Now you can't even call an assho1e an assho1e?
Who would you want to be the public face of sociology?
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Of the names mentioned in this thread, here is a quick search of google scholar for citations:
Rogers Brubaker 40,741
Jess Calarco 524
Andrew Cherlin 21,303
Vivek Chibber ~2,000
Nicholas Christakis 49,077
Dalton Conley 9,688
Tressie McMillan Cottom ~200
Matt Desmond ~4,000
Paula England 20,921
David Grusky ~5,000
Arlie Hochschild ~60,000
Eric Klinenberg ~5,000
Doug McAdam ~40,000
James Moody 11,048
Dorothy Roberts ~7,000
Fabio Rojas ~1,602
Steven Ruggles 11,945
Matt Salganik 5,897
Rob Sampson 93,335
Juliet Schor 18,525
Mario Small ~6,000
Chris Uggen 10,161
Duncan Watts 87,092
Kim Weeden 2,847
Bruce Western 18,234
Frederick Wherry ~1,000
Adia Harvey Wingfield ~1,000
Brubaker, Christakis, Hochschild, McAdam, Sampson, and Watts are clearly in their own league. Four of them also have substantial impact outside of academia. Probably Hochschild is the most famous for her popular work. Desmond, Conley, and Western also warrant mention.Lol at Tressie coming in hot with 200.
While I actually find this list interesting for other reasons (and thanks for digging it up), the heart of this thread is actually supposed to sort of be the opposite of this list; it's thinking about who potentially has a bunch of great qualities other than/in addition to a very high citation count and/or notoriety within the field, because we are an insulated group of weirdos and citation count is actually probably inversely related to being a good "face" of the discipline.
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Brubaker, Christakis, Hochschild, McAdam, Sampson, and Watts are clearly in their own league. Four of them also have substantial impact outside of academia. Probably Hochschild is the most famous for her popular work. Desmond, Conley, and Western also warrant mention.
According to your list, Paula England, Juliet Schor, and Andrew Cherlin have more than any of those three who "warrant mention."
(Of course it's relevant that Desmond is relatively early career.)
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Cherlin and England have been around forever, so it's not surprising they beat out the younger candidates on this measure. Not that there's anything wrong with them. Cherlin is a solid scholar and a great guy. England's "equal pay" thing turned out to be nonsense, but no one knew it at the time she started.
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Yeah, let's have the public face of sociology be Duncan Watts, even though he got his PhD in applied math and has appointments in engineering, communications, and business (but not sociology).
Not to take the thread in an entirely different direction, but I've never understood how (and why) Watts refers to himself as a sociologist and had a soc job at Columbia? He doesn't have an undergrad or PhD in sociology (or anything even remotely close to sociology).
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Not to take the thread in an entirely different direction, but I've never understood how (and why) Watts refers to himself as a sociologist and had a soc job at Columbia? He doesn't have an undergrad or PhD in sociology (or anything even remotely close to sociology).
I don't get this mentality AT ALL. His PhD is irrelevant. The research matters. Topics. Methods. The people he cites. The people that cite him. He is clearly in the network analysis tradition and does research relevant to what many sociologists are doing. We should be happy that he sees himself as a sociologist. But no, his PhD!!!
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I don't get this mentality AT ALL. His PhD is irrelevant. The research matters. Topics. Methods. The people he cites. The people that cite him. He is clearly in the network analysis tradition and does research relevant to what many sociologists are doing. We should be happy that he sees himself as a sociologist. But no, his PhD!!!
I'm actually thinking about it more from the opposite perspective...I'm not saying I don't want him to be a sociologist; I don't understand why *he* wants (wanted?) to be considered a sociologist.
Based on both his scholarly work and in interviews he's done (even in the AMA he did on this site), he very clearly knows/cares little about theory and the discipline itself. It's just struck me as odd that a guy with a PhD in Applied Math who works for Microsoft and now will have an appointment at Penn at the School of Engineering and Applied Science, School for Communication, and Wharton (but nothing related to sociology)...he very obviously doesn't care about sociology, so I've never understood why he pursued it. It's not like we're some super cool and prosperous bunch.
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Conversely, compared to Watts, Christakis does have a PhD in sociology and many on this site have suggested he is not doing real sociology, whereas he is among the most prolific people in showing the relevance of the field to non-sociologists (including publishing in non-sociology journals and writing popular books and articles, and training both sociology and non-sociology PhD students). Maybe people don't want to see networks as a part of our field, and hold this against both him and Watts (though Christakis also does health)? But that is nuts, since networks are something we, before any other field, were emphasizing and building a science around, for a 100 years. Plus Watts knows a ton of social theory and addresses classical sociological questions. We should be proud to own him. Name a recent new discovery from crim or demography or strat, compared to new discoveries in SNA.
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I don’t get this business about Christakis. Name or cite some network scholars who have been critical of Christakis, and explain how he is able to continue to publish so many papers in such good journals — from online experiments, to field experiments in Mexico, to biological papers, always with thousands of people randomized to treatments, etc.