Theor Soc (2011) 40:155–159 DOI 10.1007/s11186-010-9134-0

Granite and green: thinking beyond surface in place studies Harvey Molotch

Published online: 8 January 2011 # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Abstract Through their dense range of empirical sortings, Kaufman and Kaliner, in this issue of Theory and Society, are effective in showing mechanisms through which places replicate themselves over time, but also in how their cultural and economic profiles can shift. Their work points to the utility of matched comparisons of historical interaction, both symbolic and material, as tool for understanding trajectories of stability and change. Keywords Place . Urban . Comparative . Vermont . New Hampshire So many of us have been at it for so long: striving for ways to describe and understand the workings of time and place—how social relations are constant and in what ways specific. The cultural turn in sociology helped advance the cause by allowing a larger number of factors to enter into analysis, revealing what otherwise might disappear as idiosyncratic. This allows taking place seriously, seeing neighborhoods, cities, and regions as not fixed through laws of production, rent, or spatial matrices, but as living, breathing assemblages that have a specific historicity and distinctive forcefulness. The problem is how to understand the way culture thus understood interacts, in fateful ways, with other aspects of material life in a given location and for a given period of time. Kaufman and Kaliner facilitate solution with their cascade of evidence revealing the nature of place character and how that character endures as place tradition. They leave almost no stones, physical or metaphorical, unturned.

H. Molotch (*) Sociology Department, New York University, 295 Lafayette St, 4th Fl., New York, NY 10012, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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Their method is not hypo-deductive, but—in the tradition of William Whewell and the science of paleontology—the search for a “consilience of induction.”1 The detail pile, derived from diverse approaches, is necessary to the method. We learn from Kaufman and Kaliner that while forces of stability recapitulate the past, switching can indeed occur. They show, in concrete terms, the approximate dates (even) of a grand switch—how Vermont, in particular—left the conservative fold and then began the recapitulation process on a different trajectory. They learn that history indeed repeats itself until, as they say, it does not—but then it does once again. We gain framework for accepting, and studying, processes of continuity while still taking on board the empirical potential for realignment. This is a kind of interactionist history that traces material and non-material linkages, as adjacencies, over time. For me, although apparently not for them (and I can’t figure out exactly why—a small matter), there is a path dependency logic. In somewhat narrower substantive terms, their work joins the battery of recent scholarship, Richard Florida’s most notably, that assigns power to cultural “variables” in making up place fate. As Kaufman and Kaliner indicate, there have long been clues from within urban sociology that culture matters (e.g., Alihan 1938), but there has been reluctance to work out how this actually happens. The early studies were usually taken to reflect quaint folkways persisting in the urban condition, mere vestiges of earlier ethnic and national patterns. Sometimes dutifully cited, analysts seemed to assume them to be a minor blip in modern settlement patterns, likely to erode with assimilitation and secular trends of use and re-use of urban space. A major strand that has, of course, occupied much analysis is enthusiasm to represent the collective voice of peoples in places who are in danger of being dispossessed or otherwise made victims. However generous the sentiment, such studies lack the broader analytic perspective that could explain general cultural consequentiality. Within sociology, there was at least one study—albeit itself rather narrowly imagined—that could have been taken more seriously. In 1983, well before the Floridian move, Chang-tseh Hsieh and Ben-chieh Liu (1983) published an article entitled “The Pursuance of Better Quality of Life: In the Long Run, Better Quality of Social Life Is the Most Important Factor in Migration.” It gives us a sense of the potential for thinking about idio-cultural migration as at least an empirical possibility. Using regression analysis, the authors showed that place “quality of life” predicts in-migration more robustly than “economic” variables. The authors used air quality, level of inequality, level of political participation as among their indicators of quality of life. They used per capita income, unemployment rate, and wealth (among other measures) to indicate economic standing of place. The researchers built an elaborate statistical model, one that might or might not pass muster if subjected to systematic critique. The point is how early this version of a cultural argument was formed (indeed lead-in projects were published by the same authors in 1975). Perhaps because neither of these sociologists taught at research

1

See William Whewell as quoted in Gould 1986.

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universities or because the journal where the work appeared was not among the important ones, the contribution fell into a black hole. It should not have. People sense, and sense as interactants with one another—as consumers tend to do (“collective selection” as Herbert Blumer called it in 1969)— that they are more in simpatico with one type of place compared to another, and indeed with one particular place compared to another. The basis for their preference includes the vast range of subtle judgments that the sociologists and anthropologists of consumption (including even some critics of consumption) understand as within the repertoire of active and subtle choice making. We all know, as sociologists or not, that people are not self-maximizing automatons; they live in part through expressivity and aesthetic preference. Some regard their very lives as works of art, striving to make them lovely in some sense. Efforts such as those of Kaufman and Kaliner recognize a link between migration and soul. This does not mean that “hard” variables are not also at work; it helps to have sewerage and some kind of economic opportunity in the target destination. And manipulators of the political economy actively prepare the ground, as best they can, for effective exploitation of those they can attract. But within a range, migrants’ (and emigrants’) proclivities of style and sentiment come into play (literally, at times, play). And once in motion, there are mechanisms—as Kaufman and Kaliner point out—that continue to reinforce their patterning. Graphic designers and police have about the same educational levels and similar incomes but their daily routines, consumption tastes, and voting behavior will differ—as will, pari passu, their destination ambition and how they will behave once present. Hence we learn New Hampshire and Vermont are matched in educational levels and that New Hampshire household incomes are actually substantially higher than those in Vermont. Factors besides the economic are in play and the standard add-in “cultural” variables, like religion or ethnicity, are not adequate to understand the selectivity mechanisms. As Kaufman and Kaliner indicate, my co-authors and I used the term “lash-up” to signal the process whereby diverse elements (technology, sociality, art, the works) interconnect at a given time and place to produce something like a place (see also Molotch 2003). I derived this notion from a study I was doing on product design about the same time. Industrial design was a realm where I could see something discrete and durable taking form out of other concrete and not-so-concrete phenomena. The “lash-up” terminology came originally from John Law who himself, aligned with Bruno Latour, was trying to find a way to mark a kind of distinctive moment in the way actors and networks congeal, as a technology, for example, used by maritime explorers.2 It should work for a place in the same way it works for a map or sextant–or for that matter a toaster. And among places, it should work not just for modestly-scaled towns like “my” Santa Barbara and Ventura, but also states of the United States and beyond. I’m sure scale matters, if for no other reason than the differential challenges it imposes for choosing data sources and

2 Bruno Latour attributes the term “lash up” to John Law, who evidently used it in an early draft of a paper that was later published without it. See Law (1986).

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accessing them. Political boundaries also matter, again as so strikingly depicted by Kaufman and Kaliner, in assembling communities of interest and in allowing them to then perform demonstration projects (which can lead to changes elsewhere, e.g., health care reform in Massachusetts, auto emission controls in California). This brings the formalistic concerns of conventional political science, otherwise so outré in advanced social science, back into the analytic fold. But it brings these in an analytically enriched way, with culture and boundaries in mutual reinforcement. I also take some delight in the way Kaufman and Kaliner work through, in effect, how “the interests” (in the pejorative sense) do not always know their own interests. So in outcomes parallel to those I found in our California studies, selfish economic actors can self-defeat. The powers that be do not always understand how to maximize returns, even narrow ones or at least in the long-term (a daunting worry when confronting, for example, collective problems like global warming). So Vermont now lives in learning-economy cum life-style privilege, in part through the defeat of its former Republican-esque establishment. In Santa Barbara, it was only through arduous efforts of fighting those who kept speaking about the needs of “the economy” that the environmentalists truly were able to create a chicken that keeps on laying golden eggs. Vast local fortunes were made in real estate, commercial as well as residential, by losing to those for whom money was not the issue (small criticism: it would be nice to see a comparison of before and after property prices, Vermont vs. New Hampshire). For me, perhaps the largest contribution of Kaufman and Kaliner is the at least implicit notion of cultural interaction, knowing interaction, among those headed for (or living in) a given place. Some of this intra-cohort interaction may not even be direct, but rather mediated through images, including commercial branding messages. Once in place, the discursive and self-referential notions of distinction build up as a place based “cultural class.” Such an idea, which deserves further research attention, certainly goes beyond any work that I at least have done. Among other implications, place history becomes linked into matters of taste, itself a phenomenon with its own dynamics of stability and change as Stanley Lieberson (2000) has so masterfully demonstrated. Avoiding the individualistic simplicities of Tiebout (1956) inspired utility maximization, the field riches of place-fate await new discoveries.

References Alihan, M. (1938). Social ecology. New York: Columbia University Press. Blumer, H. (1969). Fashion: from class differentiation to collective selection. Sociological Quarterly, 10, 275–291. Hsieh, C.-T., & Liu, B.-C. (1983). The pursuance of better quality of life: in the long run, better quality of social life is the most important factor in migration. American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 42(4), 431–440. Gould, S. J. (1986). Evolution and the triumph of homology, or why history matters. American Scientist, 74, 60–69. Law, J. (1986). On the methods of long-distance control: Vessels, navigation, and the Portuguese route to India. In J. Law (Ed.), Power, action, and belief: A new sociology of knowledge. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

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Lieberson, S. (2000). A matter of taste: How names, fashions, and culture change. New Haven: Yale University Press. Molotch, H. (2003). Where stuff comes from. New York: Routledge. Tiebout, C. M. (1956). A pure theory of local expenditures. Journal of Political Economy, 64(5), 416–424. Harvey Molotch is Professor of Sociology and Metropolitan Studies (in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis) at NYU. His books include (with John Logan) Urban Fortunes (now in a 20th Anniversary edition) and Where Stuff Comes From: How Toasters, Toilets, Cars, Computers, and Many Other Things Come to Be as They Are (2003). He has just finished editing (with Laura Noren) Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing, 2010, NYU Press.