The analogy I am going to use is a watch, comparing the time it tells and the mechanism that makes the watch work. This is, I know, a flawed analogy. The watch/watchmaker is often used as a crutch for Intelligent Design proponents. It also implies a functional worldview (a view which has been largely debunked by sociologists for its status quo justifications and tautological inclinations). Finally, there is lots in the social and natural world that is not explained and has no singular (or possibly even multiple) causality, so the neat relationship between machine and its operation does not hold. Still, the analogy I am going to use is a watch. Hopefully this is more helpful than distracting for you. If it is just too distracting to get over, you can substitute something else that makes sense to you. Sociology is a sandwich. Life is a house.

For my purposes (the watch), there is the time, and the mechanism hiding behind the faceplate that makes the watch work. And sociologists, largely, do not care much about the time. That is to say, we do care about the time. But the sociology of the phenomena you want to examine is, much more often than not, the mechanism. Sociologists may study autism, or the Dancehall club scene, or schools, or cults, or art markets. These are the watch face in my analogy. This is the time. But we study these phenomena in order to understand some underlying processes that organize these phenomena. These are the watch mechanisms. These are the guts. Sociologists as sociologists care more about the guts of the watch than the time itself.

This distinction, and the (largely true) perception that sociologists care less about the phenomena they study than the underlying processes that make these phenomena work is, as Adrian Monk might say, a blessing and a curse. It also sits at the center of a current debate over Public Sociology. Advocates for PS think we need to spend more energy on the time and less on the timepiece.

Now, the curse is that you find yourself from time to time in talks by a national expert on racial inequality and poverty, where the speaker, who received a $6M grant to study race and class can unselfconsciously say that massive degrees of economic inequality is “just so FASCINATING!” Sometimes when we are feeling particularly nasty, we call these people poverty pimps. Why does that work? Because it is nice and easy to criticize those who care so much about the underlying processes of poverty that they forget that ‘poverty’ is a word that refers to people who have no resources, and who do not get multi-million dollar grants from the NSF to study useful things. Because sociology is obsessed with the underlying mechanisms, sometimes the actual phenomena are treated as though they are not particularly important. You can see why Public Sociology advocates get angry about this.

The blessing, however, the blessing is that sociology is about the root causes and operating mechanisms of social life. What is happening around autism (the rise of patient-led advocacy, and mother-led advocacy in particular) is a decline in the authority of doctors in an age of the increased availability of medical information. The hypothesis that doctors protect themselves by monopolizing information, and maintaining authority based in part on this information asymmetry is not limited to doctors treating autism. It (potentially) demonstrates how information technology shapes professions, the future of work, the change in regimes of authority in (US) civil society. The sociology of this problem helps to explain autism diagnoses, as well as all kinds of useful problems around professions, information, and authority.

As I say, this is the sociology. So when someone inevitably tells you that your questions are or are not interesting, what they mean by that is: you are looking at an important or unimportant mechanism for how some aspect of social life operates. An ‘uninteresting’ question is a question that does seem all that useful in understanding the underlying processes of social and organizational life. You are, in my analogy, pointing at this tiny screw off in the corner, and instead missing all the hard work done by the mainspring. What I am trying to describe is also that elusive distinction between topical questions and theoretical questions. Topical or substantive questions are about the time; theoretical questions (especially capital-T theory, but theory-as-explanation as well) are about the watch mechanisms.

There is a tension here, since areas often come into and out of focus in the broader scheme of the world due to the public’s interest in the time. A nuclear plant melts down, and someone doing work on the effects of tight coupling on the prevalence of organizational disaster is sought after. Financial crisis? Let’s go see what the economic sociologists are working on. But, in my humble opinion but certainly an opinion rooted in long participation in the field, economic sociologists are not particularly interested in financial crisis. Economic sociologists care about, well, the things they cared about before the financial crisis: performativity and market models; markets as political jurisdictions; the morality of markets; embeddedness and social networks; financialization of the economy. So financial crisis is an opportunity, and more often than not a vindication of a worldview held before the crisis.

This is only partly a criticism, if you what you care most about is the human effects of widespread, unpunished fraud and the utter failure of regulatory apparatuses to do anything but accommodate powerful interests.

While that makes you a compassionate human being, it does not make you a particularly compelling sociologist. There is, as Bruce Kogut said to me after Donald MacKenzie couldn’t bring himself to say fraud or malfeasance or greed when talking about the collapse of the mortgage derivative markets, always greed. There is always potential fraud. The question we need to ask is, through which specific pathways is greed translated into market failure. Too much attention to the time, Dr. Levin, and not enough attention to the watch mechanisms.

But this is a largely negative reading of the situation, and it should not be. There is a vast value in caring more about the innards than the time. Substantive knowledge, without interests in the theoretical mechanisms that cause, contain, facilitate, or funnel the phenomena, is inevitably incomplete and non-transferrable. If you want to do something about inequality generated by financial markets, you need to understand not just how derivatives markets work on their face, but also the underlying processes that make derivatives markets possible.

My undergraduates rarely get this distinction, though I have seen graduate students and professionals crash upon these same shoals. It manifests when students say they can not ‘find anything’ in the sociology journals about improvisational theater. Not knowing what Improv is a case of, and what you what to understand about it, you are left hoping that someone has done exactly the same kind of study on exactly what you are studying. But while the phenomena of the world may be widely and wildly variable, the underlying mechanisms and processes we use to study them are surprisingly constrained.

I hope this helps make sense of some of your frustrations, aspiring sociologist. It may seem very personal, but what you are experiencing is a common problem of socialization to an existing set of conventions, defined by an organizational and epistemic community, to capitalize on and rationalize knowledge.

If I can get it together, this will be done by the weekend. Cheers!

e.g., the front page is pretty different, and the rest is hopefully more read-friendly.

General insights:
From a number of sources, it is pretty clear that working every day ‘works’ better than waiting for moments of inspiration. Twyla Tharp’s Getting into the Creative Habit, Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, almost anything you read or hear from people who are successful in their writing/working will tell you that the danger is not too many days of getting not enough done – it’s too many days of getting nothing done. (of course, some are more religious about this than others, e.g., RKM reportedly started working at 4:30 am, seven days a week.

Bird by Bird suggests the ’1-inch frame’ approach to fixing this problem, as well as giving yourself permission to write shitty first drafts. You don’t have to do much to get started, just write enough to fill a 1-inch by 1-inch frame. Start there, and let the rest follow. And don’t sweat the first draft, it’s just a way to get it started, not meant to be a final perfect copy. Tharp is more about ritual (I get up every morning and go to the gym to work out, getting in the cab is the beginning of the ritual, which ends with stretching on the bar). But the upshot of both is that everyday-ness trumps wait-and-panic.

Of course, in everyday life there are no green-fields, no opportunities to start at zero and work diligently for that project 5 years out. Instead, we’re already behind in something or other. So maybe in all honesty it’s something like a 70/30 ratio to start – 70% of your time on the most pressing lose-sleep action items, and 30% of your time on longer-range planning. As the immediacy begins to get done, the ideal situation is to be left with rolling deadlines (ha! good luck with that!). But on the other hand, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good here.

Why to how:
Ok, so everyday works. But how to transform big stuff into doable stuff. I think it’s about turning everything into tasks. That’s the trick. Myself, I’m kind of a ‘getting things done’ kind of person, the David Allen book/cult that makes three assumptions: 1) that lots of energy is taken up on figuring out what to do, what’s left to do, what’s not done, and the like, which reduces your ability to think; 2) separating these things makes your life better; and 3) turning projects into the last actionable items, and having an excellent filing system will solve many if not most of your problems.

So ‘write chapter 5′ is too big. What is the very next thing you need to do in order to write chapter 5? Sometimes it is turn on computer and get typing, but sometimes it means emailing a colleague about a problem you have been having with Stata that needs to be solved in order to finish the data analysis, that needs to be written into chapter 5. So these are all tasks within the project ‘chapter 5′, and the next one means you need to dig up your colleague’s email address and start with that letter.

There’s a whole ‘getting things done’ cult, which I like a lot but don’t follow as much as I used to. Aside from tips and tricks, the other big insight is to split calendared tasks which are date-specific, and context-based tasks, which can be done as time and energy allows when you are in a particular context. My p thinks that’s where GTD goes off the rails, but your mileage may vary.

Per resources, there are some necessities:
- Writing for Social Scientists, by Howard Becker (“‘Getting it right’ means putting the argument so clearly that the paper begins by asserting what it later demonstrates”, p. 19). It’s an inspiration
- Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott. The latter chapters are geared towards creative writing more than social science-type writing, but the first chapters are incredibly enabling.
- Getting Things Done, by David Allen.
- and maybe, though doubtfully, Getting into the Creative Habit, by Twyla Tharp. Pretty, but ultimately, this is a sampling on the dependent variable kind of book which you might like or hate – I get annoyed by the ‘this inevitably works for me!’ kind of vibe, but you may not.

And online, I would perhaps start with KJ Healy’s indispensable applications discussion on Crooked Timber (http://crookedtimber.org/2004/12/11/indispensible-applications/). There’s a later version of this someplace. These kinds of discussions quickly become productivity tool porn (pr0n, in leet-speak).

So get to work!

I host this blog on my own site, as opposed to my university’s or through wordpress. The upside is freedom: I can pick my software, I have no editorial strings, and there is a lot more possibility for customization (and not just of blogging software, but of whatever I want to put on line). The downside is maintenance and cost.

First, costs. I host my site at hosting matters, on a shared server. I use the B1000 plan, which allows me space and flexibility, and costs $112.20/year. The domain registration (rethinkingmarkets.org) costs $15/year. I usually buy domain names in 5-year blocks, but there’s little discount for that. If you buy a domain name, have your hosting company register the name under their contact information, otherwise you’ll find your name and home address and phone in the whois directory.

Tools-wise, I use Coda or Transmit to send files to my server. Both are Mac apps, and paid for. On a pc, I would use WinSCP, which is free and open source. Use SFTP, which is secure. I code stuff by hand mostly, though lately I moved to blueprint, which is a CSS template for grids. RM is very griddy at the moment. Coda is pretty good about allowing you to hand-code in text, then see it as you make it.

I use wordpress for the blog. WordPress is great, but it’s a pretty steep learning curve if you want to get in and code it a little. The docs and codex are helpful, and I feel good about the Loop (if that means anything to you) nowadays, so if you’re ever looking for a hand in that regard, I might be able to help. On the other hand, working with wordpress means you’ll likely be customizing the hell out of your theme files. It can get a little confusing. But, in my humble opinion, not as confusing as working with Moveable Type. But this is of course personal preference, and there are obviously some MT junkies out there.

I use some plug-ins: Akismet (for spam, works great); Comment Timeout (because spammers sometimes get ahold of an old post and won’t let go. CT allows you to close out comments after X days and control this); Get Recent Comments (lists recent comments, for the sidebar). And then a few plug-ins that are weird: an archives styling plugin; a plugin that creates a little banner welcoming you to the site and asking if you’d like to subscribe to RSS for the first few times you visit; and Mint. Mint is a tracking software, which is totally unnecessary for me, given the traffic patterns of the site.

So really, I could do the same stuff with less expense and hassle by going through WordPress.com, or blogger or somesuch. But I like the gadgets and the coding part, and so this floats my boat. Of course, I’m not so much an emacs/R/LaTex guy, so I would say I’m not near the end of this particular continuum (ahem, KH). But the truth is, for me there is a pleasure in knowing how the stuff works.