In a forthcoming ASR paper, Tim Hallett, Orla Stapleton, and Michael Sauder introduce the concept of public ideas. Hallett et al are interested in that subset of ideas that are produced by social scientists and enter into mainstream public discourse. They define public ideas as those with the following properties:
mediators use them as an object of interest (being the news), (b) mediators use them as an interpretant (making sense of the news), and (c) the ideas are used as objects and interpretants in a variety of ways as part of an unfolding career.
In the paper, Hallett et al focus on seven public ideas ranging from “bowling alone” to the “second shift”, tracing the citations to each idea in 12 mainstream newspapers for the 10 years after its initial publication. They categorize the seven ideas studied into a few main clusters based on the trajectory of the number of citations and the trajectory of the share of citations that treat the public idea as an object of interest or an interpretive tool. For example, “culture of fear” is a “coaster” (meaning a relatively steady flow of cites) and is “interpretant heavy” (meaning it’s mostly used as a tool for interpreting other events, rather than a focus of the news story itself – journalists were not writing stories about the culture of fear, but using it to make sense of, say, reactions to terrorist attacks). Hallet et al offer several observations and propositions about the sources and trajectories of public ideas (noting that their sample came from elite institutions, often in books published by crossover/trade presses, etc.), without proposing a full-fledged theory.
Over on Twitter, Beth Popp Berman wondered what their analysis would have looked like if they’d extended their timeframe beyond 2011 and in particular if they’d included intersectionality. Beth pointed to a recent write-up of intersectionality from Vox, pointing to its ubiquity as both a rallying cry on the left and a target of demonization on the right (a great example of an article citing the concept as an object of interest, in Hallett et al’s terms). In this post, I’ll try to see what we can learn by thinking about intersectionality as a public idea.
scatterplot 