Abstract
The conversation that follows occurred on the listserv of the Association of Applied and Clinical Sociology in the Spring of 2014. The conversation concerns the practical value of sociology. The listserv is open to everyone and all are welcome. To join, go to the “Join AACS Listserv” link at http://www.aacsnet.net/mission/aacs-membership/
National Institute on Drug Abuse
I have spent the vast majority of my sociological career working as a researcher/evaluator in nonacademic settings. I have worked extensively in small, private business (for and nonprofit), government, both state and federal, and as a private consultant. There are important obstacles to engaging in traditional, rigorous academic research outside the academy. For one, we report to “bosses” and clients whose primary mission is rarely to publish results in reputable journals or to adhere to rigid research standards. For another, the settings in which we conduct our work are seldom conducive to controlled designs. In addition, it is less common for the research tools we use to be developed completely independently, and the study implementation is more formative and influenced by the funders or policy specialists who are the audience of our work. I’ve written this opening paragraph as if these are bad things but, in my experience, this type of research is at least as important as basic academic research. Among the reasons I believe this is that we have direct access to the program developers, funders, and policy personnel who ultimately create the things we are interested in studying. I also believe that research that is completely “controlled” (as if this were really possible) is not an accurate reflection of what is likely to occur in the real world.
While there is great value in adhering to strict academic standards, if this means that we, as sociologists, primarily promote academic scholarship that serves other academics, then our opportunities to promote change virtually disappear. I have languished on this soapbox for years, as I believe the professionals in my chosen field of sociology are at least as guilty as any other field of removing themselves from public discussions. I don’t relish the thought of our profession teetering on the brink of irrelevance but I see this as a real danger. Hence I am speaking out.
Many, many important sociologists have underemphasized participation in the public sphere. Burawoy has advocated for social influence from the academic pulpit, even arguing that policy sociology is equivalent to “selling out” (my term, not his). C. Wright Mills, one of my favorite all-time sociologists, did something very similar in the 1950s (of course, he was mostly correct about cooptation back then). The ongoing debate about whether research should be value neutral contributes to this, and while made famous by Weber and others, this position has been taken by many other fields beyond sociology. It is certainly feasible to maintain value neutrality and still do important, publicly relevant work. But imagine how unlikely change driven by sociological insights is in nonacademic settings if sociologists continue to shy away from them. Why should anyone listen to us? I hope no one will say, “because we’re right,” an argument that has carried so little weight throughout history that we should be well trained to ignore it. Do we believe it is obvious to those working in external settings why, and more importantly HOW, our knowledge can benefit them? What are the clear, actionable components of our field that we believe others can implement? Trust me, this is the way the outside world thinks. They want stuff that can be implemented, ideally tomorrow.
In my view, we remain a largely unknown field primarily because we are not participating enough in the discussions held by nonacademic organizations. There are so many opportunities to influence these discussions that we should be seeking them out. I know there are many of us who do. The Association for Applied and Clinical Sociology and the Section on Sociological Practice and Public Sociology of the American Sociological Association spend a good deal of their energy promoting sociology as an “outside” discipline. From my personal experience, here are some ways we might be able to make a difference in the outside world:
When I worked for the state of Massachusetts (USA), I was consulted because of my statistical knowledge on re-budgeting issues. Though I was not a financial officer, I understood z scores. I had left the state by the time the fiscal realignment occurred but I know my projections were taken seriously.
I have worked at two U.S. federal agencies over the last 12 years, both with Health and Human Services (HHS). The first was Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the primary service arm of HHS for substance abuse and mental health issues. While there, I was included in discussions about issuing contract awards, general agency direction (guiding frameworks), and IT. I had specific background in none of these areas, but I got the big picture. I learned how to manage contracts and how to direct contractors who were developing products for the government, and the public.
My second federal U.S. job is my current one, with the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Since being at NIDA, I have been invited to promote new areas of research, including the potential benefits of physical activity to counter negative addictions. This is an area of knowledge of mine, as is research—the mission of NIH. The challenge is negotiating the federal bureaucracy to figure out how to get new initiatives developed. It’s hard, but so worth the fight. Most sociologists understand the workings of bureaucracy and of management–labor relations.
I can also tell countless stories of working as a private consultant and in small businesses that involved managing the business, ongoing business development, client relations, and a nontrivial amount of training/teaching, but not of students. Again, I was not specifically trained in these areas but my sociology could not be more relevant—think labor-management, workplace satisfaction, curriculum development/teaching, and fiscal relations. Sociology of Business should be a required course of all sociology departments.
I regularly make known that my training is as a sociologist and that this is how I can help. As an example, in my efforts to bring physical activity into the fold as an intervention approach, I have had to lobby hard for the importance of social context—what types of activity?, in what settings?—and not just let brain science drive the discussion. I haven’t won all these battles but winning any is of great value. If there were more of us doing this work, our influence would be that much greater. And that is my core message: We need more sociologists working in applied settings and making clear to future generations why the sociology is what makes our contributions meaningful.
The Blackstone Group, Inc.
I thought I invented “clinical sociology” when, as a doctoral candidate, I answered a classified ad, “Director of hypnosis clinic wanted, advanced degree in psychology or related discipline required.” I thought, “Well, I need to support myself and, as a sociologist, I’m related.” I rented my first office and made a business card. I labeled myself “clinical sociologist” because I was a sociologist doing clinical work. I had no idea that I was not the first, nor the only one to do so (which tells you how deeply the long applied and clinical tradition had been buried). Years later, after relocating to the East Coast, having been unable to find work at a time when universities were not hiring and potential employers kept telling me I was too overdegreed and too underexperienced to make the cut, I ended up being hired to do marketing research, about as applied as one can get in a business jam packed with the “sociologically-trained-but-not-identifying-as-such.”
In fact, when AACS’s parent organizations were just getting established, there was a whole groundswell of applied social science mini-movements that were largely unaware of each other, plus even more of us who were out there doing things beyond the Möbius strip of “pure sociology.” Whatever happened to “Sociologists in Business?” It was a small group that had been around for a while when we started the Clinical Sociology Association. The applied/clinical anthropology movement has been around since before we started the Clinical Sociology Association and the Society for Applied Sociology. There were some ideas floated about connecting with their organizations, but it never happened.
The real issue, IMHO, is the continuing reluctance of sociologists to get involved in the world of “business,” at least overtly as sociologists, leaving psychologists and anthropologists to own this, that, and the other. This is a very old drum I’m beating here . . . the last time I gave an American Sociological Association paper or Sociological Practice Association presentation on the potential role of sociologists in market/marketing research must have been 15 years ago.
Which reminds me how many eminent sociologists, as well as quite a few of our more, shall I say, critical theory-oriented colleagues, were severely disturbed by the implications of doing something in the real world with sociology during those early years (as if Wirth hadn’t published his paper, Clinical Sociology, back in the early 1930s). For some it just seemed wrong to get one’s hands dirty, others worried about power disparities when one seeks to help others (this was long before “public sociology” came into the picture). Ironically, marketing research has historically been based on methods developed by sociologists (mainly those at Columbia, like Merton and Lazersfeld). But psychologists and now MBAs tend to “own” it, while the newest wave is IT folks and other tech-besotted types contending that you only need to crunch the (big) data and all will be revealed—taking “a-theoretical” to a new height. On the other hand, I have been gratified by some recent LinkedIn discussions about grounded theory, but again, ripped out of our discipline’s soft hands. The more things change . . .
Bentley University
I would say Roger hits it on the head. I couldn’t agree more, which is why I stopped going to the American Sociological Association meetings to argue about applied sociology and instead I just talk with people in industry directly. I find it much easier to convince people in industry the value of my ethnographic and sociological approach than other sociologists. With the industry audience, I find I do less defending of (1) my approach, (2) my deliverables, and (3) my associations with research in business settings.
I’m pretty fortunate in that I work at a private business university where I can be a sociologist and get to work on a great many projects with business colleagues. It is this kind of cross-disciplinary work where I can demonstrate the value add that sociology provides. If I publish outside of sociology, that is also looked upon favorably.
When people ask, “What does sociology have to do with business?” the short answer is “Everything.” There are of course a lot of sociologists who are doing ethnographic work in organizations, especially those under the auspices of “workplace studies.” Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology and workplace studies heavily influenced Lucy Suchman and Julian Orr (both anthropologists in industry). You have workplace studies sociologists in IBM, Yahoo!, PARC, Xerox, Microsoft, and many other places. The whole element of computer-supported cooperative work in looking at systems design and implementation is based on an understanding of social organization and context. I teach a course called “Ethnography of Work for Design” in our business school’s program Human Factors in Information Design, and I’ll be teaching an executive education version in Silicon Valley. I give talks with engineers on the ethnography of work. In all these situations, people see the value of a sociological approach.
The fact that the “rigors” of academia do not hold up in applied settings is often the case. But then again, as we are finding out, things in the “real world” are changing so quickly (especially for those of us studying technological use and impacts) that we don’t have time to wait 9–12 months for the peer review process to work itself out before some set of findings can be certified as relevant. This is not to dispel the whole enterprise of publishing, but that there is a place for both.
Whatever I do in industry, I keep in mind the “perfect” (which would be what I would ideally like to do), but do not let it spoil the “good” (or what I can do). It is okay to do good work even if there are gaps in terms of time, resources, access, etc. I also don’t apologize for being a sociologist. When others do not see the value that sociology brings, or if they have a limited “sociological imagination,” it just means that I have to do a better job of communicating to them the importance of what I know and do in their language. We cannot expect others to know our specialized language of academic discourse. How many graduate programs teach students how to prepare deliverables other than academic papers? Probably not many. It is beyond time that they should start.
In terms of social justice, I am often in the situation of being the voice for those I’m studying, whether it be medical transcriptionists, software engineers in distributed teams, or users of a technology that have the potential to disrupt their work and lives. Being able to, through workplace studies research, give voice to their lives is tremendously rewarding. If through my work on distributed software teams a company is able to deliver a product to market in a timelier manner and with fewer defects, and in the process make more money, then that’s great. They are able to do so, in part, through recommendations that I was able to make through studying the workplace from a sociological perspective. And in doing so, I’m not trying to be more like a management PhD (I will joke with students that management is just sociology done badly) or a consultant. There are enough of them, and if that’s what they want, open the Yellow Pages or buy a Harvard Business School Case or something. Don’t come to me. But if you want a different view compared to others who are using the same business cases and recommending the same industry-wide “best practices,” then let’s talk. I believe that by providing a uniquely informed sociological analysis rooted in examining the localized workplace practices exhibited by workers, I can provide that company with a better competitive advantage over other companies.
I will say that the luxury I enjoy is that I have a tenured job. I can literally afford to walk away from an engagement if I don’t want it. For those of us who have that luxury, we should be unashamedly pushing the message more in those applied engagements in a way that hopefully paves the way for our peers who are in more tenuous financial situations and thus have to put up with a different level of BS than we do. For those who have to put up with BS, sincere condolences and my thoughts and prayers are with you.
Again, I’m lucky to be working in this kind of environment where applied sociology (and social science) is so highly valued. We really try to push the integrated approach to Arts and Science and Business at Bentley University. I’ve been trying to put together an integrated major that combines sociology with usability and information and process management. If context matters, and sociology studies context, then we are the thing that fills the spaces in between the technical skills that allows for the identification of opportunity, the development of innovation, and the application in meaningful ways.
Georgia Southern University
Admittedly, I am young in my career. To give you a bit of a background to my thoughts, let me first give a short summary of my education and experiences.
I received my PhD in Sociology in 2008. I used mixed qualitative methods in my dissertation. I hoped for a tenure track academic job, but graduated during the recession. Hence, I ended up adjunct teaching, working as a census enumerator, doing market research, and as a “research” manager at a center in a business school. I did not like the last job, especially with how inequality was discussed by my boss, and ended up going back to school for my Masters in Social Work with a clinical mental health focus (I did my first internship is student services at a Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered, Allied Office at a university, and my advanced internships were in mental health; one in chemical dependency and later at a free mental health clinic as a counselor and program evaluation research). This last year, I applied for academic jobs and landed one in which they wanted a PhD and MSW, so I will be teaching both social service courses, supervising internships, and some sociology courses. With all this said, I was open to applied work with my sociology training before I went back for the MSW, and if I didn’t find an academic job, I was going to do clinical mental health work (which I may do eventually still to keep my skills up).
Market research: I did ethnography and surveys in stores for a virtual company. Later, I also did qualitative analysis for the company. My sociology training was helpful, yet, as some of you might know, market research is about turn-around time for analysis, so this is something a bit different I think than academic research for which we are trained. And the bottom line in this analysis was how to help companies. Not that there is anything wrong with this per se, but as a sociologist, I came into the field concerned about inequality, so sometimes it was hard, for example, to see how gender became a marketing tool. But there were sociologists, along with folks from business and anthropology, who worked as managers at the company.
Business Schools: Sociology has links to business, such as knowledge on organizations and work. I took a job as a research manager at a center in a business school and my boss liked that I had a sociology degree. I ended up being a glorified editor and had a hard time with what I consider the lack of rigorous methodology in some of the studies. Most of my problems concerned working in an environment where the “haves and have nots” were talked about in individual ways without thought to structural inequality. Yes, one could say this is where sociologists could make a difference, but I lacked power in my position to do so.
Clinical Work: With my clinical mental health MSW, I was able in various settings to intern with different kinds of professionals and students in psychology (LMFT, PsyD, PhDs, and MAs). I am glad I took the MSW route because we read similar things to psychology, but the roots of social work are also the roots of sociology. So while I was working at a micro level, environment and social justice were also part of my framework. However, my guess based on knowing a bit about licensure now to practice is that you need a MSW or a psychology degree to start the licensure process to practice clinical mental health in most states. This takes into consideration your clinical course work and internships. The licensure is tied to reimbursement, but I do think it is good practice to have a license and have the process for supervision, which would be difficult for sociologists, unless they are trained in a field that sets them up for gaining licensure. And I would like to think about how we can work collaboratively with psychologists and others instead of seeing this as a competition. There are things they know and things we know. When we have conversations, we learn more.
Searching for Applied Jobs with a Sociology Degree: I did look at jobs in market research, corporations, etc., and yes, most wanted a business degree or a marketing degree. For example, the jobs were about consumer insights or even building relationships with international markets. It was difficult not only because of my degree but lack of applied experience or even how to talk about it. This is not generalizable to every sociology PhD or MA, as I did not graduate from an applied program. My point here is that folks need help in selling themselves to nonacademic careers. They need help talking to the businesses that might hire them. They need help identifying what skills to highlight and to promoting the benefits they could bring to an organization. Internships help a great deal in meeting these goals, but the applied and public sociology needs to do more. As an example, read the recent Huffington Post article about Target (see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/09/target-multicultural-tips_n_3566873.html). A sociologist would have been an asset here, specifically in how to talk about diversity.
Public Policy: This is an applied field I think sociologists would add value, yet there seems to be little training in our programs. In social work, we had to take policy courses and do policy analysis. Many social work students in my program also dual majored in public policy. Yes, we would be competing with public policy students, but I strongly advocate sociologists should be trained more in this.
Social Justice: We have not discussed social justice much in this conversation thus far. I think that many sociologists I know, many feminist sociologists, are interested in applied work through the lens of social justice. How do we make the world a better place with our research and teaching? I am an active member of Sociologists for Women in Society, where we have many conversations and devote time in our meetings about applied work with this framework. And ultimately, I think this is why it is hard for me personally to think about a career in the corporate world. I came into sociology because I cared about the world. It was incredibly difficult to work as a sole sociologist in an environment where I saw structural inequality as an issue. How do we reconcile our commitment to social justice with careers in places where this is not important?
Bowling Green State University
I find this conversation important empirically for understanding career opportunities. For some time, I’ve argued that professions organize the world. Employers have short-term goals and need people who are experienced in the day-to-day operations in the routines of their business. They disregard the heuristic power of fundamental sciences. Sociology majors might have much better chance if they take a minor in a profession of their choice, complete an internship in that field, and show that they know how to function independently at a clerical level. These are important skills for employers.
One example from architecture: The facilities programming and planning phase of architecture involves much social research. However, clients do not see this. Many clients cannot discern the programming and planning phase from architectural design. Often clients think that since architects specialize in design, they should also hold expertise in programming as well. However, programming and planning concern the researching of the users of buildings, not the designing of them. Many architects have not studied properly how to research building utilization. Actually, they may not have studied it at all. It takes a degree in social science to get into the research realm of humans.
Employers might acknowledge that a sociologist might make an exceptional facilities planner or programmer after five years, but they need an experienced specialist now. Only the large companies can afford to take a basic science graduate, retrain that person on the job, and wait for him/her contribute to an interdisciplinary team. This process is long, costly, and unpredictable. By the time a large architectural firm trains a sociologist to become a facility programmer or planner, that person might take another position that pays a higher salary. So, a sociologist would have a hard time marketing himself or herself and gaining commissions in facilities programming and planning, despite superior research skills and thinking.
Additionally, we should look at what anthropologists are doing. It is interesting that like us, they have an applied/practice anthropological association and an applied/practice section in their American Anthropological Association. They are very active in the corporate world and have managed to penetrate the largest corporations. There are reasons to believe that corporations and businesses are more interested in research and social practice at a micro level. The major software and social networking companies use social researchers for a number of projects and have such people on their payroll. My information is that these people are more often anthropologists and psychologists than sociologists. It is interesting to understand how anthropologists have made their way into business and track that same path for generating more business than we do (see the call for volunteers for research on this by the American Anthropological Association, http://www.aaanet.org/cmtes/copapia/CoPAPIA-Study-of-Practicing-Anthropologists.cfm). Psychologists have made their way long ago through industrial/organizational psychology and human factors/ergonomics.