Sociologists launch journal to
study the ordinary
By MATTHEW FORDAHL, AP Science Writer
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES
Studies in a new academic journal shed light on the mysterious silence
of passengers in office elevators, the political significance of a morning shave and the
cultural impact of plain talk among friends.
Sound boring? Not to the editors of the Journal of Mundane Behavior,
which tries to elevate the dull and fill a void in social science research with scholarly
analyses of the ordinary, earthy and just plain normal.
"We're trying to make it so that we look at everyday life as something that's
valuable and to understand how it gets constructed," said Scott Schaffer, the
journal's managing editor and a sociology instructor at California State University,
Fullerton.
Schaffer and co-editor Myron Orleans started the online publication in response to what
they believe is sociology's emphasis on deviancy - sort of a Jerry Springer takeover of
their field. Instead, Mundane Behavior's theme mirrors "Seinfeld."
Like the popular sitcom, the journal seemingly about nothing strives to find something
deeper: Perhaps all the little things in ordinary lives add up to more than all the
extreme behaviors being studied so intently at the fringe of society.
"Most of us don't live Jerry Springer lives," Schaffer says. "We get up at
some ungodly hour, live in a 6-by-6-foot cubicle for eight or more hours, reverse the
insane commute and go home to our lives.
"This amounts to probably 60 percent or more of our lives," he says. "And
the editors here think that this vast amount of energy, effort and, in some cases, sheer
drudgery, deserves some attention."
In the first edition, an article on shaving analyzes how facial hair defines masculinity.
Another report shows how small talk promulgates a culture. And a third reviews how the
Japanese see an elevator ride as a "respite from a norm-governed society."
Schaffer and Orleans received a handful of e-mails wondering if it was a hoax. They also
got three times as many submissions as they could use for the debut of the peer-reviewed
journal. The next issue will be posted in June.
Sociologists say the study of mundane behavior is nothing new, and mainstream journals
devote many pages to such analysis.
"The idea is to sort of step back from everything that we take for granted and say,
'What's really going on here, anyway?"' said William Roy of the University of
California, Los Angeles. "A fish is the last creature to ever notice water."
But Schaffer and Orleans want to expand the journal's scope beyond sociology - the study
of interaction among people - to include history, political science, literature, art and
anything else touched by normalcy.
The idea sprang from a 1998 article published in the journal Sociological Theory.
Wayne Brekhus of the University of Missouri complained that there were many journals
devoted to extreme behavior but nothing concentrating on the mundane.
Brekhus, who studied the lives of suburban gay men, said many of his subjects suggested he
talk to gays in New York.
"They saw little in their lives that would be of interest to a social scientist and
attempted to direct me to where I might find the 'type of gays' that social scientists
write about," he said.
Brekhus' half-joking call for a journal to study the mundane caught the attention of
Schaffer and Orleans. The Cal State Fullerton sociologists sent out e-mail notices
requesting papers and launched the Web site. Six months and $500 later, the 112-page
journal was posted on the Internet at www.mundanebehavior.org.
Though the journal may eventually be printed, the online version will remain so that the
publication remains accessible to the people it studies.
"We figured since we're talking about mundane behavior, then the people who live the
mundane lives that we're studying should be able to read it, rather than just making it
the province of academia," Schaffer said.
But what is mundane in a world where everything appears dysfunctional? Schaffer says
definitions of the mundane will change as the journal evolves.
"What's mundane in one aspect becomes completely bizarre in another one," he
said. "So we wanted to kind of stray away from having an idea of what mundane was and
talk about conceptions of the mundane develop."
Still, there's a risk of becoming boring, Brekhus warns.
"It's not simply enough that we study the mundane," he said. "The purpose
to studying the mundane is to find something interesting about ordinary social life, not
just to present the mundane."
On the Net: http://www.mundanebehavior.org.