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Q and A with Professor Linda Markowitz

Professor Linda Markowitz received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Arizona in 1996, the same year she joined the SIUE faculty. In addition to an impressive variety of teaching and service accomplishments, Dr. Markowitz has published several journal articles and one book, Worker Activism After Successful Union Campaigns (1999, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe). Professor Markowitz does sociology at home and at school, and even in her sleep. She tells ejs that when she is not busy participating in the bureaucracy to assure her income and status, she loves to discover her own hypocricies with friends and students. One of Professor Markowitz's grandest dreams is to reveal the benefits of critical sociology to the world, but until that day, she can be found in her office working on research about socially responsible investing and feminist pedagogy.

ejs: Your research on morally dichotomous reasoning is fantastic. Can you tell us a little about it and explain how you became interested in this problem? Has this research impacted your pedagogy?

Dr. Markowitz: Issues of oppression bring out the morality in people. We love to judge, evaluate and feel superior to others less well-off than us. Why is he poor? Because he spends all his money on cigarettes and beer. Why does she stay with that abusive jerk? Because she=s weak and stupid. All those talk and reality shows on television help foster our absolute enjoyment in watching the meek squirm.

I believe that our utter delight in morally excoriating others is ironic for two reasons. First, when we are the victim, we=re capable of thinking of a cornucopia of explanations for why we=re down-and-out (I know I can). For example, listen to the next time a reporter interviews a woman on welfare. Invariably, this person will see the cause of her poverty as structurally related, but chances are she sees her friend down the street as just Amilking the system.@ Second, we always seem to negatively judge the immoral acts of those inferior to us, yet the people bilking the system for millions of dollars are often not seen as culpable for their violations. For example, I show a film in one of my classes called “Minimum Wage in Milwaukee.” The film suggests that measuring economic well-being through unemployment rates is deceptive because many people are working jobs with non-livable wages. During the film, we follow several people who are trying to survive on minimum wage and we listen to discussions by employers justifying these low wages. After the film, students commonly point out that one of the impoverished men was smoking. AIf he=s so poor, how can he afford cigarettes?@ students wonder. Yet, no one points out that his boss is dressed in a nice suit, driving an expensive car and living the Agood life.@ Neither of these acts is inherently more immoral than the other, yet our attention is consistently drawn to the man who Awastes@ his money on a $3.00 pack of cigarettes! How fascinating!

I think as scholars we must be aware that our students are constantly being persuaded to see issues of oppression as morally dichotomous. The world and its players are often broken into good vs bad, right vs. wrong, virtuous vs. evil. Indeed, this education is coming from a variety of directions: our religious institutions, parents, and schools B all of which commonly frame reality in simple dualistic terms (for example, how many of us haven=t heard that it=s bad for boys to play with dolls). If professors assume that students are engaged in the structural causes we provide for how a system of oppression functions, we will be completely shocked and confused when students respond to the issues in morally, dichotomous terms.

I was definitely flabbergasted when this happened to me. My first semester teaching gender, I was discussing the issue of rape. We were trying to uncover the societal reasons rape occurs. A man suddenly blurted out, AWhy are we always blaming stuff on men. If women don=t want to be raped, they shouldn=t put themselves in those positions.@ It turned out that many of the people (both male and female) shared the same view. Women were to blame for rape. Given that I was talking about WHY rape occurred, I was completely nonplused that the students thought the discussion thus far had been about WHO to blame.

How many times do we do this as professors C have an analytical discussion that the students frame as morally dichotomous? Indeed, we are hampered in our discussions about oppression if we fail to understand the moral dichotomies underlying many students= construction of knowledge. I think it is absolutely problematic to claim that professors are Avalue-free.@ We all have an agenda in our classes. However, I feel it is imperative as academics that we try and help students see reality in more complex terms; life cannot be broken down into simple dichotomies. Once we move past who to blame for oppression, we can have engaging discussions in why it happens and, more importantly, how our positions in society help us perpetuate it.

My pedagogy is definitely shaped by the belief that many of our students frame reality in simple, morally dichotomus terms. I begin each semester, in every class, making sure students know what moral dichotomies are and explaining how using them prevents us from understanding why oppression occurs. Further, I have writing assignments structured around understanding reality in complex, analytical terms. Finally, when students bring up moral dichotomies in class, other students and I can help them understand from where their moral dualism emerged and how it affects their ability to understand the problem at hand.

In the end, if I can get a few more students to think in morally complex terms, I=d feel that the class was worthwhile.

ejs: What kinds of scholarly activities and research are you involved in now?

Dr. Markowitz: I=m very excited about the new research I=m pursuing. I am studying socially responsible mutual funds. Historically, the issue of socially responsible investments has been a focus only for economists B not sociologists. The most common question economists ask is: Does socially responsible investment (SRI) yield the same returns as conventional investing? Right off the bat, a sociologist should find this question intriguing. It assumes that the primary reason people invest in SRIs is financial rather than political. If this is true, than are SRIs just one more method rich liberals can feel good about making lots of money? I=m not trying to knock rich liberals because, frankly, I=m one of them (although I like to think of myself as a rich radical C is there such a thing?). However, I think it is imperative to study whether socially responsible investing actually exists (as us over-advantaged people would like to believe) or whether its simply an oxymoron (as critical sociologists might predict).

Actually, this line of research is not that different from the research posed by sociologists when Aparticipatory management@ became big in the eighties. TQM=s (total quality management) and teamwork has become the rhetoric of many multi-national corporations headquartered in the U.S. The management literature suggests that shared brain-power enhances productivity so when workers cooperate they are likely to be more efficient. Part of this literature also suggests that lowering hierarchy is imperative for getting workers to openly discuss their ideas. The problem, suggest critics of this system, is that in capitalist economies, management and labor have an inherently antagonistic relationship; managers are trying to extract as much work as possible from its employees at the cheapest rate while workers are trying to get high wages without spending excessive energy. If the critics are correct, then Aparticipatory management@ is an oxymoron. You simply cannot give workers power if the organizational structure prevents ceding control over how, why and what the employees produce.

It=s no surprise that socially responsible investing emerged at the same time as participatory management. Both assume that multi-national corporations in the U.S. have a vested interest in being Agood.@ The reason? Well, employees and consumers won=t support companies that don=t produce their goods in a Ajust@ way. Unfortunately, I=m inclined to believe that employees and consumers do not have much choice in how goods are produced. Perhaps the conditions range from extremely, horribly, and (I mean down-right) egregiously exploitative to pretty darn exploitative. But does that make the company socially responsible?

ejs: What advice would you give to graduate students pondering a career as a university professor?

Dr. Markowitz: Wow, what a good question! Without sounding too jaded, I would say, Remember that being a professor is, first and foremost, a job. And like any other job, it is deeply impacted by the rules and norms of organizations inside a capitalist-bureaucratic economy.

Now, let me qualify that statement by discussing my experiences in graduate school. The impoverished conditions were obviously hard to take. Indeed as my high-school friends had children and moved into large houses in their twenties, I made fun of them while pondering over whether I could afford a new shirt at the Value Village. Even so, graduate school was everything I thought academia was supposed to be; a group of interested people struggling over issues about life. In fact, the best education I received was NOT in the classroom. It was among the graduate students themselves. There were about a dozen of us, from various disciplines (e.g., anthropology, political science, philosophy, sociology), that would get together twice a month and fight over post-modernism, feminism, Marx, Weber....you name it. We did this at parties, on the quad and over dinner. I don=t think we could have been more engaged. The professors were important because they helped us figure out what to read and made us put our thinking into coherent, organized thoughts. But professors were the Aother.@ They were part of the establishment that we so mercilessly critiqued (and, ironically, hoped to become).

Out of those dozen students with whom I learned to love and crave intellectual thought, only two went on to get their graduate degrees and become professors. Can you guess who those two are? (Hint: they have offices very close to each other here at SIUE). What happened to those other scholars who struggled and challenged themselves? The hypocrisy of academia drove them away. Our professors encouraged us to discourse, analyze and critique B but to what end? So we could publish, win awards, get tenure and support the very institutions we were asked to critique. My friends chose not to go that route.

So why did I become a professor? Good question. There are a couple of reasons. First, at thirty, I was ready to stop struggling economically. I wanted to have kids and attain that AU.S dream.@ I was from a professional family that expected me to become Asomething.@ And, let=s face it, I did not (and still do not) want to let them down! Second, I thought perhaps I could protect my idealism in the realm of the classroom. It would be there that I might be able to create change by educating students about the social world and its perpetual re-construction.

Honestly, though, I wonder all the time whether I=m just a sell-out. This is especially true as I find myself playing the game C either the powerless player (not rocking the boat so I can ensure my job) or the powerful one (helping evaluate people in a system whose primary purpose is to legitimate discrimination, antagonism and oppression).

Yet, I also cannot deny that deep down inside, I hope and really believe that by educating people about society B maybe one-day B all of us together can stop playing our roles and buck the system. Until then, each of us needs to attempt remaining honest and reflective about how we use power to oppress others B and ourselves.

Editor’s note: Professor Markowitz (lmarkow@siue.edu) has a wonderful website that provides information on feminism, humanism, terrorism, and pedagogy. Check it out.

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