In Public Opinion Quarterly 72:1 (the latest issue), Andrew Kohut reviews Sarah Igo’s (IMHO terrific) book The Averaged American. Predictably, Kohut likes the “good stories that are generally well told,” but complains that Igo fails to give credit to polls’ capacity to wrest control from elites and put it in the hands of “ordinary Americans.”
What Kohut doesn’t seem to grasp is the claim of performativity documented in Igo’s book. Igo argues that the advent of polling as a taken-for-granted representational mode produced a particular kind of public: precisely the kind that Kohut, well, takes for granted! Consider: “…key polling indicators–presidential approval, consumer confidence, party affiliation, and so on–play [a role] in providing an ongoing, objective record of the national mood….” Who knew there was a national mood?
The final paragraph of Kohut’s review I find particularly interesting given my interest in the aesthetics of political representation:
…perhaps Igo’s concerns… just might be assuaged if she were to assemble and analyze the overall results of all questions from the national media polls on a major contemporary topic such as Iraq. She would see how just nuanced and textured a portrait they paint of American thinking…. she would realize that Dr. Gallup’s aspirations to give voice to the people were being realized.
Myself, I doubt if Igo would be so delighted, but I could be wrong. More importantly, pure representationalism in portraiture hasn’t been in vogue for centuries; nuanced and textured portraits are creative, not transparently representational!
ap
21 Comments
I bought the Igo book immediately upon its release but like a distressing percentage of the books I buy nowadays, I haven’t read it.
I wish I knew more about how commentators went about characterizing the desires of the public before there was polling. Was it just anecdote? Was it just references to some vague sense of a spirit in the air?
Could this be the same andy perrin who, two or three days ago, had never even left a comment on a blog?
You really think we should spoil the punchline?
Igo notes that the modern poll supplanted the search for the ‘average’ American, e.g., Middletown, the Elmira studies, etc., hence the pun in the book title.
Another way of thinking about it is that there was no public (in the singular) and, therefore, no desires thereof, prior to its “objective” measurement. http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/public_culture/v014/14.1warner.html
Aww shucks, just thought I’d try my hand at it.
We try to snap people up fast here at Scatterplot.
@5 – and thus, we are rejuvenated (though, certainly this does not preclude other strategies)!
I’m very happy that our hard-fought recruitment effort at scatterplot was successful, and that orgtheory is left to jealously mope. Welcome, Mr. Perrin!
Igo’s book is worth reading. In part because it is so enjoyable to read. And in part because it helped me see how much of my thinking about communities (“averaged”) is formed not by some sociological understanding, but rather by the practices of how we tend to gather information about folks.
I heart me some Andy Perrin. But you scatterbrains (or am I one too? i never understood the casing) don’t give much of a warm welcome. Can’t a boy get a welcome post anymore?
Speaking of snatching people up, we at Vanderbilt are bursting with pride and excitement that Dr. Igo will join us in the fall. Yay Sarah!
I heard Igo give a talk at Michigan, it was quite excellent.
I wonder, does Igo’s work on the creation of the national public connect to Mitchell’s contention that the national economy (“the economy”) was a product of the 1930s (Keynes, etc.)? Was there a whole new phase of nation building going on then based on aggregate statistics (GDP/GNP, the Gallup Poll, etc.)?
Jenn: A welcome post sounds good in the abstract, but we’ve had a few people who’ve accepted invitations to post and then never did. I suppose maybe one could argue that the reason they didn’t post is that they didn’t have a welcome post. Chicken-and-egg problem.
In any case, we are very pleased that Andy has stepped up to the mike! Plus, look, we’ve already added him to the sidebar!
Dan: can you point me toward Mitchell’s contention? It sounds promising.
All: I feel oh-so-welcome already.
ap
Andy: Mitchell’s 1998 Cultural Studies piece, Fixing the Economy, makes the claim. It also is mentioned in his book Rule of Experts. I recommend both – the first chapter of Rule of Experts (“Can the Mosquito Speak?”) is both humorous and insightful. Kind of like a post-structuralist Connections.
As an aside, according to your UNC webpage, you’re looking at doing some work on the free software movement? I’ve poked at the same subject and I was wondering, am I right in saying that there is basically no existing work within sociology on the subject? The only social science I found on the subject was Weber’s “Success of Open Source”. Is there anything I’m missing?
Thanks!
Dan: I’m writing my dissertation on free/open source software. I’ll send you an email.
As of now I’m not working on anything on F/LOSS, but I remain interested. There’s some stuff on enrollment in the “movement” on MIT’s open source site, but other than that Weber’s book is the best I’ve seen. Of course Lessig’s _Code_ is excellent too, but not really social scientific. Ultimately what I’m most interested in is the development of hierarchies in programming communities. I’ve got a large archive of programmers’ listserv messages over decades and I’d like to work on informal hierarchy on the lists.
Welcome posts can be weird if the guest-blogger never blogs. I have had that happen with almost every guest-blogger I ever invited onto my blog. Or they would do “hi, I’m…” introductory posts and never blog again, and that’s also weird. Fanfare is good if something is coming, otherwise you are introducing an empty stage.
I was shocked when Jeremy invited me onto his blog. I didn’t think he was serious. Now I realize…he didn’t expect me to blog! :-)
I blog here more often than I do at Money Law (the art of winning an unfair academic game, i.e. the legal academy), although oddly legal pedagogy is my hobbyhorse. But I find it super fun here, intellectually stimulating, and not _just_ sociology. I think my hesitation at blogging at Money Law is that I feel like I can only when I have something to say about legal academia that’s non-personal, and here Jeremy has said that I can do whatever I want. Scatterplot is hard to pin down, and it makes for good, frequent, inventive blogging. It’s the sociology of everyday life, wherever your life happens to be!
Oops. Sweet hearted teasing = / blog comment. I know y’all love Andy. I know Andy feels at home. I did not know other guests were so rude.
@12 – Chris Kelty does work on open source. You can find him here: http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~anth/people/faculty/people-kelty.htm
Or at Savage Minds, the fabulous team anthropology blog:
http://savageminds.org/
I haven’t read Igo’s book yet, but it sounds like it raises some interesting points and touches on a practical problem that I am having.
I’m writing a dissertation chapter on how family structure influences maternal employment. I’m trying to put recent trends in some historical context and explain the changes in attitudes about maternal employment. My problem is that I’m not sure how to assess mothers’ desire for paid work or public approval of mothers’ employment before Gallup polls and the GSS. I could try wading through popular publications or speeches by famous people from the period, but I’m not sure that would tell me what the “average” person thought about mothers’ employment. And it certainly would be hard to compare with statistics such as “78 percent of mothers believe that working mothers can have as strong a relationship with their child as stay-at-home mothers.” So my sentence currently reads “In the early decades of the twentieth century, most women with young children probably viewed paid work as undesirable.”
Leaving aside the more abstract/theoretical question of whether a “public” or an “average American” existed before the introduction of polling, any practical suggestions on whether and how to make comparisons of public opinion between periods before and after the introduction of public opinion polling?
@perchesk.18 (I agree that this notation is awesome.) Diaries and letters are two sources I have seen used to capture the ideas of “regular people.” You might find some accounts in secondary sources written by historians. Two works that use this technique, albeit in the field of sexualities rather than families per se, are D’Emilio and Freedman and Faderman.
Hi all,
I just wanted to respond to earlier questions about sociological work on the free software/open source movement–Paul-Brian McInerney who is in the process of moving to the University of Illinois at Chicago has written a lot on this subject…
@perchesk.18: I second tina’s approach but worry that the question you call “abstract/theoretical” really isn’t. Here’s a thought experiment: in the early decades of the twentieth century, did most women with young children view iPods as undesirable? Of course paid work wasn’t nearly so “off the table” as iPods were at the time, but the same problematic holds. To the extent that they “viewed” paid work *at all*, I suspect they did so guided by the texts they could consume, i.e., tina’s suggestions of diaries and letters but also magazines and gossip networks.