This essay proposes that the theme of getting a job can help social theory instructors accomplish three important goals: 1. By examining “career angst”, instructors can go a long way toward demystifying the lives and work of major social theorists, since this concept allows instructors to draw parallels between social theorists’ and students’ biographies. 2. By examining the qualitatively different forms of “career angst” experienced and theorized by classical social theorists on the one hand, and “multicultural” theorists on the other, instructors can help students understand why the social theory “canon” has been expanded to include previously neglected theorists. 3. By examining how anxiety about getting a job has led social theorists from different social locations to develop their sociological imaginations and write social theories, students can be effectively encouraged to understand social theory as something that they themselves can and should “do”, and is not simply a body of ideas that they are required to master.
There is wide agreement among sociology instructors that sociological theory is one of the courses most dreaded by our students (Deflem, 1999; Donaghy, 2000; Lowney, 1998; Rinehart, 1999; Silver and Perez, 1998). For a variety of reasons, students come into our theory courses with feelings of anxiety, apprehension, and even fear (Lowney, 1998). While on the one hand this can mean that theory is one of the easiest courses to teach—because if students ultimately find the course even remotely survivable, interesting, or rewarding, it will have likely exceeded their expectations—most sociology instructors would probably agree that teaching theory presents a number of pedagogical challenges. Although sociologists have not devoted much systematic attention to the sources of students’ “theory anxiety” (Lowney, 1998), there have been a fair number of attempts to provide pedagogical tools to facilitate teaching theory, both classical and contemporary (cf. Donaghy, 2000; Lowney, 1998; Rinehart, 1999; Silver and Perez, 1998).
One issue that has not been well explored, I think, is how the growth of the “theory canon” affects our ability to teach the topic, as well as students’ ability to learn it. In one sense, the “theory canon” grows inexorably as new theories are developed, so that successive cohorts of sociology students are required to master a larger body of theory than previous ones. But the sociological theory canon has arguably grown disproportionately in recent years given the conscious effort by many in the discipline to incorporate previously excluded and/or ignored and/or forgotten theorists (Camic and Gross, 1998; Chafetz, 1997; Lemert, 1999; Seidman, 1994; Sprague, 1997). In many departments, students today are expected to master (and instructors are expected to teach) not only the “classic” theorists, but the “multicultural” ones as well. One measure of this change, albeit an idiosyncratic and impressionistic one, is that when I took sociological theory as an undergraduate I was required to buy three books—the Marx-Engels Reader, Weber’s Protestant Ethic, and Durkheim’s Suicide—that covered three (four, if Engels is included) theorists in a total of about 1500 pages (about half of which were required reading), and when I taught sociological theory last semester, I required my students to buy only one book—Charles Lemert’s (1999) Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings—that covers about 100 theorists in about 700 pages (more than half of which I required students to read). In any event, while I am one who is in full support of the expanded “multicultural canon”, I am concerned that it adds at least one more challenge to the already formidable task of teaching theory to today’s undergraduates: How to provide a coherent framework within which to organize all this reading? For some sociologists, of course, the relative lack of coherence in the “multicultural canon” compared to the traditional canon is precisely the point—in a fragmented, non-unitary, postmodern world, a coherent body of social theory would be suspect, if not an outright impossibility (Lemert, 1999). However, as I hope to show in this essay, it is possible to impose a coherent conceptual framework on the multicultural canon without ignoring—indeed, doing much to highlight—the range of differences between multicultural and classic theorists and their theories.
In this essay, I would like to suggest that the theme of “getting a job” can provide a framework within which to teach the multicultural canon of social theory. Specifically, I propose that the theme of getting a job can help social theory instructors accomplish three main goals: 1. By examining what I call “career angst”, instructors can go a long way toward demystifying the lives and work of major social theorists. In many ways, as I hope to show, the “founding fathers” of sociology were anxious about the prospect of having to “get a job” and, to a surprising degree, this “personal trouble” became the impetus for their attempts to theorize the great “public issues” of the modern world. Thus, to the extent that students themselves are also suffering from “career angst,” this theme can help students identify personally with the theorists and gain insights into how their theories pertain to their own lives. 2. By examining the qualitatively different forms of “career angst” experienced and theorized by “classic” and “multicultural” theorists, instructors can help students understand why it is necessary to go beyond the writings of “dead white males” when reviewing the history of social theory. The multicultural canon, that is, has been assembled not just for the sake of recognizing diversity, but because social location matters greatly to the social theoretical enterprise. 3. By examining how anxiety about getting a job has led social theorists from different social locations to develop their sociological imaginations and write social theories, students can be effectively encouraged to understand social theory as something that they themselves can and should “do”, and is not simply a body of writing that they are required to master. In other words, this theme can help students develop their own sociological imaginations and their own abilities as social theorists.
Why did Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and the other classical social theorists decide to theorize modernity? The usual explanation is that rapid social and cultural change had produced a clear “break” with “what was”, and that these changes cried out for analysis and explanation. Clearly, all of the classical theorists agreed that “the traditional” differed in dramatic ways from “the modern”, even if they differed on what, exactly, “the traditional” and “the modern” were. According to some “theorists of theory”, like Charles Lemert, and Alvin Gouldner, social theories are only produced in “cultures of critical discourse”, and the “break” from traditional society and culture led to a moment characterized by an intense “culture of critical discourse”. In Lemert’s words:
Modern life, in contrast to the traditional, did seem to encourage critical thinking. This was, in effect, the main point of the Enlightenment—that, in Immanuel Kant’s famous definition, modern, enlightened people would “dare to know”. Daring to know and daring to use that knowledge are attitudes toward life and the world that could only arise among people willing to break with tradition, thereby looking to new, future possibilities [Lemert, 1999:6].
This standard account, though, leaves out an important question: Why did individuals like Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, decide that they, personally, should take up the task of theorizing modernity? Most accounts of the emergence of classical theory, if they examine the biographies of classical theorists, do so mostly in order to explain the different “answers” these theorists put forward, but few examine the personal reasons these theorists asked “the question” in the first place. For example, the fact that Weber suffered from depression is often invoked as an explanation for why he, in some contrast to Marx and Durkheim, was so pessimistic about the state of modern society. Or, the fact that Durkheim came from a long line of rabbis is used to explain why he felt that religious ideas were a necessary and constructive feature of societies, as opposed to Marx’s dismissal of them as an “opiate of the masses”. Moreover, when we teach classical social theory to our students, most instructors, I think, emphasize the differences between theorists like Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, rather than their essential similarities. This makes sense, but again, it runs the risk of obscuring some important truths.
So when I was assigned to teach social theory last year, I began to ask myself how I could get my undergraduate students to imagine themselves in the shoes of writers like Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, in order that they could have a more personal and visceral stake in what I was requiring them to read. In other words, I wanted them first to concentrate on the similarities among these thinkers, and the similarities shared by the thinkers and the students themselves. In asking this, I began to feel that “getting a job” might be a good theme for accomplishing these goals. After all, most of my students are intensely focused on “getting a job”, and essential social theoretical concepts like Marx’s “alienation”, Durkheim’s “anomie”, and Weber’s “disenchantment”, are, to a great extent, also concerned with the experience of jobs and work in the modern world.
But as young men, were individuals like Marx, Durkheim, and Weber anxious about having to “get a job”, and if so, to what extent did this anxiety lead them toward the social theory enterprise? This is not the place for a detailed comparative psychohistorical analysis of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, but I would like briefly to sketch the claim that “getting a job” was very much on the minds of all three of the classical theorists as they moved toward beginning their careers as social theorists. Evidence for this claim can be found in secondary analyses of these theorists’ lives and work, but such evidence can also be found in close readings of the theorists’ own writings.
For example, Anthony Giddens (1996) tells us on Page 1 of his classic, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory: An Analysis of the Writings of Marx, Durkheim, and Max Weber that Karl Marx, upon graduating from the German equivalent of high school, penned an essay for his final exams called “Reflections of a Young Man on Choosing a Career”. In it, Marx wrote that:
The main principle which must guide us in the selection of a vocation is the welfare of humanity, our own perfection. One should not think that these two interests combat each other, that one must destroy the other. Rather, man’s nature makes it possible for him to reach his fulfillment only by working for the perfection and welfare of his society...History calls those the greatest men who ennobled themselves by working for the universal [Quoted By Giddens (1996:1)].
As Giddens notes, not much is known of Marx’s family life as a child and an adolescent, but it seems as though Marx was here rejecting the kind of self-preserving choices his own father had made (e.g., converting to Christianity from Judaism; making a living as a lawyer while studying great thinkers in his spare time; etc.). Marx, it seems evident, was determined from early in life not to make a separation between “making a living” and “living life”. Indeed, the concept of “estranged labor” or “alienation”, which Marx developed in one of his first attempts at writing social theory, and which underlies almost all of his subsequent social theoretical work, is largely addressed to the idea that human beings should not have to make such a separation.
When we read “Estranged Labor” in my social theory class, I encourage my students to imagine Marx as a young man, feeling the pressure to “get a job” and to see his essay as a principled response to people like his mother, father, or even Baron von Westphalen (a family friend and mentor to young Karl) who might have been pressuring him about getting his career started. Marx can be read as saying, “yes, I am anxious and reluctant about getting a job, but not because I am immature or lazy, but because the capitalist system has degraded work and productive activity, depriving people of their essential humanity”. Instead of just “getting a job” in such a system, Marx seems to have set himself the “job” of theorizing this system, criticizing it, and plotting its demise. Not surprisingly, this “job”, described by the adolescent Marx as “working for the perfection and welfare of his society”, did not pay well, and the only “employer” he could find for it was Engels, his patron and collaborator. At any rate, it is quite clear in Marx’s case that career angst was intimately bound up with the desire and effort to theorize the modern world and the unique constraints it imposes upon individuals.
But this unease about getting a “real” job, and the way that this may be the inspiration for a full-scale theorization of modern society, seems to apply almost equally well in the cases of Durkheim and Weber. Although it is difficult to find any direct biographical evidence of “career angst” on the part of young Emile and young Max, their writings too, especially their earliest ones, were intensely concerned with the ways that work and making a living had changed dramatically as society shifted from the “traditional” to “the modern”.
Durkheim’s analysis of the division of labor (his doctoral thesis), and his theoretical and moral concern with how the complex division of labor, by creating specialization and weakening traditional collective ties had led to “anomie” on a wide scale, is very much addressed to the question of “getting a job”. Indeed, Durkheim’s work on the division of labor seems to suggest that “getting a job” is a defining feature of modern “organic” society, at least as far as individuals are concerned. In traditional “segmented”, “mechanical” societies, Durkheim tells us, people’s work lives, home lives, and community lives were all interconnected, whereas in the modern world, individuals are forced to make separations between these spheres of life, and this is a source of a great deal of modernity’s troubles. It is not only the separation between home and work life that concerns Durkheim, but the fact that modern individuals are required to squeeze themselves into rather narrow boxes of specialized professional activity. But whereas Marx rejected this requirement early on, Durkheim seems to have resigned himself to it. Nevertheless, we can detect some angst, similar to young Marx’s, in Durkheim’s resignation to specialization:
We may thus state literally that in higher societies our duty lies not in extending the range of our activity but in concentrating it, in making it more specialized. We must limit our horizons, select a definite task, and involve ourselves utterly, instead of making ourselves, so to speak, a finished work of art, one that derives all its value from itself rather than from the services it renders [Durkheim, 1984:333].
It is worth noting that Durkheim began his graduate career studying philosophy. While his family certainly was pressuring the young Emile to pursue the “family business” of being a rabbi, Durkheim seemed to have concluded early on (perhaps influenced by Comte), that traditional religion was no longer appropriate in the modern world, but that a career as a philosopher in a university would be the modern equivalent of being a rabbi in a synagogue in pre-modern society. That Durkheim ultimately turned away from philosophy, which in the French academy of his day was seen as the ultimate “interdisciplinary” field, and philosophers as the most well-rounded thinkers, in favor of a relatively narrow specialization in the emergent field of sociology, perhaps reflects his resignation to the “requirements” of modern, specialized society. On the other hand, the fact that he chose sociology, which Comte had envisioned as the “queen of the sciences”, and that he consciously saw himself as being a founder and high priest of this new “civil religion”, suggests that Durkheim himself was not totally enamored of the narrow specialization he said was “required” by modern society. Far from selecting a “definite task” to which to devote his career, Durkheim devoted himself to founding a discipline that did not really exist yet, and to developing a civil religion that he envisioned as being necessary to redeem modern society as a whole. Thus, one wonders whether Durkheim is trying to persuade his readers, or himself, when he writes in the Introduction to Division of Labor that:
We are wary of those too volatile men of talent, who, lending themselves equally to all forms of employment, refuse to choose for themselves a special role and to adhere to it...Rather, do we perceive perfection in the competent man, one who seeks not to be complete, but to be productive, one who has a well-defined job to which he devotes himself, and carries out his task, ploughing his single furrow [Durkheim, 1984:4].
Weber, for his part, is often characterized as the “most complex” of the classical social theorists, and his theoretical and personal views on work and “getting a job”, also seem to have been highly complex. According to Gerth and Mills (1958), Weber was a “workaholic”, and this must be understood in the context of his conflicted relationship with his mother and father. Weber’s mother was a pious, ascetic Protestant, while his father was something of a libertine. Thus, Weber seemed to struggle throughout his life with competing impulses instilled by his parents. Early in his career, Weber threw himself into his work--academic, legal, and political. He once remarked to his wife that he would never get to “be a professor” unless he “worked until 1 a.m.” every night (Gerth and Mills, 1958:11). Yet even in this early period, Weber seemed to experience a great deal of “career angst”, and wrestled with the decision of whether to take a “practical job” or to become a scholar. According to Reinhard Bendix (1998), though at age 27 Weber already had “the definite prospect of a brilliant academic career”, young Max felt that:
I am not really a scholar after all; scientific activity is for me primarily an occupation for the leisure hours...The feeling of being active in a practical way is entirely indispensable for me, and I hope that the pedagogic side of the teaching profession will satisfy this craving...[quoted in Bendix (1998:28)]
Ironically, only a few years after deciding to take an academic job, Weber’s psychological condition forced him to abandon it—along with all other practical activity—for several years. Bendix, for his part, ultimately concludes that “the craving for practical activity and the inability to cope with the duties of an academic career was only one of the many paradoxes which marked Weber’s life” (Bendix, 1998:29). But a close reading of Weber’s work both before and after his bout with severe depression and paralysis suggests that, like Marx and Durkheim, Weber turned to social theory as a way to comprehend the dilemmas posed by modernity’s demand to “get a job”. Indeed, Weber’s first scholarly work dealt with many of the same questions as Marx’s first work on estranged labor, and Durkheim’s first work on the division of labor. This was a study of “the problem of farm labor” in Germany, and, according to Bendix, “the principle emphasis of Weber’s analysis was to indicate the process by which day laborers were gradually replacing the half-servile peasantry on the large landed estates of the east” (Bendix, 1998:40). In other words, Weber focused his analysis on the theme of getting a job, and he paid particular attention to how individuals resisted “getting a job” even when it promised to improve their material circumstances:
Domestic servants flee the household of the master. Threshers want to sever their close tie-in with the economy of the estate. The laborer on annual contract relinquishes his secure position, in order to make his precarious way as a ‘free’ day laborer. The peasant with very little land would rather starve than accept a job and work for someone else. Innumerable workers prefer to pay any price to a jobber for a piece of land and to live in abject dependence on creditors who charge usurious interest-rates, all this for the sake of the ‘self-dependence’ which they crave, i.e., for the sake of independence from personal subservience to a master. [Quoted in Bendix (1998:45)]
Later, upon emerging from his depressive paralysis, Weber wrote his most famous work, The Protestant Ethic. This work, of course, is largely addressed to the question of why modern individuals must “get jobs” and live routinized lives that, to a large degree, leave them feeling “disenchanted” and unhappy. However, it is not work per se that Weber criticizes, but the “ascetic” lifestyle, and denial of “spontaneous enjoyment” that most modern individuals are forced to endure. While such a lifestyle was tolerable to and seen as a “sacred duty” by the Calvinists who invented it, for many modern individuals it feels like being trapped in an “iron cage”. In a famous phrase, Weber refers to modern society as a collection of “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart”. When we consider that Weber became a copious beer drinker during his army training days as a way to cope with the deadening routines of military drills (again, according to Gerth and Mills), and that he fell into his paralyzing depression at the height of his specialized research into legal and economic problems in Germany, we can see that Weber was quite likely analyzing modernity from the standpoint of his own experiences both as a “specialist without spirit” and a “sensualist without heart”. Indeed, he seems to have pulled himself out of his depression precisely by writing The Protestant Ethic, i.e., by using his “sociological imagination” to analyze his “private troubles” (of depression and inertia) in the context of “public issues” (i.e., the rise of Calvinist-influenced modern capitalism). Thus, like Marx and Durkheim, rather than go gently into the good night of getting a “real job” in a specialized career, Weber “raged against” this by employing himself in the “job” of wide-ranging, humanistic critique of modern society.
So while it is certainly the case that there are important differences in how Marx, Durkheim, and Weber respectively analyzed modernity, and while instructors should undoubtedly explore these differences with their students, it also seems apparent that these three “founding fathers” embarked on the task of theorizing modernity for similar reasons, and that for all three of them, a certain amount of “career angst” was at or near the roots of their desires to be social theorists when they “grew up”. By exploring with their students these biographical issues and how they relate to the classical theorists’ work, instructors can provide not only richness and illumination to their courses’ consideration of classical theories, but perhaps can also encourage students to identify personally with the theorists and the social theoretical enterprise. Ideally, such an approach can help to create a learning atmosphere where social theory is seen not simply as a body of thought to be mastered (and perhaps dreaded and feared as well), but as a tool that helps individuals make sense of their own lives and craft solutions to their problems.
At this stage in a theory course, students can be asked to think about their own “career angst” and to compare and contrast their own experiences with those of their classmates. More specifically, students can be asked to consider whether their own angst—to the extent they have any—is similar to that expressed by Marx, Weber, and Durkheim. For example, are they concerned about exploitation and alienation as Marx was, or are they more worried about becoming too narrowly specialized and/or routinized a la Durkheim and/or Weber? Have they experienced these feelings in their past or current jobs and, if so, do they expect their jobs after college to be different? Do they have “dream jobs” in mind, and if so, what is so “dreamy” about them? Would they prefer to live in pre-modern times when work, family, and leisure were not as separated from one another? Are there strategies we can use today to cope with and/or transcend the angst that is often brought on by modern jobs and careers? Is it possible to imagine a world where individuals are not forced to endure highly specialized, routinized, intellectually deadening work lives?
When I employed the approach just described with my social theory course, something happened that I did not expect: Many of my students expressed resistance to the idea that one should feel any “angst” about “getting a job”. Indeed, several of them said that if they were anxious, it was about the prospect of not getting a job after they graduated. Some of this resistance, to be sure, was rooted in the kind of discomfort felt by many of those who are newly introduced to social theorizing; i.e., the vertiginous feeling of questioning the social status quo and of trying to imagine alternative states of affairs. When discussing Weber’s critique of Calvinist asceticism and the pursuit of wealth for wealth’s sake, for example, one student (who happened to be sporting several gold chains around his neck at the time) raised his hand and said, “Professor, I don’t understand: Isn’t the whole point of life to make as much money as you can? What’s wrong with that?”. Other students of mine, however--and it is worth noting here that I teach at a large urban commuter university in Southern California--are excited and enthusiastic about the fact that, being the first member of their family to attend college, they expect to have the opportunity to get “real jobs” that will be much more rewarding, both intrinsically and extrinsically, than the jobs their parents and grandparents had or have. Although such students are of course generally sympathetic to classical theorists’ condemnation of social injustices like exploitation, domination, and massive inequality, they apparently are not as excited as I am by the thought that Marx, Durkheim and Weber may have decided to become social theorists because they did not want to get “real jobs”. That is, such students can identify with “career angst” to some extent, but in other ways they see it as a luxury of the privileged that they themselves cannot afford.
But while this resistance to the “career angst” idea initially threw me for a loop, it soon dawned on me that it actually provided an important conceptual basis and segue for introducing the class to the writings of “multicultural” theorists. As it happens, several of these theorists also wrote extensively about “getting a job”, but in terms quite distinct from those of the classical theorists. In general, theorists like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, W.E.B. DuBois, and Anna Julia Cooper are of course writing from the standpoint of being members of groups that had been systematically excluded from the modern social system. Thus, their theories are oriented to gaining inclusion in things like jobs and careers, rather than to criticizing the social factors that have “forced” this “predicament” on modern individuals.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), for example, tells the story of a Victorian woman who has been confined to her bed as a remedy for “hysteria”. Her doctor, as well as her husband and her brother (who are both doctors themselves), all assure her that her illness stems from “nervous anxiety” brought on by too much involvement in worldly affairs, and that the only cure is bed rest and relaxation. However, the narrator of the story comes to feel that bed rest is making her condition worse, and that what would really make her feel better is being involved in productive activity, especially writing. The yellow wallpaper she has to stare at all day in her cloistered existence becomes a metaphor for the contradictions of modern society: While the graphic design of the wallpaper appears to be rational and well-ordered from a distance, the closer she looks at it, the more haphazard and irrational it appears to be (cf. Lemert 1999). Likewise, that the “cure” for her “illness” seems to be “worse than the disease” indicates to her that the “rational” well-meaning men in her life are doing her more harm than good. In short, her “sickness” is not the result of too much involvement in social and political affairs, but of too little: She only starts to feel better when she is allowed (or sneaks away) to write about the political and social problems of her day. In a sense, this is an interesting reversal of Marx/Weber/Durkheim: It is not having a job which is making this woman feel “alienated”, “anomic”, and “disenchanted”, but not having one, that seems to be the problem.
In a more straightforward discussion of these themes, Gilman’s “Women and Economics” (1898) explicitly argues that the exclusion of women from meaningful work and careers is not only unjust and indefensible on biological, economic, and social grounds, but that modern social institutions would become more humane and tolerable for everyone when they benefited from the wide-scale inclusion of women. Whereas Marx, Weber, and Durkheim seemed to resist dealing with “the Woman Question” until after they had thoroughly critiqued modern society, Gilman insists that the problems of modernity cannot be adequately addressed without taking gender into account. Although she does not say so explicitly, Gilman’s argument implies that Marx’s analysis of the exploitation and alienation of the working class is incomplete without a theory of the exploitation and alienation of women; Durkheim’s critique of the “forced division of labor” is not complete without a theory of the “forced idleness and dependency” of women; and Weber’s analysis of the dehumanizing tendencies of modern life is incomplete without an analysis and critique of the dehumanization of women.
Thus, the work of this “multicultural theorist” can be introduced to students not as an afterthought, or in the vein of “by the way, there were also women who were social theorists during the time of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim”, but as a vital counterpoint to the theories presented earlier. The “career angst” theme can be extended here to show that the kinds of feelings one has about jobs and careers are strongly dependent on one’s social location, and although Gilman’s views on these matters were in some ways diametrically opposed to those of the classical theorists, for her, too, (lack of) career angst was a powerful impetus to analyze society critically and to write social theory.
But if the classical theorists can be faulted for neglecting gender issues, W.E.B. Du Bois can help students see that the “race question” also cannot be theoretically divorced from the other major problems of modernity. Although Du Bois was certainly familiar with and sympathetic to the classical sociological theorists, particularly Marx and Weber (Green and Driver, 1978), Du Bois insists that African Americans cannot simply give up their racial identification in favor of class consciousness and working class solidarity. That is, whereas Marx, and to some degree Weber and Durkheim, seem to posit the primacy of economic liberty, and to assume that cultural and social freedom will fall into place once economic domination and exploitation have been overcome, Du Bois insists that “Negroes” have learned the hard way that emancipation from slavery did not translate into full-scale human liberation. Simply being “free” meant nothing without other freedoms, like the right to vote, the right to go to school, the right to develop one’s own culture, and, importantly for this discussion, the right to have jobs and careers. Thus, DuBois argues in favor of what we might now call “identity politics”--i.e., using one’s race as a basis for political consciousness, mobilization, and action--and he argues that this should be undertaken as the route to the “ideal of human brotherhood”, not in spite of it:
Work, culture, liberty,--all these we need, not singly but together, not successively but together, each growing and aiding each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal that swims before the Negro people, the ideal of human brotherhood, gained through the unifying ideal of Race... [quoted in Lemert (1999:167-168)]
Like Gilman, then, Du Bois writes from the position of those largely excluded from the modern social system, and for Du Bois too, the eventual inclusion of the excluded will become the saving grace and redemption of the system. So while for Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, the necessity of “getting a job” is simultaneously one of the defining features of the modern social system and a serious flaw that is at the root of alienation, anomie, and disenchantment, among Du Bois’ insights is that those excluded from the system also suffer from these afflictions, often even more intensely than those who are included. What Du Bois seems to suggest, though, much like Gilman, is that “getting a job” is how the “Negro race” will simultaneously overcome their own afflictions, and help modernity’s included groups overcome theirs. This is because, for “Negroes”, “getting a job” is a collective task, not an individualized one, and the work to be done is for the good of all. Interestingly, whereas it can be said that Marx, Durkheim, and Weber became professional social theorists as an alternative to getting “real jobs”, Du Bois ultimately left his “real job” as a professor at Atlanta University to become a full-time activist after having become disillusioned with the value of detached sociological research (Green and Driver, 1978).
At this point in the course, after students have been introduced to the ways in which gender and race differences affect social location and can therefore provide points of departure from the social theorizing of dominant group members, the stage is set for consideration of how modernity looks to those who are multiply excluded from it. Anna Julia Cooper, as the daughter of a slave, represents one of the groups most systematically excluded from the modern social system, and, perhaps because of this, writes the most enthusiastically and eagerly about wanting to “get a job”. Whereas Gilman wrote that the “woman question” could not be excluded from classical social theory, and Du Bois argued that the “race question” cannot be bracketed off from theories of human liberation and emancipation, Cooper’s argument is that theorizing from the standpoint of the “colored woman” (i.e., combining the woman and the race question) perhaps offers the most insightful perspective on modernity. As Cooper herself puts it:
The colored woman of today [1892] occupies, one may say, a unique position in this country. In a period itself transitional and unsettled, her status seems one of the least ascertainable and definitive of all the forces which make for our civilization. She is confronted by both a woman question and a race problem, and is as yet an unknown or unacknowledged factor in both [Quoted in Lemert (1999:182)].
This “unique position”, Cooper argues, allows women like her to have insights into modern social problems that are likely to escape the attention of differently located theorists. Yet while we have seen that the theorists writing from relatively privileged positions (i.e., white males like Marx, Weber, and Durkheim) offered up some pretty grim and pessimistic pictures of modern life, and while this might lead us to expect that the views of a theorist like Cooper would be even more bleak and hopeless, Cooper argues that her unique theoretical position is a “blessing” and “privilege”. Against the classical theorists’ preoccupation with alienation, anomie, and disenchantment, Cooper offers this hopeful vision of theorizing modernity from the standpoint of the “colored woman”:
...to be a woman of the Negro race in America, and to be able to grasp the deep significance of the possibilities of the crisis, is to have a heritage, it seems to me, unique in the ages. In the first place, the race is young and full of the elasticity and hopefulness of youth. All its achievements are before it. It does not look on the masterly triumphs of nineteenth century civilization with that blasé world-weary look which characterizes the old washed out and worn out races which have already, so to speak, seen their best days...Everything to this race is new and inspiring. There is a quickening of its pulses and a glowing of its self-consciousness. Aha, I can rival that! I can aspire to that! I can honor my name and vindicate my race! Something like this, it strikes me, is the enthusiasm which stirs the genius of young Africa in America; and the memory of past oppression and the fact of present attempted repression only serve to gather momentum for its irrepressible powers. Then again, a race in such a stage of growth is peculiarly sensitive to impressions. Not the photographer’s sensitized plate is more delicately impressionable to outer influences than is this high strung people here on the threshold of a career [Quoted in Lemert (1999:184). Emphasis added].
It is worth noting here that Cooper was forced out of her own job (in 1906) as principal of Washington, D.C.’s M Street school by those sympathetic to Booker T. Washington (Lemert, 1999). According to Charles Lemert, the issue was “industrial training” versus “classical education” for blacks, with Cooper favoring the more liberal approach, and Washington’s followers favoring the more practical one. Thus, it would appear that Cooper was at one level sympathetic to the classical theorists who lamented the emphasis on narrow specialization brought on by the modern system. Yet it is also clear that she was very far from the “career angst” that can be detected in the writings of Marx, Weber, and to some extent Durkheim. Similarly to Gilman and Du Bois, a meaningful career and a substantive role in public affairs is precisely what Cooper is seeking for people like herself.
As she makes clear, Cooper equates “getting a job” with being recognized by the wider society as a full adult. The “Negro race”, she implies, is in a state of adolescence, and will not be able to reach full maturity until it is permitted to participate fully in the functioning and affairs of modern society. Like Gillman and Du Bois, she suggests that this full participation is not only necessary for African Americans, especially African American women, but that it will ultimately be salutary for modern society as a whole, helping to overcome problems of “labor and capital, of government and the governed, of the family, the church and the state” (Quoted in Lemert, 1999:183). So again, the perspective of this “multicultural theorist” is by no means a mere adjunct or corrective to the analyses of modernity presented by the “classical theorists”, nor is it simply an alternative view. Rather, Cooper’s perspective amounts to an important interjection in the theoretical dialogue in which the “classical theorists” were engaged, and her contributions push this dialogue in new and important directions. At the risk of oversimplifying the matter, we can say that whereas Marx, Weber, and Durkheim saw humanity as having lost important things in the transition to modernity, and their theories of alienation, disenchantment, and anomie were oriented to helping humanity regain what it had lost, Cooper’s agenda is to confer humanity on those who never really had it in the first place and to usher in a new kind of modernity and a new kind of humanity in the process.
I have tried to show that the theme of “getting a job” can serve as a conceptual framework within which to introduce students to the multicultural canon of social theory. Obviously, in practice, instructors would not want to focus exclusively on this theme. For while jobs and work are certainly at the heart of much of modern social theory, the work of each of the theorists mentioned here goes far beyond this theme as well. For example, instructors would not want to ignore Weber’s contributions in the areas of, for example, the state, and research/analytical methods, though I personally have yet to find a way to smoothly integrate a concept like “ideal type” into my discussion of career angst and getting a job. Similarly, instructors should certainly expose students to Du Bois’ ethnographic studies of African-Americans in Philadelphia, even though this work may bear little direct connection to the themes addressed in the present essay. That is, the theme of getting a job can serve to introduce students to each of the theorists mentioned here (and some who were not, such as Simmel and Veblen), and to provide a framework for comparing and contrasting the different theorists, but I do not propose it as an all-encompassing approach to teaching social theory.
Still, one of the great advantages of this theme, I think, is that it provides students with opportunities to engage social theory on a personal level, and it therefore opens up some interesting possibilities for unique and fruitful assignments and classroom activities. In addition to the class discussion topics mentioned earlier, students can be asked to write essays on whether or not they experience career angst themselves, and to discuss this angst (or lack thereof) in light of one or more of the theorists. For students who are currently employed, an assignment I have given in the past is to ask students to imagine that one of the theorists we have read is able to accompany them to their jobs for one day, and to write an essay about what that theorist might observe and say about their jobs and their place of work. In socially diverse classrooms, students can be asked to share their experiences with jobs and career angst with one another, and from there, to analyze how social location can account for differences in such experiences. In my classroom, for example, students were somewhat surprised to see that, in an echo of the theorists we had read, the white males in the classroom typically expressed the most dread and anxiety about their future careers, whereas the Latinas and African American women expressed the most enthusiasm and excitement about their future work prospects. Yet students were also surprised to see that, when it came to imagining their “dream jobs”, there was a lot more commonality in the classroom than difference (i.e., the majority of students dreamed of jobs that would make them rich and/or famous while allowing them to do what they loved to do anyway—i.e., jobs that did not involve alienation or exploitation).
The present essay has focused mainly on “classical theory”, i.e., theorists and theories that emerged roughly in the Nineteenth Century. However, the theme of getting a job can perform pedagogical functions similar to the ones described here in a course on “contemporary theory” as well. That is, to the extent that there is a contemporary theory “canon”, it too has been expanded in recent years as a more diverse array of voices has been added and/or re-incorporated into the theoretical dialogue, and the theme of getting a job helps illuminate this expanded contemporary canon in much the same ways as it does for the multicultural classical theory canon.
For example, when introducing students to American theorists of the 1950s, the getting a job theme can help instructors shed light on the differences between, say, a Talcott Parsons (e.g., “Sex Roles and the American Kinship System”) and a Betty Friedan (e.g., “The Problem that has No Name”). Later, when examining the social movements of the 1960s, such as the student movement, and the theoretical debates they helped to foster, instructors can examine the conflicting views on “career angst” offered by theorists of youth like Erik Erikson (“Youth and American Identity”) on the one hand, and what we might call “youth standpoint theorists” like the twenty-something founders of Students for a Democratic Society (“The Port Huron Statement”), on the other. Later still, as students are introduced to theories of the postmodern era, they can be asked to compare the relatively utopian ideas of a theorist like Stanley Aronowitz (“The Post-Work Manifesto”) with the more pragmatic visions on jobs and careers offered by theorists like William Julius Wilson (“When Work Disappears”), and both of these can in turn be compared with theories of how work and jobs are being transformed in the postmodern era offered by feminist scholars like Judith Stacey (“Postmodern Families”) and Arlie Hochschild (“Working Women in the Time Bind”).
In fact, the theme of getting a job can even help students make sense of French social theorists. For example, Bourdieu’s concept of “the habitus” can be very clearly illustrated by considering why individuals make the career choices they make, and how these individual choices end up simultaneously reproducing and slightly altering the larger social structures which shaped those career choices in the first place. At any rate, again, my claim is not that the theme of getting a job encompasses all or even most of the ideas that instructors would want to explore with their students, but that it can provide direction and coherence to what otherwise might seem to students like an unmanageably large and eclectic body of course material.
In this essay I have tried to show that the theme of getting a job can provide a coherent framework for teaching the multicultural canon of social theory. I have argued that this theme not only provides coherence, but helps illuminate the differences between theorists, and helps students to engage social theory on a personal level. I would like to conclude by providing some evidence that the approach outlined here actually works at reducing “theory anxiety” and providing students with a rewarding learning experience. The evidence I will be examining comes from student evaluations of my teaching, and while this “data” is limited in obvious ways, it is useful in that about half of it comes from a social theory course in which I did not use the approach described here, and the other half comes from a social theory course in which I did employ the present approach.
The two incarnations of the course from which the student evaluations came were identical in that they both used the same text and syllabus, the same exams, and roughly the same writing assignments. The main difference was that, in the second semester I taught the course (the semester directly after the previous one), I employed the theme of getting a job as an organizing principle. Although the student evaluations from both incarnations of the course were generally favorable, the mean quantitative scores for the second incarnation were higher, and the written comments suggest that the students in the second incarnation got more out of the class than the students in the first incarnation. For example, in the first set of evaluations there are comments such as: “Some of the material was redundant”; “Things other than lecture were good: songs, videos”; “I really enjoy [Instructor’s] teaching and very helpful lectures. However, with Soc. 456, I don’t feel there has been as much opportunity for class interaction [as in other courses the instructor teaches]”; “[It would be good to have] maybe some assignments to get more familiar with the subject”; “the book for this class was poorly orchestrated, many of the theorists were difficult to comprehend”.
By contrast, in the second set of evaluations there are comments such as: “I thought he did a great job of explaining the material so the students could relate to it today”; “Great lectures, practical examples, well prepared and made boring subject fun”; “I think you did an excellent job; what helped most was your realistic examples, the way you applied classical and modern theorists to our own times. Thank you.”; “My perspective on how the world works has changed”; “Although I’m horrible in theory I liked focusing on the multicultural perspective. I took [this class] with [a different instructor] last semester and dropped because [he or she] made absolutely no sense. The text was difficult but I liked how it incorporated so many different theorists. Thanks for a great class”; “Lectures were very informative and real life examples were key to understanding material”; “I really enjoyed the fact that you make reference to modern day times and relate daily life examples to show comparisons and ensure understanding”; “I must admit that I was scared to death to take this course but it was taught in a way that was most understandable and interesting”; “I enjoyed your class as much as anyone can enjoy a theory class!”
Whether such comments say anything definitive about the pedagogical approach described in this essay is for the reader to decide. However, I hope I have made the case in the body of the essay that the theme of getting a job can provide an interesting vantage point from which to consider a range of sociological theorists and their writings. Ultimately, it may well be the case that an instructor’s own interest in a topic is the best guarantee that students will find the material interesting and rewarding, and so, if nothing else, I hope this essay helps rekindle interest in the multicultural canon of sociological theory among those of us who have the “job” of teaching this topic to undergraduates.
Bendix, Reinhard (1998). Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait. London: Routledge.
Camic, Charles, and Neil Gross (1998). “Contemporary Developments in Sociological Theory: Current Projects and Conditions of Possibility.” Annual Review of Sociology 24:4533-4576.
Chafetz, Janet Saltzman (1997). “Feminist Theory and Sociology: Underutilized Contributions for Mainstream Theory.” Annual Review of Sociology 23:97-120.
Cooper, Anna Julia (1999). “The Colored Woman’s Office.” Pp. 179-184 in Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings, edited by Charles Lemert. Boulder, CO: Westview.
Deflem, Mathieu (1999). “Teaching Theory for Sociology Students: Junior Notes.” ASA Theory Section Newsletter 21(2):7-8.
Donaghy, Mary L. (2000). “Simulating Television Programs as a Tool to Teach Social Theory.” Teaching Sociology 28(Jan.):67-70.
Du Bois, W.E.B. (1999). “Double-Consciousness and the Veil.” Pp. 163-168 in Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings, edited by Charles Lemert. Boulder, CO: Westview.
Du Bois, W.E.B. (1999). “The Spirit of Modern Europe.” Pp. 168-171 in Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings, edited by Charles Lemert. Boulder, CO: Westview.
Durkheim, Emile (1984). The Division of Labor in Society. New York: The Free Press.
Gerth, Hans, and C. Wright Mills, ed.’s (1958). From Max Weber. London: Oxford University Press.
Giddens, Anthony (1978). Emile Durkheim. New York: The Viking Press.
Giddens, Anthony (1996). Capitalism and Modern Social Theory: An Analysis of the Writings of Marx, Durkheim, and Max Weber. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins (1999). “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Pp. 172-174 in Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings, edited by Charles Lemert. Boulder, CO: Westview.
Gilman, Charolotte Perkins (1999). “Women and Economics.” Pp. 174-178 in Social Theory: the Multicultural and Classic Readings, edited by Charles Lemert. Boulder, CO: Westview.
Green, Dan S., and Edwin D. Driver, ed.’s (1980). W.E.B. Du Bois On Sociology and the Black Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lemert, Charles, ed. (1999). Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings (2nd Ed.). Boulder, CO: Westview.
Lowney, Kathleen (1998). “Reducing ‘Theory Anxiety’ Through Puzzles.” Teaching Sociology 26(January):69-73.
Mobley, Catherine (2000). “The Occupational Profile: Using the Sociological Imagination to Understand Careers.” Teaching Sociology 28(April):148-152.
Rinehart, Jane A. (1999). “Turning Theory into Theorizing: Collaborative Learning in a Sociological Theory Course.” Teaching Sociology 27(July):216-232.
Seidman, Steven (1994). Contested Knowledge: Social Theory in the Postmodern Era. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Silver, Ira and Gina Perez (1998). “Teaching Social Theory Through Students’ Participant-Observation.” Teaching Sociology 26(Oct.):347-353.
Sprague, Joey (1997). “Holy Men and Big Guns: The Can[n]on in Social Theory.” Gender and Society 11(1):88-107.
© Radical Pedagogy