A blog by Jay Livingston -- what I've been thinking, reading, seeing, or doing. Although I am a member of the Montclair State University department of sociology, this blog has no official connection to Montclair State University. “Montclair State University does not endorse the views or opinions expressed therein. The content provided is that of the author and does not express the view of Montclair State University.”
Focusing on Max Weber, Cummings and Bridgman document a series of whoppers that appear consistently in leading management texts, such as the belief that “ideal type” means best or optimal; that Weber did his major work in the 1940s (Parsons’s translation of Wirtschaft and Gesellschaft appeared in 1947, 27 years after Weber’s death); that Weber personally admired bureaucracy (In Search of Excellence avers that Weber “pooh-poohed charismatic leadership and doted on bureaucracy”); and other gross misunderstandings. FAIL
(I'm surprised that the OrgTheorists didn’t pick this up.)
When Alexandra Wallace’s video – the epiphanus interruptus* complaint about Asians at UCLA using their cell phones in the library – went viral, most of the reactions were accusations of racism. I'm not sure where the line between racism and ethnocentrism lies, but I was struck more by the underlying ethnocentric assumptions about family, assumptions that are widely shared here and by people who would never be accused of racism.
We Americans all agree that we value family. When I begin the unit on culture, I ask students to jot down three American values. The one that appears most frequently is family. If I asked students what things they themselves value, I’m sure many of them would say family. So, I suspect, would Ms. Wallace.
But here’s how she begins her rant, after a brief disclaimer:
It used to really bug me but it doesn't bother me anymore the fact that all the Asian people that live in all the apartments around me – their moms and their brothers and their sisters and their grandmas and their grandpas and their cousins and everybody that they know that they've brought along from Asia with them – comes here on the weekends to do their laundry, buy their groceries, and cook their food for the week. It's seriously, without fail. You will always see old Asian people running around this apartment complex every weekend. That's what they do.
(The transcript does not quite do justice to Ms. Wallace’s presentation. The video was taken down, but in 2018 a copy became available.)
These Asian families, in Ms. Wallace’s view, include too many peripheral members (grandparents, cousins). And family members spend too much time together and do entirely too much for one another.
The trouble apparently is that Asians really do value family.
The too-much-family motif runs through her objections about cell phones as well She obviously doesn’t know what the callers are saying or who they’re talking to, but she suspects that it’s family back in Asia:
I swear they're going through their whole families, just checking on everybody from the tsunami thing.**
Many international students in the US have noted this same contradiction between Americans’ proclaimed value on family in the abstract and what to the international students seems like a fairly thin and compartmentalized connection to family in the real world. As Rebekah Nathan says in My Freshman Year,
Americans, they felt, sharply distinguished their family from their friends and schoolmates; more than one international student remarked about the dearth of family photos on student doors,*** as if family didn’t exist at school. . . .Peter [a student from Germany] told me . . . “No one here says, “come on and meet my family.”
Do, do Americans value family? Yes, but. . . . The ‘but’ is a competing value that pervades American culture, including the family – Independence.**** As Ms. Wallace says in the conclusion to her complaint about Asian families, “They don't teach their kids to fend for themselves.”
------------- *
I'll be in like deep into my studying . . . getting it all down, like typing away furiously, blah blah, blah, and then all of a sudden when I’m about to like reach an epiphany... Over here from somewhere, “Ooooh Ching Chong Ling Long Ting Tong, Ooohhhhh.”
** Adding “thing” to “the tsunami” makes Wallace seem especially callous. Linguists must have looked into this, but for some reason, “thing” here implies, “I don’t know or care much about this because it’s not very important.”
I vividly recall a scene in the 1993 film “Searching for Bobby Fischer,” where Joe Mantegna, as the competitive chess father, is at a parent-teacher conference. The teacher is concerned that Mantegna’s chess-prodigy son (age 8 or so) is falling behind academically and socially. She adds,
I'm sure he's very good at this chess thing, but that isn't really the issue.
Mantegna loses it.
My son has a gift. He has a gift, and once you acknowledge that, then maybe we'll have something to talk about. Chess is what it’s called. Not the “chess thing.”
*** If you watch the Wallace video, look at the board of photos behind her and try to find parents.
**** See my earlier post on the family-vs,-independence conflict as it appears on American television, especially in sitcoms that have pretensions of seriousness.
I’m skeptical about the Wisdom of Crowds, at least when it comes to sports betting. I’ve blogged as much occasionally (the occasion usually being a big NFL game – see this post, for example).
Now Mark McClusky at Wired has taken up the fight in the arena of March Madness. The crowd whose wisdom he’s challenging is the ESPN online pool. Against them he pits “two top college basketball analysts.” Here’s a reduced spreadsheet with the large Crowd-Expert discrepancies highlighted. If you’re betting, it’s red for bad, green for good.
(Click on the chart for a larger view. The full spreadsheet is here.)
As McClusky notes, “most of the top seeds are highly inflated, especially Kansas.” Also, “Mountain West pair of San Diego State and Brigham Young are two of the best values out there.” He also said – and this article was posted Wednesday –
The single biggest gap between the two sets of picks? Utah State vs. Kansas State in the first round. According to the numbers, Utah State has a 57 percent likelihood of knocking off the higher-seeded Wildcats, but 73 percent of ESPN users have picked Kansas State.
Kansas State opened as 1 ½-point favorites. That line was bet up to 2. The Crowd was wise this time, both in their brackets and their bets. Kansas State 73, Utah State 68.
We’ll see how the rest of the tournament goes.
h/t Max
UPDATE, March 22: Never too late, the master of brackets Ted McCagg has finally posted his March Madness drawing (here).
Philip Cohen says (though not in his Family Inequality blog) that of the players in the NCAA tournament, sociology majors have the highest average (game points, not grade point). He links to an article by Justin Peters in Slate about “student athletes.”
Sociology is nowhere near the most popular major on the floor. Business, Communications, Humanities, and Sports Science beat us out. Nevertheless, Peters delivers this bit of trash talk
Forty-two players study sociology, that tried-and-true slackers' major. While it’s possible that UCLA players are disproportionately drawn to the sociology department for the chance to study with famed Marxist theorist Perry Anderson, it's more likely that a shooting guard would choose it because, as one of the largest majors at UCLA, nobody will notice if you don't come to class.
Hey, ref, how ’bout a T for that?
Athletes do tend to cluster in certain majors. Which major it is depends on the school and the team. For UCLA hoops, it may be sociology, for Georgia Tech football, it’s business. But the reasons for these learning communities are not the ones Perry mentions. More likely, coaches direct their players to jock-friendly majors. Different coaches have different ideas about what a good major is (and perhaps different friends on the faculty).
(I blogged this a couple of years ago – here ,with a link to an interactive graphic which I think is still working.)
