peter berger and tobacco sociology

Eminent sociologist Peter Berger has died. The New York Times has a lengthy obituary here. In my neck of the woods, Berger is most known for his book, with Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality. Berger and Luckmann introduced a vocabulary for understanding the process of social construction (externalization, objectification, internalization, habitualization, etc.) that has been applied widely, including especially in institutional theory in organizational sociology. Elsewhere, Berger is known for his extensive work in the sociology of religion.

At the same time as the laudatory obituaries circulate, I am a bit troubled by one omission: Berger’s work for the tobacco industry. As documented by Glantz et al (2008)’s article on the role of sociologists in defending tobacco from public health critics in the 1970s-1980s, and discussed more at Sourcewatch, Peter Berger was deeply involved with pro-tobacco social science. For example, in the industry-commissioned book Smoking and Society: Toward a More Balanced Perspective, Berger accused the anti-smoking movement of being a “health cult” (an interesting charge from a sociologist of religion).

None of this work is mentioned in the New York Times obituary. Nor is it mentioned on Berger’s wikipedia page. And yet it seems like a full accounting of his life and legacy (and of the legacy of 20th century sociology) should grapple with this aspect as well. What do we do with the fact that one of the most prominent figures associated with the term “social construction” also worked as a “merchant of doubt”?

sunday morning sociology, free speech edition

We can’t say if it’s age, period, or cohort but, at least right now, Millennials are the best! Or the most progressive on a ton of metrics, anyway. From this Monkey Cage post about how old and young are voting differently in both the US and UK.

A weekly link round-up of sociological work – work by sociologists, referencing sociologists, or just of interest to sociologists. This scatterplot feature is co-produced with Mike Bader.

This week’s links feature several discussions of recent “free speech controversies”, including those targeting scholars (some of which might better be characterized as hate speech controversies, or racist assaults on free speech controversies).

sunday morning sociology, non-stop violence edition

From the Washington Post’s police shootings tracker.

A weekly link round-up of sociological work – work by sociologists, referencing sociologists, or just of interest to sociologists. This scatterplot feature is co-produced with Mike Bader.

This week’s edition includes links about violence in the United States. It’s been that kind of week. Of course, in the US, it’s almost always that kind of week.

algorithmic decisionmaking replaces your biases with someone else’s biases

There has been a lot of great discussion, research, and reporting on the promise and pitfalls of algorithmic decisionmaking in the past few years. As Cathy O’Neil nicely shows in her Weapons of Math Destruction (and associated columns), algorithmic decisionmaking has become increasingly important in domains as diverse as credit, insurance, education, and criminal justice. The algorithms O’Neil studies are characterized by their opacity, their scale, and their capacity to damage. Much of the public debate has focused on a class of algorithms employed in criminal justice, especially in sentencing and parole decisions. As scholars like Bernard Harcourt and Jonathan Simon have noted, criminal justice has been a testing ground for algorithmic decisionmaking since the early 20th century. But most of these early efforts had limited reach (low scale), and they were often published in scholarly venues (low opacity). Modern algorithms are proprietary, and are increasingly employed to decide the sentences or parole decisions for entire states.

“Code of Silence”, Rebecca Wexler’s new piece in Washington Monthly, explores one such influential algorithm: COMPAS (also the study of an extensive, if contested, ProPublica report). Like O’Neil, Wexler focuses on the problem of opacity. The COMPAS algorithm is owned by a for-profit company, Northpointe, and the details of the algorithm are protected by trade secret law. The problems here are both obvious and massive, as Wexler documents.

sunday morning sociology, pride edition

LGBTQ representation continued to increase in the UK (via the Monkey Cage). LGBTQ rights may present a barrier to the smooth functioning of the Conservative-DUP coalition, as the Conservatives have many prominent LGBTQ MPs, while the DUP remains staunchly anti-.

A weekly link round-up of sociological work – work by sociologists, referencing sociologists, or just of interest to sociologists. This scatterplot feature is co-produced with Mike Bader.

sunday morning sociology, bye bye paris edition

 

Whatever minimum wage is in a given country, McDonald’s pays just more than that.

A weekly link round-up of sociological work – work by sociologists, referencing sociologists, or just of interest to sociologists. This scatterplot feature is co-produced with Mike Bader.

This week, we mourn all sorts of things, not the least of which is US leadership (or at least, followership) on combating global climate change. Please post your favorite discussions of the events, especially by social scientists, in the comments.

stata: roll your own palettes

I realize all the cool kids have switched to R, but if you still work with Stata, you may be interested in some routines I worked up to generate color and line pattern palettes and customize graphs fairly easily with macros and loops. This is useful to me because I am generating line graphs showing the trends for 17 different offense groups. Some preliminary tricks, then the code.