January 16, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston
When people pluck a word or phrase from a specialized area and bring it into widespread use, they often change the meaning. “Track record,” for example, in general speech means something very different from what it means to horseplayers.*
Sociology terms that have suffered this fate include “playing a role,” which now has a negative connotation (as Robert Park said long ago, we are all always playing some role) and “significant other,” which is now a gender-neutral term for someone you’re sexually involved with. That’s a far cry from its origins in symbolic interaction.
Here’s one I hadn’t heard before. Hillary Clinton on Meet the Press last Sunday said, “I’m very other-directed. I don’t like talking about myself.”
David Riesman coined the term other-directed nearly sixty years ago in The Lonely Crowd. He used it to describe what he saw as a new character type that had arisen in response to changes in society. The nineteenth century had been dominated by the “inner-directed” type, the person who remained rigidly true to a set of internal dictates regardless of the pressures of the social or physical environment. The upper-class Englishman on safari who, even in the jungle, wears a formal dinner jacket to dinner.
By contrast, the other-directed person is guided not by an internal gyroscope but by a kind of social radar. Other-directed people pick up signals from others, and – sensitive to these external demands, needs, and strategies – adjust their course accordingly.
Riesman did not intend his analysis as part of the critique of American “conformity” so popular at the time (books with titles like A Nation of Sheep), though that’s how it was taken. People viewed the terms as moral judgments: inner-directed good (the principled individualist), other-directed bad (the unprincipled conformist).
Obviously, what Hillary Clinton meant was that she was not much given to public introspection but instead directed her attention outward towards the problems of the world. But it’s interesting, given her “track record” on a variety of issues, to look at her statement from the perspective of Riesman’s original definition.
* The track record is the fastest time for a given distance at a given track. For example, the track record for the mile at Aqueduct is 1:32 2/5, set in 1989. What people mean in everyday speech when they say, “My track record on that issue . . .” is closer to what horseplayers refer to as “past performances” – the chart of the horse’s performance in past races.
As for “track record” as popularly used, in most cases the “track” could be dropped with no loss of meaning.
Research as Politics
January 15, 2008
Posted by Jay LivingstonBy now, I should be used to dishonest research by the politically motivated – the careful selection of time periods or samples so as to magnify effects. That sort of thing. But I’m not. Maybe Max Weber should have written a third essay – political scholarship as a vocation.*
I was browsing at Intel Dump, a reality-based blog about military affairs. Blogger-in-chief Philip Carter was ripping into the Sunday NY Times article on homicide among Iraq vets both for its method and its implied stereotype image of the crazed combat vet.
But in the comments – and Intel Dump gets a ton of comments – there was a reference to a Heritage Foundation study: The press release title was, “Post-9/11 Military Recruits Wealthier, Better Educated, Study Shows.” The lead was, “Wartime recruits who joined the United States military in 2004 and 2005 tended to be better educated and wealthier than their civilian peers.”
That didn’t sound right. It certainly did not square with news reports about Army recruiters shanghaiing near-imbeciles and schizophrenics in order to meet their quotas, or promising signing bonuses to tempt impoverished youths.
As the press release says,
I didn’t read every word of the report, but it appears that the author, Timothy Kane, uses a semantic trick to obscure an important distinction. Unless you pay close attention, you might forget that “the Army” is not the same as “the military” or “the armed forces.” The report focuses almost exclusively on “the military.”
But the branches of the military differ greatly in their involvement in Iraq and in their recruitment. The Air Force and Navy have suffered fewer than 125 fatalities and fewer than 250 casualties serious enough to require medical air transport. (The Heritage report didn’t mention these figures. I had to find them here [this link is broken, sop you're on your own in finding casualty figures on the separate branches of the military].) So Navy and Air Force recruitment has apparently been going along as usual.
The Army has suffered the heaviest losses – more than twenty times the combined Air Force and Navy figures – and it’s the Army that is having trouble recruiting and that in fact had lowered its standards. But of course you wouldn’t know that from reading the Heritage press release or even the full report. All the tables on education and income show only data for all military recruits; they do not break down the sample by service branch.
* For non-sociologists: Ninety years ago, Max Weber wrote two famous essays, “Scholarship as a Vocation” and “Politics as a Vocation.”
**There is some question as to what Kerry meant by this remark. He later claimed that he meant to say “you get us stuck in Iraq” the way that President Bush, not an outstanding student, had done.
Posted by Jay LivingstonBy now, I should be used to dishonest research by the politically motivated – the careful selection of time periods or samples so as to magnify effects. That sort of thing. But I’m not. Maybe Max Weber should have written a third essay – political scholarship as a vocation.*
I was browsing at Intel Dump, a reality-based blog about military affairs. Blogger-in-chief Philip Carter was ripping into the Sunday NY Times article on homicide among Iraq vets both for its method and its implied stereotype image of the crazed combat vet.
But in the comments – and Intel Dump gets a ton of comments – there was a reference to a Heritage Foundation study: The press release title was, “Post-9/11 Military Recruits Wealthier, Better Educated, Study Shows.” The lead was, “Wartime recruits who joined the United States military in 2004 and 2005 tended to be better educated and wealthier than their civilian peers.”
That didn’t sound right. It certainly did not square with news reports about Army recruiters shanghaiing near-imbeciles and schizophrenics in order to meet their quotas, or promising signing bonuses to tempt impoverished youths.
As the press release says,
This disproves the idea, expressed on Oct. 30 by Sen. John Kerry, that only those who fail in school end up in the military. “If you study hard, do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq,” the former presidential candidate told college students.**The Heritage Foundation is a conservative think tank, and highly political. Their view of the war in Iraq is basically, it’s all good. But how did they get the data to show the beneficial effects the war was having on recruitment?
I didn’t read every word of the report, but it appears that the author, Timothy Kane, uses a semantic trick to obscure an important distinction. Unless you pay close attention, you might forget that “the Army” is not the same as “the military” or “the armed forces.” The report focuses almost exclusively on “the military.”
But the branches of the military differ greatly in their involvement in Iraq and in their recruitment. The Air Force and Navy have suffered fewer than 125 fatalities and fewer than 250 casualties serious enough to require medical air transport. (The Heritage report didn’t mention these figures. I had to find them here [this link is broken, sop you're on your own in finding casualty figures on the separate branches of the military].) So Navy and Air Force recruitment has apparently been going along as usual.
The Army has suffered the heaviest losses – more than twenty times the combined Air Force and Navy figures – and it’s the Army that is having trouble recruiting and that in fact had lowered its standards. But of course you wouldn’t know that from reading the Heritage press release or even the full report. All the tables on education and income show only data for all military recruits; they do not break down the sample by service branch.
* For non-sociologists: Ninety years ago, Max Weber wrote two famous essays, “Scholarship as a Vocation” and “Politics as a Vocation.”
**There is some question as to what Kerry meant by this remark. He later claimed that he meant to say “you get us stuck in Iraq” the way that President Bush, not an outstanding student, had done.
Losing Face(book)
January 13, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston
Here’s an update on the technical and ethical Facebook problem I mentioned a few days ago.
The teacher who offered an A+ to any student who could hack into his Facebook page had to admit, to his chagrin, that my colleague’s son had in fact gotten access. (The kid created a sock puppet – a supposed classmate of the teacher – and persuaded the teacher to “friend” him.) But the teacher negotiated the promised A+ down to an extra ten points in every category of the final grade.
The kid didn’t care so much about the grade. To him, the best part was the “mad props” he got from all his classmates.
What do we conclude from this?
Posted by Jay Livingston
Here’s an update on the technical and ethical Facebook problem I mentioned a few days ago.
The teacher who offered an A+ to any student who could hack into his Facebook page had to admit, to his chagrin, that my colleague’s son had in fact gotten access. (The kid created a sock puppet – a supposed classmate of the teacher – and persuaded the teacher to “friend” him.) But the teacher negotiated the promised A+ down to an extra ten points in every category of the final grade.
The kid didn’t care so much about the grade. To him, the best part was the “mad props” he got from all his classmates.
What do we conclude from this?
- Intangible social rewards from peers outweigh bureaucratic rewards.
- Social solutions (creating a false identity) trump technical ones (hacking).
- Fourteen-year-olds have no ethical qualms about deceiving a teacher who, essentially, asks for it.
Chicken False Consciousness - II
January 10, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston
Back in November, I blogged about Chicken Delight as the embodiment of false consciousness – the cartoon chicken happily serving up a roasted version of himself for the dining pleasure and convenience of hegemonic humans.
The idea transcends national boundaries, and the picture I used was of a French chicken that I found in Polly’s blog. (Polly is not a sociologist, but her blog is well worth looking at.) Now, she has found this revised and more complex and nuanced version.
The video is by Remi Gaillard at N'importe qui. He has a number of these slightly surrealistic, humorous vids. Mostly silent, so understanding French is not necessary. (I’m still trying to figure out a translation for their motto: “C’est en faisant n’importe quoi qu’on devient n’importe qui.” Literally, “It’s in doing whatever that one becomes just anybody.”)
Posted by Jay Livingston
Back in November, I blogged about Chicken Delight as the embodiment of false consciousness – the cartoon chicken happily serving up a roasted version of himself for the dining pleasure and convenience of hegemonic humans.
The idea transcends national boundaries, and the picture I used was of a French chicken that I found in Polly’s blog. (Polly is not a sociologist, but her blog is well worth looking at.) Now, she has found this revised and more complex and nuanced version.
The video is by Remi Gaillard at N'importe qui. He has a number of these slightly surrealistic, humorous vids. Mostly silent, so understanding French is not necessary. (I’m still trying to figure out a translation for their motto: “C’est en faisant n’importe quoi qu’on devient n’importe qui.” Literally, “It’s in doing whatever that one becomes just anybody.”)
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