Sociology and Your 'Research': A How-to Guide for Professionals

I recently met a person from a faculty that shall remain nameless, although I will offer the 'clue' that it existed within the health research realm, and has only within the past few decades started to offer graduate level degrees based on research with 'human subjects' (their term, not mine). While working in the registrar's office as an undergrad, I discovered this faculty's penchant for graduating self-congratulatory, power-jockeying 'professionals' who tried to get in a fight with anyone who dared question their 'knowledge.' While conversing with this woman, I revealed that I was a graduate student in the department of sociology. She had the nerve to laugh at me, proclaiming "What could you possibly do with that?!" If this wasn't bad enough, she then went on to tell me about her 'thesis,' which was theoretically situated in the work of Goffman, completely unaware of the fact that he was a sociologist. Oh. My. God.

Upon reflection, I realized that a lot of people have this attitude towards our subject matter: it's a joke, it's easy, 201 was an guaranteed A so the rest of it must be, and it has no praxis. There's no clearly delineated career path associated with it, so it really can't be that important. I find that this attitude is especially prevalent amongst the professional groups in our society.

The irony is that when these said professionals take leaves of absence from their respective careers to pursue graduate level work, a large majority of them end up doing (often poorly done) research that's really just a spin off of sociology, but never seem to recognize and/or acknowledge this. As someone who has, in Latour's phrase, 'paid the full price' prior to even being allowed to do research (in the form of an undergraduate degree, an honours essay, a total of 4 methods courses, 3 statistics courses, and a year of graduate course-work), this really chaps my ass. So, because this online space is my personal soapbox, I'm about to be a totally polemic, non-gentleperson scholar, and answer the aforementioned question posed to me for all the 'professional' grad students out there. Here's exactly what you can do with sociology in your own research:

1. Completely rip off the nuance, depth and complexity of sociological theory and bastardize it into a rigid typology that 'completely' explains the phenomenon you're studying. Just remember: under no circumstances do you need to know anything about the disciplinary background of the theorist you're studying. It doesn't matter. The hundreds of years of social philosophy and subsequent social theory that preceded your entrance into grad school are totally irrelevant, and you don't need to know anything about them. Losers in the social sciences and humanities with no jobs can worry about that crap--you're a professional!


2. Read a qualitative undergrad soci methods textbook--while you're in grad school, or, more likely, in a graduate seminar--and learn a grab bag of methods, including ethnography, auto ethnography, phenomenology, narrative analysis and interviewing techniques. Do NOT try to delve into the philosophy of these techniques! Again, that is a concern for the jobless losers who wrote those books. You just need to know how to offer a cursory explanation of them to the children you TA, or the 'brilliant' powers-that-be who referee your professional journal. Any explanations of these techniques should not exceed a paragraph in journal articles, or one page in your dissertation.

3. Learn a couple of sociological terms, like 'informal social control' or 'master status,' and use them frequently in conversations with people who don't have post secondary education. It will make them think you're really smart and cool. Again, you don't have to know what these terms really mean, or who coined them. Just make sure you slip them into everyday conversation so as to convey your expert status.

4. When you meet a real social scientist at a social event, don't even respond to them when they tell you what they do, 'cause they probably don't really do anything except not make money. Remember, they really work for you: all of their theorizing, research, and publications merely exist so that you can put them in your lit review and then apply it to 'important' research. And, why would you bother entertaining a conversation with someone whose pay scales aren't available online on the CHR website? Without this key information, you'll never know whether or not to be nice to them, depending on whether or not they make more or less than you.

5. Take one course--just one--in statistics (descriptive should do) and learn how to write syntax in a software package. Then, tell everyone you know that you're a 'statistician,' which will make you look really cool and smart, especially to people who don't have degrees. Then, you can go and do cool techniques like data mining (fuck those sociologists who say that such practices run counter to the fundamental principles of confirmatory research; if you've never heard of confirmatory research in class, it can't be important).