Community and Urban Sociology

The 2024 Robert and Helen Lynd Award for Lifetime Achievement in Community and Urban Sociology was awarded to Professor Mario Luis Small. Professor Small is the Chair and Quetelet Professor of Social Science in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. His books include Villa Victoria: The Transformation of Social Capital in a Boston Barrio, Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life, Someone To Talk To: How Networks Matter in Practice and Qualitative Literacy: A Guide to Evaluating Ethnographic and Interview Research. Among many other awards and honors, Professor Small is a previous winner of both the CUSS awards for best article and best book.   

Your work encompasses so many disciplines within and outside of sociology,
what is important for you about Community and Urban Sociology in particular?

Community and Urban Sociology has been an essential intellectual community for me, because it was a place where I could both talk to people and read about two of my core interests: how neighborhoods affect people, and how people form, think about, and use their network ties. There are “urbanist” communities that don’t really care about networks; there are “networks” communities more concerned with technical issues than with the sociological nature of social relations. At CUSS my work in both areas found a home. Many of its historically important researchers, such as Claude Fischer, have long been concerned, as I have, with urban issues and with social networks.

Much of your recent work has focused on methodological innovation and
understanding—what do you think community and urban sociology has to offer
broader conversations about methods and how should methodological
innovations influence the work of community urban sociologists?

I would say much of it comes from its fundamentally substantive interests. Today, as in the past, a lot of methodologists are methodologists, first; social thinkers, second. That is just the nature of a lot of methods work, wherein people must specialize in very technical, highly specialized aspects of a field—causal inference, network analysis, complex systems, etc.—to make a real intervention. But the methodological thinking in community and urban sociology has consistently derived from trying to solve or understand social problems or puzzles. Much of my work has that character, too. For example, a lot of my thinking about case studies arose out of my frustration with how people were interpreting the implications of a qualitative study of a single neighborhood for our views of neighborhoods as a whole.

It has been 20 years since you published your landmark work of urban sociology,
Villa Victoria. What stands out to you looking back on that work today?

I still cannot quite believe it’s been two decades. One of the things that stands out is how much of my thinking reflected later methodological problems while lacking the language and concepts to discuss them. Much of that book was about what we later came to describe as heterogeneity in treatment effects, with respect to neighborhood effects. I was arguing that we should have been approaching neighborhood effects, and the role of field studies in informing them, very differently, using heterogeneity as the starting point. Another thing that stands out, or maybe that I remember, is how much at the time I thought no one would be into the book. In those years, I wasn’t sure I wanted to remain in academia, because although I was doing well I did not really feel like I fit in. So, I told myself that I would at least write one book, but it would have to be a book exactly as I wanted it—conceptual and analytical in nature, and not a standard community study. At the time, it felt like an act of defiance, because many people were pushing me to write “a community study” of the “ghetto” as experienced by Puerto Ricans. I just did not want to do that. It’s funny that while I thought the book was kind of in its own world it ended up being kind of mainstream. We never truly know how others will read our work.

How do you think the field of Community and Urban Sociology has changed in
the years you have been in the discipline?

There is a lot more data now, for sure, from more interesting sources. In neighborhoods research in the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was a lot of work based on surveys to which people added U.S. Census data at the tract level. Now there is a lot more data from private companies, such as device tracking data, which has led to interesting work. I wrote about the promise but also the real dangers of producing empty science in a recent essay. The datasets are so large and eye-catching that there’s a real danger of “data-induced blindness,” wherein the size of the data ends up blinding even experienced scholars from important weaknesses. But on the whole I think the promise is enormous.

What are your hopes (or fears) for the future of Community and Urban Sociology?

More ambitious research, more reliance on newly available sources, and more new questions and creative theorizing, given how much the world has changed and how many tools we have at our disposal.

What is next for you? How do you hope to continue to influence and contribute to
the work of Community and Urban sociologists in the coming years?

I am spending a lot of time studying economic conditions and race at the neighborhood level. With my team, I have been studying alternative financial institutions, which seem to play a bigger role in neighborhood racial inequality than I realized (https://rdcu.be/cnL8h). I am also studying entrepreneurship, which is affected by neighborhood conditions and which has long been a pathway for mobility for the economically disenfranchised (https://www.nber.org/papers/w32604). I have also been studying racial segregation, but based where people travel to, rather than where they live (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2401661121). 

Separate from my work on neighborhoods, I remain interested in social isolation and personal networks. We just finished a long-gestating study showing that when people are facing difficulties, they are just as likely to avoid as to they are to talk to their close friends and family (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00031224241263602). Isolation may be less a function of having no one to talk to than of having to avoid everyone we are close to.

So, yes, I continue to be interested in neighborhoods and networks, just in different ways as new opportunities, and new puzzles, arise.