Philip Kasinitz gave the Lewis Mumford memorial lecture at Albany today. One of the main themes of his talk pertained to the role of quantitative and qualitative research in urban sociology. He argued that urban sociologists have fallen prey to something like physics-envy in their quest for universal laws. Better technology and advanced survey techniques have led us to quantify just about anything we think is possible. It was not an argument against those techniques, but rather, Kasinitz was really lamenting the ”local specificity” we lose when we rely too heavily them.
For example, one of the reasons urban sociologists have been so fascinated with Chicago is because it represents modern industrial capitalism. New York, on the other hand, is just too unique for a lot of people. We can’t necessarily generalize our finding on NYC, but that’s why Kasinitz (and Lewis Mumford) love New York City. He used the rest of his lecture to talk about his latest book and all the wonderful things he learned by actually talking to people and inquiring about the local contexts rather than relying exclusively on surveys. In his conclusion, he pointed out three very important things to remember: 1) Places matter, 2) context matters, and 3) don’t ignore, compare.
Kasinitz was echoing something that some within the Austrian School have been saying for a while now. Pete Boettke had a great post sometime back on the work economist should be doing and it applies just as well to sociologists. I love studying the marvels of the market process as much as the next Austrian, but I think that the really cool research questions look into what Hayek called “the particular circumstance of time and place.” Praxeology and thymology (God, I wish Mises never uttered those ridiculous words) theory and history are the peanut butter and jelly of the social sciences.
In my own experience, I spent this past summer looking at race, social networks, and labor markets from an Austrian perspective. Of course I started off digging through the works of Mises, Hayek, Kirzner, and the rest, but then I went through stacks of papers looking at studies where the authors collected data sets, ran regressions, and made conclusions about the role of social networks. I gained a lot of insight from these quantitative studies, but none of them compared to the insight gained from reading Kasinitz and Rosenberg’s ethnographic study of work on the Brooklyn waterfront.
So while the title of this post is pure hyperbole, Kasinitz’s point is still a strong one worth considering.
- Josh McCabe
