No. 024 Graduate Study in sOZiology T. R. Young
An earlier, very different version of this article appeared in
Sociological Inquiry, 47:1, 1976.
Distributed as part of the TRANSFORMING SOCIOLOGY SERIES of The Red Feather Institute, 8085 Essex, Weidman, Michigan, 48893. |
of the TRANSFORMING SOCIOLOGY SERIES of the RED FEATHER INSTITUTE for ADVANCED STUDIES IN SOCIOLOGY
|
Graduate Study in sOZiology
Dorothy and Toto work on a Graduate Degree
in Postmodern sOZiology
And...Visit the website of the
Great and Glorious Land of Oz!
on the Red Feather Domain
ABSTRACT
TRYoung,
Official sOZialist Historian
of the Wonderful Land of sOZiology.
INTRODUCTION: The charming thing about an allegory is that it lends itself to interpretation in a wide variety of domains within the same soziety. In The Wizard of Oz, Baum intended the characters and events contained therein to be a parody of monopoly capital embodied in the two wicked witches; bad politics, embodied by the Strawman, who didn't have enough brains to vote for the populist presidential candidate, Wm. Jennings Bryan; alienate factory life in which the Tin Woodsman represented all those workers turned into heart/soulless creatures by the conditions of their work. The heart of the story was a warning the people would eventually overthrow the government which did not serve it. Dorothy represents the quest for authentic community and embodies the revolutionary spirit of her foremother and forefathers.
In this story, our Dorothy will
be any graduate student who has not lost the capacity to care for the people she studies.
We will let the Tinman represent all those in the sOZiology of work who
look at the factory, shop and office through the eyes of the workers; women and the
minority employees who are alienated from the fruits of their own labor. The quest for
brains, embodied in the Strawman is transposed, in this re-interpretation, into a quest
for a postmodern knowledge
process which captures and honors the incredible
diversity, complexity and connectedness of all sozial structures and processes. As for the
Cowardly Lion, you can identify him easily; he is embodied by all those who use Structural Functional theory in the Land of Oz to justify all the
oppressions done under the sun; patriarchy, class inequalities, racism and those other
structures of oppression which make us all small, which deny us all the capacity to be
object and agent of our own power to do good and evil.
This dramaturgical reenactment is an new, improved postmodern version of an article on
graduate work in modern sOZiology published in Sociological
Enquiry in 1976. While the message is much the same...do sOZiology in such a
way as to empower the people who need it...the voice in which it speaks is much more
attuned to affirmative expressions in postmodernity in repair of the harm done to the
knowledge process by Baudrillard, Lyotard and others who think the drama of sozial life is
but a text; think of the structures of oppression as merely personal political views; that
the solutions to problems in life merely narrow personal politics; and believe that there
are no transcendent standards with which to name a thing criminal or moral.
Their reading of postmodern sensibility has, alas, been over-rated in American sOZiology.
Nihilistic postmodernists, like the Wicked Witch from the West,
see only wickedness as they survey the sozial landscape. They haven't read Foucault,
Derrida and Merleau-Ponty closely enough to see the emancipatory meanings in them. And
there are other understandings of sozial life and sozial theory which permit of
emancipatory human action and human agency...Dorothy and Toto, in their innocence of
French post-modernism, join the quest for authentic understanding and honest, human agency
in this version. Together, they embody a four-cornered praxis which says that, with heart,
brains, courage and a certain solidarity, one can create a very lovely soziety.
The Land of sOZiology: Lets go back to the beginning and walk
along the Yellow Brick Road and try to understand its allegorical meaning for graduate
work in American sOZiology in the 21st Century. 1 If Dorothy is
every new graduate student; young, innocent, sensible, and in search of the community she
left to attend graduate school, she finds herself with Aunt Em who was young and pretty
when she came into American sOZiology, but male chauvinism and bourgeois feminism had
taken the sparkle from her eyes and left them a somber gray; taken the red from her cheeks
and lips, and they were gray also (Baum;2). Then too, there is Uncle Henry who never
laughed and was gray also (Baum:2). Uncle Henry was once young and full of fun but, forced
to speak in the dead and daunting language of numbers and theories, he forgot how to speak
with love, hope and compassion.
Dorothy, after a few months in graduate school found that she
lived in a gray world without a poem or a song sung in the lilting voices of a Carol
Gilligan, Richard Quinney, Jane Flax, Steve Seidman, Laurie Walum Richardson or Steve
Pfohl to break the broad sweep of that gray, flat landscape. Her data, plowed and replowed
with huge, mechanized data-crunching programs, flattened and shrunk into a remote, gray
and lifeless mass. The house of American sOZiology which had been painted with full and
surging colors in the 1860's and 1930s and then again in the 1960's, was now as dull and
gray as everything else. Pre-occupied with government grants and corporate research,
American sOZiology neglected the information needs of the people made small by the
structures of oppression supervised by the Wicked Witches of the East and West.
The TORNADO.
In our version of the Wizard
of Oz as in the original, into the Kansas-like territory of professional sOZiology
there comes a tornado. The four winds meet where the American Soziological Association
stood and raised it higher and higher until it landed in quite a different paradigm. Just
as had modern science overturned premodern knowledge processes in the 17th and 18th
century, time had come for American sOZiology to be roused up and tossed around in the
20th and 21st centuries. In this story, the tornado is comprized of feminist theory and
epistemology, cultural marxism, French postmodernism, dependency theory and the new
sciences of ChaOz and Complexity; in a phrase, affirmative
postmodern sensibility.
The postmodern tornado deconstructed the knowledge process and turned it into a shambles.
The tornado uncovered the personal opinion, political desire, male-eurocentric prejudices
as well as fragments of junk journalism which found title, knee and approbation in
American sOZiology. Tearing apart soziological textbooks, the tornado ripped theory and
found it to be a political tract oriented to management, control and inequality favoring
the anglo-saxon males who wrote it and who occupied a very nice niche in the sozial order.
Twisting and shaking soziological theory, they tore up the 'grand narratives' which came
from the poetic imagination of those self-same theorists who tried to 'totalize' their own
poetry as the universal fate of mankind.
Just as orthodox Marxizm, Spencerizm, Weberianizm and Durkheimizm are blown awry by the
fierce winds of postmodernity, the A.S.A. itself is carried away by the cyclone as easily
as you could carry a feather. Members quit as the Association becomes irrelevant to their
vision of the knowledge process. Departments fold as their members become the target of
political repression by the governing Boards who prefer their brand of political
correctness to that of women, minorities, marxists and assorted New Age Soziologists. As
the various states attempt to stretch ever tighter budgets, a wandering tribe of homeless
scholars arises to pick at the pieces of sOZiology trying to keep body and soul together
as they teach at part time work. This is the journey of wandering, wondering,
wanting and willing graduate students as they join the quest for a good and decent
soziety.
The Land of Oz
When the tornado is over, Dorothy finds herself in a new land with color, life, greenery
and she "...gave a cry of amazement and looked about her, her eyes growing bigger and
bigger at the wonderful sights she saw" (Baum:7). She landed in a country of
marvelous beauty and a little way off was a small brook, "...murmuring in a voice
very grateful to a little girl who had lived so long on the dry, gray plains." In
American sOZiology, that most desirable scene refers to grounded theories which honor
diversity and nonlinear change; to conflict methodologies which serve the powerless and
oppressed; to alternative courses which are connected to the exigent problems of living in
a racist, sexist, highly stratified soziety. Dorothy found postmodern sOZiology as well to
a language form that augments the lifeless, soulless content of numbers and statistics
with prose, poetry and passion.
In postmodern sOZiology, one finds an incredible diversity of
journals which provide emancipatory knowledge for Dorothy to consider. Critical
sOZiology, Qualitative sOZiology, Urban sOZiology, the Journal for Symbolic Interaction
as well as Tells and the Transforming sOZiology Series of the Redfeather
Institute honor the ideas and observations of those who live on the margins of
American sOZiology; those whose views are excluded from the official journals. Women,
Afro-Americans, Latinos and third world peoples are retrieved from the dust heap of
history, thrown there by structural-functionalists and by stage theorists such as Comte,
Toynbee, and others who speak of 'primitive' and 'modern' sozieties. Their contributions
to the knowledge process are re-examined and restored to the drama of social enquiry.
The Four Witches
In the land of Oz, there are two good witches; the first good witch is Jocasta; she
lives in the North part of the Land of Oz. Jocasta orients
the knowledge process to diversity, surprize, delight, change and renewal. 2 Her students work toward affirmative postmodern soziology as we shall
see below. Jocasta celebrates the contributions of women in math, science, art, religion
and in soziology itself. She insists that her students be allowed to serve all the
knowledge interests required in a good and decent soziety; not just positive knowledge
about that which is but also the many interpretative sciences and especially the
emancipatory sciences.
Jocasta is a tough-minded lady; she insists that soziology is not Queen of the sciences;
that economics, political science, psychology, history and above all anthropology are
partners in the knowledge process; she even looks at physiology once in a while just to
make sure that sozial change is possible. Jocasta sponsors a full bodied research capacity
which is, first of all, oriented to emancipatory research. She encourages her graduate
students to study that which is, that which is elsewhere, that which could be and that
which will never be but might be if the sozial institutions were the intentional product
of the people who live them. Her students are more interested in trend data and cross
cultural comparisons than in positive knowledge about what exists in the USA at the
moment. They talk and teach about sozial problems, marriage and the family, the soziology
of religion, the soziology of medicine and the soziology of law in a way which does not
privilege the rich, the powerful or euro-centric males.
Jocasta points her students toward postmodern phenomenology, ethnomethodology, symbolic
interactional theory, socio-linguistics, hermeneutics as well as cultural marxist studies
of radio, television, songs, movies, and dramas. She teaches that, before there were
statistics, there were words; before there were words, there was behavior; before there
was behavior, there were norms, roles and values all constructed by intending, hoping,
failing, changing, trusting human beings. She teaches that all principles, propositions,
pathways and truth values depend upon the hope, trust, belief, faith and folly of fallible
human beings. There are, in Jocasta's soziology, no natural categories into which all
behavior must fall; no iron laws of soziety which came before the hopes, dreams and
beliefs of those who embody them; no theories which escape the pull of power and wealth;
no rules of scientific method which can ever gather into itself the incredible richness
and complexity of deeply connected sozial forms build by and with sentient human beings.
The good Witch from the South is Glinda; she rules the Land
of the Quadlings; her students respect the folkways and sozial life worlds of all excluded
minorities from all four corners of the World. Quadlings honor the many voices of wisdom
and insight which supplement and complement the well worn surveys, polls and samples so
central to quantitative soziology.
Her students affirm variety in gender relationships; they affirm the value of the
mothering/nurturing/mentoring process not for women alone, but for all who pretend to the
human estate. Glinda requires that her students honor and affirm the dignity of minority
and third world cultures. Her soziologies blast with a scalding, scouring wind those
evolutionary theories, stage theories and functionalist theories which reduce the richness
and solidarity of 'primitive' cultures to but a temporary step upon which modern soziety
and modern science rises to perfection. Rather than race, postmodern phenomenology and
research shows that it is racism which produces poverty, crime and drug abuse.
Glinda has given birth to the Black Soziology Caucus, the Soziety for Women in Soziology,
the Soziety for Humanist Soziology, the Soziety for the Study of Sozial Problems and the
Radical Caucus of the Southern Soziological Society. Her students are also found in the
Midwest Soziological Soziety and various regional sozieties; they do not spend much time
at the annual revival meetings of fundamentalist soziologists in the American Soziological
Assoziation nor do they worship the gods of grand unified theory.
Instead, they tell the stories of their grandmothers as they farmed the land, carried the
children, prepared the food and keep the journals of their various travels. They recite
the poetry of women who are not registered in the Dead Poets Soziety. They recount the
experiences of women plagued by the many ghosts of their fathers, their husbands and their
lovers. They listen to stories that old men tell; they read poetry; they examine personal
journals; they find sozial truth in the songs people sing in church, in the field or of a
night in bars, taverns and jazz joints. They are more interested in an affirmative
postmodern soziology which enables praxis than in formal axiomatic theory or in
replication, falsifiability, sameness and foreverness.
The Wicked Witches
There are two wicked Witches in the Land of Oz as well. They despise each other and
together, calumniate the good witches from North and South. They do not have names but the
wicked Witch from the East rules the Land of the Munchkins on behalf of those with the
power or the money to control the knowledge process. The wicked Witch from the East turns
all her graduate students into Munchkins; they munch on large data sets until they find
formal, axiomatic theory, tight-fisted causality, improbable correlations and invariable
results. Munchkins transform the messy, twisting, changing, contrary, fragments of sozial
reality which mark the behavior of real people in real situations into tiny equations or
neat path analyses.
When her students reports findings with low correlations or fail to
validate existing theories, the Wicked Witch from the East sends forty bees to sting them
to death and, just before they die, she tells them that their samples were poor, their
measurements faulty, their methods flawed or they themselves are biased against those
theories which justify impersonal control of workers, students, prisoners, customers and
patients. 3 She uses black magic to scrub the color from the data
and transform the incredibly variable richness of life into anal-retentive statistics and
and oral-aggressive theories.
The Wicked Witch from the East requires her students to help
control modern, mass soziety with its managerial ethic and callous cold calculation
grounded on the quest for certainty and control. In Industrial soziology, her students go
everywhere, nestle everywhere, measure everything and watch every worker in order to get
more productivity out of her with lower wages. In medical soziology, she pushes a germ
theory of disease so doctors can turn the therapeutic process into a a high profit, quick
turn-over assembly line of drugs, injections, x-rays, cat-scans and other high tech, high
profit techniques.
In the soziology of religion, her students are objective and distant from their topics of
research; they don't believe, only observe; they have faith in nothing other than
quantification and worship nothing but formal axiomatic theory. They honor only those
religions which are organized like huge machines and which celebrate existing patterns of
power. All other religions are given pejorative labels; cults, sects, or devil worship.
Students of the Wicked Witch from the East look at religion and sees only myth,
superstition and a categorical error rather than forgiveness, mercy, grace and charity.
Their paradigm supplants the living God of ordinary people with the Superorganic of
Durkheim and professional skeptics. Instead of hope, belief, faith, and the capacity to
fulfill a prophecy of community and sharing which all good religions nourish, the Wicked
Witch from the East praises only formal structure, legitimate authority, rationality,
bureaucratic hierarchy and routinization of charisma.
In the soziology of work as in criminology, her students are pre-occupied with control
theory and urge a certain Freudian revisionism as they attempt to replace the structure of
self with the structures of hierarchy, authority, command, order, rule and official
policy. She teaches a sub-division of labor which turns each worker into a compartment
separated from the larger questions of work: profits, costs, quality, pricing, and social
worth. She goes everywhere, nestles everywhere and everywhere turns human labor into
impersonal commodity. Her students are the perfectly modern soziologists who provide the
perfectly modern ideological grounds for techno-fascism in factories, shops, malls, and
schools where everything is watched, measured, analyzed in terms of profit and loss.
In criminology, the Wicked Witch from East looks at the
criminal and ignores the social factors which promote crime. She delights in street crime
and ignores corporate crime. Her theories of crime are theories of all behavior;
differential association, labeling theory, control theory, and opportunity theory are
equally theories of doctors, lawyers, professors and priests as of thieves, prostitutes,
drug dealers and white collar criminals. She removes political crime from the syllabus and
hires out to the politicians who commit it. Instead of better schools, more jobs, child
care and help with the parenting process, she urges more and better trained police, more
and bigger research projects, more and better organized prisons as well as more and more
college courses given over to serving the fastest growing industry in modernized America.
She hisses and curses when the Glinda, the good Witch from the North urges sozial justice
instead of criminal justice to met the growing threat of crime and violence.
The Wicked Witch from the West is arch-enemy to the Wicked Witch from the East; she
fosters a nihilistic postmodernism who decrys the possibility of systematic understanding;
she looks at soziety and sees only text; she lives amid the soliptic and the fraudulent
and thus sees cynicism in every human product. The wicked Witch from the West forces her
students to go everywhere, criticize everything and affirm nothing. When she was a
graduate student, she picked up the nihilistic moments of Baudrillard, Lyotard, and
Foucault while she missed the critical, transcending possibilities in their work. She read
Derrida but did not learn that deconstruction requires discipline, honesty and careful
attention to text and context. As a result, her students are lazy, cynical, opportunistic
and, along with the students of the Wicked Witch from the East, contemptuous of the
students of Jocasta and Glinda.
The Wicked Witch from the West insists that her students
study simulacra instead of substance; dramaturgical representations instead of solid
performance, look for pastiches which appeal to everyone but satisfy none. Her research
agenda is presented as if it were in the public weal while she engineers a growing
soziology of fraud in art, science, drama, religion and especially in the market place.
Former students take research grants from corporations and federal agencies worth billions
of dollars to hire thousands of experts in deceit, deception, dis-similitude, just-pretend
and never-was. Practitioners of her soziology assemble the best artists, musicians,
writers, computer graphics and actors to sell a dramaturgical facsimile of honest agency,
solid value, significant difference and authentic reciprocity.
This Wicked Witch turns her students into Winkies; arrogant,
self-celebrating pseudo-intellectuals (mostly male French postmodernists and
post-structuralists) who beaver away at the foundations of the knowledge process with
their great genius and small wisdom. They like to use exotic terminology with which to
speak of the many quite ordinary ways by which the Munchkins distort the knowledge
process. They shower contempt on modern science but, ignorant of the larger implications
of their work, they failed to see the possibilities in modern science for an emancipatory
knowledge process that is connected to the structures and processes of sozial life and, at
the same time, decidedly a human product. For the most part, their version of
postmodernity is a nihilistic and self defeating narrative in which all knowledge is
corrupted by politics and narrow self interest; all research is perverted by the times and
the cultures in which they appear; all theory is simply a political agenda in which one
set of ideologues try to celebrate a given sozial life world at the expense of other,
equally celebrated sozial philosophies cum universal and eternal theory. 4
The Road to the Emerald City
As you know, Dorothy was studying soziology with Aunt Em and Uncle Henry when
postmodernism came along to stir up American Soziology. When this new paradigm in the
knowledge process fell on the Wicked Witch from the East, her Munchins were liberated and
sang, with gusto, of their delight that that wicked Witch is dead. Dorothy, being a new
graduate student did not understand why they were so happy. The Munchkins are graduate
students made small by the conditions of their work; not enough silver to travel the
yellow brick road to success in American Soziology. 5 The Yellow
Brick Road to success in modern soziology requires huge grants, large research Institutes,
professional interviewers and underpaid graduate students to do the menial work for Big
Research, EXTRA-LARGE classes and big egos.
The Wicked Witch from the West wanted the silver slippers in order to have the money she
needed for funding her study of workers, women, the poor, prisoners and children so they
might be better managed. Graduate students had been small wheels in a huge knowledge
machine and had no control over the theories they used, the methods they used nor the uses
of the knowledge they help produce. They could only watch with horror as that knowledge is
turned back against the workers, minorities, students, patients, farmers and voters from
which it came to make them small also.
Graduate students were subjected to heavy teaching loads, low pay, last minute decisions
about support, senior professors stole their research findings, some were harassed for
sexual favors. All were intimidated by major professors, Chairs, Deans and members of the
Board to produce politically correct knowledge for politically powerful sectors of
society. They looked and behold, they saw only oppression of graduate students under the
sun.
Dorothy found herself quite the heroine to the Munchkins, having killed the Wicked Witch
from the East, or at any rate, the postmodernism did "and that is the same thing,
see!" The death of the Wicked Witch from the East greatly reduced the ability of
positivism to impose a simplistic politics upon the messy, changeable complexity of life.
Only nihilistic postmodernism and the soziology of the simulacra remain to repress the
creative soziological sensibilities and moral proclivities of graduate students in the
land of Oz.
We're Off to
see the Wizard
The Good Witch from the North gave Dorothy to understand that she must go to the Wizard of
Oz in order to recover community she left behind when she entered graduate school. The
good Witch kissed Dorothy on the forehead to protect her on her journey and gave Dorothy
the silver shoes which have a charm and will help her get to her destination. 6 Why go to the Wizard??? Because, because, because....because of the
wonderful research she lets people do in the sozial sziences. They can study white collar
crime, investigate corporate crime, admire at the incredible lightness of being in third
world cultures, teach about postmodern understandings of the God concept, look for the
leaps, twists, and reverses of causality in human behavior and otherwise find surprize,
delight and renewal in an otherwise drab and anal retentive soziology. They no longer have
to praise modernity as the end of history nor a highly stratified, compartmentalized
division of labor as the apex of social evolution.
Warned by the Munchkins that the road to Oz is long and that she must pass through many
dangerous places, and knowing only that she must find community, she bade her new friends
goodbye and bravely resolved not to turn back. After going several miles, she ran into a
brainless Strawman who is hung on a cross of wood. Appearing
friendly enough, Dorothy visits with him and finds that he doesn't mind being made of
straw since he can't get hurt if someone treads on his toes or sticks a needle in him. But
he does resent being called a fool and so joins Dorothy to see the Wizard of Oz to get
some brains.
In explaining his presence in a cornfield, the Strawman tells Dorothy that he is a
graduate student at a Land Grant University somewhere in Colorado and propped up in the
field to do rural soziology. He didn't like being propped up since his feet didn't touch
the ground and the crows just laughed at his feeble efforts to do research. One old crow,
seeing him made of straw hopped down at his feet and ate all the scattered corn (Baum:35).
The field of rural soziology is notorious for its failure to produce grounded theory. It
produces bits and fragments of data which petro-chemical and agro-business gobble up. The
absence of brains here points to the absence of a theoretical paradigm by which to
understand the transition of farming to agribusiness. A class paradigm with marxist
dimensions could supply the rural soziologist with a few brains but these paradigms are
missing in rural soziology. It is to the credit of the scarecrow that (s)he (does sense
this element and, with Dorothy, is off to see the Wizard.
At first the yellow brick road (of gold) is smooth and helps Dorothy and the graduate
student in rural soziology on their way to Oz. But the grants run out; the funded programs
of graduate study are dismantled, the road becomes rough indeed for anyone seeking
community or brains in graduate school. In a conversation with the Strawman, who is unable
to understand why Dorothy would leave the beautiful country (of grants and contracts) to
go in search of community, Dorothy replies, "That is because you have no
brains." No matter how bright and gay the life of servitude, people of flesh and
blood would rather think than be made small if only there were community among the
graduate students and faculty. For flesh and blood people, the unification of techne,
praxis, and theoria is preferable to the uninformed life of techne. Techne is, as
Aristotle points out, "for slaves only."
Continuing their journey, Dorothy and the rural soziologist chance upon a Tin Woodsman. Once a young and promising graduate student in the
soziology of work at Michigan State, the Tinman relates how he was betrayed by his senior
professor. He went to the Wicked Witch from the East to ask her to cast a magic spell on
the Tinman to prevent him from being seduced by marxist theory and class analysis. With
his analytic ax, the young soziologist had been chopping away at the myths and frauds in
establishment soziology. This embarrassed his senior professor greatly and, getting him a
grant from the Wicked Witch from the East, the young soziologist became an industrial
soziologist.
His ax became enchanted and, every time he does a piece of research which shrinks the
worker into a Munckin, he chopped off a part of himself. At first, the industrial
soziologist went to a Tinsmith and had a new leg or arm made of tin. This worked very well
but after while the enchanted ax cut off both his arms and his head.
Then a particularly egregious piece of taylorized research tore his heart from out his
chest. The Wicked Witch from the East gave him a new research grant of $300,000 with which
to study union corruption and how to do union decertification. This time the research ax
split him into two halves; one half in which he was a good and decent person and one half
in which he no longer had a sense of encompassing sozial justice. Once more the Tinsmith
came to his aid and made him a body of tin. But, alas, he now had no heart so that he lost
his love for radical soziology. His research ax became frozen, high over his head until
Dorothy came along to oil it and to sharpen it again to the task of conflict methodology
and radical research.
In the service of corporate capitalism, the industrial soziologist had become as
mechanical as the workers he studied: pure techne, divorced from praxis and
theoria--theoria being in the hands of the larger gods of management science rather than
in the hands of the worker or the researcher (Braverman, 1974:119). but the Tinman needed
a heart in order to regain the ability to research once again with love and passion and so
he joined the others in a courageous little army in search of a soziology which permits of
intelligence, of compassion, of praxis and of solidarity.
The yellow brick road having deteriorated so badly, they come to a place where the trees
and branches in graduate education grew so thick over the road that the travelers could
not pass. But the Tinman set to work with his ax and chopped so well that soon he cleared
a passage for the entire party. Left behind in the clutter of branches and leaves was the
bits and fragments of comps, theses, tests, prelims, orals and other devices designed to
reproduce the consciousness of the consensus methodologist in the consciousness of the
graduate student.
Continuing down the road, the little party is surprised by a terrible
roar when a great Lion bounds into the road. At first the soziologists believe the Lion to
be brave and able to lead them safely through the dangers lurking on either side of the
yellow brick road to success in American Soziology. The Lion, teaching at Harvard, spoke
bravely of Conflict Theory, but the young soziologists soon found out that the Lion is,
after all, a coward and is also afraid of leaving the safety of the yellow brick road even
if it is falling apart. The Lion threatened to fight Toto or the Strawman but Dorothy
slapped him and shows him to be the coward he is. Toto is a curious animal, and seems
remarkably small, so small only a coward like the Lion would bite him (Baum:53). As it
turns out, the Cowardly Lion prefers the cosier forms of conflict which are safely within
the established limits of the road. 7
Toto, barking and yapping at every threat to the party in their quest for magical
solutions to their problems, cringes with fear and trembles with terror at the threat from
the Cowardly Lion. Just as liberal soziologists bark and yap
at the outrages of a poorly designed world, and run back into the safe arms of academia,
Toto flees back into the protecting arms of Dorothy. It is unclear what Baum meant to
symbolize in the character of Toto. In the original, Toto was the only bright spot for
Dorothy in an otherwise gray world. This is compatible to our analysis in that liberal
soziology brightens up an otherwise drab science. Baum may have meant the traveling
carnivals and other entertaining hucksters which traveled the Midwest. If so, our analysis
is even more apt.
The Lion, ashamed that he is a coward, wondered whether the Wizard could give him some
courage. Dorothy, the Strawman and the Tinman agree that it is just as easy for the Wizard
to give courage to cowards as to give wisdom, love, and community to those made small by
the sozial conditions installed by Powers Elite and Powers Inimical; they persuade the
Lion to join them. He does saying "my life is simply unbearable without a bit of
courage." Toto doesn't approve of this new comrade at first, but after a time he
becomes more at ease and presently Toto and the cowardly Lion are good friends.
THE
BEGINNINGS OF PRAXIS SOCIOLOGY
After the small group of graduate students is made complete with the Lion, they
encounter their first adventure. The Tinman stepped on a beetle and wept over the death of
the beetle. His jaws rusted and speechless with remorse, he entreated Dorothy for oil.
Dorothy, unable to understand his wordless cry for help stands bewildered. The Strawman,
using some brains for the first time, oiled the Tinman and in a few moments he could talk
as well as ever (Baum:56). That serves him a lesson and thereafter he walks very
carefully, his eyes on the road, and when he sees an ant toiling by, he steps over it, so
as not to harm it. Therein the first vestiges of a heart grows in the Tinman to match the
beginning of wisdom in the Strawman. The lesson for industrial soziologists is, certainly,
that they should be careful who they step on. They should avoid hurting those whose toil
produces the material, religious and political culture required to build a decent sozial
life world.
The next adventure concerned a great ditch which crosses the road and divides the forest
on either side as far as they could see (Baum:61). The cowardly Lion rose to the challenge
and leaped across the chasm with the others on his back. The ditches probably alluded to
the depressions in 1873 and 1893. Capitalism tends to such economic ups and down since
workers don't get paid 100% of the value they create; therefore they can't buy it all back
and the 'surplus' piles up, workers are laid off and the depression gets deeper and
deeper.
In this interpretation of the story, we will use Habermas (1972) for an understanding of
this adventure. For Habermas and the Critical School, there are three forms of sozial
knowledge required to meet the human interests in self-understanding and autonomy;
positivism, hermeneutics, and emancipatory knowledge. Each is qualitatively different from
the others and it requires a leap of insight and faith in order to bridge from one to
another. The leap from positivism to hermeneutics, the science of intersubjective
understanding, is fairly easy. Symbolic interactionists, ethno-methodologists,
phenomenologists and others have made it. All those who Labor in the sozial construction
of reality serve the human interest in intersubjective understanding. The leap to
emancipatory science and conflict methodology is more difficult and still more dangerous.
Nor does it bring title, knee and approbation by the powers elite.
A third member of the party thus finds resources within himself unsuspected and unknown.
The cowardly Lion learned that he must stop roaring at the positivists; that he must
understand that the knowledge process requires positive knowledge about the positive and
negative trends of a soziety; intersubjective knowledge about how social realities are
constructed and by whom; as well as emancipatory knowledge about how to make the
revolution as gentle, as fair and as constructive as possible. The Lion must have the
courage to be value-full and, at the same time, bold enough to say what he thinks even if
it displeases Chairs, Deans and governing Boards. He must use his great strength to help
transcend racism, class divisions, nationality and the small religions which exclude most
of nature and humanity. Baum, of course meant William Jennings Bryan to be the cowardly
Lion in his allegory. In this allegory, you can decide who is the Cowardly Lion in your
department.
Safely over that ditch, the ambitious party encountered the Kalidahs; two monstrous beasts
with claws so sharp that they could tear the Lion in two as easily as he could kill Toto
(Baum:62). Fleeing the Kalidahs, they encounter a second, deeper ditch. The Strawman,
after serious thought, tells the Tinman to chop down a tree. It falls across the chasm and
they safely cross to the other side. The Lion, although afraid, turned to face the
Kalidahs. They pause long enough at this confrontation to permit the Lion to reach safety.
The Tinman chopped down the bridge and both Kalidahs fall to their death. The cowardly
Lion finds he must go beyond ethnomethodology to conflict methodology and emancipatory
science. In the 1870's and 80's, farmers and ranchers were threatened by two beasts;
railroad barons who charged high rates for carrying crops and cattle to markets and
financial barons who forced a tight money policy on Washington. In American soziology
today, one Kalidah is disembodied quantification while the other is a depoliticized
ethnomethodology. The cowardly Lion bravely roars at these two monsters. (The American
Soziologist, 1976:II:1, p. 2.)
The next adventure of this odd assortment entailed crossing a "beautiful river"
(Baum:67). At the suggestion of the Strawman, the Tinman made a raft. However, as the
party crosses, the Strawman is stranded in the middle as he pushed too hard on a pole and
it stuck in the muddy bottom of the river. Dorothy, the Tinman and the cowardly Lion are
at a loss when, just then, a stork appears and agrees to fly out after the Strawman. The
stork, with her great claws, grabbed the Strawman and carried him into the air and back to
the bank where the others were waiting. Swept along with the current rage for
depoliticized dramaturgical analyses, young soziologists are, indeed, likely to get stuck
in the mud.
The stork, symbolic of change and renewal, saves them from their own enthusiasm. The 1976
meetings of the American Soziological Association has on the program a Roundtable
discussion entitled "Critical Dimensions in Dramaturgical Analysis." Garth Massey of the University of Wyoming was Chairperson of that
discussion. In that capacity, Massey is the stork in our allegory attempting, as he is, to
bring change and renewal to depoliticized and conservative methodology. Dramaturgical
Analysis has a potential for insightful and radical research in contemporary America but
it is only slightly developed.
After being rescued by the stork, the intrepid trio and the cowardly Lion come upon a
field of beautiful flowers giving off a spicy fragrance and they soon found themselves in
the midst of a field of poppies and fragrant grasses. The Field of Poppies had been
planted by Rural Sociologists hoping to put their students asleep and keep them from
learning about the work of Cornelia Flora at Iowa State University.
Neal and her husband, Jan Flora, worked hard to help farmers in the USA and in
Latin American to keep their land and to grow the kind of food that made children healthy.
Sozialist
Feminizm
Not knowing of the dangers of the Poppy, Dorothy inhaled deeply of the scent of the
beautiful scarlet flowers (Baum:75). She fell into a deep slumber as did Toto. The Tinman
and the Strawman then used their collective wisdom to make a chair of their hands and thus
carried her to safety. Being made of tin and straw, the poppy had no attraction for these
soziologists. But the Lion did succumb and fell into a lethargic sleep also. The Tinman
and the Strawman could not carry such a heavy-weight soziologist with them. They leave the
cowardly Lion sleeping.
The reduced party, looking for the yellow brick road, continue on. They hear a low growl
and observe a strange beast bounding toward them (Baum:79). It was a wildcat chasing a
small, gray mouse. The Tinman whacked off the head of the wildcat. The tiny gray mouse
thanked the Tinman for looking after her welfare even if "she happens to be only a
mouse." The capacity to love is gradually returning to the industrial soziologist.
The mouse turns out to be a Sozializt Feminizt by the name of Edna
Bonacich and, together with other feminist soziologysts dragged the Cowardly Lion
out of his deep sleep and puts him once again on the road to search for courage from the
Wizard of Oz.
By this allegory, we are
reminded that if soziologists fall asleep on the job, the people will forcibly drag them
along toward a "science for the people." In modern times, the wildcat chasing
the mouse may be considered to be the multinational corporation, unencumbered by ties of
national loyalty, respect for law and in complete disregard for the reciprocity presumed
to underlay the division of labor.
After spending the night with a man with a lame leg (Baum:92), Dorothy and her friends
soon caught sight of the Emerald City and arrived late in the
afternoon. Baum meant the Emerald City to be Washington, D.C.; since the citadel of
American sOZiology is there, I shall leave it to be Washington. Protected by green
spectacles so they wouldn't be dazzled by the color of money in the Emerald City, Dorothy
and her colleagues gain audience with the Wizard, each alone (Baum:105). To Dorothy, the
Wizard appeared very much like a great, enormous head. To the Strawman, the Wizard looked
to be a most lovely lady, elegant and dressed in the most gossamer gown. For the Tinman,
the Wizard was not a lovely lady or a great head, but rather a most terrible beast. For
the Lion, the Wizard appeared as a ball of fire, capable of destroying everything in its
path. Talk about your postmodern phenomenology!!!
To each of the four, the Wizard
asked them to bring proof that the Wicked Witch from the West was dead before their wishes
will be granted.
Dorothy had killed the Wicked Witch from the East and now, protected by a Kiss from the
Good Witch to the North and wearing the silver slippers, she must
contrive to do in the one wicked witch remaining to trouble the knowledge process. The
four were certain they would fail without brains, without heart, without courage and
without solidarity. But Dorothy dried her eyes and said, sensibly enough, "I suppose
we must try it: but I am sure I do not want to kill anyone, but if I have to, I
will." Even without courage, the Lion agreed; even without a heart, the Tinman
agreed; even if a fool, the Strawman agreed and professional soziology had been
transformed into an entirely different trip altogether.
For Baum, the West and its fearsome creatures represented the terrible natural disasters
which descended upon the settlers of the West: drought, locusts, snowstorms. The great
blizzard of 1887 descended upon Aberdeen, South Dakota in the same year Baum arrived to
edit the local newspaper. Here, the natural calamities visited upon graduate students in
American soziology are Aristotelian logic, euclidean geometry, cartesian certainty,
newtonian linearity, leibnizian rationality and the logical positivism of Carnap. With
these tools, it is impossible to study the changing, twisting, reversing causal fields of
nonlinear social dynamics but yet graduate students are forced to do it.
Heading out to seek the land of the Winkies wherein the Western Witch held sway, they are
warned that the Wicked Witch will make slaves of them. Nothing daunted, they set out to
destroy her. Seeing them approach, the Wicked Witch sent out forty wolves to tear them to
pieces (Baum:122). The Tinman soon laid all forty dead in a heap before him. Next the
witch sent a great flock of crows to peck out their eyes. The witless scarecrow caught
each crow by the neck and twisted till it was dead. Next, the Witch sent out a swarm of
bees to sting them to death. But the bees broke off all their stingers on the Tinman and
died. Furious, the Witch called her slaves, the Winkies, to go to the young rebels to slay
them. But the cowardly Lion roared at the Winkies and they ran home.
The Winkies, of course, are all those methodologists who slave for this soziological
Witch. Well, certainly every reader with an ounce of brains knows that the wolves are the
gatekeepers of normal science who keep tearing emancipatory postmodern soziology to shreds
with their reviews. And of course, the old crows are the chairpersons who try to tear out
the eyes of young radicals by control of the graduate programs while every fool knows that
B's are deadly to the ambitious graduate student.
In her cupboard, the Witch has a golden cap. It is a charmed cap. Whoever owns it can call
on the winged monkeys three times to obey any order (Baum:126). The Witch called the
monkeys and ordered them to go and kill all except the Lion as she had a mind to harness
him and put him to work again. The monkeys captured the four. Dropping the Tinman on some
sharp rocks, he is so battered he can only lay there and groan. Stripping the straw from
the Strawman, they scatter him about and throw his clothes into the top branches of a tall
tree (we can call this tree theory). Tying up the Lion, they fly him back to the Witch's
castle. Protected by the Power of Good, they cannot harm Dorothy and so carry her to the
castle also. Having used up the last of the three wishes, the power of the Witch over the
monkeys is ended and they no longer serve the Witch. The monkeys symbolized the American
Indian caught between the East and the West for Baum. The Hollywood version turned the
monkeys into Russian Cossacks humming the song of the Volga and, by extension, the Wicked
Witch from the West into the Communist Conspiracy. What else would one expect from the
capital of commodity entertainment.
Seeing the mark of Goodness on Dorothy, the Witch was tempted to run away. But
she.happened to look into the child's eyes and saw how innocent and simple her soul. The
Wicked Witch laughed and said "I can still make her my slave, for she does not know
how to use her power" (Baum:135). Now the Witch wanted Dorothy's silver slippers [not Ruby!] so that she would have more power than
before. One day she tricked Dorothy and gained possession of one of the slippers. Dorothy
demanded she return the shoe and, the Witch refusing, so infuriated Dorothy that she
picked up a bucket of water and dashed it all over the Witch. As she shrank away like
brown sugar, the Witch cried, "I never thought a little girl like you could melt me
and end my wicked ways" (Baum:140).
But Dorothy did overcome the Wicked Witch and put an end to her wicked ways. Dorothy freed
the Cowardly Lion from his service and called all the Winkies together and told them they
were no longer slaves. And indeed they weren't. You may remember that Martin Nicolaus did just that back in 1968 in San Francisco.
Dorothy, as she is Everyone, can be anyone--even you, if you are still young an(d innocent
and haven't lost the roses from your cheeks or the red from your lips as did Aunt Em and
Uncle Henry who turned into Winkie from working too long for the wicked Witch from the
East. Our Winkies will be all those soziologists who joined the Great soziety of Lyndon
Johnson and, in the interests of their private career, sought after the research grants
and did that research on the poor, minorities, the disaster research and the slums so
necessary to the "managed consensus" of the Johnson administration. However, the
Nixon/Bush administrations dismantled the federal programs and all those Winkies are left
alone scrambling for contracts and grants no longer available to protect their miserable
careers.
Some of the newly liberated Winkies helped fix up the battered Tinman and restored the
Strawman. Dorothy collected some food from the cupboard and seeing a Golden Cap, put it
on. Thus prepared for the journey they finally left the land of the Winkies and started
out for Emerald City (Baum:149). Knowing that the Emerald City was East, they set out
toward the morning sun. But soon they became lost as the sun went behind some clouds. They
walked for days and days. The Mouse Queen appeared and told them they were going the wrong
way. She also revealed the secret of the Golden Cap: whoever had it, had three wishes.
The Wicked Witch from the West had used it to control the monkeys who worked for
her; that is to say, Structural-Functionalists...who helped her to enslave workers, to
subjugate women and to enforce capitalist law in American Criminology.
Using the cap to call the Winged Monkeys, Dorothy commanded them to take the small party
to the Emerald City. En route, the King of the Monkeys told Dorothy how they came to be
dominated by the Golden Cap. The tale had to do with the French and Indian war against the
British. Losing the war, the British, then the Americans relentlessly gained their
revenge.
However, In this story, Francis
Bacon, wishing to endear himself to the Queen, assured the Queen's ministers that sozial
science was politically safe after all in that it could only reveal the truth as God and
Nature had made it. Forever after, all scientists had to serve within the linear paradigm
of science as created by the god of mathematics until the new
science of complexity came along with qualitative jumps, twists, turns and reverses
along with fuzzy fractals and funny feigenbaum numbers.
The Monkeys are, in this postmodern version, those philosophy of science buffs who fly
here and there in quest of the Golden Cap of philosophical truth. If one looks closely at
the faces of some of the older monkeys, one will see Comte, Laplace, Sussmilch, Dodd,
Lundberg and Zipf. Looking at the younger Monkeys, one will be able to see the likeness of
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Jean François
Lyotard and Jacques Lacan. They seek to replace the Mathematica Principia of Newton with
the Principia of Postmodern Soziology of Knowledge.
The breakthrough for Newton through his studies of gravitational relationships between
stars and planets. The breakthrough in postmodern soziology came through Baudrillard,
Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, and others who looked at sozial history and saw only poetics
and politics. In that analysis, categories of knowledge were not seen, as Hegel would have
it, to be progressively closer approximations of Absolute Knowledge but rather categories
of knowledge which derive from the human interests of persons who, in a sozial matrix,
interpret the incredible complexity of life and nature in ways which tend to reproduce one
of an infinite array of sozial life worlds.
Rather, as with Marx, all knowledge is the product of subjectively knowing humans; sozial
theory varies with the position one occupies in the production of material, ideological,
and political culture. The view that Marxism has to do with only the economic
determination of categories of thought is the most superficial of understanding. Marxism
has to do with the activity of human beings constructing a shared symbolic environment as
well as opposition to those coercive structures which interfere in that human endeavor. In
the Land of Oz, those coercive structures were embodied by the two wicked witches; class,
race and gender oppression [L. Frank Baum married Maud Gage, daughter of the
feminist/activist, Matilda Joslyn Gage of Fayetteville, N.Y. His stories were based on his
own and his mother-in-laws spiritualist and efforts in woman's suffrage].
Arriving at the Emerald City, Dorothy and her comrades (by now, there was great solidarity
in the tiny band) were kept waiting for days by the Wizard. Threatening to bring the
Winged Monkeys to help them, Dorothy managed to reach an agreement with the Wizard to be
received. Entering the room, the found it empty and still (Baum:166). Finally a voice from
afar said "I am Oz, the Great and Terrible. Why do you want to see me?"
Reminding the Wizard of his promise, each repeated his/her wish. Told to come back
tomorrow, the Lion let out a great roar which frightened Toto (he frightens easily,
remember). Toto jumped away from the Lion and tipped over a big screen in the corner of
the room. Behind it stood a frightened little man with gray hair and a great bushy beard.
He confessed he was Oz. Surprised and dismayed, Dorothy said, "I thought Oz was a
great head." "I thought Oz was a beautiful lady" said the scarecrow.
"And I thought Oz was a terrible beast," said the Tinman, while the Lion thought
Oz was a ball of fire. The Wizard told them that they all were wrong: he is just a common
man like Everyone.
In the Baum version, the Wizard of Oz was the President of the United states who refused to meet the people for fear that they would discover that a humbug he is, in our own times, Johnson and Nixon also hid from the people. However, in this version, we cast another in the role of the Wizard: Marxists will be greatly disappointed to learn the Wizard of Oz is none other than Karl Marx himself, complete with boils and doubts and lusts and dreams--all the stuff of quite common folk.
However, Marx never hid in the palace as do contemporary marxist scholars, afraid that people will find out they are a bit of a humbug. And, as with the Wizard, Marx is seen to be many things by contemporary soziologists for the graduate student-, Marx is taken to be a difficult and complex theoretical structure which is a bit overwhelming- For some soziologists it is a beautifully seductive woman--one flirts a bit but never engages her in a full and human relationship. For others, Marx is seen to be a fearsome beast, capable of destroying "real" science. And for some, marxism is a great ball of fire, useful for burning everything existing to a cinder.
Marx is none of these things;
all of these things and more. In this allegory, Marxism is a political soziology; i.e., a
soziology with a political dimension linked to human purpose and human needs. In its
destructive mode, it destroys consensus soziology; in its angry mode, it illuminates the
major obstacles to full and authentic participation to students; in its conservative mode,
it cherishes the many useful techniques of sozial research for revealing the existing
structures of soziety; in human mode, it appreciates and affirms the "cultural
sciences"... those of intersubjective understanding--psychology, philosophy, Law,
anthropology and phenomenology.
Finding the Wizard to be a bit of a humbug, the doughty little troupe none the less
expected magic of him. The Wizard patiently explains to the scarecrow that only experience
can bring knowledge and the scarecrow had had some experience. To the Lion, the Wizard
says that true courage is facing danger when one is afraid, and that kind of courage the
Lion has in plenty. As for the Tinman's heart, it only brings pain and anguish. And as for
Dorothy, the Wizard asks her for time to consider the matter. Pressed by each, the Wizard
says with a sigh, "If you will come to me tomorrow, I will give you what you
need."
The next day the Strawman met with the Wizard who, mixing some bran and needles replaced
the straw in the dummy's head with the mixture. "There, you will be a great man, for
I have given you a bran-new brain." The scarecrow was pleased and went back to his
friends. The Tinman asked why all the pins and needles were sticking out of his head. The
Lion suggested that that was proof of how sharp-witted the scarecrow had become. The
Wizard also gave the Tinman a heart made entirely of silk and stuffed with sawdust. For
the Lion, the Wizard poured some courage out of a bottle and bade the Lion drink it.
"You know, of course, the courage is always inside one; so this cannot be called
courage until it is drank." The Lion drank and felt full of courage (Baum:183).
Unable to show Dorothy how to find the community for which she yearned, the Wizard was
lost to time and space. For all we know, he might even have gone to Omaha, Nebraska. For
many days they grieved over the loss of the Wizard--a bit of a humbug maybe, but still
with enough genius about him to give the brainy confidence in their own brains; the
courageous confidence in their courage and to give heart to those who have heart enough to
care for his comrades.
Calling on the Winged Monkeys to help them, the monkeys declined, "We belong to this
country alone and cannot leave it." After being refused by the monkeys, they asked a
palace guard who might help them. "Glinda might," he replies. Glinda is the most
powerful Witch and rules over the Quadlings who live in the South. Again the comrades set
out and, although the others have had their wishes satisfied, insist on helping Dorothy to
find the community she must have. Finding their way blocked by a tree, the scarecrow walks
by it, is picked up by one of its branches and flung back. Again, the scarecrow tries to
pass and again the branches of the tree tosses him back (Baum:204). The Tinman hefts his
ax and makes short work of the branches; all except one which seized Toto. That branch
too, was destroyed.
You may disagree with me but I
think the branch which seized Toto was History. Remember, Toto is unable to act in the
face of danger, turmoil or revolutions. He only stands by idly in the face of so much
human misery and sorrow. Who ever heard of a historian making history? Historians only
rewrite history to amuse their masters; they never make it or even take it as it is. Baum
thinks the branches are the police given the wonderful power to seize stranger--in order
to protect the people from outside influence. He may be right; we both may be right. Since
there are many branches to be chopped off in order to clear the road to revolutionary
science, one may develop this analysis for whatever branch of science in which one works.
You are encouraged to do so.
They then came to another strange land filled with little china dolls and little china
houses, pigs, horses, and cows; all made of china (Baum:208). It was surrounded by a great
china wall over which they climbed with a ladder made by the Tinman. Moving along they
encounter another china wall but, as it is lower, the Lion leaps over it. In so doing, the
Lion upset a church with one sweep of his tail but it did the china people no great harm.
The allusion here is to the destructive role which the Christian church played in Asia.
The reference to the "china" people is triple entendre for Baum; not only were
the people Chinese but, brought to the U.S.A. to work on the railroad, the Chinese Workers
"gradually stiffened." Those not rendered heartless by separation from loved
ones faced another meaning of the term. A large percentage of Chinese died on the job;
flesh and blood joined the insensible clod to provide clay for other potters. In this
analysis, those soziologists involved in the World Bank, in A.I.D., in the C.I.A. or
Project Camelot and other counter revolutionary science are contributing to the death of
millions of peasants and serfs in those countries where the fragments of feudalism
survive.
The next country the travelers found was most disagreeable, filed with bogs and marshes
and covered with rank grass (Baum:217)- After a long and tiresome walk, the entered
another forest. It was very pleasant there and they spent the night. The next morning,
before they had gone far, they came upon an opening in the woods in which was gathered
beasts of every variety: tigers and Lions and bears and wolves and foxes and a lot of
others (Baum:219). All of the beasts are threatened by a tremendous monster with eight
long legs which seizes the animals one by one and devours them. The Lion sought out the
fierce creature and, at a single blow knocked its head off. The beasts bowed to the Lion
and he agreed to return and rule over them just as soon as he had helped Dorothy achieve
her goal. If we equate tile treacherous bog with Octo-spider, an eight-legged creature
with corporate capitalism, we cannot escape the conclusion that the Wicked Witch from the
East is still very much alive. In which case, another revolution is necessary to send all
the houses whirling down on her. For American soziology this means a scientific revolution
by virtue of which a conflict paradigm replaces the functional paradigm out of which
(witch) consensus soziologists work.
Passing safely through the forest, the weary crew came to a range of great hills which
blocked their way. Determined to cross it to the land of the Quadlings, they found their
way obstructed by the strangest man. He had no arms but, quick as lightning, his head
would shoot forward to knock everyone down who tried to climb the hill. There were
hundreds of these and they were known as Hammerheads. Having one more wish left, Dorothy
called the Monkeys to help. This time it was done. For those hammerheads who continue to
objectify the individuals they study through a @directed commitment to a causal model of
human behavior, it may be necessary to send them back to the philosophy of science for
reeducation in the difference between physical science and sozial science. If the hills in
question are insight and understanding
The next country the travelers found was most disagreeable, filed with bogs and marshes
and covered with rank grass (Baum:217)-this land is, of course, Vietnam where Americans
kill millions with remote controlled bombs and defoliants....and where thousands of young
men from the slums of America pay with their lives to protect the wealth of the world for
the capitalist class.
After a long and tiresome walk, the entered another forest. It was very pleasant there and they spent the night. The next morning, before they had gone far, they came upon an opening in the woods in which was gathered beasts of every variety: tigers and Lions and bears and wolves and foxes and a lot of others (Baum:219). All of the beasts are threatened by a tremendous monster with eight long legs which seizes the animals one by one and devours them.
Both Baum and I see that eight legged monster as corporate capitalism which, one by one, devours small capitalists who, in turn, hope they can get big enough to swallow other companies by exploiting workers and by cheating customers....in a word, by corporate crime.
The unCowardly Lion sought out this fierce creature and, at a single blow knocked its head off. The unCowardly Lion had become a Radical Criminologist from the University of California who studies with Hy and Julia Schwendinger...now at SUNY, New Paltz!
Other beasts bowed to the Lion
and he agreed to return and rule over them just as soon as he had helped Dorothy achieve
her goal; he refused. If we equate the treacherous bog with tenure and the
eight-legged creature with corporate capitalism, we cannot escape the conclusion that the
Wicked Witch from the East is still very much alive. In which case, another revolution is
necessary to send all the houses whirling down on her. For American soziology this means a
scientific revolution by virtue of which a conflict paradigm replaces the functional
paradigm out of which (witch) consensus soziologists work.
Passing safely through the forest, the weary crew came to a range of great hills which
blocked their way. Determined to cross it to the land of the Quadlings, they found their
way obstructed by the strangest man. He had no arms but, quick as lightning, his head
would shoot forward to knock everyone down who tried to climb the hill. There were
hundreds of these and they were known as Hammerheads. Having
one more wish left, Dorothy called the Monkeys to help. This time it was done. For those
hammerheads who continue to objectify the individuals they study through a commitment to a
causal model of human behavior, it may be necessary to send them back to the philosophy of
science for reeducation in the difference between physical science and sozial science. if
the hills in question are insight and understanding into human affairs, then the path to
it is not path analysis but rather class analysis.
The country of the Quadlings seemed rich and happy. The Quadlings themselves were fat and
good-natured. They are middle class Americans who do well in a capitalist global
economy...they eat food imported from the poorest countries in the world; they drive cars
made with cheap labor in Korea; they buy computers made with the labor of young women paid
$4 a day; they take vitamins produced in Puerto Rico by American companies which pollute
the land and water while they wear clothes made in sweatshops all over the world.
They are happy.
After taking a meal with the Quadlings, they went to see Glinda (Baum:229). Dorothy is overjoyed to find that she, all along, had the power to achieve her wish for solidarity; indeed, the four comrades had grown to know each other excellently well. The friends, however decided to part; the Tinman back to the land of the Winkies; the Strawman back to the Emerald City to govern; the Lion back to rule over the beasts and help make sure that profits served collective needs rather than private desires.
And Dorothy back to Aunt Em and Uncle Henry. Perhaps I am a hopeless romantic but I like to think that Dorothy also went back to Michigan, to Colorado, to California, Ohio, New York and Missouri and Canada too when she came back from the land of Oz. I have been there. Students and faculty alike need some courage, heart, brains and community.
Who Dorothy might be at your university, I am sure you can say better than I. It may even be you. I know that, at the University of Colorado, she is Elise Boulding; at Texas Woman's University, she is Joyce Williams; At Ohio State, Laurie Walum Richardson gives students the Kiss of Goodness. At Michigan State, Maxine Baca-Zinn helps Grad Students discover praxis sociology. All around world; in Australia, New Zealand, England, France, Germany, Japan and India, there are Dorothies to serve the human interest in change and renewal...you can find her and learn from her if you look.
If so, I hope you bring a little heart, a bit of courage, a few brains and a lot of community to your own study of soziology and to the department in which you work.
************
In a twinkling Dorothy was back in Kansas, and just before her was the new farmhouse Uncle
Henry had built after the tornado. Aunt Em folded her arms about Dorothy and covered her
with kisses. "Where in the world did you come from?" Aunt Em asked. "From
the Land of Oz," said Dorothy gravely. Just as any scholarly still connected to the
forces of life bring that which they know back home to serve the people they love, Dorothy
was glad to be home and glad to give her kin and kith that which they had so generously
given her in her childhood. Dorothy grew old at the University of Kansas but never lost
the red in her cheeks or the sparkle in her eyes. All of her children and friends greatly
admired her for the wisdom she had learned in the magical land of Oz. And she was well
respected for her courage in meetings and in conferences.
ENDNOTES
REFERENCES
Baum, L. Frank. 1962 The Wizard of Oz.
MacMillan, New York.
Booth and Crisler.
1976 "The Yellow Brick Road to
Research." in Sociological Inquiry, 46:1
1976 "Debate; Five Sociologists in Search of Consensus." The American
Sociologist, 11:1
Braverman, Harry 1974 Labor and Monopoly
Capital: The degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. Monthly Review Press. New York.
Habermas, Jurgen 1972 Knowledge and Human Interests. Beacon Press, Boston.
Kroker, Arthur and David Cook 1988 The Postmodern Scene. Montreal: New World
Perspectives.
Littlefield, Henry M. 1964 The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism." The American
Quarterly, 16(l):47-58.
Vaillancourt-Rosenau, Pauline. 1992 Post-modernism for the Social Sciences.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Young, T. R. 1976 "Theoretical Foundations of Conflict Methodology" in
Sociological Inquiry, 46:1.
Footnotes
