Tag Archives: academic disciplines

Question at the beginning of urban planning: “beautiful people or beautiful cities”?

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Here is part of an overview of the “birth of urban planning” and how the field began with a “focus on place at the expense of people”:

Before then, there were three types of people thinking about how a city should look and function — architects, public health officials, and social workers. Each group approached the question of city building very differently.

The architects were focused on the city as a built environment, implementing ideas like L’Enfant’s grand vision for Washington, D.C., and the New York City grid (set out by the Commissioner’s Plan of 1811). The public health professionals, on the other hand, were consumed with infrastructure. They knew there was a connection between certain diseases and social conditions, even if they didn’t know precisely what it was. Planning how a water system would work, or where waste should go, or how to get garbage out of a city, was the most effective way to stop diseases from spreading (see, for example, John Snow, who figured out in the 1850s that a single water pump on Broad Street in London had infected hundreds of people with cholera). And lastly the social workers wanted to use the city to improve the lives of the people living there. They wanted cleaner tenements, spaces for immigrant children to play, and more light and fresh air for residents.

These thinkers were brought together by the pressure cooker that was the Industrial Revolution. “At that moment, we began to look for technological ways to expand the city,” says Elliott Sclar, a professor of urban planning at Columbia University. “All of a sudden here’s a pressure to comprehensively plan. You can’t just put a privy wherever you want.”…

At that conference, and in the years that followed, any one of these early urban planning strains could have taken over as the intellectual giant in the field. Though the social workers and the public health officials continued to play a role, urban planning’s intellectual history ended up grounded in architecture.

That outcome is thanks in a large part to the creation of the country’s first urban planning school, at Harvard. The University founded a school of landscape architecture in 1898. It was, effectively, a vanity project, slavishly devoted to Frederick Law Olmstead (in fact, it was started by Olmstead’s son). At the same time, It was a place to start. Soon after, they began offering classes in city planning, a first for higher education in America.

This could be an intriguing intellectual “what if”: what if urban planning had initially followed a public health or social work path? How might our cities be different and how would that have changed our culture?

This reminds me of the roots of sociology. Like urban planning, sociology became a more formal academic discipline around the turn of the 20th century. While some people had been practicing sociology and urban planning, it took time for this to become institutionalized and formalized. Similarly, American sociology had its roots in a few influential departments, particularly Chicago, which shaped the early years of the field. Indeed, I suspect a number of the social sciences were formalized in this period as the cultural turn toward science and rationality combined with expanding college campuses.

Uptick in sociology job market?

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Inside Higher Ed summarizes a ASA report that suggests the number of open jobs in 2011 were near 2008 levels:

In 2011, the number of faculty jobs posted either for assistant professors or positions for which any faculty rank is possible was just 4 percent below the level in 2008, the year in which the economic downturn hit in the fall. And so many of the openings announced in 2008 were canceled that it is possible there were more actual openings in 2011. There are among the results in a new job market report issued by the American Sociological Association.

The number of faculty jobs in 2009 fell 35 percent, and the 2010 total was 14 percent below the 2008 level, so the new figures represent a significant rebound in job openings.

The data are based on openings listed with the ASA. Not all departments list positions there, so the totals don’t reflect every opening, but sociologists say that the ASA reports accurately reflect trends in the discipline, even considering positions listed elsewhere.

The top 5 specialties in demand: social control/law/crime deviance, open, race and ethnicity, medicine and health, and work/economy/organizations. The bottom 5 (last being the lowest): comparative and historical approaches, sociology of culture, education, qualitative approaches, and application and practice.

Overall, this would seem like good information though it will likely take some time to sort through the backlog of candidates who couldn’t find jobs in recent years.

Just a thought: I wonder what exactly the job figures from year to year tell us. Overall, is there a better way to get at whether the discipline is expanding or is doing well? Is it better for big departments to get bigger? For new schools to add sociology undergraduate and graduate programs? For the beginning of new graduate programs? For existing faculty to get more recognition or better salaries? To compare the growth in sociology to other disciplines?

Robert Shiller suggests economists should be more connected to sociology, other disciplines

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Economist Robert Shiller suggests the field of economics should be more connected to other social sciences like sociology:

Unlike many economists who seem unaware that their discipline has lost much of its credibility in recent years, Shiller is appropriately distraught at the seeming disconnect between economics and real-world social concerns.

“My own university, Yale, used to have a department of sociology, economics, and Government,” Shiller told me. “And in 1927 they split them into three departments. I think that was a momentous institutional change — it allowed economics to be cut off from other disciplines. Now they’re in separate buildings. You have to walk some distance. It’s utterly amazing to me how rarely economists quote the greats in psychology or sociology. Maybe they’re read them, but they’re not in their active mind.”

Shiller makes a powerful case that, while recent scandals make it easy to forget, financial innovation has done a lot of social good. As as an example he cites the creation of insurance. Because of it, almost everyone — not just the rich — can bounce back after an accident, fire, theft, or other calamity. In the past, such hardships could financially ruin a family forever.

Some interesting history here. Compared to the natural sciences, the social sciences have a relatively short history. It was only in the early 1900s that disciplines like sociology began to emerge in their own right.

From a sociologist’s point of view, it seems incomplete to only examine financial principles and transactions without the broader understanding of social motivations, interactions, and life. I wonder if sociologists wouldn’t argue that sociology encompasses more of the other social sciences than economics or psychology do, harkening back to Comte’s idea of sociology as the “queen of the sciences.”

Freakonomics.com readers vote to eliminate sociology

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Responding to the question “Which social science should die?”, the readers of Freakonomics.com voted out sociology:

As you can see from the chart below, nearly 50 percent believed that college/university presidents should eliminate sociology. Nearly 30 percent thought poli sci should be shuttered. [Editor’s note: it is perhaps not surprising that Freakonomics readers wouldn’t vote to eliminate economics.]

The rationales varied. Many felt that sociology had become too insular and out of touch. Some argued that political science had become a sub-field of economics, and a good old-fashioned “M&A” could occur. Others said “market” discipline should be enforced: that is, save the departments that bring in the most cash to the university.  And many of you argued that the tradition of the disciplines was being ignored — e.g., sociology used to promote reform, but is no longer organized around such pragmatic tasks—and so it makes sense to close them for good.

One possible explanation: economists and sociologists don’t always get along.

I would be interested to see a larger poll of academics about this. Could this be related at all to the size of relative departments?

Philosophy professor makes a case for getting a sociology major

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A philosophy professor argues that there are two good reasons for undergraduate students to major in sociology:

This comes down to several convincing points. First, sociology is a scientific discipline. It teaches students to use empirical data to understand current social realities. And sociologists use a variety of empirical research methods, from quantitative research to qualitative methods, to comparative and historical studies. Students who study sociology as undergraduates will certainly be exposed to the use of statistics as a method for representing and analyzing complex social phenomena; they will also be exposed to qualitative tools like interviews, focus groups, and participant-observer data. So a sociology education helps the student to think like a social scientist — attentive to facts, probing with hypotheses, offering explanations, critical in offering and assessing arguments for conclusions.

Second, the content of sociology is particularly important in our rapidly changing social world. Sociology promises to provide data and theory that help to better understand the human and social realities we confront. Moreover, the discipline is defined around the key social issues we all need to understand better than we currently do, and our policy makers need to understand if they are to design policies that allow for social progress: for example, race, poverty, urbanization, inequalities, globalization, immigration, environmental change, gender, power, and class. We might say that an important part of the value of a sociology education is that it gives the student a better grasp of the dynamics of these key social processes.

So sociology is indeed a valuable part of a university education. It provides a foundation for better understanding and engaging with the globalizing world our young people will need to navigate and lead. It provides students with the intellectual tools needed to make sense of the shifting and conflictual social world we live in, and this in turn permits them to contribute to solutions for the most difficult social problems that we face.

This sounds like the pitch many a sociology professor makes in an Introduction to Sociology course.

This also got me thinking about how many academics outside of sociology would defend sociology and suggest students should pursue it. Perhaps this is an issue for many disciplines but at the moment I can’t remember seeing too many public defenses of sociology from people of other disciplines.

Sociologist as “father of peace studies”

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While roughly 400 universities around the world have Peace Studies programs, I don’t know much about how the field started. Therefore, I was intrigued to see that the “father” of this field is a sociologist:

Internationally known as the “father of peace studies”, Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung broke new ground in 1959 when he established the Peace Research Institute Oslo. In the past half century, Galtung has published over 150 books, including “The Fall of the U.S. Empire – And Then What?” and mediated in over 150 conflicts between states and nations.

Here is more of Galtung’s story:

In 1940, when Johan Galtung was a young boy of nine, his homeland, Norway, was suddenly invaded and occupied by the Germans. His father, August Galtung, the deputy mayor of Oslo, was placed in a concentration camp by the Nazis.

“I was influenced by the violent madness that afflicted Norway in general and our own small family in particular during World War II. I wanted to find out how all that horror might have been averted; how to change the destiny of all of Europe.”…

Instead of becoming a doctor [like his father and grandfather] fighting the diseases of the human body, however, Johan Galtung became a doctor studying the diseases of war and violence that afflict the human race. He was a pioneer and a trailblazer. When he started his work, there were no “peace researchers” and there was no such field as “peace studies.”…

He is famous as the originator of the concept of “structural violence.” Structural violence is violence caused by the way society is structured, which gives rise to discrimination, oppression, poverty, starvation, exploitation and the violation of human rights. We can see examples of this at all levels, whether within the family or within the international community. There is also what Galtung terms “cultural violence,” the acceptance and legitimization of violence as a necessary or inevitable aspect of human society. Only when these broader types of violence are eliminated can we achieve a positive, active form of peace.

How come I’ve never heard of this sociologist? I realize that peace studies is often a separate department or program but this seems notable.

I’m not surprised that the first few programs began in Europe, a continent that had witnessed hundreds of years of religious and international wars, two major world wars that led to the deaths of tens of millions and vast destruction, and was on the front lines of the Cold War when the first program was founded. Would it seem right if an American or American school had the first peace program given the cultural stereotypes of American aggression, bellicosity, and violence?

Could the downturn in violence, both on an international level and more local level, be at least partly attributable to such academic programs? Studying a phenomenon is important but what causal impact have peace studies programs had on the occurrence of peace and violence?

Three and a half shelves of sociology books at Barnes & Noble

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While browsing at a local Barnes & Noble store, I again noted something of interest: they have three and a half shelves of sociology books.

This is fairly common as sociology is lumped in with sections like Cultural Studies and Criminology. Just across the aisle to the left was fifteen shelves of Current Affairs and just behind this was at least 15 shelves of History.

I’m not surprised by this: sociology in the public’s eye has a low profile. If you look closely at the books in the sociology section, you can find a number on sociological topics that are not written by sociologists such as Nickel and Dimed, There Are No Children Here, The Social Animal, Triumph of the City, and The Better Angels of Our Nature. So there is really less than three shelves of books by sociologists. This is the case even with several books on the shelf that have received recent attention such as Going Solo and The Cosmopolitan Canopy. Along with anthropology, I can’t think of any of the big academic disciplines from which you could find fewer books at your average chain bookstore.

Is this simply indicative of the small number of people who go into a Barnes & Noble and purchase sociology titles or does it illustrate the broader profile of sociology in American life?

Sociology can contribute to the new field of animal studies

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The New York Times highlights a new interdisciplinary field: animal studies.

The courses are part of the growing, but still undefined, field of animal studies. So far, according to Marc Bekoff, an emeritus professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, the field includes “anything that has to do with the way humans and animals interact.” Art, literature, sociology, anthropology, film, theater, philosophy, religion — there are animals in all of them.

The field builds partly on a long history of scientific research that has blurred the once-sharp distinction between humans and other animals. Other species have been shown to have aspects of language, tool use, even the roots of morality. It also grows out of a field called cultural studies, in which the academy has turned its attention over the years to ignored and marginalized humans.

Some scholars now ask: Why stop there? Why honor the uncertain boundary that separates one species from all others? Is it time for a Shakespearean stage direction: Exit the humanities, pursued by a bear? Not quite yet, although some scholars have suggested it is time to move on to the post-humanities.

The Animals and Society Institute, itself only six years old, lists more than 100 courses in American colleges and universities that fit under the broad banner of animal studies. Institutes, book series and conferences have proliferated. Formal academic programs have appeared.

As I’ve said to my introduction to sociology students, if humans are involved, sociologists can study anything.

I wish the article discussed further this talk about a move to the post-humanities – this sounds like it could be quite interesting and I’m sure it would get a lot of people up in arms.

The American Sociological Association has an Animals and Society section. Helpfully, the section has a page explaining why the section exists:

The establishment of this section reflects the increasing popular and scholarly attention being devoted to the relationship between humans and other animals for well over two decades.  Philosophers, feminists, anthropologists, psychologists — and, increasingly, sociologists – are examining the complex, profound and entangled relationships of humans and other animals…

While several existing ASA sections may touch upon aspects of the interactions of humans and other animals occasionally and tangentially, none are adequate vehicles for serious investigation and development of the issues and question in this area.  Nor do they provide a specific space in which a theoretical sociological framework on other animals can be collaboratively developed.  The ASA section on Animals and Society will facilitate improved sociological inquiry into these issues.

As of 2011, this section has 172 members. This still seems like a rather low-visibility section whose numbers have not increased since its founding.

Moral successes or failures among academic disciplines

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While some might measure the success of college majors by earnings, I was struck by a different measurement option after reading this information about Penn State’s former president Graham Spanier:

Graham Spanier, one of the most prominent college presidents in America who today is the center of a firestorm, has combined button-down tradition with the sort of moxie that led him to run with the bulls in Spain.

A sociologist and family therapist by training, Mr. Spanier has used his pulpit as Penn State University president to weigh in on national issues from campus drinking and illegal music downloading to eroding public support of higher education.

Here is a little more about Spanier’s academic background according to Wikipedia:

Spanier graduated from Highland Park High School (Highland Park, Illinois), and earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Iowa State University where he was honored with the Distinguished Achievement Citation by the ISU Alumni Association in 2004. He earned his Ph.D.. in sociology from Northwestern University where he was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. While a researcher, he contributed to the publication of ten books and over 100 scholarly journal articles. As a family sociologist, demographer, and marriage and family therapist, he was the founding editor of the Journal of Family Issues. Spanier was also an author of a study in the Archives of Sexual Behavior concerning the practice of mate swapping, or “swinging”.

Although I have seen a lot of coverage of this story in this past week, I haven’t heard anything about Spanier’s academic career. As a family sociologist and family therapist, should we expect that Spanier should be held to a higher standard in this matter?

More broadly, what can we expect in terms of moral successes and failures from different academic disciplines? Do certain disciplines contribute more to human flourishing? Do disciplines that deal more directly with human interaction, such as sociology or psychology, have more positive moral outcomes? Could the disciplines even agree on what would be positive and negative moral outcomes?

Earnings of sociology majors on list of “Best College Majors for a Career”

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The Wall Street Journal has an interactive feature where you can see income by college major according to 2010 Census figures. Here is how sociology fared: out of 173 majors (some of which I did not know existed), it was 19th in popularity, had a 7.0% unemployment rate, and median earnings were $45,000 with a 25th percentile of $33k and 75th percentile of $67k.

For median income, sociology is at roughly the 30th percentile.

In popularity, sociology ranked ahead of journalism, mathematics, architecture, chemistry, and music (among others). Top 10 in popularity: Business Management and Administration, General Business, Accounting, Nursing, Psychology, Marketing, Communications, Elementary Education, General Education, and Computer Science.

Are these figures better or worse than people would have expected for sociology?

Of course, we could also discuss if earnings are the only or best way to evaluate college majors. Other possible outcomes to consider: return for one’s money, value to society, specializing vs. having a broader focus.

How do the numbers on this list fit with the recent New York Times article that said American college students study STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) in such low numbers because they find them too difficult?