Yesterday’s New York Times featured an opinion piece on rudeness and incivility in the workplace and the high cost of mean bosses. It’s true, mean bosses suck. I’ve only had a couple, and most of my bosses during my low wage service years were pleasant overall or mostly absent, which is nice too. When I was a higher ed adjunct, my “boss” was the department chair. Technically they are not “the boss”, they are the people who have the responsibility to schedule classes and push some additional, administrative paper.…
Multi-kulti in a German Beach Resort
We brought my mother-in-law to the Baltic Sea resort town of Ahlbeck which is near the Polish border for her 90th birthday. My mother-in-law visited the resort in one of its former heydays of the 1930s. At the time she was ten years old, and very active as a swimmer—as 90 year olds will, they wanted to visit the memories of their childhood.
Ahlbeck is on the island of Usedom, which is mostly in Germany, though a tip of the eastern part is in Poland. …
New Mandarins, Old Meritocracy, It’s All the Same Thing, Really. Commentary from 2013-2048
The Daily Beast in 2013 published a piece about “the New Mandarins” by Megan McArdle. The New Mandarins are those people who test well, get good jobs, write the tests tor the next generation, and then give birth to the next generation that will do well, and so on. The problem of course is that as in Ancient China, the Mandarins become more and more remote from the people who they rule, and the connection between the ruled and rulers becomes more tenuous. …
Artichokes
By Guest Writer: N. Jeanne Burns
A friend said recently that one definitive marker of social class is whether you know how to eat an artichoke. This probably isn’t true for migrant farmworkers who toil in or around Castroville, California, the self-proclaimed “Artichoke Capital of the World.” Or even for people who grew up on the Mediterranean, where the plant is native. But M.F.K. Fisher, who herself grew up surrounded by fields of artichokes, recognized the class-climbing rank of the thistle in her essay “The Social Status of the Vegetable.”
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Mathematicians Like Social Sciences, Too!
Robert Harrington of the American Mathematical Society is trying t understand how young mathematician use their scholarly products. As an an “experiment” he tried out qualitative interview methods to investigate his question. Here is what he found out:
…As a scientist, I have ideas about what scientific method is, and what evidence is. I now understand the value of the qualitative approach – hard for a scientist to say. Qualitative research opens a window to descriptive data and analysis.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Stigma, and Learned Helplessness
Does the stigmatized individual assume his differentness is known about already or is evident on the spot, or does he assume it is neither known about by those present nor immediately perceivable by them? In the first case one deals with the plight of the discredited, in the second with that of the discreditable. This is an important difference.” Erving Goffman, 1963
I don’t have anything new to add to the thoughts I had when I wrote about PTSD in “Trauma Culture: Who’s a Normal Now?…
Good News on the Open Access Front
Cultural Anthropology looks like they are making a good go of Open Access. It is expanding the breadth and depth of their readership too–which makes cultural anthropology more accessible t the general public. Read their editorial here.
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Good Sociology Coming out of the New York Times and a Business School
Someone is doing some pretty good sociology on the New York Times–a Business Professor no less! Like I wrote before, sociology is among the most widespread and successful of all disciplines in the academy, and it is not only found in Sociology Departments. The article is callsed “Guess Who Doesn’t Fit in at Work” and it is about how discrimination in hiring practices.
…Wanting to work with people like ourselves is not new.
Open Source Academic Publication and Those Frustrating Paywalls!
Rex over at Savage Minds has another editorial about the need for Open Access in academic publishing. This is a movement across academic landscape, in which publishers are asking how they can produce well-edited articles which maintain a legitimacy within academia. As Kerim points out, the standard responses of the conservative old-time academic journals is, well, conservative. Meaning, that they do not want to take the financial risks associated with moving on-line.…
Max Weber on the Politics of Wives
One of the weaknesses of Classical Social Theory is that it deals poorly with the nature of gender and the family (for exceptions see Mary Wollstonecraft and Harriett Martineau). In two places in his essay “Politics as Vocation,” though Max Weber brings up the subject of wives. The first reference is near the beginning of the essay where he defines the term “politics.” He admits that there are a range of politics which encompass “independent leadership functions.”…
RIP Sociology, or the Most Successful Discipline of the Twentieth Century?
Last December, Julie lamented the decline of Sociology as a discipline in an essay provocatively titled “RIP Sociology.” As Julie noted in her post, it seems that the discipline no longer had the vim and verve she remembers from her undergraduate and graduate days of only 10 or 20 years ago. She laments with Les Back the dominance of “the audit culture” in sociology which avoids big questions in favor of some arbitrary metric, and in particular refuses to ask students to wrestle with big problems, or engage the broader society with a sociological imagination.…
Academic Meetings, Graduation Season, and a Bit from Rousseau
Meetings are rituals, and rituals need symbols, and decorations. I’ve been to a lot of meetings in my time as an academic where I sat bored and confused, but still fulfilled my function as a decoration, and clap on cue. And to a large extent, that is what such ritual is about: clapping on cue about that to which you are brain dead.
Perhaps Rousseau was thinking of such academic meetings when he wrote in the 19th century “On this showing, the human species is divided into so many herds of cattle, each with its ruler, who keeps guard over them for the purpose of devouring them” (Rousseau).…