With appy polly logies for cross-posting, I thought this article, sent to me from a friend, aparently coming from the Chronicle of higher education, seemed germane to all of us sociologists, be we teachers, interactionists, or whatever. Enjoy!
As always, A.
Department of Sociology
Willamette University
900 State Street
Salem, OR 97301
Phone: 503.370.6313
Fax: 503.370.6512
"It's not enough to know that things work.
The laurels go to those who can show HOW they work."
From: "Florence Maatita" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: FW: FYI - Chronicle article - another sociological brouhaha
Date: Wed, 12 Oct 2005 15:32:04 -0500
Did you peeps hear about this stuff?
-----Original Message-----
Friday, October 7, 2005
Copycat Allegations Roil Sociologists at Penn, Raising Question of Whether 'Analytic Schemes' Can Be Plagiarized
A long-simmering dispute among members of the University of Pennsylvania's sociology department came to a boil last week when, in an e-mail message sent to the entire department, Harold J. Bershady, a professor emeritus who retired three years ago, accused one colleague of plagiarizing the concepts and insights of another.
The argument concerns Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage, by Kathryn Edin, an associate professor of sociology at Penn, and Maria Kefalas, an assistant professor of sociology at St. Joseph's University, which is also in Philadelphia. The book was published by the University of California Press in March, and it has received wide and generally positive reviews. But Mr. Bershady believes that Ms. Edin and Ms. Kefalas failed to adequately credit the work of Elijah Anderson, a senior member of the department who has studied inner-city culture for three decades.
"One would not know simply from reading Edin and Kefalas," wrote Mr. Bershady in his e-mail message, "that their analytic scheme was derived practically wholesale from Anderson."
But several other scholars who study poverty, pregnancy, and kinship say that the charge is nonsense. In a letter circulated this week, 15 prominent sociologists wrote that Mr. Bershady's allegation is "absurd and suggests a fundamental misreading of the two bodies of work."
Mr. Anderson's arguments "could not be more different" from those of Ms. Edin and Ms. Kefalas, the letter continued. "Anderson claims that nonmarital births are the result of a dating game in which young men take advantage of young women's fantasies of marriage in order to have sex. In contrast, Edin and Kefalas tell a story in which the young women are unwilling to marry men who do not meet their standards for financial and emotional security." (That is a broadly accurate description of the three scholars' approaches.)
According to several accounts, including articles in The Daily Pennsylvanian, the student-run newspaper at Penn that first reported on the dispute this week, Mr. Anderson expressed concern about the book shortly before it was published.
The Chronicle has obtained a 15-page document, circulated by Mr. Anderson last spring, in which he detailed what he saw as parallels between Promises I Can Keep and two of his own publications. He and Mr. Bershady have not asserted that Ms. Edin and Ms. Kefalas plagiarized sentences or phrases. Rather, they say, the two women appropriated Mr. Anderson's concepts without giving him due credit. (Promises I Can Keep does cite Mr. Anderson's work four times, though none are in prominent locations.)
Mr. Anderson's first example concerned low-income women's "belief in fate." In his 1999 book, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City (W.W. Norton), he wrote:
Although an overwhelming number may not be actively trying to have babies, many are not actively trying to prevent having them. One of the reasons for this may be the strong fundamentalist religious orientation of many poor blacks, which emphasizes the role of fate in life. If something happens, it happens; if something was meant to be, then let it be, and "God will find a way."
In Promises I Can Keep -- which, like Mr. Anderson's work, is based on field research in and around Philadelphia -- Ms. Edin and Ms. Kefalas wrote, at various points:
Some, like Abby, begin to take chances [not use birth control] on purpose and leave the outcome to fate.
Even if children seem to just "happen," most believe they were meant to be. Jasmine ... tells us, "I never used anything [when] I got pregnant. God is in control. And [my kids] was meant to be. ... I feel like, if it happens, it happens."
Few say their children are the result of either an overt plan or a contraceptive failure. Rather, the large majority are neither fully planned nor actively avoided.
Mr. Anderson also listed 21 other topics in which he perceived similar parallels, including promiscuity, the expectation of having a child at a young age, the precariousness of the job market, and low-income teenagers' lack of a sense of future.
But none of those topics were uniquely developed or defined by Mr. Anderson, according to Sara McLanahan, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University, who coordinated the letter that defends Ms. Edin and Ms. Kefalas.
"These people are studying the same populations, and so of course they're going to be studying the same questions," Ms. McLanahan said in an interview on Thursday. Promiscuity, the precarious job market, and the "sense of fate" have been discussed by many sociologists of urban poverty, including Kenneth B. Clark, Katherine Newman, Lee Rainwater, William Julius Wilson, Paul Willis, and Ulf Hannerz, she said. Some of those scholars' books long predated Mr. Anderson's.
Other scholars agree. "Anderson and Edin and Kefalas have all written really valuable work," wrote Paula England, a professor of sociology at Stanford University, in an e-mail message to The Chronicle. "While there is some topical overlap, for the most part Anderson is asking different questions than Edin and Kefalas, and when they do ask the same questions, they are often coming to quite different answers. Having read his work and theirs, I think the idea that they stole his 'analytic scheme' or committed 'conceptual plagiarism' is just plain wrong." Ms. England signed the letter in the book's defense.
Victor M. Lidz, a former member of the Penn department who now directs a drug-abuse clinic at Drexel University's College of Medicine, strongly disagrees with Ms. McLanahan and Ms. England. Certain themes in Mr. Anderson's work, Mr. Lidz said in an interview on Thursday, are uniquely his and ought to have been cited as such by Ms. Edin and Ms. Kefalas.
"Anderson is the person who first wrote about relationships between the genders in the African-American community in considerable detail," Mr. Lidz said. "And he emphasized precisely the themes that Edin and Kefalas ended up emphasizing."
Specifically, Mr. Lidz believes that Ms. Edin and Ms. Kefalas's lengthy discussion of the corrosive effects of distrust between men and women owes a serious debt to Mr. Anderson's scholarship.
"If they had framed their book explicitly as an extension of Anderson's research, that would have been one thing," Mr. Lidz said. "It's all the more troubling because they've done their field research in the same city, and Edin is in the same department."
After Mr. Anderson raised his objections last spring, he and Ms. Edin reached an agreement in June whose full terms have not been disclosed. A sociologist from another university acted as a mediator. The agreement was not formally supervised or recorded by administrators at Penn. Its terms require Mr. Anderson and Ms. Edin not to speak publicly about the matter.
Mr. Bershady, an intellectual historian who helped to bring Mr. Anderson to the department, in 1975, was apparently unsatisfied by the resolution. His e-mail blitz -- some of which is copied verbatim from Mr. Anderson's earlier 15-page analysis -- has brought the dispute to a new level of rancor. (Mr. Bershady did not respond to repeated requests from The Chronicle for comment.)
In an interview on Wednesday evening, Mr. Anderson said that he had no advance notice of Mr. Bershady's plan to publicize the dispute. "I've always viewed Kathryn Edin as a valued colleague here at Penn," he said, "and I don't attribute any malice to her or Ms. Kefalas. There was indeed a dispute between us, which we settled months ago.
"Now the question has been reignited," Mr. Anderson continued, "and the reignition indicates that, for the wider academic community, the issue remains unresolved."
Mr. Anderson declined to answer other questions about the matter, citing the confidentiality terms of the June agreement.
On Wednesday the department's chair, Paul D. Allison, released a statement that suggested he was struggling to hold the department together and was eager to put the dispute behind him. The statement said, in part: "I want to make it clear the process by which the parties resolved their disagreement was in full compliance with the Penn faculty handbook. ... The department of sociology stands behind the scholarship of Professor Edin and Professor Anderson, both of whom we regard as extremely valuable colleagues. We hope that they can look past the unwarranted and unnecessary attention that has been devoted to this issue and will remain at Penn for many years to come."
Naomi Schneider, executive editor of the University of California Press, said in an interview on Wednesday that Promises I Can Keep is "selling extremely well."
"We're very proud of the book," she said. "There has been no credible evidence of any kind of shortfall in their scholarship."
A previous book by Ms. Kefalas was also the subject of plagiarism allegations. Arnold R. Hirsch, a professor of history at the University of New Orleans, discovered that Ms. Kefalas had used some of his language in her book Working-Class Heroes: Protecting Home, Community, and Nation in a Chicago Neighborhood (California, 2003). The borrowed language -- taken from Mr. Hirsch's Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (Cambridge University Press, 1983) -- was sometimes adjacent to sentences that properly quoted and credited Mr. Hirsch's work.
"The errors came about during the final stages of copy-editing," Ms. Schneider said, "and the matter was handled amicably between the presses and the authors." The California press resolved the dispute by creating a Web site that lists the errata.
The text of Mr. Bershady's message has been posted to the blogging site LiveJournal.com.
The letter coordinated by Ms. McLanahan appeared on Thursday in The Daily Pennsylvanian.
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