The clash is not between religious and women’s rights. The clash is between a modern world where women are treated as full people, and a pre-modern world where women are simply less than men. We’re not going back, people.

We are crippled in so many ways today by the desire to avoid fashion mistakes, to elude ridicule – a desire that leads at one extreme to the smiling elisions of political candidates and on the other to the awful tyranny of cool – that this willingness to be foolish is hard for us to sympathize with or understand. In this age of Gawker.com, we have forgotten the seventies spirit of mockery that smirks at the pretensions and fatuities of others in a way that originates with and encompasses ourselves. Aton for atom, we are made of exactly the same stuff as all the stars and galaxies.

It’s uneven, but where Manhood for Amateurs shines, it really shines.

The challenge, I think, is that food at that kind of restaurant, particularly if you are not a professional food critic, lacks a set of genres and comparables for you to make sense of it. Here’s what I mean: if you have a great slice of pizza, you know what makes a great slice. You have eaten pizza enough times not just to have strong preferences about thick v thin crust, saucy, loads of toppings v minimilist, but also to know what criteria to use to judge said slice. If you are a New Yorker, it’s probably going to be judged differently than if you are a Chicagoan. But that’s fine, of course. The point is that you have a referent for what your ideal pizza is going to be.

Likewise for most foods that you eat on a regular basis, and even new foods that you don’t eat on a regular basis. It is wonderful to taste new and delightful things prepared in an excellent fashion. They expand your taste. But at the same time, the foods at Per Se are a combination of small bites (there are many small plates) and tastes for which you probably have no referent. As Sifton notes about the green salad:

a simple garden salad is the functional equivalent of an aria — particularly as sung at Per Se, with compressed figs and young red beets, Hakurei turnips (small, plump and white, very cute in aspect), red ribbon sorrel and a coulis of pine nuts. Each flavor is bright, distinct, amazing, but none is so purely intense, as reduced to its essence, as the dense, fragrant craziness of the figs.

It’s out of this world, I have no doubt. But you don’t know if it’s sweet, bitter, sour, rich, bright. I found myself describing every dish as amazing, but like nothing I had eaten before. What’s so interesting about Per Se is not, as Sifton says, that it “represents the ideal of an American high-culture luxury restaurant.” It is almost a form of outsider art. And you know what? That’s roughly the same language people use to talk about elBulli, and Alinea, two other meccas of modern high gastronomy.

Which is kind of fabulous, really. Normally, outsider art is used to describe people whose work is created outside the bounds of cultural, artistic conventions. Watts Towers is a good example. There are many. Most of the time, outsider art remains, well, outside. But sometimes its aesthetic, form, technique, or ideals get incorporated into the existing orbit of ‘conventional’ art, changing those conventions.

But Per Se is happening at a different kind level, the same way that molecular gastronomy and elBulli-type innovation works. Here is how Anthony Bourdain described Thomas Keller in a Cook’s Tour:

What’s missing from all the wild praise of Keller, his cooks, his restaurant, and his cookbook is how different he is. You can’t honestly use terms like the best or better or even perfect when you’re talking about Thomas Keller, because he’s not really competing with anybody. He’s playing a game whose rules are known only to him. He’s doing things most chefs would never attempt – in ways unthinkable to most. Everything about him and the French Laundry experience is different from most fine dining experiences; and Keller himself is a thing apart, a man hunting much bigger game, with very different ambitions than most of his peers.

It’s possible, I think, to simply chalk this up to Weberian charismatic authority, as with someone like Steve Jobs. But I think it’s helpful in the case of Per Se to think about how conventions ground us. I came out of Per Se thinking that it was a wonderful meal, but not one that I can even remember in any kind of detail – there wasn’t enough that I was familiar enough with for me to do that. I had a gnocchi dish once at Tru in Chicago that made me swoon; a wild combination of substantial but not heavy, rich without cloying. I still remember how it tasted. By contrast, I can’t remember a single dish I had at Per Se. They were heavenly, but essentially all unreproducible.

And this, for me, is what’s interesting. Sometimes you can be different by doing what everyone else is doing, but doing it so much better that it takes on a kind of phase-shifting, difference-of-degree-becomes-difference-of-kind. This seems very different from doing something just plain different from what everyone else is doing. Analytically, it’s hard for me to articulate exactly how this is working, but it seems really important.

I would, however, suggest that we are living in an era when you don’t have to know a single thing about the law to know how the Supreme Court will rule on a case. Occam’s razor suggests that you simply ask yourself if it benefits business over workers, the powerful over the powerless, or Republicans over Democrats. If the answer is ‘yes’, that is how the Supreme Court will rule. I don’t know if this was always the case. Lawyers I know adamantly suggest that there was once upon a time a less ideological, more ‘law-focused’ Supreme Court. But it’s long past time we think of the Supreme Court as a ‘court’ in its proper, legitimating meaning of ‘arbitrating and interpreting the law of the land’, and instead just consider them one of many political players/institutions in the US landscape of other political players/institutions.

In other words, the ‘decisions’, ‘opinions’, ‘reasoning’, ‘precedence’, or ‘interpretation’ are all meaningless. If you refer to these things, I think that makes you something of a sucker. Instead, just draw a straight line between who benefits and how the court will decide.

I’m not bitter about this, genuinely, but I think legal commentary is essentially worthless here.

online news still doesn’t make enough money it seems. Some newspapers try to tackle the financial problem by erecting pay walls. “You want information? You pay!” But, as many have noted before, that’s a tough sell in a medium where information exists in overflow. The strategic problems with pay walls have been discussed back and forth:

1. There is no information shortage online—if I can’t read this article, I’ll read another.
2. Pay walls weaken the main attractor (content) of your site and complicates the user experience (login on different platforms). Some leave social media back doors for pro users, but that’s not a good long term strategy either, as more and more people are using social media to find content.
3. Often pay walled news sites feature the same amount of marketing noise as free sites. Paying customers of course are more attractive clientele, but… Paying for news and then dealing with a silly blinking bonanza while reading doesn’t seem like a fair deal.

To be clear: content pay walls are not what we are suggesting. Remember, whether you fly Economy or Business: the result is the same (you travel from a to b), and only the experience differs. And likewise Business Class and Economy class seats on news sites should deliver the same content.

The idea of creating a business class for online news where is not about buying information, but buying better experience, it’s about service and customer experience. That’s right: Customer (paying), not user (free).

I like the idea, though it relies on the fact that the modal experience of flying really sucks. It reminds me of Erin Kissane’s awesome little book The Elements of Content Strategy, which Kieran turned me on to. Her description of content as being wrapped in layers after layer of annoying, sidetracking, distancing marketing is spot-on. And that we press on despite this is as surprising as, well, the fact that we continue to fly coach. Stripping this down, it’s something of a sad state when any client/consumer/customer experience devolves to a version of ‘crap’, for which a premium, better experience could be differentiated.

Nevertheless, this seems to be a new-ish model in the news/media/data space. The first is to institute some sort of paywall (WSJ, NYT, Financial Times, most proprietary library databases, New Yorker). The idea is to force users to pay for content. But as many people have commented, we live in an era of information glut rather than scarcity. And the web is social – walled gardens are necessarily going to be excluded from wider environments. Although I haven’t been active in a while on this blog, the fact is that I read the NYT less and link to it almost never in the post-paywall world.

The second model consists of organizations, and news organizations in particular, that have gone for ‘premium content.’ I mean, Glenn Beck gives his subscribers ‘behind the scenes’ content, and Bloomberg Professional has both (free) news and data feeds that have become a de facto part of the finance community. So you give subscribers additional content that they can choose to pay for. Kickstarter, it seems to me, employs a form of this. If the Ai Weiwei documentary gets funded, we can all see it. But donating more to the project gets you bonuses in the form of special access, special recognition, etc. Maybe I’m eliding multiple models contained in this one approach, but the idea is that there is addition rather than subtraction based on paying vs. not-paying.

The first-class vs. coach idea is slightly different. It assumes that content is universally ‘free’, but that users might pay a premium for a better user experience. Looking at the two NYT pages side-by-side, it certainly makes a cogent case for the user experience being more central to content than we normally credit. What’s interesting about content is that the wrapper matters more than in many other kinds of goods/services. This is not ‘just’ better packaging, like putting an Arby’s sandwich on china, but with content, the medium and message are tied so much more closely together.

Of course, there are already tools to extract the content wheat from the advertising chaff, as it were. Readability, Instapaper, and of course ad-blockers like Adblock all do the job of making your content easier to read. Some reformat the content for you, while others pull out the advertising from the websites you are browsing, leaving you just that sweet, sweet content. So ultimately, I’m still not sure that users would be willing to pay for something that they can already get for free. But I certainly like the attempt to innovate here.

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.

And Salmon has been prescient on the decline of public stock markets, if not in the world, at least in the US (see, for example, here, here, here, here, here, Oh for goodness sake, just go subscribe to his blog already, will you?). The listing of public companies on US exchanges has been in a gliding secular decline, since the dot-com bubble of 2001. Exciting, and giant, private companies like Facebook and Twitter, are traded privately, with shares transacting among a small enough number of investors that they don’t trigger an automatic requirement to ‘go public’. Though FB presumably will at some point go public. Maybe. Maybe not.

This has had me thinking quite a bit about, of all things, Marx/Weber/Durkheim. The triumvirate of sociological patriarchs set the terms of the discipline, and they did so in response to the concerns of modernity. The contemporary edifice of Sociology is built on attempts to understand the shift from pre-modern to modern societies, and all that entails: growth of industrial capitalism, movement from small, rural towns to urban centers, decline of traditional society, increase in secularism, movement away from farms and towards factories. The theoretical tools we still use today are not completely derived from these empirical concerns; but I would nevertheless argue that there is a strong legacy effect in our theoretical tools that come from their usefulness in describing the rise of modern social life.

The work in organizations/occupations/work, likewise, was (and is, still) largely based on factory floor work. The lingering influence of Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital, and Michael Burawoy’s Manufacturing Consent are another demonstration. The point is obviously not that theory has not moved forward since Burawoy’s conception of ‘making out’ – but new work uses existing classics as touchstones and foundations, and Rachel Sherman’s examination of interactive service work in hotels (in Class Acts an excellent workplace ethnography) mobilizes ‘making out’ for service work. The theory survives, in modified form, still foundationally tied to factory work, in turn foundationally tied to the shift from pre-modern to modern, etc. Yes, yes, there are post-modern theorists, and I read them carefully. A good measure of post-modernity is a self-conscious attempt to rethink the empirical bases for the theoretical categories we use (see, e.g., Castells’ work on post-modernity as a historical moment defined by globalization, new information technology, real-time management of the economy, and the like). Yet, the point remains: there are no theoretical greenfields.

And so I am left wondering how much of our conception of finance, and of the economy, and of work, is based on the empirical fact of the public corporation. And as that empirical reality erodes, how long our theoretical models of the so-called ‘new’ economic sociology will be so quickly out of date. The decline of the public corporation is certainly not the last shift we will see in the empirical landscape (oh, and futures markets disappear too, you know).

1) The last lines of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory:
Willy Wonka: But Charlie, don’t forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he he always wanted.
Charlie Bucket: What happened?
Willy Wonka: He lived happily ever after.

and

2) This visualization of the appropriate work/life decision-making process.

Go show her some love.

And this presents a problem. Show your OB your baby, and she’ll back away, nice and slowly, to prevent that crazy little thing from going off. Show your breasts to your pediatrician, and he’ll do the same.

Organizational jurisdiction is slightly different from the institutional jurisdiction that Carol Heimer talks about in her article on competing institutions (do yourself a favor and read that article some time. The chart on p. 35 is great).

I realized this most recently when I went to purchase an iPhone for my partner. I had bought one for myself a month back, and I wanted to add her phone (and her 847 area code) to my account. A family plan. Accomplishing this required: 1) a trip to the Apple retail store; 2) a call from Apple store to AT&T customer service; 3) a trip to the AT&T retail store; 4) a second trip to the AT&T retail store; 5) a second call to AT&T customer service; 6) a third trip to the AT&T retail store; 7) a second trip to the Apple retail store. Seriously, 7 different interactions, over the course of 3+ hours and 2 days.

Why? Because first of all, carrier and tech provider each do not know what the other does, and they compete for business. And second of all, because AT&T wireless has a system whereby individual accounts are linked to a geographic location. Trying to ‘combine’ two different geographic locations results in an error (e.g., linking two NYC and a Chicago area codes into one family plan).

As a result, the moron at the Apple store tells me that my wife has to change her cell number that she’s had for 10 years, because there is just nothing they can do. “And it happens to people every day.” He continues by telling me that the idiots at AT&T would do well to let Apple take over the whole business. Meanwhile, over at the AT&T store, the moron salesperson tells me that the idiots at Apple would be able to solve these kinds of problems if they would either learn the AT&T system or else just send customers directly to AT&T to begin with.

Interestingly, though, in this battle of morons, there are no winners, but AT&T actually is the bigger loser (Apple is close, because the smugness their employees exude when speaking about non-Apple stuff makes them a hair more insufferable than the always-defensive, never-experts at A&T).

Why is AT&T worse? Because their organizational jurisdiction is fractal – not only does the iPhone fall into the cracks, but their assignment of area codes across accounts also falls into the cracks. See, they have 2 breast problems.

I learned this when, finally, I realized that I needed to change my account type from a personal, geographic one, to a national business plan. Because national businesses can add whatever area codes they want to a single account. So really, I’m getting stuck over an internal, outdated dip switch internal to AT&T, that the people at Apple don’t know about. And that the people at AT&T also can’t figure out.

For those who like resolution, it went like this. Finally called the AT&T customer service number, explained my problem, and learned that I needed to speak to the NBI department (national business something). But there is no direct number to NBI. So you need to call Business Customer Care, and ask to be internally transferred to the NBI department. Once there, they can flip the dip switch on your account from MNY (geographic NYC) to NBI. And then, the people at the AT&T store can add two different area codes to the same family plan.

As a coda to this, when I asked the nice man in NBI why they didn’t just do away with geographic area code designations, in an era of mobile technology, he noted that this is indeed the direction AT&T wants to go. I then suggested as a starting point, that they make it possible for inbound calls to reach his department. He sheepishly replied that this might be a valid point.

The Apple store morons are still morons, because when I finally went back there to transfer my wife’s G1 Android phone contacts to her Apple iPhone, the supposed expert looked at the phone like he’d never seen any kind of Apple competitor phone in his life, and had no idea at all how to move the existing photos/files to the new phone. And no suggestions. It was something like, ‘huh, so that’s an Android phone. I don’t know how they work at all. All I have is this machine that transfers contacts, and I don’t really even know what cable to use. That G1 sure is poorly designed.’ Um, right.