#14 Arthur Sakamoto on Paradigms in Sociology | Half Hour of Heterodoxy

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Arthur Sakamoto is a professor of sociology at Texas A&M. Prior to working there, he worked at the University of Texas, Austin, from 1989 to 2013. He specializes in economic sociology and class inequality. He has published a number of papers on Asian Americans and their socioeconomic attainments, and papers about whether Asian-Americans are victims of discrimination in the labor market. His work suggests that Asian American men and White men have parity in the labor market. As you’ll hear in this interview, this work is controversial because it breaks the paradigm that most sociologists use. Arthur also talks about the consequences for your career if you try to publish work that challenges the conventional paradigm.

Arthur Sakamoto’s Home Page at Texas A&M
https://sociology.tamu.edu/sakamoto-a...

Arthur Sakamoto’s Google Scholar page:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?...

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Selected Quotes

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I’ve heard of debates about why sociology is so liberal and there’s some say it’s selectivity—liberals are the people interested in going into sociology…. My perception has been that within the field of sociology, the rewards for people who don’t conform to the conventional wisdom are slim, and I’ve known good sociologists doing good research who did not get tenure because their work didn’t fit into the paradigm very well.

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I’ll be frank with you—I’ve been submitting to the American Sociological Review on Asian Americans for the past 25 years and apparently there’s no data good enough for the ASR to convince the reviewers that Asian Americans have reached parity with respect to Whites. Every single one gets rejected. What happens is when the paper doesn’t conform to the conventional wisdom, the methodological standards are raised. But when you argue that there’s discrimination against Asians, the methodological standards are relaxed.

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