Santi Furnari (CASBS fellow, 2023-24) engages renowned political sociologist & 2015-16 fellow Elisabeth Clemens on the role of private civic volunteer organizations in co-constructing national identity and state capacity as well as serving as tools of governance, solidarity, and inclusion for much of American history. In what form does civic benevolence and philanthropy operate in the contemporary landscape? This absorbing conversation draws inspiration from the multi-award-winning book "Civic Gifts," much of which Clemens wrote during her CASBS year.
Santi Furnari (CASBS fellow, 2023-24) engages renowned political sociologist & 2015-16 fellow Elisabeth Clemens on the role of private civic volunteer organizations in co-constructing national identity and state capacity as well as serving as tools of governance, solidarity, and inclusion for much of American history. In what form does civic benevolence and philanthropy operate in the contemporary landscape? This absorbing conversation draws inspiration from the multi-award-winning book "Civic Gifts," much of which Clemens wrote during her CASBS year.
ELISABETH CLEMENS: Univ. of Chicago faculty page | Clemens wins 2023 Gordon J. Laing Award | on Wikipedia |
The book is Civic Gifts: Voluntarism and the Making of the American Nation-State (Univ. of Chicago Press), winner of the Barrington Moore Book Award, Comparative and Historical Sociology section, American Sociological Association; the University of Chicago Press Gordon J. Laing Award; the Outstanding Published Book Award, ASA Section on Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity; and the Peter Dobkin Hall History of Philanthropy Prize, Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA).
SANTI FURNARI: CASBS page | City University of London, Bayes School of Business faculty page | on Google Scholar |
Narrator: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered.
Big social science question for you. How can we understand the evolution and expansion of the American nation state in the context of a historic, deeply rooted, anti-status political culture, emphasizing federal government with limited capacity? Given this political culture, how has the machinery of governance even worked as well as it has?
One key part of the explanation involves the roles of private civic organizations and associations in relating to the state, in particular, organizations oriented around social movements of volunteerism and benevolence. For much of US history, they helped co-construct national identity and state capacity by embedding reciprocity and other aspects of social relations into interweaving infrastructures and networks of political mobilization and power. Now, as you'd imagine, there's a good amount of detail to impact there, and on Human Centered today, we have an expert to guide us through it, renowned political sociologist Elisabeth Clemens, the William Rainey Harper Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago.
Clemens was a 2015-16 CASBS Fellow and spent her year on the hill fleshing out an innovative set of arguments resulting in her book, Civic Gifts, Volunteerism and the Making of the American State. Exploring the swath of history spanning from the early American republic through World War II, it's an ambitious book that has garnered a lot of praise and awards, and we'll list some of them in the episode notes. Joining Clemens in this exploration is Santi Furnari, a 2023-24 CASBIS Fellow based at City University London, and a scholar specializing in explaining ways in which organizations exert social impact on local communities and society.
One of his CASBIS Year projects focuses on how organized collective action among philanthropic elites contributes to or drives the creation of urban civic spaces, making them sites where the elites' social worlds and tensions collide. In some cases, creating new cultural forms. As you're about to hear, Furnari's superb grasp of these issues invites Clemens to elucidate her book's thesis, allowing us to more clearly recognize private benevolence as a constitutive element of public-state capacity, volunteerism as a tool of governance, and gifts as a mechanism for cultivating new forms of solidarity that didn't exist before.
This conversation is replete with illustrations from the Civil War to the New Deal, and the legacy of this history tees up an illuminating discussion on the often controversial role of philanthropy and donors in our contemporary landscape, including their evolving interdependence with universities as vehicles for managing and distributing gifts for a wide range of social projects. So let's listen.
Sani Furnari: Thank you, Elisabeth, for agreeing to do this. We're very excited to have you. How are you today, Elisabeth?
Elisabeth Clemens: I'm doing very well. Blue skies, green trees, it's lovely. And lovely to be back in conversation with CASBS.
Sani Furnari: It's very exciting for me as a current CASBS Fellow to be able to have this conversation with former CASBS Fellows and talk through ideas in the true CASBS spirit indeed. And so I understand you wrote parts of this multi-award winning book, Civic Gifts, here at CASBS. And so I'm just curious about what prompted you to write the book, this book. Why did you write it and what at the time do you want to do with it?
Elisabeth Clemens: Well, over career you have many questions, but one question has come back to me in many forms, which is, why is government so complicated? Why is it so hard to make sense of? And why doesn't it work in the way we were promised in high school civics or in the Constitution, this sort of elegant, coherent design?
And in my earlier work, that had led me to think about the way in which organizations that weren't imagined in that design, play a big role, not just political parties, which were an invention of the early 19th century, but importantly, social movements and voluntary associations. And in my current work, private firms and markets. But going back to that early work, it was about the inputs.
How did groups and movements that weren't officially political have influence? And Civic Gifts grew out of the next step, which once the legislation is passed, once the elections are won, how does governing actually happen? And it was confusing.
And Civic Gifts is really the product of an effort to figure out how government worked across a long stretch of time from the early 19th century through World War II.
Sani Furnari: Thank you. And what you just said just resonates a lot with me also, not just as an organizational scholars, but as a European. Because we tend to assume the American state is rather light or weak compared to European states.
And I think your book actually shows a different kind of story. It's not necessary, as you said, you use the word, it's complicated. Can you give us a bit more of a sense of how you then explain this complex, quite open architecture of public-private partnerships and different arrangements where the private and the public cooperates?
Elisabeth Clemens: Well, your mention of Europe is really appropriate here, because as I trained as a political sociologist, the literature on the state was deeply influenced theoretically by figures such as Weber and comparatively by the examples of the post-World War II welfare states in Western Europe. So these were strong, centralized bureaucracies, and the literature often hid a more complicated history in Europe. But it was sort of difficult to make sense of the American experience in terms of that literature.
So we wound up with a language of there are strong states in Western Europe, also in Eastern Europe, and the United States is a weak state. But weak is just a placeholder, right? It's like it still works in some way.
And so the sort of effort to understand how governing gets done while not being perceived as a powerful central state that would offend the deep anti-statism in American political culture, that was really a puzzle, and it led me in some really interesting directions.
Sani Furnari: Yeah, it's a puzzle that in fact, I think is getting many readers and academics interested, right? How do you build a state in a sort of anti-statist culture, political culture, but also how do you build a nation in many ways across differences, ethnic and religious differences? Now, if we go back to the title for a second, obviously Gifts is there, Civic Gifts.
And so can you tell us a little bit more about what Gifts do in terms of building a state and building a nation? Because that is not necessarily an obvious connection, I think, for some of our listeners. So what do Gifts do in your theory?
Elisabeth Clemens: So analytically, and here, obviously, I'm building on the great anthropologist Marcel Mauss. There's a difference between an exchange and a gift that's important to appreciate. Exchanges, particularly market exchanges.
I give you something, you give me something in return, if it's barter, if it's cash, and then we can go our separate ways. An exchange, particularly in a market, doesn't leave a relationship. If you were to give me a gift, and I was immediately to say, oh, I have to give you one too, you'd be offended because what I would be doing would be saying, I don't want a relationship with you.
Particularly, I don't want a relationship of indebtedness, where there is an obligation to reciprocate that just hangs in the air over time. So gifts are important because they build relationships. And out of anthropology, there are classic examples such as the Kula Ring of extended systems of gift exchange that build relationships.
But those classic studies often assume that was pre-modern, right? That's different than the way in which social order is constructed in modern worlds. And particularly that bit about being indebted, if you are a recipient of a gift, is offensive to a democratic principles of sort of self-sufficient free individuals.
So one of the many ways you could lose your vote in the early 19th century was to be a resident of a poor house, to be dependent on sort of the gifts of the public for your sustenance. So gifts are problematic, but they're powerful. What I argue is one of the sort of key ways of building nations, were extended systems, not of particular exchange where I give to you and you are indebted to me, but systems of what is called generalized exchange, where we both give to some cause.
And I'll give you just one example, because it's analytically really important. So one of the first great national efforts at sort of patriotic giving in this way, was organized during the Civil War in the North, around what were called the two great commissions, the Sanitary Commission and the Christian Commission. And these raised monies to support nurses, to build hospitals, to send volunteers with religious literature to camps, all these kinds of things.
And in one vignette that is clearly fictional and framed as fictional, a story is told of a wounded union officer in a hospital who is just failing, he's not doing well, everyone thinks he's going to die. And so they put a special quilt on his bed, and this is a quilt produced by these circuits of volunteers. And he starts to get better, he starts getting interested in the quilt, and he discovers in a corner that his wife's name is on the quilt.
So there you see sort of the wife's quilt as a gift that could have gone to anyone's father, brother, uncle, neighbor, but miraculously goes to her husband. But in its travels there, it contributes to this building across families, across towns, across states, and into a sense of the union. And that is the recipe for fundraising in wars and crises that is a major part of mobilization and nation building through this entire 150-year period.
Sani Furnari: Another example that you have in the book, and it's also a visual example, and I love that, is the March of Dimes of Roosevelt. And so this is, correct me if I'm wrong, a civic and business effort, a committee for the polio vaccination, raising money for the polio vaccination. And I love the ways, and you make an excellent illustration of that in the book, where the dimes, there is the Republican and Democrats' dimes, there are the Labor and Capitals' dimes.
And so it somehow creates in that fundraising effort unity across division. So I wonder here what's left out from this picture of unity, and you obviously expand on this in the book. So civic benevolence then can have a constitutive role and build unity in terms of enacting the state, enacting the nation.
But there are, as you remark in the book, some of the dimes there, there are no women's dimes, there are no ethnic minorities dimes, they are described in that vignette. And I should have said, that's a cartoon, right? By a 1939 cartoon that visualizes that.
So can you tell us a little bit more about the limitations or the problems that come with such a prominent role being afforded to civic benevolence?
Elisabeth Clemens: So the March of Dimes is a great example of civic giving as a response to the damage to oneself as a democratic citizen that was a consequence of being on relief. The March of Dimes begins in Roosevelt's first year as president. Depression has gone on for a number of years.
People who never thought they would need relief, who had always looked down on people who needed relief, then needed it. And so they were in that position of feeling dependent, feeling under some force to be grateful. So the March of Dimes, which begins, by the way, as the committee to celebrate the president's birthday, which is interesting, is seen as an opportunity where, okay, I had to take commodities, the predecessors of government cheese, I took a relief check, but I can give my dime back and then neutralize that sense of indebtedness.
What was important about this sort of mode was that, well, not in the cartoon, in a lot of the text, it's pretty expansive. And there's this whole genre of describing fundraising drives that include Eskimos in Alaska and prison gangs and Polish immigrant ladies who pick flowers to sell for money. And so it is a mode of talking that is sort of very inclusive, always noting difference, but we can all be incorporated in this great circuit of giving, where what matters is that you give what you can, not how much you give.
But who controls all of that are organizations of local elites, that in the case of the Red Cross, are part of an organization where by its new charter in the early 1900s includes on its board a number of members of the president's cabinet and the president himself as the honorary head of the organization with a practice that that would change over with each presidential election. So you have inclusive participation in the giving, overseen by circuits of local elites, and linked in to national political control. And at this point, there are 3,000 some counties in the US, and 2,000 of them have red cross chapters linked to the president's cabinet and the president.
So this is actually a sort of powerful infrastructure of political mobilization that is quite new and quite unprecedented, and remains very important really, sort of from World War I through World War II. And after that, it's undercut in part because it has become such a powerful political vehicle.
Sani Furnari: What you're bringing to mind here is fast forward to these days, what we see is increasing political polarization. And so I wonder what does your story tell us about possibilities to perhaps reduce that political polarization. Is Civic Benevolence still a potential tool to do that, or maybe we need other mechanisms? What's your take on this?
Elisabeth Clemens: You know, I think it is a potential tool, but it runs into a pretty intense headwind with the way in which polarization is now permeating local politics as well. So if you think of contemporary controversies over school libraries, school boards, very local kinds of endeavors that were once places where there could be some cross-partisan cooperation because the thing is valuable for our community, keeping that post office, keeping, as in Texas, there are struggles over this now, keeping that local public high school in a rural area because that high school and that football team are the thing that keeps that town together. But as those local politics become much more deeply polarized, I think that's really a challenge to reinvigorating this model.
Sani Furnari: Yeah. So the national versus local dynamics seem to play a role here. And you have a chapter that someone interested in cities like me really loved about cities and the local national dynamics. Is there anything there that... So in terms of how that... So what you describe in the book is the wild civic benevolence acts as this important tool for mobilization and national identity building.
There were significant differences across cities. We see these differences these days actually changing and increasing perhaps on some dimensions. I wonder whether your story speaks to that difference across metropolitan areas and also the rural versus urban divide that we debate these days. So can you expand on some of that?
Elisabeth Clemens: One of the major, I think, implications for thinking about urban sociology actually meshes with classic works like Anneli Saxinian's comparative study of Route 128 around Boston and silicon Valley, that different places have different kinds of architectures, different degrees to which community organizations are generally included, or in which decisions about collective efforts and projects on a municipal level are tightly held. I think there's also a lot of variation in terms of whether those civic networks work with or around the elected government of a city. This will look ahead to the role of universities, because urban universities are one of the best platforms for working around city hall, if you want to think about mobilizing a project.
So I do think that there are durable differences in the way in which these configurations for collaboration between civic groups representing different kinds of communities, how they were founded and how they endure. And we see a lot of this in the ongoing stream of studies that are comparative municipal studies, both within the US and cross-nationally.
Sani Furnari: So on that, because you bring in universities, it's a very timely topic. And we see our campuses these days at the center of political actions on the student side. But also we see another kind of debate that has to do with philanthropy and the donors.
So I'm interested on, you know, how do we... I mean, one of the messages that I take away from Civic Gifts is that somehow the remit of philanthropy is politically constructed. So philanthropy is an evolving field.
We, again, going back to comparison between Europe and US, definitely we see that philanthropy is less central, perhaps, to the constitution of the state in Europe and to many other political dynamics. But now we see the role of philanthropy perhaps changing. And we see also donors having a big role, or perhaps a changing role in universities.
And so I just am curious to hear your thoughts on how your history of civic benevolence and the changing boundaries between the state and philanthropy speak to some of the current debates about universities and philanthropy.
Elisabeth Clemens: So I think it's important to frame an answer to your question with two really basic reminders. First is that giving away money, and particularly a lot of money, is a lot of work if you want to do it wisely and with consequences. John Rockefeller recognized this and built the family office for the Rockefellers.
That really was a research enterprise trying to collect information about possible recipients of gifts to monitor who would have control over the funds and with what kinds of outcomes. So giving away money in a sort of responsible way that seeks real outcomes is a lot of work. And whatever money even the richest have to give away, it's really never enough compared to the scale of many of the social projects and social problems that they want to address.
So there have been shifting solutions to how donors have thought about negotiating that pair of constraints. For much of the 20th century, the idea was that philanthropy is not charity, it's not giving directly to those in need, but that philanthropy had a particular role in funding experiments and policy trials, figuring out what would work. Then, particularly after World War II, government would adopt what works and take it to scale, backed by the revenue that government can raise.
That really dominates the way in which philanthropy and government are related through much of the 20th century, and that's part of building what is a distinctive welfare state in the US. In the current moment, I think we're back to that experimental sense. What can we do to improve schools, to help those who are at risk in terms of housing or employment or health, et cetera, move out of situations of precarity?
But different foundations are funding different kinds of trials, and also how do we contribute to the socialization, education, development of the next generation? This point bring back, it's a lot of work to give away a lot of money. And many nonprofits are at a scale, they're relatively small, where it would require giving to many, many nonprofits to sort of meet someone's goals that their tax advisor has given them for charitable giving, if you have that kind of resource base.
Universities are among the relatively few organizations that can take a really big gift and then manage it and distribute it in a pretty localized way. And of course, also fulfilling that those other goals of advancing knowledge and contributing to the development of the next generation. So university like mine at the University of Chicago runs a charter school network.
It provides and supports healthcare services which are critical for the mid-south side of Chicago, although never entirely adequate. It is active in urban redevelopment, both in its own neighborhood and in the adjacent neighborhood. So thinking of urban universities in particular, they can serve as vehicles for a whole range of projects having the infrastructure to manage that kind of funding.
But of course, the danger always there is what is the internal capacity of the university as an organization to deliberate on its priorities, recognizing that many of those priorities will require persuading donors to contribute. And so conversation about that rather than a sort of effort to cut off influence or recruit donations at all costs, but recognizing that there's a critical interdependence there both for the central aspects of the university's mission and for all these other social projects for which a university can be a kind of instrumentality.
Sani Furnari: Yeah, that's fascinating. You're bringing also into some work about the somehow, I mean, your example about Rockefeller and how he is famous to keep track on his ledger and the foundation ledger of every single gift and who was going to use it. But then we see that evolving to way more sophisticated metrics through which philanthropists used to track the impact of their gifts.
The new word is impact and tracking the impact. I'm curious here also in terms of the current criticism to an extent of philanthropy. We see with books like The Winners Take It All, but many others where philanthropy has been under a lot of increasing scrutiny but also would say polemic criticism.
I wonder what to make out of it in the context of your more historical perspective because we can see that as a variation of the tension you're articulating Civic Gifts. So how do we respond or perhaps articulate and try to understand better some of these critiques particularly around the idea of inclusion? The wealthy become true philanthropy, civic leaders and acquire and reinforce, perhaps consolidate their status and power.
That could be a critique that's been emerging, but it's an old critique. So how do we understand those to critique and make sense of them, to understand philanthropy also in terms of a broader perspective, a more bigger picture perspective takes into account also philanthropy as a potential force for good?
Elisabeth Clemens: So, I think it's helpful to remember one of the central devices of late 19th, early 20th century philanthropy, which was the matching gift. So those Carnegie libraries, those Rosenwald schools were not funded solely by Carnegie or Rosenwald. They were the products of a convention in which the contribution by the philanthropist had to be matched by gifts and public commitments.
So Carnegie would provide the building in the books with some match that was raised by volunteers, but the operating funds had to be appropriated by the locality that was going to get the library. Rosenwald schools were produced by a combination of Rosenwald's contribution, funds raised within the African American communities that would benefit from these schools for black children in largely in the South, but there was also a demand for a contribution from the public school system, which in the Upper South, all the South would have been dominated by whites. So that device required the kind of building of a coalition and sort of checking in on is there support for this gift.
Famously, there are some mining communities around Pittsburgh that never got a Carnegie Library because they were not going to cooperate, right? They were not going to take a gift from an industrialist they saw as someone who had tried to smash the union, etc. That I think we don't have as much of anymore, right?
The mobilization of matches, even if they are small, even if they are composed of many small contributions. And that means that some of the work of building a coalition around projects and building a broader consensus around a sense of what is to be done can get skipped over in contemporary culture.
Sani Furnari: So, what's the role of organizations? And why is it important to look at organizations in theories of the state, but also more generally theories in sociology, I would say, since sociology of organizations was used to be a big field within the field of sociology.
Elisabeth Clemens: So, I'll give two kinds of answers, both on the input side and the implementation side. One is that it's important to be aware of how the dominance of survey research in post-war political science and political sociology to the present, invites us to think about outcomes as just aggregations of individual opinions or individual voting decisions, and doesn't think so much about the way in which individuals are mobilized into political efforts, how they come to understand themselves as someone who should be politically active rather than apathetic and abstaining from voting, and then how. And the organizational piece is absolutely critical for that.
An example, well, sort of two examples, one from where I live and one from earlier work. So one of the things we saw during COVID was an interesting revival of the idea of mutual aid. In this moment of crisis, there were just lots of efforts to develop community kitchens, community refrigerators, collect and redistribute personal protective equipment, all of that.
Now, one of the things that is interesting in Chicago is that that sort of aligned with a preexisting organization called My Block, My Hood, My City, which had mobilized people on the south side to do things like, there's been a big snowstorm. We're going to bring pickup trucks with lots of snow shovels, come and shovel sidewalks for your neighbors who can't shovel it. Put up Christmas lights down one of the major avenues of the south side, so all the pretty Christmas lights aren't down there in the loop with the fancy buildings.
Off of that, the leader of the group has now been a repeat political candidate. In Arizona, an earlier project, for a number of years, the Speaker of the House was the head of a charter school network. Charter schools are also ways of mobilizing people.
Sani Furnari: This is such an interesting example, and I bet the mayor of Chicago was happy about these voluntary efforts. That's how they take some jobs out of the city to-do list. I wonder here in terms of you bringing COVID, which is another example, this very recent experience that we all live through, that really was brought up by reading your book, because you look at efforts of mobilizing collective action to a number of crises, a number of natural disasters, wars, and obviously the Great Depression too.
Obviously, COVID is a much more recent example. They're still very fresh in our minds. Community kitchens and all these small scale, perhaps, efforts to mobilize people's voluntary efforts, some of them we see them fading away, and others maybe are there to stay.
I wonder what do you make out of how do we explain perhaps the durability or the sustainment over time of some of these emerging forms rather than the fading away of them, and which ones perhaps get captured, perhaps it's not the right verb, but somehow co-opted or incorporated by the state or other private organizations for that matter.
Elisabeth Clemens: So, as an author, I have very ambivalent feelings about COVID, because on the one hand, it destroyed all my fine plans for introducing the book, but on the other, it made the argument immediately relevant to the moment. We saw a lot of this resurgence of volunteerism locally, not just in the US. There is really interesting work on a similar, almost spontaneous emergence of voluntary and mutual aid projects in China, is where, I know from students' work in particular, but globally, there was this capacity.
It was also large scale. So the mayor at that time in Chicago arranged deals where hospitals were paired with hotels, which at that point are crashing economically. And hotels near hospitals became basically extended recovery awards for COVID.
So you had a kind of lashing together of public and private and federal money in that case, as well as all these voluntary efforts. My sense with COVID is that in the pandemic, that then largely got swamped by public money, at least in the US, although certainly often that public money went through voluntary organizations. But the muscle memory, I think, remained.
And I think most clearly, particularly in Europe, where you see capacities developed in response to the migrant crises of 2015 being revived during COVID. And then really quite stunningly with the invasion of Ukraine, where I think we can, it can be argued that the strength of that voluntary response actually neutralized one important prong of sort of the overall strategy for the invasion, which was to create another migrant crisis and destabilize governments in Europe. And yet there was a capacity to absorb much of that potential disruption.
So I suppose the glum answer is if we keep having crises, this muscle memory will keep being reanimated time and time again.
Sani Furnari: In some ways, we're talking about ibrids, right? We're talking about collaborations between the state and private organization, public-private partnerships of sort. But there is also something else.
Your book in some ways is also ibrid in the sense it's a boundary spanner. I want to move to an extent to the broader arc of your academic career. Again, as a fellow CASBS scholar here in terms of your work is very multidisciplinary.
I think the recognition that the book got is really a testament to that, of how you are able to span boundaries across fields of sociology, political science, history, but also subdisciplines with it. I guess as academic ibrid, if I may, I'm curious about your reflections about it.
Elisabeth Clemens: So, I do think there's a biographical origin, which is that I grew up in a household full of paleontology and geology, so historical natural science.
Although disappointing many of my family in going into the social sciences sort of carry that sense of wanting to understand longer historical arcs, but assuming they are full of and in large part, but not entirely, the product of general or repeatable, recurring kinds of configurations and mechanisms. So that sensibility sort of runs very, very deep. And I really came, I didn't take a sociology class as an undergraduate, but I took a lot of history and a lot of art history and a lot of political science.
And so in trying to figure out where to go with that, I started looking at fields and like, where can I do everything I want to do? And it turned out Max Faber was right, sociology is the queen of the social sciences. You can sort of bring all of that together in sociology.
And in relation to both political science and history, it gives you a kind of freedom, right? Because, you know, a historian, this is sort of overstating and stylized, but the field is organized by sort of place, time, analytic dimensions. So you're a social historian of early modern France.
And sort of that's the way in which the world is organized. So if I was a historian, I don't think I could have written a book that goes from the early republic through 1960. So, or only at the very end of a long and distinguished career.mAnd I hope I'm not quite at the end of mine yet. But as a sociologist, I could sort of frame it in that way. And with respect, political science has changed. But when I was in graduate school, if you were a political scientist interested in social movements, you often had to get a job as a sociologist. There was no place for you in political science. That has changed importantly.
But there's still a kind of freedom in being able to make an argument that politics happens in all kinds of places, not just in white marble buildings, right?
Sani Furnari: Yeah, absolutely. I guess one of the questions as someone who has worked on organizations myself that have been meaning to ask you, actually, this is a great opportunity, Lise, to have you here, is what are the big questions that are left unaddressed in the field of organizational sociology and in the study of organizations more generally? So do you have any views about that? Where will you see more research being done in this area?
Elisabeth Clemens: Selfishly, I don't so much have a new question, but rather a hope that there'll be some return to older questions that think about organizations in a very broad context, and as features of the political landscape, as organizational sociology has moved in large part into business schools. Many of the questions have become linked in various ways to managerial concerns, producing fabulous and innovative work. But I think what we have lost is that insight of an earlier generation that organizational analysis can help us to make sense of government, that private organizations are an important component of the way politics and everyday life and the home, et cetera, et cetera, are organized.
I think one of the issues raised by the encampments at universities across the country has been recognizing that universities as private organizations are important sites for figuring out how politics is done, how we understand free speech. So I would urge, again, not a new question, I wish I had one, but a return to those older concerns that I think have not been entirely forgotten, but haven't been the focus of our concern of late.
Sani Furnari: And that would be also very interesting to see, I suppose, as someone who sits in a business school, collaboration across disciplines around these dimensions, right? Because I can see in business schools, this is happening with a renewed interest in topics like sustainability, public-private partnerships. But on the other hand, some of that insights from sociology and the study of organization in sociology, they are not often or usually integrated into the...
So in an effort to look for new questions, perhaps, we also forget what are the old but good tools that we had to address the questions. So that's great to hear. And another curiosity I had, Liz, is there anything that you have read or come across recently, Liz, in terms of fiction or non-fiction work, anything really that inspired your work and your research?
Elisabeth Clemens: So the thing I've read in the past year that sticks with me is a book by Jenny Erpenbeck, who just won a major prize for another book, Kyros. But her earlier book, Go Went Gone, is an intertwined story of two kinds of dislocation, a dislocation of refugees in Germany in sort of space and social relations, and the dislocation of a retired academic who, although in the same place, finds himself having to reconstruct another life. And it stayed with me as an example of the possibilities of building new worlds as we move through the life course through space, but also as our institutions become less certain, less capable of providing guarantees about what the next step should be.
And I was clued into this because of a wonderful fellow at CASBS, Phyllis Moan, who's very involved in the effort to sort of rethink that next career after retirement, rather than thinking that that is an ending point for productive life, but rather to see it as an opportunity for reinvention and creativity. So that is a gift I take with me from CASBS, and I highly recommend Go Went Gone.
Sani Furnari: You made me very curious. No, seriously, I'm going to check out the book. So thank you, Liz.
This has been fun. Thanks for joining us today.
Elisabeth Clemens: Well, thank you so much for bringing me back into the world of CASBS after a number of years. It's been wonderful. Thank you.
Narrator: That was Elisabeth Clemens In Conversation with Santi Furnari. As always, you can follow us online or in your podcast app of choice. And if you're interested in learning more about the center's people, projects and rich history, you can visit our website at casbs.stanford.edu.
Until next time, from everyone at CASBS and the Human Centered team, thanks for listening.