Podcast Transcript

Mario L. Small

Intro music

Mario Small is the Quetelet Professor of Social Science in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. One of the most preeminent sociologists of his generation, Mario is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American academy of Political and Social Sciences, and most recently, of the National Academy of Sciences, one of the most coveted academic associations in the world. A sociologist whose work focuses on urban poverty, social inequality, personal networks, and the relationship between quantitative and qualitative methods, Mario is the author of several pathbreaking books, among them are Villa Victoria: The Transformation of Social Capital in a Boston Barrio, and Unanticipated Gains: The Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life. Both books received several awards, including the prestigious C. Wright Mills Award from the American Sociological Association. Mario is also the co-author of a recently published book that explores how social scientists should go about evaluating ethnographic and interview research.

I invited Mario to The Dean’s Table to reflect on whether being born and raised in Panama shaped his insights as a sociologist, to discuss how and when he became interested in being a sociologist, and to talk about his intellectual contributions to the study of urban poverty, personal networks, and qualitative methods. Mario, welcome to The Dean’s Table.

Mario L. Small: Thank you very much, Fred. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Fredrick Harris: You were born and raised in Panama.

Mario L. Small: Yes.

Fredrick Harris: Panama City, I believe.

Mario L. Small: Yes.

Fredrick Harris: Um, could you share with our listeners your experience with growing up there?

Mario L. Small: Yeah, so I, uh, I was born and raised entirely in Panama from Panamanian parents who were the children of Panamanian grandparents all across the board. So, um, my, uh, parents, uh, both worked. Uh, they both worked actually for the U.S. government, for the Department of Defense in Panama.

Fredrick Harris: Interesting.

Mario L. Small: Cause the canal was there at the time. And the, uh, the canal infrastructure, uh, which at the time had been leased to the United States, uh, and, uh, for the operation of the canal and also for the, uh, establishment of several military bases just within the canal zone area, uh, that infrastructure needed that a lot of civilian support. And so, there were a lot of civilians from Panama working there. And so my, my father was an architect and he worked as an architect for the Department of Defense and my mother was a human resources specialist, and she also worked there. And, um, uh, we lived, uh, in a working class neighborhood called Cerro Viento, which is still there and, um, which, uh, you know, had a combination of, you know, teachers and laborers and small business people and so on. And it was also the case that, um, I grew up, uh, on a street that, uh, by chance just had a lot of boys. So in my household, uh, before my parents split up, it was just my brother and me. Um, Next door, there were three boys, uh, our ages, uh, so one was my age, another one was my brother’s age, and the other one was a little younger. Across the street, there were also three boys, uh, my age, my brother’s age, and one a little younger, uh. Next door to that, there were two boys on my other side, there was one boy. A couple doors down across the street, there were two boys, then another boy, and then another boy [laughter]. So there were a lot of boys growing up in the neighborhood,

Fredrick Harris: Right. You can imagine all the things-

Mario L. Small: All the same age.

Fredrick Harris: [Laughter] that went on, on that street.

Mario L. Small: And you can imagine, and, you know, in Panama, Panama’s hot And, uh, the roofs of the house, of the houses, at least in this neighborhood, in working class neighborhoods, were made of zinc. And so it’s very hard inside, uh, in the summer, actually year round. And so we spent a lot of time outside and so a lot of my childhood and many of my childhood memories have to do with, uh, large groups of boys. Spending a lot of time, uh, playing sports and getting into trouble. And uh, learning how to, you know, figure your own life out just with other boys. And realizing you’re really good at some things and not as good at others and getting picked on and having to defend yourself, uh, getting teased and living with it, teasing others. So it was a, it was a, it was a, you know, a long, uh, socialization process by my peers that, uh, I very much, uh, remember fondly, uh, many years later.

Fredrick Harris: Right. So you provide a very thick description of, of that aspect of your life, of growing up in Panama City. Um, just thinking back, um, through that example, or perhaps others, how did that experience or others shape, if at all, your approach to the study of Sociology?

Mario L. Small: Yeah, it’s a really good question. Um, you know, there’s a nice old paper by Nisbett and Wilson, psychologists, that argue that, um, we have very limited insight into our own motives and C. Wright Mills said a similar kind of thing. Actually, C. Wright Mills, the sociologist who was at Columbia for many years,

Fredrick Harris: Right.

Mario L. Small: Uh, said a similar thing about, um, as a, as an interviewer. And, uh, and knowing that, I’m a little hesitant to make a connection between my prior experience and my, uh, and my own, it’s motivating my own decisions as a scholar, but having said that, I mean, it’s, it’s very hard to not at least draw some kinds of connections. So one of the things that, um, I certainly, uh, emerged as opposed as a result of my childhood is a lot of exposure to inequality and, uh, and difference. So, um, I, I, as a child, I lived in this working-class neighborhood and I went to school in an Episcopal school and, um, the Episcopal Church in Panama is very different from the Episcopal Church in the U.S. Uh, so in Panama, every Episcopal I knew was Black, um, it’s a Black church. I actually didn’t know there were white Episcopals until I came to the U.S.

Fredrick Harris: [Laughter]

Mario L. Small: Whereas here it’s almost the opposite. Um, and, uh, uh, and I mean, it’s just a very different kind of church, but the schools themselves, uh, are very much almost, I guess, like Catholic schools here. Uh, so they are good schools, often, uh, children of the elites send their schools there and so on. And so, uh, my school had, uh, it was a very small school, K through 12, uh, was about not even 500 students, uh, but it had many children of the Panamanian elites. most of them were not Episcopal. And so I, I was, and so when I went to school, I, I saw, and when I went to my friend’s houses, not everybody, but some of them lived in these huge houses in these very ritzy neighborhoods and so on. And, uh, you know, I went back home, took off my uniform, put on my street clothes and went and hung out on the streets and played basketball or soccer or baseball with sticks and so on. And so I had a very, very, uh, my whole childhood exposure to a very different class context. And that certainly, uh, got me interested in the relationship between neighborhoods and class and socialization and in class difference, and very much interested in polarization, what we now call polarization, but at the time I would’ve just described as very different perceptions of the world across very different parts of the socioeconomic distribution.

Fredrick Harris: Yeah.

Mario L. Small: And, um, so that for sure, uh, played some role. I also got interested in segregation, I would say partly and again, you know, who knows how much, um, you know, my motives did in fact unfold, unless I believe they did, but, um, the, you know, so I described myself as having grown up in Panama from parents who were born in Panama, uh, from grandparents who themselves had been born in Panama as well. But in spite of that, um, everybody, uh, in my family, uh, eventually, so the generation above my grandparents, they’re all from the West Indies. So from Trinidad, Jamaica, Barbados, primarily.

Fredrick Harris: Right.

Mario L. Small: These were laborers who had come over to Panama to, uh, uh, to help build the canal, first, and then maintain it. Uh, so my grandfather, for example, was a dredger um, uh, my grandparents on the other side, worked in the military bases in the canal zone, et cetera, my whole family, essentially, in part because of how much discrimination there was in Panama itself, worked essentially for the U.S. government. And the interesting thing about that is that spite of the fact that all four of my grandparents were born in Panama, all of them not only spoke overwhelmingly as their first language, West Indian English, but I would say either only passably, or sometimes even less so, spoke Spanish. 

Fredrick Harris: Hmmm.

Mario L. Small: Cause they grew up in highly segregated neighborhoods for canal zone workers.

Fredrick Harris: Interesting.

Mario L. Small: Even their children. So my father didn’t even start learning Spanish, even though he was the child of people who had already been born in Panama and himself was born in Panama, he had only, he really only started learning Spanish when he was in about third grade, when finally the canal zone started getting required to teach Spanish to the children. And so when you think about, uh, segregation and the extent to which linguistic isolation can manifest itself so powerfully generation after generation, it’s, it’s hard not to think about now here in the United States, how segregation manifests itself, manifested itself differently.

Fredrick Harris: Right.

Mario L. Small: And so some of my interest is, you know, residential segregation in race and cities, I’m sure has something to do, uh, with that experience.

Fredrick Harris: Right.

Mario L. Small: So those are some of the ways uh, you know, I would say, I guess the last thing I would say is, um, even though my, my scholarly interest and formal interest in network analysis didn’t come until much, much later, decades later, the seeds were certainly planted, as I could see both the interpersonal network dynamics that were unfolding in the neighborhoods and in the schools that I grew up in.

Fredrick Harris: Right. So you went from, to warmer climates in the United States and landed in the Midwest, um, Minnesota.

Mario L. Small: Yep. [Laughter]

Fredrick Harris: [Laughter] which is quite cooler. Um, actually, um, and you attended, uh, Carleton College.

Mario L. Small: Yes.

Fredrick Harris: What was that experience like?

Mario L. Small: Yeah. So, uh, it was funny, you mentioned culture, uh, because the truth is, um, I didn’t mind the weather. I mean, it’s, you know, I’m not gonna say I loved being in, you know, 10 degree below weather, but what I’m saying is that when I think about what was hardest about Minnesota and Carlton, the weather wasn’t it, it was really the culture shock. What I now need to call culture shock at the time, I just thought of “Why is everybody so different, uh, from anything I’ve experienced?” And, uh, you know, the, so just to give you some context, the, so Carleton College, it’s a very, it’s a great college, uh, academically, it’s a fantastic college, located in a small town called Northfield, Minnesota, which for some reason has two colleges, Carlton and St. Olaf. And what was interesting about Northfield, Minnesota is this, at the time, it was a, you know, one-street town, one street light, uh, couple banks, one supermarket, this kind of thing, two, three bars. Its claim to fame was that it was the place where Jesse James, the old bank robber in the 1800s, had been defeated. And it was also an extremely Scandinavian town. The whole region was. So Carlton was very, very Scandinavian, [Laughter] Very, very kind of Nordic culture. So, uh, in this context I definitely stood out, uh, you know, my accent, my looks, my color, my clothes, you know, um, everything and it, it was a difficult adjustment. I won’t lie. It was definitely difficult.

Fredrick Harris: Right. Right. So you majored in, in sociology.

Mario L. Small: Yes.

Fredrick Harris: And anthropology.

Mario L. Small: Yes.

Fredrick Harris: Um, at Carleton, um, how did you go about choosing that major or majors?

Mario L. Small: Yeah, that’s a good question. So if, if, you know, if you grew up in a place like Panama, at least the way I did, the way it worked is: if you were a good in school and especially if you were good in math and phy-, so math and physics were my favorite subjects. Um, I actually took sociology in co- in high school one year and I didn’t like it [laughter], which is very funny in retrospect. Um, but if you were, if you had some capacity and you had some, um, what you did is you just went into engineering and the real only issue at the time was what kind of engineering I would do. So I was very interested in systems like computer science and systems engineering. You know, my brother went on to become, uh, mechanical engineering. My other brother, so I, my, after my, uh, father remarried, he had two more boys, so my, the third in line, he ended up doing robotics [laughter] and then the one after that, he was into video game design. That was, was, you know.

Fredrick Harris: So you’re the outlier.

Mario L. Small: Yeah. So I went to study computer science and I did. And, um, or at least that was, that, that was what I declared as my likely major, you know, that was my job. I, my first college job was going around and fixing people’s computers Uh, but I, I took a sociology course on a whim, uh, with a professor named Nader Saiedi, uh, who was an Iranian social theorist who had studied at the University of Wisconsin and I just loved it. I mean, it was just completely eye-opening. The idea that you could perceive the world through very different categories, that by their very nature, would force you to see things that you hadn’t seen before. Uh, it was really social theory and, you know, I started taking more courses in theory, I took a lot of courses in philosophy, um, and just the idea of thinking about the world as something that could be understood more or less effectively as a function of the quality of the categories you had in your mind was just fascinating to me. And so I just ended up majoring in sociology/anthropology there, it was a double major, and there were theory courses in both sociology and anthropology, and I just ate them up, you know, um, Nader Saiedi and Jay Levy, uh, Jim Fisher, uh, Bev Nagle. I still remember my professors very clearly because they had such a big impact on how I thought about the world.

Fredrick Harris: Did they say to you that you should go, go on to graduate school and get a PhD or, and so that’s one question and the second question is, is that, how did you go back to your family of scientists and engineers to say, “Mom and Dad, I’m gonna be a sociologist.”

Mario L. Small: [Laughter] Yeah. So I got, well, that was funny. So I, um, so I was the first, uh, so I was kind of lucky in that way, plus, you know, um, we didn’t have that much money. So when I left, it was a one way ticket and I wasn’t sure when I was going back and so I kind of had the distance to help me. There were no cell phones at the time, every time I called, I’d have to go to the public phone and the- down the, and, you know, put in my quarters, you know, for a quick few-minute call

Fredrick Harris: And I guess, letters and postcards didn’t quite convey that, correct? [Laughter]

Mario L. Small: [Laughter] Exactly. They get a letter every now and then. But when I, you know, I’ll, I’ll give, uh, I’ll give my parents credit for that. When I finally decided I wanted to major in sociology and anthropology. I’m not gonna say they were thrilled, but I distinctly remember, well, I won’t say who, uh, to protect the innocent, but one parent saying, “Well, uh, you’re not gonna make a lot of money, but you’re gonna help people, and that’s good too.” And that is when I realized they thought it was social work. [Laughter] Um, and so they were not thrilled, but, um, and, uh, but two, I think two things helped. One is, um, uh, that, um, it was clear I really wanted this because I just kept taking course after course after course after course, I mean reading, reading, reading, I had, it’s funny when I was in high school, I wasn’t much of a reader, even growing up. I, I, I liked math, I like chemistry, I like physics, I like playing with numbers, I like programming, I like engineering books. I wasn’t much to sit down and read a novel. I mean, I like going out and playing sports and being out with my friends, uh, but I, I just didn’t have the patience to sit. Uh, And that changed, uh, once I got introduced to social theory, I mean, I was reading volumes upon volumes upon volumes. Um, and so it was very clear that I loved this. And so by the time you’d asked whether the faculty encouraged me to do a PhD. Not really, they didn’t really have to. I didn’t really know what a PhD was. Um, I just knew I wanted more schooling, which it turns out in retrospect was not a very thoughtful way to approach the PhD program. But I, um, so I, I applied right after, I mean, in the middle of my junior year, I applied to multiple programs. And I got into, I first got into Berkeley on a very nice, uh, scholarship. And so then I called my parents and then they were thrilled. That took a lot of the sting off of uh-[laughter].

Fredrick Harris: [Laughter] Yeah, but you didn’t go to Berkeley, though.

Mario L. Small: No, I ended up- it’s funny. I, I was pretty sure I was just gonna go straight there. And, um, by the end of my time in college, I knew I wanted to, um, live in a small city. And, um, you know, the small cities that had the strongest programs were Boston, um, were Harvard in Boston and Berkeley in San Francisco. So it was really between those two. And I, you know, again, I, I, I’d be lying if I said that I was very thoughtful or strategic about the process.

Fredrick Harris: Oh, that’s interesting, you end up working, being a professor at Harvard, but, so you went there and so who did you work with and how, how did you decide to write a dissertation on urban poverty?

Mario L. Small: Oh, the last one’s easy. So I went there and I hated it. And, um, I, you know, I, I didn’t fit in socially. I didn’t fit in intellectually, I thought it was too professionally oriented, I just didn’t understand graduate school. And I came in thinking, oh, everybody just wants to come here and read more Foucault or read more Max Weber or read more Derrida or whatever it is, and just talk. And I just didn’t realize that that is not the mortal experience, especially at that institution. It’s a little more common elsewhere. Um, and so it was difficult for me to adjust. Um, but the, and so by the end of the, my second year, I was pretty sure I wanted to leave. And, um, and it was not, I mean, I was doing very well academically, I just didn’t like it socially. So I, I published my second year paper in a good journal, and, um, in Theory in Society, that was my first publication in 1999, I believe. Uh, so, uh, sociology of knowledge, paper, um, and, uh, Kathy Newman, who was also a longtime Columbia faculty member in Anthropology for many years, had just left Columbia for Harvard in 1998. And, um, she had started a program in inequality and social policy and the, the way they described the program, it sounded like a dream place for people who were just interested in ideas and all of this stuff. And so I thought, “Well, I’ll do that program if I can. And if I get in, I’ll stay and, you know, I got in and more importantly, um, a, a faculty member who could kind of tell I wasn’t happy recommended I go have a chat with Kathy Newman. And this was in the, towards the end of my second year, nobody knew I wanted to leave because they thought, “Well, he’s doing great on paper, he must love it.” But I had a long chat with Kathy Newman. And, uh, she was fantastic. I was like, “I can connect to this person.” She was thoughtful, turns out she had been a philosophy major, but was very interested in, in social inequality, and she was one of the first people I had met who I could see as a role model, as a person, uh, which I had not experienced enough. And so then I thought, “I’ll stay.” And so I stayed in a couple of more years and I still hated it [laughter].

Fredrick Harris: [Laughter]

Mario L. Small: So, but, but, um, an opportunity came up, um, and, uh, I, I’ll spare you the details, but it occurred to me that I could move away and move from Cambridge, which I didn’t like, to Boston, uh, and live in a racially diverse community near, uh, predominantly Puerto Rican housing project and do research in a space that feels more comfortable than Boston did at the time.

Fredrick Harris: Wow. So this is how you dec- you, you-

Mario L. Small: Oh, yeah.

Fredrick Harris: Started your dissertation, which ended up as part of your, part of your first book. Um,

Mario L. Small: Correct.

Fredrick Harris: So you did field research,

Mario L. Small: Correct.

Fredrick Harris: Um, conducting, uh, ethnography as, as a part of your dissertation.

Mario L. Small: Correct.

Fredrick Harris: Um, did you face any challenges in the field? Um,

Mario L. Small: Yeah, I did, but I have to say the challenges all- were all dwarfed in comparison to everything else. So socially I just fit in and it was great. And that just made a lot of things a lot easier.

Fredrick Harris: Why do you think you fit in?

Mario L. Small: Well, everybody was Puerto Rican and I’m Panamanian, so we all spoke, the same language. And we are all Caribbean Latinos, which means, I mean, I didn’t look that different from a lot of people.

Fredrick Harris: Right.

Mario L. Small: I like the same food. I eat primarily rice, for example, just like everybody else. You know, uh, we all listen to the same music. Um, you know, we all, um, you know, a lot of our upbringings actually weren’t that different, I mean, this was a low-income housing project. I didn’t grow up in a housing project, as I said, I grew up in a working-class neighborhood, but a lot of the experiences of kids and the outdoor life were very, very similar. Um, in fact, the, what I liked most about fieldwork was being outside all the time and just like I was when I was a kid. So it was really, primarily social. I mean, I came up with a, of course intellectual justification. There was interested in neighborhood poverty, I was interested inequality, et cetera. But the truth is that the primary thing I got out of- that I wanted to get out of it was to get outta Cambridge and spend some time in the neighborhood.

Fredrick Harris: That’s interesting how you sort of fell into that, that project. I, I would’ve thought it was, was purely strategic.

Mario L. Small: No. [laughter]

Fredrick Harris: But I guess not, but things sort of happened that way. So

Mario L. Small: I am the least strategic sociologist that you’ll never meet.

Fredrick Harris: [Laughter]

Mario L. Small: Probably up there. Yeah, it’s terrible.

Fredrick Harris: Right. So let’s switch gears, just, just a bit, you, you started your first position as a professor yeah. Um, at Princeton. And during your stint there, your first book was published. Um, the title of that book is, uh, Villa Victoria, which is the community, I guess you just told us about.

Mario L. Small: That’s correct. Yeah.

Fredrick Harris: Villa Victoria: The Transformation of Social Capital in a Boston Barrio. The book has been described as, “a sociological study that challenges much of the traditional wisdom about the dynamics of ghetto life.”

Mario L. Small: Yeah.

Fredrick Harris: Tell our listeners what traditional wisdom about urban poverty your book challenges.

Mario L. Small: Yeah. So know when I was part of that inequality program I mentioned earlier, I read a lot of work on American cities. And I, one of the faculty members, uh, William Julius, Wilson, who made a big impact on me was part of that group. And he, and he was on my committee, and he had spent a lot of time doing work, uh, at the University of Chicago and writing about the city on the basis of what he’d experienced. And many of the works that we read were write, by group of people who it turns out, had all studied at the University of Chicago. People like Doug Massey, uh, Robert Sampson, Bill Wilson, himself, many others. But your listeners may not know this, but over the course of the eighties and nineties, the University of Chicago was, without a doubt, the most important place in the country, possibly the world, to study urban questions. The Sociology Department at the University of Chicago was the very first one in the country, the 1890s. It ran and still runs the, one of the premier journals in the discipline, the American Journal of Sociology. It, uh, it was the site of several of the early urbanists who were trying to understand at the turn of the 19th, the 20th century, how cities were evolving as a result of, um, migration from other countries, migration from the South by African Americans and so on. And so I was very exposed to this work and I went to Villa Victoria, uh, having read all this stuff, Villa Victoria is that neighborhood in Boston and the neighborhood didn’t look anything like what I had read in those books. And people did not behave like anything like I had read in those books. And a lot of what I saw in those books just didn’t ring true at all. And it turns out a lot of it had to do with the fact that those books had used Chicago expressly as a laboratory to understand the city and Chicago was increasingly becoming an outlier in American cities in a whole bunch of respects. So more depopulation than in poor neighborhoods, on average, uh, uh, more scarcity of establishments, harder to find a grocery store, a convenience store, more isolation, more removal from the rest of the city, it was just very different from what I saw in Boston. And so even a lot of the terms, “social isolation,” “depopulation,” et cetera. You can sort of imagine the picture you get, when you think about these neighborhoods

Fredrick Harris: Or the, or the “male marriageable pool” as William Juli-Julius Wilson talked about.

Mario L. Small: Yes.

Fredrick Harris: -in his book on, uh, urban poverty.

Mario L. Small: Exactly. A lot of these ideas just didn’t ring true. And so rather than ignore them, I just spent a lot of time trying to figure out why? And I ended up writing a book that was essentially a, a critique book, saying, you know, we need to pay a lot more attention to what’s happening in different cities, other than Chicago, because we’re gonna see that, you know, a lot of people just aren’t isolated in that way, for example. Um, so let me step back a little bit. Um, one of the core ideas in, in the literature at the time was that if you lived in a poor neighborhood, because, uh, the Black middle class had departed from many of the central neighborhoods in the country and left behind the more poor, predominantly African American population, many poor neighborhoods were essentially depopulated and socially isolated.

Fredrick Harris: Mm-hmmm

Mario L. Small: Well, Villa Victoria, separate from the fact that it wasn’t predominantly Black, um, but that had not been historical trajectory. It was actually a very high density area, rather than an area that was depopulated, because nobody left, people were trying to get into it because it was right in the middle of the City of Boston and one of the most prime, uh, pieces of real estate in the city, in the South End. It’s- I mean, right now, the South End, you know, if you tried to buy a condo in the South End, it would cost you a couple million dollars, uh, all around Villa Victoria, there are multimillion dollar condos. And then in, in, in Villa Victoria itself is a public housing project, uh, where you pay a third of your income in rent, uh, regardless of where your rent is of what your income is, excuse me. And so there were many other ways, but that, and in other ways, I just saw that, uh, what I was reading just wasn’t making sense and I thought, “We need to think about cities very differently.” And here, again, my experience at Carlton shaped how I wrote, because what I thought was important was reshaping the categories we were using to understand the city.

Fredrick Harris: Right, right. So you may have anticipated the- one question I do have, and I’m very curious about, and so you noted already that the city of Chicago is best known for research on urban poverty, um, mostly because of the University of Chicago’s, um, Sociology Department’s, um, work on urban poverty. How important do you think focusing your research in Boston, or to say it another way or think about it at a different way, um, a city other than Chicago offered a different perspective to debates about urban poverty? So, just to offer some additional context to my question, as you know, the studies of urban poverty sort of began or flourished, um, in the 1990s, but they’re also centered mostly on the African American population, with a particular focus, again, on Chicago. So if you had done a similar study, the one you did in Boston, um, in a Puerto Rican neighborhood, sort of like Chicago’s Humboldt Park, which is north, um, on the north side of the city, would that poor community look more like Villa Victoria in Boston or the poor communities on the south and west side of Chicago?

Mario L. Small: Yeah. Yeah. That’s a really good question. Um, I would say it’s a mix, so it’s partly a mix because it’s not in the south side or the west side or not the kind of the west side as we think about it. Um, uh, and, and so in that sense, it would look different from the African American communities in the far- that are also kind of moderate to high poverty in the south side of Chicago. It would also look, uh, similar, in many respects, to Villa Victoria in that a lot of, in fact, I know this, a lot of the local establishments are very much culturally centered. We go back to the idea of culture. They’re very culturally centered or culturally focused on the interests of, I would say, not just Puerto Ricans, but Caribbean Latinos priorities. So you can buy plantains pretty easily, you get rice anywhere, you can get rice and beans in any restaurant, uh, et cetera. You can buy mofongo, uh, you can eat alcapurrias, whatever it is. And so you can find foods and products that are gonna be of interest to this particular population just as you would, in Boston. But, but it would also be quite different from Boston and perhaps more similar to the south side of Chicago in other ways. So, uh, the, the physical landscape in which people live does affect relations. So for your listeners who may not have had a lot of experience with Boston and Chicago, um, Chicago blocks are quite long. So in New York City, there’s 20 blocks to a mile. In Chicago, there’s only eight blocks to a mile, so each block is much longer. Um, Chicago is a younger city than either Boston or New York. So it was built in the middle of the 19th century. That’s when it grew. Uh, And it grew essentially in kind of marshy land that was filled in, uh, in the plains. And so there’s no hills, there’s nothing like that, but.

Fredrick Harris: Very flat.

Mario L. Small: Um, it’s very flat and there’s a lot of expansion space. And so neighborhoods are kind of expansive, streets are wider, sidewalks are wider, just kind of more space. and so, because there’s more space, uh, there’s more possibility for distinct neighborhood cultures that are separate from one another. You can just, in a pretty broad area, concentrate a few people and sort of create a local culture. So there’s that. And then just the way the city’s organized around aldermen and alderwomen, Chicago is very much a neighborhood-like city, much more neighborhood focused than other cities I’ve been in. And that permeates all neighborhoods. And so, um, and even more than in Boston, so Villa Victoria itself is a housing project and people think of it that way and it’s distinct from its surrounding areas, of course, uh, but it’s quite small. It’s certainly smaller than the Columbia campus. It’s a very small neighborhood. You, you, you know, walk a mile and you’re in a totally different neighborhood. And in, in Chicago, you can walk several miles and still be in the same neighborhood. And the south of side of Chicago, you can walk miles upon miles upon miles and see nothing but African Americans.

Fredrick Harris: Exactly.

Mario L. Small: And so it’s a very different kind of urban landscape. It’s a little difficult to explain, uh, without pictures, but it’s a very different physical landscape that does shape relations, um, in a, in a way that you don’t see in Boston.

Fredrick Harris: Right. Right. So let’s talk about your second book. Um, During the time of its publication, you, um, moved from Princeton to the great University of Chicago, then as we’ve mentioned, the citadel of research on urban poverty.

Mario L. Small: Yeah.

Fredrick Harris: Now that book is Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life. Now this study is not solely about poverty, nor is it focused on Chicago. Um, Unanticipated Gains is about the networks that develop among New York city mothers whose children were enrolled in daycare centers.

Mario L. Small: Yeah.

Fredrick Harris: What does your study of mothers at daycares tell us about how social capital, um, this defined simplistically as the social glue that bring brings people together, um, how does it operate across social class? Uh, could you say more about what that study was about?

Mario L. Small: Yeah, so that study was very much a look at how networks, uh, matter. And, uh, the, the big insight of that book is the following: so everybody has an intuition that your connections make a difference. Uh, we kind of all know, that business schools and, uh, professional schools of all sorts sort of impart that idea into students repeatedly. Uh, and we also know that our networks matter, not just for things like professional development, but also for our wellbeing, right? In the pandemic, one of the things that we all experienced firsthand is that being isolated from our networks was very, very mentally tough. There’s a lot of, uh, depression induced by isolation. And so, uh, which is not surprising, uh, networks matter to our everyday, uh, feeling of belonging, to our sense of safety, to our mental health, uh, to our ability to weather something like a pandemic, right? You need money, uh, resources, support, you name it. And, um, in this study, what I argue, based on what I found, is that we have been ignoring the fact that it’s not just the case, that the, that we don’t just make our networks whole cloth. We don’t just go around being friendly and connected people. We make our networks in the routine organizations we participate in, in the childcare centers we drop our kids off, in the schools we take our kids, in the university campuses we go to work in, in the law firms we work in, in the construction sites we participate in, right? And the garage shops we fix cars in. We form our networks primarily as a result of the organizations we participate in. And what’s even more important is that those organizations, aren’t just the site, it’s not just the place, they end up structuring the nature of our networks. And that second part was extremely important to the project. So, um, both in terms of how we’re supposed to interact with one another, but also the expectations of behavior and trust and so on are very much shaped by the organization. So, you know, I’ll just give you some, some really simple examples to make this clear. Um, right now, uh, if a student comes to me, uh, and asks me for a favor, uh, how much I’m likely to do it will depend on whether the student is a Columbia University student. If they’re from another institution, I, I will for sure be polite, um, and I’ll try to help to the extent I can, but if I don’t have the time, it’s just not gonna happen. Whereas if, uh, they’re from Columbia, because of the expectation set by the University, of course I’m gonna do it.

Fredrick Harris: Right.

Mario L. Small: But that’s not just because I’m a faculty member and I’m supposed to, and of course that’ll happen, but that wouldn’t even happen, Even if that weren’t my job. So let’s say, uh, uh, an f contacts me and ask me for something, some advice on how professors think about problem A, B or C. Again, if it’s a person in an institution I’m not affiliated with, if I help them, it’ll only be because I had the time. Whereas if a Columbia accountant sends me that email, I’m far more likely to do it, and it doesn’t have to be anything involving my work. If somebody from the Columbia Medical school says, “Hey, Professor Small, uh, we’re trying to understand how somebody did A, B and C, it’s not your work, could you help us?” I’m gonna say, yes. And so the institution, among the many things it does is first, of course, it sets expectations about behavior, which we feel, y’know compelled to follow, but then separately from that, it creates an institutional affiliation that ends up altering how much we are willing to do for other members and how much we are willing to do for other members in our network is part of how our networks carry social capital. And so, um, it’s very difficult to understand really the extent to which your networks matter to you and the extent to which they have an impact on your behavior and your wellbeing, and so on, without understanding the institutions in which people are forming their social capital.

Fredrick Harris: So, um, after having been at Chicago and being dean there, you actually returned to Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Mario L. Small: Yes.

Fredrick Harris: Uh, uh, back to Harvard, not as a graduate student, of course, but as a professor. Um, and it’s there where your next book appears. It seems as every time you like you move, there’s a book coming out.

Mario L. Small: [Laughter]

Fredrick Harris: I dunno if there’s a correlation or not or it’s totally probably by accident or incident that this happens, but, the book is Someone To Talk To: How Networks Matter in Practice.

Mario L. Small: Yes.

Fredrick Harris: Um, tell our listeners what this book is about.

Mario L. Small: Yeah. So this is a book, uh, where, um, I probed something I had already, I had discovered in the previous book interviewing the mothers. So for the book on how mothers networks were altered by enrolling their children in their childcare centers, I discovered that, um, a lot of what we, and a lot of what I had read about trust and, and the factors affecting whether people are willing to trust others didn’t seem to hold. So, uh, many people were, seemed totally willing to leave their kids with people they didn’t even know that well, even strangers almost, um, if, if their context was right and the institutional affiliations were there and I found this, I had no kids at the time. And I, and I was surprised by this because the models of trust that I had read, particularly from a rational actor perspective, assume that, um, whether you trust somebody is essentially a function of a couple of ratios, um, what you get from being right, and what you suffer from being wrong and the probability that you’re right and the probability that you’re wrong. And, um, if you ask, uh, some mother you’ve never met before, but is in your kid’s classroom or someone at the airport, uh, uh, sitting or standing near a gate and you need to go to the bathroom to take care of your kid, the gain is, yeah, you get somebody to take care of your kid for a couple hours, but the losses they take your kid or they screw up, or your kid gets hurt, I mean, the losses are huge and you have no way of assessing the probabilities of being right and wrong, um, beyond impressionistic things you might get about the context. And so I thought this was really interesting and intriguing, and I decided to probe it further. And what I did was I wrote, I began a project where I tried to find the simplest thing that people could do or get from others in their network and that is to get them to listen. And so I tried probing when people had deeply personal, difficult, sensitive things to vent about, to talk about, how did they decide whom to talk to? And, um, particularly under what circumstances they’re willing to talk to or turn to people they don’t know that well for something that’s deeply personal. And what I found was that that was kind of the wrong way to ask the question, because the truth is, even though just about, everybody will say their heart, they’re careful to not trust too much. And they would only confide in a small number of people and blah, blah, blah. If you actually reconstruct people’s experiences, as they report them, uh, people are far more likely to confide deeply personal things to people they don’t know that well than they’re willing to say about themselves. It’s actually quite remarkable.

Fredrick Harris: Right. Right. So this is very interesting. Um, I wanna turn a bit and, uh, get your thoughts about methods. Um, how do you go about approaching the study of, of sociology. Now, your work has incorporated both quantitative and qualitative approaches, from number crunching of large data sets to the use of ethnography interviews and case studies.

Mario L. Small: Yes.

Fredrick Harris: You’ve raised questions recently about qualitative social science research.

Mario L. Small: Yes.

Fredrick Harris: By, you’ve raised questions about qualitative social science research by highlighting its limitations when compared to quantitative approaches, indeed your forthcoming co-authored book titled, Qualitative Literacy: A Guide to Evaluating Ethnographic and Interview Research, offers advice for assessing qualitative research. Why do you think sociologists and qualitative social scientists more generally need to establish rigor when conducting qualitative research?

Mario L. Small: Yeah, that’s a really good question. So I, I think this is extremely important to science. So the term qualitative research is used to describe a lot of very different things, uh, and some of it has nothing to do with science at all. So a lot of humanistic research, uh, is qualitative research and it can be done well or it can be done poorly and it’s important that it be done well. But what I’m talking about specifically is the importance of doing qualitative research, uh, for questions that have social scientific import. And the reason I spend so much time thinking and writing about this is that I have become convinced that many of the people who share that goal, producing qualitative work that is important to science, are doing a lot of things that don’t make any sense and that aren’t actually gonna improve the quality of their work. And what do I mean by that? Um, there are a lot of times, for example, when people doing in-depth interview research, uh, where you do an interview and you talk at length to somebody in an open ended way about a whole bunch of topics, uh, ver- uh, often very casually, but typically within the confines of a topic, you want to understand better. Um, a lot of people worry that their work isn’t gonna be taken seriously as science because it’s qualitative. And so what they do is they try to do things that make it sound or appear more scientific. Uh, the, the great physicist Richard Feynman had a, a great passage. Uh, he has a great essay in “Cargo Cult Science,” where he argues against this idea, but there’s a version of this in the social sciences where people will do things like, well, they’re gonna try to, you know, randomly sample, uh, people for their interview study, even though they’re only targeting 60 people. And those 60 people are not going to get the same questionnaire, they’re all gonna have, you’re going to have 60 different conversations with them. And even if you “randomly target” 60 people, uh, you’re not gonna get 60 responses, you’re gonna have to try to reach a hundred people to get 60 people talking to an interview, and if you’re, you’re good and lucky, and, um, and you’re not gonna have information enough on who, uh, said no to make any inferences about how representative of your group is of the people you called. And even if you did, and if you were somehow selected a sampling frame where you, everybody was selected with no probability and you produced weights, there’s nothing to weight because the interviews are qualitative. Um, A lot of practices that seem popular, particularly among budding scientists, are not really gonna improve the quality of their qualitative work.

Fredrick Harris: Hmm.

Mario L. Small: And a lot of what I’ve been doing, uh, is two things: first, showing that that’s just not gonna give you what you think it’s gonna give you, but then showing you what you really should be looking at, uh, when you’re doing qualitative work, the purpose of qualitative work and the purpose of different kinds of qualitative work, and the purpose of different kinds of, uh, qualitative work are just very different. So I’ll just give you an example. Um, as a social scientist, you can run an experiment, right? Where you give people, like psychologists do a treatment and you assign two control and experimental groups. You can run a survey, right? Like the na- like the national surveys, where you sample 2,000 people in the U.S., And you try to find out about what their political beliefs are about a particular issue,

Fredrick Harris: Right.

Mario L. Small: Or, alternatively, third, you can do what I did in my first book. You can go into a neighborhood and spend two years there, observing everything and taking field notes every night, and then studying those field notes and write a book about it, just the way anthropologists do, right? That’s ethnography. You can interview people, right? So you can find 50 or 80 or a hundred or whatever number of people there are and have very open-end ended conversations about something you don’t know very well. So, you know, my, my old friend, Celeste Watkins Hayes, found a couple hundred women, uh, who, well, no, she found about 80 women, uh, who are African American, who had been diagnosed HIV positive. And she just interviewed them because we didn’t know that much about African American women who were HIV positive, broad interviews about every aspect of their lives. That’s open-ended, that’s the totally different method. The key is that each method is good at something very different.

Fredrick Harris: Mm-hmmm.

Mario L. Small: And so the way to do each method well is to maximize your probability of getting the thing that method is good for and sort of really, really well. So in an experiment, you need random assignment. In a survey, you need a large enough sample selected with known probability. Nobody’s gonna evaluate an experiment of whether you spend enough time in the field, that doesn’t make any sense, that’s not the purpose of an experiment, right? [Laughter] you’re not gonna evaluate a survey on whether there were enough open-ended interview questions in there, that’s not the point. In fact, in a survey, every single person needs to get exactly the same instrument, with the same questions, in the same order, so you can feel confident that your inferences are applicable to the broader population. By extension, you’re not gonna evaluate an ethnography on whether, you know, um, is an experiment in there, I mean, that just doesn’t make any sense. You evaluate it on the basis of what ethnographies are good for, which is observing, accurately, people, in their natural context. And so what you need to worry about is whether the ethnographic researcher accurately captured people in their natural context. And similarly, when you’re evaluating an interview, you evaluated on the basis of whether the interviewer effectively elicited, um, important aspects of people’s lives by getting people to trust you. And, uh, a lot of what I’ve spent my time writing about is how to detect those things in qualitative research. How do you know that the ethnography was done really well? How do you know that the interviews are really done really well, rather than, um, trying to take your interview and turn it into a survey or something like that. I don’t think that’s gonna work.

Fredrick Harris: Right. I see.

So lastly, I have a question for you. Um, I would like to ask about something astounding I found out about your transition from Cambridge, um, to New York City, ability to quickly find school placements for your two young children when you arrived last fall. I have to tell you most parents in New York City pull their hair out, trying to find daycare and school spots for their kids, but you managed to do so with unusual speed, I’m told. So how, uh, for a scholar who wrote a prize-winning book that detail the ins and outs of social networks in daycares in New York City, your rapid success verged on, um, let’s say inside trading?

Mario L. Small: [Laughter]

Fredrick Harris: How were you able to pull this off?

Mario L. Small: So, I’ll say two things. First, it was extremely hard. [Laughter]

Fredrick Harris: [Laughter] It was still quick, right?

Mario L. Small: Yeah. It was reasonably fast, but um, only fast in terms of number of weeks, slow in terms of number of hours I spent on it. Um, two networks certainly played a role. We spent a lot of time asking about options and probing. And so here- are the role of networks, um, mattering before as opposed to after you enroll your children in childcare centers. Um, and then third, we were helped, I’m sure, by the pandemic, in an ironic way. Everybody had assumed that by the fall, we’d be back to normal. I’m sure, um, one or two parents, um, changed their mind about returning to the city and I- in fact, we know that, um, we, we got, uh, two very last slots.

Fredrick Harris: Okay.

Mario L. Small: So luck played a role as well.

Fredrick Harris: Okay. Okay. I was wondering if your next book was going to be Professor Small’s Guide to Finding School Spots in New York City.

Mario L. Small: [Laughter] It would make a lot more money than the other ones.

Fredrick Harris: [Laughter] Thanks so much, Mario, this has been great. Thanks for stopping through The Dean’s Table.

Theme outro music

Mario L. Small: Of course, I appreciate the opportunity, Fred. It’s been a pleasure.

The Dean’s Table is produced by Eric Meyer, with production assistance by Jack Reilly. Our technical engineers are A.J. Mangone, Airiayana Sullivan, and John Weppler. Our researchers are Emma Flaherty and Angeline Lee. Our logo design is by Jessica Lilien, episode portraits are by Cat Willett, and our theme music is by Imperial. I’m your host, Dean Harris.