- Email: [email protected]
Steven L. Nock: A personal reminiscence
Social Science Research 39 (2010) 685–686
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Social Science Research journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ssresearch
Editorial
Steven L. Nock: A personal reminiscence I began my professional career at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in September, 1973. Shortly after my arrival there, I ran into a couple of graduate students who, I later learned, were married: Steve Nock and Daphne Spain. Daphne was assigned as my teaching assistant for introductory sociology for the academic year 1973–74, and through her, I soon came to know Steve, both as a student and a friend. Steve completed his Ph.D in 1976 and took a job at Tulane University in New Orleans, where he stayed for just a couple of years, then relocated to the University of Virginia, where he stayed until his death in January, 2008, from complications of diabetes. He was two months shy of his 58th birthday. Steve was a valued and regular reviewer for Social Science Research throughout his career and a member of our Board of Advisory Editors from 1999 until his death. Even today, two and a half years later, I occasionally receive revisions for which Steve was one of the original reviewers. As a graduate student, Steve studied under Peter H. Rossi, one of the founding editors of this journal. His dissertation on household social standing was an application of Rossi’s vignette survey methodology to the problem of determining household prestige. This work formed the basis for Steve’s first scholarly publication, ‘‘Ascription versus Achievement in the Attribution of Family Social Status”, coauthored with Rossi and published in the American Journal of Sociology in 1978, the first of Steve’s 86 journal articles and book chapters. Ironically, his last publication, which appeared posthumously, was a chapter on vignette survey methods published in the Handbook of Survey Research, Second Edition (2010) edited by Peter V. Marsden and me. In addition to his numerous journal articles and book chapters, for which he was promoted to Full Professor in 1994, Steve also authored or coauthored seven books. The first was his book with Rossi on Measuring Social Judgments (1982), still a seminal text on vignette surveys. His last was Covenant Marriage: the Movement to Reclaim Tradition in America (2008), also published posthumously and co-written with Dr. Laura Sanchez at Bowling Green State University and me. That I was a collaborator with Steve on both his last paper and his last book is a bittersweet reminder of how closely our personal and professional lives had become intertwined over the years of our association. Steve’s best-known work, by far, was the award-winning Marriage in Men’s Lives, published by Oxford University Press in 1998 and the winner of the American Sociological Association’s William J. Goode prize for the year’s best book in marriage and family research. The book was a forceful argument for the proposition that that marriage changes men in fundamental ways (achievement, social participation, philanthropy and in many other spheres) because marriage successfully defines these behaviors as components of adult masculinity. Marriage provides men with the means of achieving well-being, comfort, and prestige within circumscribed, legitimate boundaries. Marriage, in short, as Laura Sanchez points out, is one of the only publically recognized platforms for what might be called benign displays of masculinity (vs. seemingly endless platforms for malignant – violent, destructive, hostile – displays of masculinity). Marriage lets men be men in socially constructive ways. Steve, Laura and I frequently discussed Marriage in Men’s Lives as we struggled to make sense of the data we were gathering in the covenant marriage project. Steve acknowledged that there should be a companion book on marriage in women’s lives and often thought about writing it but alas, never did. Our conversations, as Laura recently reminded me, made it clear that in Steve’s thinking, marriage was critical for men’s position in society and was a pivotal marker for men’s masculinity, but he was quite circumspect about whether marriage was as important for women or for the validation of their femininity as it was for men. One can only hope that another scholar with Steve’s analytic virtuosity and refined theoretical acumen someday takes up this task. As fine a book as Marriage in Men’s Lives is, my personal favorite is his Costs of Privacy: Reputation and Surveillance in America, which was published in 1993 in the book series I then edited for Aldine de Gruyter. Long before the diffusion of the Internet and widespread alarms over identity theft, Steve posed the intriguing theoretical question, How, in an anonymous society of strangers, is trust possible? What enables both individuals and institutional actors to trust others whom they have never met and do not know? How can people board airplanes, buses and taxicabs driven by total strangers confident that 0049-089X/$ - see front matter Ó 2010 Published by Elsevier Inc. doi:10.1016/j.ssresearch.2010.06.010
686
Editorial / Social Science Research 39 (2010) 685–686
their safety is not in jeopardy? The short answer is that surveillance establishes reputations, and we use reputations to justify trust in strangers. As recent years have demonstrated decisively, this trust is easily and sometimes fatally misplaced, but in an otherwise anonymous society, it is all we have to go on. The ultimate cost of privacy is an increased reliance on reputations established and vouched for by others. Steve’s final ‘‘big project” was the covenant marriage project that he, Sanchez and I initiated in 1998 and were still working on when he passed. In 1997, the Louisiana legislature created an option for newly marrying couples to enter into a ‘‘covenant marriage”. Compared to standard marriages, covenant marriages are marginally more difficult to enter (they require, among other things, premarital counseling) and definitely more difficult to exit (parties to a covenant marriage voluntarily surrender their rights to a no-fault divorce). Steve’s idea, funded mainly by the National Science Foundation, was to evaluate the effects of this law and to determine whether covenant marriages were more satisfying, less conflictual, or longer-lasting that the standard alternative. The three of us chewed on this question for a decade and by the time we got a book together describing our findings and answers, our friend and esteemed collaborator was gone. Steve was known in sociology mainly as a specialist in marriage and family, but when diabetes destroyed his kidneys and he received transplants, he and his doctors teamed up on papers that appeared in places like Transplantation, the Archives of Internal Medicine, and the American Journal of Kidney Diseases. These papers dealt mainly with social aspects of transplantation, for example, ‘‘Racial disparities in renal transplant outcomes”, the title of a 1999 paper. For a social scientist, Steve was extraordinarily well-versed in endocrinology, diabetology, and related scientific disciplines. Like many life-long Type I diabetes patients, he always believed that the cure for his disease was ‘‘just around the corner” and I recall countless conversations with him about pancreatic cell transplants, insulin pumps, genetic therapy, and numerous other ‘‘cures” that, he believed, would be ready for implementation in just another few years. Sadly, it was not to be. But Steve was forever upbeat and lived his life on the theory that ‘‘every day on the green side of the grass is a good one”. Shortly after his death, it was suggested that I commission a series of papers for Social Science Research that would memorialize Steve’s professional life and interests. Special impetus for this memorial issue arose from a papers session honoring his work at the 2009 ASA meetings. Several of the papers included in this issue originated as presentations at that session. A couple of others were invited contributions and still others were plucked from the stream of regular submissions and set aside for this issue because they so clearly resonated with the timbre of Steve’s work. Whatever their origins, all the papers appearing here were reviewed by SSR’s referees, revised, and reviewed again before they were accepted for inclusion in this issue. Steve would have countenanced nothing less. My SSR obituary to Steve noted that ours was a personal and professional relationship that had endured for 35 years. For the last ten of those years, he served the SSR community with diligence, talent, and grace – always available to take on a review, always patient and constructive, never willing to relax his standards for anyone. As I contemplated the unpleasant task of naming a replacement for him on the SSR Board, I was reminded of Thomas Jefferson’s remark when asked if he was Ben Franklin’s replacement as the American Ambassador to France: ‘‘No, sir”, Jefferson replied, ‘‘I merely succeed him. No one can replace him”. Editor James D. Wright Social Science Research, Department of Sociology, University of Central Florida, Florida, United States E-mail address: [email protected]
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Social Science Research journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ssresearch
Editorial
Steven L. Nock: A personal reminiscence I began my professional career at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in September, 1973. Shortly after my arrival there, I ran into a couple of graduate students who, I later learned, were married: Steve Nock and Daphne Spain. Daphne was assigned as my teaching assistant for introductory sociology for the academic year 1973–74, and through her, I soon came to know Steve, both as a student and a friend. Steve completed his Ph.D in 1976 and took a job at Tulane University in New Orleans, where he stayed for just a couple of years, then relocated to the University of Virginia, where he stayed until his death in January, 2008, from complications of diabetes. He was two months shy of his 58th birthday. Steve was a valued and regular reviewer for Social Science Research throughout his career and a member of our Board of Advisory Editors from 1999 until his death. Even today, two and a half years later, I occasionally receive revisions for which Steve was one of the original reviewers. As a graduate student, Steve studied under Peter H. Rossi, one of the founding editors of this journal. His dissertation on household social standing was an application of Rossi’s vignette survey methodology to the problem of determining household prestige. This work formed the basis for Steve’s first scholarly publication, ‘‘Ascription versus Achievement in the Attribution of Family Social Status”, coauthored with Rossi and published in the American Journal of Sociology in 1978, the first of Steve’s 86 journal articles and book chapters. Ironically, his last publication, which appeared posthumously, was a chapter on vignette survey methods published in the Handbook of Survey Research, Second Edition (2010) edited by Peter V. Marsden and me. In addition to his numerous journal articles and book chapters, for which he was promoted to Full Professor in 1994, Steve also authored or coauthored seven books. The first was his book with Rossi on Measuring Social Judgments (1982), still a seminal text on vignette surveys. His last was Covenant Marriage: the Movement to Reclaim Tradition in America (2008), also published posthumously and co-written with Dr. Laura Sanchez at Bowling Green State University and me. That I was a collaborator with Steve on both his last paper and his last book is a bittersweet reminder of how closely our personal and professional lives had become intertwined over the years of our association. Steve’s best-known work, by far, was the award-winning Marriage in Men’s Lives, published by Oxford University Press in 1998 and the winner of the American Sociological Association’s William J. Goode prize for the year’s best book in marriage and family research. The book was a forceful argument for the proposition that that marriage changes men in fundamental ways (achievement, social participation, philanthropy and in many other spheres) because marriage successfully defines these behaviors as components of adult masculinity. Marriage provides men with the means of achieving well-being, comfort, and prestige within circumscribed, legitimate boundaries. Marriage, in short, as Laura Sanchez points out, is one of the only publically recognized platforms for what might be called benign displays of masculinity (vs. seemingly endless platforms for malignant – violent, destructive, hostile – displays of masculinity). Marriage lets men be men in socially constructive ways. Steve, Laura and I frequently discussed Marriage in Men’s Lives as we struggled to make sense of the data we were gathering in the covenant marriage project. Steve acknowledged that there should be a companion book on marriage in women’s lives and often thought about writing it but alas, never did. Our conversations, as Laura recently reminded me, made it clear that in Steve’s thinking, marriage was critical for men’s position in society and was a pivotal marker for men’s masculinity, but he was quite circumspect about whether marriage was as important for women or for the validation of their femininity as it was for men. One can only hope that another scholar with Steve’s analytic virtuosity and refined theoretical acumen someday takes up this task. As fine a book as Marriage in Men’s Lives is, my personal favorite is his Costs of Privacy: Reputation and Surveillance in America, which was published in 1993 in the book series I then edited for Aldine de Gruyter. Long before the diffusion of the Internet and widespread alarms over identity theft, Steve posed the intriguing theoretical question, How, in an anonymous society of strangers, is trust possible? What enables both individuals and institutional actors to trust others whom they have never met and do not know? How can people board airplanes, buses and taxicabs driven by total strangers confident that 0049-089X/$ - see front matter Ó 2010 Published by Elsevier Inc. doi:10.1016/j.ssresearch.2010.06.010
686
Editorial / Social Science Research 39 (2010) 685–686
their safety is not in jeopardy? The short answer is that surveillance establishes reputations, and we use reputations to justify trust in strangers. As recent years have demonstrated decisively, this trust is easily and sometimes fatally misplaced, but in an otherwise anonymous society, it is all we have to go on. The ultimate cost of privacy is an increased reliance on reputations established and vouched for by others. Steve’s final ‘‘big project” was the covenant marriage project that he, Sanchez and I initiated in 1998 and were still working on when he passed. In 1997, the Louisiana legislature created an option for newly marrying couples to enter into a ‘‘covenant marriage”. Compared to standard marriages, covenant marriages are marginally more difficult to enter (they require, among other things, premarital counseling) and definitely more difficult to exit (parties to a covenant marriage voluntarily surrender their rights to a no-fault divorce). Steve’s idea, funded mainly by the National Science Foundation, was to evaluate the effects of this law and to determine whether covenant marriages were more satisfying, less conflictual, or longer-lasting that the standard alternative. The three of us chewed on this question for a decade and by the time we got a book together describing our findings and answers, our friend and esteemed collaborator was gone. Steve was known in sociology mainly as a specialist in marriage and family, but when diabetes destroyed his kidneys and he received transplants, he and his doctors teamed up on papers that appeared in places like Transplantation, the Archives of Internal Medicine, and the American Journal of Kidney Diseases. These papers dealt mainly with social aspects of transplantation, for example, ‘‘Racial disparities in renal transplant outcomes”, the title of a 1999 paper. For a social scientist, Steve was extraordinarily well-versed in endocrinology, diabetology, and related scientific disciplines. Like many life-long Type I diabetes patients, he always believed that the cure for his disease was ‘‘just around the corner” and I recall countless conversations with him about pancreatic cell transplants, insulin pumps, genetic therapy, and numerous other ‘‘cures” that, he believed, would be ready for implementation in just another few years. Sadly, it was not to be. But Steve was forever upbeat and lived his life on the theory that ‘‘every day on the green side of the grass is a good one”. Shortly after his death, it was suggested that I commission a series of papers for Social Science Research that would memorialize Steve’s professional life and interests. Special impetus for this memorial issue arose from a papers session honoring his work at the 2009 ASA meetings. Several of the papers included in this issue originated as presentations at that session. A couple of others were invited contributions and still others were plucked from the stream of regular submissions and set aside for this issue because they so clearly resonated with the timbre of Steve’s work. Whatever their origins, all the papers appearing here were reviewed by SSR’s referees, revised, and reviewed again before they were accepted for inclusion in this issue. Steve would have countenanced nothing less. My SSR obituary to Steve noted that ours was a personal and professional relationship that had endured for 35 years. For the last ten of those years, he served the SSR community with diligence, talent, and grace – always available to take on a review, always patient and constructive, never willing to relax his standards for anyone. As I contemplated the unpleasant task of naming a replacement for him on the SSR Board, I was reminded of Thomas Jefferson’s remark when asked if he was Ben Franklin’s replacement as the American Ambassador to France: ‘‘No, sir”, Jefferson replied, ‘‘I merely succeed him. No one can replace him”. Editor James D. Wright Social Science Research, Department of Sociology, University of Central Florida, Florida, United States E-mail address: [email protected]