IMPROVISING ON SENSITIZING CONCEPTS
William James complained that critics of the concept of pragmatism used the “stock phrase …‘what is new is not true, and what is true is not new’” (quoted in Merton 1967: 21-2). The “stock phrase” he quotes captures an important fact for ethnographers: To count as a valuable contribution, ethnography should be both true and new—and ideally, if originality (the new) is conveyed through vivid, credible, plausible, and trustworthy detail (the true). This joining or coupling of the new and the true is “thick empiricism.”
Qualitative researchers are wedded to “thick empiricism.” From Blumer’s “exploration” and “inspection” of the social world (1954) to Becker’s “inference and proof in participant observation” (1958) through Geertz’s “thick-description ethnography” (1973: 26) and Schatzman and Strauss’s protocols for “intensive observation” (1973), to Glaser and Strauss’s “grounded theory” (1967), scholars underline the importance of joining close observation and accurate recording with the shaping, reshaping, and refining of concepts. More recently, Tilly (1994) following Stinchcombe (1978) takes up the uses of the thick/thin metaphor to characterize “thick history” and time in/of historical events as “drenched with causes that inhere in sequence, accumulation, contingency, and proximity” (Tilly 1994: 270).
“Sensitizing concepts” are central organizing ideas in field research. Where do they come from? How do they affect the research questions being asked? How are they affected by what the investigator discovers during the fieldwork (interviews, observations, and examination of archival data)? As the ethnography unfolds, how are these “sensitizing concepts” assembled and reassembled as the research problem changes? How are research problems defined and redefined during the course of the investigation (on the temporal ordering of research problems, see Kuhn 1970: 171-2, 198-200, 209-10).
Certain conditions foster or suppress the new and true in specifics contexts. Ethnographers have many ideas that could be considered sensitizing concepts, but most of them don’t qualify. We have an idea, we try it out, and nothing comes of using it, nothing interesting anyway, so we try another one. We improvise on concepts. This is disciplined imagination (Becker and Faulkner 2006; Faulkner 2006; Faulkner and Becker forthcoming). The elements of discipline and organization, the rational and the routine, are on one side of the equation. The elements of improvisation and imagination, the spontaneous and the indeterminate, are on the other side. Ethnographers have ideas they develop. They go into the field, talk to people, collect running records of events, and observe and record observations with care and precision. They improvise, try out new ideas and see what happens. If nothing interesting happens, the ideas are forgotten. If something does happen, ethnographers keep following it out to see where it goes. They work with it and on it. The task that is hard for our more “scientistic” colleagues is where a good sensitizing concept takes hold, and where it does not take hold is often completely divorced from the original idea and the initial intention. Ethnographers welcome this; through learning plus adapting. There is interplay between taking sensitizing concepts and making sensitizing concepts.
There are two sources of sensitizing concepts and two outcomes. Concept exploration involves improvisation, experimentation, and the discovery of new knowledge. Concept exploitation involves receiving, refining and extending existing knowledge. The two outcomes are the coupling or decoupling of concept and evidence. Ethnographic coupling is the tight alignment and interweaving of in-depth fieldwork evidence with the sensitizing concept. In the write up, “thick descriptions” are closely aligned with hard won empirical data. Decoupling, by way of contrast, is a characterized by a gap between concept and measurement. To illustrate the interplay of exploration versus exploitation and tight and loose coupling, I draw on Music on Demand (Faulkner 1983) an inquiry into the careers of free-lance composers in the Hollywood feature-film industry.
THE SENSITIZING CONCEPT
Over fifty years ago, Herbert Blumer introduced the evocative idea of “sensitizing concept.” “Sensitizing concepts” emerge when the observer discovers something worth problematizing, “addressing” the concept to the objects of investigation, producing precise and accurate evidence of chosen phenomena. He discusses how “sensitizing concepts” (1954) may be “attached” to events in the empirical world, suggesting “exploration” and “inspection” as the tools to deploy in the attachment process (1956; 1969). But he leaves the issue of how “sensitizing concepts” actually become aligned with evidence and proof unanswered.
Blumer habitually exhorted sociologists to relinquish their commitment to received concepts and theory testing. Better to get out into the thick of things. He distinguishes between agency of the idea—a concept’s ability to act on the sociologist—and agency over the concept—the sociologist’s ability to act upon the concept (see Latour 1987). In this interplay, Blumer prefers control over the concepts emerging from engagement. However, the reader is left adrift with vague ideas about a “careful and imaginative study of the stubborn world to which such concepts are addressed” (1954: 150). We need a more precise and detailed explanation. Where Blumer’s recommendations for assembling and shaping “sensitizing concepts” drift into abstractions lacking clear empirical referents (Becker 1988), Bruno Latour (1987) shows the contingent and temporal nature of the research problem and how scientist at work develop rhetorical strategies to mobilize constituencies and shape understandings. Agency of the idea and agency over the idea can be seen as infusing the work of Latour (1987: 23-9), who situates interpretative strategies and condensing symbols as key objects or “actants” in scientific inquiry and collective action. Erving Goffman speaks of “the serious ethnographic task of assembling the various ways in which the individual is treated and treats others, and deducing what is implied about him through this treatment” (Goffman 1971: 342).
Ethnographic studies commonly assume that something new or unusual will be discovered with participation in social life. Less value, however, is attached to the precision with which it is known. The pairings are evocative: “thick” versus “thin,” “deep” versus “shallow,” or “drenched” versus “arid.” Thick empiricism is not only preferred, it is an ideal. The ethnography is supposed to be infused with detail and packaged as a whole; it is supposed to be empirically grounded and, moreover, move from thin to thick. In addition, thin ethnography is written by social science academics who care more about whether ideas (and concepts) are new, and interesting, than whether they are true. Combining both new and true, thick empiricism is the essential criterion in our judgment of ethnography.
SHAPING THE SENSITIZING CONCEPT
I use two key dimensions to examine the use of sensitizing concepts. As noted above, the first distinguishes exploitation versus exploration; each considered by whether it leads to tight coupling or loose coupling between ideas, evidence, and proof in fieldwork. Exploitation uses existing concepts, and refining, deepening, and extending our knowledge of them. Exploration discovers new concepts, developing new, nuanced interpretations. Exploitation works on the known, the conceptually tried and true, with anticipated results; exploration involves adventure and unanticipated findings. The second distinguishes thick versus thin ethnography. Researchers shape sensitizing concepts through “assembling and deducing.” Thick assembly is a tight coupling of the concept with strong evidence close at hand. Thin assembly is loose coupling of the concept with suggested evidence, more an assumption than a repeatedly demonstrated fact. There are four scenarios.
These are ideal types and there is mutual intertwining of them as the data collection and analysis takes place. The richest measures of ethnography (new and true) are generally to be found in “thick exploration.” In this case we discover and establish that the phenomenon actually exists, and that it is enough of a regularity to require and to allow explanation. Other styles and forms are absolutely essential as they trigger and generate potential in this area. “Thick exploitation” is important and worthwhile in framing concepts, in selecting, amplify, and condensing sensitizing concepts for study. Sometimes concepts are thin but need not necessarily be abandoned, as they are useful in providing background for framing careers and markets rather than as foreground concepts. In practice, there is interplay across these ideal types as the ethnographer uncovers and locates strategic research sites, objects, and events that exhibit the phenomena to be explained or interpreted. For brevity, hereafter the proper citations appear under the appropriate heading in the reference section.
Thick Exploitation
Thick Exploitation, as exemplified in my study of composers, markets and careers in Hollywood, starts with achecklist of known concepts: for instance, career, career contingency, client control, and clash of perspectives, orienting concepts from the Chicago school of occupational and institutional sociology. It is summer in Hollywood and I started calling composers and setting up interviews. I had met some composers in connection with my earlier study on free-lance musicians. My early interviews immediately revealed the tensions and clashes of perspectives between composers (the artists) and the producers and directors who are their clients. After a dozen I focused on the meanings and activities of “recurring networks.” This was one defining concept in the then developing area of the study of “art worlds.” The focus was on the production features of art markets that are the suppliers, buyers, rivals, reviewers, and regulators who are involved in the making of cultural products.
Devotees of film scour the credits looking for insights and connections. The adventure surrounding the documentation of “recurring networks” and “career dynamics” in art worlds entailed experimentation and play on the distinctive detail of the film as a project in a labor market. Each film is a market event for all those involved in its production; a film is a point or node in a career. “Career contingencies” was a sensitizing concept in the work of The Chicago School of occupational sociology. Careers are contingent on the accumulation of credits and connections. Careers are contingent on moving into “the thick of things.” In the film business this means access to more work, better work, being considered by higher status clients, getting some control over your career, and denser associations with diverse film producers and directors. I started drawing up filmographies of each of my interviewees. This list facilitated focus in the face-to-face interview. I took each interviewee through his or her career asking how each project came about, how it was to work with the producer and/or director, problems encountered, and relationships established. I wanted to get at the quality and quantity of relationships between composer and others in the market. I exploited the concept of “contingency” showing the factors upon which mobility, access, and reputation depend, thereby extending and deepening one of the central insights of occupational sociology.
Making use of this theoretical orientation, I learned how disparaging language used by professionals about their clients tells you something about what they are trying to maximize in their relations those people. The early interviews with composers taught me the value of “a clash of perspectives,” especially in a setting in which control and power is in the hands of the film producers and directors. Composers stressed the variety of people they have to work with, indicating the importance of being able to “read the values of the film,” “deal with producers,” and “try to understand what they are trying to achieve in a film,” and then to write a score that satisfies everyone involved in the project. I wrote up a couple of chapters on this concept of clash, tension, and resolution. On the ethnographic side, the project involves exploring the actual work transactions in this market, tying each idea to composers’ statements and stories about their work with producers and directors on specific projects. I saw that the composer’s career is oriented not only to particular transactions and film projects but also to a web of social relationships and their controllers.
I had to decipher a large network of linkages between producers/directors and the composers they hired to feature films. I want to challenge the black-box conceptualization of the market itself and show how career attainment was linked to market behavior between buyers (Hollywood producers and directors) and sellers of professional talent (composers). I mean “decipher” in an almost “a-theoretical” sense of being able to represent the level and direction of recurrence among buyers and sellers in a feature film labor market, to discern its major outlines.
Another sensitizing concept emerged during the course of the interviews. It was an idea that I thought was straightforward and mundane, but which eventually linked the master sensitizing concepts: reputation. The difficulty everyone in the film business has in measuring the specific contributions of composers as artists to the quality of an aesthetic object, such as a film. There is little consensus about what constitutes competence among creative personnel. There is also little understanding about what makes a film a hit or not. Films and their makers—directors, producers, screenwriters, and composers--are assessed post hoc, based on the commercial success of the products they work on. One respondent told me, “It is better to be a shit in a hit, than a hit in a shit.” It is a matter of the success of the whole project shaping the judgment of the specific contribution. In the film market, the most tangible sign of a composer’s future productivity is his or her association with prior successful film project (“shit in a hit”) regardless of the artistic merits of the film score (“hit in a shit”). A career line is a succession of temporary projects embodied in an identifiable line of credits and reputation seeking films. This market is a system of codes and conduct, where skill and productivity are not easily measured, market status or reputation is a signal of a free-lance composer’s standing and worth to clients. Identifiable projects send strong signals to the buyer side of the market. This is called “a typecast.” The concept of “typecasting” unexpectedly came out of “reputation” and was confirmed again in the field as an industry wide cultural framework for understanding “how the business works.”
“Typecasting” as a social process had a double-edged nature: “It’s good, because at least people make a link between the composer [and his film score in a film]. It’s bad, because producers and directors tend to confuse what a composer does with what he can do.” In Hollywood, film market producers and directors evaluate and buy professional talent by hiring composers, their decisions shaped by cumulative credits, reputation, and typecasting of the composers. “Typecasting” as an extreme form of status attribution by buyers in the market introduces limitations on the composer’s identity. It is experienced as only loosely related to one’s true talent, but at least it carries the recognition necessary for securing future work and a potential line of credits.
Thin Exploitation
Existing sensitizing concepts don’t always work. When existing concepts are initially imported, but then found to be ill-fitted to the empirical world, we have thin exploitation. This happened three times. In the first case, a powerful concept from labor economics called “market interaction” called for detailed labor market histories with panel data, tracking possible candidates for jobs through the bids they receive, the offers they seriously consider, and the jobs they take. In order to exploit this concept, I needed information on all offers (or bids for composer services) and all completed market transactions (or done deals or films scored). This meant I had to ask each interviewee about these events. This idea is difficult to document through interviews. Composers politely refused to talk about the jobs they didn’t get: jobs they didn’t take. By continuing to ask these questions, I undermined my credibility with composers. Therefore, I replaced the sensitizing concept of “market interaction” by another concept called “consummated market exchange” or “transactions.” Transactions are the completed film productions, and this became a leading concept in my study. In this case, sensitizing concepts that don’t work can sharpen the data collection and analysis.
The second concept was “age-grading,” in which age and cohort effects are critical in understanding labor markets and career attainment. The concepts are important for understanding the market matching of composers and clients by their respective ages. Hollywood composers told me that “the wheel turns” and that younger producers and directors want to work with younger composers. A key informant said, “Young directors want to work with someone they can talk to, not revere.” In order to develop convincing evidence about careers and cohorts--and the interdependence of aging and career—I needed voluminous data on participants on both sides of the labor market. I thought about working up a sample of directors and composers by age and film credits. This would have taken me into another, different, type of ethnography. I chose not to proceed. In this case, sensitizing concepts that don’t work can be distractions.
The third case is complicated. The sensitizing concepts were “reciprocity” and “gift giving” in market behavior. For example, some composer-respondents said they attempted to pursue a career strategy of working with one or two directors or producers in hopes of building strong and lasting relationships. They wanted to build up “the accumulation of loyalty ‘chits,’” in which free-lancers hope producers or directors would reciprocate that good will, offering generous prices for their artistic services. Both would move “up” in the business, getting called to work on more and better film productions. “You help them out and they help you out,” said a composer. When gratitude is not reciprocated, anger and frustration ensues. Composers talked about how some producers or directors “trade up.” “Trading up” reveals the hierarchy of work in Hollywood when a heretofore-loyal client chooses a more prestigious composer on his next film project. The former composer is abandoned. Non-reciprocation is important for what it reveals about clients and their preferences.
The sensitizing idea of “trading up” and non-reciprocation was thin. I had difficulty documenting it across all the interviewees. Still, respondents were incensed at the “lack of loyalty” by clients. I collected many anecdotes of this from composers. Interviews with producers and directors would help in understanding the reasons behind their hiring decisions; however, that kind of data collection would be the start of another, different, occupational ethnography. I went ahead and used “lack of gratitude” or “lack of reciprocity” in market exchange as a story telling device. In this case, thin sensitizing concepts can enhance the storyline and the appeal of the theory of markets as transactions.
Thick Exploration
All ethnographers observe with the anticipation of discovery. Thick description refers to new concepts and ideas that emerge from detailed data collected from a close, intimate immersion in the social world studied. Initially, I wanted to discover the contingencies of a free-lance career, that is, the factors upon which career advancement and success depend. I knew something about the idiosyncratic nature of Hollywood film production, and at lot about scoring and recording film music. I was unprepared for the wide range of film projects that the composers worked on, and the diversity of the demands they faced.
I started to understand how film credits accumulated into reputations. The emerging sensitizing idea is straightforward: career was a succession of temporary projects embodied in an identifiable line of film credits. The trick was to see that many, many composers never experience the “succession.” Small armies work on one film and never work on another. There is a small circle of very busy, and even famous, composers who do many films. The industry is clearly segmented. “Segmented careers” emerged as a major sensitizing concept. In interviews I learned that building a career line is an uncertain and often erratic process. While analyzing credits, I discovered that twenty percent of the composers did over eighty percent of the films. The same percentages occurred in the occupations of producers, directors, screenwriters, and cinematographers. There was a huge dispersion of market outcomes in (a) the continuity of films as transactions over a period of time, (b) the range of recurrent ties with many and different kinds of producers and directors on the buyer side of the market, and (c) the trust and problem solving that result from these market alliances. A central idea became the network “span” or range of connections. The re-sensitized concept became the network-resourced career.
Halfway through the project, I discovered that interviewees believed that the content and arrangement of connections with producers and directors affected their careers. I started improvising on the idea of “credit history” and “identity profile,” developing career profiles for each composer and asking them about “close” and “collaborative” clients work versus “one shot” projects or arm’s length “business connections” on the other. The former are stronger market ties, the latter are weaker market ties. Interviewees told me about how they wanted to work repeatedly with some directors and producers. They said: “They become your partners,” “you work closely with them on a number of films,” and “you collaborate with them.” Composers could point to exemplary relationships in the industry: Blake Edwards and Henry Mancini, Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Hermann, and Steven Spielberg and John Williams. One composer told me that he had recently talked with other colleagues and they agreed that “everyone who has had a successful career in this business had a father,” and “a father” referred to stable and enduring relationships between client (producer or director) and composer. I learned that special market relationships were characterized by mutual trust, respect, and joint problem solving between composer and client.
Having these strong, partner-like, collaborative relationships was essential for career advancement. Strategy is at work by these composers. I developed another concept: “the career portfolio.” Diversification of ties to clients increases career chances in the free-lance labor market. A composer needs a combination of repeat collaborative partnerships versus one-shot relationships with a wide range of directors and producers. I focused in on the careers of the twenty percent who scored eighty percent of the films. A diverse portfolio of ties, a hybrid pattern, maximizes access to the buyer side of the market, increases information flow, and reduces dependence on only one or two clients. I conducted my analysis by counting repeated collaborative ties, and then dividing the number of unique or one-shot project ties between composer and client. I also continued interviewing the interplay of repeat versus non-repeat ties to clients. One important discovery was repeated collaboration in an early career might exert the strongest influence on ultimate success in a Hollywood career.
Along with the portfolio or hybrid pattern is the concept of market-matching. Markets are social structures. There is a pattern of mutual attention and hiring of buyers and sellers who have accumulated similar career profiles. The two sides of the free-lance labor arrangement pay close attention to one another. Hollywood begins to reveal a looking glass market in which sellers or artists are searching for buyers and both are involved in the joint social construction of matching through film productions. They share a common orientation by observing each other’s strategies and evaluative criteria regarding success in this market. I continued to explore this discovery.
In interviews I knew that composers believed that the highly productive and busy directors work with the highly productive and busy composers. I developed a running record and sorted the credits. The respective points on the inverted J shape curve or differential distribution are side by side. The one-shot directors—with only one credit—are jointly linked on this curve to the one-shot composers. This became a brute force display of how the concept of career interdependence and client control was enriched through respondent and informant interviews combined with a huge data set drawn from tangible ties among the market actors.
What networks emerged at the very busy center of this market? To help explain this, I used the concept of “structural equivalence” taken from network analysis. I had two results, one anticipated and one totally unanticipated. The anticipated result was spreadsheet of composers by producers and directors—a “map” representing the blocks of homogeneous composers who are alike in their pattern of connections to the other side of the market. The unanticipated result was a tight clustering of segments in the ecology of careers. I called this the “echelon” configuration. This was a network of affiliations comprised by over one hundred nodes (62 buyers or producers/directors) x forty sellers (film composers) with hundreds of films as consummated market transactions. This is the center of the recurrent tier of both buyers and sellers. I map the center of the market and the intersection of clients and careers. In this case, I followed my discovery of matching the two sides of the market, used archival documents to track the running records of the two sides, and displayed a network of the results. In practice, “thick exploration” (of seller side dynamics) leads back to “thick exploitation” (of network concepts, joining buyers and sellers in a matrix). And then the “thick exploitation” of block modeling and markets bolsters new insights into markets. It was one of the first empirical studies of markets as tangible social structures.
Thin Exploration
Instead of the ethnographer addressing a sensitizing concept to the social world, sometimes the social world addresses a sensitizing concept to the ethnographer. Thin exploration refers to concepts provided by the insiders of social worlds, although they are not necessarily well fitted to the actual empirical situation. Nonetheless, because these concepts are reified within cultures, they become powerful meanings for people to draw on as they construct lines of action and engage in patterned behavior. The concept was “the blockbuster,” known in the film industry as “the blockbuster strategy,”making huge budget, multiple release productions. This type of film changed the rules of filmmaking and influenced the growth and decline of various role combinations: producer, director, and screenwriter. I learned that the rules of filmmaking were changing. Interviewees started to talk about it. The press reported it. Academics wrote about it. The era of my data collection became known as the “era of the blockbuster film.” I interviewed composers who worked on these kinds of films. I wrote about the impact of blockbusters on careers but put aside a thorough treatment of stochastic processes for another time. I had a book to finish. I took up the task of blockbusters and role combinations a few years later. It wasn’t so much that the concepts didn’t work but rather I didn’t have the time to launch a thorough study of these market processes. Sensitizing concepts have attractions; they can also turn into distractions. That is, every ethnography is, in principle, endless. There are always new avenues to explore, new discoveries to be made. I learned that when not to use sensitizing concepts is as strategic as when to use them.
Instead of abandoning “blockbuster” as a sensitizing concept, I wrote a memo on how filmmakers were “adapting” to the rise of the blockbuster. I thought I could focus on how they were shifting into combinatorial forms better able to solve organizational and technical problems. I saw imitation at work in Hollywood. Clients imitated the combinatorial forms that were associated with successful blockbusters as part of an appeal to emerging norms about the “right ingredients” for producing and directing money making movies. It was a neo-institutional approach to the client side of the market. I pitched this idea to a close colleague who was also working on the social organization of markets. We eventually went to work on it.
The sensitizing concepts of “blockbuster” and “imitation” lead us to investigate two trends: the rise of the specialized producer role, and the rise of the consolidated artistic roles. It was eventually published in a leading journal. In this way, sensitizing concepts are vehicles for collaboration, symbols to be shared at work, resources to be assembled and shaped, and products to be diffused through a population of readers and potential adopters. Throughout the process of sharing and shaping, sensitizing concepts have to be treated with care. As I have noted, some work, some do not. Some should be abandoned and forgotten. Others deserve to put on the shelf to be resurrected later.
CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS
“Thick empiricism” is typically invoked as a disciplinary rallying cry, rather than as a construct subject to close inspection. Improvising on sensitizing concepts can break new ground and dig deeper into old. In ethnographic writing some sensitizing concepts give off robust signals. Other sensitizing concepts do not. Some are alive and (used) well. Others are alive and used incorrectly. Sensitizing concepts can be desensitizing as the original idea becomes excessively condensed or shortened, highly focused or sharpened, over-assimilated or hyper-amplified (in the fashion long since established in the study of rumor).
Who remembers and, more importantly, correctly implements the concepts of “looking glass self,” “marginal man,” or “the race relations cycle”? Beyond honorific citation and slogan, these concepts are dead and gone. When concepts are going concerns, on the other hand, they can be strongly imprinted or attached to their authors. Sensitizing concepts and their authors--and authors and their concepts—have careers. Both careers rise and fall, or live and die. Expressed in the patois of demography, both concepts and their creators experience differential rates of transition, convergence, interdependence, and hazard (i.e., from time of birth until death, or from inception through decay until they are forgotten).
Thus, concepts have successful or unsuccessful careers. Witness the success combined with the current mis-specification of “mimetic isomorphism,” one of the conceptual foundations of a neo-institutional theory of organizational similarity. Then there is the drift of the original “diffusion of innovation” away from “any innovation” into it current use as “good innovation.” The mechanisms underlying the founding and successive implementation of sensitizing concepts are ill understood. Ethnographers need a demography of concepts. They also need an analysis of the mechanisms underlying the rise and fall of sensitizing concepts. This volume offers a source book, and a beginning.
Knowledge and mastery of existing sensitizing concepts is a constituent feature of occupational socialization in sociology, and other social sciences. To know concepts is to be armed with a repertoire of (symbolic) resources. To know how to use them is another matter. To know how to improvise on them is the mark of a seasoned ethnographer. That includes the intuition regarding when to deploy, or postpone, or even avoid sensitizing concepts. It means disciplined imagination, knowing when to do things superficially and when not to, and how to pay attention to your elder’s ideas and how to discard them (with reverence and etiquette, of course). In sum, knowledge, use, and shaping of novel combinations of sensitizing concepts is a repertoire for creativity in ethnographic writing.
Not much is known about the factors that influence the reception of sensitizing concepts and their affects on the careers of their creators. Space limitations prohibit a discussion of this theme. But as a spur to improvisation, here are some concepts in the sociology of careers and markets, a few have informed the argument of this chapter. Can you name one of leading sociological authors connected to the concept? A. “Career contingency,” b. “client control,” c. “unanticipated consequences,” d. “art world,” e. “moral career,” f. “career stages,” g. “embeddedness,” h. “structural hole,” i. “mimetic isomorphism,” j. “sphere of influence,” k. “typecasting,” l. “market interface,” m. “network closure,” n. “career portfolio,” o. “career flow,” and p. “block-modeling.” (Answers below).
REFERENCES
Becker, H.S. (1958) “Problems of Inference and Proof in Participant Observation Research,” American Sociological Review, 23: 625-60.
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Becker, H.S. and Faulkner, R.R. (2006) “Le Repertoire de Jazz,” in J. Uzel (ed.) Enonciation Artistique et Socialite (pp. 243-8), Paris: L'Harmattan.
Blumer, H. (1954) “What is Wrong with Social Theory?,” American Sociological Review, 19: 146-58.
-- (1956) “Sociological Analysis and the Variable,” American Sociological Review, 21: 683-90.
-- (1969) Symbolic Interactionism: perspective and method, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Faulkner, R.R. (1983) Music on Demand: composers and careers in the Hollywood film industry, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books.
-- (2006) “Shedding Culture,” in H.S. Becker, Faulkner, R.R. and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. (eds) Art from Start to Finish: jazz, painting, writing, and other improvisations (pp. 91-117), Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Faulkner, R.R. and Becker, H.S. (forthcoming) Do You Know? Jazz repertoire in action, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books.
Glaser, B.G. and Strauss, A.L. (1967) The Discovery of Grounded Theory: strategies for qualitative research, Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company.
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Tilly, C. (1994) “The Time of States,” Social Research, 61: 269-95.
H.S. Becker, b. E. Freidson, c. R.K. Merton, d. H.S. Becker, e. E. Goffman, f. O. Hall, g. M. Granovetter, h. R.S. Burt, i. P. DiMaggio and W. Powell, j. J. Levine, k. R.R. Faulkner, l. W.E. Baker, m. J.S. Coleman, n. R.R. Faulkner, o. H.S. Becker and A.L. Strauss, p. H.C. White, S.A. Boorman, and R.L. Breiger.
NOTES: My debt to Howard Becker, my daughter Laura Faulkner, Gerald Platt, and A.J. Puddephatt for giving my work incalculable amount of time and intellectual energy, and for assisting me, intellectually and practically, in bringing this chapter to completion. They have contributed immensely to whatever clarity this chapter may have.
Qualitative researchers are wedded to “thick empiricism.” From Blumer’s “exploration” and “inspection” of the social world (1954) to Becker’s “inference and proof in participant observation” (1958) through Geertz’s “thick-description ethnography” (1973: 26) and Schatzman and Strauss’s protocols for “intensive observation” (1973), to Glaser and Strauss’s “grounded theory” (1967), scholars underline the importance of joining close observation and accurate recording with the shaping, reshaping, and refining of concepts. More recently, Tilly (1994) following Stinchcombe (1978) takes up the uses of the thick/thin metaphor to characterize “thick history” and time in/of historical events as “drenched with causes that inhere in sequence, accumulation, contingency, and proximity” (Tilly 1994: 270).
“Sensitizing concepts” are central organizing ideas in field research. Where do they come from? How do they affect the research questions being asked? How are they affected by what the investigator discovers during the fieldwork (interviews, observations, and examination of archival data)? As the ethnography unfolds, how are these “sensitizing concepts” assembled and reassembled as the research problem changes? How are research problems defined and redefined during the course of the investigation (on the temporal ordering of research problems, see Kuhn 1970: 171-2, 198-200, 209-10).
Certain conditions foster or suppress the new and true in specifics contexts. Ethnographers have many ideas that could be considered sensitizing concepts, but most of them don’t qualify. We have an idea, we try it out, and nothing comes of using it, nothing interesting anyway, so we try another one. We improvise on concepts. This is disciplined imagination (Becker and Faulkner 2006; Faulkner 2006; Faulkner and Becker forthcoming). The elements of discipline and organization, the rational and the routine, are on one side of the equation. The elements of improvisation and imagination, the spontaneous and the indeterminate, are on the other side. Ethnographers have ideas they develop. They go into the field, talk to people, collect running records of events, and observe and record observations with care and precision. They improvise, try out new ideas and see what happens. If nothing interesting happens, the ideas are forgotten. If something does happen, ethnographers keep following it out to see where it goes. They work with it and on it. The task that is hard for our more “scientistic” colleagues is where a good sensitizing concept takes hold, and where it does not take hold is often completely divorced from the original idea and the initial intention. Ethnographers welcome this; through learning plus adapting. There is interplay between taking sensitizing concepts and making sensitizing concepts.
There are two sources of sensitizing concepts and two outcomes. Concept exploration involves improvisation, experimentation, and the discovery of new knowledge. Concept exploitation involves receiving, refining and extending existing knowledge. The two outcomes are the coupling or decoupling of concept and evidence. Ethnographic coupling is the tight alignment and interweaving of in-depth fieldwork evidence with the sensitizing concept. In the write up, “thick descriptions” are closely aligned with hard won empirical data. Decoupling, by way of contrast, is a characterized by a gap between concept and measurement. To illustrate the interplay of exploration versus exploitation and tight and loose coupling, I draw on Music on Demand (Faulkner 1983) an inquiry into the careers of free-lance composers in the Hollywood feature-film industry.
THE SENSITIZING CONCEPT
Over fifty years ago, Herbert Blumer introduced the evocative idea of “sensitizing concept.” “Sensitizing concepts” emerge when the observer discovers something worth problematizing, “addressing” the concept to the objects of investigation, producing precise and accurate evidence of chosen phenomena. He discusses how “sensitizing concepts” (1954) may be “attached” to events in the empirical world, suggesting “exploration” and “inspection” as the tools to deploy in the attachment process (1956; 1969). But he leaves the issue of how “sensitizing concepts” actually become aligned with evidence and proof unanswered.
Blumer habitually exhorted sociologists to relinquish their commitment to received concepts and theory testing. Better to get out into the thick of things. He distinguishes between agency of the idea—a concept’s ability to act on the sociologist—and agency over the concept—the sociologist’s ability to act upon the concept (see Latour 1987). In this interplay, Blumer prefers control over the concepts emerging from engagement. However, the reader is left adrift with vague ideas about a “careful and imaginative study of the stubborn world to which such concepts are addressed” (1954: 150). We need a more precise and detailed explanation. Where Blumer’s recommendations for assembling and shaping “sensitizing concepts” drift into abstractions lacking clear empirical referents (Becker 1988), Bruno Latour (1987) shows the contingent and temporal nature of the research problem and how scientist at work develop rhetorical strategies to mobilize constituencies and shape understandings. Agency of the idea and agency over the idea can be seen as infusing the work of Latour (1987: 23-9), who situates interpretative strategies and condensing symbols as key objects or “actants” in scientific inquiry and collective action. Erving Goffman speaks of “the serious ethnographic task of assembling the various ways in which the individual is treated and treats others, and deducing what is implied about him through this treatment” (Goffman 1971: 342).
Ethnographic studies commonly assume that something new or unusual will be discovered with participation in social life. Less value, however, is attached to the precision with which it is known. The pairings are evocative: “thick” versus “thin,” “deep” versus “shallow,” or “drenched” versus “arid.” Thick empiricism is not only preferred, it is an ideal. The ethnography is supposed to be infused with detail and packaged as a whole; it is supposed to be empirically grounded and, moreover, move from thin to thick. In addition, thin ethnography is written by social science academics who care more about whether ideas (and concepts) are new, and interesting, than whether they are true. Combining both new and true, thick empiricism is the essential criterion in our judgment of ethnography.
SHAPING THE SENSITIZING CONCEPT
I use two key dimensions to examine the use of sensitizing concepts. As noted above, the first distinguishes exploitation versus exploration; each considered by whether it leads to tight coupling or loose coupling between ideas, evidence, and proof in fieldwork. Exploitation uses existing concepts, and refining, deepening, and extending our knowledge of them. Exploration discovers new concepts, developing new, nuanced interpretations. Exploitation works on the known, the conceptually tried and true, with anticipated results; exploration involves adventure and unanticipated findings. The second distinguishes thick versus thin ethnography. Researchers shape sensitizing concepts through “assembling and deducing.” Thick assembly is a tight coupling of the concept with strong evidence close at hand. Thin assembly is loose coupling of the concept with suggested evidence, more an assumption than a repeatedly demonstrated fact. There are four scenarios.
These are ideal types and there is mutual intertwining of them as the data collection and analysis takes place. The richest measures of ethnography (new and true) are generally to be found in “thick exploration.” In this case we discover and establish that the phenomenon actually exists, and that it is enough of a regularity to require and to allow explanation. Other styles and forms are absolutely essential as they trigger and generate potential in this area. “Thick exploitation” is important and worthwhile in framing concepts, in selecting, amplify, and condensing sensitizing concepts for study. Sometimes concepts are thin but need not necessarily be abandoned, as they are useful in providing background for framing careers and markets rather than as foreground concepts. In practice, there is interplay across these ideal types as the ethnographer uncovers and locates strategic research sites, objects, and events that exhibit the phenomena to be explained or interpreted. For brevity, hereafter the proper citations appear under the appropriate heading in the reference section.
Thick Exploitation
Thick Exploitation, as exemplified in my study of composers, markets and careers in Hollywood, starts with achecklist of known concepts: for instance, career, career contingency, client control, and clash of perspectives, orienting concepts from the Chicago school of occupational and institutional sociology. It is summer in Hollywood and I started calling composers and setting up interviews. I had met some composers in connection with my earlier study on free-lance musicians. My early interviews immediately revealed the tensions and clashes of perspectives between composers (the artists) and the producers and directors who are their clients. After a dozen I focused on the meanings and activities of “recurring networks.” This was one defining concept in the then developing area of the study of “art worlds.” The focus was on the production features of art markets that are the suppliers, buyers, rivals, reviewers, and regulators who are involved in the making of cultural products.
Devotees of film scour the credits looking for insights and connections. The adventure surrounding the documentation of “recurring networks” and “career dynamics” in art worlds entailed experimentation and play on the distinctive detail of the film as a project in a labor market. Each film is a market event for all those involved in its production; a film is a point or node in a career. “Career contingencies” was a sensitizing concept in the work of The Chicago School of occupational sociology. Careers are contingent on the accumulation of credits and connections. Careers are contingent on moving into “the thick of things.” In the film business this means access to more work, better work, being considered by higher status clients, getting some control over your career, and denser associations with diverse film producers and directors. I started drawing up filmographies of each of my interviewees. This list facilitated focus in the face-to-face interview. I took each interviewee through his or her career asking how each project came about, how it was to work with the producer and/or director, problems encountered, and relationships established. I wanted to get at the quality and quantity of relationships between composer and others in the market. I exploited the concept of “contingency” showing the factors upon which mobility, access, and reputation depend, thereby extending and deepening one of the central insights of occupational sociology.
Making use of this theoretical orientation, I learned how disparaging language used by professionals about their clients tells you something about what they are trying to maximize in their relations those people. The early interviews with composers taught me the value of “a clash of perspectives,” especially in a setting in which control and power is in the hands of the film producers and directors. Composers stressed the variety of people they have to work with, indicating the importance of being able to “read the values of the film,” “deal with producers,” and “try to understand what they are trying to achieve in a film,” and then to write a score that satisfies everyone involved in the project. I wrote up a couple of chapters on this concept of clash, tension, and resolution. On the ethnographic side, the project involves exploring the actual work transactions in this market, tying each idea to composers’ statements and stories about their work with producers and directors on specific projects. I saw that the composer’s career is oriented not only to particular transactions and film projects but also to a web of social relationships and their controllers.
I had to decipher a large network of linkages between producers/directors and the composers they hired to feature films. I want to challenge the black-box conceptualization of the market itself and show how career attainment was linked to market behavior between buyers (Hollywood producers and directors) and sellers of professional talent (composers). I mean “decipher” in an almost “a-theoretical” sense of being able to represent the level and direction of recurrence among buyers and sellers in a feature film labor market, to discern its major outlines.
Another sensitizing concept emerged during the course of the interviews. It was an idea that I thought was straightforward and mundane, but which eventually linked the master sensitizing concepts: reputation. The difficulty everyone in the film business has in measuring the specific contributions of composers as artists to the quality of an aesthetic object, such as a film. There is little consensus about what constitutes competence among creative personnel. There is also little understanding about what makes a film a hit or not. Films and their makers—directors, producers, screenwriters, and composers--are assessed post hoc, based on the commercial success of the products they work on. One respondent told me, “It is better to be a shit in a hit, than a hit in a shit.” It is a matter of the success of the whole project shaping the judgment of the specific contribution. In the film market, the most tangible sign of a composer’s future productivity is his or her association with prior successful film project (“shit in a hit”) regardless of the artistic merits of the film score (“hit in a shit”). A career line is a succession of temporary projects embodied in an identifiable line of credits and reputation seeking films. This market is a system of codes and conduct, where skill and productivity are not easily measured, market status or reputation is a signal of a free-lance composer’s standing and worth to clients. Identifiable projects send strong signals to the buyer side of the market. This is called “a typecast.” The concept of “typecasting” unexpectedly came out of “reputation” and was confirmed again in the field as an industry wide cultural framework for understanding “how the business works.”
“Typecasting” as a social process had a double-edged nature: “It’s good, because at least people make a link between the composer [and his film score in a film]. It’s bad, because producers and directors tend to confuse what a composer does with what he can do.” In Hollywood, film market producers and directors evaluate and buy professional talent by hiring composers, their decisions shaped by cumulative credits, reputation, and typecasting of the composers. “Typecasting” as an extreme form of status attribution by buyers in the market introduces limitations on the composer’s identity. It is experienced as only loosely related to one’s true talent, but at least it carries the recognition necessary for securing future work and a potential line of credits.
Thin Exploitation
Existing sensitizing concepts don’t always work. When existing concepts are initially imported, but then found to be ill-fitted to the empirical world, we have thin exploitation. This happened three times. In the first case, a powerful concept from labor economics called “market interaction” called for detailed labor market histories with panel data, tracking possible candidates for jobs through the bids they receive, the offers they seriously consider, and the jobs they take. In order to exploit this concept, I needed information on all offers (or bids for composer services) and all completed market transactions (or done deals or films scored). This meant I had to ask each interviewee about these events. This idea is difficult to document through interviews. Composers politely refused to talk about the jobs they didn’t get: jobs they didn’t take. By continuing to ask these questions, I undermined my credibility with composers. Therefore, I replaced the sensitizing concept of “market interaction” by another concept called “consummated market exchange” or “transactions.” Transactions are the completed film productions, and this became a leading concept in my study. In this case, sensitizing concepts that don’t work can sharpen the data collection and analysis.
The second concept was “age-grading,” in which age and cohort effects are critical in understanding labor markets and career attainment. The concepts are important for understanding the market matching of composers and clients by their respective ages. Hollywood composers told me that “the wheel turns” and that younger producers and directors want to work with younger composers. A key informant said, “Young directors want to work with someone they can talk to, not revere.” In order to develop convincing evidence about careers and cohorts--and the interdependence of aging and career—I needed voluminous data on participants on both sides of the labor market. I thought about working up a sample of directors and composers by age and film credits. This would have taken me into another, different, type of ethnography. I chose not to proceed. In this case, sensitizing concepts that don’t work can be distractions.
The third case is complicated. The sensitizing concepts were “reciprocity” and “gift giving” in market behavior. For example, some composer-respondents said they attempted to pursue a career strategy of working with one or two directors or producers in hopes of building strong and lasting relationships. They wanted to build up “the accumulation of loyalty ‘chits,’” in which free-lancers hope producers or directors would reciprocate that good will, offering generous prices for their artistic services. Both would move “up” in the business, getting called to work on more and better film productions. “You help them out and they help you out,” said a composer. When gratitude is not reciprocated, anger and frustration ensues. Composers talked about how some producers or directors “trade up.” “Trading up” reveals the hierarchy of work in Hollywood when a heretofore-loyal client chooses a more prestigious composer on his next film project. The former composer is abandoned. Non-reciprocation is important for what it reveals about clients and their preferences.
The sensitizing idea of “trading up” and non-reciprocation was thin. I had difficulty documenting it across all the interviewees. Still, respondents were incensed at the “lack of loyalty” by clients. I collected many anecdotes of this from composers. Interviews with producers and directors would help in understanding the reasons behind their hiring decisions; however, that kind of data collection would be the start of another, different, occupational ethnography. I went ahead and used “lack of gratitude” or “lack of reciprocity” in market exchange as a story telling device. In this case, thin sensitizing concepts can enhance the storyline and the appeal of the theory of markets as transactions.
Thick Exploration
All ethnographers observe with the anticipation of discovery. Thick description refers to new concepts and ideas that emerge from detailed data collected from a close, intimate immersion in the social world studied. Initially, I wanted to discover the contingencies of a free-lance career, that is, the factors upon which career advancement and success depend. I knew something about the idiosyncratic nature of Hollywood film production, and at lot about scoring and recording film music. I was unprepared for the wide range of film projects that the composers worked on, and the diversity of the demands they faced.
I started to understand how film credits accumulated into reputations. The emerging sensitizing idea is straightforward: career was a succession of temporary projects embodied in an identifiable line of film credits. The trick was to see that many, many composers never experience the “succession.” Small armies work on one film and never work on another. There is a small circle of very busy, and even famous, composers who do many films. The industry is clearly segmented. “Segmented careers” emerged as a major sensitizing concept. In interviews I learned that building a career line is an uncertain and often erratic process. While analyzing credits, I discovered that twenty percent of the composers did over eighty percent of the films. The same percentages occurred in the occupations of producers, directors, screenwriters, and cinematographers. There was a huge dispersion of market outcomes in (a) the continuity of films as transactions over a period of time, (b) the range of recurrent ties with many and different kinds of producers and directors on the buyer side of the market, and (c) the trust and problem solving that result from these market alliances. A central idea became the network “span” or range of connections. The re-sensitized concept became the network-resourced career.
Halfway through the project, I discovered that interviewees believed that the content and arrangement of connections with producers and directors affected their careers. I started improvising on the idea of “credit history” and “identity profile,” developing career profiles for each composer and asking them about “close” and “collaborative” clients work versus “one shot” projects or arm’s length “business connections” on the other. The former are stronger market ties, the latter are weaker market ties. Interviewees told me about how they wanted to work repeatedly with some directors and producers. They said: “They become your partners,” “you work closely with them on a number of films,” and “you collaborate with them.” Composers could point to exemplary relationships in the industry: Blake Edwards and Henry Mancini, Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Hermann, and Steven Spielberg and John Williams. One composer told me that he had recently talked with other colleagues and they agreed that “everyone who has had a successful career in this business had a father,” and “a father” referred to stable and enduring relationships between client (producer or director) and composer. I learned that special market relationships were characterized by mutual trust, respect, and joint problem solving between composer and client.
Having these strong, partner-like, collaborative relationships was essential for career advancement. Strategy is at work by these composers. I developed another concept: “the career portfolio.” Diversification of ties to clients increases career chances in the free-lance labor market. A composer needs a combination of repeat collaborative partnerships versus one-shot relationships with a wide range of directors and producers. I focused in on the careers of the twenty percent who scored eighty percent of the films. A diverse portfolio of ties, a hybrid pattern, maximizes access to the buyer side of the market, increases information flow, and reduces dependence on only one or two clients. I conducted my analysis by counting repeated collaborative ties, and then dividing the number of unique or one-shot project ties between composer and client. I also continued interviewing the interplay of repeat versus non-repeat ties to clients. One important discovery was repeated collaboration in an early career might exert the strongest influence on ultimate success in a Hollywood career.
Along with the portfolio or hybrid pattern is the concept of market-matching. Markets are social structures. There is a pattern of mutual attention and hiring of buyers and sellers who have accumulated similar career profiles. The two sides of the free-lance labor arrangement pay close attention to one another. Hollywood begins to reveal a looking glass market in which sellers or artists are searching for buyers and both are involved in the joint social construction of matching through film productions. They share a common orientation by observing each other’s strategies and evaluative criteria regarding success in this market. I continued to explore this discovery.
In interviews I knew that composers believed that the highly productive and busy directors work with the highly productive and busy composers. I developed a running record and sorted the credits. The respective points on the inverted J shape curve or differential distribution are side by side. The one-shot directors—with only one credit—are jointly linked on this curve to the one-shot composers. This became a brute force display of how the concept of career interdependence and client control was enriched through respondent and informant interviews combined with a huge data set drawn from tangible ties among the market actors.
What networks emerged at the very busy center of this market? To help explain this, I used the concept of “structural equivalence” taken from network analysis. I had two results, one anticipated and one totally unanticipated. The anticipated result was spreadsheet of composers by producers and directors—a “map” representing the blocks of homogeneous composers who are alike in their pattern of connections to the other side of the market. The unanticipated result was a tight clustering of segments in the ecology of careers. I called this the “echelon” configuration. This was a network of affiliations comprised by over one hundred nodes (62 buyers or producers/directors) x forty sellers (film composers) with hundreds of films as consummated market transactions. This is the center of the recurrent tier of both buyers and sellers. I map the center of the market and the intersection of clients and careers. In this case, I followed my discovery of matching the two sides of the market, used archival documents to track the running records of the two sides, and displayed a network of the results. In practice, “thick exploration” (of seller side dynamics) leads back to “thick exploitation” (of network concepts, joining buyers and sellers in a matrix). And then the “thick exploitation” of block modeling and markets bolsters new insights into markets. It was one of the first empirical studies of markets as tangible social structures.
Thin Exploration
Instead of the ethnographer addressing a sensitizing concept to the social world, sometimes the social world addresses a sensitizing concept to the ethnographer. Thin exploration refers to concepts provided by the insiders of social worlds, although they are not necessarily well fitted to the actual empirical situation. Nonetheless, because these concepts are reified within cultures, they become powerful meanings for people to draw on as they construct lines of action and engage in patterned behavior. The concept was “the blockbuster,” known in the film industry as “the blockbuster strategy,”making huge budget, multiple release productions. This type of film changed the rules of filmmaking and influenced the growth and decline of various role combinations: producer, director, and screenwriter. I learned that the rules of filmmaking were changing. Interviewees started to talk about it. The press reported it. Academics wrote about it. The era of my data collection became known as the “era of the blockbuster film.” I interviewed composers who worked on these kinds of films. I wrote about the impact of blockbusters on careers but put aside a thorough treatment of stochastic processes for another time. I had a book to finish. I took up the task of blockbusters and role combinations a few years later. It wasn’t so much that the concepts didn’t work but rather I didn’t have the time to launch a thorough study of these market processes. Sensitizing concepts have attractions; they can also turn into distractions. That is, every ethnography is, in principle, endless. There are always new avenues to explore, new discoveries to be made. I learned that when not to use sensitizing concepts is as strategic as when to use them.
Instead of abandoning “blockbuster” as a sensitizing concept, I wrote a memo on how filmmakers were “adapting” to the rise of the blockbuster. I thought I could focus on how they were shifting into combinatorial forms better able to solve organizational and technical problems. I saw imitation at work in Hollywood. Clients imitated the combinatorial forms that were associated with successful blockbusters as part of an appeal to emerging norms about the “right ingredients” for producing and directing money making movies. It was a neo-institutional approach to the client side of the market. I pitched this idea to a close colleague who was also working on the social organization of markets. We eventually went to work on it.
The sensitizing concepts of “blockbuster” and “imitation” lead us to investigate two trends: the rise of the specialized producer role, and the rise of the consolidated artistic roles. It was eventually published in a leading journal. In this way, sensitizing concepts are vehicles for collaboration, symbols to be shared at work, resources to be assembled and shaped, and products to be diffused through a population of readers and potential adopters. Throughout the process of sharing and shaping, sensitizing concepts have to be treated with care. As I have noted, some work, some do not. Some should be abandoned and forgotten. Others deserve to put on the shelf to be resurrected later.
CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS
“Thick empiricism” is typically invoked as a disciplinary rallying cry, rather than as a construct subject to close inspection. Improvising on sensitizing concepts can break new ground and dig deeper into old. In ethnographic writing some sensitizing concepts give off robust signals. Other sensitizing concepts do not. Some are alive and (used) well. Others are alive and used incorrectly. Sensitizing concepts can be desensitizing as the original idea becomes excessively condensed or shortened, highly focused or sharpened, over-assimilated or hyper-amplified (in the fashion long since established in the study of rumor).
Who remembers and, more importantly, correctly implements the concepts of “looking glass self,” “marginal man,” or “the race relations cycle”? Beyond honorific citation and slogan, these concepts are dead and gone. When concepts are going concerns, on the other hand, they can be strongly imprinted or attached to their authors. Sensitizing concepts and their authors--and authors and their concepts—have careers. Both careers rise and fall, or live and die. Expressed in the patois of demography, both concepts and their creators experience differential rates of transition, convergence, interdependence, and hazard (i.e., from time of birth until death, or from inception through decay until they are forgotten).
Thus, concepts have successful or unsuccessful careers. Witness the success combined with the current mis-specification of “mimetic isomorphism,” one of the conceptual foundations of a neo-institutional theory of organizational similarity. Then there is the drift of the original “diffusion of innovation” away from “any innovation” into it current use as “good innovation.” The mechanisms underlying the founding and successive implementation of sensitizing concepts are ill understood. Ethnographers need a demography of concepts. They also need an analysis of the mechanisms underlying the rise and fall of sensitizing concepts. This volume offers a source book, and a beginning.
Knowledge and mastery of existing sensitizing concepts is a constituent feature of occupational socialization in sociology, and other social sciences. To know concepts is to be armed with a repertoire of (symbolic) resources. To know how to use them is another matter. To know how to improvise on them is the mark of a seasoned ethnographer. That includes the intuition regarding when to deploy, or postpone, or even avoid sensitizing concepts. It means disciplined imagination, knowing when to do things superficially and when not to, and how to pay attention to your elder’s ideas and how to discard them (with reverence and etiquette, of course). In sum, knowledge, use, and shaping of novel combinations of sensitizing concepts is a repertoire for creativity in ethnographic writing.
Not much is known about the factors that influence the reception of sensitizing concepts and their affects on the careers of their creators. Space limitations prohibit a discussion of this theme. But as a spur to improvisation, here are some concepts in the sociology of careers and markets, a few have informed the argument of this chapter. Can you name one of leading sociological authors connected to the concept? A. “Career contingency,” b. “client control,” c. “unanticipated consequences,” d. “art world,” e. “moral career,” f. “career stages,” g. “embeddedness,” h. “structural hole,” i. “mimetic isomorphism,” j. “sphere of influence,” k. “typecasting,” l. “market interface,” m. “network closure,” n. “career portfolio,” o. “career flow,” and p. “block-modeling.” (Answers below).
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NOTES: My debt to Howard Becker, my daughter Laura Faulkner, Gerald Platt, and A.J. Puddephatt for giving my work incalculable amount of time and intellectual energy, and for assisting me, intellectually and practically, in bringing this chapter to completion. They have contributed immensely to whatever clarity this chapter may have.
