content analysis

Almost every journal article I’ve ever read makes mention of “a lacuna in the literature.” Sometimes, they say “a gap” instead. Often, the supposed gap is about as wide as a single atom. Occasionally, however, one stumbles upon an area that has been genuinely overlooked. I may have discovered such an area and I can only hope my readers will correct me.

In economics and public administration, there is a popular theory called crowding out theory. Essentially, proponents of this theory argues that as government funding to a given charitable non-profits grows, individual contributions drop off. The reasons for this effect are somewhat debated. The classic argument is that individuals see the government grant as an indirect contribution via taxes and do not wish to give two contributions. Subsequent researchers have argued that individuals may not have that level of information and a much more sound explanation is that given an abundance of government funds, non-profits back off fundraising. Others have responded with so-called crowding in theory, which suggests that government funding actually increases individual contributions by lending legitimacy to the organization. Brooks (2003) proposes a synthesis: there is a non-linear relationship in which low levels of government funding increase contributions by lending legitimacy, but higher level decrease it by decreasing fundraising activities.

While this literature considers the consequences of government funding on non-profits, I can find no comparable literature examining the effect of corporate contributions on non-profit fundraising efforts. There’s plenty of research on the costs and benefits of charitable contributions for businesses, but apparently none on the consequences for the non-profits. I’ve done a number of searches and cannot find anything on this topic. If this truly is a lacuna in the literature, then it’s a big one. I can imagine all kinds of effects of corporate giving on non-profit fundraising efforts, nevermind on the nature of the non-profit itself.

So, I ask you two questions, Reader. First, am I wrong? Is there a literature on this topic? Second, is this topic so boring that the lacuna should exist?

I always read section newsletters, usually with some disappointment; too often the short articles are magnificently boring.  However, the current issue of the Culture section newsletter has a very interesting article on the future of the sociology of higher education (pdf).  The article is essentially a report on an ASA/NSF funded conference to “formulate useful and provocative goals for the field.”  I think the results of the conference might be quite useful as we continue to think about the way inequality is reproduced.

The article proposes four metaphors to represent the existing research traditions within the study of higher education.  I’ll summarize here:

 Sieves: a research tradition following Blau and Duncan that envisions education as central to the structuring of occupational achievement and other features of life (marriage markets, for example).  Of course, educational achievement is often a product of family background.  Thus, education functions as “a ‘social sieve’ regulating access to privileged social positions” (pg. 4).

 Incubator: The study of the “experiential core of college life.”  Following Bourdieu, this tradition focuses on how the experiences at college educate students in the cultural capital of upper middle-class life.  Interesting quote: “Stevens argues that the athletic activities that are so pervasive on elite U.S. campuses help produce the fit, healthy, attractive bodies that facilitate their owners’ movement through privileged circles during and after college” (pg. 5).   

 Temple: higher education serves as the primary way of producing the informed citizens necessary for advancing democratic “nation-building.”  Known as the Stanford school, this line of research, emphasizing Progress through rationality and scientific education, follows the work of John Meyer.

 Hub: “higher education … [connects] some of the most prominent institutional sectors of modern societies: the labor market, the philanthropic sector, the professions and the sciences, the family, and the nation-state” (pg. 6).

 I am wholly uninformed about most of these research traditions, but I found these four metaphors to be a very useful way of thinking about higher education.  One point made in the article is that while most of these traditions are well established, the study of college as an incubator has been “left largely … to a handful of anthropologists and historians” (pg. 5).  Man, what an important topic to be so neglected!  It is easy to see how sociologists might adopt an approach focused on credentialing and college as sieve, but the cultural capital transmitted and the social networks developed in college cannot be underestimated.

Prior to grad school, I held a fairly standard liberal view on higher education: we must expand the number of people with college education because reading Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is, like, good.  After a few semesters of teaching future cops to do social science methods, I had become radically transformed on issues of higher ed.  While I still believe that access to higher education should be universal, it seems to me that way too many people are going to college unnecessarily.  Adult pleasure education should be widely available, but as a mechanism for preparing young people for the labor market, it is wholly ineffective for most students.  I tend to think that a system like the British one (or at least the way the British system used to be) in which fewer people attend university, but those who do attend are the smartest people drawn from all segments of society and are fully funded is preferable. 

Of course, this view ignores the significance of college as an incubator and its consequences for cultural stratification.  But that’s a problem I’m not sure how to solve.  Even if we re-organized society to erase (or lessen) economic disparities, is it inevitable that cultural stratification would continue?  Given any division of labor, isn’t it a natural consequence that plumbers and professors will have different tastes and social networks?