Making a Living in Sociology in the 21st Century
(and the Intellectual Consequences of Making a Living)

Arthur L. Stinchcombe
Northwestern University

Speech for the Illinois Sociological Society Meetings, October 1999

I will first analyze the material basis of sociology, showing that it gives rise to a deep division between the subject of graduate schools ("technical" research) and the way we make our teaching living. Roughly speaking we make our teaching living by giving a learned version of the social problems that make undergraduates, and ourselves, indignant. I will generally use the word "populist" for this kind of work, for reasons I will develop later. We make our living in the promotion processes of universities and to a slightly lesser extent promotions of colleges, and in our graduate teaching, by the satisfactory quality of our arguments about explanations, especially the quality of the data we bring to bear on those explanations. I will call this kind of work and the intellectual efforts it elicits "elitist," also for reasons that will become clear later.

I will argue that this contradiction between the material basis of the institutional income of the college or university in undergraduate tuitions or state subsidies of undergraduate education, and the material basis of our promotions in technical explanatory sociology that will pass muster with our peers, drives the overall politics of standards in the discipline, .

The core elites of technical sociology are what we call our "peers," who review for the journals and write letters on our promotions, who are more nearly like the peers in the House of Lords than the "equals" of the rest of us. The main "people" referred to in "populist" are undergraduate students. The core proposition of the material part of my argument can be restated then as, "The university earns the money to pay our salaries from sociological populism, we get our individual shares in promotions from sociological elitism." I predict that we will search out new social problems for students to get learnedly indignant about in the new century, and that we will continue to develop and borrow techniques and theories of causal explanatory power on into the next century, preserving the contradiction between populist and elite status systems.

Then I will turn to the intellectual consequences in the next century of this basic material contradiction, as it is related to our uncertainty about how to recruit our new elites. One extreme of how we might recruit them is to borrow our elites and the criteria of elitism from the Society for the Study of Social Problems, which always has its meetings in the same place and the same time as the American Sociological Association. Its basic mission is to study those kinds of social processes that at least make us indignant enough to call them "problems." Thus they do not study the problem of too few Americans being fluent in Japanese.

The other is to recruit is to borrow standards from those anointed by the academic honorary society embedded, more or less secretly, in the American Sociological Association, the Society for Sociological Research. Like other academic honorary societies, it selects its members by vote of people already members, on the ground of sociological rigor, especially quantitative rigor. It has its annual elite dinner, its only activity, at the time of the meetings. I myself am on the side of the honorary society, though it so happened that the year I was first invited there the person who gave the honorary elite speech gave one of the stupidest speeches at that year's American Sociological Association meetings, so I quit. It wasn't my kind of elitism.

The code word that more or less reliably divides these tendencies in 2000 is that the populist current is in favor of "diversity." The meaning of diversity is quite variable, because it is part of an ideology of changing professional problems. Roughly it means that dominant white males from leading universities should not be so much overrepresented in association offices, in the pages of the journals, in new hires in universities. Usually also the "majority" should not vote down or peer-review out minority opinions, especially those of ethnic minorities. The elitist current quietly praises the God of Things as They Are in the discipline, especially the peer review way we run the main journal of the Association and the lucrative and prestigious posts in leading universities.

Populist forces have more trouble controlling intellectual life of the association than the political life, and especially the increasingly dominant administrative elite in the national office, which usually publicizes the populist wing. For example, in the accounts of the annual convention in Footnotes one cannot find out whether any intellectual work of any value happened at the convention. What I will predict is that the contradiction between populist and elitist forces will favor the current trend in the American Sociological Association, in which most intellectual work is done and communicated in the sections of the association, as far from central office influence as it is possible to get. The sections in turn will start to publish more journals "of their own." This will result in the splintering of the intellectual work of the discipline, located mainly in the sections.

The reason for this is that new sections can be formed as new social problems shape our teaching task, and can start an elite-forming process within those new sections, substituting technical sociology for indignation there. At any given time, the sections will differ in the ratio of indignation to explanation, and their journals and prizes will differ in the same way. The sections for which the same books are nominated for section prizes, as are nominated also for the prizes of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, will have a lower proportion of their members who go to the dinner of the honorary elite society, and vice versa. The Association's central structure itself will then be a useless parasitic bureaucracy on the sections, with periodic outburst of "diversity versus elitism" fights or low intellectual content but lots of fireworks. The place where the diversity-pushing administrative and political structure comes into most conflict with professional peer-reviewed elitism is in the editorial work of the flagship journals of the Association, especially the American Sociological Review. I look for continued conflict over the representation of diversity in the Review.

The sections with high indignation ratios will tend to drift toward more elitism over time, so negative twice the log likelihood chi-square tests will soon appear in feminist journals. Papers about the penetration of low status and darker South India ethnicities into the elite previously dominated by North India ethnicities will start appearing in the race journals, because the elite will be willing to learn South Indian languages to get an elite Associate Professorship.

Demand: The market of sociology among undergraduates can be thought of as a "liberal pluralist faith." There is no sense, I think, in spending our time convincing the government to spend more for sociology as an elite discipline in the next century. They will remember we weren't on their side in the Vietnamese war and were edgy in the Gulf war, maybe even in Kosovo. It's going to be undergraduates that pay the bulk of our salaries, so we need to analyze what they are buying.

Roughly speaking they are buying an academicized version of "social problems" scholarship. By that I mean a sort of "universalizing pluralistic moralism," of the sort first exemplified by W. I. Thomas showing us (meaning us Protestant whites) that Polish Catholics and German and Polish Jews were good Americans, too, deserving of equal citizenship. Unlike John Dewey, who thought the same at the same university, Thomas turned that "showing us the humanity Catholics and Jews" to scholarly use by showing us in detail what Poles were really like, what dynamics governed their immigration and culture-building in the U. S., and so on.

When Anglo-Saxon oppression of blacks was studied by a white Protestant economist from Sweden, Myrdal, it was sociologists, not economists, that found the undergraduate market for it. There were too many facts in it for economists. Showing the evil of racism, first racism against Poles and Italians, later against blacks, and lately sexism against women, has been our educational mission. That's how we make a living collectively.

But because it is colleges and universities with reputations to maintain that do the actual marketing, to make our individual livings, we have to show theoretical and methodological innovation in that business as well. It sells best if your research or op ed pieces show oppression in the U. S. But you can get away with oppression in the world system, with "development" or anti-imperialism as the cure. To appeal to our undergraduate audience, we have to give them some answer on what the solution to oppression is. But to get into the journals, and so to justify us teaching in on a salary rather than preaching on a soapbox, our work has to show originality and rigor, theory and method.

The basic contradiction in our discipline is between what students will buy from us and what our colleagues and deans will buy at tenure time. The number of faculty posts in sociology fluctuates with the popularity of undergraduate cosmopolitan indignation at ethnocentrism, for example, and the demand for intellectual foundations for their rejection of ethnocentrism. Graduate education has been about originality and rigor, that lead to promotion in a field whose market size is shaped by indignation at unfair inequality. Now there is no reason that the teaching of originality and rigor in graduate schools and in scholarly journals should balance the fluctuations of indignation among undergraduates.

What Graduate School (Supply) Is About: Universities and colleges they are inclined to over-invest in academic prestige, graduate education, and research. It won't pay the rent, but it is more fun, deeper, and probably more effective in the long run against evil. We are more likely to so over-invest in elite standards for sociology if we are not very good at undergraduate teaching. Then we hope we are at least original and rigorous, even if undergraduates don't care.

We know how to study the causes of social class position, though not so much about the causes of variations in the oppressiveness of classes. Race has unproblematic causes at the present time, in the sense that we know people's children are the same race as their parents, if these are of the same race. But we have the same trouble saying what causes race to be the basis for oppression.

The study of class oppression, and so probably racial oppression, has three big scholarly subjects, namely: (1) explaining oppression by people making money (especially if it's lots of money) off others' labor or others' needs; (2) explaining oppression by people's capacity to organize labor by the use of authority, coercion, and wages, so that money can be made off it; and (3) carefully observed documentation of the evil consequences (by "bringing in the news" about the lower classes to the middle and upper classes, as Robert Park described our scholarly mission). The first is the Marxist strain in our tradition, the second the Weberian strain, and the third the ethnographic tradition, say the Howard S. Becker tradition of the Outsiders.

I myself have concentrated on the authority part, starting with the authority of teachers to sort people into future middle class and future working class, going on to authority in the construction industry and in steel mills in South America, and on up to the most recent book on the social-organization of slavery in the Caribbean. I am not very good at convincing undergraduates that they should be interested in how oppression in organized in South American steel plants, or in the 17th century in the Caribbean, so I have to hope people who are good at interesting undergraduates in things will want to read my books about it.

But the future of sociology does not depend on my reputation, but on the dynamics of balancing the constraints put on us by what undergraduates will buy, and the constraints we put on ourselves when we get promoted to be peers, and our deans remind us of, of wanting originality and rigor and empirical solidity in what we teach about that.

We have to ask now how graduate student slots are generated, and why we tend to generate more of them than our market will bear. The answer briefly is that undergraduate demand has nothing much to do with it, except that it creates a body of indignant young people who would like to make their living studying and teaching the stuff they are indignant about. Instead the key to that generation of graduate student slots is the decentralized system in which graduate school distinction is the second central competitive symbol of worth for a college or university (the first is, of course, men's football or men's basketball).

This means in its turn that for individuals in universities (and over time more and more of our teaching is concentrated in research universities), being a worthwhile graduate teacher is more central to their identity than teaching 2-5 hundred undergraduates. For departments it means that having too many students in your freshman and sophomore classes is a mark for suspected intellectual sloppiness. But the key to creating graduate student slots is that there is no great reward for teaching the big classes that bring in the rent, so Deans create cheap Teaching Assistant Slots to bring in the rent, and then use the profit on that to support the little seminars that great scholars are willing to teach. The key to the future is that teaching assistant slots create graduate student slots, which in turn create unemployed new Ph. Ds.

The central measure of this contradiction is the aggregate applicant-to-tenure-track-vacancy-ratio for new Ph. Ds, which is hard to get at. The easy symptom of this is the number of applicants for an announced tenure track vacancy in a research university, roughly 100 to 200 lately in Northwestern Sociology. We need to take the top 50 departments in the country, and collect each year the number of positions advertised, the number of applicants, and for their own new Ph. Ds the average number of applications for university and college jobs for each new Ph. D. Distinguished departments may place as many as a third of their new Ph. Ds in Departments with a viable Ph. D. program, and some of the rest of them get good jobs on a tenure track in teaching colleges. A lot of the slippage between the TA slot and the new Ph. D. market is taken up by people who drop out between the second year of graduate and graduating as a Ph. D., so maybe you'd want to measure that as well. Departments hate it when you ask them their attrition rate, and always lie about it--it is I believe in the general region of two out of three entrants to graduate school that do not get Ph. Ds.

Social problems change. In my youth, it was not crazy to think that capitalists and higher management made too much money, workers too little, and that was what was wrong with the economy, and socialism might be a solution. The socialist movement was grounded on that "social problem." There are still a few people who believe that and study Sweden, but you can't convince a sophomore that Sweden has anything to do with anything. We fought the Vietnamese war instead of letting our robots do it (which we have pretty much managed in Iraq and Kosovo), and particularly college undergraduates whose deferment would run out when they graduated thought that was a problem. In my youth the civil rights movement was just starting, and some of the first big sit ins in restaurants took place between Baltimore and Washington when I was teaching at Johns Hopkins. Since then feminism had to be incorporated into the indignation and the persistence of gender inequalities into the failures of social engineering.

In short, we came to be known in Washington and in undergraduate tastes as a humanities subject that you could take if you found it interesting, but wouldn't make you any money, and might get you into jail. It would teach you "critical thinking" rather than a set of truths. And the humanities norm that your courses for undergraduates had to be "interesting" came to rule. Biochemistry only had to be "true and useful," for it to be required for medical school, and only a few nerds thought it was "interesting." The theoretical apparatus generates research on such "new" social problems as sexism: one can still study sexual oppression by Marxism, studying who makes money off cheap female labor, by Weberianism, studying how male authority is organized so as to maintain that exploitation, and Beckerism, studying how it feels miserable to have kids and be forced off welfare into a minimum wage job where your boss will fire you if you don't go to bed with him. But Washington doesn't really want to pay for research into the social mess we are in, to stoke up educated indignation, in any of those traditions. So they support biochemistry research instead, and let us be interesting to support ourselves; the ratio of research money to tuition money in sociology is very near that in the humanities, and much lower than in the physical and biological sciences.

So to make it in the next century, you will have to have your social problem to make your teaching career in, and your originality and rigor to make your scholarly reputation in. But you have to have your indignation echoed among undergraduates. As I suggested, you can be rigorous in several different ways, with the multiple-regression Marxism of Erik Wright, the historical Weberianism of, for example, Bill Bridges and Robert Nelson on gender wage discrimination cases in civil service jobs, or the ethnography of Carol Stack or Arlie Hochschild.

But worst of all, the ratio of applications to jobs in the next century will probably still be the number produced by decentralized departments all wanting to produce more graduate students in order to get famous themselves, while producing less jobs. Middle class people who send kids to college will continue, I predict, to live together and have no children until their 30s, and few even then, so there will be few people to pay tuitions to become learnedly indignant. I suspect age discrimination will get to be a big deal, with old folks complaining that their collective kids don't want to pay taxes enough to balance Social Security and Medicare account (the latest evidence is that the present Republican majority wants to cut taxes rather than support our pensions or medical care, as predicted).

Right now social problems don't sell as well as economics, or, even better, accounting and portfolio management. So academic jobs aren't being created in the arts and sciences, but instead in organizational behavior in business chools. You have to be a lot smarter than you used to have to be to get a job at all, and then you have to produce more and be a popular teacher in order to be promoted. And still its a lot a matter of luck.

As suggested in the introduction, I believe that the main feature of our intellectual structure that is determined by this material contradiction between "populist" and "elitist" sociology is the ratio of indignation to explanation in our theory and method.

Method to supply materials on what undergraduates are indignant about (or can be got to be indignant about) is documenting how bad it is out there. Ethnography about how hard it is to live on welfare, for example, or the documentation of simple differences in means (say of income) between the oppressed and the dominant, are the "descriptive" methods appropriate for rousing indignation. Theories about how the oppressed are misrepresented in the ideologies of the dominant, or their rights taken as less serious, provide causal mechanisms which also lay the blame on the dominant, and suggest that sociologists, then students, learning the right answer might start a social movement to correct it.

The appropriate method to analyze data to provide elitist explanations is a regression coefficient, or its equivalent in qualitative or other methods, which says what are the predictors of the phenomenon of interest. That often involves the redefinition of the phenomenon of interest. We no longer study racism by studying the under representation of Jews and Orientals at Harvard, because they are over-represented and so no longer rouse indignation. But that means that we have to redefine racism so that that over-representation is not caused by a racist subculture of middle aged white Protestant males, as under-representation was in the 1920s. Explaining the greater poverty of the darker people in South India may then come into the theory of racism, though few of our undergraduates can be got indignant about it, through elitist channels.

Undergraduates, though, would be disappointed if the wonderful variety of racial and quasi-racial situations in India, that make it a laboratory for the theory and methodology of racism, dominated a course on racial inequality. I recall trying to interest undergraduates at Johns Hopkins when I was a naive 29-year-old in the fact that French Canadians were as discriminated against in Canada as Negroes were in the United States. I failed to interest them on a grand scale.

The explanatory theory methods tend to dominate the flagship journals of the profession, American Sociological Review, and American Journal of Sociology. Ethnography and descriptive statistics tend to be more frequent in the journals of the sections or sub disciplines, though there are great differences among those journals in this respect. Administrative Science Quarterly, a large part of which is clearly the premier outlet for the sociology of organizations, would probably score higher on the proportion of things like regression coefficients than the leading journals of sociology, and perhaps even lower than them in the proportion of ethnography about how hard oppression makes the lives of the oppressed. But note that the journal Work and Occupations has more ethnography, less regression coefficients, and would be an outlet for the Organizations, Occupations, and Work section of the Association.

I argue that these intellectual variations reflect the projection of the material contradiction outlined above on the intellectual structure of the discipline. I think it is convenient to divide the historical processes I believe will determine the intellectual structure of the discipline into two, namely: (1) the introduction of new topics, and simultaneously new sections of the Association, into the criteria of importance of intellectual topics, by populist pressures ultimately deriving from the teaching dynamics of the discipline; and (2) the slow drift over time of increasing domination of criteria of excellence within the work of all sub disciplines, derived from elitist pressures. Under elitist pressures the sociology of gender will increasingly try to explain variations in inequality in different situations; for example, they might find out that inequality between the genders, and between females of the two races, is larger during the child-bearing years, much lower either before or after. Similarly under elitist pressures, the sociology of race will try to explain the over-representation of some formerly oppressed races in elite colleges, and how the process differs from the other still oppressed races.

I predict then that the sociology of new social problems, in the new sections, in the new century will also try to move parts of its purview into elite methodological principles and explanatory theories. The elitist pressures derive ultimately from young indignants wanting to move into the elite, and to be published in the flagship journals, to be promoted at elite colleges and universities, and to be invited to the dinners of the honor society as well as to the round tables of their section.

The aggregate historical picture I see for the next century, then. involves the following macroscopic processes:

1. The increasing intellectual irrelevance of the umbrella organization of the American Sociological Association. People will no longer care much whether the President and Council of the association are leading scholars, because the intellectual life will be in the sections. The mail we get from the Association will offer us credit cards and insurance and organize us to petition Congress for more money for bureaucratic purposes, will ask us for contributions for diversity programs, and will organize arenas for advocates of diversity to be angry with elitists who, in their turn, are angry with them. The last of the central core to fall into this morass of administration superseding scholarship will be the leading journals, especially the American Sociological Review. The rest of the central bureaucracy of the Association is, I believe, beyond hope already, and will never welcome a new sociological idea of any kind.

2. The origin of new sections and new undergraduate courses, as new social problems become the ones we can get our undergraduate students indignant about. Perhaps we can pick our topics from Amnesty International, as a way to deal with indignation in conditions of globalism. These new sections will intellectually tend to be dominated by methods and theories that tell us how important and damaging the things we are indignant about, namely descriptive statistics and ethnography of the oppressed.

3. A drift of all sections, and of the more specialized journals they publish in, toward increasing domination of the methods and theoretical interests of the elite, of the flagship journals, and the increasing domination of peer review (that is review by the elites) rather than democratic procedure in all the intellectual parts of the sections' work.

4. In particular there will be an increase in the ratio of causal parameters like regression coefficients to descriptive statistics like means and proportions, explanatory theory as opposed to documentation that the social problem is important, and empirical data from outside the United States and its social problems as opposed to interest in phenomena only about the United States. Women in China will become as important as Women in the Corporation in elite discourse.

5. Appeals to "indignation markers" in controversies in the field, such as "diversity" at the present time, should continue to dominate the larger politics of the American Sociological Association. But those markers will tend to disappear from discussions in the same parts of our discipline where regression coefficients and related numbers, or explanatory theories such as the new institutionalism, dominate. If you find an article on affirmative action that has regression coefficients and the new institutionalism, for example, you will have difficulty figuring out that it's about the oppression of African Americans from any language in the paper.

6. An outside factor: the evolution toward elite styles of method and theory will be faster when there is an elite profession deeply involved in the relevant social problem. Medical sociology, the sociology of civil law, or the sociology of management strategy, for example, will tend to move faster in the direction of elite method and theory, while the sociology of criminal justice, or of social problems that social workers deal with, will move more slowly toward elite methods and theorizing.

I have been arguing that sociology is distinctive in the relation of its teaching mission to its research mission, and that the larger society legitimates its teaching mission in a different fashion than it legitimates its elite research mission. I believe this contradiction is deep in our discipline, and will continue to shape the conflicts into the next generation. However I believe that the fashion of introducing new subjects to our discipline through indignation, and the process of taming them into explanatory theory by elites, will continue to produce a vibrant and innovative discipline well into the next century. Sclerosis of sociology will be prevented by our populist forces, while the insistence of our elites on explanatory theory and method will make us look academic, so unchallengeable, until at least 2050.