503534 ournal of Health and Social BehaviorWheaton 2013
HSBXXX10.1177/0022146513503534J
Introduction to the Pearlin Award Paper
Introducing John Mirowsky
Journal of Health and Social Behavior 54(4) 405–406 © American Sociological Association 2013 DOI: 10.1177/0022146513503534 jhsb.sagepub.com
Blair Wheaton1
My recollection is that John Mirowsky and Catherine Ross met in my medical sociology seminar at Yale circa 1977. I am sure they didn’t exactly meet there, but I do remember that they seemed to know each other a lot better at the end of the seminar than at the beginning of the seminar. Something was clearly happening there, although it is difficult in the case of John and Catherine to call this love at first sight. But obviously, it was something powerful at first sight, as that personal and professional partnership has lasted to this day, much beyond the average shelf life of most marriages, I assume. Over my career, many people have asked me this question, almost as if it is a gossip item: “Okay, who’s the smartest one, John or Catherine?” There are variations, but I have to admit that I have usually found the question to be missing the point. The best analogy is Lennon and McCartney: who is the best songwriter? Really? Is this worth debating when both of them are individually such spectacular songwriters? Carrying through this example, we now have twin Pearlin Awards in the same household in this case, which is right and just and proves that there is meaning in the world. We get it, it is Lennon and McCartney. Here’s the thing: John Mirowsky has one of the most unique styles, in writing, thinking, and in the presentation of research, in the entire discipline. We have to pretend the anonymous reviews are anonymous, but I ask you: can you not tell a John Mirowsky paper by three paragraphs into it? The language is elegant and deceptively straightforward, and a unique feature of John’s work—I think—is the way in which the style of the writing is so closely linked to the substance of the ideas. To be clear, and to be simple about why this award is so deserved, John is one of the most creative thinkers in the entire discipline, a true original thinker in a sea of those who aspire to be; his work is often surprising; he produces clear renderings of apparently conflicting ideas and then, like no one else, shows us exactly how they are related to each other.
His visuals, his graphs, are one of his signatures. Years ago, I joked with Carol Aneshensel and Len Pearlin that I wanted to do a presentation at ASA called “guess the author,” in which I just presented generic pieces of work but in the unique style of the person and then asked the audience, “Who is this?” I submit that you would immediately get John Mirowsky from the omnipresent quadratic curve. This curve is the hallmark of someone who sees beyond superficial oppositions in theory or the simplistic and simplifying assumption of linearity to get to something more interesting and almost always of much greater import. It is actually shocking how many of John’s articles have this curve in them. Everyone has their favorites in the Mirowsky and Ross/Ross and Mirowsky canon; if I try to focus on articles I think were primarily John, I can come up with a number of examples of amazing papers. My favorites include: “The Psychoeconomics of Feeling Underpaid,” in the American Journal of Sociology (Mirowsky 1987), a typical Mirowsky reconstruction of two theories that apparently predict the opposite but, when conditioned by personal income, turn out not to, and having seemingly bizarre but important implications that extend to political sociology, economic sociology, and stratification, implying that at higher incomes, the gap between actual income and the sense of deserved income increases exponentially—a finding that could be used to explain much in the current political climate; “The Consolation-prize Theory of Alienation” (Mirowsky and Ross 1990a), exploring the important connections between status, instrumentalism, and distress that I 1
University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
Corresponding Author: Blair Wheaton, University of Toronto, Department of Sociology, 725 Spadina Avenue, Toronto, ON M5S 2J4, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]
Downloaded from hsb.sagepub.com at NANYANG TECH UNIV LIBRARY on June 9, 2015
406
Journal of Health and Social Behavior 54(4)
had considered in my earlier dissertation and were discussed during that apparently fateful seminar at Yale; “Control or Defense?” (Mirowsky and Ross 1990b), to be clear, a brilliant exposition of the conflict between two strains of attribution theory, one centered on clinical lore and learned helplessness, the other on a locus of control/mastery/ instrumentalism tradition, making clear that both cannot be true and then providing a clear test to decide the issue (where, of course, sociological traditions win); “Age and Depression” (Mirowsky and Ross 1992), a mapping of the life course by the ebb and flow of roles, statuses, and developmental tasks through life and how this ebb and flow combine to produce the (of course) quadratic depression curve, dead-on correct and before its time, because we are now seeing signs of its truth; “Psychiatric Diagnosis as Reified Measurement” (Mirowsky and Ross 1989), enough said; “Life Course Trajectories of Perceived Control” (Mirowsky and Ross 2007), another example of the elegance of visuals in defining an idea; and the recent “Wage Slavery or Creative Work” (Mirowsky 2011), a brilliant social history of work, going back to the ancients and commenting on the evolving meaning of work in lives. There are too many examples to cite, but it is easy to say that John’s career has been instrumental in articulating the larger implications of this area for the discipline at large, and in cognate disciplines that might benefit from listening to us more closely. John and Catherine each have been central players in this important role over the past quarter century. Returning to the music analogy, I will tell you a short story. In the 1960s, I played and sang at an open-mic night in a small coffeehouse in Winnipeg called the 4th Dimension—very ’60s, very cohort specific. Sometimes after me, sometimes before, there was another person playing on those nights whom no one listened to, maybe less than to me; his name was Neil Young. He played some songs in the back room that maybe no one else had heard that are now iconic pieces of twentieth-century musical culture. Brilliance in young people is not always easy to read or predict. The potential in John was clear to me back at Yale, but he was also developing quickly, and it was naturally hard to see where it was going to go. John has had a Neil Young career, and with the same uniqueness and scope and idiosyncrasy that describes the brilliance of Neil Young.
You can see, I hope, how pleased I am that John is received this year’s Pearlin Award, first, because it will dispel the tension at home, but second, because it is so clearly right, and this is the time.
References Mirowsky, John. 1987. “The Psycho-economics of Feeling Underpaid: Distributive Justice and the Earnings of Husbands and Wives.” American Journal of Sociology 92(6):1404–34. Mirowsky, John. 2011. “Wage Slavery or Creative Work?” Society and Mental Health 1(2):73–88. Mirowsky, John and Catherine E. Ross. 1989. “Psychiatric Diagnosis as Reified Measurement.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 30(1):11–25. Mirowsky, John and Catherine E. Ross. 1990a. “The Consolation-prize Theory of Alienation.” American Journal of Sociology 95(6):1505–35. Mirowsky, John and Catherine E. Ross. 1990b. “Control or Defense: Depression and the Sense of Control over Good and Bad Outcomes.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 31(1):71–86. Mirowsky, John and Catherine E. Ross. 1992. “Age and Depression.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 33(3):187–205. Mirowsky, John and Catherine E. Ross. 2007. “Life Course Trajectories of Perceived Control and Their Relationship to Education.” American Journal of Sociology 112(5):1339–82.
Author Biography Blair Wheaton is a professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto. Previously, he was chair of the department from 2003 to 2012 and director of the Institute for Human Development, Life Course, and Aging at the University of Toronto (1999–2003), as well as academic director of the Statistics Canada Research Data Centre in the Toronto Region (2001–2004). He was the first recipient of the Leonard I. Pearlin Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Sociology of Mental Health in 2000. He received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin in 1976 and held faculty positions at Yale and McGill before moving to Toronto in 1989. Professor Wheaton is developing a new instrument called the Residential Life History Profile, designed to assess the impact of both past and current neighborhoods on a range of lifecourse outcomes. His current research also focuses on the impact of 9/11 on the subjective welfare of Americans and new evidence on the influence of maternal employment on child mental health.
Downloaded from hsb.sagepub.com at NANYANG TECH UNIV LIBRARY on June 9, 2015
HSBXXX10.1177/0022146513503534J
Introduction to the Pearlin Award Paper
Introducing John Mirowsky
Journal of Health and Social Behavior 54(4) 405–406 © American Sociological Association 2013 DOI: 10.1177/0022146513503534 jhsb.sagepub.com
Blair Wheaton1
My recollection is that John Mirowsky and Catherine Ross met in my medical sociology seminar at Yale circa 1977. I am sure they didn’t exactly meet there, but I do remember that they seemed to know each other a lot better at the end of the seminar than at the beginning of the seminar. Something was clearly happening there, although it is difficult in the case of John and Catherine to call this love at first sight. But obviously, it was something powerful at first sight, as that personal and professional partnership has lasted to this day, much beyond the average shelf life of most marriages, I assume. Over my career, many people have asked me this question, almost as if it is a gossip item: “Okay, who’s the smartest one, John or Catherine?” There are variations, but I have to admit that I have usually found the question to be missing the point. The best analogy is Lennon and McCartney: who is the best songwriter? Really? Is this worth debating when both of them are individually such spectacular songwriters? Carrying through this example, we now have twin Pearlin Awards in the same household in this case, which is right and just and proves that there is meaning in the world. We get it, it is Lennon and McCartney. Here’s the thing: John Mirowsky has one of the most unique styles, in writing, thinking, and in the presentation of research, in the entire discipline. We have to pretend the anonymous reviews are anonymous, but I ask you: can you not tell a John Mirowsky paper by three paragraphs into it? The language is elegant and deceptively straightforward, and a unique feature of John’s work—I think—is the way in which the style of the writing is so closely linked to the substance of the ideas. To be clear, and to be simple about why this award is so deserved, John is one of the most creative thinkers in the entire discipline, a true original thinker in a sea of those who aspire to be; his work is often surprising; he produces clear renderings of apparently conflicting ideas and then, like no one else, shows us exactly how they are related to each other.
His visuals, his graphs, are one of his signatures. Years ago, I joked with Carol Aneshensel and Len Pearlin that I wanted to do a presentation at ASA called “guess the author,” in which I just presented generic pieces of work but in the unique style of the person and then asked the audience, “Who is this?” I submit that you would immediately get John Mirowsky from the omnipresent quadratic curve. This curve is the hallmark of someone who sees beyond superficial oppositions in theory or the simplistic and simplifying assumption of linearity to get to something more interesting and almost always of much greater import. It is actually shocking how many of John’s articles have this curve in them. Everyone has their favorites in the Mirowsky and Ross/Ross and Mirowsky canon; if I try to focus on articles I think were primarily John, I can come up with a number of examples of amazing papers. My favorites include: “The Psychoeconomics of Feeling Underpaid,” in the American Journal of Sociology (Mirowsky 1987), a typical Mirowsky reconstruction of two theories that apparently predict the opposite but, when conditioned by personal income, turn out not to, and having seemingly bizarre but important implications that extend to political sociology, economic sociology, and stratification, implying that at higher incomes, the gap between actual income and the sense of deserved income increases exponentially—a finding that could be used to explain much in the current political climate; “The Consolation-prize Theory of Alienation” (Mirowsky and Ross 1990a), exploring the important connections between status, instrumentalism, and distress that I 1
University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
Corresponding Author: Blair Wheaton, University of Toronto, Department of Sociology, 725 Spadina Avenue, Toronto, ON M5S 2J4, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]
Downloaded from hsb.sagepub.com at NANYANG TECH UNIV LIBRARY on June 9, 2015
406
Journal of Health and Social Behavior 54(4)
had considered in my earlier dissertation and were discussed during that apparently fateful seminar at Yale; “Control or Defense?” (Mirowsky and Ross 1990b), to be clear, a brilliant exposition of the conflict between two strains of attribution theory, one centered on clinical lore and learned helplessness, the other on a locus of control/mastery/ instrumentalism tradition, making clear that both cannot be true and then providing a clear test to decide the issue (where, of course, sociological traditions win); “Age and Depression” (Mirowsky and Ross 1992), a mapping of the life course by the ebb and flow of roles, statuses, and developmental tasks through life and how this ebb and flow combine to produce the (of course) quadratic depression curve, dead-on correct and before its time, because we are now seeing signs of its truth; “Psychiatric Diagnosis as Reified Measurement” (Mirowsky and Ross 1989), enough said; “Life Course Trajectories of Perceived Control” (Mirowsky and Ross 2007), another example of the elegance of visuals in defining an idea; and the recent “Wage Slavery or Creative Work” (Mirowsky 2011), a brilliant social history of work, going back to the ancients and commenting on the evolving meaning of work in lives. There are too many examples to cite, but it is easy to say that John’s career has been instrumental in articulating the larger implications of this area for the discipline at large, and in cognate disciplines that might benefit from listening to us more closely. John and Catherine each have been central players in this important role over the past quarter century. Returning to the music analogy, I will tell you a short story. In the 1960s, I played and sang at an open-mic night in a small coffeehouse in Winnipeg called the 4th Dimension—very ’60s, very cohort specific. Sometimes after me, sometimes before, there was another person playing on those nights whom no one listened to, maybe less than to me; his name was Neil Young. He played some songs in the back room that maybe no one else had heard that are now iconic pieces of twentieth-century musical culture. Brilliance in young people is not always easy to read or predict. The potential in John was clear to me back at Yale, but he was also developing quickly, and it was naturally hard to see where it was going to go. John has had a Neil Young career, and with the same uniqueness and scope and idiosyncrasy that describes the brilliance of Neil Young.
You can see, I hope, how pleased I am that John is received this year’s Pearlin Award, first, because it will dispel the tension at home, but second, because it is so clearly right, and this is the time.
References Mirowsky, John. 1987. “The Psycho-economics of Feeling Underpaid: Distributive Justice and the Earnings of Husbands and Wives.” American Journal of Sociology 92(6):1404–34. Mirowsky, John. 2011. “Wage Slavery or Creative Work?” Society and Mental Health 1(2):73–88. Mirowsky, John and Catherine E. Ross. 1989. “Psychiatric Diagnosis as Reified Measurement.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 30(1):11–25. Mirowsky, John and Catherine E. Ross. 1990a. “The Consolation-prize Theory of Alienation.” American Journal of Sociology 95(6):1505–35. Mirowsky, John and Catherine E. Ross. 1990b. “Control or Defense: Depression and the Sense of Control over Good and Bad Outcomes.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 31(1):71–86. Mirowsky, John and Catherine E. Ross. 1992. “Age and Depression.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 33(3):187–205. Mirowsky, John and Catherine E. Ross. 2007. “Life Course Trajectories of Perceived Control and Their Relationship to Education.” American Journal of Sociology 112(5):1339–82.
Author Biography Blair Wheaton is a professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto. Previously, he was chair of the department from 2003 to 2012 and director of the Institute for Human Development, Life Course, and Aging at the University of Toronto (1999–2003), as well as academic director of the Statistics Canada Research Data Centre in the Toronto Region (2001–2004). He was the first recipient of the Leonard I. Pearlin Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Sociology of Mental Health in 2000. He received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin in 1976 and held faculty positions at Yale and McGill before moving to Toronto in 1989. Professor Wheaton is developing a new instrument called the Residential Life History Profile, designed to assess the impact of both past and current neighborhoods on a range of lifecourse outcomes. His current research also focuses on the impact of 9/11 on the subjective welfare of Americans and new evidence on the influence of maternal employment on child mental health.
Downloaded from hsb.sagepub.com at NANYANG TECH UNIV LIBRARY on June 9, 2015
