From the issue dated October 29, 1999

HOT TYPE

Founder and Director of Feminist Press Will Step Down; 2 Sociologists at Cal State at
Fullerton Start 'Journal of Mundane Behavior'

...

* * *

Wayne Brekhus, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Missouri at Columbia, thinks his
discipline has a teensy blind spot: ordinary life.

Writing in Sociological Theory last year, Mr. Brekhus called for a new "sociology of the unmarked."

"Although there are many deviance journals to analyze socially unusual behavior, there is no Journal of Mundane Behavior to explicitly analyze conformity," he added.

Well, there is now. Inspired by Mr. Brekhus's lament, two sociologists at California State University at Fullerton are about to start an on-line, peer-reviewed, cross-disciplinary journal by that very name.

What sorts of subjects will make the cut? "If it's inconsequential in nature, it will fit," says Myron Orleans, a
professor of sociology at Cal State at Fullerton and one of the journal's co-editors. He'll also settle for the
"ordinary," the "habitual," and the "quotidian" -- anything, he says, that "apparently has no significance beyond itself." His premise, naturally, is that the opposite is true: that the overlooked trivia of, say, everyday conversation, workplace behavior, or family life can illuminate how power and conformity shape social relationships.

Scott Schaffer, his co-editor and an instructor at Cal State, says that sociology's preoccupation with deviance even has made teaching difficult. His students find ethnographic fieldwork "absolutely, terrifyingly difficult," he says, because "they're so used to the outrageous, the outlandish, the Jerry Springerish, and couldn't look at the ordinary."

Since the editors began soliciting submissions last month for the first issue, slated for February, they have already received e-mail messages asking if the journal was a hoax. But they have also received a couple of papers. One, from a scholar in Japan, claims that the way workers there converse in elevators is revealing. "Elevators allow a safe space in Japan for people to break out of the normal hierarchical settings," says Mr. Schaffer.

"In looking for the interesting stories," says Mr. Brekhus, who may contribute, "we in the discipline have a
tendency to go toward the exotic, toward the exceptional -- kind of toward the stereotype. That creates perceptions of the stereotypes rather than the realities."

He noticed this, he says, when he began to study the lives of suburban gay men. "Just about everybody who was studying gay men was studying political activists and drag queens and leathermen. What wasn't being looked at was just sort of your average Joe -- ordinary, unexciting gay men who were just living ordinary lives, who weren't political activists, some of whom were even Republicans and church leaders and things like that."

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