A little while back, “Fabio Rojas threw down the gauntlet”:http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2010/03/04/political-science-exports/.
bq. Question: What theories or research methods have been exported by political science to other social sciences? Poli sci has been a big importer. They sucked up rational choice and identification from econ, and now they are importing social network analysis from sociology. Do they have a trade imbalance?
Four responses in increasing order of substantiveness.
(1) Be very, _very_ defensive. List off Herbert Simon’s organizational stuff, Anthony Downs’ work on democracy etc. Be prepared for obvious counterattacks in re: whether Simon got out of pol-sci as quickly as he could, median voter theory is more than just applied Hotelling etc.
(2) Be snarkily defensive. Jibe that it’s better to be located at a crossroads than stuck on a rarely-traveled intellectual byway only known to the locals. &c&c. Again, be prepared for counterattacks (fingers crossed, intemperate but _funny_ counterattacks).
(3) Try to turn snark into a substantive question. Thinking about it, it’s pretty _weird_ that people don’t pay much attention to sociology these days in broader public debate. They used to — c.f. Malcolm Bradbury’s _The History Man_ (and n.b. that Bradbury said somewhere that if he’d written the book in the 1990s, Howard Kirk would have been a management guru, given the eclipse of sociology in the era of Thatcher). Why _does_ sociology get as little love as it does? As a colleague remarked to me yesterday, it is very weird that Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson, smart as they are, should have become the media’s go-to-people for views on marriage, given that there are lots of good sociologists who have been patiently doing work on this important social institution for decades.
(4) Make a practical (and mildly self-serving) suggestion. One small way towards increasing sociology’s profile would be to have sociologists start a blog along the lines of the _Monkey Cage._ Now _OrgTheory_ is great, but it is primarily inside-baseball stuff. As a non-sociologist who reads in the field, I can figure out the fundamentals of maybe 50% of the posts. Your standard journalist or educated lay reader would likely find herself completely lost. So why don’t sociologists start up a group blog aimed at explaining fun and interesting new research in sociology to a wider audience? It’s worked pretty well for us (we have a significant core audience, good outreach, seem to be broadly appreciated by journalists etc). There’s a position there, waiting to be filled, which would bridge a real gap in a strategically valuable way (I understand that “some guy”:http://www.chicagobooth.edu/faculty/bio.aspx?person_id=12824623104 “once wrote a book”:http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=E6v0cVy8hVIC&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&dq=ronald+burt+structural+holes&ots=omRGPd-1OL&sig=33VyuWYiZN20azrutJu8HXefGvY#v=onepage&q=&f=false about this sort of thing).