A Sociologist Surrounded by Macro-Economists and Development Economists: Working on Policy Research at the UN

• In Event: 1523 - Practice Symposium Roundtables
  In Informal Discussion Roundtable: Table 3: Sociology and International Development

Abstract

In the years that I worked for the United Nations (from my graduate student days in 1978 thru retirement in 2006), I was often the only sociologist in the room. Whether the agenda of the meeting was to scope out a study or to critique drafts of a text or whether the room was one of the many basement spaces where the General Assembly delegates negotiated, I was generally a professional outsider. My on-going challenge was how to make meaningful contributions to the discussions that were not immediately discounted because of these perceptions. Of course it didn’t help that I also chose to be a critical voice challenging the dominate mode of thinking about how social, environmental, political economic, and cultural issues were not being properly included in the debates.
The situation often meant that I had three alternatives. The easiest alternative was to introduce research by others which let the outside scholar ‘speak’ in the debate without directly conveying my own views. The second was to make the best argument I could, using the frame of reference of the others in the room in order to gain their acceptance, even when my intervention was not, in my mind, the best social, political, or environmental argument. The third approach involved noting a range of social, cultural, or environmental realities that were excluded by a model or the economic school of thought and by so doing weakening the assertions of the economists in the room while opening potential new lines of thinking.
On the ASA panel, my contribution would include examples of all three types of responses that allowed this sociologist to intervene (and occasionally to contribute a different framework) in spite of the perception that sociological thinking did not have a place in international economic, political, or environmental debates.

Author

• Harris Gleckman, Umass-Boston