Stephen Vaisey

Once upon a time, sociologists believed that human beings were “cultural dopes” who unproblematically internalized the norms and values of their culture and acted on them. An early dissenter from this view was C. Wright Mills who argued that our ideas and “values” were not motives, but rather served as “vocabularies of motive”; in other words, as justifications for our actions to ourselves and others. Now most sociologists of culture have adopted the Millsian view, and the very notion of culture seems unthinkable without the words “toolkit” and “repertoire.” But can’t culture motivate and justify? As with all thorny dichotomies in social theory, the answer is, “Yes, both are important.” Simply saying "both," however, gets us nowhere and creates an illusion of theoretical progress. My goal in this area is to investigate how cultural content is involved in motivating and justifying human conduct across a wide variety of contexts.

This is a catch-all category for my interest in what I sometimes refer to as “weird methods.”  While I am certainly no enemy of general linear models, I’ve found that sometimes more “relational” techniques—network analysis, multidimensional scaling, cluster analysis, correspondence analysis, and set-theoretic methods—can shed light on patterns in the data that provide additional insights.  As a result of my interest (some might say obsession) with exploring and learning new methods, I’ve found myself working on a number of projects outside my main areas of interest.

For the fuzzy-set/QCA program Kyle Longest and I have developed, type "net search fuzzy" from within Stata.

In this area of research, I inquire about the micro-level consequences of the macro-level expansion of educational credentialing.  For the moment, I steer clear of the debate over the causes of this phenomenon (unintended consequences or social closure?) and focus on the way credential inflation influences the experience of workers.