Another Round of Cosmopolitans

November 11, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between good journalism and sociology. One obvious difference is in the data. Social science data has to be thorough and sysematic. A journalist can merely talk to a cab driver or report on how a friend reacted to a sandwich menu that offered a “Padrino” or “soppresssata.”

If you’re a journalist, you also don’t have to worry much about antecedents. You can put your ideas on display as something totally new, like fidget spinners. But if you want to pass as a scholar, you have to do your homework.

British journalist David Goodhart in his recent book on populism and politics in the UK has created two types he calls Somewheres and Anywheres to explain what’s happening. David Brooks yesterday borrowed the terms and applied them to US politics.

Somewheres are rooted in their towns and have “ascribed” identities — Virginia farmer, West Virginia coal miner, Pennsylvania steelworker. Anywheres are at home in the global economy. They derive their identity from portable traits, like education or job skills, and are more likely to move to areas of opportunity. Somewheres value staying put; they feel uncomfortable with many aspects of cultural and economic change, like mass immigration. Anywheres make educational attainment the gold standard of status and are cheerleaders for restless change.

Pardon me, but this sounds awfully similar to a typology offered sixty years ago by sociologist Alvin Gouldner in his Administrative Science Quarterly article. “Cosmopolitans and Locals.” The terms give a fairly good picture of these two types, the one more mobile and oriented towards a profession, the other rooted to a place or a company. Here’s a quick version:

Locals:         high on loyalty to the employing organization,         low on commitment to specialized role skills         likely to use an inner reference group orientation.      Cosmopolitans:         low on loyalty to the employing organization         high on commitment to specialized role skills         likely to use an outer reference group orientation

I haven’t read Goodhart’s book; maybe he does credit Gouldner. In a Financial Times article (here) he describes himself as a “post-liberal,” and perhaps he avoids cosmopolitan because he is familiar with the alt-right and their use of cosmopolitan as a pejorative synonym for Jew. (See my earlier post on this.)

I had the impression that David Brooks took some sociology courses at Chicago, but I guess cosmopolitans and locals never came up.