The Lightbulb Does Not Need to be Changed.

Q: How many sociologists does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: The lightbulb does not need changing. It is society that must be changed.

 

I thought that I might pursue a doctorate here at the University of Texas because the school will pay for up to 5 credit hours per semester for an employee. The plan died aborning. I sent a letter to the sociology department and received a rejection in 15 minutes. The essential message was, “Go away.” 

My Query Letter

The Reply

 

When I was majoring in criminology at Eastern Michigan University, I had a lot of sociology classes, of course. One of my classmates was about a year ahead of me and we had a couple of classes together for a couple of semesters. One day, walking in from the parking lot, he asked me, “Why do think that conflict theory is the one they teach best here?” I did not understand the question.

Has a special interest in criminology

Conflict theory is among about 50 explanatory or predictive narratives that describe the facts about individuals in society. Pure conflict says that individuals are naturally aggressive toward each other and society (reified) holds us together by means of its institutions by preventing, mediating, remediating, or negating conflict. Variations include class conflict, gender conflict, race conflict, and others. Those become “critical” when they assert that the conflict is unnatural. Critical class conflict theory is congruent with Marxism, for example: fix society’s problems and conflict will abate and perhaps disappear entirely. But I could tell that my friend was asking a rhetorical question. And he asked another: “Why don’t we have a department chair?”

 

Has a special interest in criminal justice reform.

At EMU, sociology, anthropology, and criminology were all under the same office in the College of Arts & Sciences. At that time, no one wanted to be the chair. You would think that any tenure track professor would take the two-year rotation, even if they had been the chair perhaps ten years earlier. But no. As a new undergraduate, I was not in stream with the idle chat about department politics, but I knew that some of my professors were unhappy with their organizational leadership. Then came the defining crisis: a murder on campus.

 

Has a special interest in law and regulation.

As I recall, there was a general mandate from the University administration to all professors and staff not to talk to the press or other news media. But they are called “press” for several reasons and the reporters pressed the criminology department for quotable quotes. And my professor for White Collar Crime (Crim 307), Andreas Tomaszewski, offered his opinion. Then, his application for tenure was denied. He did still show up for class, but he basically stopped teaching. At the end of the semester, he moved to Canada. 

 

Has a special interest in juries.
I wonder if she has read
Young S. Kim, Gregg Barak, and Donald E. Shelton
from Eastern Michigan University on the CSI Effect.

The facts of the crime and the response of the University were at issue. EMU claimed that they did not want the perpetrator to flee, so they left the cause of death as “natural” as indicated by the (acting) county medical examiner. Eventually, another enrolled student was charged with the crime and convicted. However, EMU was fined over $800,000 for violation of the Clery Act, which requires the reporting of crimes. The university president, the EMU chief of police, and several others resigned. 

 

Has an interest in policing.

Here and now, my request for an informal meeting with the chair of the UT sociology department was answered by the acting chair because the chair is on sabbatical. Despite Dr. Lin Ken-Hou’s protest that UT is not the place to study white collar crime or misconduct in scientific research, several professors in the department do claim relevant interests. 

 

More to the point, if I had had the opportunity to talk out the options, even if it were true that none of their sociologists is interested in crime, that in itself would have been a good reason for me to do just that and complete some original and significant research for the department. 

Just one option would have been to work with the Institutional Review Board, which audits research and investigates lapses in ethics. 

That is especially relevant because UT is a research university, not a teaching college. Our classes here are taught by graduate assistants (and post-grads). At EMU, the school motto is “Education first.” If your name is in the book, then you are the person standing in front of the class. In my last year there (2010), plans were made to allow graduate students in physics to do some teaching but it was then a notable exception. Like Texas State University here in San Marcos, EMU was the old Normal College, the school where teachers were trained. When EMU sought to ramp up its game by joining a sports conference with more television money, they hired an athletic director at three times the salary of a department chair, $300,000 versus $90,000 per year. Wags with spray paint went around campus: Education first—and 10! 

 

So, it is here at UT. You can find a webpage about our Nobel laureates: https://news.utexas.edu/2019/12/09/longhorn-laureates/ In fact, none of them is here. The last two on campus both died. Steven Weinberg was enticed to retire here. He continued to write essays. John Goodenough taught chemistry at the the UT Cockrell School of Engineering and among his achievements was the invention of the lithium-ion battery. As for the other Nobel laureates, biology professor Hermann J. Muller was forced out for being a communist. (After quick turns in Germany and then the USSR, he returned to the USA. Later, Carl Sagan was one of his students.) UT alumnus John Maxwell Coetzee earned his doctorate here in 1969 and then went to South Africa. He was not allowed to come back because he had published a protest against the war in Viet Nam.

 

Back in 2005, when Weinberg was reputed to be the highest paid professor at $400,000 football coach Mack Brown was paid $2.1 million. Today, coach Steve Sarkisian is paid $10.6 million and quarterback Arch Manning earns $1.6 million from Name Image and Likeness (NIL) under NCAA rules in place since 2021. Weinberg was awarded a $3 million Breakthrough Prize in 2020 just one of several such honors over the years. That being as it is, the fact remains that an undergraduate playing football earns three times more than the best paid professors and eight times more than the average professor’s salary. (See: https://texascollegesalaries.com/institution/17)

 

A card-carrying criminologist will tell you that crime knows no neighborhood. In other words, there are no bad neighborhoods, just different crimes in them. In the suburbs, they don’t beat up strangers, rob the corner liquor stores or snatch purses, they just work at corporations that dump toxins into the aquifer and then they try to delete their emails. That being so, it remains that you don’t find a lot of broken windows and absentee landlords in the suburbs. In poor neighborhoods, the people lack more than anything else social status and social capital. The broken windows theory explains why the sociology department does not welcome outsiders into their academic ghetto. You can argue the cause and effect of broken windows and broken homes but when a culture, a society, is in decline, fixing the windows will not solve the deeper problems.

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

 

The Pretense of Sociology 

Sociology: A Defense and a Call for Reform 

Sociology is a Science 

Karl Marx and the Dustbin of History 

 

Sociology: A Defense and a Call for Reform

I often recommend the OrgTheory blog by Brayden King and Fabio Rojas, sociologists who study firms, groups, and other organizations as apart from and yet of course within the broader, deeper, and longer matrix of global society.   Of late, Prof. Rojas has taken the humanities to task for being unproductive as job placement apprenticeships.  Not only are humanities majors unemployed, they are unemployable because they learn nothing of economic value.  Unlike STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), humanities have no practical purpose.  I disagree and have insisted on the economic value in a liberal education on this blog.  More to the point, though, I also remind the good professors that by their own standards sociology is also useless.

I pointed out before in comments on their blog and on my own that someone who is good with machinery can work as a technician, engineer, or, ultimately, professor of engineering.  Whether you hold a certificate, associate’s, bachelor’s, master’s or doctorate, you can work in HVAC, industrial controls, computer programming, or for tht matter, a wide range of healthcare or business careers.  You can be a phlebotomist, nurse, or doctor; you can be a bookkeeper, accountant, or manager at many levels.  With sociology, those options do not exist.   In sociology, the only degree that counts is a doctorate; and the only use of a Ph.D. is to teach classes in sociology.  – Or so it would seem.  I disagree.

About the Sociology of Music
by Jennifer Lena

I do agree - because it is obvious – that there are no job openings reading  “Sociologist: AA degree minimum BS preferred to liaison with software developers and marketing department of leading social media company.”  The fault lies not with our stars.  Mainstream sociology is anti-market, anti-capitalist, and Marxist.  This is choice, not destiny.

Worldwide the leading English language textbook for this study is Anthony Giddens’s. (Sociology, Cambridge: Polity Press 1989; subsequent editions.)  Giddens of course is the architect of New Labor in the United Kingdom (or as George Orwell called it Ingsoc).  Says Sir Anthony: “Sociology is the study of human social life, groups, and societies. … The scope of sociology is extremely wide, ranging from the analysis of passing encounters between individuals in the street to the investigation of global social processes. … It teaches us that what we regard as natural, inevitable, good or true, may not be such, and that the ‘givens’ of our life are strongly influenced by historical and social influences.  These are in the influences sociologists study.” (3^rd ed., pg 2) 

Citing C. Wright Mills, Giddens continues: “The sociological imagination requires us, above all, to ‘think ourselves away’ from the familiar routines of our daily lives in order to look at them anew.”  (page 3)  “It is the business of sociology to investigate the connections between what society makes of us and what we make of ourselves." (Page 6)

First, I point to the semantic distinction that sociology has a "business" rather than a goal, mandate, purpose, calling, mission, imperative or objective. Moreover, if any segment of civilized society has this "sociological imagination" is merchants, traders, buyers and sellers, shopkeepers, and capitalists. We know from the historical record that a community of Sumerians lived among the Hittites. 

Both McCloskey and Weber
cite Benjamin Franklin as
our capitalist Paradigm

Deeper still, if anything ameliorated contact between bands of hunter-gatherers most likely to come to blows over territory, it was the exchange of gifts. In Africa, 12,000 years ago, sea shells daubed with red ochre and strung together traveled far. The "dumb barter" method perhaps invented by Phoenicians depends on trust -- and insight into the wants of others. Herodotus says that the Lydians were the first retailers. He may have been factually incorrect while still hinting to the remnants of the Hittite-Sumerian engagement; but the fact is that he cared enough about retailing to wonder how it started - and he knew that the Greeks did not invent it. 

“It is sociology’s task to study the resulting balance between social reproduction and social transformation.” (page 6)  Giddens cites the founders of the study: Comte, Durkheim, Marx, Weber, Foucault, and Habermas. “Habermas is perhaps the leading sociological thinker in the world today.  … According to Habermas, capitalist societies, in which change is ever present, tend to destroy the moral order on which they in fact depend.  We live in a social order where economic growth tends to take precedence over all else – but this situation creates a lack of meaning in everyday life.  Here Habermas comes back to Durkheim’s concept of anomie, although he applies it in a new and original way.” (Page 12.)

Where is the "sociological imagination" to accept the morality of capitalism on its own terms, rather than ethnocentrically condemning it for not being one's own?  Empirical evidence is also lacking.  How many "capitalist societies" did he examine?  In 3000 years, China never had one.  Greece and Rome were not. Did this happen to the Islamic Golden Age that the drive for profits destroyed the moral foundation of Islam?  Was this the case in Renaissance Italy, or in Holland later, or then in England and America?  Are these different capitalist societies or continued expressions of the same one?  How have Singapore and Hong Kong fared?  Is Singapore in moral decline?  How would you measure that?  Any moral standard would by definition be objective, which is denied by the insistence on the "sociological imagination."

Nothing in Giddens's introductory chapter

Spencer may have created
"The Modern Life" 

 approaches a marketable use for the study.  No citation exists for a sociologist who actually made the world a better place.  We have many critics, of course, but nothing like a lightbulb or a suspension bridge or a computer or a medicine is offered.  I submit that any such examples that could be found are submerged under an anti-capitalist mentality that decries earning money by invention, making fortunes by removing inefficiencies, earning a living by creating markets.  Sociologists might mention Thomas Edison, but they are not happy that he was a millionaire.  (In fact, Giddens does not cite "invention" at all, though he does discuss "innovation centers" as a kind of city where bright people come together as at Cambridge. )

I agree 100% that stepping outside your given cultural context is important.  This is required  for  understanding that others near to you or far away are different.  Indeed, in our global capitalist society you may have more in common with people geographically distant from you, but culturally close.  That said, the fundamental error is that sociology attempts to study societies, organizations, firms, polities, and groups without acknowledging the individual as the primary element of any conglomerate, agglomerate, or confluence. 

Sociology could have been built on Herbert Spencer, William Graham Sumner, and Georg Simmel.  In our time, the works of Dierdre McCloskey – Bourgeois Virtues; Bourgeois Dignity – define a new narrative to explain us to ourselves.  But McCloskey is considered an economist, though, of course, so were Marx, Weber and Simmel.  In America, Robert King Merton and his socialist comrade Paul Lazarsfeld made money from their public relations firm.  Sociology could be defined as the study of the individual in society.  We belong to many societies – local, national, and global, professional, recreational, religious, and more.  Recently, Jennifer Lena of Bernard College has been writing about how musicians socialize among themselves.  In the internet age, you can find musical collaborations on YouTube. National Public Radio reported on Musicians Collaborate from Afar on the Web .  TED Talks gave us "Eric Whitacre: A virtual choir 2,000 voices strong."

Simmel studied Money
on its own terms

According to the most politically powerful sociologist of our generation, the leading sociologist of our time railed against capitalism.  Neither of them perceived the sociology of music.  In Giddens’ textbook “music industry” is an Index entry pointing to a discussion of media imperialism. Bollywood appears not at all. Afro-Celtic music is missing of course. 

Science has a sociology, as do art, sports, video games, board games, comic books, micro breweries, cooperative groceries, garden clubs, veterans associations… and within sports, NASCAR, the Olympics, sandlot softball, community center chess, ... the list is as deep as human action.  I assert that sociology will be economically viable when we break the Marxist monopoly and admit that markets are an important means for people to cooperate in the attainment of common goals serving individual needs.  When we do that - and educate a generation on that basis - then sociology will have a market function, whether you completed a certificate in social media or a doctorate in (well, ahem, after all...) "social media." 

Sociology has the same value as a liberal education.  Indeed, sociology could be the gateway to the liberal arts. I suggest that the most profitable path to that goal is for sociology to begin with the individual and demonstrate the reward in pursuing it as an academic study with market utility.  

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

Capitalist Culture

Modes of Survival 

The Shroff 

Tycoon Dough is Democratic

The Future of Money 

A Man's Home is His Market