Published Thursday, December 2, 1999, in the San Jose Mercury News
BY
BARBARA FEDER
It's called, appropriately enough, the Journal of Mundane Behavior. And when it makes its debut in February, its founders hope it will serve as a kind of antidote for a field they see as increasingly obsessed with deviance.
The brainchild of Scott Schaffer and colleague Myron Orleans, the peer-reviewed journal ultimately will include interdisciplinary articles on commuting, small talk and a thousand other inconsequential topics that might have made for a great "Seinfeld'' episode.
As a society, Schaffer argues, we can learn more about social dynamics, power and conformity from mining normal behavior, rather than the Jerry Springer-ized issues such as transsexualism that social scientists seem prone to study these days.
"In a sense, these are the basics of sociology, and yet there's been a move away from the examination of the apparently ordinary. We tend to go for the extreme because it's easy,'' Schaffer said. "We're trying to reinvigorate the study of how we maintain social codes -- in spite of the fact that they're violated so often.''
Schaffer, an enthusiastic 29-year-old instructor, got the idea for the journal after reading what essentially was a mundane manifesto in Sociological Theory, a leading journal in the field. The article, by University of Missouri sociologist Wayne Brekhus, called for a renewed "study of the unmarked'' and lamented the fact that there was no so-called Journal of Mundane Behavior to counter numerous journals on social deviance.
Intrigued, Schaffer got Brekhus' blessing to use the name and tapped Orleans as co-editor.
Since then, submissions have steadily trickled in, often from international scholars. Anything "inconsequential'' is fodder for this journal, and upcoming articles include a study of library layouts, notions of power as displayed in the eating habits of teachers and students in British classrooms, and an account of behavior in a Japanese elevator.
Not surprisingly, some have wondered if the journal is a hoax. Others sniff at online journals, saying they lack the credibility of their older, paper-based peers.
Still, Brekhus applauds the scholars at California State University-Fullerton for their undertaking.
"I meant it as a joke, but as a joke to illuminate a serious message. I'm delighted that they picked it up,'' Brekhus said. "Most of social life is not very unusual. When you study extremes, the picture you get of how society operates is skewed. But there are all these mundane decisions we make that are far more consequential for society as a whole.''
Contact Barbara Feder at bfeder@sjmercury.com or (650) 688-7598.
IF YOU'RE INTERESTED
The Journal of Mundane
Behavior can be found at www.mundanebehavior.org.
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