Harvey Molotch

Last updated
Harvey Molotch
Employer
Awards

Harvey Luskin Molotch (born January 3, 1940) is an American sociologist known for studies that have reconceptualized power relations in interaction, the mass media, and the city. He helped create the field of environmental sociology and has advanced qualitative methods in the social sciences. In recent years, Molotch helped develop a new field—the sociology of objects. He is currently a professor of Sociology and of Metropolitan Studies at New York University. [1] His Introduction to Sociology is featured as one of NYU Open Education's courses available to stream freely. [2] Other courses that he teaches include Approaches to Metropolitan Studies and Urban Objects. He is also affiliated with the graduate program in Humanities and Social Thought. [3]

Contents

Biography

Molotch was born Harvey Luskin in Baltimore, Maryland, where his family was in the retail car business on one side and the Luskin's home appliance business on the other. His father, Paul Luskin, died in the Battle of the Bulge in 1944 during World War II. His mother remarried to Nathan Molotch. He received a BA in philosophy from the University of Michigan (1963), with a thesis on John Dewey. He received an MA (1966) and PhD (1968) in sociology from the University of Chicago. He served in the U.S. Army, stationed in Maryland and Virginia, 1961-62.

He taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara from 1967 to 2003. He has also been a visiting professor at Stony Brook University, the University of Essex, and Northwestern University. In 1998-99 he was Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics.

Ideas

Racial Segregation: Rethinking “White Flight”

Molotch's early work on race criticized mainstream strategies then underway to achieve residential integration. To stem transition from all-white to all-black (a major concern at the time), such efforts were curtailing black people's access to housing, and ironically, increasing rather than lessening racial segregation. Molotch presented data to back up his critique, documenting why whites left in the first place and why blacks moved into the vacancies they left behind. Rather than "white flight" and "block busting," racial succession occurred through normal rates of whites moving into the suburbs and blacks, otherwise hindered by racist practice, utilizing opportunities thus provided.

The Santa Barbara Oil Spill and Environmental Sociology

On January 28, 1969, there was a massive eruption of crude oil from Union Oil's Platform A in the Santa Barbara Channel—an eruption which was to cover much of the coast line of two counties with oil. Molotch saw in this disaster a research opportunity. His article "Oil in Santa Barbara and Power in America" became a founding document of the new field of environmental sociology, and a key contribution to political sociology.

Molotch argued that accident research at the local level might be capable of revealing what political scientists called the "second face of power." This is a dimension of power ordinarily ignored by traditional community studies which fail to concern themselves with the processes by which bias is mobilized and thus how issues rise and fall.

Molotch's findings highlighted the extraordinary intransigence of national institutions in the face of local dissent, but more importantly, pointed out the processes and tactics which undermine that dissent and frustrate and radicalize the dissenters. Molotch called for comparable studies of the agriculture industry, the banking industry, and for more accident research at the local level, which might bring to light the larger social arrangements which structure the parameters of such local debate. In this way, research at the local level might serve as an avenue to knowledge about national power. Molotch ended, "Sociologists should be ready when an accident hits in their neighborhood, and then go to work."

The Mass Media and the Social Construction Framework

Molotch helped introduce the social construction framework to the study of news media. Whereas news accounts had been treated, however critically, as "failed" representations of a presumed reality, Molotch and Marilyn Lester held that every account is a product of the social organization that goes into its production. In founding papers in the sociology of the mass media, Molotch and Lester applied the insights of ethnomethodology to the Santa Barbara oil spill and the way it was covered. They argued for an approach to the mass media which does not look for reality, but for practices of those having the power to determine the experience of others.

In addition, Molotch and Lester recognized that this social construction of the news had a crucial political component, a perspective later endorsed by such media sociologists as W. Lance Bennett. In normal times, Molotch and Lester said, the news is merely the ritualized presentation of the stories of powerful corporate and governmental organizations. Only in certain contexts does the veil of this ruling elite consensus get pushed aside to reveal other possible constructions of the facts. Molotch and Lester pointed to such disruptive contexts as scandals and accidents like the Santa Barbara Oil Spill, while Bennett pointed to significant social issues that break through the normally ritualized conflicts of the two political parties.

Molotch's work has inspired studies of the social construction of news, of the particular ways that the content of presentation is contingent on the social setting of its production, including the occupational workplace of news professionals as well as the larger societal setting. His more recent work on mass media has included studies of war protest and the stock market.

The City as a Growth Machine

Molotch is probably best known for his book Urban Fortunes (1987, with John Logan), which won him the Award for Distinguished Contribution to Sociological Scholarship by the American Sociological Association in 1990. Urban Fortunes builds on Molotch's 1976 classic paper, "The City as a Growth Machine." In this body of work, Molotch took the dominant convention of studying urban land use and turned it on its head. The field of urban sociology (as well as urban geography, planning, and economics) was dominated by the idea that cities were basically containers for human action, in which actors competed among themselves for the most strategic parcels of land, and the real estate market reflected the state of that competition. Out of this competition were thought to come the shape of the city and the distribution of social types within it (e.g. banks in the center, affluent residents in the suburbs). Long established notions such as central place theory and the sectoral hypothesis were claims that are more or less "natural" spatial geography evolved from competitive market activity.

Molotch helped reverse the course of urban theory by pointing out that land parcels were not empty fields awaiting human action, but were associated with specific interests—commercial, sentimental, and psychological. Especially important in shaping cities were the real estate interests of those whose properties gain value when growth takes place. These actors make up what Molotch termed "the local growth machine"—a term now standard in the urban studies lexicon. From this perspective, cities need to be studied (and compared) in terms of the organization, lobbying, manipulating, and structuring carried out by these actors. The outcome—the shape of cities and the distribution of their peoples—is thus not due to an interpersonal market or geographic necessities, but to social actions, including opportunistic dealing. Urban Fortunes has influenced hundreds of national and international studies. A twentieth anniversary edition was issued by the University of California Press in 2007 with a new preface.

Other work

Molotch has also conducted a series of studies in conversation analysis on mechanisms such as gaps and silences in human conversation that reveal the way power operates at the micro-interactional level. This work includes a notable collaboration with Mitchell Duneier on talk between men on the street and women passersby. His research builds on writings of Don Zimmerman, Harvey Sacks, Gail Jefferson, and Emanuel Schegloff. Molotch was among the first to utilize ethnomethodology and conversation analysis in the study of traditional sociological topics, bridging what had been regarded as a highly esoteric and specialized approach to micro-sociology with mainstream, macro-level sociological issues such as hegemony and power.

He has also written on product design and consumption. His book, Where Stuff Comes From, builds on the work of Howard S. Becker and Bruno Latour, to show how objects and physical artifacts are joint result of various types of actors, most particularly product designers operating within frameworks of technology, regulation, mass tastes, and corporate profits. While neo-Marxists and others have treated "commodity fetishism" as a signal of oppression, repression, and delusion, he uses goods to understand, in a more comprehensive way, just what makes production happen and how artifacts reveal larger social and cultural forces. Still more recently, he turned to analyses of rising cities of the Gulf in the volume The New Arab Urban.

Honors and awards

Selected publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Outline of sociology</span> Overview of and topical guide to sociology

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the discipline of sociology:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Urban sociology</span> Sociological study of life and human interaction in metropolitan areas

Urban sociology is the sociological study of life and human interaction in metropolitan areas. It is a normative discipline of sociology seeking to study the structures, environmental processes, changes and problems of an urban area and by doing so provide inputs for urban planning and policy making. In other words, it is the sociological study of cities and their role in the development of society. Like most areas of sociology, urban sociologists use statistical analysis, observation, social theory, interviews, and other methods to study a range of topics, including migration and demographic trends, economics, poverty, race relations and economic trends. Urban sociology is one of the oldest sub-disciplines of sociology dating back to the mid-nineteenth century.

William Julius Wilson is an American sociologist. He is a professor at Harvard University and author of works on urban sociology, race and class issues. Laureate of the National Medal of Science, he served as the 80th President of the American Sociological Association, was a member of numerous national boards and commissions. He identified the importance of neighborhood effects and demonstrated how limited employment opportunities and weakened institutional resources exacerbated poverty within American inner-city neighborhoods.

Charles Wright Mills was an American sociologist, and a professor of sociology at Columbia University from 1946 until his death in 1962. Mills published widely in both popular and intellectual journals, and is remembered for several books, such as The Power Elite, White Collar: The American Middle Classes, and The Sociological Imagination. Mills was concerned with the responsibilities of intellectuals in post–World War II society, and he advocated public and political engagement over disinterested observation. One of Mills's biographers, Daniel Geary, writes that Mills's writings had a "particularly significant impact on New Left social movements of the 1960s era." It was Mills who popularized the term New Left in the US in a 1960 open letter, "Letter to the New Left".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ethnomethodology</span> Study of how social order is produced

Ethnomethodology is the study of how social order is produced in and through processes of social interaction. It generally seeks to provide an alternative to mainstream sociological approaches. In its most radical form, it poses a challenge to the social sciences as a whole. Its early investigations led to the founding of conversation analysis, which has found its own place as an accepted discipline within the academy. According to Psathas, it is possible to distinguish five major approaches within the ethnomethodological family of disciplines.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">American Sociological Association</span> Non-profit organization

The American Sociological Association (ASA) is a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the discipline and profession of sociology. Founded in December 1905 as the American Sociological Society at Johns Hopkins University by a group of fifty people, the first president of the association would be Lester Frank Ward. Today, most of its members work in academia, while around 20 percent of them work in government, business, or non-profit organizations.

Harvey Sacks was an American sociologist influenced by the ethnomethodology tradition. He pioneered extremely detailed studies of the way people use language in everyday life. Despite his early death in a car crash and the fact that he did not publish widely, he founded the discipline of conversation analysis. His work has had significant influence on fields such as linguistics, discourse analysis, and discursive psychology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harold Garfinkel</span> American sociologist (1917 – 2011)

Harold Garfinkel was an American sociologist and ethnomethodologist, who taught at the University of California, Los Angeles. Having developed and established ethnomethodology as a field of inquiry in sociology, he is probably best known for Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967), a collection of articles. Selections from unpublished materials were later published in two volumes: Seeing Sociologically and Ethnomethodology's Program.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Barrington Moore Jr.</span> American sociologist (1913–2005)

Barrington Moore Jr. was an American political sociologist, and the son of forester Barrington Moore.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of sociology</span> History of sociology

Sociology as a scholarly discipline emerged, primarily out of Enlightenment thought, as a positivist science of society shortly after the French Revolution. Its genesis owed to various key movements in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of knowledge, arising in reaction to such issues as modernity, capitalism, urbanization, rationalization, secularization, colonization and imperialism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Louis Wirth</span> American sociologist (1897-1952)

Louis Wirth was an American sociologist and member of the Chicago school of sociology. His interests included city life, minority group behavior, and mass media, and he is recognised as one of the leading urban sociologists.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles Tilly</span> American sociologist (1929–2008)

Charles Tilly was an American sociologist, political scientist, and historian who wrote on the relationship between politics and society. He was a professor of history, sociology, and social science at the University of Michigan from 1969 to 1984 before becoming the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University.

Sharon L. Zukin is an American professor of sociology who specializes in modern urban life. She teaches at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. As of 2014, she was also a distinguished fellow in the Advanced Research Collaborative at the CUNY Graduate Center and chair of the Consumers and Consumption Section of the American Sociological Association. Zukin was a visiting professor at the University of Amsterdam in 2010–11.

Mitchell Duneier is an American sociologist and ethnographer. He is currently Maurice P. During Professor and department chair of Sociology at Princeton University and has also served as a regular Visiting Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

Fred L. Block is an American sociologist, and Research Professor of Sociology at UC-Davis. Block is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading economic and political sociologists. His interests are wide ranging. He has been noted as an influential follower of Karl Polanyi.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joe Feagin</span> American sociologist

Joe Richard Feagin is an American sociologist and social theorist who has conducted extensive research on racial and gender issues, especially in regard to the United States. He is currently the Ella C. McFadden Distinguished Professor at Texas A&M University. Feagin has taught at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, University of California, Riverside, University of Texas at Austin, University of Florida, and Texas A&M University.

Barrie Thorne is a professor of sociology and of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Elijah Anderson is an American sociologist. He is the Sterling Professor of Sociology and of African American Studies at Yale University, where he teaches and directs the Urban Ethnography Project. Anderson is one of the nation’s leading urban ethnographers and cultural theorists. Anderson is known most notably for his book, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City (1999).

The W.E.B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award is given annually by the American Sociological Association to a scholar among its members whose cumulative body of work constitutes a significant contribution to the advancement of sociology. Formerly called simply the Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award, the award was renamed in 2006 to honor pioneering American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois.

Interactional vandalism is a concept in sociology that describes a situation where the implied rules of conversation are not adhered to, specifically when a person of lower social status violates those rules when interacting with a person of higher social status. The term was coined in by sociologists Mitchell Duneier and Harvey Molotch in their study of interactions on the streets of New York City between black men who were panhandlers or street venders, and middle-class white women who were passing by. The study used conversation analysis to show that women were unlikely to respond to the men's comments or questions; when the men persisted despite the women's unwillingness to engage in conversation, they violated the rules of social conduct and committed interactional vandalism.

References

  1. "Harvey Molotch". Archived from the original on 8 Mar 2015.
  2. "Intro to Sociology". Archived from the original on 8 Mar 2015.
  3. "XE: Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement".