发信人: AMDPro (如梦令), 信区: Sociology
标  题: Re: 社会学毕业后干什么？
发信站: BBS 未名空间站 (Tue Jun 28 18:32:12 2005)

布迪厄说：社会学是一门武功。底下此君说：社会学是独门暗器。学好了，可以另立门户
， 可以替人看家护院，也可以街头卖艺， 杀猪吹喇叭---什么营生都可以干， 相比起来
，商学的训练太单薄了。哈哈。


Few True Things
Commencement Address to the Graduating Class
of the UCLA Department of Sociology
June 2002
Peter Kollock

Welcome!  Revel in this moment. Congratulate yourselves on choosing to study s
ociology – it will save you.

This is a rare moment – a moment of closure. And it may be a very long time b
efore you encounter a closure that is this clean, this sweet. Your past obliga
tions are done and your new obligations have not begun. This is a moment of li
minality – a threshold, a place of transition, betwixt and between. Savor it.
Even if your new career begins on Monday, you have today. Walk around tasting
the fact that you are between – the seams of social life are extraordinary s
paces.

Commencement speeches are typically wastelands of useless advice. You are exho
rted to be successful and happy, as if that were helpful or novel. Instead I w
ill tell you three true things that will be of use to you in your pursuit of s
uccess. I will tell you what you need to be happy. And I will offer a note on
liberty for our times.

It’s Sociology All the Way Down

Do not sell sociology short. Do not think there are places where it does not a
pply.

It is easy to think, for example, that whatever sociology’s relevance in othe
r areas, in business and in markets, what matters is only price and economics.
I have stood on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, I have stood on the
floor of the New York Stock Exchange – the sacred heart of capitalism – and
it smells like sociology. These are not worlds of anonymous price takers. Thes
e are social actors motivated by trust, reciprocity, status, reputation, the e
xchange of favors, and the evaluation of their reference groups. Every market
is a social market; every world is a social world; every decision is a social
decision.

I have seen companies funded for millions of dollars based not on financial fu
ndamentals, but on fads and personal relationships.

I have seen companies loose millions by ignoring sociology. During the Interne
t speculative bubble, dozens of companies were launched that had as their goal
the creation of new online marketplaces across every conceivable industry. Th
e grave mistake made by almost all these companies was to ignore the existing
social relationships and social practices in these markets. Networks of social
trading relationships were thought at best to be anachronisms, and both their
value and their resistance to change were discounted. Many millions of dollar
s were lost in part because people ignored the behavioral, sociological realit
ies of how people actually trade.

The concerns of sociology drive this world and your lives. It is true that alm
ost no one “out there” knows what the hell sociology is, and that is wonderf
ul! It means you have an unfair advantage, if you use it.

Experience Trumps Everything

Nothing is more important than experience. Not intelligence; not effort.

During my time as an entrepreneur, I heard that “the school of hard knocks is
worth ten times as much as a Ph.D.” (Red Herring, 2001) I did not like heari
ng that. I certainly didn’t agree with the multiple, and of course the person
who said that didn’t have a Ph.D. But it is true that a degree in and of its
elf is of limited usefulness.

There was a striking moment as a businessman when I had to recommend against h
iring an academic. And I like academics! I am an academic. But he came to us n
aked of experience. We were a small company in a fast economy, and we were not
going to pay for his learning curve.

Who will pay for your learning curve? You should evaluate your first jobs not
in terms of money (especially if that is your eventual goal), but in terms of
the skills and experiences you can accumulate. Think in terms of training, men
torships, and field experiences. Think in terms of assembling a portfolio of e
xperiences.

When someone has the upper hand in their dealings, it’s typically not because
they’re smarter, but because they’ve done it a hundred times before – they
’ve done it before. Experience trumps IQ (a difficult lesson for a professor)
. Experience trumps motivation. Experience trumps effort.

The Surest Route to Success is Arbitrage

As I’m using the term here, I use arbitrage to mean taking something that is
undervalued in one market or social world into another world where it is more
highly valued.

Arbitrage is possible across careers, across disciplines, across geographic ar
ea, across cultures, among other possibilities.

I moved from academia to business and back again. Each way I could bring in wh
at was taken for granted on the other side: some of the concepts, models, and
skills that were mundane in one setting were exceptional and highly valued in
the other setting.

Similarly, the person who knows both sociology and economics can arbitrage acr
oss those disciplines, just as can the person who knows both manufacturing and
sales. And the person who knows how two distant branch offices or two differe
nt neighborhoods solve a problem can bring the best lessons of each to the oth
er.

Be the link, the bridge, between thinly connected social worlds. The more dist
inctive – yet still related – the worlds are, the greater the possibility of
riches. Thus, one should cultivate diverse experiences. But this is hard – o
ne must climb up another damn learning curve and perhaps even uproot and reloc
ate one’s life.

In this sense your greatest enemy is the beaten path: you go home the same way
, eat in the same restaurants, see the same people, and know what’s going to
happen day to day in your job and your relationships. Your great challenge is
being willing to leave the beaten path – you must at times be willing to leav
e what is known and comfortable and familiar.

What You Need to be Happy

You need two things to be happy. Not one; not three.
You need intimacy and efficacy. That is, you need the connection and the love
of your significant others, and you need a sense that you have an effect, an i
mpact on your environment.

That is how you should evaluate your relationships and your jobs: how they con
tribute to or impact the intimacy and efficacy in your life.

Many of you also want status, and it’s true that a mix of efficacy and status
drives most ambition. But strictly speaking you do not need it, and in the en
d it will prove to be an unsatisfied master.

A Note on Liberty and Mindfulness

It is a different world than it was a year ago, and there is much talk about l
iberty and its defense. I want to leave you with a sociologically informed vie
w of liberty that comes from Learned Hand – one of the most important and inf
luential jurists of the early twentieth century. He said:

The condition of our survival … is our willingness to accommodate ourselves t
o the conflicting interests of others, to learn to live in a social world. (To
Yale Law Graduates, 1931)

The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; th
e spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other
men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interes
ts alongside its own without bias....(The Spirit of Liberty,1944)

I say again: “The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that
it is right.”
You should have convictions, yes! Passion, yes!  Push.  Hard.  But it should n
ever be a passion that is blind. It should be a passion that looks, that consi
ders, that is willing to re-consider. Cultivate a mindful passion.

We are before you as teachers, and one of my favorite views of teaching is one
of the first: Socrates’ vision of the teacher as midwife. I like that view b
ecause it reminds us who is doing the hard work, and who deserves to be congra
tulated – you.
You have our respect; you have our hopes. Savor this day. Occupy this moment.

Congratulations!


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