Social Science Star: Randall Collins
posted by Frank Pasquale
Via Tyler Cowen, I’ve found out that sociologist Randall Collins has a new book coming out: Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory. Here’s a provocative excerpt:
As popular music consumption became the central identifying point of youth cultures, it also came to support greater pluralism in student status hierarchies. . . . Moshers became the leading edge of punk culture, the attention-getters within their chief cultural rituals and gathering places. Not surprisingly, there is strong antagonism between moshers and jocks, their chief counterparts in the use of controlled violence in the conventional youth culture.
I heard Collins lead a class once while I was in college, so I’m unsurprised by Cowen’s raves about his work. He struck me as one of the most insightful, humble, and funny lecturers I encountered. His “Skeleton Key” to Max Weber masterfully condenses Economy and Society. I’ve been picking my way through his The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change for years. Inspired by that work, I have a few thoughts on how the radical reorganization of knowledge via the web and the blogosphere might affect our lives as academics.
In Sociology of Philosophies, Collins analyzes how different schools of thought arise and how ideas essentially become “sacred objects” of intellectuals. He believes that the social theory of “interaction rituals” explains how intellectuals produce and reproduce meaning in communities of belief. Collins believes that his theory “connects symbols to social membership, and hence both to emotions of solidarity and to the structure of social groups. . . . A specific form of this emotional energy is what we call creativity” (20). He particularly emphasizes the chains of authority that develop between mentors and scholars:
The personal contacts between eminent teachers and later-to-be-eminent students make up the same kinds of chains across the generations. And this is so even though communications technology has become increasingly available, and the numbers of intellectuals have increased enormously from on the order of hundreds in Confucius’s China to the million of scientists and scholars publishing today.
Thus the importance of the conference, the confab, the face-to-face interaction–”without face-to-face rituals, writings and ideas would never be charged up with such emotional energy” (26-7). He also mentions that members of the audience in academic situations play a critical role, poised to disrupt authority with questions or to tacitly assent via silence.
My question is whether Collins’ account of interaction rituals among scholars will have to be significantly revised in the face of the blogosphere. For example, Franklin Snyder argues:
[L]aw school hierarchies may be changing. Not as the result of a critical assault, but because vast changes in communications technologies have seriously eroded the control of information that is necessary for the survival of any non-functional hierarchy. . . . [New,] outsider-dominated changes [are] being wrought by the Internet.
For example, I don’t think the American Law & Economics Association would rush to invite Anita Bernstein or Reza Dibadj to give a keynote critiquing fundamental aspects of L&E methodology. But new forums in the blogosphere can apply and publicize work like theirs. The economics profession itself has seen the rise of both left and right critiques of the type of orthodox modeling that has captivated top journal editors for so long.
And to return to Collins’s study: Brian Leiter suggests that
To the extent . . . that philosophers, or philosophy students, start their research with Google, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is going to play a quite big role in shaping the reception of ideas and also, one suspects, in determining what secondary literature becomes part of the “canon” on a particular topic. Fortunately, SEP is generally of high quality.
So, to borrow from Collins’s Durkheimian/Goffmanian approach to interaction ritual: the web is setting us up for a new syncretism, and a new notoriety for those willing to question the magic, mystery, and authority of traditional gatekeepers. That’s one reason why I keep a “Philosophy of Social Science” archive here, and hope to celebrate “Social Science Stars” who’ve appealed to thinkers across the “silos” of traditional disciplinary boundaries.
I also hope that, as we become more aware of our carbon footprints, we become less enamored of the talismanic importance of conference travel. I wrote my last co-authored piece with someone I’d never met before, and never spoke a word to during the completion of the first draft. If Richard Powers can speak a book, we can certainly do the same for presentations.
November 8, 2007 at 9:05 pm
Posted in: Philosophy of Social Science
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