1. Among other themes I would like to pursue at some point are the experience of being at Berkeley in the 1960s; the move from the West Coast to the East Coast; family life, parenting, and professional ambitions; teaching; the selection of research topics; the uses of sociology and the role of moral commitment in sustaining research; the method (and challenge) of writing critical yet scientifically grounded essays. I have dealt a bit with the first theme in "Role Models and Role Distance: A Remembrance of Erving Goffman," Theory and Society 13 (1984), and the last two in the introduction to Muckraking Sociology (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1972). break

2. This seems to be particularly true for a discipline such as sociology that specializes in the study of stratification and in which there is only limited consensus about what constitutes good work. One observer even suggests that academic fauna can be ordered according to the degree of concern shown toward the outward presentation of self. Variation is inversely related to a discipline's certainty of results: "Thus at one end of the spectrum occupied by sociologists and professors of literature, where there is uncertainty as to how to discover the facts, the nature of the facts to be discovered, and whether indeed there are any facts at all, all attention is focused on one's peers, whose regard is the sole criterion for professional success. Great pains are taken in the development of the impressive persona. . . . At the other end, where, as the mathematicians themselves are fond of pointing out, 'a proof is a proof,' no concern need be given to making oneself acceptable to others; and as a rule none whatsoever is given." Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem (New York: Norton, 1983), p. 202.

3. Only later, when I gave what I thought was an equally timely paper and received only a handful of requests, did I realize that on average 150 might be more appropriate as a lifetime total.

4. This more interpretive, discursive, sensitizing style inspired by authors such as David Riesman, Erving Goffman, Herbert Gans, and Howard Becker was later to get me into trouble when I had to take greater initiative in submitting articles and applying for grants. Ground rules different from the ones pertaining to the invited contribution were in force. In assessing my mounting collection of failures in the early 1970s, I learned that as a humble petitioner, rather than an invited guest, one had to conform more rigidly to the conventional academic rules. Moreover, at that time quantitative methods as ends in themselves were ascendant.

5. I am reporting the elitist views encountered at Harvard. The University of California, though not an Ivy League school, was certainly an institution of enormous distinction.

The consequences of being around highly successful people who work very hard and see themselves as among the chosen are mixed. On the one hand, they become role models and you mimic them. You get more done than most people, and their sponsorship and advice help your career. On the other hand, you have doubts about whether you could ever do anything as impressive as they have done and (even if you could) whether you wish to pay the price that such success may require.

6. With success came ever greater aspirations. My modest goals as a young professional were closely linked to what I thought I could accomplish. This was no doubt a self-protective device. I had not yet learned to shoot for the moon with the hope that if you miss, you might still grab a few stars. I think the willingness to take risks and face failure are as (or more) important a determinant of academic success as native ability.

7. Even with a degree from Harvard, the odds were still against tenure, as the cases of prize-winning sociologists Theda Skocpol and Paul Starr indicate.

8. In retrospect I now see that this pattern was more a leveling off than a fall, but that was not how it felt at the time. What had been unusual (and more continue

worthy of explanation) was the degree and consistency of the early success, not the far more common pattern of intermingled success and failure that followed.

There are of course variants of falls. Some are easier to deal with than others. However poignantly felt, mine was gradual and partial. I had lots of time for hedging bets, putting out safety nets, and devising alternatives. That kind of fall is easier to respond to than one that is swift, total, and unexpected. The latter is the case with the assistant professor who had planned a large celebration and whose oh-so-sure department head had sent him a case of champagne the night before the faculty voted to deny him tenure.

9. Two examples will suffice. An account I heard too many times was that when my mother would push me in the baby carriage accompanied by our handsome collie, people would stop her and say, What a beautiful dog. A corresponding family tale stressed my father's resemblance to Rudolph Valentino.

10. To wit a "real sharp," chopped and lowered 1949 Pontiac convertible with duo carburetors, chrome pipes, and dice hanging from the rearview mirror and what used to be called "real cool threads"—a powder-blue one-button-roll zoot suit with enormous shoulder pads. The car did get attention, but to my chagrin it was never chosen by the school newspaper as "heap of the week.''

11. The first three years of my undergraduate career were an exception to the pattern of success in high school and my first decade in sociology: I looked but did not find much. This lack of success partly was due to a demanding outside job, but also to the confusion and dissipation of youth in southern California (in the surfing film Big Wednesday a girl from Chicago, recently moved to California, observes, "Back home, being young is something you do until you grow up. Here, well, it's everything.") I was surprised when after a series of aptitude and vocational tests at UCLA in my senior year I was told by the psychologist that I could be a professor if I wanted to. An expert had passed on my qualifications and given me permission to go on and become a professor.

12. In high school I had an experience that should have taught me something about the pitfalls of narcissism and hubris. There is a Fats Domino song with the lines "I'm gonna be a wheel someday, I'm gonna be somebody." I can still recall the excitement I felt working as a box boy in the King Cole Market on Los Feliz Boulevard in Glendale, California, when I saw a vegetable box with the label "Big Wheel Produce" on it. It was the perfect thing for a self-fancied big wheel to hang on his bedroom wall. I deserted my assigned duties and proceeded to cut out the label. When the knife slipped and cut deep into my index finger, I knew there was a God and that he or she had caught me. Not only was I guilty of hubris, but on company time. The scar is still there. As in Pinocchio, mutatis mutandis , it sometimes itches when I get too carried away by achievement fantasies.

13. Of course there is always ambiguity about, and a gap between, theory and practice with respect to the rules that govern the awarding of tenure, receipt of awards, or acceptance of an article for publication. See, for example, John Van Maanen's consideration of types of rules surrounding career games, "Career Games: Organizational Rules of Play," in Work, Family, Career , ed. C. Brooklyn Derr (New York: Praeger, 1980), pp. 111-143.

14. George Bernard Shaw observed in Man and Superman , "There are two continue

tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it." In some ways our culture does a better job of preparing us to cope with failure than with success.

15. Paul Newman received the following letter complimenting him on his spaghetti sauce: "My girlfriend mentioned that you were a movie star, and I would be interested to know what you've made. If you act as well as you cook, your movies would be worth watching. Are any of your movies in VCR?" New York Times Magazine , Sept. 31, 1986.

An academic career is strewn with humbling little reminders that bring you back down to earth. For example, several times I have eagerly turned from a book's index to the pages where G. Marx was referenced only to find that the reference was to Groucho or discover that as a result of typographical errors I was given credit for Karl Marx's ideas. I well recall the smug feeling I had when I received a call from the president of a midwestern school telling me I had been the unanimous choice of their faculty to deliver a prestigious lecture. Since a recent publication was receiving considerable attention, it seemed only fitting. Yet it soon became apparent that the invitation was for my esteemed MIT colleague Leo Marx.

16. Boston Globe , June 4, 1985.

17. Beyond an occasional case of corruption the questioning of judges' decisions is aided by the lack of consensus among sociologists about what quality is (beyond the extremes) and how quality in different areas (qualitative-quantitative, comparative-domestic, contemporary-historical, theoretical-empirical) ought to be weighed. Every way of seeing is also a way of not seeing. Among my collection of diametrically opposed responses for the same research proposals and articles I have submitted are the following: "This is the best article I have ever reviewed for this journal--an absolutely outstanding contribution" versus "This tiresome review of things everyone knows does not merit publication here"; "An extraordinarily important project . . . absolutely indispensable. I urge strongly and without reservation that this request for support be approved" versus "This study offers little that would improve the infrastructure of science. Do not fund it.''

18. It is comforting to think that when we fail the causes are structural and the system is unfair and when we succeed the causes are personal effort and the system fair. My naïveté and ego needs in the early period of my career probably led me to overemphasize the latter. That some of my success had little to do with merit per se was something to which I gave little thought. To be sure, I had worked hard and done respectable work. But there were a lot of things going for me that I had no control over. As research in the last decade has made clear, there is a sense in which demography (and timing) is destiny. In the case of my first job at Harvard one of my Berkeley mentors was then teaching there, and another held in very high regard had left not long before my arrival. I thus had a strong push from the outside and pull from the inside. What is more, the year I went on the job market Harvard had three openings at the assistant-professor level. Berkeley as an institution for training sociologists was at its height, and its graduate students were then very competitive on the job market. I had done my thesis on the civil-rights movement and specialized in race relations, topics continue

much in demand. The macro factors that aided my success in the 1960s ceased doing so in the politically more conservative period that followed.

19. As paragraph 6 suggests, these patterns can be independent. For quantity, a major pattern is flat. Some people hit their stride early and stay with it, producing about the same amount of work each year of their career.

20. As a graduate student one of the most important things I learned from Erving Goffman was that you had to click with your topic and really care about it or else you were in the wrong business. He implied it would happen early--it either grabbed you, or it did not. Since that was a time of many job offers for each applicant, rather than the reverse, this advice needs to be qualified.

21. This partly explains the exhaustion with reading journals as one ages (though an additional factor is an expansion in the number of journals). Although I would not go as far as a colleague who said he could not think of a worse way to spend an afternoon than to read the American Sociological Review , the moral imperative I felt as a graduate student to read it from cover to cover is long gone. The imperative has been diluted to reading the table of contents and occasionally marking an article to read later. I took this step with some of the same trepidation my grandmother reported when she made the decision to ignore kosher restrictions regarding the mixing of meat and dairy dishes and waited for God to strike her down. In neither case did harm befall us.

22. To be sure, in my early years there had been extra income, but I had not actively sought it out. I also felt a little uncomfortable being paid for work I would have gladly done for free.

Although I did not neglect my students, I must admit to an increased curiosity about those teachers whose moral (or immoral) code permitted them to devote an absolute minimum of time to teaching. Examples include the professor who required students who wanted to see him to make an appointment by calling a phone number that was rarely answered; the professor who did not have his name on his office door; the professor whose lectures consisted of reading from someone else's book; the professor who always came late to the first class meeting, did not have a syllabus, and was vague about just what the course would comprise (other than a heavy load of exams and term papers); and the professor who offered political (antielitist) and pedagogic (students should learn from each other) justifications for never preparing for class and never lecturing.

23. The research is reported in Undercover: Police Surveillance in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) and Windows into the Soul: Surveillance and Society in an Age of High Technology (forthcoming).

24. More broadly, such feelings seem to characterize American social scientists and humanists relative to scientists and engineers in academic settings, and academics relative to persons in applied settings.

25. It appears that sociology is increasingly being practiced outside traditional departments, whether in various interdisciplinary-studies programs or in applied contexts in professional schools. This goes beyond seeking new audiences; it is a matter of economic survival. In most of these settings one sociologist is fine but two is too many.

26. Though to a degree this sense of loss is also my fault. I did not try to continue

construct a more satisfying campus life or sell sociology. Instead I kept a low profile to maximize the time available for research.

27. Robert K. Merton, Sociological Ambivalence and Other Essays (New York: Free Press, 1977), p. 63.

28. William Butler Yeats ignored an alternative when he wrote, "The intellect of man is forced to choose. Perfection of the life, or of the work." One can opt for doing each as well as possible, but coming short of what might be accomplished by pursuing only one.

29. A related question is whether I could have reached these conclusions without experiencing the success with which I became disillusioned. break