Jennifer Dudley (University of Notre Dame) interviews Mario Small (Columbia University) about qualitative research, public-facing sociology, and where there’s more potential for cultural sociologists to make an impact.

Jennifer Dudley: Your recent work on qualitative research (particularly with your book, Qualitative Literacy and your recent comment published in Nature) highlights some challenges and benefits to qualitative research as well as how to evaluate qualitative research. Do you see cultural sociology as a place with unique challenges or benefits in terms of producing qualitative research?

Mario Small: I tend to see the challenges and benefits of qualitative research as consistent across fields. In thepaper you mentioned on the role of qualitative methods in “big data” research, we provide examples from across the social sciences. Having said that, the sociology of culture may have some advantages, because historical, ethnographic, and interview methods have long been part of the tradition. Contrary to other subfields in sociology, researchers and readers regularly understand the value of this kind of work, and thus can incorporate innovation in more natural ways. For example, it is not surprising that recent advances in text analysis have been adopted in this subfield in more sophisticated, less mechanistic ways than others. People are already used to thinking from multiple methodological perspectives.

Dudley: You have a strong vein of public writing in your career, which is so important at a time when sociologists are trying to have a more direct impact on society. How does cultural sociology influence your public-facing scholarship?

Small: That’s an interesting question, because I would not necessarily have described myself as a public sociologist. If anything, I’m more of a private sociologist; I am an introvert, I vastly favor my desk over a lecture hall, and I get more joy out of studying things I find interesting than issues others deem important. The public writing I do is less out of natural inclination than a sense of responsibility. I believe that if we have discoveries, findings, or realizations that could improve how the world understands something important, we should share them. I admittedly do less than I could, because it does not come naturally.

Cultural sociology has a major role to play. Many of the most important issues we have faced in the past few years – the rise in populism, the decline in trust in science, the explosion of interest in racial inequality, etc. – are cultural in nature. I wish I saw more high-quality cultural sociology contributing to those conversations. For example, on race, the public discourse is much more influenced by sociological research on inequality than sociological research on culture, and I don’t quite understand why.

Dudley: How do you envision the future of cultural sociology or what do you hope to see more of?

Small: Until recently, the historical weakness of cultural sociology was its Eurocentrism. The field was born with its eyes firmly turned on French and

German theorists, and it did not shake their influence as quickly as other subfields dropped their focus on the Germans. I am delighted that this orientation has started to change, as evidenced for example by recent book awards in the subfield. I think continuing this expansiveness would help. I would love to see more work on the Middle East, on sub-Saharan Africa, on the ethnic diversity of Latin America; on issues other than “high culture,” taste, and cultural capital; and on the relationship between culture and politics, inequality, organizational action, network behavior, and decision-making. For example, I recently wrote a long paper on how people mobilize their networks when they need something. The topic was begging for cultural sociology – network behavior is necessarily cultural – and I could only find a few relevant researchers. Our huge new volume on social networks with 50 contributors has less on culture than I would have wanted.

Dudley: What is one piece of advice you have for graduate students or early-career sociologists?Small: This is a difficult one, not only because there are many things one could say but also because different people have different life goals, and the optimal things to do depend a bit on one’s path. But I would certainly encourage everyone to spend most of their time studying not what’s supposedly hot in the field but what they find interesting, important, or puzzling. The field rewards quality and originality, and both of those are easier to attain when you’re being true to yourself: you ask questions others wouldn’t have asked and you work harder at getting an answer. I would also encourage everyone to cultivate a network of like-minded scholars, not only people who are studying similar issues or using similar methods but also, and maybe more importantly, people who share your orientation toward scholarship, academia, and life. We get much farther with others.