With the skimming of my last two introduction to sociology texts tonight, I’ve finished the first major chunk of my summer reading list, the basic or foundational materials. Done with Level I, I guess. (I feel like I should get some kind of message scrolling across the text editor for this, or something: “Now that you have conquered the Dimension of the Doomed, realm of earth magic, you are ready to complete your task.” Where’s my powerup?) The last two texts were Sherman and Wood’s 1979 Sociology: Traditional and Radical Perspectives (emphasis on the radical, here: these guys would make Anne Coulter do the Linda Blair 360) and Gelles and Levine’s 1999 Sociology: An Introduction (Sixth Edition). I feel kinda dorky reading the super-simple stuff, but I think my original impulse — grounding the all-over-the-place discourse of composition on class with some concepts from folks (economists and sociologists) who actually study it with consistency and rigor — was a good idea; I definitely gave myself some context, and charted for myself what seem to be the main (and often unexplored, by my discipline) avenues of examination. So: a few things from tonight’s reading.
Sherman and Wood offer the familiar insight that “distribution of income is closely related to types of income” (16). Most of the lowermost portion of the incomes in America come from wages and salaries, whereas almost all of the very highest portion of the incomes in America comes from ownership of capital: interest, profits, dividends. This seems like additional support for the argument that the vocational education model of the university reinscribes hierarchies of class: training students to earn a wage may help to ensure that most of those students never reach that very highest portion. Gelles and Levine offer a me a useful twist to my understanding of that vocational education model when they list the five functions of schooling understood by functionalist sociologists: instruction, socialization, custody and control, certification, and selection (447). My perspective on education has dealt primarily with the instruction function, although I’m also certainly drawing from Bourdieu in my coupling of the selection and socialization functions to the instruction function. But Gelles and Levine also offer a distinction between individual mobility and “structural mobility” which “occurs when technological change, urbanization, economic booms or busts, wars, and other events alter the number and kinds of occupations available in a society” (277), which serves to remind me that I’ve been thinking primarily about individual mobility within the context of technological change and its affects on the vocations available to students via the instruction function. The university interacts with class hierarchies in other ways, as well. Sherman and Wood point to the traditional composition of the university’s board of trustees: one could be generous and suggest that university boards of trustees are perhaps not quite so lily-white these days, and perhaps not so overwhelmingly male, but there’s little denying that the majorities of most boards are wealthy capitalists. (As usual, I’m happy to be corrected here; please, let me know about the constitution of the boards of trustees of universities you’re familiar with.) So what do these capitalists get out of their service? Three things, Sherman and Wood suggest:
“(1) New knowledge through research and competent teaching
(2) An adequate supply of educated manpower [sic]
(3) An economic, social and political climate in which companies like GE can survive and continue to progress” (210, emphasis in original).
And I don’t think there’s anything more I can say to that.
Gelles and Levine also provide a useful link to the University of Wisconsin Institute for Research on Poverty, which I’ll definitely have to investigate further.
Overall, it feels nice to have passed a milestone, however small. Next up: some quick stuff on computers and composition and then on to the more sophisticated analyses of class (Level 2, or, in the parlance I used at the beginning, The Realm of Black Magic), before doing the network culture and economy materials (Level 3, Netherworld) and then trying to tie it together with Feenberg, Habermas, and Marx (Level 4, The Elder World) and whip it into a prospectus (Shub Niggurath’s Pit). To quote Neil Duncan’s character in the Rutger Hauer and Kim Cattrall not-really-classic Split Second: “We gotta get bigger guns.”
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