You pick up a journal. You look through it. You know that what’s in there is “sociology”. But then you think to yourself, “I don’t recognize this stuff as what I do. It seems like an entirely different discipline; one I’m not remotely interested in!” It happens to me more often than I should probably admit. More of an indictment of me than of our discipline. And the experience becomes more jarring when I think of Science and Nature - the breadth of disciplinary bounds that those journals cover, yet still make attempts at being somewhat coherent.
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Yes, I can relate to this.
More of an indictment of me than of our discipline.
Why?
I’m with the colonel — why?
I should have written, “Perhaps more of an indictment of me than of our discipline”.
But to defend it:
1.) I have idiosyncratic tastes.
2.) Given the frequency of the experience and the commonality of some of the work that produces this experience, I suspect that I am not always well suited for sociology rather than sociology being ill-suited for itself.
Perhaps this is a co-out. A kind of, “It’s not you, it’s me” way to breaking up with the discipline (no, I’m not quitting sociology). But I’m not looking to point the finger at anyone - and not simply for pragmatic reasons.
Some of the lingering thoughts behind this observation are that perhaps I am not that good of a predictor of good or bad work (or better, work that will be influential). And that what doesn’t interest me should, or will ten years from now. But if you asked me to pick articles/ideas that would be influential, I am worried that I wouldn’t be able to.
A colleague of mine is teaching a graduate level course on how to get a paper published. One of her ideas for the course was to get authors of famous papers to send her rejection letters. And in what I think of as a very gracious move, Mark Granovetter sent her his rejection comments from ASR for “The Strength of Weak Ties” paper. They are biting and emphatic. Somewhat cruel, even. And given the storied career of this paper, somewhat shocking. As a result I think to myself, “how would I have reviewed this paper? When it came out, how would I have reacted? Would I have found it interesting and exciting? Or would it produce the kind of experience I talk about above?” The answers to these questions aren’t at all clear, when I’m being honest with myself.
This is not an existential moment where I doubt my own capacities. Rather, I simply wonder about my fit with sociology. So maybe the best way to break up,
“It’s not you. And it’s also not me. It’s our relationship.”
If someone broke up with me like that I would punch them. But perhaps it would be more true than anything else…
I think this is a common occurrence in sociology. There are so many topics, methods, theories, etc., that we become quite distant from other sociologists. I think many others have had your experience and had a quite different reaction: to put up boundaries around some core of the discipline and shut out the others (isn’t Goldthorpe’s book On Sociology basically saying this?)
You don’t seem to be saying that, and I agree with you. I may not necessarily appreciate some of the work that is very different from mine, but we don’t have to look back very far in time to see a moment when work I care about was shut out of this core (e.g., sociology of gender, not to mention sexualities!)
> It’s not you. And it’s also not me. It’s our relationship.
I prefer Albert Brooks’ line in Finding Nemo — “No, of course I like you. It’s because I like you I don’t want to be with you. It’s a complicated emotion.”
As the colleague referenced above, I thought I weigh in here…
I think it took me a few years working in a department that is extremely network-centered to discover Granovetter’s work. In addition, it took me 6 years here before I ever cited it.
I always felt a bit self-conscious about this as well — perhaps I’m not intellectual enough? For me, it was “an existential moment where I doubt my own capacities.”
Then I did an informal poll in my graduate program and found that our most successful faculty aren’t over the moon about every article in ASR either. They also wonder why/how someone might devote their career to that particular topic and can’t quite figure out why it is good/interesting. In the end, this is why I like sociology — it’s big, wide, inclusive, and a little nutty on the edges.
Does Dana Fischer want to share her syllabus?
I’d like to see the Fischer syllabus as well.
The syllabus is adapted from a syllabus that Bill Freudenburg taught at UW-Madison when I was in grad school. It’s up on my website:
http://www.columbia.edu/~drf2004/FisherPracticumSyll.pdf
As you’ll see, the majority of the semester is dedicated to workshoping the students papers. I start off the class by distributing harsh reviews, some sample R&R letters, and the core influence scores for 90 top journals from ASA (you can get it on the ASA site).
On the topic of such courses.. the Princeton Sociology program has a great second-year requirement called the Empirical Seminar whose purpose is basically to teach students how to write a publishable empirical paper. Many of the papers from that year-long seminar do get published, sometimes in top journals. My year, Marta Tienda taught it, which had the added bonus of learning from someone who’d been an editor of AJS.
I introduced such a requirement to the program in which I teach now (the Media, Technology and Society PhD program at Northwestern). However, it’s only a quarter long, which is just ten weeks, certainly not enough time to write a paper of that sort. So I revised the course somewhat, but the general goal of teaching the skills of how one writes such a paper remain the same. I also cover article reviewing, but I won’t say more about that right now as we’re right in the middle of one such exercise and it has a bit of a mystery component. I don’t think any of my students read Scatterplot, but just in case, I should hold off on saying more for now.
If anyone’s curious, here’s what the syllabus looks like (not exactly since I end up tweaking it throughout the quarter based on student progress, but it’s close).
Speaking of Princeton, OPR had a course where students read prior students’ dissertation proposals, dissertations, and also included tracing the life of an article from a dissertation section through the submission, R&R and eventual publication. I didn’t take it but I think it was universally appreciated by those who did.
I also participated in a grant workshop and suggested we review grant proposals that were funded a second time around so we could see the original, the feedback and the final funded product. I think people thought I was just being gossipy to want to see rejections, but it was incredibly helpful.
Makley - the mystery assignment I mentioned is along similar lines.
Also related, I start my course by passing out to students the three-step proposal I had first handed in as an assignment when I took the course. It includes my professor’s comments (it’s with permission from her that I distribute this to students). That same day, I also hand out the article that resulted from the work I did in that course. My point with this is precisely to demystify the process. I mention that I was a second-year in grad school to point out that I was at their stage when I did this (or earlier since many of our students have an MA when they enter our program). This way they can see that while their first attempt at a research question may not work (never does), it doesn’t mean that a year later they may not have a complete original article ready for publication.
You know, this should be organized and archived under a “how do you learn to write?” heading. I have some suggestions that are along a different line. But I agree that the theme here — seeing drafts vs final products and learning about rejection letters — is very helpful.
Years ago, when I was a student editor at AJS and attending the lunch at the ASA for consulting editors, a colleague let slip to the managing editor that he had the practice of running a seminar in which students read the journal submissions and practice writing referee reports. I’ve always thought this was a great idea (both for learning the vital skill of writing referee reports and for getting students exposure to the publication process) and would want to go even further– e.g., by allowing them to see what the other referee reports look like, the decision, etc. My sense though is that the confidentiality issues are too serious to contemplate something like this. But perhaps people have experience with something similar?
I’d love to try something like this. Getting people comfortable with the publication process (including the unfairness, incompetence, and randomness that afflict so much of it [these afflictions are hardly unique to sociology journals]) is at least as important as talent in getting stuff published. (Nothing was more important to my career than being an AJS student editor).
Ezra: It might not be something easy to do for a journal (because of privacy issues), but departments may be able to do this. Each year simply ask their faculty to give one set of current paper reviews (accept, r&r, or reject) and use them in a professionalization seminar with the grad students. Over the course of five years, even in small departments, you’d have a large collection of reviews to look through. And you could even see where papers ended up in the long run (and what they ended up looking like).
shakha: now that’s an idea.
olderwoman: I’m interested in your suggestions that are “along a different line.” One of the big challenges I’m facing in my class is explaining how to change the lit review from a student paper into one that is actually identifying a gap in the literature…
What I did:
(1) Despite already being a good writer, I worked a lot with both paid and unpaid (i.e. friends) editors in grad school and early in my career. There is nothing like having someone tear your prose apart to make it better. A lot of this was at the level of sentence and paragraph, but sometimes an editor would say something that would lead me to realize that the paper logically needed another whole section.
(2) For my first “big” publication, I used an AJS article of the same genre as a template, and I recommend this to students. Pick a good article that is the same type as you are aiming for, and copy how it is done. (3) I learned a lot from coauthoring with a more senior colleague. Draft and counter-draft. You learn by doing. Coauthorship relationships are very helpful for learning.
(4) From said senior coauthor, I learned a couple of really good maxims. (i) An article is a short story, it has a single point and a clear narrative line. You decide what is figure — what you will emphasize — and the other stuff the reader needs to know to understand the piece has to be positioned as ground, as background. (ii) Think craft not art. He liked fine art and knew artists. He told me that good artists always focus on doing their craft really well, and sometimes art happens. I think this is great advice in writing as well. Don’t think “is this good enough to make me famous?” think “is this good, have I done the job well?”
Re lit reviews, the only thing I know to say is that it has to build an argument, you are making a point as you review the lit. But I already said that I just “know” what an argument is, and have a hard time teaching it. A colleague uses a puzzle metaphor: your lit review should show what piece is missing from the puzzle and why you can/should fill it.
Shakha: A very good suggestion. Thanks. Doesn’t help build students’ skills as referee-report writers, but not everything can be done in one seminar. My other concern is that faculty will not be as forthcoming (e.g., select out the really atrocious papers) as one might like, but perhaps that can be overcome.
I like OW’s about article-writing very much. I recently had a back-and-forth with the managing editor of a journal and in the process, came up with the following guidelines (for evaulating papers as well as constructing them). They had been sitting on my computer gathering dust. Might as well let more people see them:
1.. Use substantive motivations, not aesthetic ones. By an aesthetic motivation, I mean that the author is appealing to the reader’s sense that a certain kind of theory or approach should be preferred regardless of its explanatory power (e.g., we should be avoiding economistic or functionalist or reductionist explanations). Sometimes aesthetic motivations work (for getting a paper accepted), but the contribution tends to be hollow because the end of research (figuring out how the world works) is sacrificed for the means (telling each other how much we like certain ideas).
2.. Always frame around the dependent variable. The dependent variable is a question and the independent variables are answers to a question. So it makes no sense to start with an answer.
3.. Frame around a puzzle in the world, not a literature. The only reason anyone cares about a literature is because it is helpful in clarifying puzzles in the world. So start with the puzzle. (This relates to the lit review point) A related point is that just because a literature has not examined some phenomenon, that does not mean that you should. The only reason a phenomenon is interesting is if it poses a puzzle for existing ways of viewing the world.
4.. One hypothesis (or a few tightly related hypotheses) is enough. If people remember a paper at all, they will remember it for one idea. So no use trying to stuff a zillion ideas in a paper. A related problem with numerous hypotheses is that it’s never clear what implications the invalidation of any one hypothesis has for the theory.
5.. Build up the null to be as compelling as possible. A paper will not be interesting unless there is a really compelling null hypothesis. If there is no interesting alternative to the author’s argument, why would anyone care? Flogging straw men is both unfair and uninteresting.
6.. Save the null. Since the null is compelling, it must be right under certain conditions. The author’s job is to explain to the reader that he was right to believe x about the world, but that since x doesn’ t hold under certain conditions, he should shift to belief x’. This helps the reader feel comfortable about shifting to a new idea. Moreover, a very subtle shift in thinking can go a long way.
7.. Orient the reader. The reader needs to know at all times how any sentence fits into the narrative arc of the paper. All too often, I read papers where I get lost in the trees and have no sense of the forest.
8.. The narrative arc should start with the first paragraph or two where a question is framed and lead to the main finding of the paper. Everything else in the paper should be in service of that arc, either by clarifying the question or setting up the answer .