Editors’ Page

In the United States today, reasonable scientific ideas are denied and challenged, while at the same time the physical, natural, and social sciences, are denied or challenged. Even college is held not to be helpful to the nation by some supporters of the Republican Party. In this context, the National Academies of Sciences, Medicine and Engineering (2017) have published a report by a panel of representatives of various disciplines in response to a National Science Foundation (NSF) request for an evaluation of whether social, behavioral, and economic sciences research funded by the latter has made real contributions to the organization’s missions on health and welfare, national defense, business and industry, and scientific progress. The panel, including one sociologist, also made recommendations to prepare for the future.

This report comes at a time when funding for NSF and other similar institutions has been cut in the latest budget proposal by the White House. It is not surprising that such a panel was formed to make this report but also that it finds positive results from these disciplines. Those results have broader implications because they serve as a defense of the foundation and as continued justification for social, behavioral and economic science research

The report recognizes and underscores the social influences and consequences of every major problem facing society. As a result, it poses these questions: Why do people behave the way they do? What are their beliefs and values? What do they think of others? Seemingly these are basic questions but they are also more social psychological than structural. They do not ask questions about relationships, power and inequality, social organization, or the spatial distribution of resources. Yet we know NSF-funded research has supported and contributed to all forms of sociology and the study of social problems. From our perspective, the report clearly lacked critical examination of several major sociological contributions to the various missions.

The report, in preparation for the future, also calls for increased use of large data bases. It, more importantly, recommends that the NSF gather a large body of transparent stakeholders to engage in strategic planning in pursuit of a multi-disciplinary research agenda on the major problems facing this society.

Now why should we at The Sociological Quarterly be interested in this report? The NSF is an agenda-setter and if it follows through and there are funds attached for proposals, researchers will make proposals in response to these multi-disciplinary RFPs. Secondly, the contemporary political context is challenging to sciences and social sciences with allegations that these disciplines are not valid and thus favoring cutting funds for the NSF’s crucial missions. While this document provides the NSF with the support needed at this time, it should be noted that sociology was not represented equitably on the panel which chose not to discuss how society is structured, existing pervasive inequality or its social processes and culture. Moreover, the missions and choices in the report are designed to support the status quo. One might also ask how the NSF is contributing to national defense or why does labor get explored under business and industry. If the NSF takes seriously the charge for strategic planning and casts its net widely and transparently, it could offer a new direction of conceiving of science more broadly and focus itself on fostering inter-disciplinary collaboration on major societal and global problems. There are working models out there—in the areas of environmental governance, food systems, and political ecology, whose study and analysis could benefit NSF and larger society.

What do the above imply for this journal and its contributors? If the orientation to large databases is followed, we should expect more quantitative articles and perhaps offer less space for alternative approaches. We need to be careful, however, and protect space for all approaches. We are in a period when major complex global and related societal problems exist that requires inter-disciplinary perspectives. We should thus expect more inter-disciplinary studies, and would need reviewers beyond our usual disciplinary sources. We should therefore be open to both new articles and reviewers that address critical problems with new perspectives and methods. At the same time we recognize that there is a long history of failing to follow through and know that there have been unsuccessful earlier efforts along these lines. We can hope the crisis today will produce different results. Sociology, however, needs to be a central participant in these deliberations.

This Issue

The critical contributions of sociological analyses are illustrated in articles included in this issue which range from the international to the interactional. We begin with two contributions that consider homicide cross-nationally. First, Andrew Dawson reports a negative relationship between “widespread belief in state legitimacy and the homicide rate” based on a sample of 86 nations. Second, Meghan L. Rogers and William Alex Pridemore explore a number of theories regarding how social protection affects homicide rates directly and indirectly among nations belonging to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Continuing at the international (organizational) level, Rob Clark examines the distribution of voting power at the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. He notes that “social networks tend to play a prominent role in how votes are allocated at both organizations.” A comparison of China and the U.S. by He Xian and Jeremy Reynolds follows and is on the topic of perceptions of meritocracy (with attention also paid to recognition of the prevalence of non-meritocratic elements) among residents of these two dissimilar countries. Further exploring the topic of merit selection, Daniel Douglas and Paul Attewell note that despite the importance of school mathematics as a gate-keeping mechanism for higher education and to desirable majors, only a “very small proportion of educated workers use” it in actual workplaces.

Our final three articles deal with enduring effects of various forms of social differentiation in American society. Mercedes Valadez and Xia Wang research the relationship between citizenship, legal status, and sentencing outcomes at the Federal level and report that it is conditioned by age, race and ethnicity. One finding that stands out from their article is that “young Hispanic male non-citizen and undocumented immigrant offenders are among the groups that have the greatest odds of being sentenced to prison.” The next paper by Kathryn A. Sweeney and Rachel L. Pollack explores media coverage of the well-known 2013 Baby Veronica adoption case and describes it in terms of “tensions between color-blind individualism and color consciousness central to the Indian Child Welfare Act.” Rounding out this issue is a contribution by Chong-suk Han, George Ayala, Jay P. Paul, and Kyung-Hee Choi on the formation of self-identities as “gay men of color” drawing from their study sample of 35 Black, Latino, and Asian Pacific Islander American respondents in Los Angeles, California.

Considered in the context of our critique of the report on the NSF, it is important to ask whether the insights gleaned from the eight contributions included in this issue could have been gained without the sustained efforts of researchers committed to various sociological perspectives. To reiterate, sociology needs to be represented equitably whenever the future of science is being discussed and decided on.

—Peter Mandel Hall, Michael G. Lacy, and N. Prabha Unnithan