Alan P. Rudy:
Yes, it kills me. for quite a few years after working through my PhD program, I was not prepared to realize that most sociologists had received (or if they received it, resisted) the kind of critical, political, post-disciplinary, theory-driven and movement/change-focused training I had. I thought the people were taught both that sociology was born in the fire that destroyed the foundations of the utilitarian individualism that undergirds free markets, free ballots and free thought AND that the field necessitated auto-critical reflection and practice. could not have been more wrong. At the same time, because of the particulars of my background, training and proclivities, I had absolutely no idea how unbelievable radical just plain ol' boring mainstream descriptive sociology was to most Americans.
But I also think the "pull that shit" and "academia is largely a status game" view _can_ be too glib. Yes, they do that and it is that, where are knowledges no suborned and statuses not central?. but I also think that the work process is really important as well. Just like all sorts of people who are well aware that SATs correlate not one bit to native intelligence use SATs/GREs/MCATs as a first cut because to do otherwise is to 1) utterly wear yourself out and 2) staggeringly prolong the application/acceptance process, my sense is that many committees - all-but overwhelmed with other things to do - use short cuts they don't like, and colleagues semi-regularly argue against for particular cases. I've seen some egregious stuff done in such committees and, while more rare, I've also seen people really fight for individual applicants deserving of a fair - rather than efficient - shake. Of course, I am not arguing that idiocy and bureaucratic contradictions are not hegemonic.
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Alan, you almost always have something to say, but damn it's often hard to dig what you are saying from the rambling sentences that contain it. It's quite a task for the reader to discover what it was that " could not have been more wrong" :-)
Now I'm going to ramble a bit, because I lack the training in philosophy needed to make the points I want to make.
Start here. In one of his books Russell begins a critique of inductive knowledge with a hypothetical village: a visitor walks through it asking people what their last name is, and the first 99 answer, "Jones." Now, can we assume that the 100th person will also be named Jones? Absolutely NOT. We have an empirical generalization but we do _not_ have a principle or abstraction _explaining_ the generalization. One could make up some hypothetical abstractions: "This village has an ordinance forbidding anyone not named "Jones" from living here." That would take some further empirical investigation, but if empirical evidence were discovered for it, then we would have real knowledge (pending some other better theory/explanation/abstraction with a better empirical grounding). Now, if I understand one part of your argument above, you are saying that there are two categories of sociologists: one bunch know that only empirically grounded abstractions constitute knowledge -- that mere description simply doesn't do it; the other bunch produce only more or less dependable empirical generalizations of phenomena, making no attempt to discover the abstractions that would make sense of their generalizations.
And then YOU go on to make a sweeping empirical generalization, but a very interesting one. You say that for the mass of Americans mere sociological generalization (mere description) is mind-blowing. As I say, that is interesting: can you provide even tentatively the abstraction (or abstractions) that might explain and support this generalization?
I'll stop here until I get a response from you.
Carrol