Agenda for Social Justice: Solutions 2012

The Society for the Study of Social Problems has released its Agenda for Social Justice: Solutions 2012, a publication designed to inform policy makers and the public-at-large about some of the nation’s most pressing social problems and to propose policy responses to those problems. It is an effort by SSSP to nourish a more public sociology that will be easily accessible to policy makers.  The publication features entries from two of our Sociology PhD program’s students – Katie Kerstetter and Jason Smith – as well as one of its MA alumni – John Robinson.

“Preserving Affordable Housing and Building Wealth in an Economic Recovery: Limited Equity Cooperatives as an Alternative to Tenant Displacement.”
John N. Robinson III and Katie Kerstetter

“Promoting Digital Equality: The Internet as a Public Good and Commons.”
Jason Smith, Preston Rhea, and Sascha Meinrath

The publication can be found here.

Toward a Public Sociological Method – The Extended Case

By Josh Tuttle

There is no “true” sociological method.  Quantitative and qualitative methods are equally valid, as each depicts social structure from a different, yet legitimate perspective.  By the same token, there is no “true” method for public sociology. Certain methods may be more instrumental for the purposes of the public sociologist, however.  I believe I may have stumbled upon one of these methods.

I was recently introduced to Michael Burawoy’s “extended case” method.  In a very basic sense, the extended case method uses participant observation to connect individual experiences with larger structural and historical forces in a reflexive dialectic.  Unlike other approaches to participant observation, such as grounded theory, the extended case allows a public sociologist to inform their fieldwork with a pre-existing theory – which is extremely helpful when combating ongoing social problems and inequalities. In short, this is not a method that accumulates knowledge for knowledge’s sake.

Another strength of the extended case is it’s affinity for mixed methods.  While Burawoy clearly argues for a reflexive brand of sociological inquiry, the extended case allows a public sociology to mix positive and reflexive methods to form a mutually reinforcing relationship.  Consider the positive method of scientific inquiry.  The positivist philosophy maintains that research must be conducted at arm’s length.  Therefore, the researcher must be isolated from the  subject to ensure that scientific observation is not contaminated by a number of different biases.

A glaring contradiction exists in positivist philosophy, however, especially when considering positivism in the social sciences.  It is impossible to disconnect from a research subject when they exist within the same metaphysical and physical space as the researcher.  Therefore, a researcher is unable to step outside of the parameters of society, and is powerless to the biases that exist within social structure and necessarily within the researcher, as such.

Reflexive methods attempt to avoid this conundrum by requiring the researcher to accept his/her place in society.  Biases are accepted as a natural human condition, and research is conducted in a dialectical relationship: researched interacting with the researcher in a mutually influential relationship.  The possibility for disruption is an obvious methodological weakness, however.  How can a researcher keep from objectifying and dominating the researched in the field?  Such a disruption alters the routine of a social world, causing observations to lack clarity.

Combining positivist and reflexive methods counteracts the shortcomings of both methods, however.  The extended case method allows for such a combination, as a researcher can use the supposed detachment of positivism to counteract the influence of reflexive science, and vice-verse.  Furthermore, the use of the extended case method allows public sociologist to transcend the typical critique of public sociology: the lack of methodological vigor.  For surely a mixed method approach allows for the triangulation of data, a feature that many traditional sociological projects lack.

Joshua Tuttle is a doctoral student of public sociology at George Mason University.  His thesis was quantitative examination of the effects of race, gender, and socioeconomic status on Roman Catholic religious commitment.  His research interests include religion, social inequality, and globalization.  Public sociology projects that he has worked on include the Wilmington’s Youth Enrichment Zone and the Feast Downeast Project.

This article originally appeared in Josh’s blog, Sociology for the People, on Apr6, 2012

Academia ‘and’ Policy?

By John N. Robinson III

Nothing better illustrates the usefulness of public sociology as a venue for civic engagement than to reflect on the awkward relationship that exists between sociology and policy. On the one hand, they seem superficially adjacent, as if sibling disciplines. For example, it is not uncommon for a sociologist to profess the “policy-relevance” of his or her own work. In fact, “policy-relevance” is generally the most basic and intuitive way to imagine our work as important at all. Likewise, subfields such as the study of the welfare state or urban poverty treat policy as a central object of analysis, thereby further blurring disciplinary boundaries that already seem porous and vaguely defined.

However, scholars who overstep rather than merely straddle the line between sociology and policy find that the distance between the two is deceptively vast. My coauthor (Katie Kerstetter) and I learned this lesson in vivid detail as we set out to prepare for George Mason University’s Public Sociology Graduate Conference last fall semester a presentation based on a policy paper that we would soon submit to an edited collection entitled, Agenda for Social Justice. Trained as a sociologist, the conventions of policy paper writing initially had me feverishly scratching my head. Just imagine my bewilderment in being told to limit our contribution to 10 pages or less, to refrain from citing the source of every assertion we made, and (my favorite) to “minimize the jargon.” Trained in the public policy world, Katie felt more comfortable excising jargon and developing arguments via bullet points but experienced a similar sense of bewilderment when it came time to add “Theory” to our policy argument.

While the conventions of policy paper writing took some getting used to, our greatest challenge still lay before us: transforming such a paper into a presentation of interest to an academic audience. This is not to say that we were ultimately successful in doing so but in either case I can report some insights.

• First, academic and policy outlets seem to be interested in different aspects of the problems we study. This is how a policy paper about limited equity cooperatives as an underutilized policy instrument became an academic presentation about limited equity cooperatives as an example of organizational nonconformity. Both are important potential contributions but the former tries to fill a practical gap and the latter a conceptual one. But situating such a project in an academic literature, as we must do if we intend to publish in academic outlets, threatens to abstract the discussion from the more pragmatic concerns of the policy world.
• This leads into a second insight: the answers we as academics give to theoretical puzzles tend to raise still more questions, while the answers we give to policy questions are expected to settle them. For example, in our policy paper we explicitly advocate in favor of one policy instrument over another, a move less likely to win success in purely academic outlets. Naturally, some of the toughest questions we received when fielding questions concerned the challenge of conveying to our audience a sense of balance in our consideration of various policy instruments.
• Finally, we found that it was helpful to actually inform our audience beforehand that our project was one of translating between academic and policy worlds, thereby inviting them to participate in this messy process. We decided to do this as a strategy of making our presentation more intelligible, but the results exceeded our greatest expectations, as the audience asked great questions and took seriously the challenge of producing knowledge of interest to academic and policy audiences.

Unfortunately, such opportunities for fruitful dialogue appear to be rare. Most often, it seems that scholars have to choose: academia or policy? This is why venues like GMU’s burgeoning public sociology graduate conferences are so invaluable. It is true that the process of developing our presentation became for us an occasion to reflect on how the policy and academia worlds seemed so starkly dissimilar. The presentation itself, however—and our engagement with co-presenters and the audience afterward—reminded us of what can happen when so many brilliant minds are brought together toward a worthy cause. When a conference can do this it creates borderlands, full of productive exchange, where once there were only boundaries. For these reasons, I would like to sincerely thank the organizers of GMU’s public sociology conference for a job very well done.

John N Robinson is in the Sociology PhD program at Northwestern University. His research interests gravitate around the areas of urban sociology, law, and social policy. In his current project he studies tenant legal campaigns against public housing demolition and redevelopment in the wake of the HOPE VI policy in particular and welfare state decline more generally.