ONCE A SOCIOLOGIST, ALWAYS A SOCIOLOGIST American

Transcript:ONCE A SOCIOLOGIST, ALWAYS A SOCIOLOGIST American:
ONCE A SOCIOLOGIST, ALWAYS A SOCIOLOGIST American Sociological Association Retirement Network (ASARN) Life in Sociology Lecture August 20, 2023 Kenneth C. Land John Franklin Crowell Professor of Sociology Emeritus and Research Professor, Social Science Research Institute, Duke University 1 Let me begin with thanks to David J. Ekerdt and the members of the ASARN Advisory Board for the invitation to deliver this Lecture. I consider this lifetime achievement honor to be totally unexpected and appreciated. In the letter of invitation for this Lecture, David indicated that I could reflect on “… on the arc and many themes of your career in the context of trends in sociology over that same time.” Accordingly, I begin with Sociology Graduate Studies. 2 3 Graduate Studies, The University of Texas at Austin, 1964-1969: Demography, Mathematical Sociology, Social Statistics During my graduate studies, the classical characterization of Sociology by the UT-Austin faculty members (which will be familiar to ASARN members) was that the discipline consisted of three generic areas of study: Social Psychology, Social Organization, and Demography. 4 Of the three: Social Psychology connected sociology to human cognitive and behavioral research, Demography connected sociology to human population processes of fertility, mortality, and migration, and Social Organization embodied the core of Sociology characterized as: the study of all forms and dynamics of social interaction, within all varieties of social structures, and the dynamics and interdependencies of the interactions and structures. 5 In addition to the pursuit of graduate courses related to the foregoing generic areas of Sociology, I was inspired by the works in the 1960s of: Hubert M. Blalock on Social Statistics, Otis Dudley Duncan on sociological applications of Path Analysis, James S. Coleman and Herbert A. Simon on Mathematical Sociology, and Nathan Keyfitz on Mathematical Demography to pursue Mathematics as a second area of my doctoral studies. 6 This led to my first peer-reviewed publication in my last year of graduate school: Kenneth C. Land 1969 “Principles of Path Analysis,” Sociological Methodology: 1-37 an expository essay that has had over 1,000 citations over the years and that still is occasionally cited today -- even with all of the subsequent developments across the past five decades of structural equation model specifications, estimation methods and associated computer software. 7 My studies in Sociology and Mathematics also led to my PhD dissertation: Explorations in Mathematical Sociology (1969), the chapters of which resulted in the publications, two of