of course we wouldn’t just focus on the description of those aspirations as intellectual history, we would be thinking about the side of influences that bear on people. So the sociology discipline in my mind always comes back to the important social relations and the systematic attempt to capture those social relations in which people are embedded as a framework from which then we can explain other phenomena. After being learning and doing researches in sociology for so many years, what do you think is the most attractive thing to you professor in sociology? Well, I do work in a lot different veins, so for me, I don’t think this is true for everyone, but for me there is something beautiful about our field, and by that I mean I am interested personally in looking at the world in a new way, using different kinds of methods that allow me to produce objects that have never been seen before, and once you see that view you understand that they are real, they exist, they are outside of individuals, and yet they act on us. So I am interested in the beauty of the work that we do and maybe it’s a little more too abstract, maybe tangibly, for example, I have been interested in trying to understand how the system of exchange that organizes people’s relations with one another, how they arise, and yet just be able to see a perfect cycle of exchange, it’s a beautiful object, it’s as pretty as a double helix, or just to be able to visualize the structure of a complex body of knowledge, you see it in a new light, and that’s the gift in my mind of our discipline, and we get to reveal things in a new light and then because we are human beings the ideas that once they are revealed, people react to them and then they adjust their way of living in relation to them, so of course when we found the solar system and suddenly, you know, we

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have a whole new way of thinking about earth’s relationship to the sun and that shapes our behavior and so on, and in that regards sociology is not as grand as astronomy in terms of objects we produce, but we produce some quite remarkable objects, the discovery of stratification system, the robustness of reciprocity, the whole history of our field is the history of making things that are seemingly so natural that we don’t notice them suddenly come to light, and there by force a confrontation with them, and I am not sure that any other discipline does that as systematically as we do. Professor, you studied sociology at the very beginning, you went to Brown University and you kept learning sociology in Harvard, so why did you choose to study sociology at the very beginning? That’s a terrible question to me, ha-ha. So Brown University was and still is a place that misfits went to, and sociology was the discipline that had fewer requirements, actually had zero requirements, and I wasn’t a very good undergraduate student, I really didn’t, I shouldn’t have graduated, I failed a lot of classes and as I was coming into my senior year, my father was going to come to graduation, and I need to have a major, and sociology was the major only required that you take 8 courses, you just took that 8 courses, and I happened to have a couple of friends who are faulty members, I had taken 6 courses already, and they agreed to give me credits for another two courses so I could graduate and then I became a sociology major. So that was kind of accidental. I promised I would write papers for those two courses later on and I am not really sure I did. Then I was in the cascades, the mountains between Seattle and Eastern Washington, there is a beautiful mountain range. I was living on the land in the cascades, planting trees for a living, carrying trees and planting them, and I was reading a lot of system theories at that time in the cabin that was on land owned by Warehouses, a big company, and every 7 years Warehouses came and knocked all the cabins over, so people couldn’t live there more than 7 years because you live somewhere for 7 years in America, it is yours. So they razed it. Somebody built the cabin and I moved into it and I was reading a lot of theories, but it’s hard to read by yourself because you need a community. I didn’t quite know what to do, so I wrote a letter to a guy that my father knew, Ezra Vogel, and I wrote, “I am thinking about going to graduate school, what do you think about sociology at Harvard?” And he wrote back and said, “Oh, yeah, you should definitely apply.” So, I applied there and got in, wow, that was surprising. So, I went to Harvard not really knowing much about sociology which I think was a great advantage actually, if you come in from the outside, you have a different set of things that are motivating you, make you more interesting, at least for that moment. And I was very fortunate that I bumped into two people Ronald Breiger who’s now in Arizona and Harrison White who automatically became my adviser, and through their work on social networks which was what they were doing at the time I think I understood really what sociology was, which is the study of social relations between people. And it’s then that I became a sociologist during my training at Harvard, before then it was really kind of accidental because I wasn’t serious. Now I have been doing it a long time, and I think there are different kinds of sociologists, there are people who are interested in something really deeply, maybe discrimination in the workforce or the compensation returns to education. I

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am not really interested in these so called dependent variables, I don’t really, there is nothing in a dependent variable that really interest me, I am interested in solving problems that require a different way of thinking about the causes of those problems, so sociology is perfect for that too because you don’t have to be an expert in some outcome, you can be an expert in a way of thinking about the world and I learned one thing from Harrison White which is the thing I tell my students and it’s the thing that is really the sociology does. Harrison did and I think I do, and probably many of my students do, which is you see something happen and then step back and look at the implication of what that means for some other place, so for example, we often see traffic jams, there are all sorts of congestion, and I think a lot of sociologists study the traffic jam, they are interested in why did that traffic jam happen, and that’s a fine problem, but when you see a traffic jam then immediately you have to realize, oh, if all these people are here stuck in this traffic jam, that means somewhere else there is a lot of freedom, somewhere else it’s empty, you see a lot of constraint, it means somewhere else there is a lot of freedom. And to me that’s what I learned, like you see the top of the table, but what’s underneath it, look down there, the real story or the interesting story is the sequel, is what’s off the beaten path, so that I learned from my advisor and as a way of understanding how to see things in a different way, and his first paper was interesting, which was on the sociological significance of sleep, you probable think “hum?” And the first sentence of his paper was “for people who sleep, a whole bunch of people have to be awake just to protect them.” You suddenly realize that wow, that is a completely different way of thinking about the world. Professor, could you describe your graduate life when you were in Harvard? how did you spend your time? reading, publishing or doing research every day? No, back then we weren’t supposed to publish really, nowadays you have to publish to survive. I was signed randomly Harrison White as my adviser, and I talked to the other graduate students and they said, “He is a nut, stay away from him.” And they told me a little story, they said, “He has all these graduate students around him, and then one morning he wakes up and he goes, ‘What are these flies doing buzzing around my head?’ And he swats them against the wall and kills them, and that was the story that he kills graduate students.” So, they basically said, “Don’t listen to this guy, he is a nut.” So, I went to meet him, and he said, “It looks like you want to go somewhere in your life, why don’t you take six courses each semester, be done all your coursework in the first year and finish the dissertation the second year.” And you know that would have been really smart. I went back upstairs, I talked to the graduate students, “What did he say?” I said that and they said, “No, no, no, you take three courses a semester, you know, takes you two years.” So, I mistakenly listened to them and I avoided him. So I worked with Ronald Breiger for the first semester, I found some interesting data on father-son mobility, and Ron was working on mobility tables in 16 century England, and I remembered it was December 20th, and we had made an appointment, I was going to his office on Christmas morning at 9 o’clock, and, a couple days before I realized that’s Christmas, so I called Ron up, this was really before email, ha-ha, I said, “Hi Ron, you know”, he was an assistant professor

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at the time, I said, “You know, that’s Christmas”, he said, “I know, but you want to work? Come meet me, if you don’t want to work, do what you want.” I thought, “O.K., he is crazy, you know, he wants to get tenure.” So, I didn’t meet him. But after a while what happens is, you realized that that’s the life, you know, you work a lot. So, I think I did a lot of work in graduate school that never reach publication. I remember I wrote a paper that was subsequently called “generalized exchange”, it is about this beautiful kinship system, I wrote it as a second-year graduate student, and I gave it to Harrison White, I said, “I am thinking of sending this to a journal.” And he said, “Why?” You know, “Why bother?” And that wasn’t such a great paper at that time, but there wasn’t this emphasis on publication, there was more of a chance to collect your own data to do deep thinking and I never learned how to write a paper as a graduate student. That’s something I have learned as an assistant professor, it’s actually a really difficult skill, it’s not easy, you need someone who knows how to do it. But by that time, Harrison really had kind of lost touch with sociology and wasn’t actually writing papers that made sense anyway. So, I got kind of slow start because of that. Do you still remember some professors who actually influenced you a lot? Do you still remember some professors who actually influenced you a lot? Oh, sure. Harrison obviously influenced me andRon Breiger, he went to Cornell after my first year, we always stayed in touch, and we’ve never written together, but we’ve been following each other, and he has been very influential. There was a very smart Italian guy who sat on my PhD committee, named Alessandro Pizzorno works on labor problems, he came from Italy for a while and then he went back. And there was a young assistant professor, Steven Rytina who went off to McGill, and I think he was extremely smart but never figured out how to write. Rytina was a very powerful thinker, so he was influential. Another guy, outside of sociology, was influential to me was David Landes, who was an economic historian, first of all, he hired me to teach in social studies, that was helpful, and he was a very strong thinker, I learned a lot from him. I probably learn more from some colleagues who were graduate students, I was in a cohort with people who are now pretty senior, around me was Michael Macy, now at Cornell, one of my students was Joel Podolny, who now is the head of Apple University, wrote a very important paper on pipes and prisms,1 and Roger Gould who is another very close student and in the end my best friend. There’s a political sciencist named James Fearon who now I think is the chair of Stanford. So I think there were ten or twelve students who I worked with, they were smarter than me, and that was an incredible gift to bump into students who were just smarter than you, um, there is a class I taught, that had Roger Gould, Podolny, Fearon, Fineburg, Mark Feinberg. I think of the 8 students in the class, 6 of them were just smarter than I was. And when you have that experience, you learn how to learn from these people. So I had a rich life of students and colleagues who are my age are probably more influential in how I thought. At Harvard, I mean you have 1 Joel

M. Podolny (2001) Networks as the pipes and prisms of the market. American Journal of Sociology.

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been there, maybe it’s changed, but you know the gap between graduate students and faculties is pretty big. I remember everyday I would come back from my office in social studies center, I lived in Somerville which is kind of a poor community next to Cambridge at that time, and I would pick up Harrison as if it was an accident because I knew his schedule,I just happened to be there, and then I would walk him home to the street that he lived on and then I will continue on my way, so we would touch basically everyday. One day he passed the street that he normally turns on, you know after two years of walking him home, I said, “Oh, you’re finally walking me home.” And he looked at me, you know, just the guy I worked with very closely, and said to me, “The fantasies of graduate students are none of my business.” You know, crushed you in two seconds, I was suddenly an insect, so the gap between these faculties and us was huge. When you change your identity from a student to a teacher, what do you want to teach to your students and how do you deal with your relationship with students? Yeah, well, I think I developed a pretty different relationship with my students. First of all, I am more informal. Secondly you know a lot of my students were my age or older, um, you know, I was, I was thirty, um, you know, graduate students are sometimes older, um, and we, you know, I worked very closely with my students. I didn’t work very closely with Harrison, I learned from him and I observed him, I had a key to his office, I would read his mail, write, you know, sometimes people would ask for reviews of papers and I would write to them and he would just, you know, put his name on it. So, I was in his life but not, we weren’t friends. With my students, I work very closely with them and in the period that we work together, we were working partly because as a professor, as a single father of three children, so I had three children at home, you know, they had to come over, you know, they, I couldn’t be, I couldn’t be at the office, so people entered into my life and we would write together and that worked out pretty well. So how do you balance your work and family? Well, I’m not sure I did such a good job that you should ask my kids. I think I learned how to write very quickly for a very short period of time. If I had twenty minutes, I just swoosh like that. And when you’re raising your own children, you don’t have the luxury of sitting for three hours and thinking a deep thought before you write a sentence. So I would wake up before them, as soon as they got to a certain age, I realize I can’t stay up later than them, so I would go to bed early then wake up at four before they wake up and get a little bit work done then take them to school. So, you work with what you have. I became somebody who could work on many different projects at the same time for very short period of time and that’s a little bit about who I am. So, if I have an entire day in front of me, I am going to waste it, but if I have half an hour, I am going to use it. So, if I could break up the day into tiny little segments, it was okay. But I think my children got the short, especially my son, you know, it’s hard to have someone always thinking about something else. I am not sure if there is a great solution there.

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Professor, you are so successful, but on the other side, do you have any struggle during your academic career? Finding a job in the market or publishing an article, I know you spent years learning how to publish papers I was very successful on the market, which I think was luck. I wrote my dissertation and it was accepted as a book as it was. So, I kind of won on the market because I had a contract to write a book, at that time, that was unofficial. And nobody was doing networks the way I was doing them, so I was kind of on the forefront of a new field and nobody was doing historical networks. So, I was lucky. Then I went to North Carolina and what happened to me in North Carolina is that I first realized the strength of that department was in demography, so I feel like I know nothing about it. So, I became involved with the demographers because they were the people who are intellectually. I spent the first five years of my life working on a project that became what’s known as Add Health2 (Adolescent to Adult Health), it’s a huge study of adolescences that had a very big network component to it. I didn’t publish any papers, I didn’t publish because I didn’t mail them out, I kind of didn’t really know how to write papers, I’ve never been taught how to write a paper. So, I sent this paper, I think it was “Generalized Exchange” to ASR (American Sociological Review) in my third year and I got a letter back from Gerald Marwell who was then the editor and he said, which was written on my paper, it was red marks all over and crossed out, he said, “You should talk to a senior colleague about how to write a paper.” And then he put an X through senior colleague, and he wrote, “a colleague,” and he put an X through that too, and he wrote “anybody”. So honestly, I didn’t know how to write a paper. So, I went to see one of my senior colleagues called Dick, Richard Simpson who was then editor of Social Forces, and I said, “I don’t know what should I do?” And he read the paper and he said, “Well, it needs an introduction, it needs to make sense.” So, he helped me with that paper ASR rejected it, and then I sent it to the AJS (American Journal of Sociology), and then they get revised and resubmitted, and I sent, anyway, that paper took 11 years, you know, 11 rewrites before I got it right, so it’s a long time. And then I learned from Dick Simpson the form of a paper, and once I learned the form I was able to figure out how to get them published, but that took a very long time. So, when I came up for a tenure, I really shouldn’t have been tenured, you know, I would have voted against myself. I had a book and six papers, it’s really very modest but we had just been awarded 20 million dollars, so Dick and I had got this huge grant, 20 million dollars grant. What I didn’t know at that time was like when you get 20 million dollars, I mean there is 20 million dollars direct for the grant, but there is another 14 million dollars indirect, they go to the university. And you know, to be honest, I think the university just thought, “Well I don’t want to lose this money.” It was not worth it to them. So, I didn’t get a lot of positive feedback outside my department for good reason. But I did kind of finally figure out how to do it and once you learned, it’s not so hard. So, when I work with my graduate students that’s what I did, my goal was to write one paper with them, 2 The

National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) is a longitudinal study of a nationally representative sample of adolescents in the United States. For more information: https://www.cpc.unc.edu/projects/addhealth.

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so they learn how to write a paper, and then they can do it on their own from that on because it took me many years and I was really prepared to not get tenure. I kind of knew what I was going to do if I didn’t get a tenure. But then I was just lucky, I got this grant and I learned how to do it and my students were, I already had a lot of students, and they were starting to become successful, so then there is the Matthew effect, once you get a little bit of motion, you collect a lot of credits. I sometimes wonder if I sent papers out with a fake name, what would happen to them, you know, I really want to do it. I heard when you moved to Columbia, you found your new colleagues unusually arrogant and difficult, and you blamed that on the doormen in this building. And that is the original reason of the book Doorman. So, what is the story actually behind the book Doorman and what kinds of difficulties did you have to write this book? Yeah, so part of the story was I was the chair of the department. we had a bunch of ethnographers and I didn’t know who are coming up from tenure, I didn’t know how to evaluate their work and so I thought I should do an ethnography to figure out how to understand whether what they do is good or not, so I was a bit of motivation. And then I was teaching “Introduction to Sociology”, I think it’s the most important class that we can teach, because it’s the class that you can really influence students. But I was a little bored with that. I wanted to try something different, so I thought, “Oh, I will try to teach a class which is just doing research, and I want students to go out in the field, interview people, and collect data, design question, I want them to kind of pretend they are going through a whole research process.” And obviously I need people who are safe, so you know drug addicts are interesting but they stab you, criminals are fascinating but you can’t send an 18-year-old Columbia student to meet them. So, doorman, you know, they wear uniforms and they seem pretty safe, and I had this experience of meeting a doorman understanding what they are doing, and I kind of understood right away that their own sense of self, and this is a Harrison White thing, like rather than try to understand their sense of self as they came out of themselves, it was like their sense of self comes from making us something we are not. And the greater we are, you know, the better they are, so I realize that there was kind of symbiotic relationship, like the little white bird that sits on top of a rhinoceros you know, like they kind of need each other. And I realize that whatever is happening, interactively we want that out of them, they want something out of us and I got interested in that space. But mainly I wanted to see what ethnography was like. So, I wrote the Doorman, we had a class, I wrote it in 2002, and I put it into a file cabinet, a couple of years later, I opened the file cabinet, and I sent the book to Mitchell Duneier who is now chair at Princeton, and I said, you know, “What do you think about this?” And he said, “Aha, it’s a good book.” Mitch was a little more helpful, and so then I made the changes that Mitch suggested, and it came out. Finally, I think I understood what good ethnography is.

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What if you cannot get recognition in sociology, what would you do? I am dealing right today what is happening on one of my students, just today he didn’t get tenure, it was very devastating. You know I have three children, sociology is just a job, when you have one child, your life changes. So, the problem I think that people have is that they invest their whole selves into work. I invest a lot of myself into my ideas but I could do that if I am planting trees or building houses, I am not sure that we have the right understanding of how to be creative, and I was prepared anyway to do something else, and it would’ve been fine. One of my closest friends is Eric Leifer who is probably the most important sociologist of the 1980s, and you probably don’t know who he is, he wrote a very important paper what John Padgett later calls “robust action”, but Eric Leifer identified this as “local action”. He was in North Carolina but he didn’t get tenure in Columbia, he is a farmer now and he lives upstate, he’s got four kids and he is super happy. Because you know what, they didn’t take his mind away, he is still thinking. So, I think we are a little bit like race horses, we get this blank that the more education you have, the more you do something, the less you see, this is the whole world and it takes a little bit of imagination to say “It’s just the world.” But I am lucky, you know, I don’t have these problems, I got tenure, people like my work, so I haven’t experienced hardship in that regard. And you know there is a lot of jobs I want that I didn’t get, but it’s okay that I didn’t get them. So please give some advice to sociology students I think the advice was routinely thought to be bad advice but nothing makes me sadder than watching smart people do things because they feel they ought to do rather than really wanting to do. So, I think a lot of what happened within disciplines is there is discipline that strips away creativity and makes people think in routine way. The best advice I can give is if you are not having a lot of fun, don’t do it. You know I am here at 6:30, 7 a.m. every day, there is nobody here, just the janitor, I work a lot but I want to, I want to do what I am doing, I am really having fun. But I feel like a lot of people are having that kind of relationship to their work, and then being an academic is a nightmare because you just worry about what other people think, you are concerned about getting rejected. I remember one day, probably a more important lesson now, I was a graduate student, Harrison had just written a paper, he got rejected by the ASR, he called me up on the phone, and he said, “Hey! My paper was rejected.” I was just about to say, “I am sorry.” And he said, “I am so happy, the discipline is so strong!” like the discipline is so strong that they rejected his great idea. And, you know, he was generally happy for the boring people who took over the discipline, they won and I think he had the satisfaction of doing the work that he wanted to do. If I ask you to look back, how did you come to be sociologist? And how has being a sociologist influenced you? Well, I think I became sociologist by chance because it’s the easiest thing to be. And I do think in terms of trying to make sense of the world, the older I get, the more it is. When we see a young couple get together, maybe have a date or something, I don’t see, “Oh they are upper class, sociologically they are together.” What I see is

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the various social relations and networks that brought these people into proximity to each other. So, I think about the world relationally and of course it influences me. Now you know what’s sociology done? Well, we live very well, I am at this incredible university, it’s got an amazing library, incredibly smart people all around, and they are younger than me now, so they are also keeping me alive, so that is academia, right? I mean I think you know like if you stay alert, you get into these settings where it’s just incredible, plus you know there are some senior colleagues who you could talk to. I think you have talked to a couple of them, Christopher Winship, you know if I have a question, I don’t know how to deal with something, I call Christopher Winship, I don’t think Christopher is much older than me, but you know he is a kind more together person. He is more balanced. You know I am like totally erratic, so I call him. Another guy is Peter Marsden, you also talked to him, he hired me. Peter and I are polar opposite, he was very serious, but you know if we are polar opposite in personality, we actually were able to get a lot of collaborative stuff done, just in our way of thinking about how to build up our apartment. So, being a sociologist is hard to say what’s meant because the counter-factual is weird, like if I wasn’t a sociologist, I probably would be re-building old houses, like I love to use my hands, and I think I would have been super happy, but who knows? Introduction of Related Characters Ronald Breiger (unknown birth year) is an American sociologist and a sociology professor at the University of Arizona. He is well cited in the fields of social networks, stratification, mathematical models, organizational sociology and cultural sociology. The most widely cited is, with co-authors Harrison White and Scott A. Boorman, “Social Structure from Multiple Networks. I. Block models of Roles and Positions” published in 1976. Gerald Marwell (1937–2013) was an American sociologist, social psychologist and behavioral economist. He was most recently Professor of Sociology at New York University. He is best known for his innovative work on problems of collective action, cooperation, social movements, compliance-gaining behavior, adolescence and religion. One of his famous work is to explore various possible conditions for cooperation through Prisoner’s Dilemma. Richard Simpson (1929–2017) was an American sociologist at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He served as departmental chair from 1972 to 1975 and editor of the journal Social Forces from 1969 to 1972 and again from 1983 until the end of his professional career. Mitchell Duneier (unknown birth year) is an American sociologist and ethnographer. He is currently Maurice P. During Professor and department chair of Sociology at Princeton University. His representative work Sidewalk won the Charles Wright Mills Award.

Interview 14 Michèle Lamont Michèle Lamont

Profile: Michèle Lamont is Professor of Sociology and of African and African American Studies and the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies at Harvard University. Born in Toronto in 1957, Lamont grew up in Québec. She received a B.A. (1978) and a Masters (1979) in political theory at Ottawa University before pursuing her doctoral research in sociology at the Université de Paris, where she graduated in 1983. She held a post-doctoral fellowship at Stanford University (1983–1985) and took her first faculty position at the University of Texas at Austin (1985–1987). Appointed as an assistant professor of sociology at Princeton University in 1987, she was promoted to tenure in 1993, and to the rank of full professor in 2000. She moved to Harvard University in 2003 and was appointed Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies in 2006. As a cultural and comparative sociologist, Lamont is the author of a dozen books and edited volumes and over one hundred articles and chapters on a range of topics including culture and inequality, racism and stigma, academia and knowledge, social change and successful societies, and qualitative methods. She served as the 108th President of the American Sociological Association in 2016–2017. She is also the recipient of the 2017 Erasmus prize for her contributions to the social sciences in Europe and the rest of the world. Interview June 1, 2017 CGIS Building, Harvard University What is sociology in your eyes, professor? What is sociology? It’s the study of social relations and social processes and of patterns that structure social life.

M. Lamont (B) Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies, Professor of Sociology and African and African American Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA © Peking University Press 2020 L. Chen (ed.), A Journey of Discovering Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6603-5_14

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What would you like to say if i ask you to give t a definition? My definition of sociology would be the discipline, the theory, the methodology, the psychoanalytical tools that the historical intellectual tradition has produced collectively to be used to analysis of patterns, processes and social relations that characterize various types of societies. What do you think make sociology an independent discipline? I think it’s quite distinctive. It’s an old discipline that goes back to the nineteenth century. There is a certain degree of consensus but it’s also a multi-paradigmatic discipline which means I think one of its strengths is its diversity. The fact that there are various paradigms that coexist and we can basically study anything. For medium term, diversity of the discipline is extremely important because we cannot use the same analytical tools to study face to face relationship. And we would need to study systems, so the fact that our focus is micro-meso-macro and also that even at the meso level, our focus ranges from neighborhoods to networks to cultural repertoires to institutions, these are all meso phenomenon but they require very different theoretical framework, different tools to apprehend them. So, I think the complexity, the richness, the diversity of the kinds of things that sociologists can do is really an enormous strength, and it’s also a great asset in a context where some of our neighboring disciplines are becoming more and more narrow, so political science for instance is going in a direction where randomized control trials are becoming more dominate as a type of technique and it means that the range of question that political scientists are using has being declining. And I think social psychology also has crisis with experiments right now. And anthropology has faced its own challenges with putting a lot of emphasis on the relationship between the researcher and the subject. So, I think in some way our discipline has been partly successful at avoiding some pitfalls around the way over the last 30 years, so we are in a fairly healthy position now and I think it’s a great moment for the discipline. After learning and teaching sociology for so many years, is there anything you think that is most attractive to you in sociology? What is that? I like the diversity of it. I like the fact that you can study almost anything in sociology. I don’t think we should study what is happening inside the brain. I don’t think we should study for instance motivations because I think we need to operate in a terrain where we are best equipped, we should not try to do what other disciplines do better, we should really develop a vision for sociology that is affirmative. I don’t appreciate what I like to call the self-hating sociologist, you know, some sociologists think of our discipline as it should emulate cognitive science, it should emulate economics. I think we need to stand strong enough for mainly what sociologists do. So, what I like about our discipline is precisely its polyvalence, the fact that you can do so many things within sociology, you know, nothing priori is excluded, so it’s a strength. As the president of the American sociological association, what do you think sociology would be like in ten or twenty years? There are studies about this. Jerry Jacob has written a book on interdisciplinarity that shows how the fields that are interdisciplinary have prospered and how central

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our disciplines such as sociology and the development of interdisciplinary research areas such as the work that’s going on in Business School or School of Education or Criminology. So overall, I am pretty optimistic about where we are going. I think I am partly optimistic if we are able to explain cleanly what are the things that we do differently than, for instance, economists or humanists. I think it’s the moment where, although in the United States there is a little bit of crisis at the political level when it comes to alternative facts,1 you know, this is a huge industry with 4,000 sociology departments, a very large number of research departments that train empirical researchers, and we are not forcing our students to choose between doing qualitative and quantitative research. So, my hope is that we are going to be continuing to progress in a very multi-paradigmatic fashion where methodological pluralism continues to be the rule, and my hope is also that people will not necessarily be conformist. I think a lot of the pressures that the younger generation experience in terms of “Publish or Perish” is not serving them very well. I think if the primary goal is to make a difference in your field and to define an agenda that appeals to the discipline, people should really think in terms of creativity and in terms of doing things that are of interest to them, because if it’s not of interest to them, I don’t know who will be interested in the work. So, I am not going to say, you know, the future of the discipline is going to be macro sociology, it’s going to be comparative sociology, I think the substantive area that’s going to be is really a hundred thousand flower blooms, to use Mao’s expression, you know. I think the discipline does best when it is pluralistic and multidimensional. What is the major problem do you think the American sociology has right now? I think some of our colleague lack faith in our field, like they are looking at what is happening in economics and think we should be like economists or they think, “Okay, big data has arrived, we should all really tack up and start doing this.” I think big data is useful if people can have theoretical question to ask, in itself it’s not of any worth, you know. I think there is a little bit too much of concern with people jumping on the next bandwagon, on what the foundations want to fund today. I am personally a little bit more skeptical than others in terms of the virtue of following the next bandwagon. So if anything I would urge my fellow sociologists to do is to be less other-directed and to put more emphasis on finding theoretical questions that have not been explored, instead of simply, you know, there is a huge push toward working within literature that are extremely well-defined, and I personally have always tried to push literature by thinking about what is the blind spots of this theory, what can this theory not see, and use this ability to think about what has not been analyzed yet 1 Alternative

facts is a phrase used by U.S. Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway during a Meet the Press interview on January 22, 2017, in which she defended White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s false statement about the attendance numbers of Donald Trump’s inauguration as President of the United States. When pressed during the interview with Chuck Todd to explain why Spicer “utter[ed] a provable falsehood”, Conway stated that Spicer was giving “alternative facts”. Todd responded, “Look, alternative facts are not facts. They’re falsehoods.” For more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_facts.

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as a path for future research. So, I think there are so much research that is predictable and utterly boring because they are just very minor variations on something that you have already read a hundred and fifty times, so my inclination would really be to urge my fellow sociologists to think hard about what are the causal paths, the relationship that have not been analyzed yet. So, for instance, what are the ideas that cannot be thought, or you know, if you use, just to make this up, a Bourdieu’s framework, or a Randy Collins’s framework, or a you know symbolic interactionist’s framework. Back to your college days, professor, you studied political theories at the very beginning and then you changed to study sociology when you went to Paris, so what made you change at that time? For your Chinese audience this would be interesting. When I was in college, I started in 1976, I became a Marxist, but a Humanist Marxist,2 so the struggle then was between pitting the Humanist Marxists which were inspired mostly by the early writings of Marx and the Structuralist Marxists, you know, Theses on Feuerbach versus Das Kapital and I was more among the Humanist Marxist. And it was very interesting. I think I spent a whole year reading Das Kapital in terms of training for the mind, it was a wonderful experience and I learned a lot being a political theorist. I wrote my master’s dissertation on Lenin’s theory of class consciousness, and the theory of the relationship between object and subject that you find in the theory of knowledge in Materialism and Empiric-Criticism and I argued that one of them was subjectivist, the other one was objectivist, and it was a mix of theoretical class consensus with epistemology, but at the end of the day, when I finished the thesis which was really quite ambitious, I felt like this was a little bit too disconnected from everyday life. So, one of the advantages of sociology I thought was that it would be much less remote and, in some ways, more helpful for contemporary life. So, I didn’t want to be a scholar of dead people, if you will. Do you still remember how did you spend your time when you were in Paris? Because I want to know how was your graduate life? Yeah, I had done a study of ideology and in order to do this in Paris at that time, my mentor in Canada sent me to work with a friend of his who was teaching in the sociology of knowledge department, which is how I ended up being registering for sociology, but I had a large number of really interesting friends, a Brazilian friend in particular who kind of introduced me to Foucault, so I discovered Paris at that time was just an extremely dynamic environment. And I was there when Bourdieu’s book Distinction came out that was part of his seminar, so that was an extremely exciting moment as well, you know, it was just a moment of where a lot of interesting things were happening in French sociology. So, I felt like this is the place to be now. There were downsides in how we were trained, it was not as methodologically rigorous 2 Marxist

humanism is a branch of Marxism that primarily focuses on Marx’s earlier writings, especially the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 in which Marx espoused his theory of alienation, as opposed to his later works, which are considered to be concerned more with his structural conception of capitalist society. For more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mar xist_humanism.

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as it should have been, people spent a lot of time talking about construction of the sociological object, but very little time about how you demonstrate something. So, then I went to Stanford as a postdoc where I also learned more about methods and about how to do research design which is literally something that was not very much taught in Paris. How did that foreign learning experience influenced you later because i know you do a lot of research about comparative study among different countries? Yeah, I think the fact that I was a Québécois who grew up at the time, when I was growing up, most of my professors had been educated in France, very few had studied in the U. S., so going to do my graduate work in France was just a natural thing. And also, there were many fellowships I got that allowed me to do this. And after I finished, I was very young, I was 25, so I could have gone back to where I grew up to get a job, but I thought I was too young, I didn’t want to do that, so I had this chance to go to Stanford where Seymour Martin Lipset welcomed me very warmly and he was also a comparativist but then you know as a Canadian have lived in two countries, I think doing comparative work came very naturally to me. And I think my sociological thinking was very much comparatively fed by comparative questions, so it came very naturally. Do you still remember some professors who actually influenced you a lot when you were studying sociology or when you started your academic career? Sure, one of the biggest things I did when I was an undergrad, I took a course that lasted the whole year, and it was on the history of social and political thought. And the person who taught it was named André Vachet, he had been a student of Henri Lefebvre, and of Marcuse, and he taught a course you know it was from Plato to Marcuse on the history of individualism, he had written himself his dissertation on C. B. Macpherson’s the theory of “possessive individualism”,3 it was really an amazing overview and it gave me a sense of the coherence and how to do this kind of work, and it had very lasting influence on me because still today a lot of my work, I think, is very influenced by Marcuse’s book One-Dimensional Man. And his work and work of Henri Lefebvre was kind of denunciation of capitalism in its capacity to eliminate differences so that everyone eats the same thing, looks the same, thinks the same, the homogenizing power of capitalism was very central. And I in some ways continue to work on this in different ways. And interestingly enough, the only comparativist I’ve studied with was Lipset and when I worked with Lipset he was already pretty old, so he was not really teaching per se, so I guess as a comparativist, I have been largely self-trained. 3 The

theory of “possessive individualism” is Macpherson’s best-known contribution to political philosophy in which an individual is conceived as the sole proprietor of his or her skills and owes nothing to society for them. These skills (and those of others) are a commodity to be bought and sold on the open market, and in such a society is demonstrated a selfish and unending thirst for consumption which is considered the crucial core of human nature. For more information: https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._B._Macpherson.

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When you changed your identity from a sociology student to a sociology professor, what do you want to teach to your students or what do you want them to learn from sociology? When I took my first job, I went to University of Texas at Austin and that was quite a transition because I didn’t speak English that well, I had a big accent. And they asked me to teach very large undergraduate courses, so it was quite a transition, but at the same time I think I had a real faith in sociology and I think a lot of what I was trying to do was to try to help the students become aware that there is other realities that exist and that the world that they take for granted is only one possible world, and you know, I think of it very much as part of the liberal arts education where you kind of try to teach people the tools that they need to make sense of the world, to develop critical thinking, to be very thoughtful about how the world operates around them. I Found you had a very wide research interests, so to what extent do you think your personal life experiences have relation to your research interests? I am now turning 60 this year, if you look at people who’re my age who are sociologists, some people have always done one thing, and personally I could never have done this because I would have felt extremely bored. So I think there is a real element to becoming a sociologist which is about doing things that you find interesting, so there is a danger to show off changing topics so often that you end up not being an expert of anything, but in my case I felt like I was moving from one topic to another that they were always interconnected, and I was kind of studying the same question from multiplicity of angels, so I feel like at some level I followed my inclination and when I had the opportunity to just repeat myself, to write the same thing again, again and again, I never did it because I thought I would become bored. So, my advice to my own students is have trust in your guts, do what you find interesting because we could all do something else, work in the cooperate world, make more money, whatever, but I think a lot of incentives for being an academic are really having to engaging intellectually with the things you find interesting. So, hoop-jumping I don’t think presents a lot of advantages for academics. So, my advice to people is to stay away from it. So, as a very successful sociologist, how do you balance your work and family? I have been very lucky in that I have a partner who is also a sociologist and we share things pretty equally and we have also trained our kids in the sense that they know that their parents travel but they also know that when we are in town, like I am not accepting dinners every night, I am with my children when I am in town, you know. So we’ve made a lot of choices and also sometimes there is a lot of pressure on woman faculty to be the mother to everyone, and I have told my students I have three children, a lot of my capacity to do mothering happens at my house, so I will be there for you in terms of helping you with your scholarship and all that, but I cannot be a mother to everyone, and I think the students have been very understanding, and they know that they can count on me when they need me to be there. And I am very much of a feminist and I am very attuned to the dynamics in academia that reproduce gender inequality, and I am very eager to advocate for my students and to mentor a

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number of women and I have also been known be a bad-ass in the sense that when I encounter sexism in academia, I don’t suffer fools very badly and I tend to confront people when I see it happening. So, I think being a sociologist in some way is much easier than being in some of the other fields where men are clearly dominant and where women might be token and feel far more isolated. So, in some ways, I feel I have had it easier than other people because I am in the field where many and many people are fighting for the same thing, and all of my colleagues are experts of inequality, so I think people are exercising more self-control because we study inequality, but to some extent it is never perfect. Do you have any struggle during the past decades? I think for foreign students, I should say, when I came to this country, I never expected that I would live in English, so learning to write in English took a long time, and it was very frustrating. And I think especially in the first ten years of your career, or five years, it is a moment where you have the highest level of investment and lowest return, and because of that, you feel like you are stretched. I remember feeling like stretched to the maximum, like I don’t have any emotional energy yet left but you need to finish this paper, you need to finish this book. So when I was an assistant professor where I got tenure at Princeton, I decided not to publish my PhD because it was on the very rapid growth to the social sciences and decline of the humanities in Quebec between 1960 and 1980, and although I thought the question was very interesting, I was very aware that I having decided to live in the U. S., turning this dissertation into a book would not be reviewed as a topic of importance by my American colleagues, so I decided not to publish my dissertation and to do other things instead, which means that I had to begin a study from scratch and to work really fast to write a book, and the book was finished just before I came up for a tenure, so I remember very much, “Wow, this is by the seat of my pants.” You know, it was very stressful. And then because my husband is also a sociologist, he came up for tenure two years after me or one year after me, so you know, there was really the notion, well, we want to be the, we taught in the same department, we wanted to stay in the same department, so in order for both of us to get tenure, we were under a lot of pressure to publish, you know, and to develop national reputations that were very strong, the place where we taught in Princeton had not tenure anyone since, I think, 1976, so the likelihood of getting tenure was pretty low. So, sometimes I think in terms of encouraging students who are also going through a hard time, it’s a little bit like it’s normal at a certain stage of your career that you are really going to feel like, this feels like I am crawling through a desert, no one is encouraging me, it’s really hard, and I am not getting any kudos, any rewards, and yet, but you have to continue. I think most people went through this, it’s part of life. And working in factories has a lot of downside, well, sometimes working in academia has a lot of downside because it’s hard if you are not getting any petting on the back to continue, if you are not sure that you are good enough to do it, and one of my early mentor told me, that has always stayed with me, that a lot of academic success is about determination and persistence, you know, it is about intelligence and creativity and all that, but it is also

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about stick-to-it-iveness, you know, so I tell my students, yeah, you have to learn to deal with these things, and it’s part of the skills you need. But I think it’s pretty hard for you to become successful because you were born in Canada and then you went to Paris for your study and then you came to America to start your academic career and finally become a very successful sociologist, how could you do that? For anything else, I think it’s a mix of good luck, some of it is good luck, so for instance a very, an anecdote that I like telling, when I was in France and I applied for a fellowship to come to the U. S., I wrote to three people. Randall Collins didn’t have a job at that time, he was in between jobs. Alvin Gouldner who has just died, and Seymour Martin Lipset who was at Stanford sent me a telegram to say, “Sure, I will be happy to host you!” There was no internet at the time, but that was sheer luck because Lipset had written books on higher education, he was interested in my dissertation but he also had a long lasting relationship with Canada, he had had his first job in Canada, and he was a good uncle toward me in the sense that he wrote letters for me a lot when I was applying for jobs and then Randall Collins was also extremely supportive, and other people throughout my career, so I feel like it’s a mix of luck because you need to have people such as those who help you out, but you also need to do the work and you need to have really high standards. And sometimes people don’t get that, you know, how demanding you have to, you know, it is like, if you build a stool, you want the stool to not have three legs you want the stool to have four legs because you know it’s going to be a much more solid stool, well, the same thing if you want to write a book, you need four stool, so those are things that you need to learn and so I really think it’s a mix of luck and hard work, frankly. Your recent book Getting Respect, what impact do you hope it has? It’s difficult to say, it’s a book that was written by 7 people, it’s not an edited volume, it is a real book, and actually it’s an extremely complicated book and it’s a book that took us a very long time, and it’s a book that I am very proud of in a sense that it offers an explanation for how people experience racism that has to do with factors that enable and constrain different experiences and response. So, my hope is that it would be read widely because the analytical strategy that we deploy is very, I think, original and it has relevance far beyond questions of racism. So, I hope that book will have influence, you know, it’s been out for 7 or 8 months, so it takes forever for the book to be reviewed. And also, the book has a lot of footnotes, it’s a complicated book, which means it will not be reviewed in the New York Review of Books, the process by which knowledge trickles down or up or you know diffuses is complex one, but I am very lucky that the book came out the year that I am the president of ASA (American Sociological Association) because when I give my talk in Montreal this August at the meetings I will talk about the book. So, it’s also in a fortunate to help people understand what the book is about. But there’s been very few reviews so far, so it’s hard to know how it is going to be received.

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Speaking of publishing, do you still remember when did you publish your first article? And how was your feeling at that time? Yes, the first paper I published was on power, I think it was called The Power-Culture Link in Comparative Perspective. I was working on my dissertation at the archives in Ottawa, and I spent so much time reading on the concept of power, and it’s a very complex literature, and I had written a first draft on the structural approach to power which is such a bad paper, and I sent it to ASR (American Sociological Review), and they didn’t even send it out for review, they just rejected it, then I realized, “Whoa, I really have a long way to go before being able to publish.” And then Craig Calhoun was editing a journal Comparative Social Research and he invited me to submit a paper and the conceptual work I had done on power finally came out in that. And interestingly enough this year I won the Erasmus Prize, and they give the prize for people who are studying power, knowledge and diversity, and when I talked to the president of the foundation about why they gave it to me, she said, “Oh, you wrote this paper on power.” And I said to her, “I cannot believe you found this paper because it’s not cited, no one knows about it.” You know, so it’s a process, it just took a long time to learn how to do this, as I say it with my students. What kinds of books do you think sociologists should write, which if any audience beyond the academy do you think sociologist should try to reach? I think we need to write different kinds of books, like I think I am very happy I wrote Getting Respect, but right now I think it would be nice if I were to write a similar argument in a different format that would be written in such a way that it would reach different audience. So, it’s more like you have several projects ahead of you and you move from one project to the other, it’s not one versus the other, but I think it’s very important that we write more broadly for various audiences. From your experiences, what advice would you like to give students who may want to start academic career in the future? I think it’s important for people to have their publications, the first ones be very serious so that it really showcases their creativity but also their capacity to do very convincing empirical demonstration, and once you have done that, and you’ve able to develop a track record, you can write a serious book, a book that is really trying to make impact on the discipline, and then after you gain your credentials, then it’s great to write for larger audiences, So I think sometimes people want to take shortcuts, and they want to become the most widely read people before they have done anything serious, which is a problem. If I ask you to look back, how did you come to be a sociologist and how has been a sociologist influenced you? I started wanting to be a journalist and also an actress, but I realized early on I was not a very good actress, and then being a journalist or a social scientist is very similar. So, I feel like I kind of did what I was going to do, you know, and I really like what I am doing because I am a very curious person and inquisitive and it’s the kind of job that I have that requires that. It’s a lot of work though, you have a great many

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commitments, and you have to respond to many demands, and I don’t like to say “No” to people but I have to say “No” all the time otherwise I would not sleep, so you know, figuring out the right balance is a process, but it’s not only my problem, I think it’s everyone’s problem, so. Introduction of Related Characters Jerry A. Jacobs (1955–) is a sociology professor at University of Pennsylvania who served as editor-in-chief of the American Sociological Review. His research focuses on women’s employment, including authority, earnings, working conditions, part-time work and work-family conflict, and entry into male-dominated occupations. At the same time, Jacobs also studied interdisciplinary academic exchanges, and his recently published work is: In Defense of Disciplines: Interdisciplinarity, Specialization and the Research University published in 2013 by the University of Chicago Press. Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991) was a French Marxist philosopher and sociologist, best known for pioneering the critique of everyday life, for introducing the concepts of the right to the city and the production of social space, and for his work on dialectics, alienation, and criticism of Stalinism, existentialism, and structuralism. In his life, he has authored more than 60 books and more than 300 articles. Alvin Gouldner (1920–1980) was an American sociologist who is most remembered for his 1970 work The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. This work argued that sociology must turn away from producing objective truths and understand the subjective nature of sociology and knowledge in general and how it is bound up with the context of the times. He served as the president of the Society for the Study of Social Problems in 1962. Craig Jackson Calhoun (1952–) is an American sociologist and professor of social sciences at Arizona State University who has published The Roots of Radicalism: Tradition, the Public Sphere, and Early Nineteenth-Century Social Movements and other works. His research areas include social theory, social movement, and social change, and he also advocates the use of social science to solve public concerns. From 2012 to 2016, Calhoun served as the dean of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Prior to that, he was a professor of social sciences at New York University.

Interview 15 Viviana A. Zelizer Viviana A. Zelizer

Profile: Viviana A. Zelizer is Lloyd Cotsen ‘50 Professor of Sociology at Princeton University’. Zelizer was born to a Jewish family in Argentina. She attended University of Buenos Aires and studied law for two years before she immigrated to the United States in 1967. She attended Rutgers University where she graduated with a B.A. in 1971. She went on to graduate school in sociology at Columbia University where she received an M.Phil. and an M.A. in 1974. In 1977, Zelizer received her Ph.D. in sociology. Zelizer first went to teach in the Department of Sociology at Rutgers University from 1976 to 1978. She then joined the sociology faculty at Columbia University from 1978 to 1988. Since 1988, she has been teaching in the Princeton University, and during 1992 to 1996, she was the chair of the Department of Sociology. Zelizer is well known as a prominent economic sociologist who focuses on the attribution of cultural and moral meaning to the economy. She has published books on the development of life insurance, the changing value of children, the place of money in social life and the economics of intimacy. She has also studied topics ranging from economic ethics to consumption practices. Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children is one of her outstanding books which won the C. Wright Mills Award. Her most recent book is Money Talks: Explaining How Money Really Works (Princeton University Press, 2017) co-edited with Nina Bandelj and Frederick Wherry. In 2007, Zelizer was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Interview June 5, 2017 Wallace Hall, Princeton University It has been 40 years since you got your PhD and began your academic career in sociology, so looking back to your intellectual journey, what is sociology V. A. Zelizer (B) Lloyd Cotsen ‘50 Professor of Sociology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA © Peking University Press 2020 L. Chen (ed.), A Journey of Discovering Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6603-5_15

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in your eyes? And what do you think make sociology as an independent discipline? Yeah, it’s a great question and interestingly I always say that I really understood what sociology was all about only when I began teaching courses in “Introductory Sociology”, which I did for many years at Columbia and Princeton, and to express very clearly what is this field to American students that have never taken a sociology course in high school, unlike psychology or politics that they knew what it was about. There is an easy answer to this question, and I always say it’s the taxi driver test. When a taxi driver asks me, what do you do when I say I teach sociology, he says, “What is that?” so the easy answer is to say, “Well, psychology studies what is in people’s minds, what is in your mind?” I tell him or her, “Sociology studies relations among people and the impact of institutions on people.” So that’s the quick answer. And fundamentally it is the correct answer since we are committed as a discipline to move beyond the individual as the central explanatory site, and to move towards relations among individuals and again, you know, that is one of the key differences also between economics and sociology. As a well-known economic sociologist, could you tell us the difference between sociology and economics? Yes, and again the starting difference is the focus of economics on individuals as the key explanatory site and the focus on relationships. Of course, the other crucial difference is the focus on the understanding of behavior as driven by rational maximization principles that has been a fundamental part of the standard economic explanation in mainstream economics and classical economics. Let me say before I move on to the difference with sociology is that just as sociology has changed in these past forty years, economics has changed, so that is very important for us, and I tell my students this, to not do just the cartoon version of economics, but understand that we have now behavioral economics, we have game theory, we have feminist economics, we have developmental economics, so there is a whole spectrum of variations. Still, the focus in most of them is the individual, when we move to sociology again, immediately the relational focus is central and the introduction as real factors of shared meanings, as we know, my definition of culture is shared meanings and their representations in practices and the serious attention to that and to organizational and political issues too as factors. I will give you one example of the difference between economics and sociology using my research on money. One of the developments both in economics and sociology in the study of money is the challenge to the fungibility assumption that all moneys all the same, right? That there is a single standard that relies the only important feature of that is as a medium of economic exchange and that it is each unit of money whether it is in China or in the United States or my home country of Argentina, each dollar or each peso is exactly the same as the other. So, one of the challenges again within economics and sociology is to say, well, not really, if you study this. So, economists, behavioral economists have developed the model of what they call “mental accounting” in which they study how individuals mark differences among their different moneys so that they have different cognitive spaces for money that is earned through gambling, through money that is used for different kinds of

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purchases, they have different cognitive spaces, right? For example, for money that is saved for a child’s education, that’s a mental compartment. I have done obviously a lot of work on the meaning of money and the social differentiation among money, what I call earmarking of money, marking differences and I add, and now I have former students that are doing that kind of work, I say, “Yes, we all make differences, cognitive differences but we can’t really understand those differences unless we introduce also how relations mark differences among different kinds of moneys.” So, let’s say the example that we use in, with Frederick Wherry and Nina Bandelj, we use that example in our new edited book Money Talks and I have used it elsewhere as well, you take the savings for child’s college education that can be taken as a mental compartment by, let’s say, the father, but then we say, “Yeah, but why is it so important?” Is it just because it’s an individual need to have that distinction? No, we need to understand what is the relationship between the parent and the child. What happens if that division, that earmark is broken down? Look what is going to do to the relations between parent and child, between the parent, let’s say the mother is going to get very upset if the special money has been misused by the father, you know, so the goal is to say the differentiation of money are not just like economics or mental accounting will tell us, an individual process, one mind at time, but others count. And others mean we need to pay attention to social relations in order to really understand what is going on in the world. What do you think about the relationship between qualitative and quantitative methods in sociology? Do you think there is a qualitative and quantitative divide in sociology right now? I’ve been teaching students for a long time, my first warning is it’s not the method that should be worrying you, it’s the problem, the theoretical curiosity and the empirical sight that you want to explain. What do you want to know about the world? And then we will worry about how you study it. So, I believe that those divisions are not important, they do exist as in any kind of profession there are divisions in perspectives but I consider it a waste of time to fight which is better. There is no time. We need to focus on understanding the world and explaining it through whatever methods. In my own career, for my first three books, I used historical methods, a non-quantitative historical method. I was trained at Columbia University by Sigmund Diamond who was a Harvard historian and had never studied sociology and was hired at Columbia as to train students in very early, may have been the first course, so I was trained in very classical historical methods of qualitative analysis of documentary materials, I did not even use any kind of formal coding. The message was you read and read and read, and you established some implicit codes that are not quantified, and you know you are done when the documents start repeating themselves. And you try to have for a particular problem and in my first book was why was there resistance to life insurance in the United States, as many different kinds of documents just as you would have different kinds of informants if you are doing ethnography or another method. Now I did that for the first three books, and then after I finished the book on money, which centers on very specific categories of money, money in the household, money as a gift, and money in welfare organizations and among welfare recipients, I faced

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the argument that maybe the theory of money that I had developed applied only to these apparently peripheral sites, but does this theory apply to what others mistakenly consider real money, money in organizations, money in the professions, so I decided at that point to start a project that I called payments and social ties, you know, I spent a year at U. S. institute for advanced study, and I got Guggenheim Fellowship and the goal was to compare types of payments in organizations like salaries, bonuses, perks, etc., compare them with the intimate payments, and see whether similar principles of explanation apply to both areas. So, I was at the institute, and by a series of events, for example, being invited by the anthropologists’ conference to do a paper about commodification, I veered into studying more the intimate payments even though I have already accumulated and I still have all kinds of things in particular on the bonus, on the Christmas bonus in the United States. In any case, so that led to the book Purchase of Intimacy. However, going back to the method, I began that book say, “Okay, I use my standard historical method and I am going to do the same historical period that I knew so well, 1890s to 1930s.” I was going to look at variation in legal decisions having to do with intimate relations like courtship, marriage, divorce, etc., but as I was doing this and I accumulated a lot of cases on this, I realize that’s not what I want to do, I don’t want to trace the history of these, I want to show how intimate relations and economic transactions intersect and interact, I want to counter what I call “hostile world” theories, meaning theories that assume that the world of economics and the world of social life are really operating under distinct explanatory modes. I wanted to challenge that and develop what I called first “differentiated ties” and ended up in the book calling “connected lives”. To do so, and this goes back to my theory that what is important is the problem and the method comes next. I said, “The historical method doesn’t really work.” So what I did is, at first I divided the book into a review of studies already done about intimate economies and then did my own research on legal cases that had to do with the intimate economies, not tracing them over time, but capturing cases that best represent it, either that they were famous what I call landmark cases or that I had discovered and represented the kind of legal decisions in which the courts had to see, well, how does this particular kind of intimate relation, courtship, in marriage husband and wife, cohabiters, how do they decide on which kind of economic transaction matches this relation. So, poof, the historical method is no longer there. But there is more. So, what I am doing now, one of the unwritten chapters in The Social Meaning of Money that I had thought of doing historically was on organizations, one was prisons and the other was going to see universities. So, I became interested again in the world of college students, and started thinking of how does this particular world which I analyze as a form of what I call circuits of commerce that is another framework that I am using, an analytical framework, using circuits as a form of economic organization which is not captured by networks, hierarchies or markets. That would be a longer explanation that I can refer the students to references on that, but I started trying to understand what is this world, this economic world of college students, and that let me to be curious about the present, and with the assistance and collaboration of now a former graduate student who is a demographer but helped me with this, we started interviewing students, we have interviewed about 60 students at Princeton over the past four, five years as well

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as administrators, etc., and the focus now is on the relationships between the very wealthy Princeton students the ones that have no financial aid and very low-poor Princeton students, the ones that have full financial aid, in between there is a huge other category of relative financial aid. So, you know, how do they interact these very different social classes, sometimes in the same room, in the same dorm room. What is their interaction? So, as you see, I then had to switch my method to accommodate. I do plan and I have already done some historical research on Princeton and in other Ivy League schools and the relationships among poor and wealthy students, so I will maybe go back to the historical method. So that is a very long answer but to show the point in my own experience of how the method accommodated to the question. After doing research in sociology for so many years, what do you think is the most attractive thing to you? Sociology is irresistible to me because that is how I observe the world, it helps me understand the world better, it helps me understand relationships better. I have focused almost exclusively but not only on micro interactions because those are the ones that I understand better. I have studied organizations as well as in the case of welfare organizations and their use of money, and now trying to understand the university as an organization, I am never not a sociologist, I am never not in the sense that because sociology is a way of seeing the world, and that is one of the wonders of teaching sociology because you will experience that. You have a class of undergraduates that maybe never heard of sociology, and I tell them the very first class is I don’t know if you will be interested, maybe forever in the field, but I can promise you that by the end of this semester you will see the world differently and you will read the newspaper and say, “Oh, this is what’s going on.” And the proof is I get every year messages from former students, I am not talking graduate students in professional sociology, even undergraduates who sent me articles and said, “This is what we were talking about, now I can understand what we were talking about.” So, I think it helps us understand the world better, explain it better, I think that it’s a kind of sacred mission to we all go through life, you know, it’s not a very long life even when we are lucky. So even if we can contribute to better understanding what is around us is already something that matters. Beyond that as many sociologists do, we can change the world, right? We can use it to improve the world, and that is a responsibility to try to do that, some do it more directly, here at Princeton we have people very involved in policy, and others do it indirectly. I will give you a kind of approach to thinking about the policy, you know, what is the relationship between policy. As I see it, in any policy initiative, you have four different aspects, you always have a normative aspect, you want to do something that is fair or that it would improve the morality of certain arrangements, you have statements of fact, this is how things are, you have statements of possibility, this is how things could be, and you have statements of cause and effect, how do we get from here to there. I will give you an example, let’s take an example of the wage gap, right? Within the United States, the general figure is that women make about 80% to the dollar that men make, right? So, a normative statement would be we want equality, it is not fair. That is particular kind of normative statements, you know, one can debate how universal these things are. Let’s set that

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aside. That is what we are saying now, here. Second is a statement of fact; women earn about 80%. Then is a statement of possibility, we could move to a wage system that is equal for man and women. And then is a statement of cause and effect and pathways towards that goal so we can pass laws that make it illegal and contestable when you discover that women have been paid, have been paid less than men for the same job. We have these cases especially in the United States going to court a lot. We can make policies within organizations that offer for example similar possibilities of mobility towards high paying jobs for men and women. We know that in the past men and women have often been placed in different mobility ladders, so those are pathways. No good policy can really be enacted, I think, without understanding that all this is going on. That is one general way. I will give you another example again from the money world. You know, I have written a lot on the concept of earmarking as we discussed before that people don’t treat all moneys the same, and it makes a big difference, how we get paid, whose money we use, how we use it and for whom, the earmarking, what I called the relational earmarking of money, you can say that’s so interesting, but who cares? Right? Well, it is why is that significant. First, certainly it’s important in our private lives so that when a wife whose income is being used differently than her husband even though the amount is the same realizes, “Oh, this is really a gender issue.” You know, it helps us to understand our lives. But there also have been applied by policy that has been one of the surprises that other people have used my work for policy. Very prominent example, Kathryn Eden, the sociologist who does extraordinary work on welfare and household moneys, and has written many books, in some recent work with collaborators, with three or four collaborators, they have done an important study of the earned income tax credit, which is for working class families with children and that they get back a certain amount of money. So, they have discovered that the money is coming as a tax credit rather than welfare money makes an enormous difference to their dignity that the form of the money matters for the recipients regardless independently of the quantity of money. And they actually spend it in different ways than their wages, and one of the lessons that Eden and collaborators are conveying from that kind of research which draws from my work on money is that we should devise better forms of transmission of money to the needy that preserves their dignity rather than becoming humiliating transfers. Go back to your college days, why did you choose to study sociology at that time? I was raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and when I was 17, I went straight to professional training in Argentina. I did a lot of things, I was a dilettante, I liked everything, I loved studying. So, following my father’s lead, who was a lawyer, I did a year of law, and at the same time, I went to where it’s called the Facultad de Filosofíay Letras where you could study sociology, economics, etc., to professionalize with the goal of professionalizing. So, I did several and I loved my courses in sociology, I loved it. But at the same time, I trained and was working as a simultaneous interpreter for international conferences in Buenos Aires and, I did it for three or four times a year, so I liked all the stuff that I was doing. Then I came to the United States, but I mostly liked my sociology courses, you now, I remember reading C. Wright Mills

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in Spanish and loving it. And years later when I got the C. Wright Mills Award for the Pricing the Priceless Child, I had to give a little talk and I remembered having read it as a student, the C. Wright Mills, in any case. So, when I came to the United States because I got married to an American, and I thought of working at the UN as a simultaneous interpreter because I really was doing that with great pleasure and it was working very well, but I did not want to be a written translator, because it was so hard. I love the simultaneous, it’s a challenge because you always try to think of better words, etc., but I discovered that to work in the UN you have to finish your college degree. So, I finished my college degree and by the time I finished I was totally hooked on sociology. I had a brilliant professor who was a German woman who was finishing her PhD at Columbia and totally inspiring and certified that I loved sociology, and then I went to Columbia where I was further inspired. I took one of Robert Merton’s last lecture, famous lecture courses on social structure, I was able to take that. And I had wonderful professors like Bernard Barber, etc., there, so that’s, that’s…, but let me add that I did not think that I was going to go to teaching, I thought I might work with “adults”, I thought I might go into advertising, I even interviewed for non-academic jobs. However, they asked me to teach at Columbia a summer course, I think it was probably the summer, I think it was in 1976 right before I got my degree. And it was an introductory sociology course, a seminar at Columbia University. And at the very first class that I taught, I totally fell in love. When I went out of the class, I said, “This is amazing, this is what I want to do.” It was like a movie. And I never have ever stopped loving the teaching of sociology to undergraduates, now, you know, again the same passion with my graduate students, as you see the pictures behind me, some of them have become very dear friends aside from my students. In Columbia, you once said four scholars influenced you a lot, they are professor: Sigmund Diamond, Bernard Barber, David Rothman, and Robert K. Merton. So how did they influence you or what did you learn from them? They influenced me by their own knowledge of their own superb analysis, three of them as sociologists, David Rothman was an extraordinary and inspiring historian, he is a social historian. And in the second year that I was at Columbia, I received a fellowship that was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, it was called the social traineeship program that was run by David Rothman, and it was mostly to train history students in social science methods and there were two of us from sociology selected to be trained in historical methods. That is how it happened. If I had not gotten that fellowship, I would not show you and for other students the contingency of our lives, and what Merton called the unanticipated consequences, what I call the aleatory element in social life, I would have probably studied more aspects of Latin American sociology. However, this traineeship program came with a provision that the dissertation had to be an American social history. And through the course with professor Diamond, I also discovered the life insurance puzzle, and it was again, that is probably too long of a story why I chose to study life insurance for my dissertation, it’s a different story. But they inspired me as teachers and as thinkers rather than by closely supervising my work, I was very independent in my work, not

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deliberately, you know, it may have been my training in Argentina, I am not sure, but they had a very light hand in my work. It was mostly inspiring conversations that I was very fortunate to have, and I continued to my stroke of luck with later, and that’s probably you know with other friends and colleagues. When you changed your identity from a student to a teacher, what do you want to teach to your students or what sociology training do you think students should have? Well, it’s I talked before about hostile worlds falsely assuming a division between economics and social life. I also think there is another version of hostile worlds in which you either have to be very instrumental in your professional career and study only things that will get you a job and you can only take some time teaching because otherwise it takes away from your research, that is instrumental. And then there is, follow your passion, right? So, they are sometimes presented as opposites. My hope is, as I have seen it in my students, is that you can find a path between both, you cannot study something properly unless you are passionate and really curious about it, and at the same time, because at least in the United States, the professional path is so intense, and students are expected now in ways that they were not in the past to publish articles, very soon and very quickly in good places. So, you have to take care of your time a little bit differently than in the past but the goal is to combine both. And to not ever think that teaching is just what you have to do, while your real work is your research. That is another false hostile world. It is a gift that we have as academics to be able to affect people’s lives as their teachers, and we should never take that lightly. Did you have any struggle? When was that and how did you pull through it? There is always a struggle in finding the balance between the teaching and the life, the personal life, and the research. I have never been faced with a dramatic struggle. I have… let’s say that maybe, and this may be a gender story because I know that it happens to many women, excess perfectionism, you know, sometimes probably spending too much time on certain issues, but is that a struggle? No, that is how I accommodated my life. I have not for professional reasons for, you know, I just have one child, not for national policy reasons, nor because I wanted to write more books, it just happened because I was far from my family, that’s really the reason in Argentina. And my son is now a professor at Princeton and a very famous academic (You are the first team, mother and son, both are professors at Princeton.) You saw that, yes, I am very happy about that, and he is also a very good man and he has wonderful children, but of course if I would have continued my career in Argentina and had had many children, it would have been more difficult to accommodate it. But, you know, I would say that the academic schedule is one that is much more flexible than if I would become a lawyer for example as I had thought, I would have faced greater challenges, you know, as both men and women do in this kind of very demanding inflexible schedule. So, this is a historical footnote, many years ago I heard the famous Talcott Parsons who I had met, and he spoke once, I don’t remember what conference it was and he was talking about how teaching in university

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was ideal for women, you know, he had the whole theory of the household that men and women’s division of labor, etc., you know, his own interpretation of that. But he was saying, you know, the academia is good because it’s so flexible in that part of his theory, there are other problems in his theory, that part is right. Both men and women have the flexibility, we have the summers, if we are fortunate of course, and it’s important to note that different universities have different demands, but that has helped. Do you still remember when did you publish your first article? What was the feeling then? Yes, of course, one never forgets the first article. And that was the article on my dissertation on life insurance which appeared in the American Journal of Sociology. And, it was a great feel. I haven’t published so many articles, well, I have published quite a few articles, but the point is you don’t forget the first. You know, like people in business, sometimes here, I don’t know if that’s the case in China, the first dollar that they earned, they put it in their business and they never forget that. Well, we academics don’t forget our first articles. Was it hard to publish your first article? I mean what if students or young scholars couldn’t get recognition, what should they do? They should keep trying, you know. It’s a different time, I published this in nineteen…it appeared in 1978, the article, I am now forgetting the year, yes, because the book appeared in 1979, it was the year before, it appeared in the AJS. And it’s always a challenge when the reviews come in that I don’t remember as well, what I do remember, I will say an anecdote in case the students in China are interested in how these things happen. There was one very challenging and very smart review of the article which I used to, you know again, I don’t remember much about the details, I remember the feeling. But a few years later, I didn’t know who though, you know, they are anonymous reviewers, I was at the meeting of the American Sociological Association with a small group of people and they were talking something about my article, and I mentioned, “Oh, I got this brilliant review, it was hard but I was very thankful.” And Carol Heimer who is a wonderful sociologist, who wrote her dissertation in first book on life insurance, she is at Northwestern, she said, “I was the reviewer!” She was a graduate student at Chicago and they did a lot of those reviews and I knew who the reviewer was. So what I do, it has gotten more difficult, the whole process, there is more competitive and two main journals are very difficult to get into, but when I encouraged the students, you know, if you get reviewed, and you get requests for revisions, do the revisions what you can, etc., and if that doesn’t work, go to another journal and another journal, you have to keep trying, and I have cases of students who were turned down first, got into another journal then wrote a book, and then they became prominent. Again, if what is driving you is a passion for your subject, you will want to keep trying because you want to communicate what you have discovered to others.

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Your book Pricing the Priceless Child, is one of your outstanding books, which has huge influence and won the C. Wright Mills Award, could you tell us some stories behind this book, like where did you get your inspiration? Right, I do have a story on that book. When I was researching my dissertation and first book Morals and Markets which is about the development of life insurance in the United States, I found a footnote, an obscure footnote somewhere in one of the documents, the many documents that I analyzed referring to a controversy over children’s life insurance, and I was curious about that because here I had studied so much adult life insurance, what could that be? So I said okay, um, never thinking I was going to write a book on children, I said I was curious again, the passion, I was curious, but then I didn’t know how to get documents, and first I went to, I think it was the Prudential Life Insurance company, to see if they had documents because they were one of the first to sell life insurance on children, and their archives had burned down, so all they had to give me was a picture of the first child insured. But then I went to another life insurance company, I have that in the new preface I wrote for the second edition of the book, Metropolitan Life Insurance company, I went there one day in New York, and there was an elderly librarian, and I couldn’t find anything, but I talked to this librarian, “Oh, yes, I will get you some materials.” And then I came back about a week later, and sure she had a whole trove of documents about children’s life insurance, I had never happened to meet before. I had read stories of historians that had discovered archives, I had nothing like that in my history, but that was a discovery. And then it was again the passion, it was amazing because these were policies on children taken at the turn of the twentieth century in very lowincome families, very cheap but still costly in a meager budget, why did they take the insurance to provide their child with a proper burial? And so, I investigated that and from that study, the analysis and the curiosity of other ways in which children’s lives were priced became interesting to me. And I happened to be at Rutgers at my first job with a colleague Sarane Boocock who was studying the sociology of childhood, so all these merged together and only after I had done the other chapters, you know, on the adoption and sale of children and on wrongful death, only then I returned to the whole debate over child labor to show you it was not in orderly path, which is important, I always tell the students, you discover things, and then you change the route that you began on the book. For the new edition of The Social Meaning of Money, I wrote an afterword in which I refer to these unexpected paths as we write books. Last question is how has been a sociologist influenced you? It’s a difficult question because I don’t know what the alternative, the counterfactuals would be, you know, how different would I be as a person or in interactions if I would have become a lawyer that I thought I would be or if I would have remained as a simultaneous interpreter. It certainly has affected my perception of life, but my own perception of life has also influenced how I practice sociology, and my very profound feelings about social interactions and social relations have been very harmonious with the field of sociology. I could not have been a very tough boss that could not have time to think about others.

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Introduction of Related Characters Kathryn Edin (unknown birth year) is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University. She specializes in the study of people living on welfare. Two of her books are Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Lowwage Work, and Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage. In 2014 she became a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Bernard Barber (1918–2006) was an American sociologist and a sociology professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, and in 1970 he became the chair of the sociology department. Barber’s research field focuses on scientific sociology and social structure theory.

Interview 16 Annette P. Lareau Annette P. Lareau

Profile: Annette Lareau is currently the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor in the Social Sciences in the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her B.A. in sociology from the University of California at Santa Cruze in 1974, and M.A. as well as Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley in 1978 and 1984 respectively. She started her career at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale in 1986 and then she went to teach in Temple University and the University of Maryland before she joined the University of Pennsylvania in 2008 as the Stanley I. Sheerr Professor. Lareau is a sociologist who studies family life. She is interested how the social position of children and parents has an impact on the quality of their life experiences. She has explored these issues in the arena of familyschool relationships, the cultural logic of child rearing, the process through which parents go about deciding where to live and send their children to school. Her works have received numerous awards. Unequal Childhood is one of her masterpieces, which won the C. Wright Mills Award in 2004. She was elected as the President of American Sociological Association in 2013. Interview June 6, 2017 McNeil Building, University of Pennsylvania After being doing research in sociology for so many years, so what is sociology in your eyes? What’s sociology in your eyes? Sociology is the study of groups of people. Psychologists often study individuals. They study individuals’ temperaments 5 or personality. Sociologists study groups of men, of women, of African Americans, of immigrants. It’s the study of institution. It’s the study of social structure, the systems that shape our daily lives. So, the university was created before we were born and it will exist after we die, but there are professors, A. P. Lareau (B) University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA © Peking University Press 2020 L. Chen (ed.), A Journey of Discovering Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6603-5_16

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there’re students, there’re registrars, there are systems. So, sociology is interested in institutions and structures. Sociology has been recognized as a very wide and broad discipline, so what do you think make sociology an independent discipline? I think sociology has a set of good ideas. Sociology helps us understand things that other disciplines don’t help us understand. Economics is very interesting and very important but looks at the economic system often in isolation. Economists often have unrealistic assumptions about how people act in daily life. They act as if people don’t act in rational ways. Sociologists meet people where they are. They try to understand what the reality of daily life. And they understand how daily life is constrained and shaped by social forces and by historical forces. After studying and doing research in sociology for so many years, what do you think is the most attractive thing to you in sociology? I think sociology is filled with surprises. I wrote a book called Unequal Childhood, and I was interested in the reality of daily life. You know, all the families felt normal. They felt comfortable. They felt cozy. When you’re in the home, they felt like home. And yet the homes were very different. Some parents answered questions with questions. They treated children as if they were a special project. They sought to develop their children’s talents and skills. While other parents loved their children very much, but they saw that they gave them directives rather than answering questions with questions, they said, “Cut it out.” “Don’t do that!” “Shut up!” And they also would give kids directives. And they also were trying to protect their children. They saw that adulthood as a time of difficulty and challenge, and not having enough money to pay the bills, of having deadening and boring jobs. So, they saw childhood as a sacred space that they were trying to protect their children from the difficulties that would lead ahead. They had a different view of adulthood than the middle-class families in the study. Going back to your college days, professor, you chose to study sociology at the very beginning, and devoted most of your time into it, so why did you choose to study sociology at that time? Well, it’d be nice if I could say that I had a plan in my youth, but I did not. I changed majors. I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do when I was an adult. And I would say before I started my senior year, I’d been away on a junior year abroad program and they wouldn’t let me register until I declared a major. So, I looked at the catalog, trying to figure out what I had the most credits for and I’m like, um…. this, you know. So, I wouldn’t exactly say there was a plan. On the other hand, I was interested in sociological issues, I also was interested in community studies and I think I was interested in inequality. I was interested in the differences between the haves and the have-nots, so because of that, that made me interested in sociology.

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Was there any professor you think that influenced you a lot when you were a sociology student? I had a professor named professor Dane Archer, and he taught me research methods. I remember being one of the first classes that I just thought it was fascinating and interesting. And I realized, in retrospect, I was sort of going through the motions but then I found something I was very interested in. And I would say he gave me a big gift as a young person. He believed in me. He thought that I had potential. He encouraged me to go to graduate school which probably I wouldn’t have done if he had never spoken to me. My parents were school teachers and I probably would have become a school teacher. But C. Wright Mills talks about the intersection of social structure, biography and history, and when I came of age there were no jobs for elementary school teachers. There had been many elementary school children and then there had been a drop off in the birth rate, and so there just weren’t jobs for teachers. And so, I was looking around to find a job and he at that time encouraged me to go to graduate school and I did. After you became a sociology professor, was there anyone influenced you? ArlieHochschild influenced me. She was one of my professors. She wrote a book called The Second Shift, The Managed Heart, The Time Bind. Actually, when I was her student, she had not published any of those books. She was still early in her career. But she taught me to be attuned to details of daily life, to be interested in interaction, and to not have a romantic view of family life, to have a view of family life as realistic, that was a big gift that she emphasized in her teaching. And there are many teachers who were very helpful. Michael Burawoy was a big help to me, and there are many great sociologists, Domhoff who wrote about The Elite, Power Elite,1 was one of my teachers when I was a young person. Since you became a sociology professor, what do you want to teach to your students or what kinds of sociology training do you think students should have? I think students should understand that all across the world there are gaps between the rich and the poor. I think students should understand the accidents of birth have cast a long shadow over a life course. Today in Philadelphia, two babies are born at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, and the daughter or son of a doctor or lawyer or business man or woman has a very different life chance, a different life path, which is likely to unfold than the daughter or son of a janitor or bus driver or a poor person, and that’s true all around the world. And the gaps between the rich and poor have increased overtime and government policy makes a difference. The government policy in the U. S. in the 1950s and 1960s had higher taxes, they had more social programs, and that made children better off than they are today. Now there’s less emphasis on social programs for children and for other people. 1 The

Power Elite was written by C. Wright Mills. Here, professor Laurea is referring to an article written by G. William Domhoff, titled The Power Elite and Their Challengers: The Role of Nonprofits in American Social Conflict.

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What struggles have you faced during your academic career? When was that and how did you pull through it? Well, I had many struggles. I think rejection and disappointment are parts of life. I sent my first book to a university press, and they rejected it without reviewing it. Although it was later published and won an award, I think if I had given up then, it would have never been published. So, I think it is hard but I think you want to be determined but you also want to listen to feedback. Someone told me once that the person who’s had the most publications in the leading journal also had the most rejections. So ever single professor has had rejections. They’ve had articles that have been turned down, grant proposals that have been turned down, book ideas that have been shot down, and I think it’s important to realize that rejection is part of the process. Disappointment is part of the process. I think one of the troubles with Facebook is that people glorify their accomplishments, the good things that happen to them, the happy things, and that is a distortion because really life is about disappointment and setback and heartbreak, getting your heart broken, getting discouraged, getting sick, not doing well in a class, and these disappointments are integral to the process. Your outstanding book Unequal Childhoods which won the C. Wright Mills Prize was translated into Chinese and published by the Peking University recently. What was the story behind this book? Like, where did you get your inspiration for this book and what was your biggest discovery and also what was the major trouble you faced when you wrote it? Well, originally I was hoping to do interviews, actually, about children’ lives outside of school, and I was hoping to do interviews about what their daily lives were like. And I interviewed these parents, and middle-class parents have soccer games which were very disruptive of family life. They have three kids and they’re all in soccer, and if it rains outside then they’ll be rescheduled, so they could have nine soccer games in a weekend, they can’t have dinner together. They are running around like lunatics. And I said, “Tell me about soccer?” And they couldn’t give a coherent answer. They said, “Well, he wanted to and he brought it home, and so I said ‘O.K.’” and it was so taken for granted that they couldn’t really articulate why they did it. And so, it was partly because I was frustrated with the interviews that I began to think that maybe I would try to do observations. So again, it was because of a disappointment or failure that I began to decide to do observations. And at the time it was very unusual, and is still unusual. I asked families if we could visit them in their home and come in their home every day for three weeks. And that was very unusual. And we paid families the equivalent in 2017 of about $550, which was one month’s income for some of the poor families. We asked 17 families and we got 12, I think, something like that, which given what we were asking I thought was a reasonable response rate. I wouldn’t say I quite knew what I was doing when I did this study, but then it just seemed that people, they all loved their children very much but they had different ideas about how to help their children. And the magnitude of the differences was surprising to me.

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How did you spend your time when you were in graduate school? I got my Ph.D. degree in 1984, so I went to graduate school a while ago. I was in a program where they only gave you a stipend for three semesters, so the rest of the time you had to find your own job. So, we were all working different jobs. Today it’s different. Today in the U.S. students get five years of funding. So, it’s luxurious. I would say I read a lot, and there were people, I had three different professors who held up Émile Durkheim’s Division of Labor and said, “This was his dissertation. This is your role model.” So, there were very high expectations at the University of California, Berkeley. The idea that you would think big ideas, and have a theory, and really make a very important contribution. And then I got a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford, which was literally fifty miles down the road. And it was just a completely different view of sociology. They did Weber in one day, and people’s dissertation projects were just one little piece of a puzzle. They had been working with other people and they just decided to do this one little slice of something. It wasn’t something they’d been working on for years, and that was a big surprise. How different the graduate programs were? Berkeley was more theoretical, so I read a lot of Bourdieu whose ideas I think are still fantastic and very illuminating. I read about that and I think that helped to guide me in graduate school. But do you think Bourdieu’s book is easy to read? No, I think they’re impossible to read. I mean I remember there is one sentence with 76 words. So, it’s very difficult, and sometimes it’s frustrating how difficult they are. But I think he is really smart and Distinction, one of my favorite books, he shows how people’s clothing differs by social class, and their taste in food, and their bodies, their exercising, their home decorations, their politics, their make-up, and he shows how to see rituals of daily life different by social class. Do you still remember when did you publish your first paper and how was your feeling at that time? My first paper was a co-authored paper published in Phi Delta Kappa with one of my professors, and I would say when I was young it seemed unachievable that I would ever publish something, something that would not be possible. I wanted to do it, but it just seemed like going to the moon, just seemed something really hard. And I think as an adviser now, I try to help my graduate students more to give them a little bit more guidance than I received, though there are good things about it, because you kind of have to make your way and in some ways that’s similar to how it is once you get your Ph.D., you have to make your way on your own. But I think it’s nice for graduate students to have a little bit peek back behind the curtain. So, I am writing a book now about ethnography and how you do ethnography. It’s a very concrete, down-to-earth guide. And I’ve written two very confessional appendices both that try to reveal the process more and to help people understand that you can make mistakes, but you can still have a good project in the end.

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As you have mentioned that you were rejected at the first time, so what if students or young scholars couldn’t get recognition at the very beginning, what should they do? I think they should listen carefully to the feedback they’re being given. I think it’s often, I mean the system is different in China than the U. S., China is much more based on a testing system and the U. S. is much more based on writing, and essays, and feedback. But in their writing, and publishing is usually about writing, it’s about words, not numbers, usually you want to have an argument. You want to have a contribution, and you want to, it’s like in the U. S., there’s a little fairy tale about Goldilocks and the Three Bears. And one bed is too hard, one bed is too soft, and one bed is just right. So, I think you want something that is not too sweeping, “They’ve never done any of this,” and not too timid, like, “I am just describing the study,” but you’re trying to say, “You know there’s been some great work. But when they’ve done this work, they haven’t taken enough account of this concept. They’ve misunderstood this concept and I am trying to clarify this concept.” So, you are trying to make a contribution. So, I think when people are getting rejections, they’re getting them for a reason, and so learning how to interpret feedback, asking a number of people whose ideas you respect to read it, listening to what they tell you and seeing if there is a common pattern. And usually it’s one of a finite number of problems. Either the literature review is wrong, or the results are done not quite right, or the writing isn’t clear, or there are too many questions, very common problem. People started with eight questions and they only need one question. There are problems with how the analysis is done. Usually it’s a fixable problem, and so you want to listen carefully to the feedback you are being given. How do you balance your work and family? I think it’s important to have time off. Even as a graduate student, I always took off 24 h a week. I always took off from 4 p.m. on Saturday to 6 p.m. on Sunday. No matter how busy it was. It is important to rest and to sleep. Especially I think in China where people work harder than in the U. S. in general I would say that is my impression. And I think it’s important to have, in the U. S., anyway, a balanced life. Like, I like to garden. I like to read novels. I like to go to movies, and research shows actually that often you are more creative, you get good ideas if you step away from your desk, if you go for a walk, you go to the gym. Sitting here often at the desk just doesn’t always quite do it. And everybody has a time a day where they work well, and some time of day where they don’t work as well. So, you will want to find out what your time of day is that really works for you and then make sure that’s when you’re working. What kinds of books do you think sociologist should write? Which, if any, audiences beyond the academia do you think sociologists should try to reach? And why? I do think sociologists should try to reach a broader audience, I think. Sociological ideas are very important, and they help us understand the world in a different way. And I think writing clearly is important, not writing simply but writing clearly.

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Evicted, a new book by Matthew Desmond is a great book and I think it’s written very clearly. Arlie Hochschild has written great books. And I think writing, not using big words, not using jargon, providing vivid examples, but also, I think you want to make sure that you are representing your results. So, you want to look hard for just confirming evidence, for ideas that do not support your theme. You want to make sure that you think, “Okay, what if I was wrong? What if I was the opposite of view of me?” and you want to look hard for evidence to support that position. So, you need to be rigorous, I think, in your data analysis and your writing, to be sure that you are telling a story that represents what you find. Based on your own experiences, what advice would you like to give to sociology students to learn sociology well. I think it’s important to read. I think it is important to read novels. I think it’s important to read sociology. I think watching a movie and watching a documentary is not the same way of reading. And I think when you read, and you read hard things which are challenging to you, or you don’t completely understand them, it broadens your mind and it helps you think better, more clearly. So, I think reading is crucial, reading the newspaper, reading things that are boring and reading what other people have to say about these ideas. Speaking of books, speaking of reading, what is your favorite book? Well, now, I’m in a reading group. I read a book a month. I really like Evicted by Matt Desmond. I think Kimberly Hoang’s book something about desire, Dealing in Desire is a great book, new book. I like Sidewalk by Mitch Duneier. I like Colormute by Michael Pollock. A lot of great books. Karolyn Tyson’s book, Integration Interrupted is a good book. I just read a book Coming of Age in the Other America by Stefanie DeLuca, Susan Lundquist and Kathryn Edin, I think, which follows a number of poor people over a period of time. It’s a very good book. So, I think there are lots of interesting books. Arlie Hochschild’s book, Cut Adrift by Marianne Cooper is a book about how financial insecurity shapes family life. So, and of course, there are many interesting articles as well. So, if i ask you to look back, how did you come to be a sociologist? Well, I think partly because my parents were school teachers. My mother grew up in a very poor family so that she didn’t quite have enough to eat. Her dad, my grandfather, gambled a lot and my grandmother was kind of depressed, and my mother took care of her younger siblings, and my mother had a hard row to hoe as a young person, and that affected her and that in turn affected me. My father was from a navy family. And my parents were born in 1917 and 1918, which was a long time ago now. And they both went through World War II. They were both children of the Depression, and they were both were very frugal, I would say. And for various complicated reasons, they decided to move to a very affluent county, and my parents were very unusual. And we, you know, had plenty to eat, but compared to other people in this county, we were not well off at all. And so, for example, we would always have dry milk rather than fresh milk, we wouldn’t have that many new clothes, we had a very old car, so

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we kind of stood out, I would say. And I think that made me interested in the social groups because I could tell that there was a social status hierarchy and my family was different from the other families in that hierarchy, and that, I think, made me curious about it. And then when I was in college, I went and lived in an African-American black community for three months and we helped kids in the school. We would go around at night and knock on the door and say, “Oh, does so-and-so need help with their homework?” And then the next day we get in the morning, and we’d ride the school bus, and we’d go to school and we’d be teaching assistants for these teachers. And you’d be in the home at night, and they’d say, “Oh, I want him to do so well in school.” And then you’d be at the school and they’d say, “Oh those parents don’t care about schooling.” And that, I was a sophomore in college when that happened, and that was a very powerful experience because I could just see they were talking about the same kids, but the school had a very different perspective than the family. And so, I think seeing divergence in social life, seeing separation, and people looking at the same situation and understanding it very differently, made me curious to understand more deeply the factors behind those, those different views. So how has been a sociologist influenced you? Well, it’s an honor and a pleasure to be a sociologist. It’s a great job and it’s a great opportunity. I had four jobs. I was in Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. I was at Temple University. I was at the University of Maryland and I went to the University of Pennsylvania. So, I was in state universities, and I think I have a broader view of the higher education system. I studied upward mobility. I studied people who come from poor homes and end up in getting middle class jobs, and those people are very rare in America. So, I am interested in the structure of inequality and the reproduction of inequality, and then I am interested in upward mobility and downward mobility as well. Was it very hard to find a job with a Ph.D. in sociology at your time? Oh, it was hard. Yeah, and my parents never really understood it, you know. So, I left California to get a job. I went to the Midwest to get a job and then I went to Pennsylvania to get a job. And you know it’s about 3,000 miles. It’s about 6-hour flight from Pennsylvania to California and my mom never got over it, you know. She never understood why I didn’t live in California. So, it was hard to get a job but it’s made me a better person. I think living in the East Coast is different. You know, I’m married. I’ve lived here for many years. I am happy here. It’s now home, but it was a big adjustment when I was younger. What if you hadn’t chosen to be a sociologist, what would you do probably? I would probably have been a social worker or school teacher. Well, I’m old enough that when I was born in 1952, and when I came of age, women were generally teachers and nurses. And like somebody who’s a few years older than I am, she was an economist. She is an economist. And she said out of 100 Ph.D. students, there were four women. So, it was pretty unusual for women to go into the professions when I was coming up.

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What do you think sociology would be like in 10 or 20 years? Well, I think sociology is going to change as the world changes. So, for example, in the U. S. now we have a growing number of immigrant youth. We have a growing number of Hispanic youths. You know, over half the children are born not in a married couple now. We have more non-marital births. We have multi-partner fertility, which is a father who has children in different relationships with women. So, I think as the social institutions are changing, as the schools are changing, we will now have a wider array of different kinds of schools. Universities are changing. So, sociology will change and we’ll study new things as the social world changes. Many sociology students would like to ask what is the use of sociology, or what am i going to do with sociology in the future? Sociology is a very good field, and even if you go into marketing research, even if you work for Apple, or Facebook, or work as an engineer, or become a doctor. Sociology is a very good background because in your daily life, you are going to encounter people from different walks of life. You are going to try to design products to serve different walks of life in marketing. You are going to treat people in medicine who are compliant or not compliant with their medicine. And so, sociology helps you understand social variation and that is extremely important in any walk of life that you go to. So, sociology is a good discipline, it also teaches you how to write, and how to think critically and those are very valuable skills. So even if you go on to banking, I think sociology is a very good major to have. Do you think sociology make you feel happy? I don’t think compared to philosophy, or economics, or math, that there’s a difference on that dimension, no. I think it makes you look at the world in a more critical view. And I think that helps you understand the depth of inequality in life, but I think it also helps you understand things that otherwise don’t seem like they make a lot of sense. And there’s a reason for everything. You may not like the reason. So, if somebody is yelling at his kid on the bus, you know, that may not be how you raise your kid, but there are benefits to that. Maybe the kid last is more polite to the parents and less rude and more compliant. So just because that is not how you raise your kid doesn’t mean it’s morally wrong to raise your kid that way. And the way people used to raise their kid in the 1900s, people would be arrested for now. So, I think you have to see child-rearing in family life as historically contingent, and I think you want to be less moralistic about it, like you’re so sure that this is the right way, because I don’t think we know that. I don’t think it’s correct that one way is the best way to raise children. I think there are a lot of different ways you can raise children and they all have strengths and weaknesses, and I think we need to be more respectful of people who raise children in ways that are different than we would raise our own children. Introduction of Related Characters George William Domhoff (1936) is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus and Research Professor of Psychology and Sociology at the University of California,

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Santa Cruz. He is best known as the author of several best-selling sociology books, including Who Rules America? Matthew Desmond (1979/1980) is an American sociologist and a professor in the department of sociology at Princeton University. Desmond was awarded a Harvey Fellowship in 2006 and a MacArthur Fellowship in 2015. He won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, the 2017 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award, and the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for his work about poverty, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City.

Interview 17 Philip S. Gorski Philip S. Gorski

Profile: Philip Gorski is currently a professor at the Department of Sociology, coDirector of Yale’s Center for Comparative Research (CCR) and the Religion and Politics Colloquium at the Yale MacMillan Center. He gained his B.A. in social studies from Harvard College in 1986 and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley in 1996. Gorski joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin at Madison immediately after he graduated and moved to Yale University in 2004. Gorski is well known as a comparative-historical sociologist with strong interests in theory, methods and modern and early modern Europe. His empirical work focuses on topics such as state-formation, nationalism, revolution, economic development and secularization with particular attention to the interaction of religion and politics. Other current interests include the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences and the nature and role of rationality in social life. His work has been recognized widely, such as Max Weber’s Economy and Society, The Protestant Ethic Revisited. And he has been the co-editor of Sociological Theory since 2004. Interview June 13, 2017 493 College Street, Yale University My first question is to try to figure out what did you study in Harvard College. Was sociology your first major at that time? I majored in a field called social studies which is a combination of social theory, social science, and history, which prepared me very well for the kind of sociology that I do.

P. S. Gorski (B) Yale University, New Haven, USA © Peking University Press 2020 L. Chen (ed.), A Journey of Discovering Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6603-5_17

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You got your Ph.D. in sociology from Berkeley, so why did you choose to study sociology when you went to Berkeley? I considered different disciplines. I considered history, political science, philosophy, but I liked sociology because it combined empirical study with social theory. In political science, there really is not independent social theory that speaks to empirical research; there is political philosophy, which is typically quite separate from it; and history, there is really no explicit theory at all, so sociology seemed to me like the best fit for my own interests. Was there anyone you think played a very important role in leading you to become a sociologist? And what did you learn from them? I think the most important person in steering me toward sociology was actually one of my professors at Harvard named, Jeff Weintraub. I took a class with him on Karl Polanyi’s book, The Great Transformation and had a number of conversations with him. He strongly encouraged me to apply for an NSF (National Science Foundation) Graduate Fellowship in sociology and to apply to sociology graduate programs. And I think that was really quite important in that final decision. Anyone else maybe? Who may have influenced you a lot. Sure, once I got to graduate school, then I suppose the two biggest influence on me were Robert Bellah and Ann Swidler because it was through them that I discovered my interest in religion and in culture, which is very, very, very, very important, and I think they were also quite inspirational to me as people who were able to think about very big questions, very tough questions. Speaking of your graduate life, I’d like to ask how did you spend your graduate life? What did you do at that time? You know, just reading every day and doing research and thinking about publishing? Anything else? I mean how was your graduate life? It was just very all consuming. I worked many, many hours every day, reading and writing and thinking, that’s just about all I did, you know, every day, and every hour of the day. I probably should have tried to have more of a life when I was in graduate school. But I was too interested in what I was studying. And to be honest, I didn’t worry a lot about publishing. The discipline was not as professionalized and the Berkeley department was not professionalized then as it is now, I didn’t really start thinking about publishing at all until my third or fourth year of graduate school, to be honest, and that has changed, it is something that students have to think about almost from day one now. Whose book did you like to read at that time? Or whose book do you think influenced you a lot? I suppose my dissertation project was most influenced by Weber and Foucault and was in some way an attempt to achieve some sort of theoretical and empirical synthesis of their works, looking in the way in which religion and discipline led into the formation of the state, the way in which the Protestant ethic, if you like, also contained a certain

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spirit of the state or a spirit of discipline in it, so those were at the time probably the theorists who had the biggest influence on me in graduate school. Some students think Weber’s books are hard to read, did you have the same feeling when you read them? Well, certainly Weber was my least favorite of the classical social theorists when I was an undergraduate. I often just couldn’t fully understand the significance of what he was saying because it tends to assume a certain knowledge of history, in particular European history, but I had lived in Europe for several years in between undergraduate and graduate school, and I had spent a lot more time reading history and so by the time I arrived in graduate school, I was much better able to appreciate, you know, the finer points of his work. Since you became a sociology teacher, what do you want to teach to your students or what kinds of training do you think sociology students should have? I wish that there was sort of more robust kind of theory education, or more robust theory training in sociology graduate school. I think, in recent years, the theory requirements have often been cut down and in order to make room for more methods courses. I am sure I am not against methods training, but I think the danger, if you have too much methods training not enough theory training, is that you choose subjects that fit the methods that you know rather than choosing methods that suits the question that you want to ask. Those questions are oftentimes going to be inspired by a knowledge of theory. After being doing researches in sociology for so many years, the most important question I want to ask you is, what’s sociology in your eyes? I guess sociology somewhat in distinction to history and economics. So, I think economists are dedicated to explain what happens in the world in terms of individuals’ desires and beliefs, their preferences, and their utilities. And sociologists are always interested in the way in which there are realities in the social world that are more than just individuals, they are interested in culture, they are interested in institutions, and they are also interested in the way in which the world that we live in is in many ways very historically contingent, which might seem to push one in the direction of history, and of course I’m a great admirer of good historical scholarship, but I think sometimes historians become so obsessed with the particularities and details and peculiarities of the cases that they study, that they miss some of the patterns and commonalities, and those patterns and commonalities are not just intellectually interesting, but they’re also practically important insofar as one of the goals of social science that is actually to give people knowledge to change the world they live in.

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There are so many fields in sociology, like economic sociology, political sociology, cultural sociology, historical sociology and so on and so forth, so what is your opinion of this division in sociology? And in which way do you think sociology might be better? More integrated or more diverse? That is really an excellent question. I do think that the diversity of sub-fields within sociology is both a blessing and a curse. I think it’s the blessing in the sense that it has made it much easier for new fields of inquiry to develop and for new approaches to take hold. But I think the downside of this proliferation is that it leads to a great deal of fragmentation within the discipline, to sometimes very small sub-fields that don’t talk to the other sub-fields, and I think it also makes it very easy for neighboring disciplines to absorb pieces of sociology, essentially kind of break them off from the core of sociology and make them their own, and one sees this in the proliferation of the various studies disciplines: sexuality studies, gender studies, various ethnic and racial studies and immigration and so on, I mean these are all things that were really core concerns of sociology, so both a blessing and a curse and I’m not really sure if we would be better off trying to curb that or not. I think there would be both costs and benefits. What is the most attractive thing to you in sociology? I think it’s the very breadth and complexity of the discipline, so you know many other disciplines, you have to choose a very narrow specialization, and there is a great deal of pressure on you to stay within that very narrow specialization, whereas in sociology you have over the course of your career, or even a given phase of your career to do a wider range of work. I mean for me personally and somebody has very wide-ranging interests and sometimes an attention span that’s too short, that’s very attractive. Sociology has been recognized as a very wide and broad discipline, so what do you think make sociology an independent discipline to be different from history, religion, culture, and other social sciences. I guess the things that seem to me to distinguish it are its theoretical tradition and its methodological pluralism. So political science, for example, really does not have a theoretical tradition of its own, aside and apart from political theory which is somewhat disengaged from empirical research. And then anthropology for example, or for that matter history, I mean they really have one single method which is preferred, whether it is ethnographic field work or archival research, and you know sociology of course employs a variety of methods, quantitative and qualitative, and then numerous divisions within those network analysis and regression analysis, ethnographic field work and historical comparison, and on and on and on. And it does seem to me that that is the only adequate way really to study the social world, which is extraordinarily complex and requires both powerful theoretical tools but also a range of methodological tools.

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You just mentioned methodology, do you think there is a qualitative and quantitative divide in sociology? I don’t think that divide is as sharp as it used to be twenty or thirty years ago. I think most younger American sociologists aspire to do or master a couple of different methods and to use those different methods as appropriate in their work. So, you know I find that encouraging. No, I do think there is still a kind of privilege of quantitative methods, that, you know, qualitative methods are supposed to, are held up, are judged by the same standards just as quantitative methods are typically judged, and I think that actually is a mistake. I think in fact people who do quantitative methods and understand what they are doing, experimental or quasi-experimental, actually misunderstand the significance of the work that they do themselves. And that there is a reason why there is such a diversity of methods, and that just has to do with the heterogeneity of the social world itself. The social world is not just comprised of people, it’s not just comprised of culture, it’s not just comprised of material things, it’s comprised of all of those things. And it therefore requires a range of different methods in order to be adequately understood in a way that would not be the case if one is studying the physical world or even the biological world. So, I think the methodological diversity of the social sciences is rooted in the ontological heterogeneity of the social world. How did you build up your research interests in comparative and historical sociology as well as religion theory, political sociology and culture, knowledge methods? I mean you have a quite wide research interest. As I said, I’ve been a person who maybe has too short of an attention span. I don’t mean my attention span is five minutes, but I mean it might be six months or a year and you know, after working on something for a period of time, I always am thirsty for something new or for something different. And so you know my first book was on a piece of political sociology and the West German Left (The German Left), and then I deepened that interest in Europe by doing comparative-historical work and then I became more interested in my home country the United States, and so you know part of it has been just that, but it also has been somewhat contingent, what seemed important within the discipline and within the world at the moment I started a new project, I think that is often the case. What is your opinion about the relationship between teaching and doing research and how do the two connected to each other from your perspective? I think many sociologists; many academics tend to see teaching and research as being at odds. Of course, in some ways they are insofar as they both demand time and we only have so much time. But I think if you are clever about it, they can also be synergistic, they can be complementary. I think teaching taught me to express myself more clearly because you know when you’re in graduate school you often want to say the more complex and cleverer and obscure thing whereas when you’re teaching, on the other side of the transaction, you have to think about being sort of clear, and straightforward, and getting to the central point. That was very useful and even very freeing for me in terms of my own writing. I think conversely if you

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teach on subjects that are close to your research, and you have good students in your classes, you learn a lot from them, and that feeds back into your research; you also learn from graduate students about new things you have read or new developments that are off on the horizon, so there can be complementarity and synergy as well, but there is no getting around the fact that they both take time, and time is a finite resource. How do you balance your work and family? Not always as well as I would like to, it’s difficult. I think what it really comes down to is that you can’t do either, both of those things as well as you would like to, and so you try to do both of them as well as you can. But again, I think there are some benefits actually to having a family life to place some limits on your academic life to force you to put your academic work in perspective and to devote time to other things, sometimes just to relax, to have fun, to be playful, that actually can be very helpful in doing good work. If you work all the time, all the time, all the time, and care about nothing but work, you make yourself very emotionally vulnerable to the ups and downs in your academic career, and frankly you get kind of too exhausted, so it’s not bad thing to have a private family life too. Did you have any struggle? When was that and how did you pull through it eventually? I think writing and any big writing project always involves some degree of struggle, I think. For me as probably for most people, the biggest trial was really the dissertation phase just wondering whether you could actually do it, and going through a long period where it seemed like maybe you couldn’t. Most people who finish dissertations eventually get past that phase and then there is a period of great productivity that follows toward the end of the dissertation that gets you over the finish line. The other time around tenure of course is another period of great anxiety whether you know you could do something but you wonder whether it’s good enough or whether it’s just enough period. And then mid-career is somewhat different, mid-late career is different. I mean, the difference there is that there’s nobody telling you what you have to do, your future is not dependent on doing something in particular, so then you’re really have both the privilege but also the burden of trying to decide what is worthwhile, what is important, what is the worthwhile way of using this incredible privilege that you have to spend your life writing and researching and thinking. Was it hard for you to find job at that time when you graduated, you know, when you got your Ph.D., and you went to the market, and tried to find a job, was it hard? The job market is always hard. I mean there are better times and worse times for sure. I had some good fortune in the sense that I came on the market at a period that was about like it is now where there had been an economic contraction and things were going better so there was suddenly more hiring going on again, but even in a good year, there are many good people who don’t get good jobs, and some people, good people don’t get good jobs at all, or any jobs at all, and even if you do well,

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it’s a source of incredible anxiety, so, not much more to say about that, it’s just more and more difficult, junctures of a career. Do you still remember when did you publish your first article? When was that and how did you feel? Yeah, I do. It was a term paper that I produced for a class with Ann Swidler and also submitted in another seminar with Reinhardt Bendix, and they both recommended I try to publish it as an article. I had no experience with that, and you know, it was interesting to then suddenly be subject to the, not just the rather encouraging critiques of your advisors but the more unforgiving critiques of your wider peers, but it was very arduous, it took about three times longer than it seemed like it should have taken, but of course it was very exciting when it finally happened. It’s very exciting to have your name printed first time. Your book The Disciplinary Revolution in which you points to the strong influence of religion in the formation of strong states offered a very new explanation for the rise of a strong, centralized nation-state in certain areas of Europe in early Modernity, so where did you get the inspiration? And what was your major problem when you wrote the book? In some ways that book went back to an undergraduate course that I took in my senior year at Harvard. It was a course I took solely because I had heard that the professor was very engaging. It was a course called “Dutch Art and Civilization in the Golden Age”, which is sixteenth and seventeenth century. And it was with a historian named Simon Schama who I think he now retired but taught at Columbia after Harvard for many years. And one of the peculiarities of the Netherlands was that it was a state that was very orderly, very efficient, also very powerful, by any measure, had a large empire, you know, was very affluent, and yet did not have a strong, centralized monarchical regime, like France, or for that matter, England. So, when I got to graduate school, and started reading the debates that were then going on about the development of the state, it always stuck in my mind as a kind of anomaly. So that really then got me thinking about what might explain that case. I then did some more reading and discovered that the state of Brandenburg, Prussia also had this Calvinist background, just like the Netherlands, and that really then I had a basic sense that that must be part of the explanation and then really you know the rest of the project was just trying to sort of work out what that connection was and to collect the best evidence that I could to make the case for that connection. So, what was the major problem you faced when you wrote the book? Did you need more funds or more time? Well, you know, I took my time on it. I didn’t rush it; I could’ve spent more time on it. I think you always could spend more time on a book, you can always do something that is better. I mean I think part of it was sometimes following false leads, when I was doing the historical research, so I was trying to be very systematic and looking at one set of sources, then suddenly realized that really wasn’t the main argument that I wanted to make, so there were, you know, quite a few months were spent in

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various archives, collecting evidence that didn’t make its way in the book. That was frustrating, but I think that is also common with that kind of work. From your perspective, what advice would you like to give to sociology students? Well, to undergraduate students, I guess I would say, try to do an original research project before you graduate in the form of a research article or in the form of a senior essay. Try to do an original research project. That’s important partly because there are things you will never understand, fully understand or appreciate until you try to do your own research project. You know, it’s much easier to criticize other people’ work than it is to do a good piece of work of your own. I don’t think you understand that until you try to do a piece of original research. And that will also help you decide whether or not this is something you really would want to pursue further because that is what you would spend most of your time doing. If you don’t like that, you are not going to like an academic career. If you don’t like spending a lot of time doing research and writing, you know, with all of the joys and agonies that involves, it’s not the right career for you. In terms of graduate students, I guess the main advice I would give is to do something that you really care about a lot for whatever reason. Maybe you care about it just because you find it intellectual challenging, and exciting. Maybe you find out you care about it because you think it is sort of politically or socially relevant in some way. But don’t ever choose a project just because you think somebody else is going to like it, or because you think it is going to be marketable, because you can’t predict those things, and the only thing you really can predict is if you do the dissertation project, you are going to be spending three, four, five, seven years of your life on that project if you take it all the way to a book phase. If it’s not something you care about, you are going to make yourself miserable. How did you come to be a sociologist? I discovered very early on an interest in theory. For a while I thought I wanted to be a political theorist or a political philosopher, but especially when I was younger, I just didn’t have a clear enough sense of what my own normative commitments were, to feel like I could write with any authority, as a political philosopher. There I found sociology attractive because of the way that it weds theoretical ideas to empirical research. So, it gives you some grounding to some object outside of yourself and your own opinions and commitments, so I think that was very important to my choosing to go in the direction of sociology. So how has being a sociologist influenced you? It does give you a certain view of the world, for sure. I think traditionally sociologists tend to be people who are committed to social equality and social inclusion and who want to find ways to build those things, those concerns into their work. And so, I suppose that has been one way that it influenced sort of value commitment in my life.

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If you had not chosen to be a sociologist, what would you probably do right now? To be honest, I think I would be in some other academic discipline. I mean it became very clear to me very early in my college career that the academic life would be the best life for me. I wouldn’t have been happy or done well in business or law or something like that, even though I certainly have the ability to do that. I could have gone in that direction I wanted to, but I don’t think I could have done well at it or been happy at it, so I’m quite happy with how things turned out. What do you think sociology would be like in ten or twenty years? Well, that is a good question. But it’s really hard to say because I think sociology is very much driven by things that are external to it and unpredictable. So, for example, the current concern with big data. I mean nobody saw that coming twenty or thirty years ago because nobody knew that the internet was going to be invented. Well, I mean, it was invented, but certainly nobody, or very few people realized what the consequences of that would be, and so I think it’s very difficult in that sense to predict on what it would be like. And then there are things that just seem very unexpected, so why the enormous research that’s in ethnography? You know, ethnography was kind of twenty or thirty years ago, it was kind of pooh-poohed as this sub-standard methodology, and it was going to be replaced by whatever, you know, survey research, or experiments. Yet, you know, it has persisted and become one of the most exciting fields that has attracted a lot of the best young talent in the discipline. So, I guess that is a way of kind of punting on the question because I guess I really have no idea about what sociology would be like in twenty or thirty years. But I’m excited to see. Hopefully I’ll still be around. You just mentioned big data. Do you think big data is going to bring a revolution in sociology? Why? No. I think it will add to it but I think I’ve been around long enough to see this show before: you know a new method comes along, or a new data source comes along, and you look at the people, some group of people champion it, and say that it’s going to transform everything, but it doesn’t, it hasn’t. I suppose what would that have been fifteen or twenty years ago, it was Rational Choice Theory, it was supposed to unify the social sciences and change everything, and it was an important movement, and it had influences good and bad. I suspect big data will be the same. I think the thing that will, in retrospect, prove most obviously wrong about some of the current pronouncements about big data is the idea that it will make it possible to completely do away with theory, that, you know, we’ll just load it all into our neural nets, and it will just spit out really, really important results. Don’t buy it. My last question is do you think sociology makes you feel happy? Not always. I mean I’ll enjoy the activity, but I think there are ways in which, you know, the deeper understanding of the social world brings along with it a certain kind of melancholy, and even cynicism, right? Because you wish things could be better than they are, and you understand how difficult it would be to really bring about

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meaningful change, and that’s not always a happy realization. But that’s that. I mean, I do tremendously enjoy the day to day activity of writing and thinking particularly when it’s going well.

Interview 18 Randall Collins Randall Collins

Profile: Randall Collins is currently Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and well known as one of the non-Marxist conflict theorists in the world. He received his A.B. (1963) from Harvard College where he studied with Talcott Parsons and received his M.A. in psychology (1964) from Stanford University, M.A. in sociology (1965) from the University of California at Berkeley where he continued to finish his Ph.D. (1969). He has taught in many prestigious universities. The first position in academia was at the University of California, Berkeley, followed by the University of Wisconsin, University of California, San Diego, University of Virginia and University of California, Riverside, ultimately at University of Pennsylvania. He once quit from academia twice as a novelist and private scholar. Collins has been recognized as a leading contemporary social theorist whose areas of expertise include both micro sociology, such as face to face interaction, sociology of intellectuals and social conflict, and the macro-historical sociology of political and economic change. He was elected as a member of Academy of American Arts and Sciences in 2000, and served as the president of the American Sociological Association from 2010 to 2011. Interview June 28, 2017 Professor Collins’ Home, San Diego, California Professor, after studying and doing research in sociology for so many years, what is sociology in your eyes? I think it’s generally an accepted view that sociology is the science of human social behavior that is everything that people do together or against or in relation to each other, and so sociology is a very wide field, in some sense, I believe it is the widest of the social sciences. A field like economics focuses itself more narrowly on people’s R. Collins (B) University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA © Peking University Press 2020 L. Chen (ed.), A Journey of Discovering Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6603-5_18

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economic behavior, and of course it’s good to specialize in constraining particularities, but sociology has the advantage been able to see the economic behavior in the context of larger social behavior. And I think this is true, you know, in relation to other fields. I mean history is another really wonderful field, it’s the oldest of all the social sciences, and like I can always learn from reading history. But history is not so much emphasized the scientific or the theoretical side of it to learn what the patterns are, what the dynamics are. Sometimes there are famous historians talk about social patterns, but sociologists are more systematic theorists of these. Since sociology has been recognized as a very wide discipline, what do you think make sociology independent to be different from history and psychology? I know you studied psychology and got a psychology master degree, so what is the difference? I can explain that by my own experience with psychology. When I started graduate school, I went to a psychology department and at that time I was sort of under the influence of Freud and Piaget. I was interested in the cognitive development of small children. But this department, this was a long time ago before the cognitive revolution came into psychology, so they sent me to a laboratory where we worked on rats, and you know, and on their movements through a maze, their brains, so on and so forth. After a year of this, I concluded that sociology was more interesting. Now psychology is certainly expanded more to human beings, although in recent years, for instance, an area of psychology that is mostly becoming independent, now so be called cognitive science, but it’s mostly constrained on computers, that is also quite interesting, and computers interacting with people is an interesting topic for sociologists, but computers are not very much like people, I mean they are far more rational in a narrow sense than people and computers don’t have emotions. I actually propose that if you wanted to create a computer that can actually learn to be a human being, you would have to give it human capacities of having emotions, having cognition marked by emotion, then having it interact with people and then it will come to learn like a child would learn, computer would learn to be like people. There is a long way from this now because artificial intelligence is mostly in a sense, it’s kind of a breakthrough for computing, we can do tremendous mathematics in very high speed, and therefore computers in that sense can kind of work their way through a lot of things human can do and something we can’t do, but they are still not structured the way humans are. I don’t want to rule out anything, for fifty or hundred years maybe the fields will rearrange themselves, but I strongly believe that computer science ultimately need to learn more from sociology more than we need to learn from them. There are many branches in sociology, like economic sociology, political sociology, historical sociology, so on and so forth. What do you think about this division in sociology? And in which way do you think sociology might be better, Integrated or more diverse? Yeah, that’s a dilemma, I think. Since you can have sociology of everything, that is why you know your course catalog could have every possible topic in it from

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a sociological point of view, all right? So that is a strength of sociology that can cover so many things. As a discipline, as an entity with lot of people in it, it has the problem that you can meet sociologists in a big meeting, so for instance, there are about 15,000 American sociologists, and it’s not unusual, I mean somebody who is in an area or you don’t know anybody at all in that area, and vice versa. If there is something that connects them together and I would say there are two or three things which actually do connect all areas. So one of them is sociology is really oldest topic and that’s the topic of stratification or inequality, we can say social class, although in recent years, you add more onto this, that is race and ethnicity, gender, etc., but these are all aspects of the stratification model, and that cuts pretty widely in sociology, almost all fields have touched on that, like I mean a lot of sociologists do like sociology of gender, that’s very popular area but there are approach really is just a particular area of stratification that they are interested in, and you know, for a long time, the early feminist theorists are really sort of offshoots from Marx, they would necessarily say that they are more radical about gender than Marx was, but still it’s like we take the Marx model and we transpose it over here to this question. The most famous and successful sociologist of the last fifty years was Pierre Bourdieu and Bourdieu has pretty clear model about what he would call the field of power and economic-cultural capital, but in effect it’s a version of the Marxists’ emphasis on classes but made into a much more flexible kind of position cover, you know, all sorts of cultural stratification. So that’s one thing that cuts through. The other thing that I would mention that cuts through many fields is interaction itself, which is to say micro-sociology. Not everybody does this, I mean some fields just ignore it entirely, the field of demography on the whole ignores interaction, although it doesn’t have to because demography is about population so there is birth and death, so fields of demography actually connects over to the field of sex and that’s an area where there is certainly a lot of interaction both, so the kind of things that demographers are concerned about, like when do people have children, when do they start living together as sexual partners, when do they marry, when do they get divorced, for them that maybe just numbers, but these are things that sociologists in fact you can study up-close, so there are a lot of things in that, almost any area can be looked at, you just turn on the microscope and look at it more carefully. What do you think about the relationship between researchers who focus on qualitative and quantitative methods? And do you think there is a qualitative and quantitative divide in sociology right now? Yeah, there has been a divide of this sort for quite a while, although there are some people who combine things and move back and forth there. I remember when Erving Goffman started publishing his papers which should be in the 50s, that’s older than me, but we come into the 60s and 70s, people want to study everyday life and look at in detail, we were sort of inspired by the success of Goffman. And I remember one of the more quantitative researchers said, “These are a bunch of essays that have been published in the major sociological journals.” It’s like, yeah, because you don’t have the quantitative numbers to it. Although some people have that attitude, on the whole I think there is a fairly widespread belief that you need multiple methods or

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another way to say is, well, ideally you need multiple methods, but people want to specialize in, okay I am going to use this particular method, or that particular method, well, it’s kind of the nature of having a large field you will definitely have people who are specialists. Personally I think that the qualitative sociologists on the whole had made more discoveries. So, you can think about who are the ones came up with those great patterns over the early classical sociologists, Marx, Tocqueville, Weber, Simmel, these are all qualitative sociologists, the only one who is quantitative is Durkheim, he is only partly quantitative, he is a multi-methods person, I mean he kind of invents multivariate analysis to study suicides, but he also looks at religious ritual and crime and so forth. So, over the years I sort of shifted it from Weber to Durkheim. Durkheim is really inspiring if you look at what he did and the details of how he operated. Maybe I will say a little bit more about what is quantitative sociology good at. It’s good at describing things. If you want to know is there a glass ceiling for women in management, the quantitative sociologists will give you the number if they can get the data. For a long time, sociologists used to be interested in social mobility or status attainment. The field has kind of fallen out of favor not so much because it’s not important but if so heavily studied from about 1950 to 1980, eventually people get tired of it, yes, we know education has a positive or negative effect on careers, you keep adding more variables to it, but the overall pattern doesn’t change very much because it’s more interesting to do qualitative studies inside the classroom and see exactly how the children interact with the teacher and with each other. I mean I will give you an example of a student from my department at Penn, Jessica McCrory Calarco, she studied children. I think they must be about 8 years old, but maybe a wider range than that, and she had information on their social class background and she wonders the difference, she says, “The children from the higher social classes will come up to the teacher, ask them for help, they were those have learned more about how to deal with people in authority. They weren’t afraid of the teacher, they tried to get the teacher to help them with their work. The working-class children, their parents mostly told them to be polite, sometimes they weren’t, but they didn’t, they avoided the teacher, so they couldn’t get anything out of the teacher.” So, you can see, it was the interaction style that was making the difference. So, a lot of the interesting results come from actually seeing what you can find. I think the big problem with quantitative research is most of it is the data, it’s already standardized, now you have to rely on what questions to put out for interviewers to ask, and there’s been sort of traditions of what kind of question that you ask that gone on for fifty years, yes, they ask new ones, but on the whole, it’s rigid, it’s like trying to look at the world, and you’re only allowed to wear certain eyeglasses, you can’t take that glasses off and look at what the new you can find, it’s hard to find new things out of quantitative research. When you studied at Harvard, you were taught by Talcott Parsons, so I guess you began to study sociology from that time, and why did you choose to study sociology? I didn’t actually start there. When I went to Harvard, I thought I was going to be an engineer because I was influenced by my grandfather who I grew up with who was

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in the army, corps of engineers, but I quickly thought, “Well, there are a lot of other areas here that I never even heard of, like philosophy or psychology.” And so, yeah, I think that philosophy was the first area that I got into, and from there I switched essentially to psychology, but Harvard at that time had both a psychology department which was quite a famous psychology department dominated by B. F. Skinner who did research on learning in animals. And then Parsons had created a coalition of people in various fields who did social research, social relations as it existed at that time, combined sociologists and anthropologists, social psychologists, so you know it was intellectually very attractive field. I am always curious about how did famous sociologists I interviewed, you know, spend their time in college or graduate school? So how did you spend your time in school? Just reading, doing research or being busy with publishing articles? Would you mind telling me something about your story at that time? When I was an undergraduate student at Harvard, I didn’t do a lot of work actually. I mean I got into a school what Americans call prep school, it was very specialized in sending people to Ivy League Schools, so we already had like the first two years of their curriculum so we didn’t have to do any work. So, we go drinking or row boats on the river, you know, go to girl schools and trying to pick up girls, and so forth. After a while I got more down to work, I decided to work on the cognitive development in children. For graduate school, I came to Stanford on the West Coast, as I early mentioned that it was a famous psychology department, but they hadn’t gotten into what we called the cognitive revolution yet, the famous French Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget was just then being introduced in the east and there were Piaget specialists at Harvard but not yet on the West Coast. So I decided to transfer across San Francisco bay, to Berkeley, and this was just the time when the civil rights movement was trying to integrate black people into being hired in white jobs in the north, and in the south, there were actually quite serious even violent conflicts took place in the south, so some people volunteered to go down and try to register black people to vote in Mississippi, and a few got killed and some got arrested so forth, so it was intensely exciting time, so my wife and I moved to Berkeley and joined one of the civil rights groups. That was very educational, I mean it was educational not just about the civil rights movement, it was the first time I met Marxists, not everybody was Marxist, but some were, some of them were talking a lot about revolution. So actually there, I read a lot of Marx, Engels, and Trotsky and history and so forth. I know you also attended the Free Speech Movement and the Anti-war Movement? So what impact do you think these experiences had on you or your later research? It’s pretty important influence because I have been reading Marx, I was thinking, “Okay, this is sort of like you know revolution movements, it’s something which is much more local than that just in the university.” And on the other hand, there was something that wasn’t in the history and that was tremendous enthusiasm, everybody felt like, you know, “We are in the center of the world where everything is happening

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right now” because that illusion thing was happening somewhere else, you know things were happening in China and France in kinds of similar way and in same time. But the emotion is what struck me about it, the collective emotions and that made me think about Durkheim again that Parsons had talked about. So, Durkheim says, “When people gather together, they can accelerate their emotions, so social interaction can become into a kind of motion intensifying process and then people’s beliefs and symbols become strong because of the emotion.” At one point, there was about a thousand students marched into the university administration building and carried out a non-violent sit, occupying the building and actually one of the French sociologist George Sorel talked about the strike was more symbolic than realistic to get people to create solidarity, I was thinking, “This is what is happening here, it’s emotional solidarity.” So that’s one of my interests since that time, the way in which emotions rise and fall depending on the assembly and organization of a group of people in a conflict. You studied with Talcott Parsons but you broke with functionalism theory and moved to conflict theory, so you are the one who I think kind of stand at the opposite side of Parsons when compare you with Merton who proposed Middle Range Theories. So, could you tell us some stories behind your work of conflict theory because we know that concept and we know about it from our textbook, but this is a chance for us to know more about it from you. Well, there were a lot of good things about Talcott Parsons, the one thing he was missing was conflict, I mean he just barely mentioned it, yeah, it’s like conflict, sort of what happens when things are changing, but you know reach a new equilibrium, that aspect of his theory, I thought it was very weak. I want to say something strong about Parsons. Parsons was brilliant at teaching the classic theories, I mean his course on religion which is essentially about Weber and the world religions and Durkheim was the single best social science course I have never taken, you know, so I mean he was extremely good at pointing at really crucial features and so from Parsons, he put together Weber and Durkheim, now he also has some other people such as Pareto considered so important, in fact Pareto was where the idea of self-incorporated system came from, which I think was the weakest part of the theory. But being able to combine Weber and Durkheim instead of making them apart especially I think was part of what was important. At the time I was there, Parsons had also become interested in Freud, the reason for this is that he realized he wanted something on the personal level, the individual level, and so for him, if there is a certain of Durkheim and social value system which get into the individual, he said, “Oh yes, that’s Freud’s super-ego.” You know, so children are brought up and go through the Freudian stages if successfully socialized, that society is inside your mind. Now, I really like Freud a lot as many people did. He is a very excited theorist who really break through things. But at Berkeley, I discovered Erving Goffman had a better way of doing this. Erving Goffman had been a Freudian too, and but Freud was always going back to childhood, so the thing is that you are unconscious then the consciousness represses it. And Goffman has this really wonderful concept: front-stage and back-stage, like a theater. It’s as if the Freudian unconsciousness is right here, it’s just like I am not

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going to show you this, it’s not, the repression of it is socialized, not done by your parents when you were young, or put it in another way around, children also have learn to acquire front and back stages though they were very small, they have no back-stage, because their parents just can see everything, it’s always until they get older that they acquire more of back-stage. So, I realized Goffman is much better in doing this, and he also brings it into the present, so it’s not just for the children, you can see what is consciously happening. Well, to sum up, Parsons doesn’t have the element of conflict in it, but what you can take from Parsons is, well, I take concepts from Weber, I take concepts from Durkheim, I take concepts from Goffman, and bring them to the small level, so that instead of the entire society having some kind of organized equilibrium, we look for each group or even each situation, so we work better in micro-theory than in macro-theory. Since you became a sociology professor, apparently you had a very rich teaching experiences in many different prestige universities in the United States and around the globe, what do you want to teach to your students or what kinds of training do you think sociology students should have? I think I will say two things about that. One goes back to your point about sociology is filled with many different specialties, we cannot avoid that, but I think all students should have more than one specialty. So, if you have two specialties, and maybe a few other interests, you get different networks of people, and you get some crossing ideas, and also make you think a little more theoretical way because like what connect these things. So, I think that’s an important point. The thing that process connections is called theory. When I say that I mean that expression fairly straightforwardly that it is, when people do something that becomes a wide interest, people start calling it theory. I didn’t start with saying theory is some abstract or explanatory approach, of course you could start with that, but a lot of people who are famous theorists did not really set out to be theorists, now Durkheim set out to be a theorist, Erving Goffman did not set out to be a theorist, he just did stuff that serve widely interesting to people, Weber was certain of rather anti-positive, anti-scientific, he didn’t believe there could be general theories, nevertheless he can produce things, you know, his theory about three dimensions of stratification for instance, or his theory about bureaucratization, these are widely important theories. So, if you do work in a specialty and people in another specialty read it, they start calling you a theorist because they say, “Aha, we extract theory from what this person did.” I just forgot to ask you one question that is except those people you have mentioned, like Parsons and Goffman, do you think anyone else influenced you a lot when you studied at Harvard or at Berkeley? Well, at Berkeley one of the famous sociologists there was Herbert Blumer who really formulated symbolic interaction, but he had much more theoretical program than Goffman did, Goffman was, he was this tricky guy, you know, like he says, if you ask him a theoretical question, I don’t mean as a student because a little bit later I think he says something like, “Oh, I got to leave that to you theoretical people, I am just a field researcher.” You know, and he says that in a sarcastic tone of voice. But

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Blumer always try to tell you everything happens in a situation, nothing else exists, so he was strongly attacking the quantitative people and structural functionalism and so forth. Blumer would say things like, “What is social class? Where do you see it?” You know, it’s like “what does it looks like when you see it?” Now, if you look at the statistical table, it is a row numbers or variables on it, or it turns into images you might think of, okay, here is the upper class, here is the upper middle class, it may look like it’s layers, it looks like bricks on top of each other, but Blumer would say nothing looks like that, you don’t see that, you see something else. Now I think he wasn’t implying that, some people took this meaning, these things don’t exist, and the ethnomethodologists actually did take that sense, sociology is an illusion, there is nothing except people making interpretations of things, so their interpretation is all that matter. Now I think that’s certainly a naive position because power, money, organization, network position, is certainly very important. But I think Blumer’s lesson was a good one instead of taking it for granted, trying to see it, try to see what it looks like, what is actually going on there when you do it. You know, for instance, in recent years, I got interested in emotions, we got some better tools for studying emotions because we analyze emotions that people express on their faces. So, I have been collecting photographs of people for pretty much as long as photography existed, so this is essentially since the beginning of the twentieth century because before that time photographers were too static, you had to take them inside. But what I want photographers are people actually doing something in real life. So, you can see some very important differences, for instance, at least in western countries, there are enormous difference between the way in which the upper-class people and working-class people express themselves. I mean the upper-class people, now again I emphasize that this is in the west because you won’t find it everywhere, they smile a lot, you know. But if you look at carefully their smiles, they are not very warm smiles, it’s just like I should smile because everything is fine, I’m an upper-class person and working-class people tend to look somber, it’s the real thing. I think this has changed if you see it in different places. In Russia, the elites do not smile, they kind of frown. Do you have any struggle in your academic career during the past decades of years? When was that and how did you pull through it? Well, I mean one always wants people to read your work and like what you say, that doesn’t always happen but in terms of struggling, no, I just feel lucky, it’s like I have been able to do things I am interested in. I think one result of quitting jobs is you know then I get invited to teaching in particular place. There was a time when I think I knew maybe a thousand sociologists, I talked to them about their work, I can’t say that anymore because people get older, some died, some retired, the younger people come on in, so, and I don’t travel around as much so I don’t yet know as many people, but sociologists are very interesting people, if you ask them about the work they do, you know, almost all of them do something interesting, I wouldn’t say they are necessarily interesting, you know when we are not working, but as people work, you know, sociologists are pretty interesting, so it’s fun being around them.

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You have numerous outstanding books which have influence all over the world. Interaction Ritual Chains which was published in 2004 and translated into Chinese in 2011 is obviously one of them which reflects your effort to develop “radical micro sociology”. So, what is the story behind the book, like where did you get the inspiration and what was the major problem you faced when you wrote it? Well, I already mentioned Goffman and Herbert Blumer, and I should now mention Harold Garfinkel who is the leader of the ethnomethodology, and a very, very strange character, I mean he was a very strong believer in his philosophical position, although he had strong philosophical belief that everything is just phenomenology, you know, it’s our subjective categories that we impose upon everything, but he also attracted a lot of students who he pushed towards doing very micro and empirical kind of research. You know, the experiments he did were sometimes sort of bizarre, some of them became very technologically updated, so during research with tape-recorders starting with Garfinkel’s students, he himself, well, he did some of this later on but basically it was his student Harvey Sacks and Emanuel Schegloff who started doing this. So now this is a way of being able to look at very tiny details of the way in which people interact with each other. I knew these people for various reasons, I knew some of them when I was at Berkeley, but you know when I came back here to San Diego, in a new department, there were several ethnomethodologists, and I was a visiting professor at UCLA, so I got to know Harold Garfinkel himself and other people up there. Now I started reading the kind of research that conversation analysts did of conversation, realized that this fits pretty well into the Durkheim model about rituals that create solidarity, people like conversations where they get into a good rhythm, and when they get into a good rhythm then they start agreeing with each other, it changes your mind, it creates your mentality. I think that’s a very powerful mechanism, now if people always agree, how does anything ever change? Well, there are two reasons why things can change. One of them is that some people are not able to get this kind of interactional rhythm with each other, so for instance if you take people from different social classes and put them together, often they won’t work. If you take people who are very localized and put them together with somebody from some other locality, they don’t have the things to talk about. So, if people talk about certain gossip about their friends, their neighbors or you know their love affairs, or divorce something, you can’t talk with people if you don’t know about it. So instead of having one big society held together the way Parsons used to talk about is like there are lots of little societies, some of them integrated but they don’t get along with one which is at a distance. I will give you a political version of this. You know, in the West, there is tremendous concerns about terrorists, right? So how do these people have mentality of studying bomb and killing people? Well, it’s pretty clear that the so-called terrorists have on their side very solidarity too, I mean sometimes when somebody is captured by the police, he would say, “I did this because you’re killing all my people” and so on and so forth. This tremendous solidarity that you find, solidarity on a local level can generate tremendous amount of conflict, and the conflict itself then often is the thing that move things, it moves often in unpredictable directions. You usually just

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accurately predict what is going to happen when you have conflict between them, but the conflict itself will have some sorts of results and you know new situations involved. Looking back to your academic career, how did you come to be sociologist? And how has being a sociologist influenced you? I tried out a lot of different areas and became a sociologist because it’s still one of the most interesting to me. How did it influence me? Well, things that happened in my life around me usually can be turned into something interesting if you can see it as sociological, so in that sense, sociology makes you never have to be bored, now what makes things boring? Well, things are boring if either you got nothing to do or you are kind of stuck around other people who are boring. Now in the case of being a sociologist, there is nothing to do that, it didn’t take you a very long time to start thinking about the sociological aspects of something. You know, being around other people who are boring is kind of more of a problem, but they are not necessarily boring to themselves, they maybe just boring to me, but I have discovered that if you can ask people some questions, you can usually get them to tell you something interesting, now there is some exceptions to this, if you are talking to people who are very powerful, there are a lot of things they won’t tell you, and the most interesting things are exactly the ones that they won’t tell you, like you ask them about their political machinations or how they run their business, now they just kind of tell you the ideology, they won’t tell you what they really do, so that’s not interesting. On the other hand, with certain ordinary people, I mean there are a couple of questions that you don’t always get something interesting, I ask people, I mean if they have a partner or spouse, I say, how do they meet or something? They will tell me story about that. Often, it’s the story like, well, “um Laura is my wife, she used to be the girlfriend of my roommate, and then I met her.” I think about this because it’s the sociology of networks and marriage markets, you can ask people questions like that and find out something sociological interesting. Introduction of Related Characters Jean Piaget (1896–1980) was a Swiss psychologist and epistemologist known for his pioneering work in child development. The theory he founded promoted the rise of cognitive research and laid the foundation for the establishment of cognitive development psychology. Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) was a French diplomat, political scientist, and historian. He was best known for his works Democracy in America (appearing in two volumes: 1835 and 1840) and The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856). Burrhus Frederic Skinner (1904–1990) was an American psychologist of behaviorism, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, who is considered as the most important and influential psychologist since Freud. Skinner put forward ideas such as “reinforcement theory” and “operating conditions”, and created the Skinner box––an instrument for studying animal learning activities. In 1950, Skinner was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1968, he was awarded

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the highest scientific honor of the United States by the President of the United Statesthe National Science Medal. And in 1990, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Psychological Association. Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) was a German philosopher, social scientist, journalist and businessman. Engels founded Marxist theory together with Karl Marx. In 1848, Engels co-authored The Communist Manifesto with Marx. Later, Engels supported Marx financially to do research and write Das Kapital. After Marx’s death, Engels completed the collation and publication of the second and third volumes of Das Kapital. Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) was a Marxist revolutionary, theorist and politician. In terms of ideology, Trotsky was a Marxist-Leninist, but later he developed his ideas on the basis of Marxism and founded Trotskyism. Trotskyism is a major school of Marxism, and its main idea is to oppose Stalinism. During Stalin’s rule, Trotsky was exiled and eventually assassinated. Georges Eugène Sorel (1847–1922) was a French philosopher and theorist of Sorelianism. His notion of the power of myth in people’s lives inspired anarchists, Marxists, and Fascists. Vilfredo F. D. Pareto (1848–1923) was an Italian engineer, sociologist, economist, political scientist, and philosopher. Pareto began to turn to sociological research in his later years. He developed the concept of “elite circle”, which was the first theory of social circle in the field of sociology. Pareto’s sociological ideas were later brought to Harvard University via George Homans and others, which had a huge impact on Talcott Parsons and others. Harold Garfinkel (1917–2011) was an American sociologist, ethnomethodologist, and a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is known for establishing and developing ethnomethodology as a field of inquiry in sociology. Harvey Sacks (1935–1975) was an American sociologist influenced by the ethnomethodology tradition. He pioneered extremely detailed studies of the way people use language in everyday life. Despite his early death in a car crash and the fact that he did not publish widely, he founded the discipline of conversation analysis.

Interview 19 Michael Burawoy Michael Burawoy

Profile: Michael Burawoy is a sociological Marxist, best known as the author of Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process under Monopoly Capitalism—a study on work and organizations that has been translated into a number of languages—and as the leading proponent of public sociology. Burawoy received his BA in mathematics from the University of Cambridge in 1968 and then he went on to pursue graduate study in the newly independent African nation of Zambia, while simultaneously working as a researcher for a multinational company, Anglo American corporation. After completing his MA in sociology at the University of Zambia in 1972, he went to the University of Chicago as a doctoral student, working on a sociology dissertation that later become the book Manufacturing Consent. Aside from his sociological study of the industrial workplace in Zambia and Chicago, he also has studied industrial workplaces in Hungary and post-Soviet Russia. Overall, he has looked into the nature of post-colonialism, the organization of state socialism and the problems in the transition from socialism. His method of choice is usually participant observation. Because of his outstanding works, he was elected as the President of the American Sociological Association in 2004 and the President of the International Sociological Association for the period 2010–2014. Interview June 3, 2017 Professor Burawoy’s Home, Oakland, California As we all know, you studied mathematics when you were at University of Cambridge, so why did you change to study sociology after that? Indeed, I guess there are probably two reasons. One is that if you are going to be a mathematician, you have to be very good at mathematics and I was not, I mean I got a degree and I was obviously good enough to get into Cambridge as a mathematician M. Burawoy (B) University of California, Berkeley, United States © Peking University Press 2020 L. Chen (ed.), A Journey of Discovering Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6603-5_19

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but you have to be quite brilliant and get satisfaction of pursuing it. Actually, the reason I wanted to be a mathematician was because I wanted to be an astrophysicist, and I thought that mathematics would be necessary. But on the way I got interested in the world, and mathematics seemed extremely irrelevant to the world. And this was a period of 1965 to 1968, I made the mistake of coming to the United States in 1965 that opened my eyes to a whole world. I was coming from England, small island, small city, Manchester. So, coming to the United States in 1965 was very exciting for me, I was 17, 18 years old, and then when I went back to Cambridge, I thought this was an irrelevant, ridiculous place, I think the most miserable years of my life was spent in Cambridge. And so, every summer I would try to travel somewhere The first summer I went to Africa, and hitchhiked through Africa, then I went to India, and third year I just left Bombay to Africa, I lost interest in mathematics and I became interested in what was the very fashionable discipline at the time, sociology. But why did you choose to go to Africa, specifically Zambia, after you graduated from Cambridge? What was the story? Well, I got to say, there is no very good reason. I wanted to travel in the end of my first year at Cambridge and so I decided to go to Africa, and I decided that I would go to South Africa first which was of course a very interesting country. I spent six weeks and had a job there, then I decided that I would hitchhike through Africa, and so that was what I did. It was a completely unknown continent to me. So then when I graduated from Cambridge, I decided to go back to spend more time there. I was in South Africa for 6 months, I was a journalist, and then South Africa was very depressing in those years, 1968, it was a very repressive order, so I decided I wanted to go north, I went to Zambia and already in search of a sociology degree and in Zambia I decided that I needed to earn some money so I had a white skin, a degree from England, so I was able to get a job in the multinational corporation, Anglo American corporation, and I was there for two years and after that I spent another two years in the university continue to do research actually in the color bar on the copper mines, but in the university I got my first degree of sociology and anthropology. How did you spend your time in graduate school in the University of Zambia and later in the University of Chicago? In Zambia, it was a very interesting time, it was four years after independence and social sciences were very lively flourishing field, but the most interesting thing is the interdisciplinary, there were sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, historians, they were all in the same seminars and all interested in the history and the future of Zambia, so everybody contributed to each other’s project, it was a very, very engaging, exciting time to be and that’s why I began to learn about the influence of American sociology, American political science, particularly so-called development theory. And I grew up in an atmosphere that was very inclined towards more Marxist materialistic analysis of Africa, putting Africa in a global context that became quite critical of the American social science. So, I thought the next step would be to go to the United States and discover the development theory at its source. And in Chicago,

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there was something called the committee on new nations, which has been the sort of the center for disseminating development theory, very famous social scientists, like Clifford Geertz, Edward Shils, Lloyd Fallers, these were very, very big figures in those days, who had actually partaken in the re-structuring of social science around the emerging independent democracies of Africa or Asia and of course America. When I arrived at Chicago in 1972, nobody in sociology was really interested in Africa, actually it was a very intellectually impoverished department in my view. And so, there were very few people interested in Africa, and the committee on new nations has been disbanded, so there I was in Chicago wondering what I was doing then, and it was not the exciting place that I come from Zambia, but this was very boring in my view of sociology that they were trying to instill in us. But I was very lucky, first of all, I met William Julius Wilson who just arrived at the same time, and so we struck up a relationship, at that time he didn’t have any students, so I was very lucky, and so we had long conversations about the relationship between race and class. I had written a book on race and class in Zambia, and he was just in a sense beginning to understand the importance of class as well as race. So, it was very interesting. He protected me from the people who were very disparaging of the Marxism I brought from Africa. So that was one point that I was very lucky. Then I was very lucky to meet a Polish political scientist called Adam Przeworski who also just arrived, I was very lucky that these people just arrived and I don’t have to, you know, there were people in Chicago three or four year, then there is no way to actually gain access to them, anyway he just arrived and it was 1973, fall semester, he just arrived from Paris, and he had been a sociologist in Poland, and then got his Ph.D. in Northwestern University in the United States, and he was giving us course on Marxism, no Marxism course in the sociology department, and that was probably the only outspoken Marxist in the department and I was just a graduate student. But anyway, he came and he brought the latest Marxism from France, but I didn’t really know and understand, and so he gave the seminar, two quarters seminar, it was the most amazing seminar in my life. And he is a brilliant social scientist, and so I was introduced to French Structural Marxism and the work of Gramsci through that course. It was fun because I was learning the work of Talcott Parsons on the side in the sociology department, I would always say to Adam, “How to say? They just like to talk Talcott Parsons!” And he would say, “No, it is ridiculous!” And I say, “No, no, they are all functionalist together.” In the end he was so irritated by my continually bringing Parsons into the seminar of Marxism that he invited me to teach with him. So that was also a very important learning experience to teach with him. So, we taught the course on Marxism and Functionalism. So anyway, that was my early years and then of course I decided, “Okay, these people are not interested in Africa in sociology, I will engage them on their own terrain.” And so, I have always been an industrial sociologist, that was my research, or part of my research in Zambia, so I decided that I was becoming a participant observer in south Chicago factory. My participant observation had been very influenced by my supervisor in Zambia, Jaap Van Velsen, who was part of the Manchester School of Social Anthropology, a very famous school of social anthropology that had sent down students to study different parts of central Africa. So, he was there, he taught me so much and he had total

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contempt for survey research. And I accepted that contempt, I remember starting out one day, so bringing him a survey I was doing on the copper mines and he said, “This is nonsense.” And he convinced me that it was nonsense and then I felt I had to be a participant observer from then on. However, since I have learned that survey research has its place in the world, there were some wonderful survey researchers, often the best survey researchers are also great ethnographers. But anyway, the point is that Van Velsen did influence me to become a participant observer, that was the way I did my research, I have always done my research, and that is how I did my research in south Chicago in this factory that became the subject to my dissertation. And it was the factory had been studied by another very famous industrial sociologist Donald Roy, he had studies by coincidence the same factory thirty years before, and so I laid my name on Donald’s basis of having revisited his research, he was a real worker from the working class, so he understood the workplace much better than me, and he wrote beautifully about the workplace. When I read his work, I felt very inferior and in awe of his tremendous achievements, but I took advantage of that by seeing what had happened in those thirty years since he had left that factory. I realized that landed in the same factory was not deliberate but was an accident, then I got in touch with him. We met once or twice and he was a very curious, very interesting sociologist who did never feel at home in the academic world, he felt at home in the factory, it was very different from myself, I came from a middle class. But you also spent a lot of time in factory. Well, in that case, I was spending a year working in a factory, but my background is very middle class. So, I go into a factory, everybody can see me directly that I don’t come from the working class. I don’t have the skills, what Bourdieu would say, the habitus of a working-class person, so they immediately see that I am an incompetent worker. I just don’t have those skills. And so, it was very interesting for me as a sociologist to enter a situation where I am resented, hated, loved, but always seem to be different from the others. So, it’s interesting to see how in different countries, because I have done research like this in different countries, now it’s interesting to see how people react to an incompetent worker. It’s very interesting in different countries you get different reactions; In Chicago they hated me, in Hungry they loved me, in Russia they were just very skeptical and didn’t want to have anything to do with me. So, yeah, that’s sort of my career, so that is why I did my Ph.D. on the study of this factory. Then I left Chicago, I was only there for four and a half years, I did not love the department of sociology in Chicago. No, no, it had very narrow vision of what sociology could be, except for Bill Wilson who was a model to others but on the whole I was happy to leave, I think. Don’t you know when in graduate school, one makes one’s best friends, so my best friends were made in Chicago, they are good close friends to this day, one of them you interviewed is Andrew Abbott and he was about a year ahead of me, I think. And he is very erudite.

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So, when you became a sociology professor, from your perspective, what do you want to teach to your students or what kinds of training do you think sociology students should have? One of the reasons that I wanted to be a sociologist was because I knew that I would have fun teaching it. Because sociologists in principle should speak to everybody’s living experience, and should enlarge that experience, deepen that experience, so when I teach sociology, that’s my passion in life. I hope first of all I tell them in the beginning of my class, I teach theory class every other year, two semesters. I tell them this is a course of reading, writing and thinking. So, it just happens to be sociology but we should always try to in university learn to read, to write, you think you already know how to read, to write and to think, but actually you will learn in this course that it’s not quite simple as it seems. So, I am trying to teach them how to read very carefully texts, and to analyze those texts, and to then be able to write about those texts, both internally how they are structured, and also how they relate to the world around. So, one can read these dead white men from the nineteenth century, but still we read them because they had something to say to us about the world today, so that’s how I teach, I call my methods of teaching the ethnographic method of doing social theory. So, two ways I believe in doing social theory, one is the survey approach, that is most people do when they teach a course, they say, “Oh, you know, it’s Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and then they go on to perhaps a little bit of Freud, and they will teach a little bit of Goffman, then they will teach a certain bit of Foucault.” As I said, it’s a survey, and basically, you know, you have to sort of do a theory every week or two. So, I think that is one way of getting a grasp upon the breadth of social theory. But I don’t believe that people will learn how to read, to write and to think analytically by doing the survey approach. They may absorb some ideas, but they won’t learn these techniques which I think is very important. So, I always give students very little to do, ten or fifteen pages, but I expect to read, and to reread and to reread, to really understand it. So, it’s not an extensive but intensive approach to theory, that is why I called ethnographic. So, we spend six weeks reading bits of Marx and we slowly together collectively put the pieces together like in a jigsaw puzzle and in order to build the sort of theory of Marx. But I am based on base, I have carefully chosen. So, they can learn to put bits together, they can learn the technic of understanding when somebody else writes the ambiguities in the contradictions. And so, I would say somewhat controversial way of teaching, but anyway that is the way, I mean in the other aspect to the ethnographic methods is that I am in dialogue with students. So, actually, there are three dialogues going on, there is a dialogue between myself and students, there is a dialogue among students and then there is a third dialogue, I try to send students out to have dialogue with people outside. So, it’s ethnographic in many ways, anyway teaching is always a challenge, and it gives you immediate gratification and yes, I feel very lucky that I am here in Berkeley to teach undergraduate and graduate students here. How do you balance your time of doing research and teaching? I don’t see them as so disconnected. Many of main ideas that I develop as I teach. Many of the research projects come about through teaching what people would be

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interested in. So, the teaching shapes the research, and the research inevitably to some extent shapes teaching. But on the other hand, if you want to do serious research, you have to extricate yourself from teaching because teaching can be quite overwhelming. So, yes, the balance is sometimes difficult. I am too old to do ethnographic participant observation research. But when I did, after spending a year away in different places and different countries, that course gave me a way of extricating myself from teaching. But increasingly over time, the teaching and the research have converged, I tend to write more theoretical things that emerge from actual graduate seminars, the best research is now done by my students, I feel like I don’t have to do any research, they could do much better research I could ever do. How do you balance your work and family as a sociologist? Work and family, well, that is very easy because I don’t have a family. (I am sorry I didn’t know that before.) That is all right. I have friends, but basically, I don’t have a family, so I can devote my entire life to sociology. You know, there are three types of sociologists, that the 8-h sociologists, nine to five, then there are 12-h sociologists, and then there are 24-h sociologists, and I suppose of myself a 24-h sociologist. I guess some of my colleagues think I am crazy, they say, “Oh, Burawoy, he is the man who love sociology.” Yes, it’s true I do love sociology, I think actually the three types of sociologists produce three different types of sociology, so 24-h sociologists are somebody who are continually thinking sociologically, and, yeah, so my life is a life of sociology. Your books: Manufacturing Consent, The Politics of Production and The Radiant Past have laid foundation of your status in labor sociology, but what do you think made you focus on labor study from the very beginning, why were you so interested in labor sociology? Well, partly it happened as an accident because I was in Zambia, I got a job in the copper industry in the multinational company Anglo American. And I became interested to know what happened to the copper industry in the post-colonial period, what happened to race particularly, to what extent the racial order of colonial Zambia had been transformed in the post-colonial period. And I found that the color bar, which basically divided black from white, reproduced itself in the post-colonial period and then I wanted to explain this. I explained it in terms of class, the class relations of the copper industry in relationship to the state, set the foundations which race reproduced itself. So, I would look into the class analysis of the copper industry, and parallel class analysis was of course to see what were the conditions of the working class in post-colonial Zambia. So, from that sort of advantage I became interested in class, and as a Marxist, I became interested in actually what is the character of the working class in these different countries. When I came to Chicago, I realized that nobody was interested in Africa, I thought, “Well, a lot was interested in Marxism” I mean this is a period of the efflorescence of Marxism in the United States, and people were talking about the working class, but then in so wild, romantic terms. So, I thought, “No, it’s important for somebody to actually go and work as a worker but come to that workplace with the Marxism frame then to see what the working class really

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like?” And I found it was the capitalism by actually experiencing it, and see what that implies for Marxism. So, when I worked in the factory, what astounded me was how hard everybody was working. The history of the industrial sociology was, “Oh, these workers are lazy, they are indolent, they are straight-out poor.” Then there was an imaginary point of view who always complain workers don’t work hard enough. But I was really impressed they are really working so hard I couldn’t keep up with them, and so the real problem was why they were working so hard and then Marxists hadn’t answered that question and the past Marxists said it was the coercion of the marketplace which push people to produce surplus. I think this is not really what is going on, it’s something called the organization of consent rather than coercion, and so I drew on that idea of Marxists, such as Poulantzas and Althusser, but also most importantly Antonio Gramsci, so his idea helped me understand what was happening in south Chicago. So, once I started being interested in these questions why workers work as hard as they are, what was the working class’s consciousness in advanced capitalism, and then I think, “Well, if I am right, it should be different in the state of socialism.” So, then I went to study workers in Hungry in the socialist period 1980s, then it collapsed. And then I thought, “Well, I’d better go to Russia or Soviet Union.” And so, I started working there but it was only a year before Soviet Union dissolved. And so, then I spent time studying the working class in the post-Soviet period of great decline, the time China was growing, Russia was declining at same rate, so that was a very interesting question. But you know of course I really, I should have gone to China. (But why didn’t you go to China?) Yeah, well, first of all, my friend says that wherever I go, some crisis follows me, so I mustn’t go anywhere else, stay in Russia. So, through the 1990s I was continually doing research in Russia. But the other reason why China is not possible is because the language. I mean, I more or less learn Hungarian, more or less learn Russian, less than more, ha-ha. But China is so big, I was over a stage, there is no way I could handle it. You know, you come from the West, you want to study China, you have to start when you are young. I know there are other people who sort of try when they are old, but it’s not the same. So, I have had wonderful and amazing students who study working class in China, but I have never done, it’s just too daunting, so different, so big and it’s beyond my capacity. I mean Russia was difficult enough, so I leave that for others. In your presidential address to the ASA, you divided sociology into four different areas and one of them is public sociology which emphasized the return of sociology to the public. So, what is the story behind the public sociology you proposed? In the United States, sociology is very professionalized. The basic sociologists talk to one another, they share their papers, they write to publish articles, perhaps the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, and ten people would read it. So, we are basically in a closed community. And so that is why I call it professional sociology. And it seems to me that it was important in this particular area but generally that sociology should have a responsibility to actually transmit their sociology to wider audiences. If there is anything in sociology and has to be somehow comprehensible to people beyond the academia, it seems obvious. But with

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large professional pressures, they actually kept on pushing sociologists just to talk to one another. So, the idea is to open up sociology and bring in different ways to different audiences. Now of course I did have some models of people who did this, I mean you have interviewed Arlie Hochschild, she was one such model, and many of my colleagues here and that was a peculiarity of Berkeley, Berkeley sociology that it did have an engaged sociology, there is some really very famous faculty people, like Robert Blauner, Robert Bellah, Todd Gitlin, Kristin Luker, Nancy Chodorow, Jerome Karabel, these are people who wrote not just for academics but for the world beyond and shaped public discourse. And so, I thought that was an important project called public sociology. I am not the first by any means to be pushing this position, I suppose most formally Herbert Gans, in his presidential address, he is a sociologist, very famous sociologist of Columbia, he is also very committed to the idea that sociology should not just be the academic discipline. And before he, even C. Wright Mills, was very critical of professional sociology, so those are legacy of critical thinking that focus sociology should be disseminating beyond the academy. So that was the rationale now and as I say, I was very much inspired among many of my colleagues in Berkeley who were doing something like that. And then of course in other parts of the world, so for example, I returned to South Africa. I was there in 1968 and then I returned to South Africa in 1990. I didn’t go in between because there was a boycott, the Africa National Congress said academics from outside should not go to South Africa so long as there was apartheid regime, but anyway the apartheid regime was crumbling, the boycott was called off, and the president of the South Africa Sociological Association invited me to give an address. And so, I went there and I was really stunned by the excited sociology that developed in the struggle against the apartheid. And this was often based on industrial sociology because the working class were at the center of the struggle against the apartheid, so many of the sociologists that actually cultivated that sociology had cultivated shop stewards and had written about it. So that was the social movements sociology, social movement union. I was very impressed by this very engaged sociology so I came back to the United States with this alternative model in mind. And then when I traveled around the world, of course, public sociology is quite normal in many countries, Brazil, Latin America, India, you know, and they say to me, “What’s all this business about public sociology? What other kind of sociology can be, but public sociology.” So that’s the little story, but anyway it’s a very American idea in some way because only in America is this idea of professional sociology so strong that you have to invent something called public sociology. So, you think that sociologists should try to write something for the public to reach audiences beyond the academia, right? Yes, I think that is an important part of our role, I mean it is, it’s not easy, and often the public does not interest it. But what is the best way to do that? Well, it varies from country to country. So, in China, it’s one story, South Africa is another story, in England, it’s another story, France is another story, in the United

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States, it’s another story. So, in order to think about the strategies of doing public sociology, you have to reconcile the world, the academic world with that wider political-economic forces that are operating in the society. So, there is no one way of doing this. In my mind, I have distinguished two types of public sociology, one is a traditional public sociology, which one essentially writes for the media or write books and they get broadly read and disseminated. So that’s sort of a mediated public sociology, mediated through the media, that is why I called traditional public sociology. What we conventionally think of when we think of public sociology. But there is also an organic public sociology in which there is an unmediated relationship between sociologists and his or her audience. These are sort of perhaps sociologists that got involved with social movements, with neighborhood associations, with religious organizations, but having intimately close relationship with limited but nevertheless thick public. So, I distinguished them between these two types, they coexist, they support each other but they are different, and they combine in different ways in different countries. But overall, the political-social context is absolutely very important for the vitality of public sociology. One has to recognize; one has to map the social structures of society to understand the possibilities of public sociology. Next is my most important question. What is sociology in your eyes? That is an interesting question. I think one has to distinguish sociology from other disciplines. So that is how I began. My belief is that sociology is different from political science and economics in the sense that sociology takes the standpoints of what I call civil society. Civil society are those organizations, social movements, institutions that are not part of the state and not part of the economy. Civil society grew up in western societies, in capitalist societies in the nineteen century that is when sociology grew up, and sociology takes, let’s say, the standpoint, the perspective of civil society. And in that way contrast with economics, it takes standpoint of the economy and the expansion of the market, it distinguishes itself from political science which takes the standpoint of state and it is interested in political order. Now of course all these disciplines are contested fields, Bourdieu would say, and so of course there are dissident political scientists who are not necessarily interested in the political order, there are dissident economists who wonder about the virtues of the market. But the central thrust of these disciplines is one is to expand the market, the other one is expanding political order. Sociology is in a sense that for all interested in the expansion in the development of civil society and keeping at bay the states and the economy. So that is how I think of sociology and of course that doesn’t mean that one just studies civil society but it means that one would study politics from the standpoint of civil society, so the state in terms of its effects upon civil society, in the way civil society will actually provide foundation for the state, equally with the market. So, you have economic sociology, what is economic sociology? To my mind, economic sociology is understanding the conditions of the possibilities of markets, and which sometimes economic sociologists pay less attention to the effects of the market on civil society. So, it’s a matter of standpoint, perspective on sociology and of course where civil society is weak, sociology will be weak. Where civil society is being repressed, sociology is repressed and there you often get a very vibrant underground

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sociology. So, for example I talked to sociologists who survived the dictatorship in Chile and Pinochet,1 they described the they were underground the universities or the dissident sociologists in the Eastern Europe, so the most interesting sociology has come under conditions of repression because in a sense they have been fighting for the creation of civil society under very difficult conditions. So anyway, that is how I think of sociology and its different branches. And yeah, because civil society has such a plurality of institutions and organizations, sociology has so plurality of internal perspectives, so an anarchy of different perspectives within sociology, so it’s not like economics. So, economics has identified this concept called the economy, and then they claim to have a monopoly of knowledge on economy. We have not really been able to define society very effectively, so we are much more a pluralistic discipline than economics which is much more driven by a singular paradigm. So, as you have mentioned, we have many branches in sociology, in which way do you think sociology might be better, integrated or more diverse? I think it’s diverse but it also has to have a center, right? To have an internal coherence. And I think that internal coherence will emerge by the self-recognition of sociologists, their standpoint of civil society. We are living in an era when civil society is under threat both from politics, as we speak today, even universities in the United States are under some sort of potential threat from the new political administration in Washington and has been for many years now under threat through the commercialization of the products of university, namely knowledge. So, the civil society is being undermined by the expansion of states and economy. And so, we are living in an increasingly precarious civil society and so I think it’s very important for us to think about sociology in these terms because it gives us a very important role in the world to defend us civil society against states and economy. But it also puts us in a very defensive position, yeah, interesting topic. What do you think make sociology an independent discipline? An independent discipline, well, as I say, independence related to standpoint. And so, independence is always under threat from other disciplines and from the world around. Some of the most exciting moments in sociology, like I was saying, when it actually puts on the defensive, tries to create new visions of the world in response to the threat to its autonomy. Trouble is as Bourdieu would say, you know, everybody is a sociologist. So, you know we have some theory about poverty, everybody got some theory about poverty, I mean right or wrong. So, there is a lot competition out there. And so, some people often have very skeptical view of sociology. So, we have a lot of work to do.

1 Augusto

José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte was a Chilean general, politician and the dictator of Chile between 1973 and 1990.During his administration, Pinochet persecuted leftists and political critics, resulting in the executions of from 1,200 to 3,200 people, the internment of as many as 80,000 people and the torture of tens of thousands. For more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Augusto_Pinochet

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Did you have any struggle? How did you pull through it? Oh, then I had struggle, if you don’t struggle, if you are not struggling, then you might as well not exist. All my career has been a struggle, probably that is not so now, has been a struggle surviving as a Marxist, (Because of sociological Marxist), yes surviving as a Marxist, I mean ten years struggles, battles out, battles in the university. I mean if you are not struggling as sociologist, there is something wrong. The struggles to be a sociologist, never thought I could be a sociologist. In Zambia, I thought I was always very ignorant and stupid, and so it’s always a struggle in Chicago, the whole way that Chicago program was organized was to make you feel stupid. And teaching is always a struggle, always a challenge. So, I think the life of a sociologist is the life of struggle, it has to be. So what advice would you like to give to sociology students based on your own experience, you know, in sociology? I think what drives a sociologist is a commitment to an alternative world. If we read our classics, they all were someone engaged with the possibility that the world can be better and can be different. And so as long as one is driven by the imagination, that the world can be better and can be improved and therefore one has to understand the limits of the possible and the possibilities within the limits. Just that drive will make one into a great sociologist, you don’t have to be brilliant to be a sociologist, you have to be committed and I think the best sociologists are always the ones that have real commitments to particular projects, that don’t overwhelm that science, but motivate that science, and that science then in a sense enlarges and energizes the sociology that emerges. The best sociologists, the ones who write the great books are the ones who have some sort of real deep value commitments. So, my advice then I guess is don’t be frightened of your values that one should cultivate them, and they should be, as Max Weber was very insistent on this, you know, you can’t pursue science without those value commitments. So, yes, I think that is very important. How has been a sociologist influenced you? That is interesting. Well, as I was saying, I mean sociology is my life. So, it’s hard to say I am absorbed into sociology, yeah, so sociology has absorbed me, yes. I have absorbed sociology; sociology has absorbed me. But it’s not so simple, I mean you are right, it’s an interesting question one may spend one’s time teaching about the world, we all do a lot of that, or even writing about the world, but it’s an interesting question to what extent that influence is actually in my day to day life. And I think there is a sort of a gulf between the theological theory and the logical practice. So, the way one behaves in one’s day to day life are often at odds with the theory that one expounds. That’s a very interesting paradox. Sociologists are often the most unsocial people and naive people, so that is a good question, you know, there is a gap between the logic of sociology and the logic of one’s eyes. Yes, so there is maybe some interaction but there is also quite a bit of autonomy between the two.

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What if not sociologist, what else do you think you probably are doing now? What I would be doing? Well, I would be teaching something. That’s right, I would be teaching. I love to teach mathematics. In fact, sociology is another sort of mathematical theorem. So I think if I were not doing sociology, I would be teaching something else, mathematics possibly, so I always enjoy teaching mathematics, you know because you can always have a Socratic dialogue about…because it’s so logical, A to B to C, you can organize teaching so people grow in the teaching, in the very active teaching because mathematics is based not on knowing too much but on thinking, on understanding how one goes from A to B to C. So, yeah, if I were not doing sociology, I would be teaching something else. There are times when I thought I would never get tenure, it’s hopeless, so I would go teaching mathematics somewhere in the world, somewhere interesting. Introduction of Related Characters Edward Shils (1910–1995) was a Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and in Sociology at the University of Chicago and an influential sociologist. He was known for his research on the role of intellectuals and their relations to power and public policy. His famous work is Tradition. Lloyd Fallers (1925–1974) was the A. A. Michelson Distinguished Service Professor in the departments of anthropology and sociology at the University of Chicago. Fallers’ work in social and cultural anthropology focused on social stratification and the development of new states in East Africa (especially Buganda) and Turkey. Adam Przeworski (1940) is a Polish-American political scientist, currently a professor of political science at New York University. His research is mainly concentrated in the fields of democratic society, democratic theory and political economics, and his representative work is Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America. Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) was an Italian Marxist philosopher and politician. His Prison Notebooks are considered a highly original contribution to twentieth century political theory. Gramsci is best known for his theory of cultural hegemony, which describes how the state and ruling capitalist class—the bourgeoisie—use cultural institutions to maintain power in capitalist societies. Donald F. Roy (1909–1980) was a sociologist on the faculty of Duke University from 1950 to 1979. Well known for his field work into industrial working conditions, workplace interactions, social conflict, and the role of unions. Roy is well-known to the academic world because of an article in Human Organization entitled “Banana Time: Job Satisfaction and Informal Interaction". Robert Blauner (1929–2016) was an American sociologist who has taught at the University of Chicago and the University of California at Berkeley. He proposed the “Brauna hypothesis” that compared with voluntary immigration groups, the minority groups caused by colonialism faced a greater degree of racism and discrimination because they were forced to leave their homes. Todd Gitlin (1943) is an American sociologist, political writer, novelist, and cultural commentator who Has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, New

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York University, Columbia University, Yale University, University of Toronto. He has written about the mass media, politics, intellectual life and the arts, for both popular and scholarly publications. Kristin Luker (1946) is a sociology professor at the University of California, Berkeley and Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Luke’s research involves sexual behavior, gender, and the relationship between gender and the history of social science. Luke is the author of five books, of which Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood won the Charles Curry Award. Luke was also invited by President Clinton to the White House to discuss political and social policy issues. Nancy Chodorow (1944) is a sociology professor at University of California, Berkeley, who is also a feminist sociologist and psychoanalyst. She is widely regarded as a leading psychoanalytic feminist theorist. In 1996, her representative work The Reproduction of Mothering was named one of the ten most influential books in the past 25 years by Contemporary Sociology. Jerome Karabel (1950) is an American sociologist, political and social commentator, and Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. He has written extensively on American institutions of higher education and on various aspects of social policy and history in the United States, often from a comparative perspective. Herbert J. Gans (1927) is a German-born American sociologist who has taught at Columbia University between 1971 and 2007. Gans came to America in 1940 as a refugee from Nazism and served as the 78th President of the American Sociological Association. In his inaugural speech, Gans called for sociology as a subject to be directed to the more general public, and proposed the term “public sociology”.

Interview 20 Andrew G. Walder Andrew G. Walder

Profile: Andrew G. Walder is the Denise O’Leary and Kent Thiry Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, and Senior Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford. Previously he served as chair of the Department of Sociology, as director of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia–Pacific Research Center, and as Director of the Division of International, Comparative and Area Studies in the School of Humanities and Sciences. He received his BA in political science from Johns Hopkins in 1975 and Ph.D. in sociology from University of Michigan in 1981, after he graduated, he taught at Columbia University before moving to Harvard in 1987. As a professor of sociology, he served as chair of Harvard’s MA Program on Regional Studies-East Asia for several years. From 1995 to 1997, he headed the Division of Social Sciences at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. In 1997, he became a professor at Stanford University. As a political sociologist, he has long specialized on the sources of conflict, stability, and change in communist regimes and their successor states. His publications on China have ranged from the political and economic organization of the Mao era to changing patterns of stratification, social mobility, and political conflict in the post-Mao era. Another focus of his research has been on the political economy of Soviet-type economies and their subsequent reform and restructuring. He was elected as the member of American Academy of Arts and Science in 2012. Interview July 4, 2017 Encina Hall, Stanford University As we all know, you studied political science first and then changed to sociology as your major when you read your Ph.D., so why did you make this change? Back in the 1970s, when I was deciding which social science discipline to go into, I knew I wanted to work on China, but I had three choices. I was interested in subjects A. G. Walder (B) Denise O Leary and Kent Thiry Professor, Stanford University, Stanford, United States © Peking University Press 2020 L. Chen (ed.), A Journey of Discovering Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6603-5_20

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like inequality, conflict, protest, and as a political science student, I pursued that at undergraduate but when I was contemplating graduate school, political science at that point of time really did not deal with issues like inequality, conflict, most of the political scientists who studied China were interested in government policy, policy-making, policy implementation. The discipline really was not the place where you would go if you are going to study things like revolution, that was really more what sociology was about. But there was also practical career advice because at that point of time, most American Ph.D. students who wanted to work on China were interested in political science. But there were a few sociologists at least in the major universities, so for two reasons, I thought that sociology was preferable, one is as a discipline, it was focused on inequality and conflict, many of the great sociologists are social scientists who work down on subjects like revolution and political protest, were in the discipline of sociology, people like Barrington Moore, Charles Tilly and others. So, at that time I thought political science was kind of boring, sociology was more congenial. I was also interested in political economy, so I thought briefly about economics. But my advisers told me that if I wanted to get a Ph.D. in economics, I probably could not do anything meaningful about China at that point in time because it’s a discipline that had very clearly defined theories that were designed to analyze market economy, it was in the early 1970s and so China did not have a market economy. And economics as a discipline really didn’t focus on specific countries, so that was a nonstarter, plus you had to have mathematics ability that were like those physicists I think to get a Ph.D. in economics. So that was an insane choice. You spent most of your school time in 1970s, which was a period full of movements I think in America, so how did you spend your time in your graduate school in the University of Michigan? And do you think that period had any influence on you and your later research interest? I didn’t become a college student until 1971, but at that point, most of the anti-war protests were already over. I was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins, the only major student movement, anti-war movement they had in the spring of the year before I arrived on campus. By the time I arrived, there were still some anti-war activity but the war was already waning down, Richard Nixon was bringing American troops back and he ended the draft in 1973, I think that really took the steam out. But intellectually I was very much anti-war and that is why I chose to major in political science in the beginning. For a long period of time, I guess I became a Marxist by the time I was junior in college, I studied with my academic adviser who was a China specialist, anti-war activist, and politically he was very left wing. You had a certain degree of influence on me, I would say. But I also studied with other Marxists on campus, fellow named David Harvey who later became well known as a post-modern theorist of basically post-globalism, globalization. He taught a year-long seminar on Marx’s Capital. So, my introduction of social science was basically through Marxism, through socialists’ political thought. And as a result, China was interesting because very few people on the left had any positive views of the Soviet Union, it was considered to be a very conservative bureaucratic oppressive dictatorship, but China looked like something was very different because Mao told the students, workers to

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rebel against bureaucratic repression. That was really quite attractive to the young, and I would say, naive leftists in the United States. So, who do you think influenced you a lot in leading you to the world of sociology? I don’t think I ever took a course in sociology as an undergraduate. And to me it was an intellectual decision. I guess no single teacher. I was advised that the career prospect in sociology would probably be better if I want to focus on China. But I really didn’t know too much about sociology until after I enrolled in a Ph.D. program. And if I wanted to get a Ph.D. and do research on China, there were really only two places around 1974, 1975 where I could have gotten my degree. One was the University of Michigan where Martin Whyte was an assistant professor and looked like he was going to get tenure and stay and the other was University of Chicago which was William Parish. Since I was already at Michigan, I just simply shifted from an MA program in China studies into the Ph.D. program. And that’s pretty much a story, there was no intellectual inspiration that led me to the discipline, it was just me figuring that it was more open, kind of more exciting discipline at that time if you wanted to study things like inequality and political conflict. After I got started, I said earlier that I read a lot of Marx’s works, and sociology is a discipline that was more influenced by new left thinking than political science was at that time. Political science was more conservative establishment kind of discipline. So, you know you take courses on the revolution, they would assign works by Leon Trotsky, for example, I thought that was pretty interesting. But once I went into graduate school, I started reading Max Weber, and it was pretty clear to me he was in dialogue with orthodox Marxism of his time. And I found his arguments actually much more compelling than what I have been reading as an undergraduate and so that began to remake my intellectual viewpoints. What is sociology in your eyes? That’s a really hard question. That is like asking an anthropologist what is culture. I can tell you now in the United Sates it’s become very, very much focused on inequality in all of its dimensions in the United States. It is not the way it was when I first started. I think political sociology which is the field that I worked is shrinking in the United States. In fact, if I were going to choose a Ph.D. today, I would for the same reasons that I chose sociology back in the 70s, I would go into political science. Because political science now is much more focused on comparative work, it’s much more focused on international, it’s less narrowly focused on the United States, I mean that was one of the reasons why I went into sociology in the first place in the 1970s because political science was heavily focused on American politics, how congress works. The most boring classes I took as an undergraduate were about American politics, by far the most boring thing. I took a course on constitutional law which convinced me I didn’t want to go to law school. I took a course on the American politics which convinced me that studying congress and how a bill becomes a law is probably… I’d rather go into accounting than do something like that. But you know, if you are not interested in the details of inequality in the United States; gender inequality, ethnic

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inequality as it’s manifested in the United States, income inequality, career patterns, you are not interested in those kinds of things, poverty, race. There is really not a whole lot else you can do in sociology in the United States today. So, in addition to the fact that American sociologists are becoming much more parochial, they don’t study foreign countries very much, they don’t study foreign languages, but political scientists do that now. So, I mean this is not a great advertisement for the discipline of sociology, but you asked, I haven’t answered your question, what is sociology? I think sociology basically is an intellectual discipline that’s descended from three great thinkers, Marx, Durkheim and Weber. And in the United States, after World War Two, American sociology became a mixture of those three, a blending of those three. And you know some more inclined towards the Durkheim tradition, some more inclined towards the conflict tradition which is associated with Marx, but Weber kind of bridging those two. And that is my view of it. As we all know sociology is a very broad discipline, so what do you think make sociology an independent discipline to be different from politics, history, economics and other social sciences. I have a colleague in the history department here who said that, “History is a great unstructured discipline. You can study anything you want, you can study anything you want and there is no real canon, there is no theory, single theory that dominates it.” Sociology is very much like this, no dominant theory, no real dominant method. You can more or less study just about anything you want. There is one big difference. It’s interesting, just look at political science as a discipline, when I was in the 1950s, 1960s and even in the 1970s, political science has no theory that they developed. In that period, all the theory that they had was borrowed from sociology, initially from Talcott Parsons and Functionalist, later from conflict theorist Marx, modernization theory basically came out from sociology is adopted by political science. Since then political science hasn’t developed its own theory, but it borrows theory from economics. Sociology was really quite broad and flexible, it doesn’t matter whether you do so-called qualitative research, it doesn’t matter whether you do quantitative research, there is a plenty of room for all kinds of different approaches and there is no dominant theory. So, I think it’s a very nice place between political science and economics, and anthropology is kind of in the middle of those. As you have mentioned we have many branches in sociology, economic sociology, historical sociology, organizational sociology, political sociology, so what do you think about this division in sociology? And in which way sociology might be better, more diverse or more integrated? I think the discipline is narrowing in the United States, it’s narrowing. I think Chinese sociologists are also very focused on China, probably even more than the United States that American sociologists focus exclusively on the United States. I don’t know many sociologists in China who study foreign countries. Almost all of them are really obsessed with China. But I think the United States is moving in that direction. I have kind of lost your question, I think I have already said that the sub-fields really inspired me to enter sociology, political sociology and historical sociology have been

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shrinking, and I also think that whereas sociologists were much more interested in the world outside the United States in the 70s than they used to, than is the case now, the discipline is really becoming more and more narrowly focused on the United States. So, when I publish an article or try to publish an article in a journal that is not devoted to the study of China, most reviewers who looked at it and think, “What was this have to do with the world? It’s just China.” Whereas if they do an extremely narrowly focused paper on some little aspect of something about the United States, it’s considered to have universal significance. So, when I go to China, I feel mainstream, when I am here, I feel somewhat marginal in the discipline, it’s only people who do comparative and historical work that may have even thought about something I may have published. I am not complaining, that’s just the way it is. And it’s very interesting, if I go to China and speak in a sociology department, many more students would have read my work than is the case in any department here in the United States because most of them are focused on contemporary issues of inequality in the United States. And that’s an extremely important topic and it’s much more important now than it was ten or fifteen years ago in the United States, I can’t really object that focus but it’s just the fact. When you changed your identity from a sociology student to a sociology professor, what do you want to teach to your students or what kinds of training do you think sociology student should have? I think the most important thing is to learn that the evidence is really an arbiter of, I don’t want to say truth, but valid knowledge. I have to say most of my intellectual influence came after I started teaching. That’s when I really started to dig in and read a lot of more classic sociological work. I knew Marx and Marxism, my best course at Columbia University where I first taught was called Marxist Social Thought, where I went through the entire Marxist tradition from Marx’s early writings all the way through Lenin, Stalin and Mao. I could teach that without a lot preparation but I hadn’t read deeply in the sociological classics, I hadn’t read people like Robert Merton who happened to be my one of colleagues at Columbia where I taught. And when I started to read at Columbia, I realized that Columbia was probably the most important department in shaping American sociology in the 50s and 60s. There were three main schools of thought, one was Harvard sociology or social relations department, which was dominated by Talcott Parsons and functionalists, for whom I had absolutely no use. It’s only in recent years that I began to appreciate Émile Durkheim. (Did you read Parsons’ books?) I found his work unreadable, I could not understand it. And I was pretty sure that it was not worth trying to figure out. Now many people disagree with that. The other was University of Chicago, which focused on basically ethnographic field work, urban sociology and so forth. But Columbia was the place that Robert Merton who wrote elegant, clear, well-reasoned essays which I never read in graduate school, I thought him of a functionalist therefore unreadable and not worth reading. The other was Paul Lazarsfeld, I have to say that I had no exposure to statistics until I went to graduate school, I took no math as an undergraduate which was kind of amazing if you think about it, that was very stupid career move on my part, and I really had little use for that kind of empirical

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sociology. But at Columbia, Merton was considered to be a theorist, Lazarsfeld was basically a statistician, he was working on statistical applications and survey data. And the basic idea that came out of Columbia sociology was you shouldn’t just sit around and spit out these theories that were not related to research findings. On the other hand, you shouldn’t just do research and describe things that you found in your data. So, on the one hand, the Columbia School was critical abstract theorizing, ever since entering graduate school, I’ve viewed that as pretty much a waste of time. And there are a lot of popular thinkers who don’t do research and I find their work completely vacuous to the extent that I can understand it. It’s vacuous because they are not constantly confronting their ideas with evidence. On the other hand, factual description, simply telling the reader what the coefficient says without any underlying theoretical aim, is also fairly useless. And what the Columbia School stood for was basically theoretically guided empirical research. If you have an idea, you have to spell out its implications for what you observe in the real world and if you can’t do that, your ideas are not useful to generate knowledge. Professor you go to China a lot, do you find any difference between America and China on how they train sociology students? I haven’t had that much direct contact with sociology departments in China. So, I really can’t say. I think Beida’s sociology department is very much focused on theory, that is my sense. I don’t know many other…Tsinghua’s sociology department, I know a bit about that, it’s a small department. I think they have more people who do more empirical research. But there are also people at Beida in the sociology department that do survey research and so forth. But you know I really don’t have that clear of a sense because I haven’t taught Ph.D. students at Beida, but I have taught undergraduates, I mean I have a very clear sense of the differences between undergraduate education at schools like Stanford and Harvard versus Beida and Tsinghua, I have a very clear sense of that. But the graduate training, I don’t really know. The one that is an interesting thing is that even if a student from Beida or Tsinghua takes an undergraduate degree in sociology and never did any empirical research, only read theory, when they come to the United States, because of the entrance exam, right? Their math is still much better than most American students. And so, they can handle just about anything that you give them. It doesn’t matter whether it’s theory or whether it’s statistics. They can handle it. So that’s very clear impression that I have. But I don’t really have a clear sense of Ph.D. programs. (How about undergraduate?) Undergraduate is very different. First of all, one major difference between the very top Chinese universities and the very top, mainly private American universities, is that there are many more students at Beida or Tsinghua. I mean Beida has around 18,000,1 Stanford has 6,000, Harvard has 6,000. So, my impression is the faculty-student ratio is much more unfavorable in leading Chinese universities. Here, I mean, if you talk about Zhejiang University, that is like 40,000 (note: according to the official data from Zhejiang University, there are 24,878 undergraduates by 2017.), just incredibly large, so China’s elite universities are more like American large state universities, like 1 There

were 15,628 undergraduate students in Beida (Peking University) by December, 2017.

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Michigan or Berkeley or UCLA or Ohio State, Indiana, Arizona, schools like that. And Chinese undergraduate students almost never able to take small class, seminar, almost never. Whereas I think the best undergraduate education you get in the United States is not necessarily in Stanford or Harvard, Yale but would be in schools, smaller liberal arts colleges where all of your classes are small, you are constantly talking to professors, having them read your work. My other impression is that Chinese undergraduates at leading universities don’t get a lot of feedback on their work. I had a student, a Beida student said, “We turn in papers, the grade comes out, we never hear back, we never get the paper back.” You know, I don’t know if that’s the case in all disciplines, I mean maybe in laboratory, base science, engineer, is different, but the social science and humanity students that I have taught in my classes at Beida tell me this is what is going on. So, it’s possible for a student to go through four years at Beida or Tsinghua, Fudan, any other leading universities and never having written a paper that was graded by a professor and given feedback. Now despite of all that, students are so well-prepared when they enter the university and are so highly selected by the Gaokao that they still are very well-prepared, but it’s almost like it’s they’re self-taught in a way, that is probably an overstatement. But whatever is done in the undergraduate years, kind of exposes students to a lot of ideas, exposes students to a lot of other smart people, but that process that we idealized really is only attained I think in small liberal arts colleges in the United States, and partially in universities like, I know Princeton is especially good in teaching undergraduate students, Yale, Chicago, probably after that Stanford, Harvard, places like that where you will be able by your junior, senior year to take small classes mixed with graduate students, intense work with faculty member. Certainly, I did that when I was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins, actually that university was so focused on undergraduate education that after your second year you were expected to take seminars with faculty because I think they only had 3,500 undergraduate students, so I think that is the big difference. Now my impression of graduate school is that graduate students are primarily take one year of classes and then after that they are doing research. And that is much more like the British system, or maybe the French system than the American system where you take two or three years of courses at the graduate level before you do the research. But I think part of what the story is in China is that, there are several things going on. First of all, a massive expansion in undergraduate and graduate education over last 25 years. At the same time, incredible pressure on faculty to publish, and so as a result they don’t focus on their teaching, it’s career suicide to become a great teacher. And so, I think the professors I know focus on their graduate students, do research with their graduate students and the undergraduates, they walk in and they give lectures. The other thing, that is different, I have seen course outlines at Beida, a list of topics, a list of dates, a bunch of readings listed at the end, no connection, I am sure that not all course outlines are like this, but a list of readings at the end not tied specifically to any lecture, with no clear requirement that you have to do all the readings, it’s like suggestions, so you go into a class, the professor comes in, gives his lecture, probably not a lot of discussion. Am I right? I mean this is my impression I get from taking to Beida students and Tsinghua students, that is not the way we are encouraged to teach here. In fact, I have taught in Columbia, I have taught in

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Michigan as a graduate student’ TA, I have taught in Harvard and here, I have never heard a course taught like that. But it seems to be the normal, but the students are still so good, so eager for knowledge, somehow it doesn’t hurt them too much. How do you balance your work and family as a sociologist? I think a sociologist is no different from any other academic fields. I think it’s easier than being in other fields, you have more flexible schedule, you don’t teach in the summer time, you don’t have to be at work eight in the morning, you don’t have a boss, right? And you can work at home if you need to, teach only a certain number of hours, you have office hours, so I think it’s easier for a man, for a female it’s going to be different, that’s more difficult because the time limits on decide whether you can get a family or not. The hardest year is when you have children, but before you have children and after your children have gone off to university, there is very few, I think, work life trade-off pressures. But it helps a lot to have a spouse who is an academic, who understands and has the same kind of approach to spending time on time-off from work as you do. That makes it easier. So, did you have any struggle during your career? I think when our son was very small and… I was kind of lucky because I got tenure pretty young, I was a full professor at Harvard at thirty-six, so the struggle to get tenure actually came earlier than I had expected, so I didn’t go through a long period of worrying about whether I would get tenure, but I didn’t have much money and that was the biggest struggle not until about forty, not until I taught in Hong Kong in mid-nineties did I have a saving’s account with money in it, because I lived in New York, then I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, both of those were extremely expensive places to live, and my first salary at Columbia was 18,500 dollars which is equivalent to around 38,000 U. S. dollars today, which is about one third of what they are paying starting assistant professor at Columbia, so you know that was a big struggle for me, it was paying bills especially after our son was born and then we had to think about, you know, daycare at one point, we must have been spending almost half of our income on daycare, which is insane. So that was the only real struggle I would say from my perspective. What advice would you like to give to sociology students based on your own experience? This is true not just for sociology but I think for all academic work, especially the social sciences. Don’t view this as a job like any other, don’t view this as the same thing as going into investment banking or whatever, don’t view this as a career that you are playing a game at checking boxes, publishing here, publishing there, publishing things that you don’t necessarily care about, simply for adding a line to your resume. I think that’s become all too common in American sociology, I think it’s taking the intellectual joy out of being a sociologist. Many of the graduate students that I see here are obsessed with publishing in a top journal, it’s all they think about from the time they get here, and the part of it is the pressure that we put on them. It’s becoming incredibly intense, intensely competitive, people worrying about impact

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scores, right? I think it’s also happening in China, it’s happening in Hong Kong, and increasingly it’s becoming more like a rat race, a rat race means that basically people are running on all directions, fanatically trying to do things, right? And you know I became an academic because I did not want to be in the rat race, I did not want to do meaningless work, I did not want to do work that was not meaningful to me. So I think my advice is try to resist the pressures to treat an academic career like you are working for Goldman Sachs or a law firm, try to think carefully about what’s interesting and meaningful to you, don’t be paralyzed by this thought, but try to work that is meaningful to you, you should push yourself to be productive in publish, but don’t make that the only thing that you try to accomplish, make sure you are always doing work that interests you, that permits you to be creative, and once you basically forget about that, and just try to strategically publish in this top journal, churn out an article on some side issue that you really don’t care about, just to pad your resume, well, then I think you might as well be working for a bank because you make a lot more money. I mean it’s a different career, and you know, at least in the United States, academics make a lot more money than they did when I first went into this and I always expect to be relatively poor, but you know when students consider a career now, those starting salary at least in the top universities in the United States is not that much lower than it used to be from some of the professions. You never become wealthy, I think one of our previous university presidents said in the 1960s and 1970s, “If we are going to become professors, that was kind like becoming a priest.” You didn’t quite take a vow of poverty, but you were never going to be that comfortable that let your family have lots of money. And you were doing it only for the meaning of the work, you weren’t doing it in order to climb some career ladder. But it’s become professionalized in the United States, and I think even more it’s increasingly become highly professionalized in China in the same way, you know, ranking systems, citation counts, impact scores, it’s just, becoming not only professionalized but also bureaucratized. How has been a sociologist influenced you? I am not a Marxist any more. I am not a fan of the Cultural Revolution any more. I guess it has impressed upon me that it’s good to have opinions, it’s good to have strong viewpoints but always check yourself before you come to a conclusion, before you feel something very strongly, make sure that you have good reasons for believing what you believe, whatever subject I ever have taken up, the ideas that I had about that subject before I did my research were very different from where they ended up. In fact, in almost every case, I came to view the ideas that I started out with as being completely wrong-headed. And what that means is that you know if I go through life, I read newspapers, I have opinions about this policy issues, that political issue, foreign relations, look at the evidence dispassionately before you come to a conclusion. And so, I guess that’s a big impact, be careful about your beliefs because that can be very mistaken. Don’t become highly committed to a position without being thoroughly self-reflective about your reasons for holding that ideas and always consider the other point of view seriously, don’t write a research paper as if you are on one team and you are trying to defeat the other team, I mean that’s just the wrong

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way to do work, consider both points of view very seriously and if the evidence is not unambiguously on one side or the other, say it, be quite honest about it. So, I guess that’s the way that the scholarly work kind of bleeds back into my personal life. And I guess another way is try to be objective as possible because most of us are automatically subjective and reexamine your beliefs, I mean that’s what I have learned, that is why I like being a sociologist. What i not sociologist, what do you think you probably are doing now? I never thought twice about becoming an academic. In recent years, I wondered if I fit better today in the political science department than in the sociology department, actually that is probably true. I do not regret being a sociologist, if I shifted it over into the political science department, I would look like a sociologist in a political science department, my way of thinking the work that I have read, the work that I have published is different from the way that political scientists write about things today, but the topics are the same. If I weren’t an academic, I honestly don’t know, I think I probably could have been a pretty good lawyer, I didn’t want to be a lawyer, but you know there are certain similarity between the skills that I have as an academic in certain kinds of legal writing, making arguments, I probably would be much wealthier if I did that, but you know I haven’t had any complaints about my standard of living. Introduction of Related Characters Barrington Moore Jr. (1913–2005) was an American political sociologist. He is famous for his Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (1966), a comparative study of modernization in Britain, France, the United States, China, Japan, Russia, Germany, and India. David W. Harvey (1935), born in England, is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography, City University of New York, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1961, Harvey received a Ph.D. in geography from Cambridge University. He has written a large number of books and articles to promote the development of geography as a discipline. After publishing the book Explanation in Geography, Harvey turned to care about the nature of social injustice, racism, exploitation and capitalism, and published several influential works. Martin K. Whyte (1942) is an American sociologists and a sociology professor at Harvard University who is best known for his research on contemporary Chinese society in both the Mao and reform eras. He has taught at the University of Michigan, George Washington University and Harvard University. His main research areas are comparative sociology, family sociology, development sociology and sociology of contemporary China. His masterpiece is One Country, Two Societies: Contemporary China Urban and Rural Inequality. William L. Parish (unknown birth year) is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago and China Research Center at the University of Michigan. His representative work is Village and Family in Contemporary China.

Afterword

On August 23, 2016, I embarked on a year-long exchange program at Harvard University. To me, having a chance to study at Harvard is really a big fortune in my life so far. However, the fortune was so big that I often felt I had paid so less and gained so much. As the Bible says, “To Whom Much Is Given, Much Will Be Required”, I thought the best way to reward the big fortune is to share it with other people. This is like splitting the big cake into many small parts, I just take the one belongs to me and the remains should be shared with others. It seems like that is the only way I could accept to take the big fortune for granted. So, at the end of the first semester, I suddenly realized time did fly fast and I needed to do something. As a student who studies sociology for nearly a decade, I still could not answer a question with 100 percent confidence to my friends, junior sociology students as well as people who are interested in sociology. The question is, as they always ask, “What is sociology?” In fact, this question has been suspended in my heart for many years. The longer I study sociology, the harder I feel to explain it. And one day when I was at Harvard, an idea just popped up, “Since I am studying at Harvard, why do not I ask sociology professors the answer? They are all the leading sociologists in the world!” What is more, “I should not be satisfied with exploring the answer at Harvard, I should also go to Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Pennsylvania, Chicago, Berkeley and Stanford, and ask professors there the same question—what is sociology in your eyes?” So, I suddenly realized what I was going to do. Yes, I would interview American leading sociologists. Not just the interviews, I would also like to make films of each interview. Since English is a global language, the interviews might spread in the world, thus the fortunate cake could be shared with more people. But when I calmed down from the excitement, I started to thinking about some practical problem, which was whether I had the conditions to achieve this vision. I planned to interview 20 well-known American sociologists, but they were living throughout the United States; from that time, I had only eight months left but a lot things needed to be done: I needed to send invitation letters first and negotiated time with professors who accepted it, I had to travel along the East coast back and forth many times, then flew to Chicago in the middle, and finally to the West coast of California; I needed to invest some © Peking University Press 2020 L. Chen (ed.), A Journey of Discovering Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6603-5

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money on video equipment as well as traveling fare. Considering I was going to many places, the cost would not be a small sum. When I thought about all these things, it seemed the project was very impracticable. I realized that the previous thoughts may be kind of impulsive and hot-headed. Although I spent a few days to calm down, there was always a voice kept telling me that the project was perhaps the thing I was destined to do. Because no one knew when the next person with the same idea would appear, and no one was sure that the person had the same idea would fulfill it with persistence. However, Any uncertainty was likely to lead to the delay of this plan. Then I thought of Max Weber’s famous term “calling”. It seemed like there was a calling encouraging me to complete the project too. I was very fortunate because there were a lot of people helping me fulfill the project. First of all, I want to thank Professor Frank Dobbin, without his invitation letter, my visit to Harvard would be impossible from the very beginning. And when I told professor my plan, he kindly found professor Richard Swedberg’s book Economics and Sociology from his bookshelf and recommended it to me as a reference. This book really gave me great inspiration. I immediately decided to interview some American sociologists just as what professor Swedberg did, but my plan was to write an introduction book to junior sociology students, young scholars as well as the public who are interested in sociology. I am very grateful to professor Dobbin for what he has done for me and “Thanks” is not enough to express my gratitude to him. I also want to thank my advisor professor Xin Tong and professor Aiyu Liu from Peking University, professor Changcheng Zhou from Wuhan University, because they provided great support for my trip to Harvard. I want to thank professor Min Ren from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Dr. Yajun Cao from Wuhan University, because they were the earliest audiences of my idea and plan. I would also like to thank the members of Dobbin Research Group, especially Laura Adler, Barbara Kiviat, Carly Knight, they gave me a lot of very good suggestions to improve the project. Thanks to Dr. Jie Guo from Peking University who was with me at Harvard at that time, she assisted me with the first interview. I am also grateful to Dr. Kankan Huang from Renmin University of China who helped me make video records many times. We together drove from Boston to Dartmouth College and that was the first time we drove in the U.S. after we both got American driving licenses. I would also like to thank Dr. Chen Chen and Dr. Qiang Zhang from Peking University, Dr. Yilin Chiang from the University of Pennsylvania, Xian Qu from the University of Chicago. They all offered me a great help when I was with them. It is my big fortune to have Dr. Meng Yu’s support becasuse I could not finish the book so smoothly without her help.

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I want to thank my parents, since they were “invited” by me to travel in California, but when we were in Oakland, San Francisco and San Diego, I always had to leave them behind because I had to do my interview project. The only thing they could do during that period was to wait me in the car. I remember one time when I came out from professor Collins’ home, they looked very happy because they heard their son was talking to a foreigner smoothly and that was probably the first time they realized that their son’s English was so “good”. I would also like to thank my roommate Henry Jiang. He helped me proofread most of the English interview transcripts I transcribed. I still remember during that period, the first thing Henry came back from work was to go into my room and helped me proofread until late at night. I would also like to thank my English teacher Lisa Chiulli and my friend Barbara Kiviat, Victoria Asbury, Dylan Lim Jun Shen and Richard Maher, they all helped me proofread some of the English interview transcripts. Thanks to Yixian Qiu who helped me proofread part of my Chinese manuscript. The success of the interview project was also inseparable from friends who gave me a lot of help in daily life. They made my life in Boston full of warmth and happiness. They are Isabella, Herman, Patty, Paul, Chuck, Inger-Marie, Steve, Natasha, Sabrina, Weibo, Lisa, Richard, Cathy, Grace, Walt and Cecilia. Thanks to professor Min Ren and her husband as well as their lovely daughter, they made me feel at home in Boston. Thanks to editor Yue Wu from Peking University Press. Her passion, sense of responsibility, carefulness made me truly understand the meaning of what professor Mario Small once said “Submit your paper to the right person!” Finally, I would like to thank the 20 American sociologists who have accepted my interviews because the book would not come true without their support. More importantly, these 20 American sociologists have the same consensus with me, which is to build as many academic bridges of communication and discussion as possible between American and Chinese sociology. I sincerely hope this book could be one of those bridges in the coming future. And I am very grateful to the 20 American leading sociologists for their willingness to share their precious life experiences and stories with Chinese students in the world of sociology. As the English transcriber and Chinese translator who has read the book many times, I admit that not every paragraph in the book is wonderful. I guess there are probably two reasons: one is I present the interviews through printed words instead of vivid video; the other is because of my blunt translation skill which makes the colorful side of each interview wanes a lot. Nevertheless, I still hope readers could start from their favorite sociologist, and according to professor Michael Burawoy’s ethnographic approach–to read, and to re-read and to really understand it–to read this book. As the first person who has done this, the direct benefit to me is a lot of their words have been absorbed and those words keep influencing me constantly.

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I think the most meaningful thing I have done so far is to finish this interview project. I remember when I first set out from Boston to Hanno Dover and then to New Haven, Providence, New York, Princeton, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco, I talked to those great sociologists face-to-face, listened to their wonderful stories and experiences. Now I sincerely hope every reader could experience a wonderful journey of discovering sociology through this book and learn something at the end of the trip. Long Chen Peking University September 1, 2018