I often know what I don’t want before I know what I want—and making one of my biggest career decisions was no exception. I didn’t choose a profession outside academia. Instead, I decided not to pursue an academic career.
When I was deciding on my career track, my sense was that many of the faculty members I knew seemed unhappy. Further, I watched what they did and did not feel excited about teaching, participating in the seemingly arduous peer-review process for academic publication, or doing committee work. Even if I was lucky enough to get a tenure track position, I thought I would be unhappy.
My perceptions about developing a career outside of academia were compounded by my increasing interest in applied research. My studies focused on racial and ethnic inequalities and social stratification, and basic science research on these topics is voluminous. Quantitative studies estimate racial and ethnic disparities in various outcomes: education, income, and wealth. Qualitative studies offer rich descriptions of how these disparities sustain through social processes. I decided I wanted to build on this scholarship with a focus on concrete policy prescriptions. This prompted me to I pursue a career as a policy analyst, rather than following an academic path.
Positioned for Impact
Sociological imagination is indispensable in my work as a policy analyst at RAND Corporation. I help my clients shape human resource policies and practices to promote well-balanced, healthy, diverse, equitable, and inclusive work environments. My clients vary in size and mission, ranging from the U.S. Department of Defense to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and from federal and local law enforcement agencies to fire departments.
I cannot imagine crafting human resource policies and practices without sociological insights. To be an effective policy analyst, I need to understand what C. Wright Mills calls, “the personal troubles of milieu,” “the public issues of social structure,” and their relationships. The problems my clients face are systemic. Systemic problems require systemic solutions, and sociology is a discipline that studies systemic factors shaping our social world. For instance, racial, ethnic, and gender disparities are systemic problems. Social stratification literature documents how structural factors create and sustain these disparities. I also find that some sociological insights, like “the Mathew effect,” “unintended consequences,” “self-fulfilling prophecy,” and “relative deprivation,” are now absorbed into our communal consciousness such that my clients use them without knowing their sociological origins. For them, these are common sense ideas—not academic concepts.
My first policy analysis project helps illustrate how my work benefits from my sociological training. The project was to find ways to help military wives overcome negative impact of their husband’s military service on their employment.
As a sociologist, I look at the military as an archetype of the “greedy institutions” and the employment conditions of military wives as a result of all-encompassing demands made by the military to its members.
As a sociologist, I am familiar with the work sociologists, led by Clifford C. Clogg, have done to capture how someone can be underemployed. I applied their typology, the Labor Utilization Framework (LUF) to measure the magnitude of underemployment among military wives. Based on the LUF measures, a majority of military wives are not in the labor force. Their chances of participating in the labor force vary with their husbands’ military pay grade and famility responsibility. This finding highlights the importance of child care on military wives’ employment. And many military wives who are working full time have higher education than their peers in the workforce. As a sociologist, I also know that occupations significantly shape individuals’ work conditions, while economists rarely consider occupations as a unit of analysis. As a demographer, I know the survey data with a large sample of military wives and methodologies can be used to compare them with their civilian counterparts with similar characteristics. In addition, my sociological training enables me to apply a mixed-methods approach by combining qualitative and quantitative data to provide a fuller picture for the policymakers.
The Strength of a Sociological Perspective
Sociologists provide distinct perspectives and methodologies for policy analysis. While economists have dominated policy analysis since its inception as an applied social science in the 1940s, in recent years policy analysts have recognized the limitations of economic theories and the importance of behavioral foundations in public policy. Unfortunately, some policy analysts continue to ignore sociological insights, instead offering individualized solutions to humanity’s systemic challenges, including worsening environment, deepening inequalities, deteriorating social bonds, and weakening democracy. The more sociologists get engaged in the policy world, the more attention can be drawn to social structure. Sociologists not only care deeply about these issues, they also have a wealth of knowledge they can apply to better shape effective public policies addressing these challenges. Policy work provides a fulfilling and impactful career option for sociologists.
Any opinions expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the author and not the American Sociological Association.
