Becoming Somebody: Toward A Social Psychology Of School

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Product Description

Offers a social psychological account of social life in three high schools, combining theoretical analysis with reflective methodology. The emphasis of the book is on how social relations have varying effects on the feeling of "self" in young people from different socioeconomic environments.

Becoming Somebody: Toward A Social Psychology Of School Review

A few years before Becoming Somebody was published, I heard its author make a presentation at the American Educational Research Association's (AERA) annual meeting held in Toronto. The presentation was replete with the concepts and locutions of post-structuralism, post-modernism, and, no doubt, other arcane perspectives that I was not sensitive to and could not identify.

The purpose of the presentation was a comparison of sociology as an academic discipline, and sociology as a tool for profit-making ventures that used academic research and theorizing as sources of ways to better manipulate, control, and exploit an unsuspecting public. If memory serves, the author also made reference to sociology as a discipline that was of use in American military adventurism.

At the end of the presentation, I recall a woman seated in front of me wryly whispering to a friend, "Got that ...!" A good response might have been "What the Hell is this guy talking about?!" Instead, the friend simply shrugged in a way that bespoke troubled confusion and frustration at failing to grasp even bits and pieces that she, as a professional educator, might be expected to know.

I was inclined to offer the suggestion that if you work in the social and behavioral sciences, you eventually become accustomed to the recurring feeling that you've been reduced to obsolescence. You haven't been, but odd methodological and theoretical developments in the division of intellectual labor require that you be oblivious, or at least resilient and resistant, when faced with obfuscation and misguided trendyness.

Becoming Somebody, which has been reviewed favorably in upper-drawer sociology journals, deals with schooing and identity formation for three groups of students: working class adolescents, upper middle class adolsescents, and same-aged students who belong to the urban under-class. As with the author's presentation at the AERA meeting, the book is loaded with the concepts and modes of expression peculiar to post-structuralism and post-modernism. The author also enjoys using portentous images, in the manner of an up-to-date literary scholar, to fashion his presentation.

As with others of his theoretical bent, the author avoids anything that might seem technically methodological. The ethnographic work that resulted in Becoming Somebody is off-handedly characterized as "hanging out." That's it.

Becoming Somebody presents the reader with a very uneven reading experience. The sections on working class adolsecents and urban underclass adolescents are ponderous, pretentious, and, ultimately, uninterpretable. However, the section on upper middle class adolescents is readable and insightful, written in a prose style that is really pretty conventional.

What's going on? I can only guess that the author came up in an upper middle class environment, enabling him to write with knowledgable clarity about his experience. His hanging out among adolescents from other status groups, however, was not sufficiently informative to enable him to write clearly and knowledgably about them, so he resorted to heavy-duty theoretical obfuscation to fill in the blanks.

I think the author is intelligent, well-meaning, and learned. However, I also think that he might want to examine the possibility that a little bit of theory goes a long way. (Something that Reinhard Bendix is reported to have told Arthur Stinchcombe when the latter was a graduate student.) Nevertheless, I'm surprised that the book is not still selling pretty well, if only because this is the sort of thing so many of us suspect we should be able to grasp. Take a stand!

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