Harvey Luskin Molotch (born January 3, 1940) is a U.S. sociologist and a sociology professor at NYU who is renowned for studies that have reconceptualized power relations in interaction, the mass media, and the city. He helped create the field of environmental sociology and has advanced qualitative methods in the social sciences. In recent years, Molotch helped develop a new field—the sociology of objects.
Biography
Molotch was born Harvey Luskin in Baltimore, Maryland, where his family was in the retail car business on one side and the home appliance business on the other. His father, Paul Luskin, was among the 19,000 American servicemen who died in the Battle of the Bulge in 1944 during the Second World War. His mother remarried Nathan Molotch, who adopted Harvey at age 7.
Prior to entering the army, Harvey’s father went into business with his brothers and founded a chain of discount appliance stores called Luskin’s. The business became quite successful and Harvey worked along with his brother and cousins in the stores as a salesman as he was groomed by his uncles, Jack and Joe, to be a discount king. But by the time he graduated from Milford Mill High School in Baltimore and went off to the University of Michigan (the first in his family to go to college), Molotch says “I was using my mouth as well as my brain to bite some of the hands that fed me.” (Where Stuff Comes From, p.ix). His rebellion against American materialism would lay the groundwork for his left politics and Marxist scholarship and his critique of the Vietnam War. But the biographical tensions manifest in his continued interest in the world of merchandise and material production from the appliance store days would emerge in his later sociological work.
Moloch received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago in 1966 under the direction of Morris Janowitz, and an MA in Sociology from Chicago in 1965. He received a B.A. with highest honors in Philosophy from the University of Michigan in 1963, where he wrote a thesis on John Dewey. He served in the U.S. Army, stationed in Maryland and Virginia.
Molotch was on faculty from 1968 to 2003 at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has also been a visiting professor at the State University of New York, Stonybrook, the University of Essex, and Northwestern University. In 1998-99 he was Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics. He has also been a fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies at Stanford University. He now holds a duel appointment at New York University as professor of Sociology, and Professor of Metropolitan Studies within the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis.
Ideas
Racial Segregation: Rethinking “White Flight”
Molotch's early work on "white flight" overturned conventional wisdom by showing that the dynamic of neighborhood change was of a different nature than was commonly assumed. In Managed Integration (1972), Molotch begins with the simple question: is it necessarily true that racial change is accompanied by white flight? To answer his own question, Molotch developed a simple measure: the rate of property turnover. He compared the increasingly black neighborhood of South Shore, Chicago with the North Side neighborhood of Rogers Park, which was similar to South Shore in almost every way except that it had experienced little racial change. Molotch studied the Realty and Building trade journals and divided the number of properties transferred to new owners by the total number of properties located in the community. He discovered that South Shore appeared to be as stable as or more stable than Rogers Park. From this revealing measure and his interviews, he concluded — much against the grain of thinking at the time -- that it is likely that a similar number of persons would have changed their residence no matter what racial conditions existed in the area. The speed of racial change characteristic of South Shore may seem at first glance to be so high as to indicate that only a flight of white residents could make it possible. But when viewed in the context of the high mobility rate of the general urban population, it becomes perfectly reasonable for such a racial change process to occur within the context of a market characterized by normal turnover. Normal mobility makes neighborhood racial change possible, according to Molotch. When blacks constitute the bulk of those who move into the vacancies which result, racial change is made inevitable. The implication of this subtle finding was that it is the reluctance of whites who live elsewhere to move into a changing neighborhood that makes racial integration so difficult to achieve. From a policy perspective, Molotch was not certain that anything could be done. He concluded that while stablizing neighborhoods would not be easy, but the focus needs to be on geting white people to replace the whites who are leaving, rather than talking people who are leaving into staying.
Molotch also tried to determine whether, during the periods of racial transition which seemed to inevitably lead to black occupancy, the geographic propinquity that did exist led to some degree of racial integration. With painstaking fieldwork, Molotch gained precise measures “which would indicate the frequency of such contacts, the contexts in which they most often appear, and the dynamics of their development.” He visited each of the shopping strips during business hours of shopping days, and racial head-counts were made for all street-level retail establishments (including restaurants and taverns) on both streets. Among his explanations for findings like the tendency toward Saturday night segregation (including a significant increase in the number of blacks relative to whites on the streets) was that “during the hours reserved for intimacy, segregation increases.” He concluded that South Shore residents, when taking outdoor recreation as well as public indoor recreation, do not lead integrated social lives, and that blacks and whites rarely come together as equals. At the same time, Molotch's data led him to this theory: “Transracial solidarity” occurs whenever there were cross-racial communities of a shared or deviant ideology, an equality in occupational status and organizational usefulness and a lack of previously constituted local organizational ties. The questions Molotch addressed in "Managed Integration" were clearly motivated by a political commitment to building and maintaining racially integrated associations, institutions, and community, but the results did not affirm the dominant view that white flight caused racial succession. He found that his white subjects were racist in many ways, but they were not nearly as racist as they were made out to be by the theories that explained their movement.
The Santa Barbara Oil Spill and Environmental Sociology
On January 28, 1969, there was a massive eruption of crude oil from Union Oil's Platform A in the Santa Barbara Channel--an eruption which was to cover the entire city coastline (as well as much of the Ventura coastline as well) with a thick coat of crude. The oil companies paid $603,000,000 for their lease rights, but neither they nor the federal government bore any significant responsibility. Molotch, who had joined the faculty of the University of California, Santa Barbara, saw in this disaster a significant research opportunity. His article "Oil in Santa Barbara and Power in America" became a founding document of the new field of environmental sociology, and a key contribution to political sociology.
Molotch argued that even though the local community is notorious for the increasing triviality of the decisions which occur within it, accident research at the local level might be capable of revealing what political scientists called the "second face of power." This is a dimension of power ordinarily ignored by traditional community studies which fail to concern themselves with the processes by which bias is mobilized and thus how issues rise and fall.
Molotch's findings highlighted the extraordinary intransigence of national institutions in the face of local dissent, but more importantly, pointed out the processes and tactics which undermine that dissent and frustrate and radicalize the dissenters who in Santa Barbara were literate and leisured -- they had the ability and the time to read, to ponder, and to get upset. He argued that this particular relationship between oil, power, and knowledge industry did not constitute a unique pattern of power in America, that all major sectors of the industrial economy led themselves to the same kind of analysis.
Molotch called for comparable studies of the agriculture industry, the banking industry, and for more accident research at the local level, which might bring to light the larger social arrangements which structure the parameters of such local debate. In this way, research at the local level might serve as an avenue to knowledge about national power. Molotch ended, "Sociologists should be ready when an accident hits in their neighborhood, and then go to work."
The Mass Media and the Social Construction Framework
Molotch helped introduce the "social construction" framework to the study of media representation. Whereas news accounts had been treated, however critically, as "failed" representations of a presumed reality, Molotch and Marilyn Lester turned attention to the idea that every account is a product of the social organization that goes into its production. In founding papers in the sociology of the mass media, Molotch and Lester took the insights of ethnomethodology to look at the Santa Barbara oil spill and the way it was covered.
"Only in an accident like an oil spill, or in a scandal, is routine political work transcended to some significant degree, thereby allowing access to information which is directly hostile to those groups who typically manage public event making."
Unlike media critics and other standard approaches to the sociology of the news, he argued that the media did not reflect a world "out there," but the practices of those having power to determine the experiences of others. Molotch and Lester developed methods that could show how ideological hegemony is accomplished by examining the records which are produced. They argued for an approach to the mass media which does not look for reality, but for practices of those having the power to determine the experience of others.
"Sociologists who habitually take their research topics and conceptual constructs as they are made available through mass media and similar sources may wish to extricate their consciousness from the purposive activities of parties whose interests and event needs may differ from their own." ("News as Purposive Behavior: On the Strategic Use of Routine Events, Accidents, and Scandals," American Sociological Review, Vol 39, No. 1 (Feb., 1974), pp. 101-112).
Molotch's work has work has inspired studies of the social construction of news, of the particular ways that the content of presentation is contingent upon the social setting of its production, including the occupational workplace of news professionals as well as the larger societal setting. His own more recent work on the sociology of the mass media has included studies of war protest and the stock market.
The City as a Growth Machine
Of Molotch's diverse contributions, he is probably best known for his book Urban Fortunes (1987, with John Logan), which won sociology's most prestigious prize for scholarship in 1990, the American Sociological Association's Distinguished Scholarly Contribution to Sociology Award, as well as the Robert Ezra Park Award of the Urban and Community Sociology section of the ASA as the best book of 1987. Urban Fortunes emerged from a series of smaller pieces published early in Molotch's career and builds on his 1976 classic paper, "The City as a Growth Machine." In this body of work, Molotch took the dominant convention of studying urban land use and turned it on its head. The field of urban sociology (as well as urban geography, planning, and economics) was dominated by the idea that cities were basically containers for human action, in which actors competed among themselves for the most strategic parcels of land, and the real estate market reflected the state of that competition. Out of this competition were thought to come the shape of the city and the distribution of social types within it (e.g. banks in the center, affluent residents in the suburbs). Long established notions such as central place theory and the sectoral hypothesis were claims that are more or less "natural" spatial geography evolved from competitive market activity.
Molotch helped reverse the course of urban theory by pointing out that land parcels were not empty fields awaiting human action, but were associated with specific interests--commercial, sentimental, and psychological. Especially important in shaping cities were the real estate interests of those whose properties gain value when growth takes place. These actors make up what Molotch termed "the local growth machine -- a term now standard in the urban studies lexicon. From this perspective, cities need to be studied (and compared) in terms of the organization, lobbying, manipulating, and structuring carried out by these actors. The outcome--the shape of cities and the distribution of their peoples--is thus not due to interpersonal market of geographic necessities, but to social actions, including opportunistic dealing. Urban Fortunes has influenced hundreds of national and international studies. A twentieth anniversary edition was issued by the University of California Press in 2007.
Other Work
Molotch has also conducted a series of studies in conversation analysis which focus on how mechanisms such as gaps silences in human conversation reveal the way power operates at the micro-interactional level. This work builds on the work of Harvey Sachs, Gail Jefferson, and Emmanuel Schegeloff. It was among the first to utilize ethnomethodology and conversation analysis in the study of traditional sociological topics, bridging what had been regarded as a highly esoteric and specialized approach to micro-sociology with mainstream, macro-level sociological issues such as hegemony and power.
More recently Moltoch has turned his attention to creating a new field of the sociology of objects. In Where Stuff Comes From, he builds on the work of Howard S. Becker and Bruno Latour, to view objects as the product of the joint work of many people, especially designers. While neo-Marxists and others have treated "commodity fetishism" as a signal of oppression, repression, and delusion, he uses this attribute of goods to understand, in a more comprehensive way, just what makes production happen.
Honors & Awards
- Robert E. Park Award of the American Sociological Association (1988) (Urban Fortunes)
- Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award of the American Sociological Association (1990) (Urban Fortunes)
- Lifetime Career Achievement in Urban and Community Scholarship issued by the American Sociological Association's Urban and Community Studies Section (2003)
- 2001 ASA Outstanding Journal Article of the Year in Political Sociology
Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, CA (2000)
- Resident Fellow, Rockefeller Foundation, Bellagio Center, Como Italy (1999)
- Stice Lecturer in the Social Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle (1996)
- Distinguished Visiting Professor, University of Lund, Sweden (1995)
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