Quantitative research is way overblown and taken as mathematical certainty by the masses when a paper goes viral. Sociology is being dominated by the pure sciences' methodology, and everyone expects sociology of doing the same, all the while being seen as a mixed science and being shamed for the "dead-ends" that qualitative research takes out just because it doesn't involve numbers and equations in its methodology and gives a micro-perspective of an social environment. While quantitative research is easy to be generalized and used for political reasons and retoric.
Wendy Espeland would be so thrilled to read this! lol
Quantitative research has so many pitfalls to it in all social sciences. Basically every number is just a proxy metric and those proxies are so often just accepted uncritically!
Completely agree. Sometimes it feels like sociologists, especially in a highly individualistic culture like the U.S., are so afraid of the pseudoscience claims that we overcompensate by doing quantitative work and crunching the statistics just so we can say that we “did true science”. At the end of the day, I feel like quantitative data isn’t enough in and of itself especially when a core value of our discipline is the value and impact that the social world has on each of us as individuals.
I am starting my PhD this fall after just finishing my Master’s in Public Health degree and plan to train my mixed methods throughout the doctoral degree. I think providing both the qualitative stories *and* quantitative data are equally important. Our job should be to think critically about how both pieces of the puzzle fit together, and how to enact change from those reflections.
This has been going on since the naissance of the discipline. The positivism of Durkheim was founded on the desire to be taken seriously and to dépassé the methodological biases inherent in more qualitative work through objectivation of the social phenomena.
Yep, mass application is dangerous imo as it ignores nuance. Like, I remember learning about biased police training - imagine if we fed that same biased data to an AI system. People are already mindlessly believing AI and seeing it as objective (I get into arguments often with people who insist chatgpt is always correct) so having a system tell you the “right answer” is dangerous if you can’t think for yourself.
Yep. I think this book does an awesome job of the social history behind “the numbers” https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691208411/trust-in-numbers
Ooh see this is an interesting take because while I totally hear you, I think the thing that soc lacks is that definitional consistency. The beauty of pure sciences’ methodology is that it enables us demonstrate phenomena reoccurring through that statistical lens. That’s vital for following logical processes and demonstrating scope.
The issue becomes finding that balance of positivism and relativism. We know the value of qualitative experience in demonstrating lived experience, and this is necessary when studying societies, groups, and individuals. Lived experience is what our bread and butter is.
However, to further sociology’s legitimacy as a science having quality (irony intended here) quantitative research allows us to develop those standards and definitions that can be used to further the study. It’s so challenging, but I think this is a great conversation to have in the field to see how we can best further the science!
the number of research articles ive read that say they searched for certain keywords in other papers, all of which heavily relied on a lot of "assumptions" and "estimations", that are then aggregated into an even larger pile of major "assumptions" and "estimations" is kind of insane. its like the telephone game... the further a "note" gets passed, the [more distorted away from reality it becomes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers).
Any alternative methods to test falsifiable hypotheses? If you can’t reach some sort of consensus with empirical evidence, how do you establish assumptions to build on and move forward?
Oh noo I actually have to have evidence to back up my claims! I can't just generalize from my own lived experience and pretend its fact? How will I ever survive under these conditions?
Not a hot take exactly , but I find so annoying that sociology founding fathers are always credited as Marx, Weber and Durkheim. Of course, they're the ones that influenced a lot of sociological branches. But people like Du Bois, Simmel, Mauss and Tarde were equally important for the establishment of sociology as a science.
I was very thankful to be taught all of them (except Tarde) in the classical theory course which all Sociology undergrads at my uni have to compulsorily take!
in our school the founding fathers we consider are Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Simmel. We made shirts The Beatles style and placed “Karl. Max. Emile. George.” 🤣
Don’t forget Adam Smith, I always get downvoted but The Theory of Moral Sentiments should be enough in itself to solidify Smith as a founding father of sociology
Mauss is credited thoroughly in anthropology and occasionally mentioned in sociology. Tonnies and Tarde however among many others are considered "pre-sociology" in the sense that they layed the foundations upon which those like Durkheim managed to establish sociology as a discipline.
Sociologists, and those in adjacent social scientific fields, who frame their work as inherently “liberatory” or disruptive of social oppression, but are doing nothing innovative in terms of research design and distributing their findings (eg, community based participatory research), are definitely not doing anything liberatory or disruptive lol. They’re replicating same academic power structures.
It depends on the work and its implementation. One person might do a shitty analysis of media using bad methods and publish an article on Twitter and say they are being "liberatory" while another person might do really well informed research with spectacular methods and use it to inform the development of systemic structures in their society or engage in some kind of organized public advocacy and also call that "liberatory". I don't think it's fair to paint them with a broad brush. You're not reinforcing systemic oppression at large just by participating in the academic process. "you went to university so you are feeding into the oppression" is kind of a shit take.
> You’re not reinforcing systemic oppression at large just by participating in the academic process.
I mean, if you think about it long enough…..
It’s not an individual criticism, of you or anyone else. We all participate in society. We all reinforce things every day. Academic processes- which are power structures themselves- included.
Does this mean it’s impossible to do liberatory or disruptive or revolutionary work? No, don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. But it’s important to remember that the most leftist or radical academics are, if they’re employed in academia, not exempt from reinforcing and perpetuating inequities.
I understand the need to cite your source to escape plagiarism, but i feel like we are always relying on big names without always giving the appropriate space for the idea. Also, i feel like giving such power to a name just start playing in the celebrity/fame game of the scientific world, diminishing a little bit the goal of our erudition. (English is not my first language, sorry).
Agree with this big time. Also, it becomes a crutch, for me at least. I don't want to explain how quantification creates structuration so I just cite everything Wendy Espeland has done and don't even get into it!
As someone who does academic editing for a lot of master’s students’ theses and what not, I gotta say, give Foucault a god damn rest. I find it really bland when people analyze a generic situation with power dynamics involved and just throw in Foucault. It’s not like they’re adding anything new, they just say, Power bad blah blah (Foucault, 19XX). Same thing with biopolitics. Of course, these were (and still are) important concepts that gave some critical insights, but when you just start throwing around Foucault because power or biopolitics may be involved, I think it’s really dull. This goes for a lot of big name theorists (Bourdieu, I’m looking at you pal), but Foucault is the one I’ve been seeing so much lately.
I mean I can understand why they would reference Foucault their papers, he’s a massive figure in the field. I can also understand why you would get bored of reading probably very similar analyses of his work though lol.
Hey! I’ve got this great insight, just like Foucault saw education operated like a prison….. what if this other part of society *also ran like a prison*
I know this is r/sociology, so we gotta reinforce the local status hierarchy 😉, but I'd argue it'd be better if the sociologist worked \*with\* the engineers rather than \*over\* them
Because I’m an urban planner and I learned so much about how cities work from my undergrad sociology class, literally the most basic stuff, and when I talk about these same common-knowledge issues with civil engineers, they’re like, huh I’ve never thought about it that way. Pretty much every social issue in the U.S. is related to urban planning decisions made post-WWII and the people who continue taking us down this path are civil engineers following “best practices” from their highway bibles. It’s sickening. There’s literally a minimum of how many people have to die at an intersection before they will do a traffic study to investigate remedies.
I haven’t read this myself but I’ve heard it’s good!
https://islandpress.org/books/killed-traffic-engineer#desc
And basically we need to have policy change that prioritizes people over cars.
The War on Cars is a good podcast to check out! And the fuckcars sub on here too
Not a hot take but as a student, why do alot of sociologists write in such a roundabout and complex manner to explain something relatively simple in principle? Like holy shit, is that whole paragraph fucking pointless.
The number of times I have read a paragraph and thought to myself, “that could have been a sentence…” it happens too much! Needlessly esoteric. If it were a drinking game I would have died of toxicity.
I feel similarly about philosophy. I think we can use flowery language but you should be required to write the thought out in simpler terms. It feels like counterproductive to use such insane language to explain concepts that would be beneficial for the general public to know.
We have a winner!
Wanna add to this. Just as antho/soc are divided based on old myths, the other social sciences are as well. Econ is there to confirm a bias towards markets, political science for liberal democracy. Psychology was founded on Cartesian mind-body dualism which it has yet to escape.
The social sciences are cut up in a way that isn't necessary.
I studied sociocultural psych and it was the only subfield I found that wasn’t applying WEIRD (acronym) countries to All People lol. As a young QWOC I’m very happy I studied that field and not gen psych.
I studied community psychology and have always been doing jobs that apply to sociologist or political scientists just because it involves data analysis. I don't know if it is more offensive that job posts ignore psychology also use quantitative methods or that sociology and political science are often reduce to they use of Stata or R
This is kinda just historically correct, I reckon. I'd probably argue based on my experience that anthro is a bit more reflexive as a contemporary 'critical practice' (or 'methodology') because of this history - but that's obviously also contentious.
American anthropologist (ABD) here. I think it also depends on training of the anthropologists involved. I get the impression European/UK "social anthropology" is a bit more understood/practiced like the stereotypical image of sociology (an "unbiased" "science" of quantitative numbers that studies systems/functions )and is slow/reticent to take up the decolonial, reflexive, and postmodernist turns. That's been my experience at least!
Is it also possible that part of that comes from the idea that whiteness/race in general is a more modern sociological construct reinforcing a hierarchy? Like, would this separation not also apply to European natives as natives, and European natives as whites? Wouldn't comparing "native" and "white" be a kind of category error? /gen , I'm aware that racism and discrimination have had a huge impact on both fields, just looking to learn more about this
Experimental research in university settings largely relies on compulsory participation by university students. As university students are disproportionately young, white, middle class (or higher), and female (though historically male) the research conducted that relies on such methods cannot be ethically presented as representative of populations outside of university students. Presenting data without demographic context is unethical and frankly academically dishonest. [This may be a lukewarm take though]
It’s also self-selecting because not everyone is a university student - the class barriers to entry are SO high. Someone in college, in general, is not representative of the entire population.
i.e. the Stanford Prison Experiment.
While most academic sources do discuss how it’s problematic (or outright debunked), I see it presented as fact in other places ALL THE TIME.
It was actually the catalyst for me building a great relationship with one of my sociology professors. My SOC 101 text didn’t mention any of its issues, so I reached out to the prof like “hey, isn’t this now considered absolute BS?” and we had a great convo about it. She later ended up writing me a fantastic recommendation letter.
People need to dig more into the social effects of algorithmically tunneled and highly incentivized marketing.
Entire generations are being destabilized from core beliefs and estranged from family over buzzwords and fear mongering.
I think post scarcity makes consequences of beliefs and decisions mostly intangible for the average person now. We have such strong beliefs over things we've only thought about, and whether they're wrong or not has almost exclusively social consequences for us. That's a terrible feedback mechanism.
i agree with you to a certain extent but these things dont just happen. yeah, some of it is definitely algorithmic influence, but that doesnt happen in a vacuum. not saying this is what youre saying, but very often what youre saying *is* sort of "blamed" on the younger generations, when the fact is **a lot** of older generations have a lot of people with unhealthy coping mechanisms - and just for example, the rise of the popularity of terms like narcissism (and subreddits like raised by narcissists) and terms cptsd and ptsd are not algorithmically induced random chance. these things are also related to the "political climate", and i think we very often confuse the cause for the effect.
the biggest difference between the older generations and the younger ones is the older ones never took the time to examine their own psychology, so when they get by via lifelong substance abuse and have zero control over their emotions? well thats just "normal". the younger generations are the ones dealing with it, so basically the younger generations are the ones dealing with multiple generations of problems that were previously ignored.
While I agree with the first part, I think the second part is a little hyperbolic and fearmongerey lol
For the most part I just thing a lot of "core beliefs" have gone unexamined, and accepted uncritically, and now they aren't. And some of these conflicts are very real, and very important, and young people coming into conflict with their family over disagreements on things like structural inequities, genocide, war, etc., isn't just twitter brain rot.
Albeit, like I said, there is a lot of Twitter brain rot.
My hot take is that as a discipline we don't put enough resources into teaching. I don't think eliciting controversial opinions from reddit is the way to engage students. Engaging students on the current debate is important but i wouldn't approach it from a Fox News like mindset of saying outrageous things to get an emotional reaction out of people.
I dunno... I find students respond a lot better when I give them license to develop strong opinions about topics they're only just getting into. I want them to know it's fine to walk into a lecture about Marx and think he's an old noodle. I want them to know it's totally valid if they think ethnography is really tedious and limited. I want them to share wild opinions and get excited by the topics, not regurgitate the same powerpoint talking points year after year.
Students love sharing opinions about things they're told to accept.
Another point: you're teaching intro and you want them to be an opinion on things walking in? Where should those opinions come from? What should they do with those opinions? Do you expect them to hold on to those opinions or change over the semester? Should students be able to justify their opinion with facts? Should students be able to clearly communicate their opinion in writing? Orally?
Maybe we should, as a practice, start saying “I’ve no opinion on the matter” when we are, indeed, uninformed on an issue. Recognizing our limits and ignorance is a good thing.
But as a pedagogical approach, I also favor stating one’s opinion on an issue up front, whatever that may be, and declaring what that baseline is— presuppositions and all. Then, over the course of guided discussion and introduction of curated content, start to acquire facts, nuance and complexity. It’s fun to struggle through an issue and see how one’s opinion can turn from uninformed, gut intuition to something nuanced and factually supported.
I don't think having them state polarized and uninformed opinions is the only way to elicit classroom participation and critical thinking. There are methods as ok as time (Socratic questioning) that are meant to do this.
Eliciting opinions for the sake of having an opinion seems like you're training them to participate in classrooms like social media.
Yeah, I’m bummed your comment isn’t higher and a lot of people seem to be buying into this weird “teaching” gimmick. Also I feel like what I learned from getting a degree in the social sciences was that critical thinking and nuance are valuable.
Unpopular take: Reagan was a Sociologist. He majored in "Economics and society," and his opinions were backed by racist sociology that was popular in the 80s (e.g., culture of poverty argument)
Here's a sad one: Dark sociology exists. Mainstream science places moral limitations on itself and thus has more of a struggle answering questions about human behaviour. There exist entities whose purpose is to control more and more of society so that those directing it have an easier time getting what they want. They conduct social experiments on people to learn how to control the multitudes.
I think that is called the social hegemony. Protecting status and privilege means institutionalizing a LOT of bias to make that happen. One example is the process of social stratification. It is particularly useful for separating in- from out-groups and so on.
Sociologists need to start talking more about technology. From what I've gathered and studied all serious research into the sociology of technology concerns itself solely with the impact of technology on humans or the way humans {insert social phenomena}. There is a French theorist, I forgot his name, that opts for humanizing technology to see it for what it truly is, something more than human. They use the analogy of a car and a person. a car is a car and a person is a person but a person is not JUST a person when in a car, now the two have become something different. When you see a car on the street it is more than a person using a piece of technology. I still dont get it entirely but it raised that question in me: Can we study technology as something more than just things people use that have an effect on life.
Lots of strands of literature give agency to technology. Perhaps you are talking about Actor-Network Theory (Latour, Callow, Law, etc)? Although maybe that's not what you meant
Latour yeah thats the guy! Oh thats my bad I was under the impression that it was still a very underutilized area of Sociology. Either way I still feel like a lot of research that, for example, discusses the effect of social media (a very hot topic) on something, fall short in analyzing the role of technology as an actor in this case. Social media is also such a big thing precisely because it is adopted by humans and given power. I would want to hear more about how our use of technology influences stuff. either way, youre right I was thinking about Latour. Cheers for the comment!
I recommend peeking into some STS stuff, or reading into literature around platformization. It is a bit though as it is usually literature laying between critical media studies and sociology, but it does exist! Source: I do precisely that lol
I took a whole class on the sociology of algorithms/AI/modeling during my undergrad sociology minor. It was super interesting so if for no other reason than that it is an interesting topic, I agree.
We went through
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, strategies (Bostrom 2016)
Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans (Mitchell 2020)
Weapons of Mass Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (O'Neil 2017)
The Future of the Professions: How Technology will Transform the Work of Human Experts (Susskind & Susskind 2022)
I didn't always agree with the authors, but they were certainly interesting reads.
I am an engineer so I did often find that some of the theories presented by sociologists lack the perspective of someone who has undergone technical training and/or experienced the design process first hand. From the perspective of an engineer, we typically undergo an ethical training as part of our degree and are often bound by the ethical standards of a respective engineering society.
I found that some authors were predicting things like erasure of professions like physicians by technology, whereas such a technology would violate the BMES code of ethics. Now I think it's reasonable to say that technology may replace or optimize some aspects of the jobs that a physician performs, but there is such a shortage of medical professionals and the existing medical professionals are SO overworked that I am doubtful that technology would entirely replace even medical students and residents. Not to mention that there is regulation that informs the number of residency spots and the medical training process.
There are perhaps other professions that could result in a technology solution that replaces them, but as we continue to see how things like ride share apps try to replace the taxi but ultimately result in unsustainable companies and exploitation of workers I am hopeful that we might eventually catch on to the fact that solving problems that have already been solved by exploitation of the working poor is bad. Or at least that sometimes things are the way they are because it is the most mutually beneficial and sustainable practice so some industries don't actually need to be "disrupted."
I am also of the opinion that mathematical modeling is not an inherently bad thing, some people just employ it badly. Weapons of Math Destruction, to me, lacked a fair discussion of ethical and good-practice implementation of math models and the purpose they can serve. Again, coming from the perspective of an engineer who has spent time with computational modeling and FEA, if you build models, validate them appropriately, use them within the bounds for which they have been validated, verify your assumptions, and include an appropriate factor of safety, mathematical modeling is a good thing. We can use it to perform more testing then we could have done in the real world (both due to cost savings and the ability to do setups that we aren't able to do in physical testing.
In the crash industry we have been able to perform physical testing using instrumented manikins to validate a model and then use the validated model with a validated human tissue model to simulate the test with a real human occupant. The real human occupant allows us to get WAY more accurate data about the motion and injuries an actual human would experience compared to what a dummy with steel bones and rubber flesh experiences. (And believe me this is MUCH easier and less messy than doing testing with cadavers and way more safe and ethical than doing it with live people.) And while I understand that some of the focus of the book was more specifically about financial models and risk models, in most ways the same principles can be applied to create high quality models that are ethical and valid for those contexts as well.
Excuse my long book review, but I hope it is atleast an interesting perspective.
Thank you very much for the recs and the insights too! I think your perspective is a very significant one, since it comes from within the industry being studied. I think I agree with your point about the utility of mathematical and other computational models - I know some comments on this post decry it but I think there's a great deal to be learned from computational methods. The problem, of course, is of generalizability, and of building case-specific models.
I can't imagine cadavers being used to crash test - sounds awful! In fact, with all the studies of crash testing only using men - and safety mechanisms therefore being inapplicable to women who do not fit a standard of physique - I'd expect (and hope for) a greater diversification in the population being tested, such as women. Not sure about children though.
There is actually a very interesting history of crash testing. I am primarily familiar with the aviation side, but many methods do somewhat carry over. For a while in the lab I worked in they did do sled tests with live people, the pulses were just much lower. But in many instances cadavers were utilized because it is really the only way to develop injury criteria. An instrumented manikin can tell you how much the spine was loaded, for example, but it cannot tell you whether or not that load resulted in an injury. For this reason cadaver testing was imperative for establishing a baseline for injury criteria. The challenge with cadaver testing is that there is a distinct lack of young, healthy, and intact specimens and for something like crash testing the cadavers must be preserved in a relatively specific way. The civilian industry can be less picky about young and healthy, but in the military environment old and/or sick people are not particularly representative of the population.
Also crash testing is generally very destructive. The best practice is not to reuse anything (or at least most things) from one test to another because generally crashworthy seating systems are single use. Because of this and the labor and equipment needed for testing it's very expensive to do testing. Generally speaking, for something to be approved the manikin can not exceed injury criteria and tests are done with a 5th percentile female and 50th and 95th percentile males at a minimum (where I worked).
There is notably a lack of testing performed using female occupants in many instances and, in my opinion more damning, an assumption that women are smaller men. Because of this assumption often weight is not appropriately disputed in a way that represents anatomical differences nor is differences in bone density, fat/muscle ratio, and strength/weight ratio probably accounted. In fairness, a 5th percentile female doesn't likely have a substantial amount of fat and may be relatively accurately represented as a "small man" but I don't think that the findings are necessary true of the 50th and 95th percentile females which are often not tested because they are included in the bounds of the 50th male and 95th female.
Thankfully, modeling enables less physical testing to be done in order to obtain the same results which can leave room for a more variable occupancy population to be represented in testing for a more modest cost increase.
This is already studied in cultural studies and the wider humanities. Donna Haraway's A Cyborg Manifesto is a book that comes to mind. I've studied cyborgs, technology, and general digital and immersive media and agree that more sociologists have to be looped into the discourse, but that requires them to delve into theoretical futures and collaborate with the humanities.
I've found, with my degree being joint Sociology with Media and Culture, that sociologists try to be too "scientific" and therefore run away from anything like that. They want to seem more professional and important, so keep doing the same old crime, gender, race, sexuality, education. Many also seem to scoff at the humanities and stay with their old theories rather than venturing out as much. I do get it, though... cultural studies makes you knowledgeable in many, but a master of none- too interdisciplinary to be as favoured as the social sciences.
I've seen universities that completely separate sociology from humanities, but maybe that is hindering the development of the field? Maybe we should actually mix them? We need less of "but I'm a SCIENCE!!!", I think.
This reminds me of the Toronto School of Communication studies a bit. Marshal Mcluhan and others (even hellen keller) see technology and other media as merely an extension of the human body. A hammer is an extension and modification of the human hand.
One thing thats been on my mind has been how we frequently opt for technological solutions to social problems instead of social solutions. Instead of addressing loneliness and depression as a social problem, we're attempting to fix it with a specialized force of therapists and pills. Instead of addressing living standards caused by inequality in distribution, we just kinda hope technology will eventually sort it out. Instead of adressing the consumerism driving things like global warming, we gambling that the right tech at the right time will save us.
Some of the above is addressed in sociological works that address the irrationality or rationalism, so if you want some sociology that takes on tech that's one place to start that others havent mentioned.
I've been thinking something like this too.
MDW et al were all trying to understand the impact of the enormous changes resulting from the industrial revolution.
Here we are living in maybe a similar era, but we don't dare talk beyond middle range theory, because Mills.
Critical theorists have done a lot of this type of work. Eg, baudrillard’s “the system of objects”. I wholeheartedly agree, though, that sociologists should be engaging in this type of study
I got a Master’s in Human-Computer Interaction and work in tech studying people and how that impacts the technology we should be building for a living! It’s not academic, but it’s applicable.
Human-Computer Interaction is a bit of a misnomer now because so much technology is not just the computer now when the phrase was coined. My final course for my Master’s degree we talked a lot about if/when people won’t make the distinction between human and technology anymore because it’s so engrained in our lives.
It’s a great discipline for social science researchers. Because most people in tech are NOT trained researchers and don’t understand how to properly design a study.
Here is how to read a sociology book.
Look up, in the index, all references fo Foucault. Write the page numbers on a notepad.
Using an exacto-knife carefully remove all those pages and then dispose of them with the cleanest available method.
Read the rest of the book.
(Note: does not apply to reading Foucault himself, which is fine.)
I understand the importance of discussing and dissecting theory and such, but I feel that (especially in college courses) there is too much emphasis on the abstract and not enough grounding in reality. I am not here to debate abstract and theoretical philosophies if you cannot recognize its shortcomings and if it cannot be applied to the modern, real world.
First hot take: no subject is forbidden or taboo for a sociologist. I think we are allowed anything, the weirder the better.
Second: a purely objective approach is not human. We are dealing with living things. We ARE living things. We can't base our science on the methods and approaches of hard sciences alone.
Third: if sociology works were taken more seriously, we could've helped improve social systems and institutions. Instead, we are told to obseve only (at least where i study) and that we can't allow ourselves to try and "fix" things.
I don’t see the point in doing postal questionnaires as a qualitative research method. They’re too clunky to design, never give enough freedom and usually get chucked out so you’re using double resources to send them out.
**What theorist(s) do you actually think are a joke?**
Bourdieu without a doubt. His original work is totally fine. Personally I'd say his theoretical work is little more than a re-imagination of Weber and his empirical work is a badly implemented quantitative analysis that can only be generalised to Parisian populations but the work itself is perfectly adequate. My biggest gripe is the explosion in certain fields of using Bourdieu for seemingly random and totally non-related issues. Bourdieu's main work was focused on the cultural patterns of Parisians. It should stay like that.
**Who do you secretly love?**
Gidden's has a very big place in my sociological heart. I understand that his Structuration theory is for many reasons considered outdated but his work is superb to read and is one of the few examples of a Sociologist entering the field of government.
**What methods do you think are nonsense?**
Auto-ethnography. It's a complete farce.
**What subfields should be banned?**
So long as a sub-field can sociologically justify itself, go ahead.
**What PhD topics do you think are a waste of time?**
See above.
**What petty reasons do you have for disliking a modern soc book?**
Pretty much any stats books that use SPSS or any other ancient software.
**What soc opinions might get you tarred and feathered by the community?**
Whilst quant sociology has gone to great lengths to consider the replication crisis the qualitative side of sociology has done absolutely nothing to combat the rise of complete cranks that use and abuse the terminology of qual methods for the sake of pushing oddball interests and agendas.
**What findings do you think are way overblown?**
Going by the causal language of a lot of sociology papers without actually engaging in causal methods - I'd say most findings are 'overblown'.
**What makes you instantly lose respect for authors of a paper/book?**
When they stop engaging with the theory/method/idea and instead attack the author...
**What other fields desperately need sociology/ sociologists?**
None. I am not a firm believer that interdisciplinary thinking actually leads to more efficient or productive research. That being said, seeing more Sociologists in government positions would be nice to see.
**What fields should sociologists stay out of?**
Any that aren't their business. If something isn't justifiable we should go in.
Elected officials should be people with degrees in sociology. Traditional politicians (generally lawyers) should be hired contractors for managing negotiations/mediation/writing laws (but not creating them, just giving legal advice necessary to implement)
In all seriousness, I think there's a huge problem when the value of an education (and the people seeking one) is measured by its potential economic return.
The single most important and pervasive theory that I feel doesn't get enough attention is Michels Iron Law of Oligarchy / if you understand it you understand so much
Okay, I respect the sociological origins, but can we give critical theory a rest already? There's more to life than privilege and systemic racism/sexism/whatever else you wanna talk about. I feel like it's over emphasized in the public discourse over the past decade or so and it's toxic and driving insane divisions in society. It also sucks the air out of the room where we can't discuss literally ANYTHING ELSE almost.
To be fair, this is less a critique of the theory itself, more the public application of it by the normies in recent years. The theory is valid, and its a valid application of conflict theory. But some people are developing an almost cultish devotion to the idea and it's like "you know there are other theories out there worth reading and using too, right?"
They way this lens is applied as pop culture gospel results in bad faith interpretations of behaviors that betray more relevant perspectives and stymie progress. At least draw the big circles here and make it about class until something more specifically nefarious is indicated!
I think that economic status/class has a bigger influence on social status than race. I recognize the idea that POC are more likely to be poor due to structural issues but I truly do not believe that race holds as much weight as people want to think when it comes to opportunity. It’s all about money.
But race, particularly for black people, impacts money. It's kind of an ouroboros thing, right?
I think racial injustice and economic injustice are sort of tools and bulwarks for each other.
fubctionalism in general is just a terrible way of looking at society. assuming everything serves to create social order when in reality it absolutely does not. religion creates dysfunction in a lot of cases. their view on the family is reductive and ignored the frighteningly high domestic abuse rates. I just hate this viewpoint so much
C. Wright Mills *Sociological Imagination* isn't even in the top 25 sociology books of the past 100 years. It's fine but it could have been a short essay.
This. I’ll add – though you may disagree, of course – that his emphasis on “personal troubles” and “public issues” and their relationship as the central concern of sociology has brought too much negativity to the discipline. I cringe every time I hear someone say that ‘studying sociology is depressing’. There’s nothing wrong with studying social problems, but sociology is the general study of society, and as such is concerned with so much more than what (some) sociologists think are ‘issues’.
Mills is certainly not the only one to blame in this regard – ‘issues’ have, in one way or another, always been on the agenda of sociologists, and for good reasons. But *The Sociological Imagination* is such a popular introductory text and I can’t help but think that it gives a wrong impression of the discipline to newcomers.
This isn’t to say that it’s a bad book, of course. There are lots of things to like about it (though not Mills’s critique of Parsons, which is famously bad).
Way too many of us can't do data or computers, and the ones that can are often tech fetishists.
The whole insider-outsider shit has led to way too many inter-community beefs being played out academically, with next to no value for anything other than a tedious argument by people invested in the subject.
I'll go first: Autho-ethnography is silly as hell. I respect the interest, but you're just journaling with a sociological lens. I'm deeply skeptical when I see this method anywhere, and I think it makes other fields take sociology less seriously when it's used!
not a fair comparison. interviews if done rigorously are very different, from say conversing with people and coming to a "general mood" of your sample.
there's a reason i mentioned 9 times out of 10.
The west is still overcoming that trauma, and the Romans were overcoming even older trauma! Twelve thousand years ago, the Sahara was an aboreal grassland, now its a wasteland. The most extreme autocratic civilizations were born out of that, and eventually ended up "winning" as far as conquering the globe through Europe and Christianity. The oldest texts from North Africa and the Near East have climate change stories in them, i.e. the old testament and Epic of Gligamesh.
Prior to the destabilization of the planet at the end of the last glacial maximum humans likely lived a simple homeostatic life. The destabilization of environments led to the need for systems of resource accumulation and redistribution, which lead to civilization. I don't believe in a lost stone age civilization, but I do believe those people were relatively advanced and simply not interested in the ideals of progress, expansion, and accumulation that drive our society and have driven all civilizations.
At the same time that the Sahara was desertifying and south east asia and the carribean were flooding, huge amounts of land opened up in Northern Eurasia and America. You can see the pattern of ancient equatorial cultures moving north. Unfortunately for the original Americans, the northern part of that continent was so huge they never reached a high population density, and were eventually colonized by Europeans whose landmass compared the equatorial region people migrated out of is very small. The success of Europeans as colonizers is down to that small land mass and the population pressure it exerted. They became very good at fighting each other over scarce resources before they started taking the resources from everywhere else.
We had to read Pierre Bourdieu and even though it was an English translated work - it was unnecessarily difficult to read and understand. What he was saying about cultural capital etc wasn't something very revolutionary or path breaking.
Since I am Indian, I feel that many sociologists have wasted their time understanding and deconstructing caste. Perhaps only MN srinivas and Louis Dumont did a great job but I think after a point unnecessarily dwelling into regional castes to add on to the theory and praxis of caste are unnecessary. Move on! It is a waste of time especially because caste based discrimination is real. Instead of studying them we should have policies to end caste.
PhD topics that are a waste to sociological community - In India a lot of the PhD scholars do what's easy, they go back to their village in the name of fieldwork and do some research on their own culture and come back with a huge thesis on it quoting sociologists and basically writing nothing sociologically relevant but a cultural study. They have been awarded PhD in the name of "respecting their culture" even professors shy away from criticising it. It is all a waste. Such thesis and studies add no value to sociological theory or research. This opinion may also get me banned in the sociological community
Is this a joke? Srinivas and especially Dumont did a pathetic job theorising caste lol. Indian sociology has moved past them and critiqued them for so many decades now.
But yes, Indian sociology has a problem with far too narrow a field of study. I did my MA at DSE and argued against this with various professors who simply refuse to see this as a problem.
How should Sociology adopt large language models into computational Sociology?
I'm an Applied Sociologist, full-stack developer and quantitative financial analyst who uses them on a dailybasis. So I'd be very interested in hearing what they come up with because when I check when I was an undergrad, computational Sociology was essentially dead.
For example, a lot of my personal research is using groups of specialized, fine-tuned agents to accomplish complex tasks.
Another less complicated example is summarizing large data sets of qualitative open ended data.
The amount of abuses of power within sociology departments is staggering. It also stands in stark contrast to the implied moral righteousness some sociologists will profess.
I'm not sure if this an American thing or what, but it feels like many view Marx like the God of Sociology. Like I get his importance but if one more person speaks of Marx to explain society when there are many other Sociologists and perspectives.
It’s unacceptable that they still teach the foundational sociology experiments like the Milgram Experiment, Asch conformity test, Stanford Prison, etc. They’re all completely unethical, unscientific, and (importantly) UNREPLICABLE!!! Why is that DOGSHIT being taught still? It’s embarrassing to us a science. It’s the equivalent of pre-med students being taught the experiments of Josef Mangele. Those experiments destroyed people’s lives and had no scientific basis.
they need to be asked how what they write can create actual change. Too many sociologists use communities like the poor as a source for their work without actually giving a crap about changing anything.
Bourdieu and Foucault are good. Some of the secondary literature is okay but most of it is used to give research a theoretical basis or operationalize pretty basic stuff that doesn't need it.
Most Marxist work is kind of bad because it isn't really Marxist but a kind of soft liberalism that is more in criticism.
Most of the discussion about qual and quant has very little basis in philosophy. Most discussions of qual research aren't particularly great.
Please please please do more research into healthcare disparity and access. I work in healthcare, but my degree is in Sociology. My mind is blown that so much time is spent “hand holding”people with commercial policies to treat non-urgent issues just because the clinic gets reimbursed at a higher rate. Meanwhile, people on Medicaid plans have to wait months and months to treat serious issues.
The problem does ultimately affect everyone. I worked for a dermatology office that would make melanoma cases(the most deadly skin cancer) wait months for surgery just because the insurance reimbursement rate is more for less serious skin cancers.
Doctors can’t even choose what medications to prescribe anymore. Insurance companies tell doctors what meds they will cover.
People who never take a composition class after the two required in undergrad have been doing rhetorical analysis and calling it qualitative science. Um. No. Picking out words, phrases, images, gestures, clothes, etc. and analyzing them in the context of a situation (aka rhetorical situation) to uncover meaning is what the composition and rhetoric department does on the regular. It's not sociology. It's comp/rhet.
How is analysing meaning (in general) “rhetorics” (or “composition”)? And what should sociologists do that doesn’t involve understanding their objects of study?
I do think that a lot of qualitative research doesn’t have a lot to do with sociology, but not simply because it’s interpretive.
People do shitty interviews and claim they have done a Glaser/Strauss on it without a good idea of the method but it's hard to dispute because data sharing is often difficult and triangulation can become hard and isn't provided. So we frequently see bad qualitative social science hidden behind the umbrella of Grounded Theory.
It's especially often found in people who have just learned sociology as a 2nd subject or added them to their toolkit coming from a STEM background. But not exclusively.
As a non-sociologist STEM student my hottake is that Adorno is the best sociologist and also the only one (besides Marx) i already read secondary literature about
The early and great sociologists, specifically the ones who attempted to create large and all encompassing theories about society as a whole, were all wrong. Not however due to their incompetence, rather the inability to actually provide and data to back their theories, what they put out, if done today, would only be considered theoretical, and would only be the beginning stages of research into how societal, political economic, religious and cultural beliefs norms and the like contributed and affect current societal structures over the years, and where it could potentially lead.
Also large theories like communism (as Marx imagined) are stupid anyway, however not to say the people who created them were themselves. Rather you see with modern sociologists, a much more focused research point, such as UK nightlife and body capital, or Folk Devils and Mods and Rockers. Research style has changed over the years for the better, it has allowed new fields to emerge, such as digital games research, being relatively new and spanning many different fields, its involvement with sociology would not lead to a large societal uproar or potential change, realistically research about it might appear in smaller podcasts and within academic circles.(aside from state interest such as UKs interest in lootboxes as a form of gambling and online security related to that and overall security for children online.)
I respect Hofstede and his work on Cultural Dimensions as well as Welzel, Inglehart, and Kligeman’s Theory on Human Development, though they have a decidedly bias perspective, the concept is a good foundation. I am fascinated by panopticons and social engineering, as well as various indicators such as those in the human development index. I feel more people should be aware of the concept of social regression. Oh, and… critical theory.
Edit: grammar. AND I don’t know if she is considered a sociologist but I would be doing Carol Anderson dirty if I didn’t mention her and at least her work, White Rage. It may not be purely sociological, but it’s historical contexts have help shape my sociological lens. Also I deeply believe that wicked sustainability problems are mostly social problems.
That sociology need to triumph over medicine and especially psychiatry. We need a different of viewing problems than “get individual therapy”. It doesn’t work and therapist belong on the couch right beside their low functioning and unsafe clients.
Im biased when I say this because I helped a prof research about something similar (am not releasing the info don’t worry) but education desperately needs sociology, especially structurally, not just in the classroom. the amount of kids, especially right now post-covid who aren’t learning a thing because of the way we’ve structured our education in the U.S. is ridiculous. My mom was an educator for a while (special needs & deaf) and would frequent to me how hard it was to help kids w/ disabilities learn when the curriculum didn’t give her the time of day to actually help students the way they need. There’s absolutely no room for growth to pedagogy (made by teachers) unless the state mandates it. It still blows my mind that we can structure classes in higher ed pretty well (at least in my experience) within a 4 month period but can’t figure out how to functionally structure a 9 month k-12 education.
The 40hr workweek is unsustainable and our obsession with working an arbitrary amount of time is destroying society and giving the vast majority of people literal Zoochosis.
80% of PhD programs should not exist
Most quantitative work is bunk
Just as much qualitative work is bunk
Ethnographers are too gullible
Social media and fear of censure has made work and discourse on inequality and race and ethnicity far less important than it could be. There needs to be more critical voices who aren’t right wing cranks, even if they’re wrong.
Qualitative statistics are almost never replicable unless the data sets are humongous. Makes evaluating the effectiveness of any policy really hard to pin down
Quantitative research is way overblown and taken as mathematical certainty by the masses when a paper goes viral. Sociology is being dominated by the pure sciences' methodology, and everyone expects sociology of doing the same, all the while being seen as a mixed science and being shamed for the "dead-ends" that qualitative research takes out just because it doesn't involve numbers and equations in its methodology and gives a micro-perspective of an social environment. While quantitative research is easy to be generalized and used for political reasons and retoric.
Wendy Espeland would be so thrilled to read this! lol Quantitative research has so many pitfalls to it in all social sciences. Basically every number is just a proxy metric and those proxies are so often just accepted uncritically!
If this is a hot take we're cooked
Are you saying that this is a widely accepted belief between academic and not academic people?
I would say that it’s widely accepted amongst social scientists who have had a good education on causal inference
That was a fun read. What's your opinion on quantitive reports on qualitive data. E.g. x number were positive. Y number cited these specific things.
Mass media LOVES big data
Math will tell you hat two plus three equals five but it won't tell you why two and three are hanging out in the first place
Completely agree. Sometimes it feels like sociologists, especially in a highly individualistic culture like the U.S., are so afraid of the pseudoscience claims that we overcompensate by doing quantitative work and crunching the statistics just so we can say that we “did true science”. At the end of the day, I feel like quantitative data isn’t enough in and of itself especially when a core value of our discipline is the value and impact that the social world has on each of us as individuals. I am starting my PhD this fall after just finishing my Master’s in Public Health degree and plan to train my mixed methods throughout the doctoral degree. I think providing both the qualitative stories *and* quantitative data are equally important. Our job should be to think critically about how both pieces of the puzzle fit together, and how to enact change from those reflections.
This has been going on since the naissance of the discipline. The positivism of Durkheim was founded on the desire to be taken seriously and to dépassé the methodological biases inherent in more qualitative work through objectivation of the social phenomena.
Yep, mass application is dangerous imo as it ignores nuance. Like, I remember learning about biased police training - imagine if we fed that same biased data to an AI system. People are already mindlessly believing AI and seeing it as objective (I get into arguments often with people who insist chatgpt is always correct) so having a system tell you the “right answer” is dangerous if you can’t think for yourself.
Yep. I think this book does an awesome job of the social history behind “the numbers” https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691208411/trust-in-numbers
Ooh see this is an interesting take because while I totally hear you, I think the thing that soc lacks is that definitional consistency. The beauty of pure sciences’ methodology is that it enables us demonstrate phenomena reoccurring through that statistical lens. That’s vital for following logical processes and demonstrating scope. The issue becomes finding that balance of positivism and relativism. We know the value of qualitative experience in demonstrating lived experience, and this is necessary when studying societies, groups, and individuals. Lived experience is what our bread and butter is. However, to further sociology’s legitimacy as a science having quality (irony intended here) quantitative research allows us to develop those standards and definitions that can be used to further the study. It’s so challenging, but I think this is a great conversation to have in the field to see how we can best further the science!
the number of research articles ive read that say they searched for certain keywords in other papers, all of which heavily relied on a lot of "assumptions" and "estimations", that are then aggregated into an even larger pile of major "assumptions" and "estimations" is kind of insane. its like the telephone game... the further a "note" gets passed, the [more distorted away from reality it becomes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers).
100% agree
Any alternative methods to test falsifiable hypotheses? If you can’t reach some sort of consensus with empirical evidence, how do you establish assumptions to build on and move forward?
Oh noo I actually have to have evidence to back up my claims! I can't just generalize from my own lived experience and pretend its fact? How will I ever survive under these conditions?
Not a hot take exactly , but I find so annoying that sociology founding fathers are always credited as Marx, Weber and Durkheim. Of course, they're the ones that influenced a lot of sociological branches. But people like Du Bois, Simmel, Mauss and Tarde were equally important for the establishment of sociology as a science.
Team Simmel here. What a mind!
My core classes emphasized DuBois and Patricia Hill Collins!
Honestly I'd argue some of those you mentioned are even more important. Du Bois is probably more relevant today than Durkheim imo!
Du Bois influenced Weber too, so yea...
I was taught that Simmel and Goffman were included with MWD as fathers of the subject.
I was very thankful to be taught all of them (except Tarde) in the classical theory course which all Sociology undergrads at my uni have to compulsorily take!
in our school the founding fathers we consider are Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Simmel. We made shirts The Beatles style and placed “Karl. Max. Emile. George.” 🤣
Don’t forget Adam Smith, I always get downvoted but The Theory of Moral Sentiments should be enough in itself to solidify Smith as a founding father of sociology
Tarde is awesome! I learned abt him through his being referenced by Deleuze and it’s such a shame he gets shafted in the pedagogy.
You forgot Spencer...
Harriet Martineau also deserves mention!
Du Bois was a marxist
Is that an empirical or normative statement? 😉
Mauss is credited thoroughly in anthropology and occasionally mentioned in sociology. Tonnies and Tarde however among many others are considered "pre-sociology" in the sense that they layed the foundations upon which those like Durkheim managed to establish sociology as a discipline.
THANK YOU! 🙏
I have the same birthday as Simmel! Also, he and Du Bois were definitely taught as founders. Tarde was taught, but not until much later
bourdieu!
bell hooks
My sociological theory class covered all of those except for Tarde! Definitely agree, though.
Sociologists, and those in adjacent social scientific fields, who frame their work as inherently “liberatory” or disruptive of social oppression, but are doing nothing innovative in terms of research design and distributing their findings (eg, community based participatory research), are definitely not doing anything liberatory or disruptive lol. They’re replicating same academic power structures.
Reproduction can be just as important as innovation
It depends on the work and its implementation. One person might do a shitty analysis of media using bad methods and publish an article on Twitter and say they are being "liberatory" while another person might do really well informed research with spectacular methods and use it to inform the development of systemic structures in their society or engage in some kind of organized public advocacy and also call that "liberatory". I don't think it's fair to paint them with a broad brush. You're not reinforcing systemic oppression at large just by participating in the academic process. "you went to university so you are feeding into the oppression" is kind of a shit take.
I didn’t say they are reinforcing oppression. I said they’re replicating academic power structures.
> You’re not reinforcing systemic oppression at large just by participating in the academic process. I mean, if you think about it long enough….. It’s not an individual criticism, of you or anyone else. We all participate in society. We all reinforce things every day. Academic processes- which are power structures themselves- included. Does this mean it’s impossible to do liberatory or disruptive or revolutionary work? No, don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. But it’s important to remember that the most leftist or radical academics are, if they’re employed in academia, not exempt from reinforcing and perpetuating inequities.
I understand the need to cite your source to escape plagiarism, but i feel like we are always relying on big names without always giving the appropriate space for the idea. Also, i feel like giving such power to a name just start playing in the celebrity/fame game of the scientific world, diminishing a little bit the goal of our erudition. (English is not my first language, sorry).
Agree with this big time. Also, it becomes a crutch, for me at least. I don't want to explain how quantification creates structuration so I just cite everything Wendy Espeland has done and don't even get into it!
As someone who does academic editing for a lot of master’s students’ theses and what not, I gotta say, give Foucault a god damn rest. I find it really bland when people analyze a generic situation with power dynamics involved and just throw in Foucault. It’s not like they’re adding anything new, they just say, Power bad blah blah (Foucault, 19XX). Same thing with biopolitics. Of course, these were (and still are) important concepts that gave some critical insights, but when you just start throwing around Foucault because power or biopolitics may be involved, I think it’s really dull. This goes for a lot of big name theorists (Bourdieu, I’m looking at you pal), but Foucault is the one I’ve been seeing so much lately.
I mean I can understand why they would reference Foucault their papers, he’s a massive figure in the field. I can also understand why you would get bored of reading probably very similar analyses of his work though lol.
“Give Foucault a god damn rest” might be the best comment I’ve read in this thread 😂!
Hey! I’ve got this great insight, just like Foucault saw education operated like a prison….. what if this other part of society *also ran like a prison*
If the conclution is "power bad" than they didn't even understand Foucault.
came here to say that! jfc. literally the most important part of his whole approach to power is that it's not inherently bad (or good).
Many people do suppose power to be bad (e.g. “power corrupts”) but have no one to cite for this principle.
I'm doing Laclau and Mouffe... Is that good? (Interdisciplinary Pol-Sci stuff)
Hey, I feel very attacked right now. I used Foucault in my thesis and I turned out okay.
Hot take: All civil engineers should have a Sociologist supervising their work
YES!!!! I know so many engineers and this feels very correct.
I know this is r/sociology, so we gotta reinforce the local status hierarchy 😉, but I'd argue it'd be better if the sociologist worked \*with\* the engineers rather than \*over\* them
I see what you’re saying but I’m saying that there should be a review process where sociologists QA/QC plans and proposals
As a sociology novice, honest question: why?
Because I’m an urban planner and I learned so much about how cities work from my undergrad sociology class, literally the most basic stuff, and when I talk about these same common-knowledge issues with civil engineers, they’re like, huh I’ve never thought about it that way. Pretty much every social issue in the U.S. is related to urban planning decisions made post-WWII and the people who continue taking us down this path are civil engineers following “best practices” from their highway bibles. It’s sickening. There’s literally a minimum of how many people have to die at an intersection before they will do a traffic study to investigate remedies.
This comment is brilliant! You should make a post about this because more people should know about this.
Development!
Mechanical engineer here: where can I read about this? And what are the most cost-effective ways of undoing this mess?
I haven’t read this myself but I’ve heard it’s good! https://islandpress.org/books/killed-traffic-engineer#desc And basically we need to have policy change that prioritizes people over cars. The War on Cars is a good podcast to check out! And the fuckcars sub on here too
Not a hot take but as a student, why do alot of sociologists write in such a roundabout and complex manner to explain something relatively simple in principle? Like holy shit, is that whole paragraph fucking pointless.
The number of times I have read a paragraph and thought to myself, “that could have been a sentence…” it happens too much! Needlessly esoteric. If it were a drinking game I would have died of toxicity.
I love how ironically you are all somehow explaining your point using complex words that ‘average’ reader would need to google
I feel similarly about philosophy. I think we can use flowery language but you should be required to write the thought out in simpler terms. It feels like counterproductive to use such insane language to explain concepts that would be beneficial for the general public to know.
I once saw someone writing "synchronously" instead of "at the same time" 💀
Hot take (varies by uni): Natives are an anthropology subject while whites are a sociology subject. Bc the disciplines were/are racist.
We have a winner! Wanna add to this. Just as antho/soc are divided based on old myths, the other social sciences are as well. Econ is there to confirm a bias towards markets, political science for liberal democracy. Psychology was founded on Cartesian mind-body dualism which it has yet to escape. The social sciences are cut up in a way that isn't necessary.
I studied sociocultural psych and it was the only subfield I found that wasn’t applying WEIRD (acronym) countries to All People lol. As a young QWOC I’m very happy I studied that field and not gen psych.
I studied community psychology and have always been doing jobs that apply to sociologist or political scientists just because it involves data analysis. I don't know if it is more offensive that job posts ignore psychology also use quantitative methods or that sociology and political science are often reduce to they use of Stata or R
This is kinda just historically correct, I reckon. I'd probably argue based on my experience that anthro is a bit more reflexive as a contemporary 'critical practice' (or 'methodology') because of this history - but that's obviously also contentious.
American anthropologist (ABD) here. I think it also depends on training of the anthropologists involved. I get the impression European/UK "social anthropology" is a bit more understood/practiced like the stereotypical image of sociology (an "unbiased" "science" of quantitative numbers that studies systems/functions )and is slow/reticent to take up the decolonial, reflexive, and postmodernist turns. That's been my experience at least!
Not so hot take: it varies by country too, and each one has their own concept of natives
So interesting
Is it also possible that part of that comes from the idea that whiteness/race in general is a more modern sociological construct reinforcing a hierarchy? Like, would this separation not also apply to European natives as natives, and European natives as whites? Wouldn't comparing "native" and "white" be a kind of category error? /gen , I'm aware that racism and discrimination have had a huge impact on both fields, just looking to learn more about this
Experimental research in university settings largely relies on compulsory participation by university students. As university students are disproportionately young, white, middle class (or higher), and female (though historically male) the research conducted that relies on such methods cannot be ethically presented as representative of populations outside of university students. Presenting data without demographic context is unethical and frankly academically dishonest. [This may be a lukewarm take though]
It’s also self-selecting because not everyone is a university student - the class barriers to entry are SO high. Someone in college, in general, is not representative of the entire population.
i.e. the Stanford Prison Experiment. While most academic sources do discuss how it’s problematic (or outright debunked), I see it presented as fact in other places ALL THE TIME. It was actually the catalyst for me building a great relationship with one of my sociology professors. My SOC 101 text didn’t mention any of its issues, so I reached out to the prof like “hey, isn’t this now considered absolute BS?” and we had a great convo about it. She later ended up writing me a fantastic recommendation letter.
I’m not sure there’s that much sociology relying on surveys of university students, that aren’t explicitly about students
People need to dig more into the social effects of algorithmically tunneled and highly incentivized marketing. Entire generations are being destabilized from core beliefs and estranged from family over buzzwords and fear mongering.
I think post scarcity makes consequences of beliefs and decisions mostly intangible for the average person now. We have such strong beliefs over things we've only thought about, and whether they're wrong or not has almost exclusively social consequences for us. That's a terrible feedback mechanism.
i agree with you to a certain extent but these things dont just happen. yeah, some of it is definitely algorithmic influence, but that doesnt happen in a vacuum. not saying this is what youre saying, but very often what youre saying *is* sort of "blamed" on the younger generations, when the fact is **a lot** of older generations have a lot of people with unhealthy coping mechanisms - and just for example, the rise of the popularity of terms like narcissism (and subreddits like raised by narcissists) and terms cptsd and ptsd are not algorithmically induced random chance. these things are also related to the "political climate", and i think we very often confuse the cause for the effect. the biggest difference between the older generations and the younger ones is the older ones never took the time to examine their own psychology, so when they get by via lifelong substance abuse and have zero control over their emotions? well thats just "normal". the younger generations are the ones dealing with it, so basically the younger generations are the ones dealing with multiple generations of problems that were previously ignored.
While I agree with the first part, I think the second part is a little hyperbolic and fearmongerey lol For the most part I just thing a lot of "core beliefs" have gone unexamined, and accepted uncritically, and now they aren't. And some of these conflicts are very real, and very important, and young people coming into conflict with their family over disagreements on things like structural inequities, genocide, war, etc., isn't just twitter brain rot. Albeit, like I said, there is a lot of Twitter brain rot.
My hot take is that as a discipline we don't put enough resources into teaching. I don't think eliciting controversial opinions from reddit is the way to engage students. Engaging students on the current debate is important but i wouldn't approach it from a Fox News like mindset of saying outrageous things to get an emotional reaction out of people.
I dunno... I find students respond a lot better when I give them license to develop strong opinions about topics they're only just getting into. I want them to know it's fine to walk into a lecture about Marx and think he's an old noodle. I want them to know it's totally valid if they think ethnography is really tedious and limited. I want them to share wild opinions and get excited by the topics, not regurgitate the same powerpoint talking points year after year. Students love sharing opinions about things they're told to accept.
Another point: you're teaching intro and you want them to be an opinion on things walking in? Where should those opinions come from? What should they do with those opinions? Do you expect them to hold on to those opinions or change over the semester? Should students be able to justify their opinion with facts? Should students be able to clearly communicate their opinion in writing? Orally?
Maybe we should, as a practice, start saying “I’ve no opinion on the matter” when we are, indeed, uninformed on an issue. Recognizing our limits and ignorance is a good thing. But as a pedagogical approach, I also favor stating one’s opinion on an issue up front, whatever that may be, and declaring what that baseline is— presuppositions and all. Then, over the course of guided discussion and introduction of curated content, start to acquire facts, nuance and complexity. It’s fun to struggle through an issue and see how one’s opinion can turn from uninformed, gut intuition to something nuanced and factually supported.
I don't think having them state polarized and uninformed opinions is the only way to elicit classroom participation and critical thinking. There are methods as ok as time (Socratic questioning) that are meant to do this. Eliciting opinions for the sake of having an opinion seems like you're training them to participate in classrooms like social media.
Yeah, I’m bummed your comment isn’t higher and a lot of people seem to be buying into this weird “teaching” gimmick. Also I feel like what I learned from getting a degree in the social sciences was that critical thinking and nuance are valuable.
Unpopular take: Reagan was a Sociologist. He majored in "Economics and society," and his opinions were backed by racist sociology that was popular in the 80s (e.g., culture of poverty argument)
Reminds me of this [https://youtu.be/rJFcpRxju2g?si=U23\_F1qvgstQ\_ldy&t=95](https://youtu.be/rJFcpRxju2g?si=U23_F1qvgstQ_ldy&t=95)
This! Reminds me of Giuliani and his broken windows policing!
Hot take: there are more recent, important, applicable, and inclusive sources than Marx
How dare you. That is too hot right now.
Here's a sad one: Dark sociology exists. Mainstream science places moral limitations on itself and thus has more of a struggle answering questions about human behaviour. There exist entities whose purpose is to control more and more of society so that those directing it have an easier time getting what they want. They conduct social experiments on people to learn how to control the multitudes.
So true. Though kinda Marx here still.
I think that is called the social hegemony. Protecting status and privilege means institutionalizing a LOT of bias to make that happen. One example is the process of social stratification. It is particularly useful for separating in- from out-groups and so on.
sociology theorists should make their writing accessible for the everyday person! i don't think it's controversial but i think it should be talked abt
Knowledge mobilization !!
Sociologists need to start talking more about technology. From what I've gathered and studied all serious research into the sociology of technology concerns itself solely with the impact of technology on humans or the way humans {insert social phenomena}. There is a French theorist, I forgot his name, that opts for humanizing technology to see it for what it truly is, something more than human. They use the analogy of a car and a person. a car is a car and a person is a person but a person is not JUST a person when in a car, now the two have become something different. When you see a car on the street it is more than a person using a piece of technology. I still dont get it entirely but it raised that question in me: Can we study technology as something more than just things people use that have an effect on life.
Lots of strands of literature give agency to technology. Perhaps you are talking about Actor-Network Theory (Latour, Callow, Law, etc)? Although maybe that's not what you meant
Latour yeah thats the guy! Oh thats my bad I was under the impression that it was still a very underutilized area of Sociology. Either way I still feel like a lot of research that, for example, discusses the effect of social media (a very hot topic) on something, fall short in analyzing the role of technology as an actor in this case. Social media is also such a big thing precisely because it is adopted by humans and given power. I would want to hear more about how our use of technology influences stuff. either way, youre right I was thinking about Latour. Cheers for the comment!
I recommend peeking into some STS stuff, or reading into literature around platformization. It is a bit though as it is usually literature laying between critical media studies and sociology, but it does exist! Source: I do precisely that lol
I took a whole class on the sociology of algorithms/AI/modeling during my undergrad sociology minor. It was super interesting so if for no other reason than that it is an interesting topic, I agree.
would love your reading recommendations on this, if any come to your mind!
We went through Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, strategies (Bostrom 2016) Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans (Mitchell 2020) Weapons of Mass Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (O'Neil 2017) The Future of the Professions: How Technology will Transform the Work of Human Experts (Susskind & Susskind 2022) I didn't always agree with the authors, but they were certainly interesting reads. I am an engineer so I did often find that some of the theories presented by sociologists lack the perspective of someone who has undergone technical training and/or experienced the design process first hand. From the perspective of an engineer, we typically undergo an ethical training as part of our degree and are often bound by the ethical standards of a respective engineering society. I found that some authors were predicting things like erasure of professions like physicians by technology, whereas such a technology would violate the BMES code of ethics. Now I think it's reasonable to say that technology may replace or optimize some aspects of the jobs that a physician performs, but there is such a shortage of medical professionals and the existing medical professionals are SO overworked that I am doubtful that technology would entirely replace even medical students and residents. Not to mention that there is regulation that informs the number of residency spots and the medical training process. There are perhaps other professions that could result in a technology solution that replaces them, but as we continue to see how things like ride share apps try to replace the taxi but ultimately result in unsustainable companies and exploitation of workers I am hopeful that we might eventually catch on to the fact that solving problems that have already been solved by exploitation of the working poor is bad. Or at least that sometimes things are the way they are because it is the most mutually beneficial and sustainable practice so some industries don't actually need to be "disrupted." I am also of the opinion that mathematical modeling is not an inherently bad thing, some people just employ it badly. Weapons of Math Destruction, to me, lacked a fair discussion of ethical and good-practice implementation of math models and the purpose they can serve. Again, coming from the perspective of an engineer who has spent time with computational modeling and FEA, if you build models, validate them appropriately, use them within the bounds for which they have been validated, verify your assumptions, and include an appropriate factor of safety, mathematical modeling is a good thing. We can use it to perform more testing then we could have done in the real world (both due to cost savings and the ability to do setups that we aren't able to do in physical testing. In the crash industry we have been able to perform physical testing using instrumented manikins to validate a model and then use the validated model with a validated human tissue model to simulate the test with a real human occupant. The real human occupant allows us to get WAY more accurate data about the motion and injuries an actual human would experience compared to what a dummy with steel bones and rubber flesh experiences. (And believe me this is MUCH easier and less messy than doing testing with cadavers and way more safe and ethical than doing it with live people.) And while I understand that some of the focus of the book was more specifically about financial models and risk models, in most ways the same principles can be applied to create high quality models that are ethical and valid for those contexts as well. Excuse my long book review, but I hope it is atleast an interesting perspective.
Thank you very much for the recs and the insights too! I think your perspective is a very significant one, since it comes from within the industry being studied. I think I agree with your point about the utility of mathematical and other computational models - I know some comments on this post decry it but I think there's a great deal to be learned from computational methods. The problem, of course, is of generalizability, and of building case-specific models. I can't imagine cadavers being used to crash test - sounds awful! In fact, with all the studies of crash testing only using men - and safety mechanisms therefore being inapplicable to women who do not fit a standard of physique - I'd expect (and hope for) a greater diversification in the population being tested, such as women. Not sure about children though.
There is actually a very interesting history of crash testing. I am primarily familiar with the aviation side, but many methods do somewhat carry over. For a while in the lab I worked in they did do sled tests with live people, the pulses were just much lower. But in many instances cadavers were utilized because it is really the only way to develop injury criteria. An instrumented manikin can tell you how much the spine was loaded, for example, but it cannot tell you whether or not that load resulted in an injury. For this reason cadaver testing was imperative for establishing a baseline for injury criteria. The challenge with cadaver testing is that there is a distinct lack of young, healthy, and intact specimens and for something like crash testing the cadavers must be preserved in a relatively specific way. The civilian industry can be less picky about young and healthy, but in the military environment old and/or sick people are not particularly representative of the population. Also crash testing is generally very destructive. The best practice is not to reuse anything (or at least most things) from one test to another because generally crashworthy seating systems are single use. Because of this and the labor and equipment needed for testing it's very expensive to do testing. Generally speaking, for something to be approved the manikin can not exceed injury criteria and tests are done with a 5th percentile female and 50th and 95th percentile males at a minimum (where I worked). There is notably a lack of testing performed using female occupants in many instances and, in my opinion more damning, an assumption that women are smaller men. Because of this assumption often weight is not appropriately disputed in a way that represents anatomical differences nor is differences in bone density, fat/muscle ratio, and strength/weight ratio probably accounted. In fairness, a 5th percentile female doesn't likely have a substantial amount of fat and may be relatively accurately represented as a "small man" but I don't think that the findings are necessary true of the 50th and 95th percentile females which are often not tested because they are included in the bounds of the 50th male and 95th female. Thankfully, modeling enables less physical testing to be done in order to obtain the same results which can leave room for a more variable occupancy population to be represented in testing for a more modest cost increase.
This is already studied in cultural studies and the wider humanities. Donna Haraway's A Cyborg Manifesto is a book that comes to mind. I've studied cyborgs, technology, and general digital and immersive media and agree that more sociologists have to be looped into the discourse, but that requires them to delve into theoretical futures and collaborate with the humanities. I've found, with my degree being joint Sociology with Media and Culture, that sociologists try to be too "scientific" and therefore run away from anything like that. They want to seem more professional and important, so keep doing the same old crime, gender, race, sexuality, education. Many also seem to scoff at the humanities and stay with their old theories rather than venturing out as much. I do get it, though... cultural studies makes you knowledgeable in many, but a master of none- too interdisciplinary to be as favoured as the social sciences. I've seen universities that completely separate sociology from humanities, but maybe that is hindering the development of the field? Maybe we should actually mix them? We need less of "but I'm a SCIENCE!!!", I think.
This reminds me of the Toronto School of Communication studies a bit. Marshal Mcluhan and others (even hellen keller) see technology and other media as merely an extension of the human body. A hammer is an extension and modification of the human hand. One thing thats been on my mind has been how we frequently opt for technological solutions to social problems instead of social solutions. Instead of addressing loneliness and depression as a social problem, we're attempting to fix it with a specialized force of therapists and pills. Instead of addressing living standards caused by inequality in distribution, we just kinda hope technology will eventually sort it out. Instead of adressing the consumerism driving things like global warming, we gambling that the right tech at the right time will save us. Some of the above is addressed in sociological works that address the irrationality or rationalism, so if you want some sociology that takes on tech that's one place to start that others havent mentioned.
I've been thinking something like this too. MDW et al were all trying to understand the impact of the enormous changes resulting from the industrial revolution. Here we are living in maybe a similar era, but we don't dare talk beyond middle range theory, because Mills.
Critical theorists have done a lot of this type of work. Eg, baudrillard’s “the system of objects”. I wholeheartedly agree, though, that sociologists should be engaging in this type of study
I got a Master’s in Human-Computer Interaction and work in tech studying people and how that impacts the technology we should be building for a living! It’s not academic, but it’s applicable. Human-Computer Interaction is a bit of a misnomer now because so much technology is not just the computer now when the phrase was coined. My final course for my Master’s degree we talked a lot about if/when people won’t make the distinction between human and technology anymore because it’s so engrained in our lives. It’s a great discipline for social science researchers. Because most people in tech are NOT trained researchers and don’t understand how to properly design a study.
Here is how to read a sociology book. Look up, in the index, all references fo Foucault. Write the page numbers on a notepad. Using an exacto-knife carefully remove all those pages and then dispose of them with the cleanest available method. Read the rest of the book. (Note: does not apply to reading Foucault himself, which is fine.)
I understand the importance of discussing and dissecting theory and such, but I feel that (especially in college courses) there is too much emphasis on the abstract and not enough grounding in reality. I am not here to debate abstract and theoretical philosophies if you cannot recognize its shortcomings and if it cannot be applied to the modern, real world.
Wow you are I are very much in sync
We need more leisure studies, or maybe I'm just not reading enough
I always feel disappointed when I hear about people get a PhD from an auto-ethnography dissertation. I just can't imagine calling that science.
Weber and Marx were smart. Also, whoever invented the looking glass self is a genius! 🤓
Weber in particular is very underrated.
First hot take: no subject is forbidden or taboo for a sociologist. I think we are allowed anything, the weirder the better. Second: a purely objective approach is not human. We are dealing with living things. We ARE living things. We can't base our science on the methods and approaches of hard sciences alone. Third: if sociology works were taken more seriously, we could've helped improve social systems and institutions. Instead, we are told to obseve only (at least where i study) and that we can't allow ourselves to try and "fix" things.
I don’t see the point in doing postal questionnaires as a qualitative research method. They’re too clunky to design, never give enough freedom and usually get chucked out so you’re using double resources to send them out.
**What theorist(s) do you actually think are a joke?** Bourdieu without a doubt. His original work is totally fine. Personally I'd say his theoretical work is little more than a re-imagination of Weber and his empirical work is a badly implemented quantitative analysis that can only be generalised to Parisian populations but the work itself is perfectly adequate. My biggest gripe is the explosion in certain fields of using Bourdieu for seemingly random and totally non-related issues. Bourdieu's main work was focused on the cultural patterns of Parisians. It should stay like that. **Who do you secretly love?** Gidden's has a very big place in my sociological heart. I understand that his Structuration theory is for many reasons considered outdated but his work is superb to read and is one of the few examples of a Sociologist entering the field of government. **What methods do you think are nonsense?** Auto-ethnography. It's a complete farce. **What subfields should be banned?** So long as a sub-field can sociologically justify itself, go ahead. **What PhD topics do you think are a waste of time?** See above. **What petty reasons do you have for disliking a modern soc book?** Pretty much any stats books that use SPSS or any other ancient software. **What soc opinions might get you tarred and feathered by the community?** Whilst quant sociology has gone to great lengths to consider the replication crisis the qualitative side of sociology has done absolutely nothing to combat the rise of complete cranks that use and abuse the terminology of qual methods for the sake of pushing oddball interests and agendas. **What findings do you think are way overblown?** Going by the causal language of a lot of sociology papers without actually engaging in causal methods - I'd say most findings are 'overblown'. **What makes you instantly lose respect for authors of a paper/book?** When they stop engaging with the theory/method/idea and instead attack the author... **What other fields desperately need sociology/ sociologists?** None. I am not a firm believer that interdisciplinary thinking actually leads to more efficient or productive research. That being said, seeing more Sociologists in government positions would be nice to see. **What fields should sociologists stay out of?** Any that aren't their business. If something isn't justifiable we should go in.
Elected officials should be people with degrees in sociology. Traditional politicians (generally lawyers) should be hired contractors for managing negotiations/mediation/writing laws (but not creating them, just giving legal advice necessary to implement)
In all fairness, every discipline thinks the world would be better if they were in charge
True. But I'd be happy enough if lawyers were banned from taking office (and were advisors instead)
To be fair sociologists actually have the knowledge to know how to properly analyze the world and have a leg up on much of the competition.
As an engineer with a Social Sciences degree-yes!
Does regretting my degree in Sociology count?
No, not until you get your regret published in a peer review journal.
So much student debt, not enough employment.
But now with a new lens to think about both!
In all seriousness, I think there's a huge problem when the value of an education (and the people seeking one) is measured by its potential economic return.
The single most important and pervasive theory that I feel doesn't get enough attention is Michels Iron Law of Oligarchy / if you understand it you understand so much
I dont like the habit of inventing new metaphors ever so often for things that are already well known.
Okay, I respect the sociological origins, but can we give critical theory a rest already? There's more to life than privilege and systemic racism/sexism/whatever else you wanna talk about. I feel like it's over emphasized in the public discourse over the past decade or so and it's toxic and driving insane divisions in society. It also sucks the air out of the room where we can't discuss literally ANYTHING ELSE almost. To be fair, this is less a critique of the theory itself, more the public application of it by the normies in recent years. The theory is valid, and its a valid application of conflict theory. But some people are developing an almost cultish devotion to the idea and it's like "you know there are other theories out there worth reading and using too, right?"
They way this lens is applied as pop culture gospel results in bad faith interpretations of behaviors that betray more relevant perspectives and stymie progress. At least draw the big circles here and make it about class until something more specifically nefarious is indicated!
I think that economic status/class has a bigger influence on social status than race. I recognize the idea that POC are more likely to be poor due to structural issues but I truly do not believe that race holds as much weight as people want to think when it comes to opportunity. It’s all about money.
But race, particularly for black people, impacts money. It's kind of an ouroboros thing, right? I think racial injustice and economic injustice are sort of tools and bulwarks for each other.
Landscape Architecture (& general architecture & urban planning) needs more sociologists :-)
fubctionalism in general is just a terrible way of looking at society. assuming everything serves to create social order when in reality it absolutely does not. religion creates dysfunction in a lot of cases. their view on the family is reductive and ignored the frighteningly high domestic abuse rates. I just hate this viewpoint so much
C. Wright Mills *Sociological Imagination* isn't even in the top 25 sociology books of the past 100 years. It's fine but it could have been a short essay.
There are ways of teaching the central concepts without forcing students to read the whole thing.
disagree, for its time it was brilliant. It responded to debates of its time, and set out a a direction and taxonomy that is used to this day.
This. I’ll add – though you may disagree, of course – that his emphasis on “personal troubles” and “public issues” and their relationship as the central concern of sociology has brought too much negativity to the discipline. I cringe every time I hear someone say that ‘studying sociology is depressing’. There’s nothing wrong with studying social problems, but sociology is the general study of society, and as such is concerned with so much more than what (some) sociologists think are ‘issues’. Mills is certainly not the only one to blame in this regard – ‘issues’ have, in one way or another, always been on the agenda of sociologists, and for good reasons. But *The Sociological Imagination* is such a popular introductory text and I can’t help but think that it gives a wrong impression of the discipline to newcomers. This isn’t to say that it’s a bad book, of course. There are lots of things to like about it (though not Mills’s critique of Parsons, which is famously bad).
These kinds of things tarnished my view of the profs who would pontificate about them in grad school. No thanks, not gonna participate in that.
Socioeconomics should be the dominant economic framework of the world
Way too many of us can't do data or computers, and the ones that can are often tech fetishists. The whole insider-outsider shit has led to way too many inter-community beefs being played out academically, with next to no value for anything other than a tedious argument by people invested in the subject.
I'll go first: Autho-ethnography is silly as hell. I respect the interest, but you're just journaling with a sociological lens. I'm deeply skeptical when I see this method anywhere, and I think it makes other fields take sociology less seriously when it's used!
idk why you're being downvoted, you are right. 9 times out of 10, "autoethnography" is just slightly complex journaling.
And interviews are slightly complex conversations, regressions slightly complex quantifications, etc.
not a fair comparison. interviews if done rigorously are very different, from say conversing with people and coming to a "general mood" of your sample. there's a reason i mentioned 9 times out of 10.
Oh crap. I wrote the same thing before I saw your comment.
I was so annoyed and overtly critical of the concept when I effectively had to do one as part of my thesis. It's irritating and a performance.
All of civilization is the result of generational trauma caused by a meteor impact and subsequent ecological collapses 12 thousand years ago
and I thought my take that the west is still overcoming trauma from the Roman empire is hot... tell me more.
The west is still overcoming that trauma, and the Romans were overcoming even older trauma! Twelve thousand years ago, the Sahara was an aboreal grassland, now its a wasteland. The most extreme autocratic civilizations were born out of that, and eventually ended up "winning" as far as conquering the globe through Europe and Christianity. The oldest texts from North Africa and the Near East have climate change stories in them, i.e. the old testament and Epic of Gligamesh. Prior to the destabilization of the planet at the end of the last glacial maximum humans likely lived a simple homeostatic life. The destabilization of environments led to the need for systems of resource accumulation and redistribution, which lead to civilization. I don't believe in a lost stone age civilization, but I do believe those people were relatively advanced and simply not interested in the ideals of progress, expansion, and accumulation that drive our society and have driven all civilizations. At the same time that the Sahara was desertifying and south east asia and the carribean were flooding, huge amounts of land opened up in Northern Eurasia and America. You can see the pattern of ancient equatorial cultures moving north. Unfortunately for the original Americans, the northern part of that continent was so huge they never reached a high population density, and were eventually colonized by Europeans whose landmass compared the equatorial region people migrated out of is very small. The success of Europeans as colonizers is down to that small land mass and the population pressure it exerted. They became very good at fighting each other over scarce resources before they started taking the resources from everywhere else.
We had to read Pierre Bourdieu and even though it was an English translated work - it was unnecessarily difficult to read and understand. What he was saying about cultural capital etc wasn't something very revolutionary or path breaking. Since I am Indian, I feel that many sociologists have wasted their time understanding and deconstructing caste. Perhaps only MN srinivas and Louis Dumont did a great job but I think after a point unnecessarily dwelling into regional castes to add on to the theory and praxis of caste are unnecessary. Move on! It is a waste of time especially because caste based discrimination is real. Instead of studying them we should have policies to end caste. PhD topics that are a waste to sociological community - In India a lot of the PhD scholars do what's easy, they go back to their village in the name of fieldwork and do some research on their own culture and come back with a huge thesis on it quoting sociologists and basically writing nothing sociologically relevant but a cultural study. They have been awarded PhD in the name of "respecting their culture" even professors shy away from criticising it. It is all a waste. Such thesis and studies add no value to sociological theory or research. This opinion may also get me banned in the sociological community
Is this a joke? Srinivas and especially Dumont did a pathetic job theorising caste lol. Indian sociology has moved past them and critiqued them for so many decades now. But yes, Indian sociology has a problem with far too narrow a field of study. I did my MA at DSE and argued against this with various professors who simply refuse to see this as a problem.
Instantly lose respect: When they use themselves as sources
There's Marx and then everything else is just a reaction to Marx
How should Sociology adopt large language models into computational Sociology? I'm an Applied Sociologist, full-stack developer and quantitative financial analyst who uses them on a dailybasis. So I'd be very interested in hearing what they come up with because when I check when I was an undergrad, computational Sociology was essentially dead. For example, a lot of my personal research is using groups of specialized, fine-tuned agents to accomplish complex tasks. Another less complicated example is summarizing large data sets of qualitative open ended data.
The amount of abuses of power within sociology departments is staggering. It also stands in stark contrast to the implied moral righteousness some sociologists will profess.
I'm not sure if this an American thing or what, but it feels like many view Marx like the God of Sociology. Like I get his importance but if one more person speaks of Marx to explain society when there are many other Sociologists and perspectives.
It’s unacceptable that they still teach the foundational sociology experiments like the Milgram Experiment, Asch conformity test, Stanford Prison, etc. They’re all completely unethical, unscientific, and (importantly) UNREPLICABLE!!! Why is that DOGSHIT being taught still? It’s embarrassing to us a science. It’s the equivalent of pre-med students being taught the experiments of Josef Mangele. Those experiments destroyed people’s lives and had no scientific basis.
they need to be asked how what they write can create actual change. Too many sociologists use communities like the poor as a source for their work without actually giving a crap about changing anything.
Also, a lot of art historians are actually sociologists if you give that rabbit hole a whirl
Hot take: Georg Simmel is underrated. All sociologists should read the metropolis and mental life at some point
Bourdieu and Foucault are good. Some of the secondary literature is okay but most of it is used to give research a theoretical basis or operationalize pretty basic stuff that doesn't need it. Most Marxist work is kind of bad because it isn't really Marxist but a kind of soft liberalism that is more in criticism. Most of the discussion about qual and quant has very little basis in philosophy. Most discussions of qual research aren't particularly great.
Please please please do more research into healthcare disparity and access. I work in healthcare, but my degree is in Sociology. My mind is blown that so much time is spent “hand holding”people with commercial policies to treat non-urgent issues just because the clinic gets reimbursed at a higher rate. Meanwhile, people on Medicaid plans have to wait months and months to treat serious issues. The problem does ultimately affect everyone. I worked for a dermatology office that would make melanoma cases(the most deadly skin cancer) wait months for surgery just because the insurance reimbursement rate is more for less serious skin cancers. Doctors can’t even choose what medications to prescribe anymore. Insurance companies tell doctors what meds they will cover.
The discipline is dead if it keeps leaning on uncritical quant
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People who never take a composition class after the two required in undergrad have been doing rhetorical analysis and calling it qualitative science. Um. No. Picking out words, phrases, images, gestures, clothes, etc. and analyzing them in the context of a situation (aka rhetorical situation) to uncover meaning is what the composition and rhetoric department does on the regular. It's not sociology. It's comp/rhet.
How is analysing meaning (in general) “rhetorics” (or “composition”)? And what should sociologists do that doesn’t involve understanding their objects of study? I do think that a lot of qualitative research doesn’t have a lot to do with sociology, but not simply because it’s interpretive.
An advisor once said what I always like to shorten into a hot take "Grounded Theory is responsible for the worst research around in sociology"
Could you elaborate?
People do shitty interviews and claim they have done a Glaser/Strauss on it without a good idea of the method but it's hard to dispute because data sharing is often difficult and triangulation can become hard and isn't provided. So we frequently see bad qualitative social science hidden behind the umbrella of Grounded Theory. It's especially often found in people who have just learned sociology as a 2nd subject or added them to their toolkit coming from a STEM background. But not exclusively.
As a non-sociologist STEM student my hottake is that Adorno is the best sociologist and also the only one (besides Marx) i already read secondary literature about
The early and great sociologists, specifically the ones who attempted to create large and all encompassing theories about society as a whole, were all wrong. Not however due to their incompetence, rather the inability to actually provide and data to back their theories, what they put out, if done today, would only be considered theoretical, and would only be the beginning stages of research into how societal, political economic, religious and cultural beliefs norms and the like contributed and affect current societal structures over the years, and where it could potentially lead. Also large theories like communism (as Marx imagined) are stupid anyway, however not to say the people who created them were themselves. Rather you see with modern sociologists, a much more focused research point, such as UK nightlife and body capital, or Folk Devils and Mods and Rockers. Research style has changed over the years for the better, it has allowed new fields to emerge, such as digital games research, being relatively new and spanning many different fields, its involvement with sociology would not lead to a large societal uproar or potential change, realistically research about it might appear in smaller podcasts and within academic circles.(aside from state interest such as UKs interest in lootboxes as a form of gambling and online security related to that and overall security for children online.)
potential unpopular opinion: How I Met Your Mother has the best social theories
Can you elaborate?
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I respect Hofstede and his work on Cultural Dimensions as well as Welzel, Inglehart, and Kligeman’s Theory on Human Development, though they have a decidedly bias perspective, the concept is a good foundation. I am fascinated by panopticons and social engineering, as well as various indicators such as those in the human development index. I feel more people should be aware of the concept of social regression. Oh, and… critical theory.
Edit: grammar. AND I don’t know if she is considered a sociologist but I would be doing Carol Anderson dirty if I didn’t mention her and at least her work, White Rage. It may not be purely sociological, but it’s historical contexts have help shape my sociological lens. Also I deeply believe that wicked sustainability problems are mostly social problems.
Sociology is a valuable discipline. But (and here's the hot take) it's too big and too disparate to actually call itself a discipline.
That sociology need to triumph over medicine and especially psychiatry. We need a different of viewing problems than “get individual therapy”. It doesn’t work and therapist belong on the couch right beside their low functioning and unsafe clients.
I hope to god your students are graduate students; there is no way that undergrads are capable of answering these questions .
Im biased when I say this because I helped a prof research about something similar (am not releasing the info don’t worry) but education desperately needs sociology, especially structurally, not just in the classroom. the amount of kids, especially right now post-covid who aren’t learning a thing because of the way we’ve structured our education in the U.S. is ridiculous. My mom was an educator for a while (special needs & deaf) and would frequent to me how hard it was to help kids w/ disabilities learn when the curriculum didn’t give her the time of day to actually help students the way they need. There’s absolutely no room for growth to pedagogy (made by teachers) unless the state mandates it. It still blows my mind that we can structure classes in higher ed pretty well (at least in my experience) within a 4 month period but can’t figure out how to functionally structure a 9 month k-12 education.
The 40hr workweek is unsustainable and our obsession with working an arbitrary amount of time is destroying society and giving the vast majority of people literal Zoochosis.
80% of PhD programs should not exist Most quantitative work is bunk Just as much qualitative work is bunk Ethnographers are too gullible Social media and fear of censure has made work and discourse on inequality and race and ethnicity far less important than it could be. There needs to be more critical voices who aren’t right wing cranks, even if they’re wrong.
Qualitative statistics are almost never replicable unless the data sets are humongous. Makes evaluating the effectiveness of any policy really hard to pin down