Jeffries Vincent (Editor). Handbook Of Public Sociology

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272 Chapter 15

sometimes challenged us. The chief of a First Nation in British Columbia,

for example, urged us to rethink our understanding of the relationship be-

tween tribal politics and tribal enterprises, particularly in small nations. It

departed from his own experience, and he turned out to be right, helping us

pick up nuances we had missed. Another Native leader asked us what starts

some nations down the institution-building path while others can’t get go-

ing, leading us to think about institution building as collective action and

the role of leadership in generating change (for a preliminary exploration,

see Cornell et al. 2007).

One of the lessons here is that public sociology is sometimes better so-

ciology. It engenders a dialogue with embedded experts: people who are

living the processes we want to understand. A more complete understand-

ing of those processes demands that we create a joint intellectual effort in

which we and they are together engaged in figuring things out. That effort

requires trust. But it can lead to better social science: richer insight into

social phenomena.

The result is a two-way educational process. Burawoy describes this

as organic public sociology, as opposed to the mass-oriented traditional

kind. It involves “direct, unmediated relation to publics . . . that are lo-

cal, thick (with intensive interaction among their members), [and] active”

(2007:254). It moves beyond researchers asking questions and informants

providing answers and becomes a cooperative endeavor: If we put our

minds together and listen to each other, can we better understand the issues

on the table and the possible ways to address them?

A DISAPPEARING LINE BETWEEN PUBLIC

AND POLICY SOCIOLOGIES

These interactions moved us into another of the quadrants in Burawoy’s

fourfold vision. I find Burawoy’s (2005a:9) conception of policy sociol-

ogy—”sociology in the service of a goal defined by a client” and designed

“to provide solutions to problems that are presented to us”—too restrictive:

we felt we were doing policy sociology before anyone asked us for advice or

solutions, in the sense that we were explicitly concerned with the implica-

tions of our research for tribal and federal policy makers. Our answer is the

same as Burawoy’s to the “knowledge for whom” question: policy sociology

consciously includes a non-academic audience. But it is not dependent on

outside initiatives or conceptions of the issues.

However, Burawoy suggests that we imagine policy sociology itself as

having four subquadrants, replicating his division of the field (personal

communication). There isn’t space to adequately discuss this suggestion

here, but it opens intriguing possibilities. One could say that we entered

Becoming Public Sociology 273

policy sociology through its professional subquadrant, turning the research

lens on current policy and its effects. Eventually, clients did play a role in

this, including federal agencies (e.g., Wakeling et al. 2001), Indigenous

organizations (e.g., Cornell, Jorgensen, and Kalt 2002), and Indigenous

nations (e.g., Brimley et al. 2007).

Our own interest was primarily in the

last of these, and particularly in Indigenous governments, which constitute

not only a distinctive public but also exercise significant power in both

the external arena (relations with other governments) and the internal one

(the lives of their communities). Our work had implications for them (e.g.,

Jorgensen 2007), and this gradually pushed us into the public subquadrant

of policy sociology. There, the question they were asking—what can we do

to achieve our nations’ goals?—and the question we were asking—what

makes some nations more successful than others at such achievement?—

converged.

In the conventional conception of policy sociology, policy makers’ agen-

das shape inquiry. In our case, as this convergence suggests, the relationship

has been more reciprocal. Our work on governance as a key component

in sustainable community and economic development led Native nations

to ask us to examine their own governance arrangements; such examina-

tions in turn led to joint discussions of options for change. In this public

subquadrant, policy sociology replicates public sociology, becoming a

conversation in which each party draws on the other’s expertise to produce

policy insights and solutions. This shared provenance has not been the

prevailing pattern for Indigenous peoples in North America, where outside

actors—governmental, academic, and other—typically have urged or even

imposed one-size-fits-all policy interventions on those peoples. Partly for

that reason, those interventions have seldom worked.

We also have encountered some of the dangers of policy sociology.

Burawoy, referencing Ulrich Beck, warns that when sociological knowledge

enters the policy arena it can become “a servant of power” (2005b:420).

Power, of course, will take its servants wherever it can find them; we need

not enter the policy arena to find ourselves in that role. As with other bod-

ies of knowledge, any sufficiently creative policy wonk can cherry-pick

sociology for justificatory purposes.

We had our own experience of this when Canadian government officials

embraced our argument that sustainable development in Indigenous com-

munities required capable Indigenous governance while ignoring our find-

ing that it also required putting substantive, jurisdictional, decision-making

power in Indigenous hands. The government, using us, thus neatly found a

way to hold Native nations accountable for bad outcomes (“the problem is

your dysfunctional governance”) while denying those nations the power to

design their own governments and policies or to control what happens to

them—a classic and counter-productive formulation in Indigenous affairs.

274 Chapter 15

We opposed this in subsequent presentations, underlining our self-determi-

nation findings and emphasizing that nothing we had seen justified such

dismembering of our results. While we had little influence over agency ac-

tions, we tried at least to offer Indigenous nations ammunition with which

to fight back.

POLICY SOCIOLOGY AND CRITICAL SOCIOLOGY

In one of his discussions of policy sociology, Burawoy (2005b:421) argues

that “at its core there is no dialogue about normative assumptions.” While

some of our experience departs from this—almost any effort to be useful

to American Indian nations soon led to a conversation about values and

goals—such dialogue, in Burawoy’s scheme (2005a), is the task of critical

sociology: to identify, understand, and often challenge the normative as-

sumptions not only of policy but of stakeholders in social processes, of

publics, and of professional sociology, including ourselves (see Burawoy

2005a).

In this sense, at least, critical sociology was present early in our project,

if modestly so, in our expectation that there were actions Indian nations

might take to address their situations, that social science could help un-

derstand what those actions might be, and that a public sociology—a so-

ciology engaged with this particular public—could increase social science’s

ability to do so. These beliefs, poorly articulated at the start, questioned

the assumption that Indigenous poverty would be solved by economic

progress in the society at large, that social science could do little more than

be a detached, analytical observer of the process, and that the appropriate

role for Indian publics was to be studied but not to join the analysis or the

discussion of what could be done.

Critical sociology was present also in our eventual recognition, born

out of the kind of conversation that public sociology is all about, that the

appropriate metrics for understanding success in Indigenous development

were not simply measures of individual economic well-being—important

as those are—but less easily quantifiable measures of collective capacity,

action, and achievement. This recognition not only affected our research

program and methods; it also challenged assumptions underlying a great

deal of federal policy toward Indigenous peoples in North America and

elsewhere. Much of the governmental conversation about Indigenous de-

velopment, particularly in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, has been

about closing socioeconomic gaps—not between the mainstream and In-

digenous nations but between the mainstream and Indigenous individuals.

This removes from the discussion a critical issue for Native peoples: their

survival as distinct communities. As one Canadian official put it in the early

Becoming Public Sociology 275

2000s, his government was willing to talk about equality but not about dif-

ference (Cornell 2005). But for many Indigenous nations, difference is the

heart of the matter.

Here, another line began to disappear. In effect, we were moving into

what Burawoy calls the critical subquadrant or “moment” of policy sociol-

ogy (personal communication). In our emphasis on legitimacy and the role

of Indigenous political culture in building capable governing institutions,

we were questioning at least two assumptions dear to the hearts of policy

makers. One holds that U.S. liberal democratic institutions offer the best

available path to good governance and development and should be pro-

moted everywhere. Our evidence disputed this. The other is the fantasy of

bureaucrats that—if they take Indigenous governance seriously—they can

produce a single governmental model that can be implemented uniformly

across Indigenous nations, simplifying their bureaucratic tasks. We argued

instead that while those nations may face similar governance challenges,

their diversity and the cultural match requirement mean they are likely to

produce variable responses. This, we argued, “is not really a problem. On

the contrary, it is a solution” (Begay et al. 2007:53).

Even in these critical moments, public sociology continued to play a

part. Some Native and non-Native academics and activists have criticized

us at times for not being critical enough, for paying too little attention to

the historical oppression of Native peoples and its disastrous effects. But

we have seldom heard this complaint from tribal leaders, most of whom

have little time for polemics. Their search has been not for affirmation of

past suffering but for guides to practical action. They wanted to know what

to do. Under pressure from them, we struggled to discover what works. Our

critical position emerged from that process.

MERGING PROFESSIONAL AND PUBLIC SOCIOLOGIES

Behind all of this lay professional sociology—or more precisely, given the

interdisciplinary nature of the project, professional social science.

It in-

formed our sense of how to proceed, from a classic comparative research

design (the attempt to explain differences across cases by searching for

sources of variation while controlling for as much as possible) to the spe-

cific tools we have used, including field methods, regression, econometrics,

and the small-sample Boolean techniques developed by Charles Ragin

(1987)—an approach ideally suited to some of our inquiries (e.g., Cornell

and Kalt 2000). We also have turned to professional colleagues for advice

and commentary and to the existing literatures on development, gover-

nance, organizations, social movements, culture, and Indigenous studies

for ideas, frameworks, and insight.

276 Chapter 15

But while social science in its professional forms has been a touchstone,

we were slow to engage it through publications and professional presenta-

tions. This was not a conscious decision on our part but the inadvertent

result of our engagement with Native publics. In the situations we were

studying, people wanted help. They had urgent, practical needs and wanted

to know if we could offer anything useful. We spent more time working

with and writing for Indigenous peoples about governance and develop-

ment strategies that met Indigenous objectives than thinking about how

our research might contribute to our own disciplines. In our case, the dan-

ger in public sociology was not that some public would capture our agenda

or persuade us to bend results to suit its interests. On the contrary, public

dialogue forced us to refine our agenda in intellectually productive ways,

and we found tribal leadership admirably open to our sometimes critical

results. As one said in introducing one of our presentations, “they may

not tell us what we want to hear, but they tell us what we need to know.”

Instead, the danger was that this engagement would absorb all our energy

and hinder the conversation with our own professions.

Our solution was deadlines. By committing to conference presentations

and book chapters, we forced ourselves to frame our work in professional

terms, situate it in our fields, and invite our peers’ reactions. The benefits

were new ideas, insights, and energy.

Sharon Hays (2007:84) has argued that “if we aren’t doing public soci-

ology, we’re just talking to each other.” Talking to each other, both within

and across disciplinary divides, has been extremely useful to us, but it

would have been far less so if we hadn’t at the same time been talking

with the people whose lives and possible futures we were trying to un-

derstand. We came to them as professionals, with theories and interview

questions in hand. Many of the questions were good ones, and some of

our theories found support. But much of what we learned came when

we listened not just to their answers but to their views of what we were

doing and of what we were missing, and to what they wanted to know.

My n is one, and I admit to bias, but in my experience this sort of public

engagement is far more likely to enhance sociological skills and insights

than to limit them. It depends, of course, on the sort of inquiry one un-

dertakes, but in our case, the lines have been profitably blurred: Doing

good professional sociology has required doing good public sociology at

the same time.

NOTES

My thanks to Michael Burawoy, Vince Jeffries, and Joe Kalt for helpful comments

and suggestions on an earlier draft of this chapter.

1. See, for example, Cornell and Kalt (1995, 1997a, 1997b, 2000, 2003), Cornell

and Gil-Swedberg (1995), Cornell (2005, 2007), Jorgensen (2000), and Krepps and

Caves (1994).

Becoming Public Sociology 277

2. These executive education sessions continue today under the auspices of the

Native Nations Institute at the University of Arizona.

3. At their request, we also have testified before U.S. Senate and Canadian parlia-

mentary committees and have met with U.S., Canadian, and Australian government

officials.

4. This danger is not peculiar to federal governments. In at least one case, leaders

of a Native nation tried to use some of our findings to legitimate their own grip on

power.

5. Started by a sociologist and an economist, this effort has become still more

interdisciplinary over time, involving participants from education, public adminis-

tration, public policy, anthropology, geography, and political science.

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Since 2000, I have given over 75 PowerPoint lectures to a wide variety of

audiences demonstrating the patterns of racial disparities in imprisonment

in the United States and Wisconsin. These slides have an impact and tell a

story about racial dynamics in the United States that cannot easily be con-

veyed in words. They show not only that there is a racial disparity, but that

it increased in the last quarter of the twentieth century, that the drug war

was a major source of the disparity, and that Wisconsin is even worse than

the rest of the country. After seeing the presentation, audience members

agree the problem is serious and that some of their ideas don’t fit the data,

even as they have different ideas about solutions. My slides are posted on

my website

and have been downloaded by and distributed to people I have

never met; my work is regularly cited and discussed within criminal justice

circles in Wisconsin.

I have also worked with several local groups around these issues. In 2000,

I joined the board of an advocacy group Money, Education, and Prisons

(MEP). My visibility on the racial disparities issue led to my being asked

in 2003 to join the advisory board for Dane County’s federally funded

Disproportionate Minority Contact (DMC) project in juvenile justice. In

April of 2007, this same visibility led to my appointment to the Governor’s

Commission to Reduce Racial Disparities in Criminal Justice.

In his campaign for greater recognition of the value of public sociology,

Michael Burawoy offers a 2x2 typology of sociologies where the dimen-

sions are type of knowledge and audience. In his scheme, professional

sociology develops instrumental knowledge for academic audiences; criti-

cal sociology develops reflexive knowledge for academic audiences; policy

sociology develops instrumental knowledge for non-academic audiences;

281

Talking about Racial Disparities

in Imprisonment: A Reflection

on Experiences in Wisconsin

Pamela E. Oliver