for you sociology nerds: bibliographic edition

Quick! Without using a search function or looking at your bookshelf, how many Arlie Hochschild publications can you name that begin with the word THE? I'll start you off with some easy ones...

The Time Bind
The Second Shift

I'm editing a bibliography and just noticed that all six references to Arlie start with THE and then reveal a new concept, to be forever etched into the minds of sociologists.

No links from this post, as that would give it away.

monday sociologist: Barbara Ehrenreich

Barbara Ehrenreich is my favorite public sociologist, hands down, no competition. My dream college course to teach would be called "sociology according to Barbara Ehrenreich" and we would read either her own writings all semester, or writings that she references or suggests. That means that the course would include at least a peppering of Katha Pollitt and Arlie Hochschild, among others.

Ehrenreich is a feminist, activist, poverty scholar, and so much more. She is at once local and global, and always has been. In my sociology of poverty course I use her 1983 Women of the Global Factory (with Annette Fuentes) as well as her 2002 Global Woman (with Hochschild), both of which document an increasing trend over the decades for women to carry a large portion of immigrant labor - contrary to the popular image of men going overseas for factory jobs.

Of course we all know Ehrenreich today, at least any person who was a college freshman within the last four years knows her, as the author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America. This has led to a website (I suggest the blog!) which has now become Ehrenreich's homepage, featuring her new book Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream. Of course Nickel and Dimed is the contemporary classic, but Bait and Switch is just as noteworthy. Ethnographically speaking, it reveals the oddball - but evidentally very common - culture of out-of-work middle class America, as they search (in futility) for new jobs. Her book takes us through job coaches, networking opportunities, interviews, pyramid schemes, and in the end suggests that the American middle class isn't all it seems cracked up to be.

While impossible to document all things Barbara in one short post, I do want to refer you to several important Ehrenreich hotspots. First, don't miss her collection of Alternet essays, especially the most recent June 6 article "Can Marriage Fix Poverty?" (note to self: include in fall poverty course). Find her essays also at Znet, Common Dreams, Truthout, and Salon.

Hey, some like Streisand, I prefer Ehrenreich.

the monday sociologist series: Dorothy Smith, C. Wright Mills, W.E.B. Du Bois, Raya Dunayevskaya, Eric Schlosser

"everyday life" in quotes

Check out this great "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks! "Blog" reminds me of the acknowledgments to sociologist Arlie Russel Hochschild's book, The Commercialization of Intimate Life. In it, she thanks her husband/editor, Adam Hochschild:

To impress on me the dangers of using too many quotation marks, he commented in the margin of one early darft, "Oy!" "So" "many" "quotation marks" "around" "so" "many" "words" "makes" "the" "essay" "seem" "weird." Quotation marks, he sensibly pointed out, are a way of placing reservations on our use of a word, and we need to have a good reason for doing that. So, the few quotation marks in this book that have resisted his red upward-tilting deletion marks had to make a strong case in writer's court for their right to stay. I "thank" "him" "for" "his" "good" "advice," and send him love with no quotation marks. (page ix)

But you don't have to read sociology for this. The team members of "blog" do an excellent job finding examples of pointless quotation mark uses in our everyday life. Now... if we could just do something about our overuse of the ellipsis...