Mark Mizruchi is the Robert Cooley Angell Collegiate Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan. He also holds an appointment as Professor of Management and Organizations at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business. His research has focused on the political activity of the U.S. corporate elite over the 20th and 21st centuries. He was influential in the development of social network analysis, and has published research in the fields of organizational theory, economic sociology, and political sociology. (June 2025)

1. In your Theory and Society article you argue that the near universally accepted assumption that a unified economic elite is more effective and powerful, no longer holds. You pull together diverse types of evidence in an unbiased way to make the case for the plausibility of a set of rich and nuanced postulates regarding the behavior and power of elites. Would it be fair to say that your article exemplifies the type of value-neutral non-politicized approach to the development of explanatory theory that has largely been abandoned by recent sociology?

I suspect that the proportion of sociological work that is deliberately ideological, in that its analyses and conclusions are driven by "social justice" concerns, has probably increased over the past three decades. I wouldn't say that intendedly non-politicized or value-neutral work has been abandoned, however. Most of my colleagues, for example, even those whose work is motivated by social justice concerns, continue to conduct serious and high-quality scholarship, in which they uncover "truths" about the social world. Many of the problems in sociology occur in our evaluation of research rather than our conduct of it. The almost complete absence of ideological diversity means that certain assumptions and findings, especially those involving race and gender, aren't questioned, which means that a lot of low-quality work gets accepted as correct because its conclusions fit the prevailing narrative.  Seemingly smart people seem to lose all critical perspective when findings accord with their worldview and/or political perspective. When a sociologist has the guts to report findings that question the accepted wisdom, however, he or she is typically excoriated, regardless of the quality of the work. In these cases, many of the same people who uncritically accepted more "palatable" findings on the same topic suddenly become fierce and incisive critics. I don't think that ideological diversity is necessarily the solution. How exactly are we going to convince conservative college students to get PhDs in sociology? I do think that existing sociologists, whatever their political views, need to make greater efforts to look honestly at the world and be willing to be critical of every piece of scholarship, even if its findings otherwise reinforce their worldviews. In other words, we need to be better at monitoring ourselves.

2. You and others have said that there are pockets of sociologists doing serious empirical work, and that the quality and rigor of this research is stronger today than it was in earlier decades. How can a sociological specialty or sub-field flourish if there are a small number of high caliber studies and a long tail of scientific junk? Doesn't  progress require theorists to develop new concepts, methodologists to refine techniques, worker bees to develop and refute the theories, etc.?

My guess is that the majority of work in most scientific fields is not very important or enlightening. That's just the nature of academic work. So the existence of a long tail is not a problem per se. In sociology, however, the long tail is heavily populated with work that is driven by social justice concerns rather than efforts to understand the world.  [As an aside, the term "social justice," as used by most sociologists, assumes that there's a consensus on what "justice" actually is. There isn't. One person might view admitting a less-prepared minority student over a more-prepared non-minority student as a just act. Another might view it as unjust. Sociologists' use of the term justice almost always refers to actions consistent with their particular political views.]  But back to your question. The quality of today's sociological scholarship at the highest level is generally very strong, in that it requires levels of technical expertise that did not exist in earlier decades, either because the methods hadn't been developed or because the increased standards of evidence hadn't yet been widely disseminated. Even the high quality work is slanted by sociologists' political orientations, however, in two ways: First, findings that run counter to wokeness are either not reported or are rejected by reviewers (see my earlier point about sociologists' selective application of their critical faculties). Second, the topics that sociologists study are strongly slanted toward their political perspectives (the emphasis on police treatment of blacks, for example, but the almost complete absence of work on black on black crime).

3. It is no longer only dissidents who are speaking out that much of sociology is political advocacy under the guise of scholarship, and that only studies that reach the politically and ideologically "correct" conclusions are accepted. Some go so far as to say that the whole enterprise is rotten. You cite Doug Massey's view that the way to discredit theories you do not like is to confront them directly, test them rigorously and prove them wrong. Is this approach even possible today? What solutions would you recommend, and what direction would you propose for the field?

I do think it's possible to do what Massey suggested. Following Massey's review of "The Bell Curve" (Herrnstein and Murray, 1994), from which the statement you cite was taken, a group at Berkeley led by Claude Fischer wrote a book based on an exhaustive reanalysis of Herrnstein and Murray's data. They showed, in a rigorous fashion, that H&M's relatively crude measure of social background and their failure to control for a broad range of related variables led them to significantly inflate the role of IQ on social outcomes. I found Fischer et al.'s analysis largely convincing. I should note, however, that they did not completely eliminate the effect of cognitive ability on outcomes, even with their numerous controls. There is a newer study suggesting, consistent with H&M, that among those with equal cognitive ability there is no evident difference in outcomes between white and black subjects. I don't have the reference handy but I'm sure I can find it. So yeah, it is still possible to do what Massey recommended. It's 30 years beyond the Fischer et al. study, however, and I don't see sociologists seriously considering the possibility that those whose views run counter to the sociologists' political biases might actually have a point.

4. An important current debate concerns the relationship between business and economic elites and woke ideology. For example, leftist theorists point out that by creating conflict between various identities within economic classes and dividing the working class, woke politics facilitates economic exploitation. How would you explain this phenomenon? Is it consistent with your evolving theory of economic elites?

Marx noted that a smart ruling class will identify the most talented members of the working class and try to coopt them, which robs the proletariat of its potential leaders. I don't think that today's elites are smart enough to be even thinking this way, but I do agree that it's very easy for them to incorporate wokeness, since it's cost-free for them. Whatever conflicts this causes among various non-elite ethnic groups is, I suspect, just icing on the cake for them. Serious critics of American society, such as the terrific Marxist political scientist Adolph Reed, believe that the overemphasis on racial politics has alienated the very people (the white working class) who are needed as allies in any kind of broad movement for social change. The idea that a poor white family living in a shack in the hills of West Virginia enjoys "white privilege" serves no useful purpose for anyone, except to make some "antiracist" activists feel morally superior. I'm as frustrated as anyone that those people in West Virginia vote 80 percent for Republicans. I think it's best, in the interest of being a good scholar, that I refrain from expressing my opinion about such people. My point is, they learn about their "white privilege" from watching Fox News (which loves to cover every existing case of wokeness on college campuses) and they're angry enough about it to vote for a party that will strip them of what little they have so they can give bigger tax breaks to the wealthy. Today's woke left is among the most self-destructive groups in recent memory, and today's elites are the biggest beneficiaries.