Interview, Newsletter

Interview with Omar Lizardo

Clara Cirdan (C): Do you want to just tell us a bit about yourself, and your research and if you’d like to share any future plans or perspectives?

Omar Lizardo (O): Hi, my name is Omar Lizardo, and I teach and do research at UCLA. A big chunk of my research has to do with cultural sociology – sociology of taste, mainly, and, more recently, with applying formal methods to measuring culture. I’ve got a good chunk of my other research dealing with theory in general, but also the subset that connects cultural theory with the socialization and internalization of culture. Another theory project that I’ve been working on with a co-author is about the notion of probability as it relates to the theory of action, and, then, another chunk of my research is on social network analysis.

C: How do you have time for all these different research strands, and how do you connect them?

O: Two things happened in my career: coming across a bunch of authors and topics. And it’s then more like a geological layering. I started mostly as a person interested in cultural networks and tastes, Bourdieu, network analysis, etc. Then, I began to acquire more interest in Network Science, Complex Systems, etc. Obviously, I became interested in theory, and then all those things have accumulated over time. I’ve also accumulated co-authors – a lot of my work is now co- authored- which is very different than it was initially, when you are mostly thinking your thoughts. So, I would say that over time, what I’m working on, has definitely become much more of a function of, you know, this co-author is ‘bothering’ me about something, or, I signed up to write handbook chapter, something very externally oriented. But, also, in the interest of what I’m teaching at the moment. When I was at the University of Notre Dame, six or seven years ago, I was teaching a lot of culture and cognition classes. My work was thinking more about those topics theoretically, maybe some also empirically. But since I’ve been at UCLA, I’ve been teaching a lot of networks classes, which I feel has made the networks research strand more prominent. At some point, I thought that my research agenda was illustrated by some kind of internal, coherent motivation within. I have recently realized, looking at my research trajectory, that it is essentially purely a function of what I’m teaching at the moment and the collaborations I have going.

C: Could you tell us a bit more about collaboration in your research.

O: Co-authors and co-authoring projects are the main way that I’m going to venture into familiarizing myself with new literature – it forces me to read things that I would not otherwise read, and, definitely, read outside of discipline proper.  And then, of course, after we do so many things, there is at least some impetus to try to bring some coherence into it and say: ‘Well, it’s really all related’. If I write some Handbook Chapter or maybe some theory piece, occasionally it will be single-authored, but most of the empirical work that I do, and the social network analysis work is co-authored. And because I’ve been at this for a while, there is an accumulation of both senior co-authors, but also people who used to be my students who are now co-authors. At Notre Dame, I was able to get some students that were interested at the same time, in the same kind of culture and cognition topics. And we began to co-author these theory papers. They are also used to co-author amongst themselves now, which, I think, is a really good way of thinking about theory. Theory tends to be thought of as a very lonely realm of a single scholar thinking big thoughts, but  I think, sometimes, three or four people writing a theory paper is better than one written by a single person. With collaboration, the main thing is that you have to put your ego aside. Because when you do your work, you are kind of the ‘ultimate boss’ and the creator of whatever happens. When we collaborate, we have to figure out what’s going to be the balance, right? And there can be really brilliant scholars on their own, but, when it comes to collaboration, they can’t have it because they just can’t let go of all the micro-decisions. So, to me, that’s super important. In the STEM fields, there’s a super high-level division of labor, which means that if you collaborate, there is a really nice entry into collaboration. If you are a sociologist in the team of engineers and computer scientists or physicists, then you’re understood to be kind of the authority of sociology, and you don’t overstep the boundaries of the other things. I remember trying to transpose that in the way you collaborate for sociology papers, defining the roles very early on. My smoothest collaborations have been the ones where it was like: ‘Okay, I’m the data person, somebody else does the theory’, or       vice versa. That way, you don’t over-step on each other’s toes. In a fuzzy division of roles and labor, collaborations become really challenging.

C: Can you also talk a bit about the different methods that inspire you? Sure. Initially, I was mostly trained in fairly conventional quantitative methods, with social network methods – which, maybe in the early 2000s, were still non-conventional, but now they are pretty conventional. My methodological toolkit was fairly quantitative for most of my career, although, once again, because of co-authoring, that has also been a platform for learning methods by observing other people do it and then doing mixed methods work. My first major foray into that was a mixed methods paper that I co-authored with an ex-colleague from Notre Dame, named Robert Fishman, now at Carlos III. And it started with me kind of ‘mucking around’ with quantitative survey data and then realizing there was a comparative project there. Fishman is a historical sociologist, a comparativist, who focuses on Spain and Portugal. And then we wrote a paper that combined quantitative Eurobarometer data with historical and qualitative data that he had collected. That was my first hands-on exposure to historical, comparative, and even qualitative interview-based work, which was great: learning about how you construct qualitative, historical comparative argument, how to use interview data to support cases, and so on. I feel I learned a lot. The main sociology of taste project that I have right now is also mixed methods, using survey data and interviews.

C: Would you like to talk a bit about how cultural sociology influences your thinking?

O: It’s always been a central part of my thinking, depending on how broadly you define it. My first attempts to do empirical work focused on cultural taste and consumption. I was thinking about culture in both this very concrete application to the study of taste stratification, distinction, etc, then, also thinking about it in this more general, theoretical sense. It was in the early 2000s, when I was a grad student when the culture and cognition research was beginning to happen, special issues in Poetics, and formal methods stuff. At the time, John Mohr was pioneering work on bringing measurement and meaning together; then, there was the then relatively small – but now gigantic – industry of empirical work in sociology of taste. All that influenced the way I was thinking and the way that I was thinking of myself as an empirical researcher. It did not depend on any internal compass but was much more related to what’s happening around me intellectually. The last major project that John Mohr did, the various conferences that ended up becoming the Measuring Culture book, were like that. John’s main thing was to bring together a bunch of people who were not homogeneous, either in approach or methods, and try to have a conversation about measuring culture. When John organized all those conferences, I thought of myself almost as a substantive/ theory person. But a lot of the messages my previous supervisor (John Breiger) implanted early on in my career were around how to think about certain problems that are both theoretical and methodological? So, when you use a method, it’s not just to level up a new method, but also to solve a theoretical problem. I think it’s a good emphasis on how some of my early training ended up showing up later.

C: What do you think defines ‘cultural sociology’ within sociology?

O: I think that the field has changed. Initially, it started as just another section of the ASA with some thematic focus (culture as media and the arts). Over time, the field has become broader and more ambitious in its scope. In many ways, even by the mid-80s and early 2010s, it was clear that whatever you’re doing in cultural sociology, it was going to be in the middle of the other fields in sociology. The questions asked are broader, and the tools – both theoretical and methodological – are more multipurpose tools, which, I think, it’s both the strength and the weakness of the field. The field is, arguably, one of the most general fields in sociology. It still has a strong DNA of a substantive field, given by studies such as those in arts and culture, but then there’s this larger sense of culture as a general thing, that obviously applies to every other field: if you’re a race, gender scholar, etcetera, you can use tools, theoretical and methodological, from the study of culture, right? The general phase of the culture is good because it keeps it in the middle of everything – dealing with general theoretical questions, but also being a field that absorbs some of the methodological input from outside. It has always been a highly adaptive field methodologically, and it has the advantage of making those methods into some kind of interesting theoretical problem, right? That’s obviously good. I think the disadvantage is that the field gets diffused through sociology. The culture section itself is fine, but it’s not necessarily the only place in which culture is done. And even the term culture doesn’t necessarily imply anything or bring anything to mind for most people. I always advise my students to have an ‘end’ when they talk about culture: culture, and something, the thing they do, because culture is not going to bring anything to mind, it’s not recognized as a field.

C: What do you think is then ‘culture’ in cultural sociology?

O: I think so in many ways it is everything, right? If you think about culture in the West as cultural institutions, culture as mental representations, culture as well-established cultural narratives… It’s my sense that sometimes people don’t like to say this because then, they think: ‘Well, culture is everything, and then it means nothing’. Yeah, but it is literally everything. Everything that matters, right? Unless you’re a physicist or a chemist or whatever, but if you’re, if you’re a sociologist…It’s hard to not refer to ‘culture’. That’s fine to say culture is everything – doesn’t mean it’s an undifferentiated blob, but that you then make differentiations within this larger thing. And, in many ways, this is why it’s completely unproductive to say you study culture. Think about race, class, gender, sexuality – the core fields in sociology. You grab a random scholar in a field, and you catch them in the middle of what they’re doing, odds are they’re studying ‘culture’. They’re studying categories, practices; they’re studying discourses, people’s narratives, memories. So, then you’re saying: ‘Well, everybody is studying culture’. It’s fine to be in a field in which what you are studying is what everybody else is studying. The issue then becomes that there’s so much diversity in terms of what people are studying, and that the category that is supposed to be at the center  of the field is also heterogenous. Then there’s two ways of approaching that: Culture – how do you break that up? You can say: ‘Okay, I’m going on to a more convoluted vocabulary, adding all these other words that are equally complex, like: ‘practice’, ‘institutions’, ‘schemas’ etc. That’s, one way of doing it. Another way, which is the way we ended up writing the Measuring Culture book – almost by accident- is actually to get very simple. Instead of trying to define ‘culture’, we were asking: ‘Where is culture?’ And we ended up with that schema of ‘culture’ as – ‘people,’ ‘interactions’, and ‘objects’. Because those words: ‘people,’ ‘interactions,’ and ‘objects,’ yes, they are still complex, but they’re not as complex, because they are also answering a very concrete question. You catch a cultural sociologist, what are they doing all day? They’re either talking to people, ‘messing around’ with some objects, or looking at some social context or interactions in, usually, some institutionalized context. I remember the first draft of Measuring Culture’s “People” Chapter, Maggie Frye and I were the first ones to take a crack at it. We ended up, completely without planning, with a very simple schema also. People are either talking, thinking, or doing something – so, you study culture in talking, thinking, and doing. That schema was a really easy way to organize the field, in simple categories of action. And I feel that’s one way of dealing with: ‘What is this culture thing?’ Culture is everything. But it’s also heterogeneous assemblages of a bunch of other things. The best way is then to break it up. But don’t break it up in a way that one particle ends up essentially remapping all the complexities of the whole thing into your other thing. Map it so that you’re getting something that seems pretty simple, and say: ‘This is the slice that I am studying’.

C:  How do you see the future of cultural sociology?

O: It’s hard to know because that definitely depends on the mode we’re going to enter. The field has become more methodologically focused, which is where  the political economy academia is pointing to. Especially in  American universities, it seems they only want to hire somebody who does computational social science, which, of course, creates a strong incentive for anybody who’s a young culture scholar: ‘Well, you better learn how to code, right? And that’s what I mean by methods focus – because it’s not even any method;  it’s computational. But the strength of culture is that it is a multi-method field: historical sociologists, qualitative scholars, and ethnographers, do cultural work. And I think that that methodological diversity has to be kept. There’s a ton of external incentive for computational sociology, but that still is never going to be a majority of the people, just given both the distribution of interests and the questions that people like to ask. The nature of the people who  get recruited into sociology is never going to be mostly people who  do computational work. There’s always going to be diversity, and qualitative methods are now in a period of strong codification that didn’t exist before. When I was in grad school, Michèle  Lamont was still a highly controversial scholar because she was doing interviews. Now, it’s like it makes  you yawn: ‘I’m gonna do an interview project’. Lamont was radical, and this was only  30 something years ago – and Michelle is still a relatively young scholar. But now qualitative  methods are highly codified, the ultimate Kuhnian paradigm. They have textbooks telling you: ‘This is how you do interviews: you sit down, you talk to people.’ It’s amazing that we live in this era of high-level codification of qualitative methods.  The field is never going to become purely quantitative, even though some people fear the quantitative “data” revolution. It’s more like these bridging and ‘trading zones’ – the kind of vocabulary used by STS people – that is how these fields actually operate. I think that cultural sociology will continue to be strong because it always has this bridging capacity. The field is in a good position – you want maximum entropy in terms of methodological approaches. That’s usually a sign of a healthy field: fields that are on either extreme – i.e., mostly quantitative or, mostly qualitative -, tend to develop much more homogeneous epistemic cultures, which sometimes can be advantageous in the short term  but disadvantageous in the longer term.

C: Do you have any advice for early scholar sociologists?

O: That’s hard, because things have changed. I feel like my advice to graduates has become totally obsolete. The kinds of jobs that appeared posted when I applied in 2005-2006 said something like: ‘hiring sociologist’. Now there are all these elaborate descriptions of all kinds of contradictory things. I wouldn’t have known how to apply for any of those jobs. So, the advice is mainly hypothetical; there’s little practical advice I feel can give young scholars because I don’t think I have the experience. The timing of the field changing should be linked to people’s biographical, or biological career, right? When I was on the market in 2005, the director of the grad studies at Arizona was Sarah Soule. She said – which I’ll never forget: ‘When I was at the start, I had no publications. I just got hired because I had good letters. You need publications.’ And that was 2005. That is way too fast of a time scale to shift. It’s also hard to give that advice because I feel sometimes the only way to do that is to become so instrumental about what you do, to get rid of everything that is fun about the job. Yes, you have to be productive, but you have to make it so that you are enjoying the productivity.

C: How would that look like?

O: Choice of subject matter should never be driven by instrumental concerns. I see this sort of cynicism very early on in the grad school career: ‘Well, since they are only hiring computational scientists, I’m going to learn Python and R, even though I don’t like it’. If you’re doing that in a completely mechanical way, it’s not good – instrumentalization would be something I would advise against. There are all kinds of ways to be productive. There was an old book by Jon Elster on paradoxes of action. And he had a really cool example about certain actions that are inherently byproducts, like trying to fall asleep. You can’t will them. Because if you will them, you fail. And I feel it’s the same thing as being a successful scholar: it is inherently a byproduct, you can’t will it. So that’s why it’s also very hard to give advice, because it can imply an instrumental means-to-an-end orientation. Rather, do this other thing: study something that you are passionate about. In terms of the micro-dynamics of motivation, it is the only way to do it: find something that is part of the ongoing labor of intellectual production you actually enjoy and that will hook you into doing it for hours in a non-instrumental way. I feel, a lot of times, people don’t just find that. It’s hard because the other thing is that a person’s career keeps getting shortened. So, the time to do work is much faster, and there’s much less of that exploration component. But you can’t find what you are passionate about if you don’t have time for it. A lot of early scholars commit too fast to do something. And you have to do that because of the way everything is organized, but sometimes, that sort of “satisficing” (in Herbert Simon’s terms) can be bad, because if you could search for a little longer, you could have found something you’re more passionate about.

C: Thank you for your time, it has been really insightful. All the best in your future projects!