I chose to be on this book club for completely non-intellectual reasons, and now I’m paying the price. Lamont’s book annoys me to a degree I rarely experience outside of watching the CNN. I have a cognitive block that prevents me from seeing any value in sociology.
Lamont’s book offers a series of comments made by people who served on panels that award grants to research panels. To me, these anonymous comments are evidence of nothing bigger than the fact that these people chose to make these comments at a certain point in time for reasons we will never know. I call that gossip, not evidence.
Here is an example:
English faces the most acute disciplinary crisis, both demographically and intellectually. Several panelists hailing from this discipline question the very concept of academic excellence.
Do you see any difference between this claim and, “Several Ukrainians I know said they hate borscht, so there must be the most acute crisis in the attitude towards borscht in Ukraine”? I don’t.
In the quote, there seems to be a huge logical gap between the two sentences. And the entire book is like that. “Somebody said something, and it must be gospel truth.”
And the same author claims literary scholars deal in the subjective as opposed to the truth-based social sciences.
Clarissa's Blog 
was there not a bit somewhere in the book about method? i think it’s not uncommon for sociologists to do extensive observations and interviews and then summarize their findings with observer judgments, examples, and representative reports from the subjects. especially when writing for a wider audience.
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No matter how extensive the interviews are, my own professional deformation 🙂 tells me that what people say is evidence of nothing but that they chose to say this at a given point in time.
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one thing it’s evidence of is evidence of what people say! which in many cases where social realities are unstudied, is at least a first step. especially so, i would think, when those realities develop partly through the medium of what people say.
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As someone who loves sociology, what drives me crazy is that we are taught to have certain standards in school to avoid this type of thing, but very few people who apply sociology in the “real world” feel obligated to follow them. Why bother with well designed studies when the average person will be just as convinced by a handful of stories?
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She takes “excellence” as though that were the real goal, not realizing that it is an administrative term of fairly recent coinage. One is looking for significance, or value, or reliable and useful new information, or an interesting new interpretation, etc. Not “excellence” which (nowadays) means conformity to and promotion of certain market values, etc. See, for starters: https://www.sensepublishers.com/catalogs/bookseries/higher-education-research-in-the-21st-century-series/questioning-excellence-in-higher-education/
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I knew there was something that bothered me about this term! Thank you for the clarification.
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Remember it was a set of sociologists that turned down our external grant. This was for Hispanic World related books for the library, in a number of disciplines. They claimed we were “in a narrow field of little general interest.” This comment indicates the extreme subjectivity and also low educational level of some sociologists.
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The comment I got on my grant proposal was, and I quote verbatim, “What do we care about Spain here at X University?”
So yes. . .
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