What life experiences have contributed to your interest in social psychology in general and/or your specific research areas?

I grew up in a working-class family of eight children in Indianapolis. We were widely spread out in age and I was in the middle.  My early childhood was pretty good, but I began working in my father’s business when I was just six years old.  He had a retail produce business in a large city market in the city center. Due to the competition of supermarkets the business eventually failed, and our family was in economic distress.  I was caught in the middle of this struggle and had to take on extra jobs while continuing to work for my father.  He eventually started over in low-level illegal gambling. Meanwhile, I was doing well in high school and was encouraged to go to university, but no one in my immediate family nor most relatives had gone to college.  Given my father’s illegal work I could not apply for financial aid and worked over 40 hours a week in high school to save money for college. 

I chose Purdue and tried to become an engineer because a cousin had done so.  I quickly realized engineering was not for me.  I took an aptitude test which indicated social sciences to be a good fit.  So, in the second semester I enrolled in introductory courses in sociology and psychology. Before this I had no idea what sociology or social psychology even were. But these courses provided me an academic lens to make sense of my past and guide my future.  Especially important was my discovery of G. H. Mead and symbolic interactionism as well as the Chicago School.

Can you tell us about where you spent the early part of your sociological career (first as a student and then as faculty)?

After Purdue I spent one year at the Indianapolis campus of IU where I established my major in sociology. When I arrived in Bloomington my junior year, I became a fixture on the seventh floor of Ballantine Hall. Inspired by Alfred Lindesmith, Sheldon Stryker, Allen Grimshaw, Peter Burke and others, I literally fell in love with social psychology. Sheldon and Allen were mentors, colleagues, and dear friends from my first days at Bloomington to my return to IUB as an assistant professor in 1975 until they passed near the end of my 39 years in the department.  Sheldon created a special undergraduate teaching assistantship for me in his introductory social psychology course my senior year right as I was running out of money for tuition and living expenses. Allen was an unwavering champion in his support, and his interest in sociolinguistics led me to children and childhood as my main area of research as a social psychologist.

When I arrived for graduate school at North Carolina, I knew that the department was highly quantitative with much less interest in social psychology than Indiana. However, I was surprised to discover several of the social psychologists there were Skinnerian behaviorists. My struggle with behaviorism and my developing interests in sociolinguistics led me to take special interest in language acquisition and children’s communicative competence. With the mentorship and economic support of Leonard Cottrell (an actual student of G.H. Mead) I developed a radical dissertation study at the time (the first qualitative one at UNC and the first involving videorecording in sociological social psychology) in which I videorecorded the naturally occurring interactions of three children in their families and in a playroom, I set up in the department. In the dissertation chaired by my long-term mentor Glen Elder and with mentor and later colleague at Indiana Dave Heise along with Cottrell I focused mainly on the data collected in the home settings and on how adults talked to children expanding another mentor Aaron Cicourel’s early work on socialization.

While struck by the complexity of the adult-child interaction, I was overwhelmed by the peer interaction I recorded.  Here were young kids who Piaget and most all developmental psychologists claimed were egocentric and not capable of sustained interaction with peers. This claim was clearly not the case in my data. The fantasy and role play I recorded was complex, innovative and creative. These findings led me to postdoctoral work in a preschool in Berkeley, California in 1974 where I documented that children not only had agency, complex social interactive skills, and played a major role in their socialization, but also created and shared their own peer cultures.  These findings were presented in numerous articles and my book Friendship and Peer Culture in the Early Years and later my text The Sociology of Childhood which established the field of the sociology of childhood and in which I offered an alternative to traditional views of socialization with my concept of interpretive reproduction.

How has your thinking about your subject matter evolved over time?

Over the next 39 years through a series of longitudinal studies that built on one another across different social class, ethnic and racial groups in the US as well as work in Norway and especially Italy, I provided generalizability for my empirical findings and theoretical views.  I also discovered new aspects of peer cultures (for example important differences in the peer cultures of Italian and African American children compared to American white middle-class children in terms of interactive communicative styles and the nature of friendship relations). In Modena, Italy 1996 in a seven-year longitudinal study I undertook groundbreaking work on highly important transitions in the lives of young children that being from preschool to elementary school, to middle school and beyond. I developed the concept of priming events and its implications for life transitions over the life course for children, youth and adults. Finally, I conducted research on comparative early education (most especially in Italy, the US, and Scandinavia) and its policy implications for not only innovative pedagogies but also the general well being of young children and their involvement in their families and communities.  In all this work with rather than on children, children and childhood were the central focus of my research methods and interpretation of findings and not just their social, emotional and educational development or their futures as adults.  In short, I argued relentlessly that the future of childhood is the present.

What are your current research projects?

Since my retirement from Indiana University in 2013 I ended my active research projects.  However, I completed the 4th and 5th editions of my text The Sociology of Childhood and steadily work on a 6th edition that I expect will be published in 2022 or so depending on the effect of the pandemic.  I was a visiting professor in the Department of Education at Uppsala University from 2017 to 2019 and participated in many research projects with faculty and graduate students. I continue to mentor to younger faculty and many graduate students throughout the world.

What interests and/or activities, outside of sociology, are important to you?

I love baseball first following the Brooklyn Dodgers until they moved to LA and then suffered with the Chicago Cubs and was overjoyed when they finally won the world series in 2016.  I also enjoy horse racing and handicapping with modest success. Growing up in Indiana and then living in North Carolina I have been an avid college basketball fan.

From my time at IU, I developed an interest in Opera and my daughter, Veronica, as a member of the IU children’s choir performed in several productions in Bloomington.  I expanded this interest and the arts more generally during time in Italy especially classical painting, sculpture and architecture.  From her preteen years Veronica enjoy a keen interest in film making, direction and cinematography.  Finally, I enjoy reading nonfiction but with recent deaths of my two favorite authors Patricia Highsmith and Gabriel García Márquez I have struggled to find adequate replacements.

Given your success in the field, how do you balance professional and personal demands?
In truth I have to say not very well.  However, I love spending time with young children and being able to do research with them the professional was highly satisfying personally. Also, having done research in Italy and Scandinavia for many years I learned much about these cultures which is related to some of the interests described above.  However, during travel work giving lectures and consulting was always involved.  When I finished my time as a visiting professor in Sweden in late 2019, I vowed more leisure travel but then came the pandemic.

Do you know something today that you wish you had known when you started in sociology? What is it?

Be open to cross cultural research and learning new languages and about new cultures.  Not only will it improve your research and theoretical views but also make you a better person.

What one piece of advice would give a graduate student?  What about an assistant professor?

First, push to do the kind of research you want to do even if it is out of the mainstream and embrace and appreciate your mentors.  Ply it forward by being a good mentor yourself.  Second, avoid getting caught up in departmental conflicts and always give your fellow graduate students and colleagues the benefit of the doubt.  Third, invest time in your teaching and focus on, appreciate, and emotionally support your good students especially those who need more attention.  For those who act entitled and who are just pains, invest as little emotional time as possible.

The COVID-19 pandemic is disrupting much of children’s everyday routines. As best as you can tell, how do you think their peer cultures and the processes by which they create meaning are changing in light of restrictions on face-to-face interaction?

I am cautious because we need to do the research to really know.  We need studies like those of other upheavals of children’s lives like Fothergill and Peek’s brilliant Children of Katrina.  However, it will be challenging to gain access for longitudinal ethnography and intensive interviews of children, youth and families in and even after a pandemic as these authors were able to do for the hurricane. 

I would offer as many developmental and social psychologists have that young children are resilient. For young children in interactions with siblings, parents and other adults (who are reactive and let themselves be drawn into children’s spontaneous role and fantasy play), and even imaginary friends, peer cultures, meaning making and agency can remain intact and even expand to some degree. For older children and youth technology and the media can play a central role in the process. While not a big proponent of studying one’s own children audiovisual recordings, reflective narratives, and diaries can capture these processes to some degree. However, in the end for children, youth and all of us at different places in the life cycle, the pandemic years have and will steal away more of our lives we will never fully recover.  For young children, these lost years are especially precious, and we must do everything in our power to help children recover some part of them.

What life experiences have contributed to your interest in social psychology general as well as your specific research areas?

I grew up in a Navy town—San Diego—during the late 1950s. We were the only Asian-American family in my elementary school. I experienced racism from my schoolmates, who were often children of WWII veterans for whom the Japanese were the enemy. It was particularly bad in interactions with boys. I experienced shame and stigma.

In the third grade, I met my best friend’s parents, who recognized my Japanese-American ethnicity and spoke about the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, and explained that it was a good thing because it protected the Japanese-Americans. Having never heard about internment, I mentioned to my parents that I’d learned that internment was a good thing. They were stunned. Because of the shame they felt, they had never discussed camp to us. But now, they opened up and shared their humiliating experiences of being interned and the stigma they faced reentering society after the war ended.
Having lived with shame and stigmatization, I was drawn to topics like poverty, racism, and crime. As a child, I was always a good kid. But later, during adolescence, with the tutelage of peers, and my attempts to blend in, I reluctantly joined in on doing drugs, committing delinquent acts, and getting into trouble. I could see both sides: law abiding culture and youth subcultures.

Where did you spend the early part of your sociological career (first as a student and then as faculty)?

I began college at UCSD, where I got turned on to sociology. Given my interests in sociology—ethnomethodology, symbolic interaction, and deviance—the academic advisor in Sociology suggested I transfer to Santa Barbara after my sophomore year, which I did, and ended up taking courses with Donald Cressey, a social-psychological minded criminologist in the Chicago style. He took a great interest in me, sponsoring independent studies courses and hiring me as his teaching assistant my senior year. After considering the University of Chicago, UCLA, University of Arizona, and Columbia, I ended up staying at UCSB because the department fit my interests in deviance, symbolic interaction, and ethnomethodology.

After publishing my M.A. thesis, I got a call from the Sociology Department at Wisconsin inviting me to apply for an assistant professorship. I took the position and spent my assistant and associate professor years at Madison, in what I referred to as “Assistant Professor Heaven.” The senior faculty mentored junior faculty closely, allowed us to focus on research unencumbered by labor-intensive committee assignments, or many new course preps. I was part of a remarkably cohesive cohort of eight new junior faculty—the NAPS (new assistant professors), which included, among others, Larry Bobo, Roberto Franzosi, Adam Gamoran, Richard Lachman, Nora Schaeffer, and Judy Seltzer. Assistant Professor Heaven, indeed.

After tenure, to be with my partner at the time, I moved to the University of Iowa, which had a strong program of social psychology: Willie Jasso and Cecilia Ridgeway had just left, but remaining were Karen Heimer, Ed Lawler, Michael Lovaglia, Barry Markovsky, and Lisa Troyer. After serving a term as Department Chair, I moved back to the west coast to the University of Washington. UW had a storied history of social psychology—Dick Emerson, Karen Cook, Phil Blumstein, and Judy Howard—but by the time I got there, the Department had decided not to replace those that left.

How has your thinking about your subject matter evolved over time?

I was taking mostly science courses at UCSD when I walked into my first sociology course. I loved science—especially models of metabolic pathways in genetics and biochemistry —but fell in love with sociology, which I thought offered a chance to apply scientific models to serious problems facing society, like poverty, crime, discrimination.

I also signed up for the graduate sequence in statistics. Having learned methodology from Aaron Cicourel and Bud Mehan, I knew that statistics in sociology was “bullshit” — “constructs of the second order” in Alfred Schutz’s terms, but wanted to know exactly why they were “bullshit” (my statistics professor suggested they hadn’t learned to count in San Diego). I ended up doing well—better than the graduate students.
I stayed at UCSB for graduate studies. After spending my first year wondering if I’d made the wrong career move—faculty seemed more interested in their next article than improving the world, and creativity seemed stymied by having to “fit into the existing literature”—I wrote a quantitative M.A. thesis testing social psychological theories of crime, which was published in ASR. Suddenly, colleagues referred to “my thing,” which, it turns out meant testing theory using quantitative methods. I started identifying with “my thing,” and eventually it became central to my intellectual identity.

At Wisconsin, I became interested in rational choice theory after taking up with “bad companions,” Irv Piliavin and Rosemary Gartner. I also returned to my love of symbolic interaction and the writings of George Herbert Mead. In graduate school, I took seminars with Tom Shibutani, a former student of Blumer and Wirth at Chicago, on Mead and American Pragmatism. We read Mind, Self, and Society and the Philosophy of the Act chapter by chapter, as well as Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct, and other classics of Pragmatism. Later, I was influenced by the writings of David Miller, Gary Cook, Shel Stryker, and especially Hans Joas (who briefly overlapped with me on the faculty at Madison) on Mead’s work. My interest in rational choice let me to an interest in James Coleman’s work on social capital theory and the micro-macro problem.

What interests and/or activities, outside of sociology, are important to you?

It is important to me to keep up with current events, and in particular, political developments, particularly in the current fraught period. I also enjoy sports—I no longer play, but remain an avid sports fan—movies, playing guitar, listening to jazz and blues, fine dining, and fine wine.

Given your success in the field, how do you balance professional and personal demands?
I’ve never been very good at this. I tend to immerse myself intellectually in a project—reading broadly and deeply, drilling down to get at underlying assumptions, and using the correct methods. I get so caught up that I often forget to pay bills, file tax returns, and keep up with friends and family. If I were to do it again, I would try to make more time for personal relationships and the demands of everyday life.

Do you know something today that you wish you had known when you started in sociology?

Yes. While most academics are honest, hard-working, and collectively-oriented, there are a few who are more interested in personal glory, will play politics to get ahead, and only feign interest in the collectivity. It is important to recognize these individuals and find ways to work with or around them.

What one piece of advice would give a graduate student? What about an assistant professor?

Graduate school is a time for building research and teaching skills, building a sociological imagination, and acquiring substantive knowledge about a topic. It is also a time of learning what a career in sociology entails, and most importantly, if it is a good fit for the student. By reading top journals, finding role-models, and getting feedback on work, graduate students can proactively decide early on if sociology is the right fit for them, and exactly where they fit.

For assistant professors, it is important to get feedback from thoughtful senior faculty. This is most imperative for faculty within one’s department, but also for faculty in one’s subdiscipline outside the department.

Has your expertise in your subject matter helped you understand or engage with current events?

I think sociologists, more than ever, have the tools to understand what is going on in a complex global system. Those tools have seeped into everyday discourse. I find it striking that sociological concepts like social structure, opportunity costs, identity, social organization, group process, social capital, and intersectionality are increasingly used intelligently in media outlets such as the New York Times. That has changed dramatically in the last 35 years and bodes well for the discipline.

​What life experiences have contributed to your interest in social psychology and qualitative methods in general and/or your specific research areas?

I grew up in a family among chronically ill adults and was a sickly kid myself. Constant medical crises and the subsequent spiral of problems became a part of everyday life. By the early 1960s, I had become an occupational therapist who worked in physical rehabilitation. Witnessing firsthand how illness and disability affected people’s self-concepts fascinated me. I was also concerned with how well-meaning therapists’ lacked understanding of many of their patients’ lives. These therapists seemed oblivious to the implications of poverty and prejudice. So, I decided to pursue a Master’s in sociology and then go back and teach occupational therapy students. But sociology hooked me.
 
Can you tell us about where you spent the early part of your sociological career (first as a student and then as faculty)?

As I was finishing my master’s degree, I decided to switch areas from seeking a doctorate in political sociology to social psychology and wished to study with renown qualitative social psychologists on the West Coast. At that time, Erving Goffman was leaving University of California, Berkeley, so I was fortunate to be the last student chosen amongst stiff competition for the first doctoral cohort at the University of California, San Francisco. I had loved Anselm Strauss’s essay on identity, Mirrors and Masks: The Search for Identity and was impressed by his empirical studies such as Images of the American City. Fred Davis’s work on physical disabilities also captivated me. The doctoral program at UCSF was a perfect match for me with my interests in social psychology and medical sociology and the program’s six quarters of training in qualitative research. I also took advanced tutorials in classical theory. When I began my doctoral studies in 1968, jobs in sociology were plentiful for white males. When I completed my degree in 1973, only a handful of jobs in California were available and I needed to stay there. By that time, however, universities were implementing new affirmative action policies of which I was a beneficiary. I received a temporary position at Sonoma State College because I could teach classical theory, not grounded theory. Despite years of tenuous employment, I managed to stay at Sonoma State.

How have you approached disseminating your ideas and communicating across disciplinary boundaries?

Although I had no strategy for disseminating my ideas, on reflection, I have several suggestions. In addition to your regular conference schedule, occasionally present at multidisciplinary conferences that fit your substantive expertise. If the conference organizers plan a special journal issue or edited volume, revise and submit your paper. Publishing in an international journal will also give your work a wider audience. Turn methodological innovations and insights from conducting your research into methods papers. An imaginative or provocative methods paper attracts readers and can serve as a vehicle for introducing your substantive contributions. When possible, make use of social and professional media to disseminate your work.

What one piece of advice would you give a graduate student?  What about an assistant professor?

Follow your passions! Even if more lucrative research opportunities come your way. Your passionate interests will keep inspiring you and carry you through the rough spots. Following your passions as a graduate student eases the trials of being an assistant professor. You’ll have something original to say and will have gained the confidence to say it. Don’t let time management prescriptions from privileged professors and writing handbooks discourage you. As writing expert Helen Sword discovered, many productive scholars do not write every day. Do what you can. Study how you spend your time and evaluate it with candor. Make changes to allow more writing time but forgo the guilt when your situation precludes living by other people’s schedules. And, most of all, enjoy your work.

What life experiences, if any, contributed to your interest in social psychology in general and/or your specific research areas?

Raised in a large Catholic family of 10 children in Northeastern Ohio, my parents owned a women’s clothing store that my mother managed while my father, a chemist, worked at the local steel factory. The 12 of us lived in very close quarters above the store, so life growing up encouraged me to understand the different individuals and subgroups with whom I came into contact. It raised questions such as “How do I fit in?” “What is my identity?” In high school and college, questions about the personal and interpersonal that sociology and psychology addressed seemed to naturally draw my attention. I considered clinical psychology early on, but then realized that the academy provided a larger world in which I could examine human behavior.

Where did you spend the early part of your sociological career (first as a student and then as faculty)?

My interest in social psychology was formulated late in college at the University of Dayton. It became clear that if I wanted a career, I would have to do graduate work. Indiana University (IU) was physically close and was the best fit given that, at the time (the 1980s), IU ranked near the top in the nation in social psychology. It was a powerhouse of leading social psychologists: Stryker, Burke, Heise, Bohrnstedt, Corsaro, Felmlee and others. I received excellent training and met wonderful people who still are a part of my life today. Late in graduate school, I was exposed to the new and developing research area of domestic violence. Much research is personal, and I became aware that this area might help answer the many questions I had about the aggression I witnessed growing up.

For the next half a dozen years, I unexpectedly left the field of social psychology and entered family sociology, researching interpersonal aggression in all its forms (physical, sexual, verbal, and psychological abuse in marital, cohabiting, and dating relationships). Early on, I worked on aggression with a talented faculty member in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at IU (Maureen Pirog). After graduating from IU, I spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of New Hampshire to work with the leading figure in the country on aggression (Murray Straus). My collaboration with him was enriching. In 1988, I started my career at Washington State University (WSU). I continued my work on interpersonal aggression until I felt that I answered some of my own central questions, and that I had made some important contributions to the area. That took me to tenure. 

How have your specific interests in sociology changed over time?

I always have been one to enter new areas of research substantively and methodologically, particularly if I see there is much to learn in that exploration. It keeps me excited about my work. Following tenure, I returned to my graduate school interests in social psychology, particularly identity theory. I also began to supplement my graduate training in survey research with laboratory research and began to carry out identity experiments in WSU’s laboratory. Simultaneously, I became interested in the developing area of emotions, and that opened another world. When I moved to the University of California, Riverside, Jonathan Turner and I began collaborating. This was an exciting time. We published a major emotions book and edited two volumes on the sociology of emotions. Over the past dozen years, I have been working in the sociology of morality and related areas. In some ways, these more recent interests return me to questions I had during my first year in college at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio, as a philosophy major.

For the past 25 years, my multiple substantive interests have developed identity theory beyond its current boundaries. I believe that one of the most important tasks we have as scholars is to engage in theory-building so that we have the best explanations to understand our world and the people who inhabit it. I also think we need to be rigorous in our study. I have found survey and experimental research to be useful methods to approach social psychological work in a systematic manner.

What is your current (or recent) research focus? What sparked you interested in it?

I have been exploring a couple different substantive areas. I just finished writing an NSF grant with my collaborators (social exchange theorists Savage and Whitham, and identity theorist Burke) on generosity. I love working with experts who use other social psychological theories; I believe in theoretical cross-fertilization. We want to study the generosity identity within generalized exchanges using a “pay-it-forward” design to see if we can gain some insights into giving behavior within and across racial/ethnic groups. Generosity is an extension of my interest in morality. Given the extreme inequality that exists in our society, I think we need to study how individuals can be more generous. The good news is that generosity has positive physical and psychological consequences not only for recipients, but also for those who give.

I also recently finished an interdisciplinary edited volume on the religiously unaffiliated (with the President of the Institute of Advanced Catholic Studies at the University of Southern California). I am very interested in identity change. To see religious identification begin to wane suggests that something significant is occurring. What might be the cultural, structural, and individual forces that influence people to dis-identify with their religion? What insights might this tell us about the process of identity change of any kind? Some of the chapters in this volume address identity-related issues, but much more work is needed.

What do you see as the through line that connects the research you’ve done throughout your career?

Throughout my career, I have been interested in how people create meaning to make sense of their situations. For most of my career, this has involved understanding people’s identities or the self-meanings that characterize themselves. If we take the time to understand how people see themselves, it can provide tremendous insight into how they feel and behave.

As a recent co-editor of SPQ (and section chair not long before that), you know the state of the field better than most. What do you think are the biggest opportunities facing social psychologists right now? What do you think are the biggest challenges?

I think one of the biggest prospects for social psychologists is partnering with scholars outside of social psychology, and sociology, more generally. While interdisciplinary research can be challenging, it also can be beneficial for the development of science and public policy. Another opportunity for social psychologists is studying how physiological and neurological responses can provide independent evidence for the veracity of our theories. We need more implicit, unconscious measures of human thought and feeling. The challenge is in learning the technology that captures this, and then seeing how the data corroborates or contests current knowledge.

What interests and/or activities, outside of sociology, are important to you?

I enjoy seeing the world and getting into other worlds, so I like to travel and read. I keep a pretty active lifestyle with biking and Pilates, and when the California weather doesn’t cooperate, I’m on the elliptical. On the quieter side, I meditate routinely and enjoy listening to podcasts in which social thinkers, poets, artists, theologians, and courageous figures share their thoughts about life, love, laughter, and leadership.

Given your success in the field, how do you balance professional and personal demands?
I try to balance the professional and personal by staying organized, focused, and compartmentalizing the different arenas of my life as best I can. I am not always good at this. Sometimes I am just driven by what I see to be important questions that I want answered. Fortunately, I have a spouse who understands this.

Do you know something today that you wish you had known when you started in sociology?  What is it?

I recently heard something that I wish I would have heard earlier in my career. If you can go to bed each night and say to yourself, “Good work, done right, and for the right reasons,” then you can rest a little easier. Today, if I can say this to myself, particularly during difficult times, then I’ll know I have done my best.

What one piece of advice would give a graduate student?  What about an assistant professor?

I would tell a graduate student to be open to learning, to explore the field in every possible way, and then when one has settled in an area, to make sure that the work is theoretically driven, empirically rigorous, and contributes to science. To an assistant professor, I would say do the best work you know how to do, enjoy it, develop resilience, and try to be a good and generous contributor to the people and places in your world.
 

What life experiences have contributed to your interest in social psychology in general and/or your specific research areas?

I grew up in a wealthy suburb of Detroit during the race riots of 1967. From an early age, I was aware that my daily life differed significantly from the lives of people who lived just a few miles away. Social relations in my high school also followed a strict social hierarchy. I occupied a position high on the academic hierarchy but low on the social hierarchy, which gave me a unique perspective on the bases of inequality. Was I able to articulate this at the time? Probably not. But I was keenly attuned to exclusionary processes.

My interest in inequality took more specific form in graduate school, when I took courses with Jim House on social structure and personality research, and with Ron Kessler on medical sociology. It made sense to me to think of inequality as embedded and enacted in organizations, small groups, and interpersonal interactions, perhaps in part because I could interpret my own life experiences through that lens.

Can you tell us about where you spent the early part of your sociological career (first as a student and then as faculty)?

My undergraduate degree is in statistics, a major I chose because it seemed practical. For reasons I cannot recall, I applied to graduate school in public health and anticipated a career in health care administration. While I found public health school unsatisfying, I was fascinated by the study of health while working as a research assistant for Ron Kessler at the University of Michigan. Ron asked if I would be interested in joining an interdisciplinary graduate training program in Psychosocial Factors in Mental Health and Illness at the Institute for Social Research. To join, I had to be accepted into a PhD program. I applied to the Department of Sociology and was accepted without knowing much about what would happen next.

I spent most of my sociology graduate career in the interdisciplinary training program. The faculty encouraged us to read and think broadly, with little concern for traditional disciplinary divisions. It was, I think, as close as one could have gotten to a joint sociology-psychology social psychology program at the time, and I feel fortunate to have been part of it. My dissertation research, on the effects of childhood parental loss on adult mental health, drew heavily from both fields.
 
I began my faculty career at the State University of New York in Albany but moved to the University of Minnesota after only two years (better job prospects for my husband in Minneapolis/St Paul) where I was quickly swept into the vibrant intellectual atmosphere of Jeylan Mortimer’s Life Course Center. Jeylan suggested that I extend my research on mental health inequalities to children—advice that I followed. My friend and colleague, Candace Kruttschnitt, sparked my interest in the predictors and consequences of child abuse. Inspired by Jeylan and Candace, I added life course concepts and methods to my tool kit.

How have your specific interests in sociology changed over time?

Nearly all of my research has focused on physical or mental health using the social structure and personality (SSP) paradigm. What has changed is where I position health in the process, as an outcome or a basis of stratification.

Take children’s mental health. We can treat it as the outcome of stratification processes: children who occupy advantaged social positions live in safer neighborhoods, attend better schools, live under less stressful conditions, experience more salutary parenting practices, which all lead to better mental health. I adopted this approach earlier in my career. However, we can also view children’s mental health as the starting point in a different kind of allocation process. Differential value is assigned to children with different competencies or predispositions, and rewards are allocated accordingly. In essence, children’s mental health is a resource they bring into their interactions with other people and institutions. The study of the social responses to mental health (as when children with behavior problems elicit punishment from caregivers) and of how mental health affects the choices people make (as when troubled children become involved in troubled peer groups) gives us insight into the broader question of the reciprocal relations between persons and their environments.

By considering the implications of children’s mental health for the transition to adulthood, I integrated my theoretical interest in meso-level interactions with my substantive interests in mental health and life course research. The shift also prompted more general theoretical work (with Kathryn Lively and Tim Hallett) and deepened my engagement with the social psychology of inequality (culminating in the Handbook of the Social Psychology of Inequality, which I had the pleasure of co-editing with Ed Lawler and Michael Schwalbe).

What are your current research projects?

As director of my department’s research practicum for first-year graduate students, I initiated a project on the experiences of college students on the autism spectrum. We conducted a survey of college students at 14 public postsecondary institutions in Indiana to compare academic, social, and health outcomes of students on the spectrum to students with other disabilities and to their non-disabled, neurotypical peers. The project extends my interest in the implications of stigmatized conditions for successful transitions to adulthood while also incorporating new interests I developed as an administrator.

What interests and/or activities, outside of sociology, are important to you?

I have sung in choirs almost continuously since I was 10 years old and can’t imagine not doing that. I enjoy the challenge of learning difficult music and the pleasure of working attentively and collaboratively with other singers. Choir members’ heartbeats sync when they sing together, adding a physical dimension to the shared experience. I hike regularly and am usually on one nonprofit organization board or another. I am also a foodie and member of a “fine dining” group. Life is full.

What has drawn you to the several administrative roles you’ve occupied throughout your career?

I can’t honestly say that I have been drawn to these roles although I have been drawn into them by others. I have occupied quite a few and found each challenging and rewarding in their own way. I met a much broader range of students and faculty as an administrator than I would have otherwise. I enjoy working with colleagues on academic and managerial initiatives and find the problem-solving aspects of administrative work satisfying. 
Administrative work can also be stimulating intellectually. Each position (campus-level Associate Vice Provost, College-level Associate Dean, department chair) offers a unique perspective on the institution and its operations. Having served across multiple levels of the administration, I have a much deeper understanding of the challenges facing public institutions, the concerns of administrators at different levels, and the resources they command. Perhaps as important, I enjoy running meetings.

What’s something you’ve learned from these administrative positions that you think more faculty and (if applicable) graduate students should know/understand?

First, everyone, no matter how highly placed in the institution, operates within constraints. Administrators have agency but their agency is not unbounded. Postsecondary institutions operate within a complex political and legal field, not all of which is immediately visible to faculty and students. Second, administrators make better decisions when they are honest about their goals and transparent in their deliberations. Faculty and students are not fooled by fake rationales. And last, administrators make better decisions when they listen to the people who have to implement those decisions. It is very easy for people who have not been in the classroom for a while to lose sight of the day-to-day realities of scheduling classrooms, teaching classes, responding to student requests, etc.

Given your success in the field, how do you balance professional and personal demands?

Not very well! I am constantly juggling demands on my time and energy. I schedule important tasks, including those outside of work, onto my calendar to make sure that I have time to complete them but often have to reshuffle tasks as urgent matters present themselves. I only allow myself to reshuffle if I can find an open slot for the task somewhere else on my calendar. I have my email open at all times and try to answer emails promptly, but when something really requires my full attention, I shut everything else off and hunker down in my office.

What one piece of advice would give a graduate student?  What about an assistant professor?

Live your life every day and don’t wait until you have time for the things that are important to you. If there is something you have to do to be happy—whether running 5 miles, singing in a choir, reading mysteries—make time to do that thing. The demands on your time will increase throughout your career so find a way to make your life what you want it to be now.

How did your life experiences contribute to your interest in social psychology?
 
My whole family was sensitive to inequality even though we were middle-class suburban types with education. My mother was an early feminist and the Civil Rights Movement was going on when I was in high school. My high school had some Spanish speaking areas, some super bourgeois areas all smashed together. At that point, it was my main encounter with the American class system, so I think all that pointed me toward sociology, although I didn't know it.
 
When I went to college at age 16, I immediately enrolled in a big intro physics class at the University of Michigan. I took it with engineering majors: 250 men and two women. I couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t understand why. I just knew I couldn't bear to be there. So I started thinking about other majors and that led me to sociology indirectly.
 
I took this honors intro class that was social psychology jointly taught by a sociologist and a psychologist. We would enact all the famous experiments—Asch, autokinetic, and prisoner's dilemma—before reading about them. It hooked me and made me a sociology major. It was social psychology that brought me into the social sciences.
 
Can you tell us about your current book project?
 
Status is a form of inequality, but it's always been the weak stepsister of power and wealth. Traditionally it's acknowledged, but not thought to be as important. And yet it is absolutely everywhere. So why? What is it? I've come to the conclusion that it's best to think of status as a cultural schema of human invention to manage situations that are fundamental to the human condition, which is to be cooperatively interdependent to achieve things we want or need. That's us as a species.
 
But it takes a village. That interdependence creates nested competitive interests because as soon as you say “we're going to do it together” then, on whose terms are we doing it? My way? Your way? Who gets what? Who does what? All that arises. Status is a cultural schema that people put together to manage that. I develop that argument and then I try to look at why it matters for broader patterns of inequality.
 
What have been your interests and hobbies outside of academia?
 
I'm a scholar first and I am a political activist very much second. Nevertheless, social justice politics, especially race and gender, are important to me. I've also always tried to be active on campus in terms of how universities are run and how students are treated. I helped establish the Clayman Institute for Gender Research and things of that sort as a political activist.
 
Outside of all that, I’m an outdoors person. I like to hike. I also like travel. I did a lot of backpacking in the Arctic, Alaska, and the Amazon. I'm also really interested in literature and the arts.
 
Is there something you wish you’d known when your career started?
 
When I started out, I did a lot of the things I do now, but I kind of did it crawling on my hands and knees blindly. I only later developed a greater appreciation of what I was doing right. I had to learn how to shut off that neurotic voice: ‘I have to do it’ – ‘I can't do it’ –  ‘I can't, I can’t’ – ‘it won’t work’ – ‘make yourself do it,’ back and forth, back and forth. I learned how to push past that and find a quiet place and do it. So just focus on work and shut out the voices, shut out battles, shut out all that. It's hard to do and I felt that especially in the beginning.
 
What kind of advice would you give a graduate student or an assistant professor who's just starting out?
 
The system rewards persistence. Keep doing it. Keep trying. Keep at it. Keep thinking. Don’t give up. Don’t get daunted. Don't you allow yourself to be washed away by the complexity of feedback and don't think ‘I can't do it.’ Almost anything can be learned. You don't need to look at some new statistical technique and think ‘I'll never figure it out.’ Yes, you will. Just spend some time on it. Keep at it. That’s key for both graduate students and assistant professors.
 
For assistant professors, there’s the desperate struggle to get stuff out, get stuff published. That gives you license to do all kinds of projects you might not normally have thought about. But in the process of doing that, you also need to try to find your own voice. You need to find a set of topics that you can speak to that you really have something to say on because in the long run, getting tenure and then making a name for yourself in the discipline comes from finding that voice, and not just having a string of publications that no one would think to associate with one another.  
 
How did your experiences as editor of SPQ and President of the ASA shape how you think about the institution of sociology?
 
I believe in our institutions and I believe we’re responsible for them. You can't assume they're going to operate and you just get to float. I have no love for higher-level administration jobs. But if you think there are better or worse ways to do it, you need to step up a little bit.
 
I edited SPQ because it’s a journal I wanted to support and I wanted to see good work there, but I experienced something I never anticipated. As the editor, you see the earnestness and the seriousness with which a large community of people pursues social scientific knowledge. It's heartening. It's like building something together and as editor, you are at the center of it. It gave me a sense of the hard, serious cooperative work that so many people try to do even though a lot of things crash and burn.
 
As far as being ASA President, you get nominated—so what the heck. Although worth doing,  that was definitely less heartening. The field is fragmented, first, by subfields. People are off in their corners with dim awareness of one another. Second, it’s highly stratified. There are very privileged actors and very unprivileged actors and that activates all sorts of mutual resentments.
 
People are less interested in the core of the association and want to belong to different sub-societies. I belong to a lot of those and like them, but I believe in maintaining a core. People have also argued, ‘fine, who says we need the disciplines we do? Maybe we could change things.’ As sociologists who study organizations and institutions, we know that's not so easy to do. I'm not clinging to the old structure. I think there is value in a centralized organization. We’re not the most respected social science. We think we should be. But we're not. Because of that, we need our central organization to protect our status in universities. So I hope we will tend these central institutions, rather than abandon them for political reasons.

*Originally published in the 2017 Summer Newsletter*

Edward J. Lawler
Cornell University
  
Interviewed by Shane R. Thye

Edward J. Lawler is the Martin P. Catherwood Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Professor of Sociology at Cornell University. He earned bachelor's (1966) and master’s (1968) degrees in sociology from California State University, Long Beach and Los Angeles, respectively, and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1972. His primary teaching and research areas are group processes, exchange, power, negotiation, sociology of emotion, and theory.
 
His current research analyzes the role of emotion in social exchange and negotiations, the formation of groups, the commitment of individuals to organizations, and more generally the emergence of social order. Lawler has authored or coauthored three books and over 60 articles, and edited or co-edited over 20 volumes of the annual series, Advances in Group Processes. He has won numerous awards for his work, including the 2010 James Coleman Best Book Award from the Rationality and Society Section of the ASA, the 2001 Cooley-Mead Award for career achievement from the Social Psychology Section of the ASA, and the 2002 Theory Prize from the Theory Section of the ASA.

​Were their experiences or mentors earlier in your life that contributed to your interest in social psychology in general and/or your specific research areas?
 
This is tough to answer. For as long as I remember, I was interested in politics and how people behave. I remember my father and I talking politics and social issues a lot, starting especially during the 1956 election. I suppose that election was my awakening. Then, of course, the 60’s made conflict, power, coalitions all salient issues. Yet, my intellectual interests were not well formed. I had a Professor and advisor, Franz Adler at Cal State, LA who stimulated my fascination with theory and introduced me to the idea that a micro foundation for sociological theory is important. He also inspired and encouraged me to change my career goal from getting an MSW to getting a Ph.D. My serious interest in social psychology came later when I was in the Ph.D. program at Wisconsin (see below).
 
How have your specific interests changed over time?
 
I started graduate school with an interest in theory (classical and contemporary) and organizations. I first worked with Jerry Hague at Wisconsin, a major organizations scholar. Then fate entered. During my second year in graduate school, Jerry Hague was on sabbatical, and I took an RA position with Andy Michener who was doing experiments on coalition formation. Working with Andy is what generated my interests in social psychology and set the stage for my early work on revolutionary coalitions. I learned to do research from Andy Michener. All in all, happenstance made me a social psychologist, but I retained my interest in theory, macro and micro, classical and contemporary. At Iowa I taught the required contemporary and classical theory courses over many years which helped to sustain and develop that interest.
 
My interest in power developed from my work on coalitions. The greatest intellectual influence on me was probably Richard Emerson (who I never met). What I saw in his approach was a deeper way to understand the positive side of power, as implied by his nonzero sum theorizing of power. This is what makes it possible for power and power use to generate cohesion and solidarity.
 
What are the major changes you have seen in the field of sociological social psychology over the course of your career?
 
When I started my career (1971 at the University of Iowa), social psychology was severely balkanized (the three faces). There were intellectual (and some personal) tensions among the senior representatives of different traditions of sociological social psychology (experimental, symbolic interaction, and social structure and personality), and a fair amount of counterproductive competition. Some argued that social psychology was in crisis and within sociology perhaps in its death throes. This environment has changed for the better over the years. There is much more dialogue across the three major traditions and more mutual respect and recognition. Moreover, the place of social psychology in the larger discipline is stronger and the experimental and qualitative methods used by many social psychologists have more acceptance in the discipline. There are undoubtedly many reasons for these changes, but I would point to two. First, the growth of theory-driven and theoretically informed research. All three faces of sociological social psychology can agree on this while practicing it in somewhat different ways. Second, the idea that macro explanations require at least some attention to micro level processes has made social psychological processes more important to sociology as a discipline. Consider all of the attention today given to mechanisms. It is no longer acceptable to simple document interesting and important effects but also necessary to tease out mechanisms. This attention to mechanisms throughout the discipline is an entree for social psychology.
 
What are your favorite pastimes or hobbies? What do you enjoy most in your leisure time?
 
Aside from reading (fiction and nonfiction), music and hiking are important pastimes. I have been hiking locally around Ithaca and also in the Adirondack Mountains of New York. The last few years I have hiked to the summit of 10 of the 46 Adirondack high peaks with my son and two grandsons. That has been energizing and great fun. Piano and music is another major pastime. I am taking piano lessons as well as classes in music history/appreciation and music theory. This is a new passion for me and I have a hard time staying away from the piano. Theater has also become an important pastime because we now live part time in New York City.
 
What one or two pieces of advice would give a graduate student or young assistant professor?
 
Your success as a researcher depends heavily on how you respond to reviews of your work, in other words, how thoroughly and carefully you process and respond to criticisms. When you get reviews of your work, blame yourself for all the comments you get and digest them carefully. Ask yourself: “What did I do in the paper that enabled or led the reviewer to that criticism or comment? How did I allow or generate that dumb, uninformed, off-base comment?
 
Given our pecuniary, transactional age, I also would advise young scholars to keep in view the intangibles that make academic life enjoyable and exciting. Listen to and “follow your gut.” My career has been heavily shaped by the intangibles –the intellectual and interpersonal environments at the two institutions (Iowa and Cornell) I have had the privilege to be a part of, excellent long-term colleagues and co-authors (Shane Thye and Jeongkoo Yoon), and simply being at the right place and the right time. The intangibles at the University of Iowa, including the people who were there when I was, jumped-started my academic career.

*Originally Published Winter 2017*
 
Peter J. Burke
University of California, Riverside
 
Interviewed by Phoenicia Fares
 
Peter J. Burke received his BA in sociology from the University of Massachusetts in 1961. He entered graduate school in sociology at Yale University where he earned his masters and doctorate in 1964 and 1965, respectively. It was while at Yale, working with Theodore Mills, that he became interested in group processes, the focus of his work when he joined the faculty at Indiana University as an assistant professor. Promoted to Associate Professor in 1969 and Professor in 1975, he served as chair from 1978-1982. In 1988, he joined the faculty at Washington State University as Professor and Research Scientist. In 2002, he joined the faculty at UC Riverside, and served as Chair from 2003-2005. He retired in 2014.
 
Burke served as Editor of Social Psychology Quarterly from 1982-1988, as Chair of the Social Psychology Section, 2000-2001, and as Chair of the Theory Section 2008-2009. He was awarded the ASA Social Psychology Section Cooley-Mead Award for life contributions to social  psychology in 2003. In 2004 he was named Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and appointed to the Sociological Research Association. In 2006 he was named Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.

What life experiences would you say put you on a path towards sociology and social psychology? Why sociological social psychology?
I wouldn’t say it was any particular life experiences that moved me in that direction. It was more of an accidental thing. I started college in 1957 at UMass and lived at home in Amherst. My parents were divorced the year before I started college and with the divorce, I could afford college only if I lived at home and worked summers to earn tuition.
 
At the beginning, I found so many of the subjects I studied very interesting. I drove my freshman advisor crazy by changing my major every month or two. I started in Chemistry, but decided I did not want to be in a smelly lab for the rest of my life. I toyed with biology (special interest in slime molds), physics, economics and some others (though I never found psychology attractive). Toward the end of my freshman year, I was in an introductory sociology class. Now sociology was a subject that I had never heard of in high school. I found it better than psychology, but I did not find it that interesting until, one day, I was reading some unassigned chapters in the accompanying reader. Those, I found fascinating and so took a second course, and a third, and so on. The more classes I took, the better I liked the subject matter.
 
I ended up taking eight or ten sociology courses – but none of them were social psychology, as that was not in the curriculum. Indeed, I didn’t even know there was a social psychology. It wasn’t until graduate school, when I was working with Ted Mills (a student of Robert Bales at Harvard) in small group processes that I moved in the direction of social psychology, though I didn’t know it at the time, i.e., it wasn’t called social psychology. I was interested in the development of structure in small groups, so I viewed myself as a social structural person, though at a micro level.
 
It wasn’t until I took a job at Indiana University, in 1961, that I discovered I was a social psychologist. Sociology at Indiana divided between structural sociology (which I thought I was) and social psychology. According to their view, my research on small group processes put me in the social psychology category and I was assigned to teach social psychology. Alfred Lindesmith oversaw social psychology at the time, and we were told what books to use in class (it was only another year or two before such mandates were removed), and so I used the Lindesmith and Strauss, Social Psychology (Lindesmith and Strauss 1956) to teach an introductory course named the individual and society. Sociology could not name their course social psychology because psychology had that name for a course. But then, the text for their social psychology course was Krech and Crutchfield’s Individual in Society.
 
It was by reading (and teaching from) the Lindesmith and Strauss book that I learned what social psychology was, especially the symbolic interaction approach from a Meadian point of view, and, indeed, that fit my thinking like a glove; that was me – I just didn’t know it. That is where I picked up an understanding of signs and symbols, role taking, and interpersonal processes. Of course, I still was interested in small group processes and the development of leadership structures, especially development of role differentiation with task leaders and socioemotional leaders, and so my early research continued with that for several years before turning to the study of identity processes.

Even the move to study identity processes was somewhat fortuitous. In about 1974, I was approached by a graduate student, Judy Tully, who was working with John Liell, another faculty member, on a study of almost 2000 6th, 7th, and 8th grade school kids in Indianapolis. She was interested in looking at the gender identities of these kids. At the time, my colleague, Sheldon Stryker, had been developing identity theory and through discussions with him I was familiar with his work and understood that identities were composed of meanings. But, I also had been reading Osgood, et al.’s (1957) work on the measurement of meaning. I had an idea that perhaps we could measure the gender meanings of the self-concepts of these school students. So, Judy and I worked out a series of bipolar adjectives trying to capture gender meanings. We interviewed several kids to see what they thought as to what it meant to be a girl or a boy (my first experience with something like focus groups). This all worked out quite well, and we published the results in Social Forces. Of course, this was just the beginning. Now, we had a tool, and like the two-year-old who has a hammer and discovers that everything needs to be hammered, I found lots of applications for this measurement method. I also found how much easier it is to develop theory when there are solid measurements of the concepts being theorized.
 
What was your favorite part of being a young scholar (in graduate school or pretenure)?
 
I was doing something I liked. I enjoyed the research and writing. I was with a set of excellent colleagues and mentors at Indiana. There were lots of discussions in the hallways and over lunches. It was a time when people went to a coffee lounge at 10:00am, there was always a group for lunch, often off campus, and again a coffee break around 3:00pm. Of course, there was also lots of work happening, researching, writing, preparing classes. But, it was the colleagues that made it great. They, too, were interested in ideas and learning. Elton Jackson and I sat in on a math course every semester for my first five years: calculus at several levels, linear algebra, mathematical statistics, differential equation. Some of those I took two or three times to finally absorb the material. I also learned in sitting in on those courses that I am not inclined as a real mathematician. Some of those undergraduate math majors just left us in the dust. Now, I know enough to get by.
 
It was the colleagues that made graduate school fun also. There were 10 persons in my cohort and we all got along well with each other. There were always discussions about our work, about what we were reading, and about life in general. It was a great time of intellectual growth and discovery. Graduate school is when I started buying books. I didn’t like to go to the library, so I bought most of what I read. I bought all of Freud, all of Parsons, all of Weber and Durkheim and on and on. I was always fascinated by ideas and I discovered those in plenty by all that reading.
 
What advice do you have for graduate students on the market today? 

If the student is on the market, it is probably too late for advice. Graduate school is the time for mentored learning of everything you can get your hands on. Not just sociology, not just social psychology, but also philosophy of science, logic, psychology, economics. Read, read, read (including novels – my favorite is science fiction, lots of it). Read all the original research, not just summaries. Read it so you understand it and can replicate it. Also take as many research methods courses as you can possible get. This stuff is hard to learn on your own after graduate school when you should be using it not learning it. Also, get involved in doing research and writing papers, either working with someone else or on your own. Begin to keep a file of ideas you want to pursue. What I always find fascinating is that whatever research question I am working on, I learn, as I dig into it, that there is far more to the question than I ever imagined. I also learned that others have already explored much of what I think is new, so I had to go deeper. But, I also learned to always, always, always work with a theoretical focus. The contribution of research is not the findings, but in what those findings mean, theoretically. I think it is important to develop a line of work, rather than moving from topic to topic. I remember when I first heard of the concept of sink costs. These are the investments that must be made before anything else can happen. On my first sabbatical I toyed with the idea of changing from small groups to demography. But, I realized that the investment I had already made in social psychology and understanding group processes would be lost. All the knowledge and skills I had developed over the years would serve little purpose, and I would have to invest time, and effort into a new enterprise before I could make any contribution. I didn’t make the change to demography. I did change focus a bit from small groups to identity theory, but as my thoughts evolved, I found the two areas were interrelated and I could use what I learned in each to bring them together.
 
Are there any surprising or unexpected directions your work on self and identity has taken you over the years?
 
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of my work with identity theory, and it continues to surprise me, is how well the theory has worked and how many areas it works in (Burke and Stets 2009). In the beginning, with the development of a method for measuring the meanings of an identity, we were only concerned with showing that people behaved in ways that were consistent with the meanings in their identities (Burke and Reitzes 1981). That part worked well. But the big development was the addition of Powers’ perceptual control model to the idea of identities as meanings (Powers 1973). This turned much understanding of human behavior on its head. People do not control their behavior; they control their perceptions. This addition led naturally to the idea of identity verification and non-verification as part of the control of perceptions (meanings reflecting the identity). It also made it possible to understand both identity stability and change as part of the same verification process (Burke and Cast 1997). What was surprising to me was how well these ideas have been supported in research; even the idea that being evaluated more positively than our identity meanings makes us feel bad (Burke and Harrod 2005).
 
References
 
Burke, Peter J. and Donald C. Reitzes. 1981. "The Link between Identity and Role Performance." Social Psychology Quarterly 44:83-92.
 
Burke, Peter J. and Alicia D. Cast. 1997. "Stability and Change in the Gender Identities of Newly Married Couples." Social Psychology Quarterly 60:277-90.
 
Burke, Peter J. and Michael M. Harrod. 2005. "Too Much of a Good Thing?". Social Psychology Quarterly 68:359-74.
 
Burke, Peter J. and Jan E. Stets. 2009. Identity Theory. New York: Oxford University Press.
 
Lindesmith, Alfred R. and Anselm L. Strauss. 1956. Social Psychology. New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston.
 
Osgood, Charles E., George J. Suci, and Percy H. Tannenbaum. 1957. The Measurement of Meaning. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
 
Powers, William T. 1973. Behavior: The Control of Perception. Chicago: Aldine.

*Originally published in the 2015 Winter Newsletter*

David Wagner
State University of New York, Albany 
 
David Wagner is Professor of Sociology at the University at Albany- SUNY. He received his graduate degree from Stanford University in 1978. He has received awards for his excellence in research, teaching, and service. His work has been featured in such venues as the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, and Social Forces. His research interests are in theory construction and group processes. This fun little interview was conducted over the phone and it was a pleasure to hear his story!

​We’re always interested to know what brought you to social psychology. So, what life experiences contributed to you wanting to become a social psychologist?
 
I have to go all the way back to the environment I grew up in. My father was a minister, my mother a public school teacher, mainly in small towns in Pennsylvania and Ohio. When you’re in small communities like that and your parents have those kinds of occupations, you’re in the public eye pretty much all the time. And in the denomination that my father was in, Methodism, you moved every two or three years. So I was accustomed to having to learn a new world every two or three years. As a consequence, I pretty quickly developed an interest in other people and how their lives went and, for that matter, in dealing with social and moral issues given my upbringing as the son of a minister. I wouldn’t say that at that time the experiences were gearing me specifically towards social psychology, but they were certainly developing my interest in and a sensitivity to sociological kinds of questions.

The other thing that probably more specifically led me to focus on things that were social psychological and sort of group processes-oriented were my experiences in college. I was a student in the '60s and at that time a lot of the way in which students interacted with each other and worked on social issues and other things that interested them was in small group settings. A very common kind of phenomenon at the time was something called sensitivity groups. These were sessions in which group members were geared to studying the ways in which their group worked. They also focused on what the interests and concerns and needs of each member of the group were as a means of helping those groups work more effectively. I got interested enough in studying this that I ended up writing my honor’s thesis on sensitivity groups. Part of the thesis dealt with what I would call a social movement analysis. The phenomenon had actually started back in the late 1940s in the work of Kurt Lewin who was organizing leadership training sessions primarily for business folk. It diversified into really quite a social phenomenon with a wide variety of different kinds of groups, from leadership training sessions to groups as exotic as the nude encounter sessions held at the Esalen Institute in California.
 
But the part of my thesis that ended up being of greater and longer term interest to me was looking at how training groups and sensitivity groups worked. Did they, in fact, successfully change people’s sensitivity towards other group members? Did they develop effective leaders? I was looking at the research and theoretical ideas that people had developed to try to account for those things. Now, at that time I wouldn’t have described this work specifically as social psychology and group processes. However, by the time I got into graduate school, I realized that was part of what I had been interested in all the time.
 
Tell us about your early career.
 
As I suspect you know, my graduate training was at Stanford and that was really the most formative experience in terms of my sociological identity. Coming out of college, I was really enamored of C. Wright Mills and very antagonist towards a lot of traditional sociology. Mills talked about the notion of an anti-sociology and I sort of thought of myself as an anti-sociologist.
 
In more positive terms, a book had just been published a couple of years before I had graduated: Berger and Luckman’s "Social Construction of Reality" and I was really, really into that. You should see how marked up my copy from college is of that book. When I got out to Stanford, I realized I was kind of lucky that I ended up there. Damned if they weren’t able to meet every objection and criticism I had to the way in which sociology was practiced, suggesting, in fact, there was a way to build a more robust sociology. It was really quite convincing to me and I embarked on a much more positive path than I ever would have prior to that. I found myself most interested in the Expectation States program that Berger, Cohen, and Zelditch had all been working on. I was an assistant for Joe. That worked out very fortunately because we shared a variety of interests and he sort of shepherded me early on. Toward the end of my graduate training, I got an opportunity for a job at the University of Toronto. I hadn’t finished my dissertation, but Jim Moore at York and John Kervin at Toronto wanted to build a Canadian school of social psychology. That school would focus especially on Expectation States work, but also on other group processes, to build a Stanford of the North, if you will. I interviewed for a job at Toronto while a colleague and good friend of mine in graduate school interviewed for a job at York. We both got offers and had we both gone there, I think we would have been quite successful in developing a good social psych program at Toronto and York. Unfortunately, my friend took a job at South Carolina instead and I ended up staying at U of T only two years. I finished my dissertation and moved from there to Iowa, where I did all of my early work. That’s where I published my first book on theory growth and where I worked with Becky and Tom Ford on a couple of experiments concerned with whether gender inequalities can be reduced.
 
Do you find that your specific interests have changed at all over time?
 
Not in any dramatic sort of way. In part, it’s because I’ve had sort of a dual track career with interests both in expectation states processes and in theory and theory growth. So, whenever I get tired of doing one thing or something’s not going particularly well in one of those areas, I jump track to the other area. I've moved back and forth quite a bit over my career. But in terms of the kinds of things that I got interested in in graduate school, those are still pretty much the things that I’m interested in now. In terms of advice to people, have alternatives! Don’t just have one track of things you’re in pursuit of because things don’t always go right. And if they don’t, if you have some sort of alternative direction that you can pursue, then, let me tell you, it makes life a lot simpler.
 
Your most current research that you’re focusing on, do you want to share some info?
 
The work that I’m doing right now is concerned with what I call status deviance. It’s actually based on some work I published in Group Processes in ‘88. It dealt with what happens in groups when you have somebody who you really think should be the leader in the group and that person simply does not perform that role effectively at all. He or she is just a bump on the log, if you will. How does the group respond to that? What kinds of evaluations do they have of such a group member? Do they even want that member to continue in the group? And at the other end of the scale, suppose you have someone in the group who is really expected to be just one of the followers in the group and not expected to do very much. Suppose that person attempts to take control of the group, to become the leader and take charge of things. How does the group respond to that person? Do they really want that person in the group? I developed an informal version of the theoretical argument about that back in ‘88. More recently, I have formalized the theory and right now we’re involved in pre-testing some experiments that deal with the general question. We are also focusing on the more specific question of what difference does it make if you started out with higher or lower status in the group when you begin to behave in either of these deviant ways. What effect does that have? Based on my ’88 paper, Chris Moore and Reef Youngreen did a partial study of this about a decade ago, but nobody had really done very much work on it since. I’m realizing why now. It’s definitely a challenge to figure out how to test this. It’s the sort of work that I couldn’t have done much earlier in my career because it’s much more risky. There’s still a possibility, although the pre-testing is going really well, that nothing will come from it. At this stage in my career, I can just say “oh well” and go on to something else. I have plenty of other things in the fire. But, if it bears fruit, I will feel a very real sense of accomplishment.
 
What interests and activities besides sociology are important to you? What do you do besides sociology?
 
I sing with a group called Albany Pro Musica. APM is probably the most accomplished and highly recognized amateur singing group in the Northeast. We’ve cut several CDs and have had some of our recordings played on NPR. We perform in the Troy Music Hall. That venue is considered one of the most acoustically perfect music halls in the world! And we perform there quite regularly. Anyway, I have the good fortune of having a trained tenor singing voice and that’s a fairly rare breed. I’ve been singing with Pro Musica for about 20 years. I don’t do a lot of solo work these days, but I do sing pretty regularly with APM. I’ve had singing as a part of my life for a long, long time. I’ve been in other kinds of choral groups and university choirs. When I was a kid, I sang in church choirs from second grade on. So, I’ve clearly had a lot of music in my life. I had piano lessons for 11 years and played the trumpet and the French horn in high school and I still play the piano, but my best musical instrument is still my voice. And that’s what I’ve pursued most commonly outside academic work.
 
I’m also really interested in words and word play--crossword puzzles and varieties of that sort of thing. I definitely do the New York Times puzzle, which I’ve gotten quite good at. It’s an acquired skill. I’ve even constructed and published a few crossword puzzles of my own, although only in really minor venues. But mainly I’m a solver, not a constructor.
 
That kind of leads into the idea of how to balance professional and personal demands. How have you been able to do that?
 
I’d have to say: begin by recognizing that there is something other than one’s academic life and attending to that to some degree. I think of it primarily in terms of family. If you have a life partner or simply someone else who is important to you, maintain a degree of consciousness in that person’s life. Their concerns are important as well. Take time to make sure you’re not sacrificing their concerns in pursuit of your own. Sometimes you need to make some sacrifices in terms of the things you pursue.

*Originally published in the Summer 2015 Section Newsletter*

Murray Webster
University of North Carolina, Charlotte
  
As interviewed by Sharon C. Doerer
 
Murray Webster is Professor of Sociology at UNC-Charlotte. His degrees are all in sociology from Stanford University. In August, he will receive the Social Psychology Section’s Cooley-Mead Award.
 
Sharon C. Doerer is a Manager in Talent Management at TIAA-CREF. She earned her B.A. and M.A. in sociology and her Ph.D. in Organizational Science from UNC-Charlotte. Her dissertation research, which was supported by an NSF Dissertation Improvement Grant to her and Webster, adapted Martha Foschi’s application folders design to study racial double standards in hiring.

How did you get interested in sociology and social psychology?
 
It was just luck. In high school I took a one-semester course called sociology, and all I can remember about it is thinking “How could anyone want to study this?” The textbook gave the impression that there was no knowledge in the field, only conflicting opinions with no way to decide among them, and moral injunctions that lacked empirical support. You couldn’t design a better way to turn off a teenager.
 
My first year of college I enrolled in an introductory sociology course taught by Sandy Dornbusch because the student course review book described him as “ebullient.” He was, and is. His impression of evangelical preachers is classic. He assigned a paper he had published with S. Frank Miyamoto testing predictions regarding the importance of specific others and the generalized other in forming the self-concept (AJS 1956). That paper got me thinking about the significance of social structure and the importance of interaction in creating and maintaining the social world. Remember, I grew up in rural Illinois, a stable society with few people around, an only child, and in a culture that promoted individualism and self-reliance. I wanted to understand how social structures get built up and maintained and the place of interaction within structures.
 
My term paper for that course was on race and intelligence. It could easily have degenerated into moral platitudes—as in my high school class—but Sandy only accepted evidence. I learned that the research showed lower mean IQ scores for African American kids than for white kids. But every time you control a factor—parents’ income, teacher’s experience, rural vs. urban school, section of the country, summer classes, etc.—the gap lessens. I concluded that if we knew and controlled all the social factors affecting test scores, the group difference would disappear. I’m pleased that I figured that out before I learned statistical regression modeling.
 
Where did you spend the early years, student and faculty member?
 
After the Intro course, I enrolled in more sociology courses, becoming a major and entering the small honors program. The honors students—there were four of us—met weekly in Sandy Dornbusch’s office and discussed topics in theory and research. I also took several psychology courses, but the psychology department was overreacting against the complicated non-empirical formulations of the psychoanalysts. Instructors said “There’s no such thing as theory; all we have are findings.” I know that’s hard to square with Leon Festinger’s presence as he published his theories of social comparison processes and cognitive dissonance, but it’s what I remember. Without theory to organize findings and show their interrelations memorizing them all seemed hopeless. The sociology department, in contrast, emphasized developing general theory, and findings were important only as they helped to assess theories.
 
To earn money, I got a job as an experimental confederate in Bernie Cohen’s conformity experiments, which used the basic Asch situation. At the end, an experimenter would ask the group, among other things, whether they thought anyone in the group was pre-instructed to behave in a particular way. One time, he asked specifically about me. The high point of that career was when an actual participant replied “Not him; he looks really confused.” Joe Berger also was beginning the earliest expectation experiments using machine-controlled disagreements, and with a recommendation from Bernie, I began working on those. The experience of experimental sociology was eye-opening because of the quality of data. You cannot take on too many research questions in a single experimental condition, but usually you can be quite confident in the findings and less troubled by alternate interpretations than with other designs.

For graduate school I wanted to learn other kinds of sociology and applied to the program at UCLA and was accepted. At UCLA I became an RA for Oscar (Ike) Grusky and Lindsay Churchill, who were conducting Bales-type discussion groups. We coded speech and gestures. A raised middle finger is category 12 “seems unfriendly.” I studied classical theory, survey design, and culture and personality. I also worked as an RA in Public Health, where I learned about differences in design and interpretation of applied and basic research. But I missed the experimental laboratory, so applied and returned to Stanford the next year.
 
Joe Berger accepted me as one of his students. That lucky event shaped my intellectual life for all the years since, and Joe has become my best friend as well. I worked on several different experiments, the most memorable being with Staff Sergeants at Travis Air Force Base that was used to hone the theory of status characteristics and expectation states (ASR 1972). The space that the Air Force gave us to work was close to a runway with planes taking off every few minutes headed for Vietnam. Everyone, experimenters and Sergeants, wore headphones so we could read the instructions and communicate.
 
My first job was at Johns Hopkins University where Pete Rossi took a chance and hired me. A huge benefit of being at Hopkins was knowing Doris Entwisle, with whom I did several experiments in school classrooms. We showed that we could raise children’s expectations for  success, and those changed expectations affected behaviors that improve learning. My biggest regret when I left Hopkins for South Carolina in 1974 was leaving the research program with Doris. We saw each other only rarely for many years, but a few years ago we reconnected when Hopkins established a graduate fellowship in her name. The wonderful thing about friendship is that it resumes at the same place where it left off. Doris and I were laughing at the same things as before, and finishing each other’s sentences. Friendship may be unique in that way. Certainly status relations, dominance relations, romantic relations, and other types don’t resume unchanged after a long period.

I know you love theatre. Tell me what draws you to live theatre.
 
Live theater is an astonishing art form. Unlike movies, every performance is slightly different so the experience of watching also is different. The performance vanishes the instant after its creation, and it never reappears in exactly the same way. That evanescence is what I think people mean when they speak of the magic of theater. 

I am in awe of the performers. On Broadway, they create characters and relationships eight times a week. Most of the audience will see a show only once, and it always has to look fresh for them. Actors have to love their work for it’s hard, there is no job security, and, with few exceptions, they aren’t paid much. For many actors, TV shows—The Good Wife, Law & Order, the soaps—pay the bills when they aren’t on stage. One of my New York friends used to ride two different subways to get to the TV studio for 6 a.m. call.
 
Bob Shelly likened pretesting an experiment to a dress rehearsal of a show, and the metaphor seems apt. Both efforts involve creating a short-term alternate reality, and you always have to see how others interpret the experience. However there are limits to the metaphor. An experiment is a very simplified situation and usually it should not remind anyone of any real social situation to avoid bringing in unwanted suppositions.
 
What is your favorite show? Why? What show have you seen the most?
 
Xanadu, which opened in 2007. Believe it or not, I saw it 80 times on Broadway, plus a dozen or so times on tour. I can’t give a rational answer to why I love it, but I always walk out in a good mood. They use stage seating, and you can see me on YouTube with Mary Testa turning my head. Not surprisingly, I got to know the actors. One, Kenita Miller, later came to Charlotte as lead in The Color Purple. After the show you and I and your husband Brian spoke with her and he took the picture.
 
What advice would you give to a graduate student? To an assistant professor?
 
I feel presumptuous giving advice. (People usually stop listening after “If you ask me….”) For whatever they’re worth, though, here are some thoughts.
 
Graduate school is tough and every student feels at some point as though she or he is not going to make it. Remember that everyone around you often feels the same way. Help each other. Sociology, like the world, is not zero-sum. Some of the most valuable experiences of graduate school come from talking with other graduate students. A fundamental decision is whether you aim to work at a four-year college, a university, or a research institute because that affects the distribution of skills that you want to acquire. Four-year colleges want faculty who teach well, so practice as a teaching assistant and consider taking a course from the school of education. Universities and research institutes want research, so make sure you are as good at it as you can be. Consider taking a course in advanced statistics or in modeling from the mathematics department.
 
When it comes to picking a dissertation topic, there is no shortage of advice. Here’s mine: A good research question is one that sociologists want to know the answer to. Notice I did NOT say to choose something you’re passionate about. Passion is OK but optional. (Passionate interests often reflect your own life. Tell your therapist but don’t write it for publication.) Attracting the interest of sociologists is crucial. How do you know what questions sociologists want to answer? Read the journals. Most articles state “next steps” or “further questions” in the discussion section. Those are guaranteed to be of interest to at least a few sociologists. Please do not try to justify a topic with “Nobody has yet studied….” There are plenty of topics that nobody has yet studied for the very good reason that they are silly topics. Remember that the goal of a dissertation is to show that you can formulate and conduct an investigation of a good research topic. The goal is not to radically change everyone’s thinking. That’s delusional, and if you take it seriously, you will find yourself becoming the world’s oldest graduate student. Not a pretty picture.
 
Assistant professors should emphasize research. You don’t want to generate complaints from students (and nowadays, from their parents), but teaching really isn’t the central focus of your job. Research matters. When you go up for promotion, the p & t (promotion and tenure) committee will scrutinize your research productivity, and probably from only the first four years, so don’t waste time getting started. And of course if you look for a job elsewhere, they have no reliable way to assess teaching or service, so it’s all on your research record. Teaching and service can be seductive and demanding, yet nobody is likely to tell you “Put a little more time on your research today.” You have to tell that to yourself.
 
If you have an opportunity to work with a more senior member of your department, that can be valuable. You can learn new research skills and you will have some-one to ask for advice and to help with writing for publication. Collaborating with another assistant professor can be almost as valuable. Teach yourself quickly how to write research proposals. There are many benefits of this—you learn to express ideas clearly and you begin to integrate with the community of researchers, among them—and also, p & t committees smile if you get grants or at least show that you are trying to do so. Stay open to new ideas and research topics, talk with as many people as you can at meetings and through email, Especially in the social psychology section, there are many more smart people who are generous with their ideas than you might imagine. You will find time spent with them to be exciting and enormously satisfying. Enjoy your work.
 
If you ask me.

*Originally Published in the Spring 2015 Section Newsletter*
​
John DeLamater
University of Wisconsin - Madison
  
John D. DeLamater is the Conway-Bascom Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He earned a B.A (Psychology) at University of California-Santa Barbara, an M.S. (Psychology) and a Ph.D. (Social Psychology) at the University of Michigan. His areas of research and teaching include social interaction and relationships, human sexuality, and social psychology. He has published more than 50 research articles, and 30 chapters in edited volumes and encyclopedias. His current research is applies a biopsychosocial model to sexuality in later life; most recently he has studied the effects of hormones on sexual expression of men and women over 57. John is co-author of Social Psychology, 8th ed. (with Daniel Myers and Jessica Collett), and Understanding Human Sexuality, 12 th ed. (with Janet Hyde). He is the co-editor of the Handbook of Social Psychology, 2nd ed. (with Amanda Ward), and co-editor of the Handbook of the Sociology of Sexualities (with Rebecca Plante). He is a Fellow of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, the 2002 recipient of the Kinsey Award for Career Contributions to Sex Research, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality. He has received awards for excellence in teaching from the Department of Sociology, and the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award from University of Wisconsin-Madison.

What life experiences have contributed to your interest in social psychology in general and/or your specific research areas?
 
I had psychology as an undergrad and was a psychology major. I think it was in my junior year, I had been taking courses like learning and motivation and statistics. Another class was something called “Motivation and Perception.” I just felt like that the content in those courses couldn’t speak to the things that I was interested in; in regards to the human social behavior. I was more interested in: How does the interpersonal or interactional context influence our behavior? I wasn’t seeing any of that in the psychology courses that I was taking at that time. I think I actually said that to one of my professors and he said, “Well, you should take social psychology.” I said “Oh, okay.” So, then my first semester of my senior year I took social psychology and I really found that it covered much more of the kind of questions about human behaviors that I was interested in. So, I decided to get a Ph. D in social psychology.
 
In those days there were three interdisciplinary programs in the United States where you got some sociology as well as some psychology – Stanford, Michigan, and Columbia. I was out in California, so I visited Stanford and said, “Well, I don’t want to go there!” I didn’t want to move to Columbia and live in New York City. So I went to Michigan sight unseen and enrolled in a joint social psychology programs there which turned out to be a really good fit for me. So, that was how I got into social psychology specifically.
 
I’ve always been interested in social interaction, and I think my interest once I got into the field moved in that direction. When I came here as an assistant professor, I needed to start a research program and I decided to study human sexuality and particularly interactional aspects of sexual behavior because I had this nice convenient sample of college student right outside my door. My first major research project was an interview study that looked at a variety of social influences including: attitude and the self; and the nature of relationships with partners and with friends and with parents; to see how those things all contributed to the development of intimate relationships. Since then I have done a few other things, but primarily I focused on various aspects of social psychology of sexuality.
 
Where did you spend the early part of your sociological career as faculty?
 
My first job was here in University of Wisconsin, Madison. At that time in the sociology department there were several social psychologist including three other graduates of the joint PhD program at Michigan. So, I came here and immediately felt right at home and have been here ever since. Madison is a wonderful place to live, a great place to raise children, and the department has been very congenial, so I’ve never been particularly motivated to move.
 
How have your specific interests in sociology changed over time?
 
I think I’ve gotten much more interested in, on the one hand, in the social context. In recent years I’ve been looking at literature on the social environment. So for example, I am fascinated by Adam Isiah Green’s new work on field theory – the nature of the immediate field within which our behavior occurs and how socially defined physical features, as well as the specific collection of other people who are present, have an impact on our behavior. I’ve been reading some books on the city and sexuality over the last few years and finding that really interesting in terms of how particularly city environments facilitate the development of subcultures that attract people with particular kinds of interest. On the other hand, I’m much more interested in biology and the links between biology and social behavior. That probably reflects the fact that I am getting older. So my body is calling my attention to the fact that it is there and I’m becoming more aware of it. I think that in general sociologists have overlooked the significance of the body until very recently. I’m really pleased to see new work now being done by younger people on bodies and embodiment because I think that’s a very important aspect of our behavior and our feelings about our self.
 
My most recent research has been on sexual behavior in later life and how it is influenced by biology, by relationship factors, and by sexual history. I have just drafted a paper looking at the influence of hormones on the sexual behavior of people over the age of fifty-seven. Looking at the impacts of estrogen and testosterone of male and female sexual behavior and that’s still in the works and hopefully will get published. My other big writing project is the Handbook of Sexualities which is going to be part of the Springer Handbook series. Rebecca Plante at Ithaca College and I edited that and solicited 25 chapters on various topics in the sociology and social psychology of sexuality. That will be coming out in August in time for the ASA meeting. The theme of the meeting this year is Sexuality in Society, so the book will coincide nicely with that.

​What interests and/or activities, outside of sociology, are important to you?
 
My family I think has probably always been my other big interest, so I work hard at getting what I thought was a good work-family balance. I’ve appreciated being in academics because it enabled me to go to some of my kids’ events at school during the day and occasionally take them on field trips and stuff like that. So that (until they all left!) was a big focus of my time and energy. My hobby is actually is railroads and rail transportation. I’ve been a member of a couple of different railway museums that have large collections of real railroad equipment and real rail transit equipment. I spend an occasional day working on some antique streetcar or some antique collective railway car and making them run again which gives me a lot of pleasure.
 
Given your success in the field, how do you balance professional and personal demands?
 
One of the things that I’ve been doing in mentoring graduate students is telling them that the earlier you start working on the balance the better. I encourage graduate students to start working on a good balance the first year in graduate school, because I think when you get into graduate school you develop habits of work that are going to become your standard practice – unless you intentionally work at coming up with a different kind of balance. I think it’s really easy in graduate school to let the immediate demands of due dates and all these requirements you have to meet take over and get focused on those at the expense of personal relationships. I’ve seen a number of couples over the years where – in my perception – that graduate school could be the breakup of their relationship. Some of these were couples where both were graduate students (not necessarily in the same field), but others were couples in which one was in graduate school and the other one wasn’t. The latter type seems to be particularly vulnerable because the one who’s not in graduate school really wants to do couple-oriented things on the night, and weekends, and go away in the summer. If you’re totally focused on your graduate work, you don’t want to do those things. I really encourage people to be thoughtful about that early on in their careers.
 
Some of the most successful marriages that I ever seen involved explicitly scheduling activities with the partner. I’ve known for a number of years a very prominent physician here in Madison and I asked him once how he managed to keep his marriage together and have four kids. He said that every Friday from 6PM until 8AM Saturday morning was his “wife time.” He never, ever, ever did anything professional, including going a way to a meeting, to violate that time. It was just an absolute rule. Another couple, dual career couple, they used to have a rule that from 9:30-10:30 every night was their time and nothing could interfere with that – including their kids. I think for some people it might actually take the discipline of scheduling time with their partner, and then maintaining it, in order to be sure that you are putting some time into that. I mean I know some people vary, but it’s something people should pay attention to early on.
 
If you had to leave academia, what career would you choose?
 
In my younger days, if I had left academia, I would probably try and go into transportation because I do have a real love of railroads and particularly passenger railroads. So, I think that would have been my first choice of an alternative career. I really have enjoyed being in academics. I love teaching and I feel very fortunate because I think having a job that you love and from which you derive personal satisfaction is probably a very important aspect of good mental health. I feel fortunate to have had that and by working in academics. I would certainly look for something else that would give me that kind of feelings of accomplishment and satisfaction.

Do you know something today you whish you had known when you started in sociology? What is it?
​
I got into sociology forty something years ago. I wish I had appreciated the importance of networking. I had this naï ve idea that if you did good work and published it the world would come to your doors. That maybe true for a few people, but probably as a general rule it’s not true. Over the years I have increasingly come to appreciate just how important networking is. Networking with other people who are working on similar kinds of problems, to some degree, networking with your colleagues in your department, and certainly networking with your professional associations, and networking with the people in the social psychology section of the professional association has been very important – and I should have done more of it. In the context of publish or perish, going to a meeting or spending an extra day there to go to a section reception may seem expendable. But really, in the long run, that will probably do your career a lot more good than a few more hours sitting trying to get few more words on a paper or analyze a bit more data. It really is those relationships with your colleagues that are going to keep you fresh and that are going to get your work out where people can really see it and really appreciate it.
 
What one piece of advice would give a graduate student?
 
Early on start being strategic about your career. If you can do it, even your first year of grad school, start thinking clearly about what kind of position you are working towards. Do you want to be a faculty member at an R1 school or do you want to be a facility at a second-tier school? Do you want to go to a small liberal arts college? Do you want to do full time research? Do you want to do consulting? Do you want to do clinical work? Each of those careers requires a somewhat different set of activities in graduate school. So, the earlier you begin to focus on what kind of career you want, the earlier you can start being very intentional about how you use your time and use your time in a way that really benefits you. I do placement here. Students, usually in their fifth or sixth year, will start thinking about the job market and they’ll come and say, “What do I do?” I’ll say, “What kind of job do you want?” and they’ll say, “Well I want X job.” I’ll reply, “You need to do A, B, and C”, and they’ll say, “Well I didn’t do any of those. Why didn’t somebody tell me?” So, I think you can avoid that kind of being mismatched on the base of what you did to the kind of job you want if you start getting intentional about it earlier on. I encourage graduate students to think about if there is somebody in the field that is doing what you want to be doing. If there is, get in touch with that person. Get their advice on how to get into the kind of job that they’ve got. You’ll be a lot happier in the long run and you won’t risk wasting your time. There are things you can do in graduate school that may turn out to not have been useful at all – depending on where you are going. You can avoid that if you have a better sense earlier on at what your goals are.
 
What about an assistant professor?
 
Well I guess, again work-life balance. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy – and makes problems in Jack’s relationship (or Jill’s!). Also, I think really spend some time finding out what the decision criteria are if you are working towards getting tenure – What are the criteria for getting tenure for your department at your institution? Hopefully it will take care of itself or hopefully people have told you. What we have for example, is a mentoring committee for our assistant professors. Many assistant professors don’t really take advantage of them but they should. They really should at least once a year have a sit down with the mentoring committee and have a pretty open discussion about their work, how is going and where it’s going, how things are shaping up in terms of tenure decisions. We have on a campus-wide basis a special committee for women. University of Wisconsin, Madison made a commitment about twenty years ago now trying to really encourage women faculty who were feeling in many cases that the mentoring they were getting from male mentoring committees wasn’t as useful. We encourage all of our women faculty, and assistant professors especially, to take advantage of their women faculty mentoring committee. And the committee includes women from outside the department which in some ways really makes it even more valuable. Read the documents! I mean UW- Madison has a ton of documents about tenure criteria and decision-making processes. Check out the process. Make sure your department is doing it the way it is supposed to be done because, unfortunately, not every department does. So, investing some time and energy early on and learning about those things, I think, can just make you more efficient. If you know what those are then you know exactly what you should be working on.

*Originally Published in the Fall 2014 Section Newsletter*
 
Joseph Berger
Stanford University
 
As interviewed by Murray Webster
 
Following service in the Army in World War II, an undergraduate degree at Brooklyn College, a doctorate at Harvard University, and a faculty appointment at Dartmouth College, Joseph Berger moved to Stanford University in 1959. There he and other young sociologists began to practice what some called “Stanford sociology.” The approach is marked by developing explicit explanatory theory and conducting empirical tests, often, although definitely not always, in a laboratory. Other sociologists have independently developed comparable approaches at other universities, and today this kind of work constitutes a significant source of contributions to social psychology.
 
Joseph Berger has received significant awards for his work, including research grants from federal agencies, the Social Psychology Section’s Cooley-Mead Award, and ASA’s W. E. B. DuBois Award for a career of distinguished scholarship. His remarkable career continues to the present as Joe participates in professional meetings and reviews for our journals; his most recent scholarly paper was published in 2014. This year Joe reached the age of 90, an occasion that seems like a good time to ask him to reflect on his career, our discipline, and his views of our shared future

Were there experiences early in your life or when you were growing up that influenced your becoming a sociologist?
 
Yes, there were. Both my parents were intensely interested in the political and economic issues of the day (these were the years of the great depression, the New Deal, of Fascism in Italy, and National Socialism in Germany). My father was a committed Marxist all his life. I grew up in that environment so it isn’t too surprising that by 14, I was reading and struggling to understand Engels, “The Origin of the Family” or that about the same age I was marching in May Day parades, and calling out “Free the Scottsboro Boys” and “Down with Jim Crow Laws.” During this period in my life I had already become extremely sensitive to the differences between socially advantaged and socially disadvantaged groups in society.
 
As the years went by and I read more widely and thought more intensively about the subject, I developed reservations about Marxist theory. By the time I left for the Army I had serious doubts, and I was looking for alternatives, but found none that satisfied me. However, I began to think of Sociology and in my high school yearbook when asked what I wanted to be, I said “Instructor in the Science of Sociology.” By the time I came out of the Army, I had decided Marxist theory was not a viable theory of society or social processes. As I saw it the task ahead was to develop new theories of society and social processes. Obviously this was the work of Sociologists, so I decided to go into Sociology. For me, going into Sociology was a “calling.”
 
I know that you have been involved in different research programs in your career. One of these has been concerned with the nature of sociological theory generally. How did this program evolve? What were your primary objectives in this program?
 
My objectives in this research were to analyze the structure of different types of theory building activities in sociology and to determine the nature of different forms of theory growth that occurs in our field. My interests in these questions peaked in graduate school at Harvard. I was exposed to the works, for example, of Talcott Parsons on the one hand and to that of George Homans on the other. Each claimed to be creating theory, but from my standpoint there were big differences in what they were doing. What emerged for me was the question of how can we distinguish the different types of theoretical enterprises that sociologists are engaged in?
 
Over the years I read extensively in the history and philosophy of science (looking for insights) while pondering this question. Eventually, I came to distinguish between theoretical work concerned with developing Orienting Strategies in sociology from those concerned with developing Unit Theories in sociology. However, I knew that this classification wasn’t complete. In working on Expectation States theory, I found that I was developing different unit theories that appeared to be interrelated. How did this kind of work fit into my classification? I had no answer and in 1968 I wrote of this type of theoretical work as developing “theories in parallel.”
 
In 1971, while on a fellowship, I encountered and was exposed to the work of the philosopher Imre Lakatos. Lakatos lectured and wrote extensively on the idea of scientific research programs. This idea became the basis of my own work on theoretical research programs. The rest is history. Starting in the 1970s and going on into the 1980s, I worked with David G. Wagner on determining the nature of different types of theoretical research programs and the nature of different types of theoretical growth including the elaboration, the proliferation, and the integration of theories. In the 1990s collaborating with Morris Zelditch I worked on the nature of orienting strategies. We distinguished fundamental principles from working strategies, which theorists use in developing unit theories. In summary, this research provides us with a working typology of different types of theory building activities in the terms Orienting Strategies, Theoretical Research Programs and Unit Theories. It also provides us with an analysis of the structure of each of these three types as well as an analysis of some important forms of theoretical growth that occur in sociology.

A second major research program you have been heavily involved in is the origin and growth of the Expectation States theory program. How has this program evolved? What is the present state of this theoretical work?
 
The Expectation States program has absorbed the greatest share of my research efforts. I will describe it informally avoiding theoretical details.
 
This program began with my doctoral thesis in the late 1950s, which was concerned with the emergence of interaction hierarchies in small groups whose members were initially similar in status. Sometime after this program was initiated, Morris Zelditch, Bernard P. Cohen and I constructed a theory, published in 1966, concerned with disadvantaged groups, as for example, women, blacks, and Mexican Americans. In it we ad-dressed the question of when do status relations exist between these disadvantaged groups and their complementary groups, say men, whites, Anglo Americans. We argued that for status relations to exist at least two things had to be true. First, women, blacks, and Mexican Americans had to be culturally defined as being less valued than individuals in the advantaged groups. And second, women, blacks, and Mexican Americans had to be culturally defined as having less generalized performance capacities than those in their complementary groups. Status relations between groups, when they exist, have consequences particularly when individuals from different status groups work together in committees, work groups, or task groups generally. They create inequalities in behavior in groups, inequalities in who influences whom, and inequalities in how individuals evaluate each other. And those inequalities can often operate to maintain the initial status relations.
 
The original 1966 theory was modified, then elaborated, and finally it was formalized in the 1977 book. Status Characteristics Theory has now been applied in the study of major social distinctions in our society including, among others, gender distinctions, racial distinc-tions, and ethnic distinctions. Over the years the program of which this Status theory is part has steadily expanded and grown. We now have additional theories that, among other things, show how ine-quality of rewards is related to status relations, how new status characteristics can be socially created, how status relations evolve through a sequence of tasks, and how status objects can be con-structed, and we even have research, but not enough in my opinion, that tells us how we can overcome the effects of status inequality in group situations. Today the Expectation States program has more than a dozen and a half branches that we documented in Advances in Group Processes this year. This is due in part to the fact the pro-gram has attracted scholars who are committed to developing a cumulative body of theoretical research that is empirically grounded. Nevertheless, there are exciting research tasks still to be tackled.
 
What advice would you give to someone starting their career?
 
That’s a hard one since individuals start their careers with very different histories and are in very different situations. Personally, I found the following ideas to be important:

• Acknowledge your basic research goals and objectives. What do you want to understand? What do you want to achieve? For myself, I usually want to understand fundamental social principles and basic mech-anisms that can account for the different types of social behavior I am studying. These goals have influ-enced my work throughout my career.
• Sociology is a fascinating field with so many interesting and important problems. Select a set of problems that you are intensely interested in. Can you see yourself working on these problems five years from now or even longer? Can you see getting a deep understanding of the principles and mechanisms that are involved in these problems? I started out being interested in inequalities, social expectations, and status. Status in particular intrigued me since it often involves invidious and collective evaluations of an individual and his or her behavior in the group.
• While being open to new ideas and new arguments, take a strongly pro-active approach to them. What is the empirical basis of the new idea? Is there research that supports it? Is there research that calls it into question? If the new argument derives from more general principles, what is the status of these general principles? Is the new argument really derived or is it a case where the theorist simply thought of a sec-ond idea after he or she thought of the first?
• Finally, keep in mind that while the problems faced by sociologists may be hard, their solutions can be of great social importance. If so, they represent challenges that are often worth responding to.

 
You have had a long career in Sociology. What impresses you as being some of the major changes that you have witnessed during your career?
 
Much has changed in my area of research since I first began my career at Dartmouth College in 1954. At that time experimentation in sociology was a novelty that often had to be explained and justified to colleagues. Today experimentation is widely accepted in our field and with time it becomes ever more sophisticated; examples are in the Webster and Sell book on experiments. My area of specialization was then referred to as “small groups” but over the years “small groups” has morphed into the study of “group processes.” There is much more here than a simple change of name. Today, there is a strong commitment among group process scholars (which Zelditch has noted was not always true of early small group researchers) to develop theories that are abstract and general, theories that are rigorous, and theories that can be empirically tested and applied. The result is that today we find in this area theoretical research programs that deal with processes involving social identity, affect control, power and exchange, rewards and distributive justice, status and expectation states, among others described in Peter Burke’s 2006 book.
 
But there is an even more interesting difference between the “small groups” research and current group process research. Many of the theories being developed today apply to more social contexts than simply to small groups. For example, if their scope conditions are met, status theories apply to encounters, small groups, teams, committees and other organizational contexts. As another example, Lawler et al.’s theory of relational cohesion deals with the individual’s relation to a group and the individual’s relation to an organization. The reward expectations theory recently has been effectively applied to macro-phenomena by David Melamed and to micro-phenomena by Hamit Fisek and David G. Wagner.
 
Finally, let me stress that there also are important problems that lie ahead in the study of group processes. And while it has been an expanding area of research over the past twenty-five to thirty years, I would argue that group processes is a research area that—fortunately—is still “in progress.”

​References
Berger, Joseph. 1968. “Elements of a Sociological Self-Image.” In Irving L. Horowitz (Ed.), Sociological Self Images: A Collective Portrait. New York: Sage.

Berger, Joseph. 1974. “Scope-Defined Formulations.” Pp 15-16 in Joseph Berger, Thomas L. Conner, and M. Hamit Fisek (Eds.), Expectation States Theory: A Theoretical Research Program. Cambridge, MA: Winthrop.

Berger, Joseph, Cohen, Bernard P., and Zelditch Jr., Morris. 1966. "Status Characteristics and Expectation States." Pp. 29-46 in Joseph Berger, Morris Zelditch Jr., and Bo Anderson (Eds.), Sociological Theories in Progress, Vol. 1. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Berger, Joseph, M. Hamit Fisek, Robert Z. Norman, and Morris Zelditch, Jr. 1977. Status Characteristics and Social Interaction. New York: Elsevier.

Berger, Joseph and Morris Zelditch Jr. 1993. “Orienting Strategies and Theory Growth.” Pp. 3-19 in Joseph Berger and Morris Zelditch, Jr. (Eds.), Theoretical Research Programs: Studies in Theory Growth. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press

Berger, Joseph, Wagner, David G. and Webster Jr., Murray 2014. “Expectation States Theory: Growth, Opportunities and Chal-lenges.” Pp. 19-55 in Shane R. Thye and Edward J. Lawler (Eds.) Advances in Group Processes, Volume 31. Bingley, UK: The Emerald Group Publishing.

Burke, Peter J. (Editor), 2006. Contemporary Social Psychological Theories. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Fisek, M. Hamit and Wagner, David G. 2003. “Reward Expectations and Allocative Behaviors: A Mathematical Model.” Pp. 133-148 in Shane R. Thye and John Skvoretz (Eds.), Advances in Group Processes, Vol. 20. New York: Elsevier/JAI Press.
​
Melamed, David 2012. "Deriving Equity from Expectations: A Cross-Cultural Evaluation." Social Science Research, 41: 170-181.

Thye, Shane, R., Aaron Vincent, Edward J. Lawler, and Jeonkoo Yoon. 2014. “Relational Cohesion, Social Commitments, and Person-to-Group Ties: Twenty-five Years of a Theoretical Research Program.” Pp. 99-138 in Shane R. Thye and Ed-ward J. Lawler (Eds.), Advances in Group Processes, Volume 31. Bingley, UK: The Emerald Group Publishing.

Wagner, David and Joseph Berger. 1985. "Do Sociological Theories Grow?" The American Journal of Sociology 90: 697-728.

Webster Jr, Murray and Jane Sell (Eds.), 2014. Laboratory Experiments in the Social Sciences, 2/e. San Diego, CA: Elsevier.

Zelditch, Morris. 2013. “Thirty Years of Advances in Group Processes: A Review Essay.” Pp. 1-19 in Shane R. Thye and Edward J. Lawler (Eds.), Advances in Group Processes: Thirtieth Anniversary Edition, Volume 30. Bingley, UK: The Emerald Group Publishing.

What life experiences have contributed to your interest in social psychology in general and/or your specific research areas?
 
I grew up in Richmond, Va. in the 1930s and 1940s. I was appalled as a child at the racism and discrimination that Black Richmonders faced daily in those years and wanted to work to end it. When I discovered social psychology in my second year of college at the University of Virginia, I knew immediately this was the field I wished to enter and intergroup relations was what I wanted to specialize in.
 
Where did you spend the early part of your sociological career (first as a student and then as faculty)?
 
Thomas started is BA at Virginia Tech (1948-9) and would graduate with a BA in Psychology from University of Virginia in 1952. He received both his MA and PhD in Social Psychology from Harvard, finishing in 1956. He began as a professor at the University of Northern Carolina (1956-1957), was at Harvard for a few years (1957-1980), was at the University of Amsterdam for a few years (1986-1991), and is now at the University of California, Santa Cruz (198-current).
 
What is your current (or recent) research focus?
 
On relative deprivation – see my Cooley-Mead address in March 2015.
What interests and/or activities, outside of sociology, are important to you?
Travel and chess – in the past, tennis though I can no longer play at 83 years of age.
Given your success in the field, how do you balance professional and personal demands?
My wife is an MD - so we had to learn to balance together.
We had only one child (son – Mark Pettigrew who is an Arabist with a Berkeley Ph.D.) and each of use tended to those matters that we were best at.
 
If you had to leave academia, what career would you choose?

Earlier I tried architecture – but I could not draw! The academic life proved perfect for me, and I have no idea of what else I could do well.
 
Do you know something today you wish you had known when you started in sociology? What is it?
 
To get a deeper math and statistics background.
 
What one piece of advice would give a graduate student? What about an assistant professor?
 
For grad students, take all the statistics and math you can acquire. The same for assistant professors plus work on that which you care deeply – not just research for the sake of publishing.

​What life experiences have contributed to your interest in social psychology in general and/or your specific research areas?
 
Both of my parents were political liberals with graduate degrees. Public and political issues were constantly discussed in the home, making it virtually impossible to be unaware of the social world, particularly injustices. Try as I might, I could not avoid engagement with these issues from a very early age, although it was not until high school that I actually became serious about anything except sports. Despite the high level of education of my parents, I grew up in a financially strapped and dysfunctional family, leading me to wonder about the rather subtle but draining emotional dynamics around me. As a result I began to think that I should become a psychiatrist and help others with the kinds of problems that I was constantly confronting.
 
Where did you spend the early part of your sociological career (first as a student and then as faculty)?
 
When I entered the University of California at Riverside as a freshman, I still thought about becoming a psychiatrist and thus majored in psychology. I soon learned that psychology was not very concerned with the issues that interested me. Indeed, the psychology department then was heavily behaviorist in orientation, with the result that I ran rats in the laboratory for psychology 1 and 2. I left Riverside after my freshman year and transferred to the University of California at Santa Barbara, where by chance I took a social psychology course in the sociology department from Tamotsu Shibutani. The small and growing department began to fill up with symbolic interactionist-oriented professors—Walter Buckley, Donald R. Cressey, David Arnold, and Thomas Scheff—and so I got a heavy dose of SI theory. I was also exposed personally to such great scholars as Erving Goffman, Ralph H. Turner, and Herbert Blumer who, while visitors to UCSB, inspired me even more. I began to make trips to Berkeley and UCLA to ask them questions; and they were kind enough to receive this naïve but bright-eyed student.
 
At UCSB, I was selected for an experimental program (funded by the Ford Foundation) that allowed me to read extensively in psychoanalytic theory and general systems theory. So, by the time I graduated in 1965, I had taken many directed studies courses in social psychology and psychiatry, as well as many theory courses. I was accepted at some really top schools but I decided to go east and learn more sociology proper, especially macro-level sociological analysis. I selected Cornell but continued to keep social psychology as my major, but over the next couple of years, I was increasingly drawn to alternative theories and to macro-level sociological analysis. My master’s thesis was a test of several propositions from Thomas Scheff’s formalization of labeling theory; my dissertation drew some elements from psychoanalytic theory in the analysis of achievement motivation. Thus, even as I defended my dissertation, which was decidedly social psychological, my real interest had become general theory and, more specifically, theory on macrodynamic processes.
 
How have your specific interests in sociology changed over time?
 
Yes, indeed. If you look at my vita, the first three published articles were from my dissertation, but by the time they were published in the early 1970s, I was fully engaged in macro sociology and general theory. I had, in essence, left social psychology. For several years, I published normative books and articles on social problems and ills, books with titles like American Society: Problems of Structure (note: no social psychology), Inequality: Privilege and Poverty in America, American Dilemmas: An Inquiring into Enduring Social Issues, and Social Problems in America. I wrote article on ethnic discrimination, stratification, and ecological problems. Still, even as I was doing this, I wrote a book on Social Institutions in 1972 (my first book) and, then, in 1974, I published the first edition of The Structure of Sociological Theory, followed in 1978 by The Emergence of Sociological Theory. And, in the end, it was the theory that captivated me; and I can began to preach value-neutrality and hard-social science sociology, revolving around modeling and formal theory.
 
Becoming ever-more the general theorist, I kept exploring new topics theoretically, which also meant that I had to learn the empirical literature in new fields. And so, since the early 1980s, I have just kept moving into new fields. I get bored with one line of research, prompting me to move into new substantive fields in order to become an ever-more general theorist. I moved into stratification, wrote two more books on institutions, began to become fascinated with reviving evolutionary analysis in sociology, saw that detailed knowledge of primates was critical to understanding humans (as simply evolved apes), became intrigued with world systems analysis, general modeling and theory construction, and so it went. Inevitably, having left the field for twenty years, I came back to social psychology in the late 1980s. If one is to develop theories about all domains of social reality, obviously it is necessary to theorize about micro-level processes. I did not, at this time, consider myself a social psychologists, and even today, I am not sure that I am. Rather, I am a general theorists who theorizes about micro interpersonal processes—which is different than the way social psychology is today.
 
Indeed, unlike many social psychologists, I am the opposite of a specialist, and I cannot label myself by any of the names for various theoretical research programs in social psychology , even symbolic interactionism where I had my early training. And, I often make the plea that social psychology needs to be less partitioned and specialized.

What interests and/or activities, outside of sociology, are important to you?

​Since I was not always been academically inclined—indeed just the opposite in my younger years—I have always had many not-so-intellectual interests. One passion has stayed with me since I was five years old: the love of sailing, which is something that I do all of the time today. When young, I played sports in high school and during early years of college as well. As a professor, I played in student intramural leagues until my body fell part in my early 40s. In my 20s, I raced motor-cross until I came to my senses after a few spectacular crashes. Then, I spend years walking and hiking each day, again until my body declined some more. Now cycling, where I await the other shoe to fall on this seeming benign activity like all other vigorous things that I have done in the past. But there is always sailing.
 
I should also emphasize that raising three children—now middle aged—was something that I had to take an interest in, and indeed, has been perhaps the best influence on me in terms of not taking my academic work too seriously. My nine grandchildren—ranging in age from 25 to 9 years old—have continued to be a major source of interest outside academia, even though all of my children and all of my children’s spouses, except one, are in employed education in some fashion. And, two the three former spouses are university professors. This large family keeps life meaningful in ways not possible with the narrow pursuit of academic goals, even as the topic of education is never very far away from most discussions.
 
Given your success in the field, how do you balance professional and personal demands?
 
This is an important issue, especially for academics who can become so wrapped up in their work. I have always had way too many interests in non-academic areas of life to let this happen. Kids certainly pulled me out of my work, often against my will but to my ultimate benefit. Also, I find that I work better when I break up days and weeks with other activities because, when I come back to academic work, I focus so much better. My love of sailboats also pulls me away from work. I may take my work to the boat, but rarely do I actually work; instead, play, sail, and talk to friends on the dock over beer and, sinfully, an occasional cigar. There are times when I over-work, but my body tells me to stop, and I have learned to listen and go have some fun, if only a walk around the neighborhood and talk with neighbors. All of us have to find the right balance that works for our respective temperaments. I work steady hours, virtually every day of the week, but I do not work long hours (indeed, I am in bed by 9:30pm most nights), and I make sure that I engage in non-academic, more physical activity for some part of each day. That is enough for me to keep the right balance. For others, some other pattern may work to maintain balance, but it is balance in life, however achieved, that is important.
 
Oh, I should close by noting something else: over the years, with some degree of success, I worry less about work; and, yet, I find work ever-more gratifying. It is fun to sit and write for several hours each morning. It is not even work like it was at the beginning of my career before I knew where I was going. Now I know where I have gone, I can relax and enjoy academic work for the intrinsic pleasure that playing with ideas brings. Indeed, finally at the age of 71, I have become a real academic.
 
If you had to leave academia, what career would you choose?
 
Well, if I left academia at my age, it would normally be called retirement. I don’t think about this issue now, but at one time I did. In fact, in my late 30s I contemplated doing something that fascinated me when I was young, and still does: architecture. I love building, whether it is theory or houses. I still occasionally draw house plans, just for the fun of it. And, I read about architecture. What kept me from making this leap in my late 30s was the sunk costs and investments in academia. But, the interests has never gone away. Indeed, one of my activities that kept me grounded when I was young was carpentry—remodeling the many houses that my wife and I have owned. I could, I imagine, build a house from the ground up, if my body would allow it.
 
Do you know something today you whish you had known when you started in sociology? What is it?
 
It is actually more than one thing. First, I would have taken some of the pressure off myself when I was starting out, as difficult as that can be. I wasted a lot of energy worrying about whether or not I could be successful. Second, I would come to realize a decade earlier that, as wonderful as academia is, there is often intellectual bigotry and pettiness that even today still surprises me. If I could do it over again, I avoid department politics; they sap your energy and, in the end, do not help you accomplish the really important things: research and teaching.
 
What one piece of advice would give a graduate student? What about an assistant professor?
 
For starters, just what I said above. For graduate students, I would offer two pieces of additional advice that might seem to contradict each other. First, do not close your mind off to potential areas of inquiry by committing too early to a particular specialization. Second, keep your eye on the prize: a Ph.D. These days one needs publications and that can often keep you from finishing your degree work, but don’t pursue publications at the expense of finishing the Ph.D. Many would disagree, but getting the degree is still the most important goal.
 
For Assistant Professors, a variant on the earlier advice: be cordial and pleasant; respect all your colleagues; don’t get pulled into department battles; and instead, write and teach. And another point, try not to let your chair push on you tasks and obligations that would get in the way of your research. It is important to protect your time, and it is unfair if senior people push time-consuming tasks on those who need to develop their careers. So, in nice, pleasant, and collegial way (something that I preach now but did not always practice when I was young), say “no” to anything that is going to drag you away from the really important work necessary to get tenure. Obvious advice, I know, but often hard to follow.

What life experiences have contributed to your interest in social psychology in general and/or your specific research areas?
 
I became a member of a “social club" of sorts called the Young Judean Trailblazers made up of some 14 girls and boys (equal numbers of each) when I was about 16 years old. Part of a larger Young Judea organization, this "club" was serious about many things, not simply socializing, that involved the Zionism of the time, Synagogue attendance, doing "good" in the Jewish community of St. Paul, etc. I spent a good deal of time thinking about the club after leaving for military service in World War II, coming to the realization that my relationships in it changed the course of my life. Note that this idea, the formative power of the social unit with respect to the lives of the individuals who are members of those social units, underlies all of the work I have done as a sociologist.
 
Later, shortly after returning to the University of Minnesota after the war, I was exposed for the first time to the work of G.H. Mead. I became deeply convinced in the value of that work which emphasized the role of self in human social behavior. I also became convinced that most of what I read in the literature that used Mead did not "test" his ideas; rather, it took Mead's ideas as sacred text that provided the answers to questions they posed. The product of a department that emphasized sociology as science, I deemed that stance objectionable. When an opportunity presented itself to try to build a testable theory that used Mead's ideas as a point of departure, I began the development of Identity Theory, a project that began in about 1964 and continues today.
 
Where did you spend the early part of your sociological career (first as a student and then as faculty)?
 
I took all of my degrees, BA, MA. and Ph.D at the University of Minnesota, seeing no need to leave there after obtaining the MA because the personnel of the department of sociology changed considerably at that time, because my mentor at Minnesota encouraged me to stay, and because personal circumstances were such that move did not seem feasible. I returned to Minnesota after military service in 1946 with a number of undergraduate credits, completing the BA in spring of 1948 and the MA in the spring of 1950. Thus, it was with almost exactly two years as a Ph.D student when the then Chair of the Department put his arm around my shoulder and said (and I believe I quote) “It’s about time you got out in the world." At that point, I had just completed course work, had not taken pre-lims, and had not even thought of a dissertation topic. Not brave enough to argue with him, and offered the opportunity to join my mentor who had left Minnesota to become the Chair at Indiana, I took that opportunity. I took it even though it consisted of an appointment as a Teaching Assistant at a salary of $2500. I was promoted the following year to an Instructor rank, then a tenure appointment. I have been at Indiana University Bloomington ever since.
 
How have your specific interests in sociology changed over time?
 
I went from a general interest in the conceptual and "theoretical framework" provided by Mead to the development of an empirically testable theory to which I gave the name "Identity Theory."
 
What is your current (or recent) research focus?
 
Most recently, working with my former student who has been my research colleague over the past 30 years, Richard Serpe, as well as with Philip Brenner, I participated in the development of a paper, now accepted for publication in Social Psychology Quarterly. The paper deals with the over-time relationship of the concept of identity salience and the concept of identity prominence that comes out of the work of George McCall and J.T. Simmons. (Psychological centrality and—most simply-- importance have essentially the same meaning as does prominence.)
 
What interests and/or activities, outside of sociology, are important to you?
 
Until recently, travel that has concentrated on Europe, Latin American, and southwest Asia; and a wide range of music--jazz (from Louis Armstrong to contemporary free-form), opera, the symphonic and chamber music repertoire, and ballet.
 
Given your success in the field, how do you balance professional and personal demands?
 
Earlier when my children were young, from their infancy through the many years of attending the performance activities of our five children in whatever they might be doing until they left home for their higher education, my work time consisted of time spent in my university office, roughly coincident with the time the children were in school;. My home working hours were from roughly 10:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. each weekday night.

If you had to leave academia, what career would you choose?
 
I've often wondered what alternative career I might have chosen. I never could think of an alternative.
 
Do you know something today you whish you had known when you started in sociology? What is it?
 
No.
 
What one piece of advice would give a graduate student? What about an assistant professor?
 
The best advice I have given--and still give--to students whenever I have the chance, stems from what I know as Schuessler's Law. (Karl Schuessler was my mentor and friend at Indiana who arrived there a few years ahead of me.) Schuessler's Law is "sociology must be fun.” Translating that maxim to advice, what I would tell students, simply put, is if you don't really like what you are doing, get out! There are easier ways of making a living. I tell young Assistant Professors the same thing. I also advise the latter to keep themselves open to opportunities to go in new directions that will arise along the way. Taking one (or more) of these may well invigorate your professional performance.

What life experiences have contributed to your interest in social psychology in general
and/or your specific research areas?

My father was a Freudian psychoanalyst in New York City. So I grew up in a home in which issues of psychology, and even to some degree social psychology, were present. And so that certainly developed my interest in psychology and psychoanalysis. But at the same time, there’s often an attempt to move away from, reject, and question the beliefs of one’s parents. So at the University of Pennsylvania, where I was an undergraduate, I was assigned in a section of Introduction to Sociology to read Goffman’s book Asylums, with a very wonderful teaching assistant, who shaped my interest in sociology. I found Asylums
extremely stimulating, persuasive, and useful, because it takes a very skeptical view of psychiatry; it provided exactly the kind of familial distance that I needed. It was a way of
incorporating ideas of psychiatry, while still questioning them. So that book certainly shaped my perspective. And at that point, Erving Goffman was coming to the University of Pennsylvania as a faculty member, and I wound up taking two of his graduate seminars, even though I was an undergraduate at the time, which further shaped me. So there’s a real sense in which I was more shaped by my undergraduate education at the University of
Pennsylvania than I was by my graduate education at Harvard. At Pennsylvania, I was
influenced by Goffman, E. Digby Baltzell, Ray Birdwhistell, Jane Piliavin, Allan Teger, Albert Pepitone, and a number of other scholars who worked in this broadly defined social psychological perspective: a perspective that crossed sociology and psychology.

Attending Harvard in Social Relations certainly further shaped who I am and what I’ve become. My mentor was Robert Freed Bales. Bales was a leading small-group researcher,
and it was through the combination of my undergraduate education and my graduate education that I became interested in the relationship of culture, structure, and interaction, and in particular looking at the ways that small groups produce cultures. That was something that I was interested in as far back as my first year in graduate school, which is now some forty years ago. So even though my research has covered a lot of different substantive communities (for example, Little League Baseball, mushroom collecting, restaurant kitchens, high school debate, meteorology, chess), my core interests have remained very similar. In 1979, I published a paper in the American Sociological Review on small group cultures that used data from my Little League Baseball research. The original draft was a paper that compared the culture of the Manson family and Little League baseball. But the first set of reviews said it had too much data, and the point could be made with a single case. So for the sociology community, I used the Little League research. But I’m also a folklorist; my Ph.D. minor was in folklore and mythology, and I had taken courses in folklore at the University of Pennsylvania. So I was publishing in folklore, and I used the data on the Manson family to talk about small group cultures and small group traditions in such a way as to be useful for folklorists.

Where did you spend the early part of your sociological career as a faculty member?

I taught as a lecturer at Boston College, where I met David Karp, who trained me in ethnography. He, not Goffman, not anyone at Harvard, was responsible for me becoming
the kind of ethnographer that I am. And also at Boston College, I got to meet and know Everett Hughes. Karp and Hughes helped to shape me.

And then for my first teaching job, I went to the University of Minnesota, and it was in Minnesota that I became more involved in the symbolic interaction tradition. Now Goffman was obviously part of that, and Everett Hughes to some extent, but the real symbolic interactionist community surrounded Gregory Stone at Minnesota, and a number of his students. It was there that I got exposed to the traditional symbolic interactionist perspective.

How have your specific interests in sociology changed over time?

In the main, my interests in sociology and social psychology have pretty much remained constant. I began in graduate school to study small group cultures, and that remains a central part of what I do. In graduate school, I started writing papers about rumor and gossip, and I’ve continued that over the course of my career. The one area that I’m known for that came a little bit later was my research on collective memory and reputations. And that came from the time that I was on the faculty at the University of Georgia, and I got to meet and work with Barry Schwartz. It was a very strong connection and still is. While Barry was studying the great heroes of American culture and American history, I decided that my
contribution could be the villains and the controversial figures. My first article that dealt with reputation was about Benedict Arnold; Barry was writing about George Washington, so I wrote about Benedict Arnold. And during that time he was doing research on Abraham Lincoln, so I studied John Brown. I was kind of Barry’s dark twin. Certainly one reason I decided to accept a position at the University of Georgia was because of Barry’s presence. I was hired in 1990 as department head, so I served a term, and after it ended, we decided to move back north to Northwestern. And from 1997 on, I’ve been on the faculty at Northwestern.

What is your current (or recent) research focus?

In theoretical terms, I remain interested in small groups, their cultures, and the way that local interaction systems operate. This will be the topic of my Cooley-Mead address in August. However, I’m always looking at different empirical domains, and looking at them through a set of theoretical questions. So I’m finishing a book on competitive chess, and in that I’m interested in the way that local communities create status systems. That book will hopefully be completed this summer. And my current empirical ethnographic research is on MFA students in the visual arts. I am interested in going back to some of the old studies on occupational socialization, and looking at the ways that local cultures inform how occupational socialization gets achieved.

What interests and/or activities, outside of sociology, are important to you?

There’s a sense in which I really love sociology, so sociology is my interest outside of sociology. But going a little further than that, I have an interest in the arts. I’m interested in culinary issues, theatre, visual arts, and literature. When I was an undergraduate I started writing theatre reviews for the University of Pennsylvania newspaper. Then, after two years I was hired by an entertainment weekly to write theatre reviews for them, and subsequently they also asked me to write restaurant reviews. I like doing reviews, and for a
period of about five years I had a restaurant blog (www.vealcheeks.blogspot.com) and for a
time contributed many restaurant reviews.

Given your success in the field, how do you balance professional and personal demands?

I think to be successful in a disciplinary sense one has to emphasize professional opportunities. I’d rather stress opportunities, rather than demands, because demands make
it seem like there’s something you don’t want to do. When one has children and one is married, there is a certain balance that comes into one’s life. So, as a professor I did a lot of
the childcare. My wife was in business, and my time was a lot more flexible than hers. But my younger son graduated from high school in 2002, and at that point, we were empty nesters, and that allows me, to some measure, emphasize the professional.

If you had to leave academia, what career would you choose?

I wouldn’t wish to leave academia. If I did, I suppose I would wish to be some kind of arts critic. I don’t think I have the talent to be a visual artist or a novelist. But I have skill as a critic, and I like it. I don’t know if I could write a long form novel that our great novelists can do, but shorter writing I can do with much greater facility.

Do you know something today that you wish you had known when you started in sociology? What is it?

That question can either be answered substantively, or it can be answered personally. Substantively, I wish that over the course of the past forty years I had more directly emphasized the importance of small group culture as a theoretical matter, even more than I did. In 2012, I published a book Tiny Publics: A Theory of Group Culture and Group Action, and part of me wishes that I had written that book twenty years before, to get small groups back to center stage of sociology. That is the case that I will be making in August at ASA. In 1954, ASR published a special issue, which was entirely devoted to small group research. That has largely disappeared, and I wish that when I started writing about small groups in 1979 and before, that I had kept on doing that much more explicitly.

What one piece of advice would give a graduate student or an assistant professor?

Every year at Northwestern, faculty members come into the proseminar for our first-year students and I have a lecture that I give, the 10 Commandments of Sociology. Most important, it’s useful early in your career to decide what you’re interested in, what that motivating question is going to be for you. And then it is also important for you to love our discipline, which gets back to this question of balance. If I had free time, I’d read, write, or think sociology. So that would be the core of the advice that I would give. If you don’t love this discipline, this line of work, then it might not be the best choice. It’s certainly not the case that an assistant professor must work 15 hours a day. But it can’t hurt, unless you get burned out. The more you love, and the more you do your work, the better off you’re going to be. Of course there are people who are more able or luckier than others. But all things being equal, if you love what you’re doing, and you work at it long and continuously and with enthusiasm, you will make a more substantial lifetime contribution.

What life experiences have contributed to your interest in social psychology in general
and/or your specific research areas?

From a very young age I have seen people in their interconnectedness. For good or ill, I have been blessed with a sociological eye. I won’t claim any edge on deep sociological wisdom or insight, but I have always recognized and attended to the ways that the presence of others, be they friends, family, a particular group or organization, or an even larger social units like communities or nations, at once figure (and prefigure) our lives. In part, this inclination may have been rooted in an early awareness of race, racial difference, and prejudice. Listening to my parents talk about clearly racialized experiences, thinking about the adaptations they were making, or even learning about slavery in school all made an impression on me. In 1965, when I was 7 years old, the family planned a cross-country drive from Los Angeles to see, among other things, the World’s Fair in New York. The trip would include visiting relatives in Atlanta, Georgia and possibly in Florida as well. This occasioned serious discussion of the potential difficulty to finding hotels or places where we (the kids) might go to the restroom without a problem. In part, this inclination is the natural result of being a product of Martin Luther King’s America. I was old enough to witness the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements on television—though not old enough to actually take part. But this sparked a concern to make the world a better place. Hence, my enduring scholarly and social psychologically inflected interest in matters of race, politics, and social inequality.

Where did you spend the early part of your sociological career (first as a student and then as faculty)? How have your specific interests in sociology changed over time?

My interest in sociology began as an undergraduate at Loyola Marymount University in Los
Angeles. Like so many young people with an interest in politics and changing the world I began college thinking political science was the logical pre-law major. For one reason or another the courses did not excite me but a friend convinced me to take a class on “Social Deviance” taught by Professor Nicholas Curcione. Wow! What an exciting class and what a
dynamic and engaged scholar. Curcione had us reading Laud Humphries (on tearoom trade), Howard Becker (on becoming a marijuana user), Erving Goffman (Asylum, and the presentation of self in everyday life). I was a sociology major before the end of my sophomore year.

Eventually, I decided to give up law aspirations (years of participation in speech and debate convinced me that I want to seek and create real knowledge, not merely prepare to argue either side of a case). This choice was made easier by the fact that my mother had grown up in Atlanta, going to school on the Spelman/Morehouse campus. This meant that for a time she would see Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, sporting his Homburg hat, gloves, and cane, as she walked into school. So I grew up being regaled with tales of my mother saying “Good morning Dr. Du Bois” each day (who guessed her son would grow up to hold the W. E. B. Du Bois Chair at Harvard!).

Moreover, E. Franklin Frazier, the first African American president of the American Sociological Association, was a close family friend and her godfather. As events played out and I became serious about graduate study I ended up at the University of Michigan for graduate study. This was the perfect intellectual fit for me. As an undergraduate I had crafted a sort of senior thesis project (LMU really did not have this option when I was a student there) that involved analyzing data from the General Social Survey on white public
opinion on the use of school busing for school integration. I advocated in favor of Herbert Blumer’s theory of group position versus David Sears’s theory of symbolic racism. Much of my argument on the nature of racial attitudes was based on the work of Howard Schuman
and Mary Jackman, both of whom, it turned out, were faculty at Michigan. Bear in mind, my decision to apply there was serendipitous in that I only did so because a roommate had written off for the Michigan application materials and decided not to use them. So, he let me have the forms. I worked for Howard Schuman for 4 years as a research assistant and he chaired my dissertation committee which also included Mary Jackman and Jim House. The rest, as they say, is history. My first tenure track appointment was at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. At the time I chose Madison over Berkeley, Penn, and Indiana, each of whom had also made me offers. For me, I felt an immediate connection to folks like David Featherman, Robert Hauser, Franklin Wilson, Cora Marrett, Karl Taeuber, and Jane Piliavin. This seemed, for me, the best mix of race, social psychology, and normal science as I understood it.

What is your current (or recent) research focus?

I am currently working on two books. The first will involve an elaboration of the theory of laissez faire racism. The book is an extended interrogation of the notion of post racialism in the U.S. The second book is on the scourge of racialized mass incarceration, a more social psychological and political analysis of the emergence of historic levels of reliance on formal incarceration as our societal response to the problem of crime.

What interests and/or activities outside of sociology, are important to you?

Always a bookish sort, I enjoy reading murder mysteries, especially British police procedural mysteries (Dorothy L. Sayers, P. D. James, Elizabeth George) but also some American detective fiction (Walter Moseley). I am an avid jazz fan, enjoy watching professional football and basketball. And I spend as much as of the summer months as possible riding a bike on Martha’s Vineyard.

Given your success in the field, how do you balance professional and personal demands?

An awfully good question. Never take myself too seriously. Get out to the movies. Never pass up a good martini or fine bottle of wine (preferably at a great restaurant).

If you had to leave academia, what career would you choose?

Investment banker, with some combination of an MBA and/or law degree.

Do you know something today that you wish you had known when you started in sociology? What is it?

Academe is actually a small world. Be diplomatic.

What one piece of advice would give a graduate student? What about an assistant professor?

For young faculty, my main advice on the positive tip is produce, produce, produce. To wit, keep your head down and do your research. Write, write some more, and get it out there. Repeat. Spun in a more negative fashion, what I am saying is ignore the status striving, petty politics, and departmental and disciplinary intrigue that defines altogether too much of life in the academy.

What life experiences have contributed to your interest in social psychology in general and/or your specific research areas?

Looking back, I guess it’s possible to make everything fit. My research focuses on stratification, power and the legitimation of inequality. The study of legitimacy and inequality raises questions about distributive and procedural justice. I have also published research on family, gender, and race relations. My interest in developing and testing explanations by theory probably ties all of my work together.

My life experiences motivated my interest in research and in the issues I study. That statement not withstanding, my biography traces a long and torturous path to sociology. I was the fourth child and fourth son of Frank and Thelma (Burgin) Walker. Neither finished high school. I was born a couple of years after Pearl Harbor in the colored ward at the Kansas University Medical Center in Kansas City, Kansas. After finally meeting Howard Becker a few years ago, I told him where I was born. KUMC was the site he and his colleagues studied for Boys in White.

My family lived about 15 miles northwest of the hospital in a rural part of the county. My dad had grown up near the Italian-American community in Kansas City, Missouri’s tough North End. As a teenager during Prohibition, he lived with, and ran whiskey for, a local capo. To keep the streets from claiming his three sons, Dad moved with my mother to the “country” in the late 1930s. I was the first of five more children born after the move.

I was a shy, inquisitive child and a precocious reader. From about two years on, I read everything I could get my hands on. Reading fueled two lifelong tendencies: tolerance of—maybe a preference for— solitude, and a tendency to question everything.

I began formal education in a setting that was unusual even for racially segregated systems. Kansas law permitted, but did not require, segregation in communities with populations greater than 15,000 but there were not enough blacks in our small community to warrant a separate elementary school. Instead, black students were given a single room for eight grades and a single teacher. The white students had one room and one teacher for each grade.

Mrs. Burnell, my first teacher, was my best teacher. She was very organized in a classroom that had a row (or sometimes a half row) for each grade. That made it easy for her to deal with me. I read all the first grade books by the end of my second day of school. Unable to keep me occupied, she quickly moved me to the second row. About four weeks later, after I had “performed” for the county superintendent of schools and a few others, she got permission to move me to the third row—third grade. That slowed me down considerably. I joined the other third graders who were learning to write in cursive. But in order to write, I had to learn the alphabet. Nobody in the family had bothered teaching the alphabet to a kid who could read. At some point, I learned to print by watching my younger sister and brothers.

I got my first lesson in social activism during my early school years. My mother was a life member of the NAACP and in 1951, my second year of school, she and some other women in our little community approached a Kansas City attorney about filing a lawsuit. Their intention was to force the county to allow our black students to attend the local white high school about 3 miles away rather than travel 12 miles to attend the all-black Sumner High School which served all black students in Kansas City, Kansas. They believed that desegregating the high school would lead to desegregation of all schools in the county. Their attorney told them that a similar case had been filed recently in Topeka, the state capital. Incidentally, the county officials correctly read the writing on the wall; our schools desegregated two years before the Brown case was decided. I was living in a sociology laboratory.

I made my first career decision in high school. My chemistry teacher wore a white lab coat and I thought that was cool. I decided to become a scientist. Curiously, I never thought about college. I graduated at fifteen. Too young to get a job, and at my mother’s insistence, I entered Kansas City Kansas Junior College. I would major in chemistry. An aunt, Lillian Burgin, gave my mother $50 for my first semester’s tuition; I was standing there at the time. Aunt Lillian, my mother’s sister-in-law, was the only college graduate I knew on a personal level. A few years later I learned that she had run out of money during the Great Depression, left school and never completed her M. A. in sociology at the University of Kansas. Years later, I repaid her support of my education in the only way that could have mattered. She was the first person I told that I had accepted an appointment to Yale.

I could only work odd jobs before I was eighteen so, by design, I spent five semesters in junior college. One of my smartest decisions because I met, Joyce, my wife in that last semester.  We were married about five years later.

I completed my A. A. and got my first punch-a-time-clock job. I was a janitor responsible for cleaning the kitchen at a local hospital. I had avoided applying for janitorial or busboy jobs. I knew, and knew that others knew, that those were “colored jobs.” I thought that it would be hard to move up to better work once I was stereotyped as a “janitor” or “kitchen worker.” But we were just coming out of a recession so I took the worst job I ever had. Fortunately, I was fired. I took a job as a sales clerk at a store on “The Avenue,” the main shopping district in Kansas City, Kansas. It was early 1962 and I was the first black male sales clerk on “The Avenue.”

Now that I was working 40 hours a week I began studies at National College, a small college in Kansas City, Missouri. I went one semester, smelled the college’s demise and left
school. National declared bankruptcy at the end of that academic year. The following fall I began studying at Kansas City University which eventually became the University of Missouri’s Kansas City campus. I was still majoring in biology and chemistry. I managed to flunk out without ever failing a course. I left the sales clerk job for better paying work at the post office. By then it was early 1965. I had been out of high school six years and was not a sociologist or social psychologist.

Where did you spend the early part of your sociological career (first as a student and then as faculty)? How have your specific interests in sociology changed over time?

I stumbled into sociology after flunking out of college. Like a lot of people from my generation, I had a strong interest in changing the world. James Meredith was a cousin of my best friend in high school and my mother, some aunts, an uncle and several older cousins were active in the Civil Rights Movement. In the early 1960s, I began reading a lot on revolutions, black liberation, etc. I read all of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s books but, at the time, the ideas of Malcolm X, Marx, Fanon, Regis Debray (and others) were more compatible with my world view. I served a tour of duty in Vietnam (1968-1969) and, while there, spent a lot of time reading about war, including War and Peace, Matthew Ridgway’s account of the Korean War and General Giap’s books—Dien Bien Phu and People’s War. The Art of War is still one of my favorite books.

Somehow I decided that sociology was the key to changing the world. I was discharged in late August 1969 and immediately reentered the University of Missouri-Kansas City. At UMKC I studied with Edward Tomich, Lee Hearn, Ernest Manheim and others. I suppose the first social psychology course I took was with Ed Tomich. Tomich and Hearn were symbolic interactionists as was Oscar Eggers. I completed requirements for the B. A. in three semesters.

I worked as an interviewer on one of Lee Hearn’s projects and it was Lee who first suggested that I get graduate training in sociology. I learned later that he put his reputation on the line to get me admitted to UMKC’s M.A. program. My sociology grades were stellar but there was a little matter of my flunking out almost a decade earlier. UMKC is also where I first met Dave Willer when he spoke at a graduate student-sponsored colloquium. He was on the University of Kansas faculty then. I could not foresee that he would become eventually a mentor, collaborator and fast friend.

Ernest Manheim was my most influential teacher. He is not as well known in the U. S. as his cousin Karl; Ernest dropped one “n” from his surname. But he was a real inspiration. Ernest withdrew his habilitation thesis (a step above the Ph.D. in the German system) after the faculty at Leipzig had accepted it. The Nazi’s had come to power and he assumed that they wouldn’t approve it. Like many other Jews during that period, he left Germany. He went to the University of London, working as Karl’s assistant, while earning a Ph.D. in anthropology.

Karl recommended Ernest to the faculty at Chicago. But after a year or two at Chicago, he left for the upstart Kansas City University. Chicago’s loss was a net gain for the city of Kansas City, UMKC, and generations of students. His empirical research on race, poverty and crime changed city leaders’ ideas about race and, in turn, influenced race relations in the region. I wrote him a congratulatory note on his “retirement” in 1972. I talked with him last in spring 1991 which, I think, was his last year of teaching. Last summer, I had my picture taken standing in front of Manheim Hall—the current home of UMKC’s sociology department.

Students in UMKC’s graduate program were required to take Ernest’s two theory seminars. Manheim immersed us in the classical works in sociology and introduced us to Abraham Kaplan, Carl Hempel, Paul Oppenheim, and lots of other work in the philosophy of science. I completed my M.A. thesis in 1974, got a fellowship at the eleventh hour and, that fall, headed west with my wife and young son to enroll in Stanford’s doctoral program.

Stanford was the smallest of the departments that had granted me admission and I was intrigued by its focus on what I now call theoretical methods—ideas I had begun learning in Ernest’s seminars. Department size was important because I was determined not to get lost in graduate school. Joe Berger, Bernie Cohen, Dick Scott, Buzz Zelditch and the rest of the gang kept me on the straight and narrow during my four years there. But without support of the National Fellowships Fund for Black Americans I would not have attended Stanford.

Finally, I can tell you how I became a social psychologist. Fall quarter 1977, my fourth year. Bernie Cohen called me to his office. He asked if I could teach introduction to social psychology. I told him that I could teach intro physics if given enough lead time. His response: “Good. You are a social psychologist. Apply for this job (at Iowa).” I didn’t get the job. It went to our good friend and fellow social psychologist, Dave Wagner, who preceded me by a few years at Stanford.

I began sociology with a desire to change the world and an obsession with the state of blacks in America and how it could be improved. Over time, my goals changed, but not my research interests. I adopted an aphorism from Marx and turned it on its head: “The point of sociology is not to change the world but to understand it.”

I have moved around a lot. Donnelly Community College (a Catholic community college where I taught while getting the M. A.); Yale, Stanford, Iowa, Cornell and Arizona. I managed to gain something at each stop—important sociological insights from, among others, Wendell Bell and Rosabeth Kanter at Yale; Carl Couch at Iowa; Robin Williams, Jr. at Cornell. At Arizona, my ideas about political culture in university towns and on university campuses began to crystallize.

My principal interests haven’t changed much. My M. A. thesis was on black postal workers. My concern was with race stratification within the agency. Blacks were over represented—twice their population proportion—but concentrated in the bottom six of twenty-two grades. There were no blacks in the top two grades. Yet, blacks rarely filed grievances. I didn’t know at the time but I was studying nondecisionmaking. I learned that term at Stanford after beginning work with Buzz Zelditch who was running an unfunded project with a handful of graduate students and post docs. The project eventually became the Zelditch-Walker program on legitimacy and authority.

What is your current (or recent) research focus?

At some point I am going to try my hand at writing a general theory of legitimacy. Not sure if it can be done but now I have more time to commit to the project. Expanding the scope of Status Characteristics Theory is high on my list. I continue to work with two doctoral students on issues related to SCT. I have also a keen interest in complexity/chaos theory. I am convinced that Wolfram’s New Kind of Science will fit into the Popper-Lakatosian model of science. Last, but not least, I have a longtime interest in the social and political economy of education in America. My theoretical ideas are tied to the political culture, organization and political economy of higher education. I am particularly interested in understanding the lagging academic achievements of blacks, the general erosion of academic standards and grade inflation/grade compression. I have become convinced that universities play a key role in what I have begun to call the institutionalization of mediocrity. Those who know of my interest in this last topic, also know that I have drawn my keenest insights from my love of basketball and University of Kansas basketball in particular.

What interests and/or activities, outside of sociology, are important to you?

Genealogy. Mine in particular. Family is important to me. My mother was motherless at two and an orphan before she was 10. My father was abandoned by his natural father and was adopted at age two after his mother died. Within two months of my retirement last summer I found some second-cousins on my dad’s side, located and visited my paternal grandfather’s grave at Arlington Cemetery and learned the identity of dad’s paternal grandparents. Another passion is music although I seem to have inherited only a small fraction of the talent in my family. Many relatives on both sides were/are skilled musicians. Some have made a living at it. I will dabble in music during my retirement, if I can find the time between visits to see our three grandchildren in Oregon.

Given your success in the field, how do you balance professional and personal demands?

I count my success in terms of having lasted, not particularly in terms of impact. I think for someone in my position that I have an unusual orientation to my occupation/profession. I am still a working-class kid at heart. I never thought of sociology as more than a J-O-B and as a means to my only stable life goal—survival. My wife, Joyce, hates for me to say that, but it is true. I finished high school because my mother demanded it. I knew that when I graduated I would need a job to survive. The biggest personal demand has been providing for me and my family. Having a steady job was key to doing that. Luckily, I married a professional woman and for forty-five years we have lived a comfortable life.

I have been driven to solve puzzles but was never driven to publish. I typically publish with others as a logical consequence of completing a project. My collaborators expect to publish; that is why I have published as much as I have. I probably have two file drawers of drafts that could be turned into publishable papers if I had the inclination to do so. And I will probably polish some of them in retirement. I spent lots of time preparing to teach and spending less time publishing gave me time to do other things, like helping raise two children. By the way, I don’t recommend de-emphasizing publishing as a strategy for newcomers to the field.

If you had to leave academia, what career would you choose?

If I had been smarter, I would have worked harder at sport. I come from a family of athletes. My mother played basketball and dad played semi-pro baseball. An older brother and two older cousins played in the Kansas City Monarchs organization—arguably the most successful of the old Negro Baseball League teams. I played a lot of playground basketball but never worked at it. I taught the game to my two younger brothers who played in community college. I might have been a good coach. Again, with more work, I could have done something in the music industry—probably writing or producing more than performing. Writing and photography. Although I hate writing for sociology audiences, I love to write. A lot of essays sit on my computer’s hard drive. I also love photography and my wife thinks I am good at it when I work at it. More realistically, a research career dealing with policy research, maybe doing historical research. Puzzle-solving, raising and answering questions, has been an important driver since my preschool years.

Do you know something today that you wish you had known when you started in sociology? What is it?

Two things stand out. First, I decided about three months into my first teaching job that “teaching” is a misnomer. No one teaches anyone anything. I tried to be a good instructor—an instructor can only provide guidance and opportunities to learn. Learning is an active process. The academy needs more activists.

The second thing I learned took longer. I naively assumed that truth, even the conditional truth of science, would win out in the end. I was wrong. As one who has read a reasonable amount of work in the history of science, I am embarrassed to admit that the evidence against that assumption was always before me. I wish I had been more active in pushing theoretical science—a term that expresses a redundancy. Today, I believe that we should have gone to the barricades to fight off the empiricists. Even if it destroyed the discipline. As Liz Cohen once said in a private conversation, had the discipline collapsed, we could have reinvented it.

What one piece of advice would you give a graduate student? What about an assistant professor?

Normally, I don’t give advice. I put stuff on the table and leave it to people to decide if any of it is worthwhile. I have generally thought about the profession much as I have thought about my favorite ideas and theories. Under what conditions would I be willing to give it up? I decided that I would leave the profession if I could not be true to the values that served me so well. I urge newcomers to think about the values they bring to the profession. I learned science from a host of people, many of whom were biologists and chemists. All had high academic standards and challenged me in the classroom and in research. They would not lower their standards. I am particularly grateful that none of them seemed to have “cut me some slack” because I was black. Throughout my career I have tried to do the same.

I have told generations of graduate students—and more than a few undergraduates—that adherence to high standards is a guard against my worst nightmare. In that scene, a former teacher, typically Joe Berger, engages one of my students in a discussion about his or her dissertation or paper. The paper uses SCT or some related idea very poorly. After some questioning, the student reveals that the work was done under my supervision.

To avoid that scenario, I tried to be as demanding of my students as those who taught me. My good friend Bernie Cohen told me that I was more demanding. Today, people decry the deterioration of standards in the academy. I join them in their concerns. But I sleep well. Joe has yet to inhabit my dreams and I convince myself that I did little to contribute to the current state of affairs.

What life experiences have contributed to your interest in social psychology in general and/or your specific research areas?

I can definitely trace my academic interests to early experiences in my life. I was born in 1956 and raised with an older brother in a lower middle-class family outside Boston. I started becoming aware of the world around me during a time of social upheaval and transformation: the cold war and the nuclear arms race, the dawn of the space age, the rise of rock & roll music, the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, the women’s liberation movement, and so on. Change was the norm.

At the same time, I was a shy and introspective kid, and felt quite the little oddball in my own family. I probably had more than the usual adolescent dose of feeling like an alien looking in from the outside, or sometimes feeling like an actor in a play. Ironically, starting in my junior in high school I began trying out for plays and musicals to help me address the shyness and also a fear of public speaking. I was actually very successful at that and even continued it into college—one of the best choices I ever made, despite resistance from my parents who thought it was pretty weird.

As for research interests, I’ve had quite few. Apart from the desire to do work that’s interesting, creative, useful and sound, I’m not aware of any more specific agenda that unifies those interests. Agendas and perspectives are constraining and potentially misleading. I honestly never adopted any particular sociological perspective or “ism,” a True Believer in nothing except that the scientific method is our best hope for developing reliable and valid knowledge of the social universe. Given that, I think that some compelling theories are formal and some are informal; sometimes appropriate methods are quantitative and sometimes they are qualitative; interesting phenomena happen both at micro levels and at macro levels. My choices as to what projects to pursue are influenced by several things: personal experiences and concerns, mentors’ interests, available resources, conversations and collaborations with students and colleagues, reading books from other fields, and so on.

Where did you spend the early part of your sociological career (first as a student and then as faculty)? How have your specific interests in sociology changed over time?

I began college as a psychology major, but took just as many sociology classes from the outset. Social psychology was the natural bridge, and there was a good strong group of social psychologists in the psych department at University of Massachusetts, Amherst where I attended college. Seymour Berger, George Levinger and Jim Averill were all mentors. In sociology I received a nice introduction to symbolic interactionism from Jack Hewitt, deviance and criminology from Tony Harris, and research methods and statistics from Jim Wright and Pete Rossi. I loved college and I think that I probably distinguished myself not (at all) as a brilliant or sophisticated student, but as interested, engaged and hard-working.

I ended up enrolling in the honors program and conducted thesis projects in both psychology and sociology. Although UMass is a mega-university, by the time I was a junior I had exclusive access to my advisor’s well-equipped psychophysiological laboratory, and in sociology I was helping to TA a methods course and shared an office with graduate students. Nobody else in my family went to college. I still remember the phone conversation when I told my parents I was doing well in school, learning a lot, and thinking about applying to graduate schools. They didn’t get it. They just assumed I’d graduate and find a job somewhere. I had no academic role models in my life, and I didn’t really know where I might be heading. I did know that I wanted to keep learning, and I heard that the better grad schools will help pay your way if you’re good. My advisors seemed almost as skeptical of my grad school aspirations as my parents, but they wrote their reference letters and I finished my theses in time to graduate a semester early, work and save some money.

I only applied to three graduate programs in sociology and one in psychology. I also applied for an NSF Graduate Fellowship, which I knew was a long-shot. I was living in Eugene, Oregon while awaiting those decisions, working awful jobs like stocking shelves in a record store and waiting tables. Spring finally came and I learned that all four programs accepted me. Even better, NSF offered me the fellowship, making me all the more desirable to those four grad programs. That was an incredible time for me. I had real doubts about getting into graduate school, and real fears that I would be stuck working unfulfilling jobs. Then all of a sudden grad programs were recruiting ME! After nine months of drudge work, I was ready to give grad school all I had. With apologies to my mentors, I chose to go to Stanford not because of who was there, but because it was the smallest of the four programs, a very high proportion of its students completed their Ph.D.’s, and I knew they had a good reputation in social psychology. Palo Alto also seemed like it would be a nice place to live for a while.

I had so many great influences at Stanford. My earliest included Pat Barchas who was blazing trails in socio-physiology, and Barbara Rosenblum who was making a name for herself in symbolic interactionist and ethnographic circles. I also learned statistics from Mike Hannan, organizations from Dick Scott, theory from Buzz Zelditch, and theory construction from Bernie Cohen. Later on I developed a project with Joe Berger. Despite all these wonderful influences, I can’t say that I ever developed a strong tie with any faculty member. I regret this, and don’t recommend it to students. I was hardworking and autonomous, but simply not very assertive or confident. Still, along the way, I gained deeper respect and appreciation for a variety of subject areas and methodological approaches.

I moved relatively quickly through the grad program, but largely under the radar. I wasn’t flashy and did not have much interaction with faculty, mainly due to the old lack of confidence. That had a real downside. For instance, when I interviewed for a faculty position at University of Washington I was just 25, a third-year student still in the early stages of my dissertation, completely uncoached in the Art of the Interview. It was a useful
experience, but very humbling to say the least. A year later I was finished with the dissertation and a little better prepared to interview. The job market then was horrific and I only had two interviews. One of them was at the University of Iowa.

My professional socialization continued at Iowa, thanks especially to my colleagues Jae Kim, Ed Lawler and Chuck Mueller, each in their own way showing me what it meant to be a working sociologist. My main interests coming out of grad school included justice perceptions, status processes and theory construction. I think I was quickly labeled an experimentalist, but I’m actually a multi-methodologist. “Experimentalist” is a rather misunderstood and deviant identity in sociology, and so that’s the one that tends to stick. On the other hand, I think that some of my best empirical publications are based on experiments, so I wear the label with some pride.

I was also labeled early on as having a kind of fetish with formal theory. That’s based on a misunderstanding and I don't accept that characterization at all. I’ve believed since grad school that our job is to invent new theories and/or to strengthen existing ones, this accomplished through an endless process of testing and revising. Since well-tested formal
theories don’t spring fully-formed out of the minds of sociologists, and since many of our field’s most interesting theoretical ideas are not formalized, demeaning or outright rejecting non-formal theories is counter-productive. On the other hand, I believe in being very tough on our theories. We should always treat them as provisional, always regard them with a measure of skepticism, always try to make them better insofar as clarifying their terms and arguments for the benefit of others and subjecting them to the strongest possible attempts to disprove them. On the theoretical side, formalization is the best tool we have for accomplishing these things. But you have to evaluate a theory in the context of its level of development and that of its alternatives. If there are no formalized alternatives or predecessors to a theory, then merely defining a single key term may be a valuable incremental improvement.

What is your current (or recent) research focus?

These days my time and my mind are mainly occupied with three projects. I’m working with Chris Barnum (former student from Iowa and now on the faculty at St. Ambrose College) on an NSF-funded project that bridges social identity and status characteristics theories. Jennifer McLeer is serving as graduate assistant, and also working on her own status-related NSF-funded dissertation project. I’m also working with another of our grad students, Nick Berigan, on a second NSF grant project, that one dealing with perceptions of justice in public goods settings.

I'm especially excited about a third project, a long-term collaborative endeavor that combines several of my interests. Eventually I want to help establish a dynamic, on-line toolkit and library for building and sharing “modular” sociological theories. My hope is to make this “Wikitheoria” rewarding and enjoyable to use so people will contribute to the library, improve on existing modules and, most importantly, be able to locate and assemble components in ways that help to solve real-world problems. I know how pie-in-the-sky that sounds at this point, but obviously there’s a lot more to it and a lot of work to be done. I’m currently developing the system with a colleague in Computer Science and some of his students, starting with a couple of dozen modules contributed mostly by grad students in my department.

What interests and/or activities, outside of sociology, are important to you?

Aside from my family which is more important to me than anything, I put a pretty good amount of energy into music. For the last seven years or so I’ve been playing guitar, bass guitar, and singing in a band called Second Honeymoon. (We have some recordings on-line at second-honeymoon.com). We’ve actually been getting hired regularly to play around the Columbia and Charleston areas here in South Carolina. This has been important to me as a different kind of creative outlet. After 25 years of only playing in front of my immediate family, the band motivated me to learn a new instrument (bass guitar), get comfortable performing in front of all kinds of people, broaden my musical horizons, write some original tunes, and move in some different networks. It definitely rounds me out as a person.

Given your success in the field, how do you balance professional and personal demands?

I probably worked 80-90 hours/week as an assistant professor, and fortunately my spouse was very understanding. I never took my career for granted and felt like I had to work twice as hard to keep up with all those people who were twice as smart. Soon after I was tenured we adopted my daughter. A couple years later my wife had a life-threatening illness. My priorities shifted during that period, but not at all reluctantly. I was figuring out what was truly important, and I was glad to be working fewer hours and spending more time with my family. Sure, I felt that I could be accomplishing more in my work, but I also felt that way when I was working most of my waking hours! So shifting the balance toward my personal life only made me happier. Although that choice made me somewhat less productive, I don’t regret it at all.

If you had to leave academia, what career would you choose?

When I wasn’t sure I could get into grad school, or write a dissertation, or get a job, or get tenure, I always considered music and computer programming as my fall-back interests. I count myself as incredibly fortunate that I didn’t have to pursue those career paths. Music is a very tough business, and I’m not sure I ever would have succeeded as a programmer. If I had to find a new career today, I’d consider being a chef or having a small restaurant. I really enjoy being creative with cooking, as well as the immediate gratification of seeing others appreciate what I make.

Do you know something today that you wish you had known when you started in sociology? What is it?

Sure, lots of things, but how about one bad and one good? I wish that I had known how resistant our field is as a whole to raising its standards of scientific scholarship. None of us—but especially not our grad students and younger scholars—should have to fight an uphill battle against referees, editors and even colleagues just because we are explicit in our theorizing, critical of illogical or vague theorizing, or using rigorous methodologies that are widely accepted across legitimate sciences. If I had known how truly pervasive these attitudes are in sociology, I’d have been better prepared for lots and lots of rejections, and probably would have been more aggressive earlier in my career insofar as battling misconceptions head-on. Biologists such as Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins have written quite a lot about their battles with young-earth creationists in the field of biology. They say that they’d prefer to devote none of their time to fighting their pseudoscience because it takes time away from their real work. The situation in sociology is much worse in that a far greater proportion of our field’s members are indifferent or hostile to what it really means to do science. At least Gould and Dawkins could be reasonably assured that their journal submissions and grant proposals would not be reviewed by creationists. Sociological social psychologists still have to take in stride the fact that often half or more of the reviewers assigned to our submissions will call for rejection of our work on purely non-scientific grounds, however sound that work may be.

On the positive side, I wish I had known sooner how satisfying certain teaching and administrative work can be. This is partly due to the reward system in our field, but also to personal choices that were not so well-informed. Now I enjoy teaching and mentoring as much as doing research and my administrative experiences—particularly as a program director at NSF for two years and as a department chair for seven years—showed  me that there are many ways to make useful non-research contributions, such as by facilitating the work of others.

What one piece of advice would you give a graduate student? What about an assistant professor?

To graduate students, I'd say that grad school is a chance to vastly increase your knowledge in a relatively short span of time, more so than at any other stage of your lives. Take advantage of it! Don’t approach it as “school.” Regard it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

To assistant professors my advice is to keep your head down and stay focused on your work, but avoid burn-out by taking care of yourself and the people you care most about. On the work front, this means making yourself aware of the documented expectations for tenure and doing your best to exceed them. Take on manageable projects and do work you can be proud of. Balance teaching, research and service, but favor your research when push comes to shove. Your department’s politics pre-date you and you can’t change them, so don’t be tempted to engage in them. Above all, keep in mind how lucky you are to earn a living doing this!

What life experiences have contributed to your interest in social psychology in general and/or your specific research areas?

Most people don’t know the story be-hind how I became interested in going to graduate school. There was a job at University of Colorado, Boulder that was associated with a mental health internship program for college students. One of my professors offered me the job, but one of the requirements of the job was that you had to be a graduate student in sociology. So, I applied to graduate school in sociology to get the job. I had no clue what graduate school was all about.

Originally I became interested in the self and self-esteem because while I was a graduate student at the University of Colorado, the women’s movement was in strong force. My typical response to things happening around me is to study them. I began looking at gender differences in self-esteem, which is one of the con-sequences of women’s oppression. Also, my interest in mental health was generated by my mother having a fairly serious psychological dis-order for about 10 years of her life—she be-came ill when I was around 13, persisted until I was about 25. This was a fairly profound experience. A lot of the research in my career has been trying to explain psychological problems in people, focusing on adults. I got interested in labeling theory as one explanation for mental illness careers. The problems with labeling theory lead me to stress theory, as a complement. I became interested in role-identities as both a site and a buffer of stress. Underlying all of my work has been a symbolic-interactionist angle. I think the self, mental illness, and trying to account for the social etiology of mental illness using ideas about the self has been my primary focus. Later in my career I got interested in emotions because of the psychological conditions I had been focusing on, anxiety and depression. I turned to the sociology of emotions because I thought it might have something to say about stress and mental health processes.

Where did you spend the early part of your sociological career (first as a student and then as faculty)?

I received my master’s degree at the University of Colorado, Boulder. I then went on to Stanford University for my Ph.D. in sociology, which solidified my background in social psychology.

I have moved around quite a bit during my career. I have been very lucky—each department has been very collegial and very productive. Each department has its own culture, causing me to be exposed to different sociological ideas and orientations. I spent two years at Washington State University. Then, I spent six years at Princeton University, where I received tenure and promotion to Associate Professor. I then moved to Indiana University, Bloomington for four years and was promoted to Professor. I next spent fourteen years at Vanderbilt, and then moved on to University of North Carolina as a Distinguished Professor. In 2008 I moved back to Indiana University.

What is your current (or recent) research focus?

My current research has been going into two directions. I have been returning to social support as a topic within the social stress field. I have become very interested "similar other" support—social support from people who have been through the same experiences that you are going through. Others refer to this as peer sup-port. How does this differ from support from family and friends, who do not have the same experience you are facing? I have a new project looking at a group organized around giving similar other support. I am looking at an organization called "Mended Hearts." This is an organization that has been around for nearly 60 years. Individuals who have had cardiac procedures visit patients who are facing cardiac procedures. The volunteer visitors have been through the experience before—they serve as role models and provide reassurance to those about to go through a cardiac procedure. I am using this organization as a case study to contrast similar other support to other strategies of social support.

I am also returning to labeling theory, which has always been an interest of mine. I was very attracted to labeling theory early on in graduate school, but I became critical of it, and became more interested in things leading up to potential labeling by others. For the Cooley-Mead paper I am putting together a speculative piece that examines the conditions under which people resist labels. More specifically, I am looking at how people resist the stigma of being labeled mentally ill. Labeling theory portrays people as victims. Missing from classic labeling theory is the underlying symbolic interactionist idea that people are both an "I" and a "me." The "I" is the agentic, creative aspect of self that seems to be missing from labeling theory.

What interests and/or activities, out-side of sociology, are important to you?

A lot of my life has been built around work. Outside of work I read mysteries, watch films and walk my dogs. I travel, but usually travel is in concert with conferences.

Given your success in the field, how do you balance professional and personal demands?

This is always a difficult question, especially for female faculty. This is a question asked often by graduate students. I have had an easier time with this because I don’t have children. I am childless by choice. I have enough kids to look after—my college students! The only strategy that I know of is prioritizing—deciding which daily tasks have to be done. The important things, you do first. Part of prioritizing is learning how and when to say no. This is a tricky thing to do, especially for those early in their careers. Being able to say "no" and to know when it is important to do so is a key skill. You should never make a decision on the spot—always ask for time to think about it. You need to ask yourself if this going to get in the way of other important things to do. It is important to talk to other people first about the request, before you say yes or no. You need to save time for your personal life and make it a priority. Then, you need to prioritize the important things to do in your professional life and learn to say no in a nice way.

If you had to leave academia, what career would you choose?

If I were to do my whole career over again, I might have preferred to go into public health and epidemiology. My impulse in research is to look at social distributions of stressors, social support, mental health problems. If I were to change my discipline, it would have been public health and/or epidemiology.

In thinking about retirement (5-10 years), the most enticing thing would be the Epidemi-ological Intelligence Service (EIS), which is part of the CDC. The EIS are emergency personnel who investigate disease outbreaks. I could be a detective of disease – remember I read murder mysteries. A more straightforward thing relates to my love of doing data analysis. It would fun to continue research for myself and also to analyze data for others. I’m also really good at writing clear instructions so I think I would enjoy writing instructional manuals for people. I have really enjoyed my career in sociology so I would be sticking with the skill sets that I already possess.

Do you know something today that you wish you had known when you started in sociology? What is it?

It would have been useful to know about myself, after 32 years of teaching and presentations, that I would still get nervous. It would have been useful to know this so I wouldn’t get so mad at myself for being scared. I have a different position about getting nervous now. The reason why I get nervous is because I still care about doing well and being prepared. I think it would be a bad thing if I wasn’t nervous when I start teaching a class or start a presentation. If I didn’t get nervous then it would mean that I was taking too much for granted and it wouldn’t be the same quality of work that I want to do. I am nervous because of the high standards that I impose upon myself. I probably would have been less hard on myself if I had known that this would be something that would continue. I always thought that I would magically stop getting nervous. I have realized over time that the way to mitigate nervousness is to remember that people are not there to judge. They are there because they are interested in the material. You need to focus your attention on the material and conveying the material, which is what interests you, too. This makes the nervousness less because it turns your attention from yourself and to the main point—getting people interested in the material. Being nervous is personally a good sign—it means that I do care.

What one piece of advice would you give a graduate student? What about an assistant professor?

I am a huge advice giver. My piece of advice to graduate students is this…. Everyone is scared when they start graduate school – am I smart enough? How will I ever learn enough? How will I ever get all this reading done? The key thing is that everyone else is
scared too and most of us try to hide this, so you think you’re the only one suffering these anxieties and that makes you even more nervous. Three things are important: remember other people are anxious too – it’s not just you; hopefully you will find a fellow student who will give you support (and you’ll return the favor); and students in more advanced cohorts can be remarkably helpful and reassuring.

My piece of advice to assistant professors is that if it is financially possible, then do not use your summer time for teaching. You need the time off. This is your chance to focus on your own writing. This is absolutely crucial in the summer. You can’t move your research at the pace you want to during the year. Summer is the time for renewal and to move ahead in research. This makes all the difference between teaching all year and being refreshed. This advice applies to university careers and for liberal arts college careers, too. You can work on projects with concentration. My other piece of advice, because I can’t just give one…. Don’t wait for big blocks time to do your work, especially during the semester. They never materialize. If you keep waiting for a big block of time, things don’t get done. Or, if they do materialize, you get less done than you originally thought and you will be disappointed. The trick during the school year is to break things down into small steps, try to do one step each day or every other day. You feel momentum in your work without building big expectations that you will get lots of work done. You could write one paragraph a day (or do one data analysis run or draft one table).

Can you tell us a bit about your early life: where you were born, where you grew up, family and siblings?

I was born in Fargo, North Dakota, in 1948, and grew up in a small town (pop. 400) in southeastern North Dakota. When I was 12 we moved to our farm, 15 miles away, where I lived until I left for college. My father owned a car dealership during the early years of my life, but then began farming and later learned to fly and built his own aerial spraying business. He became a prominent figure in agricultural aviation and was inducted into the North Dakota Aviation Hall of Fame two years before his death—all accomplished with only an 8th grade education. I have one brother, Larry, who is 4 years older than I am and who continued the family farming and spraying businesses until his retirement two years ago. My mother was a homemaker and farm wife who contributed substantially to both of the family businesses.

Where were you educated?

Both my brother and I attended North Dakota State University in Fargo for our undergraduate degrees. My graduate degrees are from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Have you had any lifeshaping experiences? If so, can you describe one for us?

I think all life transitions—geographic moves, new educational and work experiences, new personal relationships—are in some ways life-shaping experiences, so, like most people, I have had many. But for me, probably the most important transition was leaving rural North Dakota and experiencing a fundamentally new world: attending graduate school and learning about academia, living on the East Coast (in the South) and learning about a whole new part of the country, and becoming acquainted with a very different lifestyle than the one I grew up with.

When did you first become aware of sociology as a discipline? How? What made you pursue it as a profession?

I didn’t become aware of sociology until fairly late in my undergraduate career. I was originally planning to become a hospital pharmacist (my sister-in-law’s career) and was immersed in basic science courses, which I loved, until my junior year in college. Then, I took my first pharmacy course and hated it—it was boring, rote memorization. I took a sociology course (my first) simply to get as far away from pharmacy as I could. I quickly took other sociology courses and became more and more interested in the field. Late in my junior year I changed my major to sociology (my minor was in chemistry). My intention at that time was not to become an academic, however, but rather to somehow use sociology to save the world — after all, this was the late sixties!

Graduate school changed all of that. I entered graduate school planning to get a terminal M.A. degree, to specialize in juvenile delinquency, and to pursue a nonacademic career of some sort. By the end of my first year in graduate school, my career goals were entirely different. I had decided to obtain a Ph.D., to pursue an academic career in research and teaching, and to specialize in social psychology. I discovered I loved research (probably related to my love of science, more generally), and I never took a single course in juvenile delinquency or criminology.

My career goals were strengthened further, oddly enough, by two years that I spent working in Washington, D.C., after obtaining my M.A. my first year in graduate school (I was married at that time to a law student attending Georgetown University, and we were taking turns getting our degrees). I worked as an analyst in the Research Office at the American Council of Education, conducting longitudinal survey research on college impact on students, with a fabulous group of sociologists, psychologists, and economists — a truly wonderful experience that both matured me as a social scientist and confirmed that it really was an academic career that I wanted. I then returned to Chapel Hill and completed my Ph.D. in 1976, specializing in social psychology and, secondarily, in the sociology of education (which I taught for a few years but never pursued further).

Where did you spend the early part of your sociological career? What were your sociological interests? How have they changed?

In graduate school my mentor, James Wiggins, introduced me to social exchange theory, behavioral sociology, and the work of Richard Emerson. My dissertation was an experimental test of a theory of the development of social exchange in dyadic relations, and I have been a social exchange theorist and an experimental researcher ever since.

My first job was at Emory University, where I served on the faculty for 12 years. I obtained a small NIMH grant my first year and set up a laboratory for the study of dyadic exchange relations, using electromechanical relay circuitry (which I had learned to wire in graduate school) to run lights and counters and record button presses on “human test consoles.” The transition to a computerized laboratory gradually followed.

Changes in my sociological interests have been modest ones, all variations on my enduring interest in the experimental analysis of theories of social exchange. My early years were devoted to studying the establishment, maintenance, and change of dyadic exchange relations. I later became interested in power and inequality, like so many of my colleagues, and concerns with power and injustice dominated my research for many years. In the last 10 years I’ve shifted to studying how different forms of exchange, with different structures of reciprocity, affect the emergence of integrative bonds of trust, affect, and solidarity, but power and justice have remained part of that work.

Are you married? Do you have kids? If yes to either, how did you manage high productivity with competing family demands?

I am not married (my earlier marriage ended in divorce in 1981), but I have been with my partner, Bill Dixon (a political scientist), for over 25 years. We don’t have children, but we do have two much loved and very spoiled Siamese cats. Being part of an academic couple has helped my career in many ways, because we support and understand each other’s work.

Can you tell us a little bit about your private life—for example, do you play bridge, sail, do country line dancing, or have other hobbies and interests besides sociology?

enjoy reading British mysteries, watching old movies, attending the theater, dining out, taking long walks, and spending time with my cats. My most recent hobby is a fish pond and watergarden that we added to our yard a year ago. I also love to travel, especially to Europe.

Please reflect on how you see the current state of social psychology. Where do you think it is going, and is it going in the right direction?

A few years ago I participated in an intergenerational panel on the “Future of Social Psychology” at the Pacific Sociological Association meetings. I think my comments then still hold: I greatly appreciate the theoretical and methodological diversity that characterizes our field, but I would like to see more of the “sociological” in sociological social psychology. Our field has been moving in a more psychological direction for some time now, with increased emphasis on cognitive processes and emotions, and I’d like to see us balance that work with greater emphasis on social structures, social relationships, and collectivities. I’d also like to see us actively work at linking our theories with those of other, more macro fields of sociology. I’m pleased to see a number of efforts in that direction quite recently, and I believe it is one of the things that will help our field continue to grow and remain vibrant and relevant in sociology.

What one piece of advice would you give a graduate student? Or an assistant professor?

I have one piece of advice for beginning graduate students, and a second for advanced graduate students and assistant professors. I would urge new graduate students to give themselves time to explore different areas and methods of sociology before settling on a field of specialization — the discipline is so much broader than any of us realize (or are introduced to) as undergraduate students. For advanced graduate students and assistant professors, I would advise finding a theoretical or substantive problem that is deep and broad enough, and fascinating to you, to form a research agenda that you can pursue for at least 4-5 years and that will produce a coherent, cumulative body of work by tenure time.

Can you tell us a bit about your early life: where you were born, where you grew up, family and siblings?

I was born in Montclair, New Jersey, in 1937, into a middle class family. Both my parents went to Ivy League/Seven Sisters colleges, and I was expected to do the same. My mother’s father was Chair of the Math Department at Dartmouth. I never met him, unfortunately, since he died before my mother married. I had an older sister, Mary Ann. I grew up in West Orange, New Jersey, living in the same house until I went away to college.

Where were you educated?

Not in one of the Seven Sisters. I visited some of them, but decided on the University of Rochester, based on the advice of a guidance counselor. I was valedictorian of my high school class, but also won the music prize (violin) and I didn’t know which way I wanted to go. The Eastman School of Music is part of the U of R, so the counselor suggested it. It was the perfect place for me, although I very soon discovered that I could not compete in music. (First semester grades: 4 A’s, 1 B—in violin.)

Have you had any life-shaping experiences? If so, can you describe one for us?

I have had many life-shaping experiences, the first—and probably the most important—at the U of R. I was engaged to be married in the spring of my junior year. In the fall I was doing some hourly work for Professor Vincent Nowlis, from whom I had taken social psychology (in the psychology department, where I was a major). While doing my work (chi-squares done on a Monroe electric – not electronic – calculator) we would talk, and he
started to nag me about graduate school. I had never considered it, thinking that I would do social work after college. When I saw my fiancé in January (he had graduated and was working elsewhere) I raised the question, and he said, “No wife of mine is going to graduate school.” Two months later when I saw him again, I gave him back his ring and then went to see Nowlis. “I broke my engagement, where should I apply to graduate school?” Says he, “I hope it wasn’t anything I said!” He advised Harvard and Stanford, and I applied to both and got a fellowship from Stanford. So off I went to their Psychology Department to work with Leon Festinger.

When did you first become aware of sociology as a discipline? How?

I minored in Sociology at Rochester. The most valuable course I took was called, “Orientation to social work”. It convinced me that I was not cut out for social work.

What made you pursue sociology as a profession?

JAP: I didn’t. I pursued psychology. I ended up in sociology in a very strange way. After not getting tenure in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, I ended up with a job offer from the home economics school at Wisconsin, where my husband had accepted a job. (This was after an exhaustive search we each pursued as individuals, since there were at
that time, 1970, no programs to help spouses find work in the same area.) I worked there for six years, at which time the school became independent from the College of Agriculture and hired its first Dean. I was by then the chair of my small area, child and family studies, and thus had to meet with the Dean and the other chairs. She did not understand the “bottom up” governance of the university, and neither did the other chairs,
who had never been allowed to exercise them by the Dean of the College of Agriculture. So our new Dean would make unilateral hiring and budget decisions, and I would call her on them. “The Executive Committee has to make those decisions.” Unknown to me, after our meetings, the other ladies would all tell her to pay no attention to me. So, of course, she decided that I was impossible to work with and called the Chancellor to give me and my budget line away. This is how I ended up in sociology. (Psychology was never interested in me.)

Where did you spend the early part of your sociological career? What were your sociological interests? How have they changed?

My first job after my Ph.D. was at the Survey Research Center at Berkeley. I had recently married, and was geographically immobile. I never interviewed for the job. I got it because my advisor, Festinger, was at a cocktail party with Brewster Smith, whose job it was. They paid me at a lower rate than I deserved, because I was captive. The project was a study of adolescent anti-Semitism. I worked on it for five years. In 1967, I got divorced and left for the job at the University of Pennsylvania. There, I got interested in the study of emergency
intervention, and in one form or another I have studied altruism and helping behavior ever since. I have moved from experimental work to survey work, which I attribute to my being in sociology. And my theoretical preferences have shifted from cognitive social psychology to symbolic interaction theory.

Can you tell us a little bit about your private life—for example, do you play bridge, sail, do country line dancing, or have other hobbies and interests besides sociology?

I knit, both for my family members and for charity. I always knit in faculty meetings, seminars, and student orals. Students have said that they would be really nervous in their oral if I weren’t knitting. I have also done needlepoint, and I sew my granddaughters’ Halloween costumes, now that I am living near them (near, by California standards—75 miles). I go to the symphony; I have never lost my love of classical music. I used to play softball and swim. Now I just work out—pilates and aerobics. I do a lot of volunteering now that I am retired. I teach a Bone Builders class, which consists of a set of exercises designed to slow down osteoporosis. And I “glean”. Oxnard, where I live, is an agricultural area, and the local Food Share organization has a gleaning branch. We go out to orchards and fields and pick stuff, which then gets distributed to food banks.

Are you married? Do you have kids? If yes to either, how did you manage high productivity with competing family demands?

I am married. It will be 40 years this year, and it was not the first marriage for either of us. Between us, we have four children: two of his, one of mine, and one of ours. We have six grandchildren. Two are in their 20’s, and are from his older son. We have little to do with them since they are politically and religiously very different from us. We have four young grandchildren, ages 8, 8, 6, and 3. They say that each child is worth two publications, but I am sure it is far more than that. I never was very productive—maybe 2-3 things a year, with long gaps when collecting and processing data. I think I still neglected them more than I should have. My daughter says so.

Do you know something today that you wish that you had known when you started in sociology? What is it?

I think this is not really relevant to me, since I started in psychology. But if you mean the academic world in general, I’d say that I didn’t know how disciplined you have to be, and how you have to learn to manage your time. This is particularly important if you have family responsibilities, as most people—both male and female—do.

What one piece of advice would you give a graduate student? Or an assistant professor?

Don’t forget that you went into sociology for two reasons (at least): intense curiosity about how the world works and a desire to solve social problems. If it stops being fun and you are just going through the motions, pick a different problem, or work up a new course.

 an you tell us a bit about your early life: where you were born, where you grew up, family and siblings?

I was born in Raton, New Mexico just after World War II, along with a twin brother who is ten minutes older than I am, to this day. I also have a younger sister and brother. All of us attended Stanford University for our undergraduate degrees. I grew up in Austin, Texas, having moved there in the third grade from Oklahoma City, where my younger brother and sister were born.

Where were you educated?

I was educated at Stanford University where I did my B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in sociology. I ended up at Stanford, in part because I had an aunt who lived in San Jose, California (the only one of my parents’ eight siblings who lived outside of Texas at that time). She mentioned to my dad that the “twins should apply” to a nearby university. There were no catalogues for colleges and universities outside of Texas in my public high school.

Have you had any life-shaping experiences? If so, can you describe one for us?

I have had many life-shaping experiences. It is hard to select one. Something that made a strong positive mark on me as a young child was the interest in and commitment to education exhibited by my grandfather, a farmer in Hondo, Texas. Whenever I was around him he asked what I had been learning and he always listened intently to the answer. I used to read books just to talk with him about them in the summers at the farm, where, in exchange, he taught me how to milk cows, find eggs in the hayloft, ride a horse in the pasture, shoot rattlesnakes and rabbits, and shuck corn.

“Traveling with a youth group by bus in the ninth grade from Austin to Miami in 1960 meant seeing the deep South for what it was in person for the first time --- separate doors, separate lines, separate bathrooms, separated seats, separate water fountains, deeply separated lives…some in the group more equal than others everywhere we went. Stopping at the church where Martin Luther King Jr. preached was the highlight of the trip for this group of young Texans steeped in the teachings of Martin Luther. I mark this trip as the most important step in my educational journey. The second most important was leaving the state of Texas for college. Close my eyes today and I see many of the images of that trip in vivid detail – nothing faded” (Sica and Turner, 2006).

When did you first become aware of sociology as a discipline? How? What made you pursue it as a profession?

I first became aware of sociology in an introductory course taught by Sandy Dornbusch at Stanford. He was a great lecturer and he made the field intriguing through his engaging presentations. One mimicked a sermon to convey strategies of influence in large gatherings. I wanted more and thus declared a major soon after taking only two courses in the field. I had already begun to love the social sciences through exposure before this to anthropology (a course taught by George and Louise Spindler) and to developmental psychology (a course taught by Eleanor Maccoby).

It was the late sixties. All of my female friends no matter what their initial career aspirations had been (law, medicine, business) were beginning to move toward teaching careers in their senior year. I decided if I were going into teaching then I would want to teach at the college level and thus I applied to graduate schools after winning an NIMH training fellowship, which I was encouraged to apply for by my undergraduate advisor. Another important input was the decision in my junior year to do a senior honors thesis. My primary advisor was Bernard Cohen and I ran an experiment in which I studied the Asch conformity effect in relation to the gender of the experimenter and of the confederates. I loved conducting my own research and this was pivotal in my choice to pursue graduate education.

Where did you spend the early part of your sociological career? What were your sociological interests? How have they changed?

My first job was at the University of Washington, where I received a job offer by phone from Otto Larsen during my last year of graduate work. I chose to take this offer for a number of reasons, the primary one being that there were a large number of social psychologists in the department that I thought I could learn from. They included: Richard Emerson, Robert Leik, Robert Burgess, David Schmitt, Phillip Blumstein, Frank Miyamoto (an early friend and collaborator of Sandy Dornbusch), Lynn Ofshe, and later Edgar Borgatta. Other influential members of that department in my early career were Tad Blalock, Herb Costner, Edward Gross, Wesley Wager, Michael Hechter, Gunther Roth, Pepper Schwartz, Sam Preston, Pete Guest, Clarence Schrag and Rodney Stark. It was a stimulating, supportive and challenging department environment. I was lucky to have the opportunity to begin my career in such a nurturing place. I went to Washington with an interest in social psychology and that interest only grew over time, though I also benefited from excellent colleagues in the fields of organizations, theory and methodology who were also influential in my development as a scholar.

“Just as on the national scene, politics and science primarily remained separate endeavors for me during the [following] decade. Coming of age professionally in the sixties as a sociologist marked my studies in subtle, but clear ways. I began with a focus on distributive justice and fairness and later moved to the topic of social power as a result of a long and fruitful collaboration with Richard Emerson (power-dependence theory) for a decade at the University of Washington where I began my career and served on the faculty for twenty-three years before moving back into the world of private universities. Little of my work has not focused fundamentally on issues of power or justice over thirty years. I was often questioned early in my career about my orientation to feminism. This was
not a difficult question to answer. For me issues of power and justice were at the very heart of all of the social movements of the sixties. I needed to understand not only the micro-level social interactions that embodied power inequalities, but also the broader social, economic and political dimensions of these processes in order to comprehend the social changes that enveloped me” (Sica and Turner, 2006).

Can you tell us a little bit about your private life—for example, do you play bridge, sail, do country line dancing, or have other hobbies and interests besides sociology?

I am not sure what you mean by private life (and that may answer your question). I do love walking in the woods and hills, skiing anywhere, reading as often as I can (mainly social science), and cooking with my two grown sons who seem to be much better at it than I ever was. I also like to travel and have enjoyed many trips to Europe, Japan, and more recently, South Africa and China. I always feel like a sociologist parading as an anthropologist when I travel since I think my experiences in foreign places with social scientists of all kinds have been the most important source of my continued education as a sociologist over the years. I hope to be able to do more of it in the future. (I limited my travel to very short trips when my children were young, unless I could take them along, which I often did and now they love it as well.)

With children and a family, how did you manage high productivity with competing family
demands?

I married after my undergraduate years and had two children along the way, one just before I got tenure and one just after. Both boys became a great source of fun and distraction for me from the harried life of an academic. I enjoyed taking them to the zoo and often thought such field trips prepared me for faculty meetings. I managed the competing demands by getting more organized, learning how to write and work effectively in very small stretches of time, working very late into the night when all was quiet, and with lots of help from my parents and family, especially when I traveled to meetings and conferences.

Do you know something today that you wish that you had known when you started in sociology? What is it?

I think I know now that sociology is a very broad, varied and endlessly fascinating field. I don’t think I knew enough about its breadth when I started.

What were your thoughts, if any, when the social psych section was in abeyance in the mid-1970s? How do you see the current state of sociology in general and social psychology in particular? Where do you think the latter is going and is it going in the right direction?

I was in my assistant professor years at that time and was a bit distressed that the subfield I had chosen seemed to be unorganized at that time, but it did not affect my commitment to the field or my interest in the things that social psychologists typically study.

I am not a pessimist by nature and thus I see a bright future for sociology and the social sciences generally. Many of the major issues facing the world today require the insights of social scientists in all fields, anthropology, communication, economics, sociology, political science and psychology. What I find most stimulating currently (and for the past decade) is working with those in related disciplines, whether on trust, social networks, social influence, or other topics of significance. I am also an optimist about social psychology primarily because individuals and groups of individuals are the bedrock of social life. We will always need to understand how people make decisions, what motivates them, what makes relationships work in all contexts, how to organize to accomplish important tasks in society, and how our lives change over time with what consequences. The need for what we do will not go away no matter how the profession organizes itself into sections or associations. I also think we will need to connect more often with those in biology in the future as we reconsider the roots of human behavior and explore the brain with new technologies.

What one piece of advice would you give a graduate student? Or an assistant professor?

I would tell graduate students to find their own voice, not to follow too closely the footsteps of those who have gone before them, but to strike out in new directions. I would tell an assistant professor the same thing.

What does having been elected to the National Academies of Sciences mean to you?

KSC: Actually, when I was called at 5:00 am by the secretary of the National Academy of Sciences (who happens to be a chemist at Stanford) and given the news, I was relieved since at that time in the morning I was sure that someone I knew and loved had died or was injured. My first words to him were “I am shocked”. It was quite a surprise and not remotely anticipated. In my view what it means in general is that sociology is being recognized for its contributions to science in ways not common in the past and that is a good thing. The social sciences are extremely important to the survival of our species on this planet and to the future in so many ways. I thus share this recognition with all of us and especially with those I have been fortunate enough to learn from, most notably Richard Emerson in my early career. And, I was able to share this news with Otto Larsen, the one who gave me my first job offer, only one week before he died. I am grateful for this as well. He replied: “This gives me great joy at a time when I am struggling to live.”

 an you tell us where you were born, where you grew up, and your family and siblings?

I was born in Philadelphia, the second of two sons of James House, Jr. and Virginia Sturgis House, and grew up in Springfield (Delaware County), a southwestern suburb of Philadelphia. My brother, Halsey, was four years older and the better athlete, starring in high school basketball and baseball, before going on to a career as a chemical engineer in the oil industry, and retiring early to become an award-winning middle school science teacher. I was the better student, and found tennis as a sport that I could compete in (on low-key and small high school and college teams) before it became really popular. My father was an artist who was on the faculty for the graduate Department of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. He worked in a variety of media, but was most noted in his early and mid-career for caricature, and in the later decades of his career for wood sculpture. He was born and raised in Michigan, and began his post-secondary education at the University of Michigan before moving to the Philadelphia area to study and practice art. He and my mother met there when she was a staff member of the Fine Arts Department, having begun her career as a children’s librarian and finishing it as a homemaker and mother. Ironically, I ended up going to graduate school and spending most of my career at the University of Michigan.

Have you had any life-shaping experiences? If so, can you describe one for us?

No singular event. I feel fortunate to have had loving and supportive parents, who never quite fit into the 1950s suburban world in which they lived for the sake of their children, as did so many in those years. My college and graduate school years were particularly formative, as noted below, not only academically and interpersonally, but also in terms of the broader social and political context of the later 1950s and 1960s.

In this vein, a particularly memorable experience as a child was a trip to Virginia in the mid-1950s, I think after the 1954 Supreme Court decision on school desegregation, where I was fascinated and appalled to experience first hand the full and pervasive nature of de jure segregation in all aspects of public and private facilities and life (with signs everywhere denoting where whites and “coloreds” could go and what they could do). My wife and I returned to the South in 1968 on a research visit to Florida State University in Tallahasse FL. The legal signs and trappings of the Jim Crow era were gone, but we saw the worst rural, mainly black, poverty we had ever seen just blocks off the FSU campus, and discovered that no downtown stores were open on Saturday. When we asked why, we were told that formerly whites had shopped in the morning on Saturday and blacks in the afternoon, but when such overt segregation and discrimination became illegal, the white merchants chose to close their stores all day on Saturday rather than serve blacks and whites together. Even when we moved to Durham NC in 1970, the downtown stores had just been desegregated two years earlier via direct action. Of course many things were then changing and have continued to change for the better, with many African-Americans now choosing to “move home” to the South from a North that no longer seems a better or even as good a place for them. Such experiences impressed on us, more vividly than anything that we had read or seen at a distance, the depth of racism and social injustice in American and world society, and the great difficulties of transcending it, even today.

The McCarthy era, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War left indelible impressions on me and most who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s, even if we were not centrally involved in them. The assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and of Martin Luther King Jr. were especially tragic events, which probably altered the post-1968 world in ways that we have not yet recovered from. Nevertheless, the world is a better and safer place today on the whole than it was in the first three quarters of the 20th century, albeit with many old as well as newly emerging problems still to be solved.

In retrospect, I also feel fortunate to have had my postsecondary education at a small Quaker college (Haverford College in Pennsylvania) and a large public research university (University of Michigan) because in different ways they both consider values and public responsibility an integral part of academic and scientific life, while also recognizing that academics and science involve more than just the expression of one’s values.

When did you first become aware of sociology as a discipline? How?

I knew nothing of social science before I got to college, though I had long been interested in history, especially what now is termed social history. History, geography, and civics were all there was of social science in my elementary and secondary education, and I went on to major in history in college. But in my sophomore year, I discovered psychology, and then social psychology, which seemed to me to offer a more systematic and scientific way to study social life and history. Hence I went on to minor in psychology and to attend graduate school in a then interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in social psychology at the University of Michigan, one that I still feel fortunate to have been a part of, even in its twilight years. It was there that I took my first courses in sociology, and confirmed that my interests were in the more social/sociological and quantitative/survey/nonexperimental aspects of social psychology, leading me to take a position in a sociology, rather than a psychology, department when I left graduate school.

Sociological social psychology seemed then like the perfect lens for understanding and improving social life and society, and it still does.

Where did you spend the early part of your sociological career? What were your sociological interests? How have they changed?

I entered graduate school mainly interested in using social psychology to understand social, political and historical behavior, events, movements, and historical trends. Social and personal strain or stress seemed to play a major role in all of this, and in seeking a broad and integrative theory of the nature of stress/strain and how individuals and groups react and adapt to it, I discovered the physiological stress theory of Hans Selye. This theory
was being used to understand how a wide range of environmental stressors (social and psychological as well as physical, chemical, and biological) produced physiological changes in animals and humans, which, if sufficiently intense or prolonged, could lead to physical as well as mental disease/disorder and even death. I pursued both lines of interest in graduate school, but ended up working with a group at the Institute for Social Research that was studying occupational stress and health, and doing my dissertation on occupational stress and coronary heart disease risk factors.

My first academic position was very fortunately in the Sociology Department at Duke University. The Department was distinctively strong in social psychology and in medical sociology (with Kurt Back, Alan Kerckhoff, and George Maddox in different ways being very important and supportive senior mentors). It was located near the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which perhaps then had the leading program in social epidemiology (led by John Cassell) in the country, if not the world. Thus I was able to pursue my interests in general quantitative/survey/nonexperimental social psychology, and its application to both health and social/political events and movements, as well as to experience a balance of undergraduate and graduate teaching that I wanted.

In 1978, I was offered and accepted a position in the Survey Research Center of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, again a very fortunate opportunity that I have become increasingly grateful for over the years, with an associate professorial title in the Sociology Department. There I continued to pursue my full range of interests, but by the mid 1980s constraints of time and research funding led me to begin to focus increasingly heavily on my work on psychosocial determinants of health. Initially I focused on occupational stress and health, then social relationships and supports and health, and since the late 1980s, socioeconomic disparities in health and the way health changes with age over the life course.

Can you tell us a little bit about your private life—your hobbies and interests besides sociology?

I have continued to play tennis regularly for fun, and occasionally at low levels of competition, since high school and enjoy watching it. I also enjoy watching other sports, especially basketball (which I began watching my brother play, and later observed as a manager of the basketball team in junior and senior high school, when I was no longer good enough to play.) I also enjoy reading (mainly nonfiction), traveling, hiking, and gardening, and look forward to having more time for all of these things when I retire from formal academic life.

Are you married? Do you have kids? How did you manage high productivity with competing family demands?

I married a fellow graduate student in social psychology, Wendy Fisher House, in 1967, and we have just celebrated our 40th anniversary. Over time, I moved more and more into sociology and she transitioned into a very successful career in clinical psychology, first in community mental health and then private practice. We have a son (Jeff, born in 1970) and a daughter (Erin, born in 1974). Jeff has gone on to become a teacher, and will soon be a principal, in inner city charter schools, and Erin is a special assistant attorney general for the prosecution of domestic violence. We became grandparents about a year ago.

It is always a struggle to balance multiple roles, but I have always felt that my spouse and children were the most important people and sources of satisfaction and joy in my life, and what I have done with and for them were the most important, meaningful, enjoyable, and fulfilling things that I have done. So, I have tried to always prioritize them, while taking very seriously my scientific and academic work and duties.

Do you know something today that you wish that you had known when you started in sociology? What is it?

That there is a lot more to academic and scientific life than just doing your teaching and research, and that academics and scientists are more like other people, for better and worse, than I or they would like to believe, and certainly than I believed when I entered graduate school, even having grown up in a somewhat academic family. But it still beats any other kind of work or profession that I know of.

What were your thoughts, if any, when the social psych section was in abeyance in the mid-1970s?

Seemed to me like a great shame and mistake, largely perpetrated by one of my former
professors and soon to be colleague.
I tried to do what I could at my age
and career stage to help to revitalize
the section and sociological social
psychology, which I, like Auguste
Comte, have always seen as the core
and essence of social science.