Practical Lessons

Three broad practical lessons follow from these perspectives on success and failure: (1) value the process of creating as an end itself; (2) develop new professional goals; (3) do not make your career your life.

Turning to the first, it is necessary to value the process of creating. Work has to be fun and interesting in its own right, apart from any external rewards once it is finished. Harry Chapin caught this idea when he sang:

Getting off this dirty bus
one thing I understood.
It's got to be the going
not the getting there that's good.

In graduate school I was impressed by Erich Fromm's argument to live life such that you did everything as an end in itself and not as a means. At the time I saw this directive in terms of interpersonal relations. It never occurred to me that the argument had local occupational application. But I now see that once you have tenure, if you do not enjoy the research or writing (apart from whatever payoff the finished product might bring), then it is not worth doing. I came to realize that I got pleasure from finding partial answers to questions I wondered about, turning a clever phrase, ordering a set of ideas, and seeing connections between apparently unrelated phenomena. In a competitive world of uncertain and perhaps unsatisfying reward there is much to be said for valuing the process of production as an end in itself.^[20]

The focus on process and becoming can mean less concern over the quantity of work produced and fewer comparisons to colleagues. It can protect against judging yourself by some quantitative standard wherein whatever you do next has to be more and better than what you did earlier and bring greater rewards. If for personal satisfaction what matters is enjoying your work, then it does not much matter how many publications that work eventually leads to, or how quickly, or even in which places it gets published. I am not particularly troubled that some of my work may never be published, or may be published a decade after its completion, or may bounce down the prestige hierarchy of journals before finding a resting place. This attitude contrasts markedly with the rational cost-benefit calculation and the intensity and snobbishness about publication I felt as a young academic. What matters most is a sense of engagement with your work and of movement. I do not deny that the need for social recognition can be congruent with, and even conducive to, the advancement of knowledge or that there is pleasure in seeing an article or book in print—producers need markets for validation and feedback. But that is not enough to sustain research activity, particularly after a professional reputation is established.

A second conclusion involves the need to develop new professional goals because of the diminishing-returns effect and the increasing difficulty of climbing ever higher. I broadened my professional and personal goals (described in the next section). In the case of the former, I expanded my intellectual repertoire. You are likely to discover early in your career that you quickly master contemporary sociological research knowledge regarding your topic (or if not, at least get bored with it). Occasionally there will be some highly informative, useful, or fresh empirical findings, concepts, theoretical approaches, or methods, but

not often. Although by and large it is not true that sociology consists of "findings of the obvious by the devious" (as an Alison Lurie character suggests), there is not much new under the sun after you have been out in it for a while.^[21]

I sustained intellectual interest by developing new substantive areas of interest, turning to comparative research and to other disciplines, investigating new sources of data and methods, and taking up consulting. My initial interest was in race and ethnic relations, part of a more general interest in stratification. Partly as a result of being a white studying blacks in an age of black power, but more out of the fatigue I have described, I shifted from race-relations research to questions combining my interest in race and ethnic issues with an interest in collective behavior and, later, deviance and social control. I now see the latter giving way to an interest in questions concerning technology and society. Such moves are gradual and not very rational. You cannot predict your intellectual trajectory by what you are concerned with in graduate school. But I would venture that unless you change and expand, it is easy to get turned off to intellectual inquiry.

Variety can come from studying in some other country what you have studied here. It is fun, and there are solid intellectual grounds for doing it. I went to India to study race relations. I went to France and England to study police. I hope to go to Scandinavia to study computer systems. Beyond the new intellectual horizons travel presents, it offers a new set of colleagues and new bodies of literature and outlets for publication. Whatever knowledge may be gained, I get a strange pleasure from struggling to read the French journal I receive.

Variety can also come from learning what other disciplines have to say about your topic. One consequence of having spent more than a decade in a planning department that is problem-centered rather than discipline-centered is a continual reminder of the variety of perspectives, methods, and data sources needed to understand a phenomenon. In this sense discipline-based professional education, with its insular, self-aggrandizing, and often imperialistic tendencies, does an intellectual disservice.

Although I always start with sociological questions, they are no longer enough. Over the years they have been supplemented by a series of questions from psychology, political science, economics, history, law, and ethics. What is more, for the research that touches on public issues I have added a broad normative question: given what I have learned from my research, where do I stand on a policy issue, and what would I

recommend? In graduate school, still reeling from the conservatism of the 1950s and the thrust to make sociology a science, such issues were ignored or seen as disreputable.

I have also broadened my definition of data and of what I feel comfortable working with. For both my M.A. thesis on Father Coughlin and my Ph.D. dissertation on the civil-rights movement I used standard survey research data. I continued to conduct survey research for several years after getting the Ph.D., but now rarely do. Instead, I have made increased use of observational, historical, and literary materials. My book Undercover has a historical chapter. In my work on forms of interdependence between rule breakers and rule enforcers I am analyzing novels and film. In my work on social movements I am investigating the role of art and songs in mobilizing people. My work on electronic surveillance methods for discovering violations deals directly with ethics. This broadening I advocate may not endear you to those with highly specialized disciplinary concerns who have their hands on the reward levers of your profession. But it is likely to enhance the quality of the intellectual product. The sense of growth and development it offers feels good and helps keep one fresh.

What I have described represents diversification rather than displacement. I have expanded the questions I am concerned with, the kinds of evidence I see as data, the places I look for them, and the methods I use. The movement between questions, data, methods, and location has not been linear. Instead it has, to a degree, been cyclical. I think that characteristic is another key to staying motivated. It is easy and fun to come back to a topic after having been away for a while. New materials will have appeared, and the experiences you have had in the interim may cause you to see what was once familiar in a new way. There is some salvation in moving back and forth between qualitative and quantitative, domestic and international, contemporary and historical, basic and applied questions and the various social-science disciplines.

This diversity also makes it easier to have a few irons always in the fire. If nothing more, it gives one a modest reason to go to work: to check out the mail. Beyond statistically improving your chances of success, having submitted multiple articles, proposals, and grant applications can serve as a kind of safety net for the imagination. When a rejection comes, you have the hope that the other things still out will meet with a happier fate. Of course, there is the risk of a harder fall if they all end up being rejected. However, with enough nets and fishing lines out, that need never occur. The future has an open-ended quality

that can be wonderfully conducive to optimism. I also guard against demoralization from rejection by typing out two letters whenever I submit an article. The first is to the journal to which I am submitting the article, and the second (undated) is to the next place I will send the article if it is rejected. I would not deny, though, that there is also wisdom in knowing when to fold, as well as when to hold.

Another professional goal that I actively pursued for a while (but am now ambivalent about) involved earning extra income through consulting and textbook writing. Earning money did not become an obsession, but I stopped seeing it as necessarily an unworthy goal. It was what I did to earn it, I thought, that merited moral evaluation, not the goal per se.

If making all the right academic moves did not insure success or satisfaction, why not use the same skills and credentials to get rich? The payoff was likely to be more certain and immediate, and the standard required was less demanding. Given disillusionment and fatigue with academic amateurism, it was easy to rationalize spending more time playing for pay instead of for honor, footnotes, and the acclaim of adolescents.^[22] However, as will be noted, this emphasis is not without problems if you remain committed to academic values.

A reassessment of the bourgeois life began with my move from Berkeley to Cambridge. My senior colleagues were living well, and well beyond their academic salaries. Spacious, elegantly restored historic homes with cleaning services, travel to exotic places in the winter and vacation homes in the summer, camp and enriched education for children, gourmet foods and foreign sports cars were not available to persons who gave all their royalties to political causes (as I had originally planned to do) or who only did social research gratis on behalf of causes they believed in. This shift in emphasis began symbolically with my gradual acceptance of, and eventual belief in, the usefulness of an electric can opener. We received one as a wedding present in the 1960s, and it stayed in its unopened box for many years. For reasons I cannot clearly recall, at the time it seemed to epitomize all that was wrong with our society. Brick-and-board book shelves were replaced by real book shelves. A new sofa eliminated the need for a draped Mexican serape to disguise the sorry state of the sagging couch beneath it. We came to view paying someone to clean the house as salvation rather than exploitation.

While it was nice to have the extra income, earning outside money was not all that great either. It got boring, and I did not like the feeling of being a sociologist for sale: have ideas and methods, will travel. I was not comfortable with the salesmanship that pleasing and finding clients

seemed to require. After all, I had chosen an academic life rather than the commercial life of my ancestors precisely to avoid the need to pander to customers. The pressures to meet deadlines were much greater than in the university. I felt the consulting reports I wrote were generally unappreciated and unread, except for the oversimplified and watered-down "executive summaries" with which they had to begin.

There were also role conflicts. The norms of scholarship sometimes conflicted with the interests of my employer. The substitution of market and political criteria for those of truth and intellectual rigor troubled me. It was alienating to be told what research to do and to have business persons and bureaucrats place conditions on intellectual inquiry. I did not like the lack of editorial and distributional control over what was produced.

I encountered bad faith on the part of employers. Thus, in an evaluation of a community-oriented criminal-justice project I pointed out how innovative and important the program was, while also honestly documenting problems and ways of overcoming them. Imagine my surprise when the research document was not used to improve the program but to kill it. It became clear that the hiring agency viewed research as a tool to pursue a course of action that had been decided before the research was undertaken. In another example a well-established consulting firm hired me to write a proposal for a large grant and promised me a major role in it. The grant was funded, although all I received was an invitation to serve on the advisory panel of the study.

I felt uncomfortable with the pressures and temptations to dilute work, cut corners, treat issues superficially, and delegate tasks I was hired to do to much lower-paid graduate students. These could be rationalized since consulting standards were generally lower than those of academic peer review. The goal was to maximize income rather than obtain a high level of craftsmanship, which in most cases would not have been recognized or appreciated.

I emphasized earning extra income for about five years. I met with some modest financial success and learned some things about government programs, textbook writing, and social science as business. It was a nice break from my early years but clearly could not sustain me. I gradually moved back to a predominant focus on academic work and caught a second wind. I still appreciate the benefits of doing sociology in applied and remunerative settings, and I have not given up such activities entirely—they can keep you fresh, involved, and informed and be a source of research data and a way to influence policy and shape debate.

It is refreshing to meet people who actually do things rather than merely talk about what others do. Yet if you are fortunate enough to have a job in an academic setting, it seems foolish not to take advantage of the freedom for intellectual inquiry it offers.

The third practical conclusion I reached was that your career cannot (or should not) be your entire life. Not only did I question the payoff from occupational success beyond a certain point, but I also saw the price that excessive devotion to a career could extract from personal and family life. The prospect of being a narrow, one-dimensional person with a good chance of having family trouble and an early heart attack was unappealing, even if there had been greater certainty in the hard work-success-happiness connection.

In the initial years after moving from Harvard to MIT I left several projects undone for lack of funding and graduate students. A bit weary and cynical about the single-minded pursuit of academic achievement, I devoted more time to highly personal, noncompetitive activities over which I had more control. I spent more and better time with my family, rebuilt a dilapidated Victorian house, learned to play the guitar, read novels, kayaked wild rivers, and worked on a family history project. Watching "Sesame Street" with a young companion, plastering and painting walls, scrutinizing the 1840 Detroit census for information about a great-grandfather, struggling with an out-of-tune guitar, and catching up on a decade's worth of unread novels were far removed from the usual academic obsessions and compulsions.

The respite from an unrelenting focus on academic work gave me great pleasure. Concrete activities provided immediate rewards. Ascriptive rather than achievement criteria were present. There were no risks and no concern over whether distant judges would find me wanting. These activities belonged to me in some very basic sense. They could not be taken away or withheld by editorial or academic gatekeepers. My family history, for example, was simply waiting to be discovered. The work was intensely personal and involved no deadlines or evaluations.

Yet as with exclusively playing the monastic academic game or going commercial, focusing primarily on quality of life also has its limits. It is not much fun to paint the same room a second time. Small children quickly become adolescents who do not want to go on family outings with you. You can trace back family history only so far.

After five years of spending considerable time on other things, I returned to the conventional academic activities of applying for grants, writing journal articles, and presenting papers. I was fortunate to find

and help develop a broad topic involving social control, deception, and technology that has sustained me for more than a decade. I find issues of surveillance and society and the revelation and concealment of information endlessly fascinating. The topic has implications for social theory and social change. It is of interest to academic, practitioner, and general audiences, and I have not had trouble obtaining resources to investigate it. Through working with congressonal committees, federal agencies, public interest groups, and the media, the research has also had some modest impact on shaping national debate and on public policy.^[23] But I have not pursued this project with the same single-mindedness or desire for professional success of the early years. My life has become more balanced.

There are some issues that I have not resolved. One concerns feelings of being underutilized and underappreciated,^[24] which comes with being the only academic sociologist in an interdisciplinary department of urban studies and planning at a technology institute.^[25] To be sure, in other ways my department and MIT have offered a superb home. There are advantages to being left alone in an environment where no one is like yourself. But it leaves a vague sense of loss.^[26] The part of academic life that I have found most satisfying is mentoring and working with younger colleagues and students on research. I would have learned and published more and done less self-questioning had I had the steady flow of students and the day-to-day validation and chance to contribute that large graduate sociology programs offer. It does not feel right to offer a new class or hold office hours and have few or no students appear. What kind of a professor are you if no one seems interested in what you profess?

Another unresolved issue is what to do with the anger I still feel toward certain persons who have treated me unfairly or simply wounded my pride. These actions were in discretionary contexts where what I believe to be the ideological and personal motives could easily be masked. On any broad scale such events were minor and are now long gone. Intellectually I know that to dwell on the past is unproductive and I may even be wrong in attributing personal and political moves to some of the rejections, but the feelings remain. Life is too short to waste time on replaying the past, and the evidence indicating unfairness is rarely unequivocal.

But in general I have ceased being so self-reflective. The issues about work, life, and identity that had troubled me became less important. I realized I was caught in the paradoxes of achievement and its discontents. I became more accepting of dilemmas and tensions that had once

consumed enormous amounts of emotional energy. Instead of viewing these as problems to be solved and choices to be made, I was better able to accept personal and professional contradictions and multiple motives as the order of things and, in Robert Merton's words, to appreciate the "functional value of the tension between polarities."^[27] Sometimes I would be drawn to one end of a continuum and at the other times to its opposite. Sometimes I would try to combine them in my writing or bridge them in my political work.

I also realized that I wanted a number of things that could not be had to the fullest extent or necessarily all at the same time. I compromised and settled for less of any one in order to have some of each.^[28] Instead of worrying about what I "really" was and what I valued most, I saw that I was probably more marginal than most people. I came to value being something of an invisible person and social chameleon, able to fit into, and move in and out of, different worlds. This quality may be part of my intellectual interest in deception, passing, and infiltration.

I am both the intensely driven, hardworking, competitive, ambitious person (like those I encountered early in my career) and the laid-back bohemian surfer of my California days; the intellectual interested in ideas for their own sake and one of the progeny of Karl Marx and C. Wright Mills who wanted to see ideas linked to change (perhaps a committed spectator, as Raymond Aron termed it); the quantitative and systematic sociologist and the journalist seeking to describe in language that people could understand what Robert Park called the big story; the scholar and the handyman; the athletic, river-running, beer-drinking, former fraternity man who could admit to still having some neanderthal-like macho attitudes and feelings and the righteous carrier of a new gender morality; a Jew with German and Eastern European roots and a secular American at home on both coasts (and in northern as well as southern California); the pin-striped suiter who could easily pass among elites and yet announce when the emperor was scantily clad or naked—but always with civility and in the King's English. And, as Lévi-Strauss notes, sociological inquiry can be enhanced by the skill of distantiation.

A cynic might suggest that the cautionary wisdom I have offered about success be viewed skeptically, as sour grapes. Are my new goals just compromises made out of necessity or, with appropriate professional socialization, is it possible to start a career with them? If my career trajectory had continued upward at its original pace, and had there been no fall, would I still have reached the same conclusions?^[29] I certainly would not have thought as much about these issues, and the

emphasis might be somewhat different. But since the fall I described was temporary, I am confident that my advice is sound and represents more than the idiosyncracies of my personal situation. It is based on two decades of successes and failures, and not only those in the beginning.

Unlike the Doctorow character quoted in the epigraph to this essay, I came East rather than West as a young man, and my expectations did not really wear away. However, they did change, and I was able to put them in perspective. Human existence is dominated by vast contingent forces that we gamely try to channel and control. That we sometimes succeed should no more lull us into thinking we can continually pull it off than should failure lead us to stop trying.

It was once said of Willie Nelson that he wrote songs out of love but was not above accepting the money. Nor am I above accepting professional recognition should it come. Yet I have become more concerned with process and learned more about how to deal with outcomes, whatever they are. I have become less troubled by rejection and also less thrilled by success. I have sought a more balanced life.

The Greeks gave their Olympic champions laurel wreaths as an ironic reminder that victory could be hollow. In Greek mythology Apollo pursues the nymph Daphne. She flees, and he runs after her. Abhorring the thought of marriage she prays to her father to save her by changing the form that has so attracted Apollo. Just as Apollo is upon her she is changed into a laurel tree. Is it a sign of modernity and a cause of its malaise that we offer our Olympic heroes gold instead?