Interviewed on September 27, 2023 by Larry Au for the Fall 2023 SKAT Newsletter

Shai M. Dromi is associate senior lecturer on sociology at Harvard University. He is also the author of Above the Fray: The Red Cross and the Making of the Humanitarian NGO Sector and coeditor of the Handbook of the Sociology of Morality, Volume II. Samuel D. Stabler is doctoral lecturer in the department of sociology at Hunter College, CUNY. Moral Minefields: How Sociologists Debate Good Science (2023) is available through Chicago University Press.

Larry: First off, I really enjoyed reading this book. There’s so much I learned from the text and it’s something that I will assign in my future classes in theory and methods. And it really makes what sociology is as a discipline very clear for people who wonder what it is. I want to start by asking how the two of you came together to write this book. What sparked your interest in how sociologists talked about good science?

Shai: Sam and I know each other from grad school and we went to grad school at a time where there was much conversation going on about what sort of values should guide sociologists. Both of us were involved in a project aiming to bring critical realism into sociology—a framework that helps think through the ontology of human needs that undergirds sociological work. We read work by Christian Smith, Doug Porpora, and Margaret Archer, trying to give a moral compass to our discipline. And it always struck Sam and me that there’s an underlying assumption that the “lay sociologist” doesn’t really think through these topics and have reflexive moments where they think about what’s the general good that they want to achieve through my work.

This assumption and the conversations that everyone has been having at ASA about social justice, methodological rigor really struck us as very disconcerted. And that’s got us thinking “why don’t we take a look at what sociologists actually say about the social good that they’re trying to promote, and work up from there?”, rather than try to think from the outside about what sociologists should ought to be thinking and impute into their actual work.

Sam: Here at Hunter,  in the grad student area where there’s a coffee machine and other stuff,  and there’s a little poster on the wall and it’s of this meme: What I think I do—a picture of Marx, What my parents think I do—a picture of somebody protesting, What I actually do—somebody with their head buried in books. The book attempts to unpack this puzzle of the multiplicity of what sociology means and it really warms my heart to hear that you feel like it makes what sociology is clear because I’ve often felt that you know that’s a difficult task.

Larry: One of the many things that I really enjoyed about reading this book is how the snippets of conference, colloquium, and seminar comments that you’ve captured really ring true to the day-to-day experiences of a lot of professional sociologists. I can really imagine colleagues and other researchers asking the types of questions (on p. 23)—about the interdisciplinary appeal of my work, my productivity, or my empirical data, etc. as ways of evaluating whether I’m doing good sociology. This shows what kind of discipline sociology is—one that thrives on the diversity of multiple ways of doing good science. I’m wondering about the take-home message for sociologists. How should we as a discipline move forward after recognizing that there are multiple repertoires of talking about good sociology?

Sam: The big one-word takeaway is pluralism. An embrace of a point of view about sociology that says there are multiple different ways to succeed at being what a sociologist is. That doesn’t mean anything goes. We are not advocates of relativism or anything near it. But much more a sense that part of what makes sociology rich is that we find ways to hold one another accountable to these visions of what we think the discipline should be.

Sometimes that means you’re a methodological crank, and you argue with people about standard errors, or about how experiments were conducted, and you use what we call efficiency repertoire— a way of judging something around concerns about how the data is produced. But at the same time, that doesn’t mean you get to study anything. If your work, for instance, undermines your research subject’s credibility, then people from what we call the anchored repertoire will come and say, “Hey, you can’t portray people as idiots”. You have to portray them in a way that they recognize themselves and see themselves as worthy. Even then, when you satisfy that claim, and somebody else may come along say, “Well, your work is still not interdisciplinary enough”. It doesn’t cross enough bridges outside of sociology to make a wider impact. Especially in grad school, there is this feeling that you have to be one of these things helped motivate the project.

What I certainly learned with Shai in writing this book is that what makes sociology thrive is this tension that comes from accepting this pluralism. You want to do work that is both methodologically rigorous and has an impact on your community and represents the people you’re studying in a way that you feel they understand. You want to do all of this at once. That kind of pull and that effort actually makes us all better at what we do collectively and makes sociological research a truly collective endeavor.

Shai: To underscore something that Sam said, pluralism doesn’t mean that all of us should necessarily like each other or like each other’s work. But in the context of our book, it entails understanding that if we want sociology to thrive, we have to support an environment where multiple types of doing theory and doing sociology can thrive, with the understanding that our conflicts sometimes are the best engine for progress. And sometimes the best ideas come out of people strongly disagreeing with one another over what sociology is.

Larry: In the book, you talk about how controversy can become an opportunity. That it can be a moment that can be clarifying for sociologists to really understand the mission that a lot of us really look for in our work. Your book also, in your words, writes a “shadow history of the discipline” (p. 90) by documenting how sociologists handle controversy and perform these moral choreographies to navigate around potential roadblocks to their work—in sometimes not so visible or obvious ways. How this is done is sometimes also invisible and not very obvious to outsiders or to graduate students just entering into sociology. The way that you write about these controversies is also so rich and layered—and you show the sequences and contingencies that make different types of sociological claims possible in each historical moment. You review five very different cases where sociologists have had—at times—acrimonious debates over the value and morality of research in a specific topic.

What types of sociological questions invite controversy? Are all parts of sociology equally susceptible to being dragged into controversy? How do research topics become politicized?

Shai: When Sam and I were thinking about the cases to include, initially we went to the sociology of religion, which is the area that we both grew up in. But then we actually wanted to bring in the “harder” scientific sides of sociology, namely demography, to show that this isn’t just the more humanistic usual suspect side of sociology, namely, studies of religion, beliefs, culture, and so on, that could be open to these sorts of debates. But actually, the debates that are very much about methods and about how to measure specific parts of human reproduction, and so on, are equally susceptible. These broad ethical debates, in particular, in our analysis of demography, we’re showing that something that for many sociologists would seem completely uncontroversial could actually fuel long-lasting controversy that’s around for 70 years or so.

Sam: An early rallying cry for the project was, “Is a standard error ever just a standard error?” When we’re arguing about what seems like minutiae, for instance, are the standard errors inflated, can you use this model under these conditions, etc. Some sociologist sits around and polices this at the reviewer level. And it’s not for nothing. It’s really easy for us to forget. Especially the more quantitative you go, it would seem at least the easier it becomes to forget that all of this is about correctly analyzing some social problem.

The other thing we thought a lot about when we thought about case selection was, how the public sees sociology. Sociology has its usual suspects. For instance, in the book, we talk about recent work in the sociology of race, racial inequality, and its purported genetic bases. Part of the reason we do this is not an accident, it’s because there are lots of scholars out there who claim us sociologists, we’re just blind to the reality of the influence of genetics on social life. Conservatives and the media, they’ll tell you that sociologists are so biased, that we can’t even see the truth. But, that’s not true at all. It’s just that not a lot of people pay attention to what sociologists have to say about race and genetics, because most people assume that sociologists don’t have much to say, when in fact, there’s tons of very interesting research that challenges, expands, and rethinks those questions.

For instance, Dorothy Roberts work in Fatal Invention, where she analyzes and comes to understand the complex interplay between genetic and social forces. There’s what she describes as the social, biological, and back-to-social loop, where genetics come to affect social life. And so, her argument is not so much that, you know, sociologists shouldn’t study this, or this is a bad thing for sociologists to study, as much as sociologists need to be an important voice to add more depth to the social in this conversation. Part of the question is where are sociologists out there fighting to be heard, and fighting to make our perspectives important and significant? Because often when we talk about the usual suspects in sociology, we forget those people.

Larry: Related to this issue of case selection, I wanted to ask about the methodological approach that you took in studying these controversies. In SKAT and STS, the study of controversy is often used and researchers often take the position of symmetry in analyzing different sides. But it seems like in most of the cases that you write about, there was a need to “reject” certain types of claims—such as when research “contradict the common humanity of its research subjects” (p. 68), and that a position such as “building solidarity” might be a wiser approach to diffuse controversy.

What was it like writing about sociological controversies? How did you navigate the potentially controversial task of writing about these controversies?

Sam: Our general feeling was that we observe actors saying things about why they do moral things; we observe actors justifying their research as connected to some claim about the good or the bad. And it is not necessarily our job to police those claims as much as it is to articulate and identify how those claims are made and what certain types of claim-makings do. And so early on in the book we have this typology. When you’re debating with somebody you can either reject their position. You can ignore their position. You can work to build solidarity with them, even when you don’t see eye to eye. Or you can debate. You can have an open debate about, what’s best for civil society, or what’s best for science.

One of the cases we use is the Moynihan Report, which is remembered as this telltale story in sociology of “blaming the victim”. That’s where the phrase was actually used initially as a critique of Moynihan and a critique of Oscar Lewis’s work before. There was this push to reject that and rightly so. We shouldn’t blame people for their plight. And we shouldn’t unnecessarily cast our research subjects as the cause of their own suffering. At the same time, work on culture and poverty has persisted ever since: on how culture is linked to a lack of economic resources.

Now some people, notably Lawrence Mead, ignore this history. Mead wrote an article in Society that eventually got retracted because he basically pretended as though Moynihan never happened. If you read that article, Mead writes basically the same things as Moynihan—the trouble in black families starts with the black mother—terrible, terrible stuff. And acts as though we haven’t already gone through this and said as a discipline, “No you can’t talk about people like that” and actually claim explanatory credibility by dehumanizing them. That article was retracted. There was a huge Letter to the Editor campaign. Part of the reason was that it’s not only did he go to the same place, but he pretended as though we hadn’t been there before.

Now, there are lots of people who continue to work on the link between culture and poverty. Mario Small is a name that comes to mind. One of the things Small did early on was an edited issue. We see this often. We see this also in the case on genetics, you know, where Peter Berman’s edited issue is sort of like saying, “We all know that this is a controversial terrain, but we are all committed to making it better”. It becomes a “safe space” for thinking about the topic while acknowledging the serious problems in the past. Then there are more arguments where people openly disagree. William Julius Wilson’s work, for instance, has been a popular way of thinking about culture and poverty. But sociologists like Crystal Fleming have called this “Post-Really-Bad-Racism”. You can advance the ideas and people still disagree. Is the cleaned-up version of this idea with more focus on the agency of the actors and their significance? Is that really justifiable? Well, based on Crystal Fleming’s work, the answer is no. But other people disagree, and we focus on these exchanges. Our job here is like a play-by-play sportscaster.

Shai: I will just say also that our aim is not to guess what scholars’ underlying motivations are. We’re solely focusing on the meta-commentary that they offer to the scholarship that they make. Their criticisms of their peers’ scholarship. So really our focus is on what’s the what has been said and is out there. We’re also not trying to undermine anyone’s position by saying, “Oh, they’re only saying that because they’re of this generation” or “in this department” and so on. But to really take the statements seriously, for better or worse. If they are, statements that are widely rejected, we want to just amplify that. If there are statements that are in conversations with each other, we also want to highlight the logics that they use in order to make their claims.

Larry: Somewhat relatedly, in the text, if I’ve read it correctly, has a commentary about power and also perhaps about the role of tenure in allowing for certain types of responses towards controversy. For instance, the position of “ignoring” is risky and something that perhaps only tenured folks can do at their own peril. Whereas the position of “building solidarity” might also require some degree of seniority and power in order to take this risk of broaching a difficult topic.

Could you expand on and talk a little bit about how you see the role of power, seniority, and maybe tenure in allowing for certain types of academic research? But also potentially the flip side of silencing certain types of claims?

Shai: In our approach to studying academia, we start with the explicit statements and then work our way back into the institutional dynamics, through the actors’ own words. In a sense, sure, it’s easier for someone who’s tenured, senior, and at a prominent department to make those connections to bring together various scholars with very different positions in order to build community. At the same time, it’s not solely their domain to make such statements an critiques. There are initiatives that happen outside of prominent departments. Perhaps they get less traction, but the claims are being made. So rather than try to start from the institutional position and go from there to explain the actions, we start by looking at the environment and the sorts of claims that are allowable to begin with within that environment, and work our way back into the institutional dynamics.

Sam: Shai, you hit it really nail on the head. The one thing I really learned from historical sociologists—both Shai and I are historical sociologists—we cite Bill Sewell for on how do you transform structures. It’s about what schemas you can get to fit. And what frameworks can you get to work and fit in a situation. Power plays a role. But power can’t be everything because people with power, senior faculty, can get in real trouble too..

Larry: There also seems to be another part of the puzzle, related to funding, money, and the political economy of sociological research. This I think is the clearest in your discussion of the use of genetic data in sociology. You quote an Annual Review article (on p. 60) that says something along the lines of: sociologists shouldn’t “stand back and watch as these contests play out in other research areas”. In other words, if we don’t learn to integrate genetic data and use these new tools and technologies, we’ll be left behind. This also I think relates to the funding of these types of research and the desire of funders to really leverage the most out of genetic techniques. I think there’s also a similar impulse in the use of big data and new computational techniques in sociology—there’s a lot of funding and jobs around these new techniques and tools.

This might be a bit of an ill-formed thought, but what is the role of funding in shaping what we see as innovative in good in sociology?

Sam: My two cents on that is that justifying research funding is part of what it takes to survive in the contemporary academic research environment. Some works in sociology help to reproduce the moral logics that these funders desire. But this is the struggle we face in sociology. We have to also hold each other accountable. As much as sociology would like to exist outside of the confines of the current academic structure, we can’t. We are in some ways, at best, like unattached intellectuals. That’s about as close as we can get, this Mannheimian kind of vision of somebody who is connected to the system, but, ultimately, in some way, choosing their own fate. Will I go do the sketchy research to get paid by the geneticists? Some people do it in a hokey way and just want money and it’s very sketchy and it’s super unappealing.

Same with the big data stuff. Some people think, “Oh, you just throw an algorithm on it, it solves all the human crises”. But there are other people who I think really believe that if sociology wants a seat at the table, then it is up to me, or someone like me, to help find a way to engage this work in a meaningful and publicly justifiable way. And I believe that, with a lot of emergent technologies, it is important that we have a seat at the table. Sociologists have reservoirs of knowledge of how terribly these kinds of things have gone in the past. If we can draft the right folks, it could be worthwhile. But that’s a complicated political process, which of course doesn’t always work out.

Shai:  I will also say that funding sources can help form critiques and empower factions in the discipline to think through and explore areas that are problematic. We have an example of that in our demography chapter, where a group was convened specifically to rethink the way we think about fertility in our surveys. Conversely, funding sources can face a great deal of pushback.

Sam and I once had a conversation with a sociobiologist working at a well-funded area who told us they’re actually transitioning away from sociology and into biology because of the pushback that they are facing within the discipline I’m not saying if that’s good or bad, but I am saying that funding notwithstanding, you’re still going to need to justify your research to a community that’s going to be your reviewers in journals, and your colleagues and people who evaluate you for tenure. So all of these dynamics, in a way, check the effect of funding on the process of knowledge production.

Larry: This reminds me of conversations around bioethics and, sociologists who engage in bioethics who want to shape what happens upstream. Or even discussions around whether to take money from big tech to do research—whether or not you should just walk away, or if you actually have a seat at the table.

Shai: That’s a really helpful way to think about funding and these moral claims. I will just say, one of the types of justifications that we highlight in the book, we call the Marketability Repertoire, assigns value to research specifically because there is funding and general interest for it. So it’s the advice that perhaps your advisor will give you, “You should maybe turn your dissertation a little bit in that direction, then you’ll be able to apply for grants and there’s a lot of money there”. That’s another way in which funding obviously shapes part of our knowledge production process.

Larry: This book is obviously written for sociologists. But what are the lessons that this book has to offer for non-sociologists? What about anthropology? Are fields like economics less diverse in the repertoires they use? And what about the sciences? What can we learn about moral repertoires that scientists in the life sciences or other fields use?

Shai: The book focuses on sociology, but we’re very much aiming this as a broader contribution to the sociology of scientific knowledge production across disciplines. Especially when you look at other disciplines, it’s interesting how each discipline is in a different place and it’s an internal conversation about what’s ethical and what’s appropriate for us to research.

Cultural anthropology is a great example because in the late 1980s, the field experienced what’s been referred to as the “crisis of representation”. Anthropologists were thinking about what are we really doing as outsiders when they write about the faraway, often disempowered populations that they’re researching. What sort of ethical standing do they have when they try to tell the Western reader what someone in Asia is thinking and what their culture values? That dramatically shifted not only the types of scholarship that’s being made but also the types of questions that anthropologists will typically ask. So scholars may now ask in a review of an article, for example, what’s your positionality in the field that you’re researching? Why are you making these statements about your subject’s internal worlds? What is this based on? And questions about ethics, power, and so on. This suddenly became very dominant in this field.

Sam: I’ve recently been reading more about physics and chemistry and how these hard sciences work. Over there too they are experiencing a post-Kuhnian transformation—recognizing that science doesn’t advance in this perfectly linear process. The story I love to tell is from Robert Crease’s Philosophy of Physics, is about the Yang-Mills theory, which is this highly improbable branch of quantum field theory. I don’t even really understand it. But it became true at some point. The basic ideas were published early on in the 1950s. Then, over a number of years, some sort of observations convinced the physics community that unlikely theory was all true. Later when people asked Yang why he published it, he said, “The idea was beautiful and should be published”. Even though it seemed completely impossible. We would classify that as the creative repertoire—good scholarship has aesthetically pleasing qualities, is creative, or is new. The more of this stuff I read, the more I become fascinated by which there are all these different ways that scientists discern truth and come to a consensus.

The sciences in general may be better served by a model that recognizes the diversity of pathways to scientific truth, for instance, by saying, “I’m publishing this article because it’s creative even though I know it seems completely insane”. But if it gets past a bunch of reviewers, as this Yang-Mills paper did, maybe that is a justification that we should acknowledge and address. That there are multiple ways of discerning scientific truth and that science itself is much more like a craft than a machine.

Larry: I wish sociology also tolerated a little bit more creativity.