Abstract
In his chapter on “Ignoring Justice in Disaster Planning,” Peter Marcuse observes how contemporary social science research often focuses on “the separate pieces of a problem without examining the larger picture of which they are a part” (p. 13). Marcuse’s comments reveal both the strengths and limitations of this edited volume, American Democracy and the Pursuit of Inequality.
Indeed, editors Merlin Chowkwanyun and Randa Serhan have assembled a variety of notable social scientists who write on divergent subjects linked to inequality in the United States. Todd Gitlin and Peter Marris contribute essays that address methodological considerations. Writing of “getting people to tell me more than they wanted to” (p. 10), Gitlin outlines the “double seduction” (p. 8) involved when he interviewed media personnel for Inside Prime Time (1983), likening his telling of “my story” (p. 10) to the interpretive work of journalists. By comparing his sociological research to the writing of his novel, The Dreams of General Jerusalem (1988), Marris elicits ways in which each practice “can be examined for their truthfulness, though the criteria of validation differ” (p. 14).
Four essays, by Michael Katz, William Kornblum, Delores Hayden, and Denise Scott Brown, examine characteristics of urban and suburban realities that bear on issues of inequality. Against a backdrop of the seminal work of Jane Jacobs, historian Katz compares the pattern of economic transformation, demography, and spatial distribution in two prototypical cities, Philadelphia and Los Angeles. Contrasting the progressive responses to urban problems around the turn of the twentieth century to the “withdrawal of active government” in the late twentieth century, Katz laments the fact that diverse urban metaphors and promising ideas “have not coalesced into a new urban progressivism” (p. 35). Each of the remaining essays in this section provides a distinctly illuminating window for understanding the transformations of urban-suburban life: Kornblum reveals ways in which community is being transformed as urban areas continue to spread outwards; Hayden traces the impact of federal policy on the transformation of cities and suburbs, fingering the “process which has diverted public dollars to private rather than the public space” (p. 160); and Brown traces the shifting influences on planning through her own career as an architect from the 1950s to today.
William Julius Wilson provides a graphic and persuasive documentation of the forces that have produced what he has called the “new urban poverty” (p. 121) while Katherine S. Newman and Margaret M. Chin examine the contradictory effects of federal welfare and educational reforms, illustrated through the ethnographic study of twelve families. Marcuse provides a framework for analyzing disasters which, through its application to the comparative analysis of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, reveals how disaster research classically fails to examine the larger picture of social justice. Two essays, one by Richard Alba, the other by Rubén G. Rumbaut, examine theories and applications of assimilation research through several permutations in the field—Alba proposing a reformulation of assimilation theory that he and Victor Nee have developed as a response to segmented-assimilation theory, and Rumbaut tracing the “bumpy road” (p. 189) of approaches to assimilation from the later nineteenth century to the present, culminating in a useful comparison of six contemporary ethnic self-identities reflecting variations in acculturation and discrimination.
Two essays focus on the media. Michael Schudson elaborates on Herbert Gans’ Deciding What’s News (1979) by examining seven propositions about how the practice of journalism in the United States conceives of politics. While there is a great deal of validity to most of Schudson’s propositions, my own sense is that like the volume as a whole, they do not delineate enough of the institutional big picture that shapes journalism’s product in ways that are profoundly relevant to, and arguably erosive of, democracy. Focusing on models of citizenship rather than drawing on normative considerations of democracy narrows the portrayal of how journalistic practice is ideological in ways that have significant implications for inequality. Eric Klinenberg laments the decline in the sociological study of news organizations over a span of time characterized by “revolutionary” (p. 225) change in the news media. Through his ethnographic study of “Metro News,” Klinenberg examines the impact of both economic and technological forces on the journalistic production in newsrooms, in good part providing a broader framework for Schudson’s examination of journalistic practice.
In her concluding essay, Frances Fox Piven also provides a broader framework for thinking about inequality and democracy by examining the crucial impact of social movements as catalysts for the “big bang” (p. 253) eras of social reform in the twentieth century, the 1930s and the 1960s—in the process, critiquing the more conventional “historical-institutionalist” and reformist explanations. By tracing the impact of these social movements on electoral politics, Piven not only provides a persuasive explanation of why institutional and reformist impulses sometimes produce significant egalitarian reform, but also begins to anticipate theories of how and why retrenchment and even reversal of these reforms occurs.
The latter point reflects my main critique of the volume’s limitations, namely that there is little explicit consideration given to the political and economic forces that have produced the fundamental shift toward far greater economic inequality in the United States over the last forty years. How, for example, did the interests of economic elites converge with those of political reaction to produce the neoliberal world in which both equality and democracy have suffered profoundly? Indeed, where in the volume is the idea of democracy conceptualized in ways that would underscore the crucial significance of contemporary inequality, a privatized and corrosive political culture, and the lack of public accountability—or for that matter, many of the societal patterns uncovered in the book’s essays?
Obviously this critique reflects my own story, to use Todd Gitlin’s term, as a political scientist with interests in democratic theory and big picture analysis of the relationship among economic institutions, mass media, and social movements. But the “American Democracy” in the title does not come through as a critically discussed theme in the book. In fact, it seems that the essays were assembled in part as tribute to the life work of Herbert Gans. Indeed, the volume’s strength lies in bringing together notable social scientists from diverse disciplines and areas of specialization, thus reflecting Gans’ (and his mentor, Earl S. Johnson’s) own proclivity for work that straddled multiple fields. Like the editors, the contributors to the volume are practitioners of “engaged social science…with an eye toward realizing a more equal, inclusive and democratic order” (p. 4). With more explicit discussion of what that democratic order would (or should) look like, as well as a broader examination of the forces that prevent it, the volume would come closer to fulfilling Earl Johnson’s ideal of big-picture thinking.