Harvey Molotch
Encyclopedia
Environmental sociology
Environmental sociology is typically defined as the sociological study of societal-environmental interactions, although this definition immediately presents the perhaps insolvable problem of separating human cultures from the rest of the environment...
and has advanced qualitative methods in the social sciences
Social sciences
Social science is the field of study concerned with society. "Social science" is commonly used as an umbrella term to refer to a plurality of fields outside of the natural sciences usually exclusive of the administrative or managerial sciences...
. In recent years, Molotch helped develop a new field—the sociology of objects.
Biography
Molotch was born Harvey Luskin in BaltimoreBaltimore
Baltimore is the largest independent city in the United States and the largest city and cultural center of the US state of Maryland. The city is located in central Maryland along the tidal portion of the Patapsco River, an arm of the Chesapeake Bay. Baltimore is sometimes referred to as Baltimore...
, Maryland
Maryland
Maryland is a U.S. state located in the Mid Atlantic region of the United States, bordering Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia to its south and west; Pennsylvania to its north; and Delaware to its east...
, where his family was in the retail car business on one side and the home appliance business on the other. His father, Paul Luskin, died in the Battle of the Bulge
Battle of the Bulge
The Battle of the Bulge was a major German offensive , launched toward the end of World War II through the densely forested Ardennes mountain region of Wallonia in Belgium, hence its French name , and France and...
in 1944 during World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
. His mother remarried to Nathan Molotch.
Molotch received a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Michigan (1963), with a thesis on John Dewey
John Dewey
John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey was an important early developer of the philosophy of pragmatism and one of the founders of functional psychology...
. He received an MA (1965) and Ph.D. (1966) in sociology from University of Chicago. He served in the U.S. Army, stationed in Maryland
Maryland
Maryland is a U.S. state located in the Mid Atlantic region of the United States, bordering Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia to its south and west; Pennsylvania to its north; and Delaware to its east...
and Virginia
Virginia
The Commonwealth of Virginia , is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Coast of the Southern United States. Virginia is nicknamed the "Old Dominion" and sometimes the "Mother of Presidents" after the eight U.S. presidents born there...
, 1961-62.
Molotch was on faculty from 1967 to 2003 at the University of California, Santa Barbara
University of California, Santa Barbara
The University of California, Santa Barbara, commonly known as UCSB or UC Santa Barbara, is a public research university and one of the 10 general campuses of the University of California system. The main campus is located on a site in Goleta, California, from Santa Barbara and northwest of Los...
. He has also been a visiting professor at Stony Brook University, the University of Essex
University of Essex
The University of Essex is a British campus university whose original and largest campus is near the town of Colchester, England. Established in 1963 and receiving its Royal Charter in 1965...
, and Northwestern University
Northwestern University
Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois, USA. Northwestern has eleven undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools offering 124 undergraduate degrees and 145 graduate and professional degrees....
. In 1998-99 he was Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics
London School of Economics
The London School of Economics and Political Science is a public research university specialised in the social sciences located in London, United Kingdom, and a constituent college of the federal University of London...
. He now holds appointments at New York University
New York University
New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...
as Professor of Sociology, and Professor of both Metropolitan Studies and American Studies within the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis.
Molotch's 1964 marriage to Linda Sigesmund ended with her death, by car accident, in 1976. The couple had two children, Shana (born 1969), now with two children (Christopher and Emma Craddock) and living in California where she is the manager of the Hotel Leger, and Noah (born 1972), now with one child (Darwin Molotch) and living in Boulder Colorado where he is on faculty at University of Colorado as hydrological
Hydrology
Hydrology is the study of the movement, distribution, and quality of water on Earth and other planets, including the hydrologic cycle, water resources and environmental watershed sustainability...
scientist, as well as research scientist at Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a federally funded research and development center and NASA field center located in the San Gabriel Valley area of Los Angeles County, California, United States. The facility is headquartered in the city of Pasadena on the border of La Cañada Flintridge and Pasadena...
. Molotch has lived with his domestic partner, Glenn Wharton, a conservator at the Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
and faculty member at New York University, since 1979.
Racial Segregation: Rethinking “White Flight”
Molotch's early work on "white flightWhite flight
White flight has been a term that originated in the United States, starting in the mid-20th century, and applied to the large-scale migration of whites of various European ancestries from racially mixed urban regions to more racially homogeneous suburban or exurban regions. It was first seen as...
" overturned conventional wisdom on neighborhood change, showing that normal mobility makes neighborhood racial change possible. When blacks constitute the bulk of those who move into the vacancies that result, racial change is made inevitable. The implication of this finding, based on Molotch's systematic studies of matched neighborhoods (and since replicated by others on large data sets), was that it is the reluctance of whites to move into a changing neighborhood that makes racial integration so difficult to achieve. From a policy perspective, Molotch concluded that while stabilizing neighborhoods would not be easy,the focus needs to be on getting white people to replace the whites who are leaving, rather than talking people who are leaving into staying.
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 ChannelSanta Barbara Channel
The Santa Barbara Channel is a portion of the Pacific Ocean which separates the mainland of California from the northern Channel Islands. It is generally south of the city of Santa Barbara, and west of the city of Ventura....
--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
Environmental sociology
Environmental sociology is typically defined as the sociological study of societal-environmental interactions, although this definition immediately presents the perhaps insolvable problem of separating human cultures from the rest of the environment...
, and a key contribution to political sociology
Political sociology
Contemporary political sociology involves much more than the study of the relations between state and society . Where a typical research question in political sociology might have been: "Why do so few American citizens choose to vote?" or even, "What difference does it make if women get elected?" ...
.
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 sociology's most prestigious prize for scholarship 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 sociologyUrban sociology
Urban sociology is the sociological study of social life and human interaction in metropolitan areas. It is a normative discipline of sociology seeking to study the structures, processes, changes and problems of an urban area and by doing so providing inputs for planning and policy making. Like...
(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
Urban theory
Urbanomics describes the city formation phenomenon where economic priorities prevail to facilitate the city’s propensity to generate and accumulate wealth. Such city formation involves some irreversible spatial investments, massive resource allocations and financial investments recoverable only if...
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 interpersonal market of 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,and the difference between the first book and last book,is a different preface.
Other work
Molotch has also conducted a series of studies in conversation analysisConversation analysis
Conversation analysis is the study of talk in interaction . CA generally attempts to describe the orderliness, structure and sequential patterns of interaction, whether institutional or in casual conversation.Inspired by ethnomethodology Conversation analysis (commonly abbreviated as CA) is the...
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
Harvey Sacks
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...
, Gail Jefferson
Gail Jefferson
Gail Jefferson was, along with Harvey Sacks and Emanuel Schegloff, one of the founders of the area of research known as Conversation Analysis . She is particularly remembered today for the methods and notational conventions she developed for transcribing talk...
, and Emanuel Schegloff
Emanuel Schegloff
Emanuel Abraham Schegloff is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles. He was born in 1937 in New York. With Harvey Sacks and Gail Jefferson, Schegloff was one of the principal creators of the field of Conversation Analysis...
. 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.
More recently in Where Stuff Comes From, Molotch builds on the work of Howard S. Becker
Howard S. Becker
Howard Saul Becker is an American sociologist who made major contributions to the sociology of deviance, sociology of art, and sociology of music. Becker also wrote extensively on sociological writing styles and methodologies. In addition, Becker's book The Outsiders provided the foundations for...
and Bruno Latour
Bruno Latour
Bruno Latour is a French sociologist of science and anthropologist and an influential theorist in the field of Science and Technology Studies...
, 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
Commodity fetishism
In Marx's critique of political economy, commodity fetishism denotes the mystification of human relations said to arise out of the growth of market trade, when social relationships between people are expressed as, mediated by and transformed into, objectified relationships between things .The...
" 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.
Honors and awards
- Fred Buttel Distinguished Contribution Award, Section on Environment and Technology, American Sociological Association (2009)
- Lifetime Career Achievement in Urban and Community Scholarship, American Sociological AssociationAmerican Sociological AssociationThe American Sociological Association , founded in 1905 as the American Sociological Society , is a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the discipline and profession of sociology by serving sociologists in their work and promoting their contributions to serve society.The ASA holds its...
Urban and Community Studies Section (2003) - ASA Journal Article of the Year in Political Sociology (2001)
- Robert E. Park Award of the American Sociological Association (1988) (Urban Fortunes)
- Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award of the American Sociological Association (1990) (Urban Fortunes)
- Scholar in Residence, Russell Sage Foundation, 2008-2009.
- Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral SciencesCenter for Advanced Study in the Behavioral SciencesThe Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences is an American interdisciplinary research body in Stanford, California focusing on the social sciences and humanities . Fellows are elected in a closed process, to spend a period of residence at the Center, released from other duties...
, Stanford, CA (2000) - Resident Fellow, Rockefeller FoundationRockefeller FoundationThe Rockefeller Foundation is a prominent philanthropic organization and private foundation based at 420 Fifth Avenue, New York City. The preeminent institution established by the six-generation Rockefeller family, it was founded by John D. Rockefeller , along with his son John D. Rockefeller, Jr...
, Bellagio Center, Como Italy (1999) - Stice Lecturer in the Social Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle (1996)
- Distinguished Visiting Professor, University of Lund, Sweden (1995)
Selected publications
- Toilet: The Public Restroom and the Politics of Sharing. [co-edited with Laura Noren] New York: New York University Press (2010).
- Where Stuff Comes From: How Toasters, Toilets, Cars, Computers and Many Other Things Come to Be as They Are. New York and London: Routledge (2003).
- Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place. (With John Logan.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1987.
- "The City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place." The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 82, No. 2 (Sep., 1976), pp. 309–332.
- "News as Purposive Behavior: On the Strategic Use of Routine Events, Accidents, and Scandals," American Sociological Review, Vol 39, No. 1 (Feb., 1974), pp. 101–112.
- Managed Integration: Dilemmas of Doing Good in the City. Berkeley: University of California Press (1972).
External links
- Arts & Sciences faculty at NYU