Download Sociological Imagination

A Labor Market Theory of the Value of the “Sociological Imagination”
by Benjamin Mordecai Ben-Baruch
a presentation to a panel on non-academic careers in sociology at the 1999 Annual Meeting of the American
Sociological Association, Chicago, August 8, 1999
Introduction
I work for an hourly wage for businesses and organizations that want to buy my labor. I am a Senior
Associate in StarWorks, Inc. – which means that I am organized with others in a company that has
characteristics of both a private practice group and a labor brigade (or worker run labor exchange). In
short, the proletarianization of doctors, lawyers and other professionals that many sociologists have been
studying has encompassed me.
I want to present a brief analysis of my current – perhaps temporary – success in selling my professional
labor in the public sector labor market. In short, I will answer the questions “What does a large
corporation or small business buy when it purchases my professional services? and how does this relate to
the skills imparted to me by university sociology departments?” I will talk about how one person earns a
living in contemporary American society with sociological skills but without a Ph.D.
I will not answer questions about how I actually “do sociology” in my current career. I earn a living by
selling research and support services to businesses and organizations for an hourly wage. This is not
synonymous with “doing sociology”. Rather, it is “earning a living from sociology”. My “practice of
sociology” – in the sense of a personally and socially transformative calling and intellectual pursuit -- is
largely performed for no pay in the non-profit sector in my work as an activist. (For anyone who wishes
to talk with me afterwards, a group of us have just signed the papers to incorporate the Progressive Jewish
Voice.)
Path Analysis of My Career
Divorce separated me from my research notes and files and led to a vicious cycle of time-money
problems that I never solved – and to my continuing status as an ABD. Combining my previous career as
a Jewish educator with paid graduate student work on the Zionist social movement and with my activism
within the Jewish community, I fell into a series of consulting jobs with foundations and non-profit
organizations. With the entrepreneurial skills typical of graduate students in high-powered Sociology
departments oriented towards academic research, I eventually found myself changing my status from an
independent professional to a salaried worker. I worked for about two-and-a-half years at the High/Scope
Educational Research Foundation (widely known for the Perry Project and for its longitudinal studies of
Head Start). While there I was the analyst for an international study of child care in fifteen countries –
and our work actually changed public policies in several countries even before the entire project was
finished. My last professional contribution was published by the World Bank. I then moved on to a very
small company that provided research services to businesses and organizations. Marketing research in the
automotive and health industries is a large share of our revenues – by organizing to sell professional
services as hourly wage labor.
StarWorks is a virtual company that shares characteristics of a contract house or consulting business and
of a private practice. Each associate acts as their own boss but much of our work is based on contracts
with StarWorks for temporary staffing on specific projects. StarWorks also has the characteristics of a
labor brigade. A group of workers organized to sell their skills in the labor market, attempting whenever
possible to sell the services of as many of us as we can. During my 3 years with the company I have
worked as the research manager for a company that provides consulting and training to the automobile
A Labor Theory of the Value of the “Sociological Imagination”
panel presentation, ASA 1999 Annual Meeting, by Benjamin M. Ben-Baruch
page 2 of 4
industry and I have designed and managed assessments of marketing and advertising programs of
automobile manufacturers. I have also done very short-term projects that involved designing mail survey
questionnaires, managing and supervising the survey and data entry, and then producing clean data files
and top-line reports (e.g. frequency tables and some cross-tabs). For the last 20 months I have been
working at GM WHQ on the Detroit River providing staff support for GM’s reorganization of part of its
marketing operations – which itself is a key part of GM’s overall reorganization efforts. I was hired to do
analysis and data mining of consumer market data but my role has evolved and now includes providing
general staff support and budget management functions. My contract has extended from the planning
stages through the reorganization and I now function as part of the Enterprise Customer Management
staff.
What are they Buying?
What is it that companies have been paying for? Why are they willing to pay more for an ABD contract
employee than most sociology professors earn? Why am I able to earn at a rate comparable to a goodpaying professorship?
In short, companies are paying for
1) A specific skill set, particularly
a) Ability to use wordprocessors and spreadsheets
b) Better than average ability to use pc and to adapt to new software and operating systems
c) Short learning curve for learning new software
d) Basic quantitative analysis skills – most importantly, the ability to cross-tabulate data
e) Ability to fully use statistical software for analysis, to write programs for SAS, SPSS and/or
similar programs.
f) Skills that are basic for most of our students are well paid in the business world because they are
rare there. The inclination of sociologists to avoid businesses like the plague means that those of
us who choose – or who are forced – to seek a livelihood in the private sector can do very well -thank you.
2) Sociological Imagination, including
a) Ability to see and analyze second-order (and third order) correlations
b) High tolerance for ambiguity
I mention the specific skill set because sociologists should know that skills they consider to be basic and
“low level” are rare and often well remunerated in the private sector. The ability to use SAS and/or
SPSS means that one has the ability to analyze data that companies have paid lots of money to collect and
store.
Businesses also pay for the “Sociological Imagination”. They don’t always know what it is, but they
know they need it and they have demonstrated a willingness to pay for it.
C. Wright Mills, in his classic work, defined the sociological imagination as:1

being “aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of [one’s] own [life] and the
course of world history” [pp. 3-4]

“to grasp the interplay of man [sic] and society, of biography and history, of self and world”
[p. 4]

“a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to
achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and what may be happening
within themselves.’ [p. 5]

“the capacity to shift from one perspective to another – from the political to the
psychological; from examination of a single family to comparative assessment of the national
1
C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, New York: Oxford University Press, 1976 (orig. publ. in 1959)
Benjamin Mordecai Ben-Baruch
Personal website homepage
A Labor Theory of the Value of the “Sociological Imagination”
panel presentation, ASA 1999 Annual Meeting, by Benjamin M. Ben-Baruch
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budgets of the world; from the theological school to the military establishment; from
considerations of an oil industry to studies of contemporary poetry. It is the capacity to range
from the most impersonal and remote transformations to the most intimate features of the
human self – and to see the relations between the two.” [p. 7]
“to understand what is happening in [one’s self] as minute points of the intersections of
biography and history within society.” [p. 7]
“to be aware of the idea of social structure [and to be capable of sensibly] tracing such
linkages among a great variety of milieu” [pp. 10-11]
“It is a quality of mind that seems most dramatically to promise an understanding of the
intimate realities of ourselves in connection with larger social realities.” [p. 15]
“The sociological imagination . . . in considerable part consists of the capacity to shift from
one perspective to another, and in the process to build up an adequate view of a total society
and its components. It is this imagination, of course, that sets off the social scientist from the
mere technician. . . . its essence is the combination of ideas that no one expected were
combinable
To paraphrase Weber, this form of consciousness, this sociological imagination, is the awareness and
understanding of the connections between the causes and consequences of one’s social position, the
understanding of the linkages and patterns of social relationships between people individually and in
collectivities.
To state this more formally, sociologists analyze variations in social relationships in order to comprehend
and explain the intricate connections of a total society and its individual components.
In the business world, this is called “thinking outside of the box”. It is particularly valuable when
companies are restructuring or when companies have to adapt to structural changes in their social or
technological environments.
What does this mean in practice? Often it has a very banal meaning – but one that is worth quite a bit to
businesses.

For one client, it meant refusing to respond to an RFQ and telling them to utilize their own
internal data. For another client, it meant reducing the scope of work and telling them that they
had some of the information they were putting out for a bid. The ability to understand how
information is related – and hence how databases can be merged for analysis – is part of the
sociological imagination. The craft of a sociologist is the development of the specific
methodology in a specific case.

For one client, it meant telling them that their data were not analyzable. They administered a
questionnaire that was a series of questions with three possible answers. The first third of the
questions were comprised of ordinal scales, primarily “dislike, neutral, like”. But the rest of the
questions had nominal categories that could not be analyzed with tools specific for ordinal data.
They had contracted with a major research firm to process and analyze the data as if it were all
ordinal data and they asked me to interpret and summarize the reports produced. Instead I told
them that their data were gibberish. In this case, the “sociological imagination” meant thinking
about the meaning of data and information rather than merely following established procedures.

For several clients it meant creating new ways of analyzing the data and of defining relationships.
In their terms, I created a new “metric”. In sociological lingo, I found new patterns and
relationships by rethinking and redefining the units of analysis and the categories that continued
to be used by car companies because of organizational inertia. The business world calls it
“thinking out of the box”. Sociologists call it “original analysis”. Business people call it datamining. Sociologists call it empirical investigation informed by theory.
Another characteristic of the sociological imagination coupled with quantitative skills is the ability and
inclination to both see and analyze indirect and second-order relationships. This standard
sociological practice is both a scarce skill and a luxury in the business world. It is a scarce skill because it
Benjamin Mordecai Ben-Baruch
Personal website homepage
A Labor Theory of the Value of the “Sociological Imagination”
panel presentation, ASA 1999 Annual Meeting, by Benjamin M. Ben-Baruch
page 4 of 4
is not cultivated and it is not cultivated because it is time-consuming and the pay-off is unpredictable.
But when routine practices have reached the point of diminishing returns, the investment in this rare skill
pays off big-time. For an hourly wage worker, it provides many hours of employment that large business
organizations gladly pay.
Finally, GM pays me for a personality characteristic highly correlated with the sociological imagination –
a high tolerance of ambiguity. It means the ability to assume open-ended tasks and give them
definition. It means the ability to anticipate information needs. And it means the ability to adapt quickly
to changing conditions. And perhaps most importantly, it means being able to function productively and
efficiently without clearly defined goals or procedures. In effect, it means making sense out of an
emerging organizational structure. I believe this characteristic has been critically important in my
continuing value, as a provider of unspecified support services, to GM during its period of reorganization.
GM hired me to use SAS to analyze their data and discovered that they could profit from my sociological
imagination so they are now paying me to continue analyzing their data but to also specify for them
problems and tasks that I can also accomplish for them.
And leveraging their need for someone with the sociological imagination and a high tolerance for
ambiguity creates the fun part of my work.
Implications
I draw the following implications from my experiences in the labor markets:
1) There is a labor market for skills and characteristics typically acquired in graduate school programs of
sociology departments.
2) It may be difficult to “do sociology” in the private sector, but it is definitely possible to be a
sociologist applying research skills and the sociological imagination.
3) The profession should recognize the value of sociological skills in various labor markets. We need to
understand the social position of our intellectual labor as well as the market value of intellectual
output.
4) Professional associations such as the Society for Applied Sociology – and even the ASA – will
themselves have to adapt to the proletarianization of part of the profession. Such adaptation will be
reactive if we fail to address the impact upon ourselves of the social processes we study. We can also
accept the challenge and see this as an opportunity to apply our sociological knowledge and skills
towards building new models of professional workers’ organizations – new models of labor unions
adapted to current labor and commodity market realities.
Benjamin Mordecai Ben-Baruch
Personal website homepage