Sociology: An Idea Whose Time Has Come Author(s): Earl Babbie Source: Sociological Perspectives, Vol. 47, No. 4 (Winter, 2004), pp. 331-338 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4148855 Accessed: 23/01/2009 17:50 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucal. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
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SOCIOLOGY:AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS COME EARLBABBIE* ChapmanUniversity
ABSTRACT: This is a revised version of the 2004 PSA Presidential Address. It examines the vital needfor sociology in today's world and the ways in which sociology already overtly and covertly makes a difference and suggests ways to enhance the impactof sociology in the years ahead.
As I grow older and mortality is less of a theoretical concept, I find myself sometimes thinking about how I would like to be remembered. While "still alive" is perhaps my first choice, I would also like to be remembered as a sociologist who persistently and even annoyingly poked, prodded, and nagged his colleagues to take their profession ever more seriously and to insist on sociology making a difference in the creation of a just and humane society. Hence this year's theme, "Sociology: An Idea Whose Time Has Come." If I repeat a few things I have said on this topic before, that is in the nature of nagging. If we were gods, contemplating the state of humanity, I suspect we would be inclined to start over. However, we are not gods. We are sociologists, so we are more inclined to look for ways to patch things up, uncover problems, discover ways to fix them, and so forth. I would like to suggest that we shift that orientation into high gear. It is time for sociology with an attitude. Let me begin by saying a little about why I feel sociology is important to humanity, and then I will look at what kind of impact it has been having. I will conclude with some suggestions for the future. ALL SOCIAL PROBLEMS ARE SOCIOLOGICAL AND SO ARE THEIR SOLUTIONS To begin, I think it bears underscoring that all social problems are sociological. I do not mean to suggest, of course, that we currently have all the answers, but I assert that every social problem that concerns people today has its solution in the domain tended by sociologists. This might seem tautological to many in our field, but it is also worth pointing out that we, as a society, still tend to look for solutions elsewhere. *Direct all correspondence to: Earl Babbie, Chapman University, Department of Sociology, Roosevelt 216, One University Dr., Orange, CA 92866; e-mail:babbie@chapman.edu. Sociological Perspectives, Vol. 47, Issue 4, pp. 331-338, ISSN 0731-1214, electronic ISSN 1533-8673. ? 2004 by Pacific Sociological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.
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It is my conclusion, for example, that overpopulation is the mother of all social problems today. Harnessing population growth will not solve all the other problems, but if we fail to do so we have no hope for long-term solutions to hunger, poverty, ethnic violence, war, environmental degradation, and probably every other problem that concerns us. And yet where have we tended to look for solutions to the problem of unchecked population growth? We turned first to biologists, hoping they could tell us where all those babies came from and why. The biologists gave us a definitive answer, but the problem persisted. If only we could solve the problem without dampening one of the great pleasures we had discovered. That became our new goal. We asked the rubber industry for a solution, and they obliged. Yet the problem persisted. Maybe if you could just take a pill, we mused-and the chemists provided a solution. Still the problem persisted. It is time for everyone to recognize that the problem of overpopulation resides in the sociological domain: in the form of pro-natalist beliefs, values, norms, and other aspects of culture. And that is where we will find solutions. It has been my pleasure to work with the Population Media Center' in its attempt to fight overpopulation around the world. It is currently working to get people in dozens of countries to recognize, examine, and shift their views and practices regarding (1) family size, (2) safe sex, and (3) the status of women. Their primary tool: soap operas, which go to the heart of the cultural factors maintaining overpopulation and related problems. The initial assessments suggest they are being very successful. In Tanzania, for example, the leading male character finally gave in to his wife's two years of nagging and went to the family planning clinic for condoms. The next day, real family planning clinics were flooded with men asking for condoms. In Ethiopia, new visitors to the family planning clinics commonly cite the soap operas now being broadcast in two languages there as the stimulus for their interest in controlling fertility. Without addressing every social problem, one by one, I want to be clear that what I am saying is not true just of overpopulation. Consider war. If we simply look to where we spend money to prevent war, there is no contest: we spend it on the development of weapons. This has seemed like the way to go for a long time. For example, when Hiram Gatling invented the first fully automatic machine gun, he is said to have declared that he had finally brought an end to war. His new weapon would reap such devastating slaughter on the battlefield that no general would ever send soldiers to face such sure death. By the same token, the Wright brothers felt they had made future wars unthinkable, as airplanes could now fly over cities and drop explosives that would destroy everything in sight. Such hopes, of course, underestimated the vicarious courage of national and military leaders. Many of us remember the Cold War theory of Mutually Assured Destructionaptly generating the acronym MAD. The ability to destroy the possibility of human life on the planet seemed the way to bring an end to war. Clearly, this has not been working. Perhaps it is time to examine seriously such issues as ethnic identity, international economics, exploitation of resources, and poverty. In the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks, for example, scholars need to be able to
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ask why people have such hatred for the United States without being accused of being unpatrioticor of justifying terrorism.We need to be able to assign readings such as ChalmersJohnson'sBlowback(2000) without worrying that it will invite Justice Department investigation, without having to defend ourselves against chargesthat we are lending aid and comfortto an enemy. So to repeat, it is past time to recognize that our social problems and the solutions reside in the domain tended by sociologists. Wecannot waste any more time addressingthem elsewhere. Sociology is an idea whose time has come. WE ARE EVERYWHERE
I realize my commentsso far have a certainRodney Dangerfieldquality,moaning that sociology can't get any respect.Thatis not an altogetheraccurateassessment of our currentplace in society. There are sociologists all around us, though they are not necessarily recognized as such. I think it is important to recognize that people who have been trainedin the sociologicalimaginationare everywhere. When I taught at the University of Hawaii, I could inform students considering majoringin our field that JimLui, my insuranceagent, was a sociology graduate, as was Francis Keala, the Honolulu chief of police, and Don Ho (in 1997 Ho received the Citizen-Sociologistaward from the Mid-SouthSociologicalAssociation). At that time, I could report that my wife, Sheila, was a sociology graduate and that my father-in-lawhad a Ph.D. in sociology. (Later,our son, Aaron,would majorin sociology as well.) In his 2001 commencementaddress to graduatingsociology majorsat the University of Oregon, Peter Drier of OccidentalCollege listed a few other sociology majorswho might not be known as such.2They included, among others, mayors, members of Congress, and other government officials; civil rights movement founders Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins, Jesse Jackson, and Ralph Abernathy; the archbishop of Washington,D.C.; community organizer and activist Saul Alinsky; arts and entertainmentfigures such as Saul Bellow, Regis Philbin, Dan Akroyd, Robin Williams,Dinah Shore, and Dr. Ruth; and former President Ronald Reagan.Clearly,students of sociology have had a diverse and powerful impact on modern society. Sociologists have been active organizers and participants in all the major movements in social life: civil rights, women's liberation, environment,peace, labor,poverty,and others. Often, sociologists are recognized for making sociological contributions.As World WarII was winding down, the U.S. Army asked Sam Stouffer to poll soldiers on the issue of who should be released first,those just entering the service or those who had been in the longest. Also, sociological researchfigured into the 1954 arguments of Brownv. Boardof Education,and the Coleman Report (1966), a decade later, brought about more changes in public education. During the Second Vatican Council, some participants wanted a formal pronouncement that the Roman Catholic Church did not hold the Jews responsible for the death of Jesus. Those opposed to the proposal stated that the church had not blamed the Jews, hence there was no reason for disclaiming that position. After research on anti-Semitism by Charlie Glock and Rod Stark (1966) pointed
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out that many rank-and-file Catholics believed that the church in fact held Jews responsible, the Council made a formal declaration that they were not. There are many continuing examples of sociologists at work as sociologists in the community. Marc Smith is a sociologist at Microsoft, studying the nature of on-line communities of cyberspace (Festa 2003). Ross Koppel (2002) recently estimated the annual cost of Alzheimer's disease to American businesses at $61 billion, and that contribution was recognized as sociological research. When presidential candidate Howard Dean wanted to discuss the persistence of institutional discrimination in America, he used the sociological research of Devah Pager (2002), whose dissertation revealed that a white man with a criminal record stood a better chance of being hired than a comparable black man without a criminal record.3 Rather than pursue more examples of our overt recognition, I want to draw attention to the covert side of sociology. This goes to a powerful distinction between making a difference and getting credit for making a difference. COVERT SUCCESSES Sociology has had what might be called covert successes in the past. This can be seen in the form of respected fields that are specialized spin-offs of sociology: social work, demography, criminology, human resources, organizational leadership, marketing research, to name just a few. I tend to add economics, political science, anthropology, and others to this list, but it often makes colleagues in those fields cranky. However, their knowledge and use of sociological concepts, techniques, and findings lends support to the image of sociology as the Mother Ship of the social sciences. The point is that sociological methods and insights are making important contributions to modern social life, even if people generally do not think of those contributions as examples of sociology at work in the world. When we discuss sociology making a difference in the world, it is important that we distinguish between (1) making a difference and (2) getting credit for making a difference. I would suggest that when we stop worrying about getting credit, we see sociological footprints all over modern society. There are countless terms in common usage that originated in sociology. Consider W. I. Thomas and Dorothy Thomas's dictum regarding the "definition of the situation," popularized by Robert Merton, as the "self-fulfilling prophecy." Merton also gave us the concepts "role model" and "focus group." And the list continues with Thorstein Veblen's "conspicuous consumption," Sam Stouffer's "relative deprivation," Max Weber's "charisma" and "Protestant Ethic." Were George Herbert Mead alive today, I am sure he would regularly watch Significant Others on the Bravo channel. Socioeconomic status and stratification, the upper middle class, peer groups and peer pressure: these are terms that ordinary Americans relate to and use. Perhaps few recognize that these originated in sociology, nor do they see them as part of a conceptual armory that can be used for more than casual observations and sitcom themes. Yet to some extent they shape the nature of common discourse; these embedded concepts are like sleeper cells of the sociological imagination.
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Sociological research techniques are being used extensively and regularly--by sociologists and by others. Opinion polls and focus groups are obvious examples. Small-group research in the form of mock juries is another. When investigative journalism is at its best, it smacks of sociological field research. In assessing the impact of sociology in the world today and in the future, I think we have to be willing to include the sociological activities of nonsociologists. Earlier, I mentioned my work with the Population Media Center and its use of soap operas to affect family size, safe sex, and the status of women. What I did not mention is the "Sabido methodology" used in that program. Twenty-five years ago, Miguel Sabido, then a vice president with Mexican television, developed a rigorous set of procedures for analyzing the dominant culture of a target society and configuring fictional stories that would produce a shift from traditional patterns regarding family, sex, and gender. Thus the Ethiopian soap operas were preceded by more than a year of surveys, content analysis, focus groups, and field research. Only after the research had been completed was it possible to lay out and script the appropriate dramas. Similarly, Lynne Twist, in The Soul of Money (2003), describes numerous instances of the Hunger Project (THP)4 working in a variety of cultures throughout the world to bring an end to the chronic, persistent hunger that results in up to nine million deaths each year. Several years ago THP established the Women's Initiative in recognition of the conclusion that world hunger could not be ended without radically recasting the status of women in societies where hunger is rampant. This conclusion was derived in part from an analysis of women's roles in the production and distribution of food, in sharp contrast to the support they received for those activities (agricultural loans, for example). Thus THP has frequently focused on training and organizing local women as agents of change in their communities. Sometimes these activities have required a fairly sophisticated understanding of the local cultures. In Senegal, for example, Twist traveled hours through uninhabitable desert lands to finally arrive in a remote area where seventeen villages were about to perish as a result of years of drought. As she met with the local people and heard their views of the situation, she discovered an ironic dilemma: several of the women in the group were convinced it would be possible to drill for water in an underground lake, but their culture had no place for women to make such decisions or engage in such work. As Twist learned more about the culture, however, she found that dreams and visions were respected no matter who had them. The women's conviction that there was water below was recontextualized as a "vision," and the women were soon at work digging wells, which, happily, produced the needed water for irrigation and crops (Twist 2003:68-74). As one more example, the American occupation of Iraq has produced endless examples of failures that could have been avoided through judicious doses of the sociological imagination. What may be less obvious are the numerous critical analyses in the popular press that employ rather sophisticated understandings of Iraqi, Arabic, and / or Islamic paradigms. While I cannot report how many of these writers majored in sociology or even took an introductory course, it is clear that sociological concepts and sensibilities are being put into the public discourse every day.
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So the point I have sought to make is that sociology is, in fact, alive and active in the world today, even when that activity is not explicitly identified as sociological or practiced by certified, card-carrying sociologists. AN AGENDA FOR THE AGE OF SOCIOLOGY An aim of the 2004 conference is for participants to work together in the development of an agenda for the Age of Sociology. Let me close with just a few contextual comments about this. First, I think we need to raise public awareness about the power of what we might call "sociological diagnostics," that is, analytical techniques that allow us to identify certain social problems and explicate their causes. For example, when someone casually says that women earn less than men because they are more likely to work part-time, they tend to concentrate in lower-paying occupations or industries, or that they are likely to have less seniority, we cannot let people be satisfied with such logical possibilities unless and until they are tested. And sociological analytical techniques allow these to be tested easily. As many of us know, of course, the kinds of factors just listed play some part in the income discrepancies by gender but not all. When the Census Bureau (1987) took a couple dozen such variables into account simultaneously, they explained about two-thirds of the income difference by gender but could not account for the other third. A somewhat different methodology was used by researchers at the University of Michigan in 1971 (Levitin, Quinn, and Staines 1971). Beginning with a massive survey of the labor force, the researchers separated the sample by gender. Then the men were divided into two groups at random. One of the male subsamples was used for a regression analysis that included twenty or thirty variables that ought to relate to income. Once the complex regression equation had been generated, it was used to predict incomes of men in the other subsample. The equation predicted incomes within an average of $30 a year. Then the equation was used to predict the incomes of the women in the sample, and it overestimated their incomes by an average of $3,000 a year (in 1975). Clearly, all the "reasonable" explanations for gender difference were insufficient. The residual difference would seem to represent discrimination by gender. Similarly, we cannot let people be satisfied with the explanation that minorities are less likely to get loan approvals because of group differences in "reasonable" variables such as past bankruptcies and job history. Variables such as these are easily controlled in a sociological analysis to determine if there are residual differences in loan successes of various ethnic groups when the impact of reasonable variables have been taken into account and controlled for. Second, we need to be more explicit in telling people what our findings mean in practical, action terms. In his keynote address to the California Sociological Association in 1996, Jonathan Turner spoke of the need for sociologists to develop engineering applications from our understandings of and findings about society (Turner 1998). Recognizing that this would be criticized as "social engineering," he noted that social engineering is being done every day on the basis of ideological
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agenda and without attention to scientific analyses of how society operates. The loud and deep concern over ways to "protect the family" in contemporary American society is a case in point. Third, in developing those issues that need to be addressed by sociological analysis, we should be proactive in achieving collaboration with nonsociologists, particularly those in decision-making positions in government and in the private sector. In this regard, I was especially pleased to have Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez with us at the 2004 conference, discussing ways that sociologists can fill some of the gaps in facts and understanding that legislators face. Fourth, we need to ensure that our "sociological" pronouncements are, in fact, sociologically sound and not simply ideologically comfortable. (No sociologist needs this reminder more than I do.) This means, among other things, that we must be willing to revisit and reassess old issues and trusted conclusions in such sensitive areas as ethnicity, poverty, economics, peace, religion, and the like. Most of the topics we study are so infused with ideological concerns that we always run the risk of being dismissed as ideologues rather than scientists. At the very least, we need to ensure that such complaints are never justified. The recursive nature of sociology in society makes this all the more vital, since any sociological understanding of society becomes a new social fact, likely to have an impact on that which was just understood and conceivably changing the nature of social reality. I have always felt we should regard society as autopoieticas a self-creating entity. Sociology represents the Hawthorne effect with a vengeance. This also guarantees a never-ending need for sociological analyses. The sociologist's work is never done. In summary, then, we need to begin recognizing the many ways in which sociological research and reasoning is already embedded in ongoing social life, even when it is not identified as sociological. We need to make that role more explicit, and then we need to go farther. If we review the state of social life in the United States and the world today, it becomes obvious that sociology is truly an idea whose time has come, and we do not have time for anything less. NOTES 1. http://populationmedia.org. 2. Peter Drier's list can be found on the AmericanSociologicalAssociation'sWeb site at http://www.asanet.org/student/famoussocs.html. 3. Thereare,happily,many more examplesof sociology being used and appreciatedin the life of society.For continuingexamples,see the Societyfor Applied SociologyWeb site, which monitors"Sociologistsin the News." http://www.appliedsoc.org/soc-news.html, 4. http://www.thp.org. REFERENCES Coleman,James. 1966. Equalityof EducationalOpportunity. Washington,DC: U.S. Government PrintingOffice. Festa,Paul. 2003."Microsoft'sIn-houseSociologist."news.com,August 19. Retrievedfrom http://news.com.com/2008-1082_3-5065298.html, May 20, 2004.
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Glock, Charles and Rodney Stark. 1966. Christian Beliefs and Anti-Semitism. New York: Harper & Row. Johnson, Chalmers. 2000. Blowback:The Costs and Consequencesof American Empire. New York: Henry Holt. Koppel, Ross. 2002. "Alzheimer's Disease: The Costs to U.S. Businesses in 2002." Report to the Alzheimer's Association, June. Levitin, Teresa E., Robert Quinn, and Graham Staines. 1971. "Sex Discrimination against the American Working Woman." Report to the Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. Nariman, Heidi Noel. 1993. Soap Operasfor Social Change.Westport, CT: Praeger. Pager, Devah. 2002. "The Mark of a Criminal Record." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Turner,Jonathan. 1998. "Must Sociological Theory and Practice Be So Far Apart?" Sociological Perspectives 41:244-58. [Revised version of Turner's 1996 keynote address to the California Sociological Association.] Twist, Lynne. 2003. The Soul of Money. New York:Norton. U.S. Bureau of the Census. 1987. Male-FemaleDifferencesin WorkExperience,Occupation,and Earning, 1984. Current Population Reports, Series P-70, No. 10. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.