We thank Dr. Peter Bearman for participating in SJMR’s AMA series. Peter Bearman is one of the nation's most prominent sociologists. His work has significantly increased our understanding of several key social phenomena including health, social networks, and sexuality. Below are Peter’s responses. You can learn more about his research by visiting his website.
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Questions.
1. You started in historical/comparative before moving on to sociology of health and illness/medical sociology, and you've worked in several other subfields along the way. What direction would you like to see historical/comparative sociology move in? What direction would you like to see medical sociology move in? You're well known for your wide reading habits. What do you think the most exciting subfields in sociology are right now? What sort of developments do you hope to see in specific subfields, or the field as a whole?
I don’t think about where fields should go. I think there is a place for people who do have the skill to write front-end papers that are designed to direct the work of others, but that is not a skill (or interest) I have. The work in historical sociology that I find convincing is work that embeds individuals into the right action frames (so this involves thinking about networks and interactions) and then makes sense of their observed action adequately at the level of meaning. I think we typically fail to do this because we fail to situate actors in the right action frames, that is, fail to see what they could see. I don't think of myself as someone who works in medical sociology, but I am interested in a series of puzzles I would situate in population health. Here too, I find work convincing when the macro-level outcomes we are interested in are accounted for my plausible micro-level mechanisms. I’m right now excited by and working on the seam betwee
...See full postn cognitive neuropsychology and sociology, and am learning how to work with the incredible new textual data structures. My two most recent papers are in these veins.
2. What do you think of the evolution of the Add Health study after wave II? Are you glad to see it embrace genetic and biomarker data? If you were still in charge, what would you focus on in wave V and beyond? Any regrets?
I wrote the Wave 3 proposal with Udry and thought then that we were pushing in important new areas for thinking about genetics. I have always thought that the observation of a genetic effect on X told us something really important about social structure. That it seems to tell people something about genes is, to me, less interesting. I haven’t followed where Add Health has gone in a lot of detail, but the fact that Kathie Harris has been able to carry it through five waves is just amazing. It’s an incredible data structure. I’m not sure about the regrets question. I don’t regret leaving Add Health. It was great to be able to design such a study when I was professionally young, and I learned a lot about how to organize big projects and work with others from working with Udry
3. Roger Gould's "Collision of Wills", which you helped posthumously prepare for publication, is one of the few examples of an ambitious book that presents a general, universal theory. It's an incredible book, and it's one of my favorites that I plan on assigning to intro classes because it musters evidence (from the micro to the macro) from a huge variety of sources to argue a single point, and does so very convincingly. It also is probably the best text I've read (along with Becker's) that explains really how to convincingly build and test social theory. Unfortunately, I feel like I've rarely run across it being cited as an finding; when I've seen it cited, I feel like I've mostly seen it cited as "oh, here's a weird thing you can do methodologically." No one, to my knowledge, has sought to test it. No one, to my knowledge, has sought to build on it. It hasn't been picked up in the same way that, say, Bourdieu has been, and it doesn't look like it will be. It doesn't even look like it will have an enthusiastic niche following, like Burawoy's extended case method or something like that. Do you think sociologists should aim to produce more works of this sort of general theory? Are there other recent examples that you'd put in the same category? (other than obvious ones, like Fligstein and McAdam's "A Theory of Fields" and Padgett and Powell's "The Emergence of Organizations and Markets"--neither of which were as convincing as Gould's "Collision of Wills").
I agree it is a great book. Roger was a deep and consistent thinker. I think some of his ideas are picked up. Many of my students frame their work in terms of Gould’s insights in Collision of Wills. And sure, it would be nice if there were many other books like it.
4. You've been central to the promotion of analytical sociology. What do you see as analytical sociology's stance on the normative orientation of the analyst? For instance, would it be possible or desirable to have a feminist or critical analytical sociology?
Analytical sociology for me is a short-hand for describing sociology that I find convincing; that is, that gets actors in the right action frames; that imputes motives that are adequate at the level of meaning, that is crisp enough to allow for formalization of the operative mechanisms, that affords simulation, and so on. Hedstrom and I wanted the Handbook to indicate this openness, which is why we solicited articles on ethnography, comparative historical sociology, etc.
5. Your first book, Relations into Rhetoric, examined a topic that few sociologists knew well (the English Civil War) and deployed methods that few historians could evaluate (network analysis). One of the few critics who could operate in both these areas suggested that the book's argument was contradicted by the bulk of (then) recent historical scholarship, which you did not engage, and that it was therefore unconvincing. Sociologists routinely examine topics outside the discipline's bounds of competence; what sorts of safeguards might we construct to ensure that such "exotic" research maintains high standards of scholarship?
It’s not a great book, I agree, but there are some good ideas embedded in it. On this specific critique, I think you are referencing the Zaret review. The critique is that other ways of situating actors induces different ideas about their motives for action. I totally agree. I’m not sure why that makes it unconvincing, but people differ in what makes them find an argument convincing, and that is to be expected. I’m not sure how to respond to the second part of the question, about high standards as it presumes that the mechanisms we have in place -- peer review prior and after publication – are insufficient. In general they work. Relations into Rhetorics was written for sociologists and has some interesting ideas for sociologists, or at least I thought so when I wrote it. One thing about getting older is that you can learn that your work could have been done better. Relations into Rhetorics builds network objects by pooling relations over long periods of time. It then situates actors in those objects and imputes motive for action from their position in the network. The objects I created are replete with relations that occur in the future of the action was interested in. I probably should have seen this but it took my working on Blocking the Future and collaborating with Hrag Balian that I saw how important it was; but that is a different critique.
6. You've successfully placed a lot of your students in top departments. What kind of mentoring do you provide to them? What is your strategy for placing them when they go on the market?
I have been fortunate to have really great students with exceptional work ethics. I work very closely with my students. I like them to have two hats -- their dissertation and another side to them that we try to express as a paper. We try hard to get a great paper published. No one knows naturally how to write an AJS paper. It took me years to learn on my own (see my CV, 1986-1991), and so I try to share that knowledge with my students. We also work obsessively on job talks. The main thing is to insist on good problems that pass what I call the “two-tailed” test, that is, are interesting whatever the answer is, and which the student totally owns, in terms of building the data structures, etc.
7. What will you tell incoming (a) grad students; and (b) assistant professors, on how to succeed in sociology?
Consciously learn to look at everything upside down; for example – if you see a traffic jam, think about the fact that this means people are free somewhere else; if you sleep at night, think about the people who stay awake so you can do that; if you do not see relationships between people think about how much energy is going into prohibiting them, etc. Then: have children, enjoy life, spend time reading fiction, when not reading fiction, read mainly outside of sociology, don’t give a s**t about what other people think you should be doing, avoid pointless activities like wondering about the discipline, caring about who is succeeding or not, attending ASA meetings because that is what you “should do” as versus attending because you really like to see your friends; develop a reputation for discretion, garden, avoid TV and don’t work on safe projects because they are safe were some starters for me. Since we always start theorizing from our own experience, this is pretty much what I tell my students and my AP friends. Mainly, I think people who succeed are those who have good – two-tailed – projects and whom work on articulating a puzzle that they could imagine that people outside of the discipline could find actually interesting. I try not to give too much advice but do try to model what I think works, which involves at the end of the day, taking chances with work with the confidence that if it doesn’t work you have more to think about that is more important than sociology.
8. If you were back in graduate school, what research methodologies or skills would you focus on and what specific topics would you try to tackle? In other words, what are the most promising methodologies and sub-fields for sociologists today?
Right now, dynamic networks, simulation and natural language processing and text analysis excite me and since I try to act like I am still in graduate school (e.g.; I want to keep trying to learn new things so I can do something different) these are my choices. I try not to think in terms of sub-fields. When you think in terms of sub-fields you end up at greater risk of getting buried in the morass of existing sociology. It is better to think of a good problem, which probably crosses subfields and makes your contribution resonate with a wider group of people.
9. What's your best paper? What's your worst?
I’m not sure there is an answer here. I write with my students for the most part and each paper captures what was special about that collaboration and that relationship, so they seem richer to me than they would otherwise. That said, some of my favorite papers are – Generalized Exchange (because I spent every July for 10 years working on it, which is why it has so many beginnings); Desertion as Localism (because I managed to save a bad research design by finding a way to use the paths that census takers must have walked to induce network ties of some sort); Blocking the Future (because it is my wife’s favorite paper and because it is a sort of homage to Danto, whose work was always influential for me); Social Demographic Change and the Autism Epidemic (because we anticipated the discovery of de novo mutations as relevant for autism for three years); Social Influence and the Autism Epidemic (because of the edge test and a bunch of other cool tests); Chains of Affection (because of the elegant simulation that nailed the “yuck” factor”); and the papers I have just finished with my students on stoppage, averted lynching, the state of the union, and so on. I actually like almost all of my papers and I love all of my papers the day I submit them for publication, which seems psychologically important. I’ve written papers that I now think are less than optimal; and as I get older, more of the papers that I have written fall into that class, in part because people figure out how to do things I wanted to do but was unable to because I couldn’t figure out how, and so the older work is not as good.
10. How would you run ASR differently if you were the editor?
I did put in a bid with Jeff Manza when the Vanderbilt group won for the first time. As I understand it, our team was the lowest ranked of all the teams. The idea we had was to take away one 10,000 word paper each issue and replace it with five 2,000 word papers that were submitted on a different pathway, and for which there would be rapid turn-over (I think we committed to 3 weeks) – a commitment only possible with extremely aggressive desk decision making. Nobody reads sociology papers because they are burdened by literature reviews that are truly pointless and boring. I would love to see all that stuff get buried in the supplementary information associated with a paper. Right now, weirdly, we bury methods and cool results in the SI, and feature the literature reviews. It is impossible for the papers we write to be timely – that is directly relevant for audiences outside of sociology – if we consider that between the pointless revise and resubmits and the queue there is probably a 2-year lag (someone has statistics on this, I am sure). And then we wonder: why doesn’t anyone read sociology! This is why, in case it isn’t obvious, I am not likely to be the editor of the ASR and why I think Sociological Science and the new journal of the ASA (Socius – it is a bit of an unfortunate name, I guess reflecting some of the ambivalence that the field has about it) have a chance to really change the discipline.
11. Would you rather fight 1 horse-sized Andy Abbott or 40 duck-sized Michele Lamonts?
I tried to turn the question around and ask about 40 duck-sized AAs and one horse-sized ML but it wasn’t helpful. The problem is that I know Andy better than I know ML, and so I know that Andy’s bark is bigger than his bite. That is true about most people and so it is probably true about ML, but I don’t know that for sure. So, I guess AA, though if I had a choice there, it would be for the 40 small versions because I am scared of horses and not scared of ducks.
12. At Columbia, you lead a seminar on "qualitative methods" for at least two semesters. What role do you think qualitative research should play in sociology? Should it have a separate function (theory generation, data gathering, theory testing, theory application, symbolic interaction studies, Weberian anti-positivist theory, etc) from the more qualitative methods that you've used in much of your work? What do you think the ideal relationship between qualitative methods and quantitative methods would be in the social sciences?
I’m working on a book about qualitative design with Alix Rule, which came out of that class we facilitated for a few semesters. We are trying to identify what makes qualitative work feel right to us, that is, feel as if it opens up a new way of thinking, provides new objects to think about, and which advances a way of thinking about what people do that seems more flexible than competing frameworks for accounting for action such as the idea of habitus. That said, I couldn’t say whether it is reassuring to me or disturbing that I cannot answer any of these questions. They are good questions: it’s just that we are not thinking about what we are trying to do in these terms. Hopefully I’ll finish the next draft over the next few months – it’s only been two years past what I thought.
13. In your opinion is sociology in an institutional crisis (e.g. flat/declining enrollment sl not enough TT jobs)? What can and/or should be done, if so?
I’m not sure what “sl” means -- maybe it is a typo. That aside, I suppose all of academia is in that crisis. I don’t think we are in as bad a shape intellectually as our sister disciplines in the social sciences, economics and political science, which seem committed to a bizarre form of intellectual suicide by autarky. But we don’t help ourselves by teaching intro sociology as if it were a parlor game – a friendly debate between three or four incommensurate ways of seeing the world. Nor do we help ourselves by writing in a language that is impenetrable except to those already ordained, as if that helps us be more serious. Practically speaking, we probably need to radically cut back on the number of PHDs we grant each year, but no single school is going to find this in their interest, so we continue to produce too many, and thus face a tragedy of the commons.
14. Who is the most underrated sociologist in your opinion?
I think there are so many really great sociologists these days. I have no idea how others “rate” them. In terms of specific contributions that may or may not be noticed by others: Chris Winship is an amazing mentor; Ron Breiger is a deep, deep thinker and reader whose comments always stretch me; Jim Moody is incredibly generous with his time. Seymour Spilerman has written on as many topics as Art Stinchcombe, so both have unusual range. I discovered Gabriel Tarde via Latour last year which was mind blowing. And I don't think we have come close to mining the observations and insights of Harrison White, especially in his earlier work that is so deeply penetrative. The people I routinely ask right now at Columbia for comments on my work are (in alphabetical order): Mark Hoffman, Shamus Khan, Kinga Makovi, Debra Minkoff, Chris Muller, Adam Reich, and Alix Rule. Not all of them are household names, so maybe that indicates they (like others who do the same thing for each of you, and so easily number in the hundreds when pooled) are also “underrated”.
15. Looking back, what is the one thing you felt you did right in your career and one thing you did wrong?
When I first got to Harvard, Harrison White told me I should take 6 classes a semester, finish my course-work in one year and my dissertation in three. I went upstairs and told the senior graduate students what he told me and they said he was nuts, that I should take 3 courses a semester for two years, just like them. I followed their advice, which was stupid. Once I left Harvard, I pretty much always did what I wanted to do, which turned out all right. But I was lucky – throughout I got a lot of good advice from really great, positive people. In my first year, White and I got in an argument and we did not speak for a decade. That was really good for me, because it led to greater intellectual independence. I never marshaled the energy/motivation to write book length versions of my bigger projects, which would have been good to do career wise, but always ran into the reality that by the time I was ready to do that I was working on something else. So I guess that was “wrong”, but only in a purely careerist sense.
16. Do you feel like any of your papers are highly cited, but for the wrong reason? That is, did you intend for one of your papers to argue X but everybody takes it as arguing Y?
I don’t think everyone gets any of my papers wrong. The virginity pledge paper that Bruckner and I wrote together was initially misunderstood by the right wing which thought that it showed that abstinence education worked, which it did (up to a limit) in terms of delayed sex, but conveniently ignored the facts that this did not alter risk for pregnancy, STD acquisition, was associated with riskier sex, and led to clusters of undiagnosed STD cases that made communities less safe for non-pledgers. But we clarified things pretty quickly. Blocking the Future on the other hand doesn’t seem to be read by anyone, even though it is actually a paper that has a very deep idea in it.
17. Why are there so few African American and Latina faculty at top sociology departments? What are some of the main factors involved and main sociological explanations in your experience? Does it matter? If it does, is there anything that top departments can or should do?
This is not something I have studied. Are there proportionally fewer than in 2nd tier departments, or are there fewer than expected by population distribution at all levels (which seems more likely to me, but I don’t know). In any case, it seems a pipeline problem. Departments need to engage seriously with diversity and such engagement can make a difference, as it did for Columbia when our proportion female was too low. And sure it matters.
18. Your research agenda has moved between widely disparate topics. When you are considering a new project, do you select the topic and then do the reading to get up to speed, or are you already reading on the topic when you decide to jump in? Ie, what comes first, engagement with the literature or deciding to contribute to it?
I select the topic, figure out what would be an interesting strategy for getting leverage on it, find the data that makes that possible, see if I am right, and then run around looking to see what literature might be in some way germane to what I am doing.
19. Is it true that you don't normally attend ASA meetings? What's your opinion of ASA?
My attendance is getting worse with age. I always went when I was younger. After I moved to Columbia I probably went to every other meeting for a while; now I am down to every third meeting, typically when it is in NYC or SF. Even when I do attend people do not think I am there since I don’t register. When I want to see the book exhibit I borrow someone’s nametag. People I don’t know don’t know what I look like which is perfect for me. When I do go I spend time in sessions, typically those of my students. I am relatively shy and don’t enjoy the kind of conversation I typically find myself in at the ASA. In general, I find the sessions uninspiring and the papers relatively weak. I also generally have better things to do in the middle of August –like spend time in the country gardening, or visiting my wife’s parents – than go to the ASA, especially if it is in a city I have no interest in visiting, like Atlanta. I enjoy smaller conferences more. I don't have a strong opinion about the ASA. I haven’t been a member for a long time. When I did keep up with what the ASA was doing I thought it was generally an embarrassment; not a serious embarrassment – rather, of the sort one feels after discovering something green stuck in your teeth after a dinner out with not so close friends – but still nothing to feel grand about.
20. What are your thoughts’ on contemporary sociology’s focus on inequality topics? Do we focus too much on inequality to the detriment of other questions? Should we study it more?
This is a subset of Q1, e.g. “do I think we should be doing X or Y in the discipline”. I really don't think about things like this. If you are asking me whether I think it has been healthy for the discipline that people think we have to teach stratification, or that every great department is great in stratification, or some other such nonsense, the answer is no.