Comrades,
Maybe this ground has been trod already -- apologies if so.
Seems key to me to pay attention to the structure of "insights" -- I'm
influenced here by Murray S. Davis ("That's Interesting!") and Randall
Collins (_Sociological Insight: An Introduction to Nonobvious
Sociology_) -- so as to distinguish them from "facts I knew but you
didn't." Interesting insights are the ones that counter conventional
expectations of the audience.
Davis tries to characterize what makes various theories interesting and
suggests that the best ones have form of "everyone thinks (or it's
obvious that) X is Y, but really it's Z", especially when Y and Z are,
respectively, "personal/individual/psychological" and "social" (or vice
versa).
Thus: everyone knows suicide is personal, but really it's social
(Durkheim); everyone knows war is social, but death instinct may be
personal (Freud); work is tough on individuals -> work is tough on whole
classes of individuals; religion/god is a superstitious atavism ->
religion/god is fundamental part of all group life.
A piece that I've used over the years is an extract that appeared in
Coser's _Pleasures of Sociology_ by Paul Lazarsfeld, "What is obvious?"
You can find the original in JSTOR -- Public Opinion Quarterly v 13
Fall 1949. He offers some "obvious" explanations for "findings" such as
soldiers from the south fared much better in the heat of the south
pacific during world war II because they were used to hot climates.
After presenting these sound explanations he reveals that in fact
research showed the opposite -- here, soldiers from the south fared less
well. It's a great exercise because students don't just get clobbered
with "here's how clever we are" or "let me show you how false your
consciousness is!" but rather with constructing a plausible explanation
and then discovering how easy it is to rationalize something that's in
fact false and how a result can surprise us.
Refs
Collins, Randall. 1982. _Sociological Insight_. Oxford.
Murray S. Davis, "That's Interesting: Towards a Phenomenology of
Sociology and a Sociology of Phenomenology", Philosophy of the Social
Sciences, Vol.1, pp.309-344, 1971
http://www.mang.canterbury.ac.nz/writing_guide/marketing/index.shtml
Lazarsfeld, P. F. (1949). The American soldier: An expository review.
Public Opinion Quarterly, 13, 377-404.
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0033-362X%28194923%2913%3A3%3C377%3ATASER%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Z
Coser, Lewis. The Pleasures of Sociology. New York: New American Library.
For links to electronic versions of some sources for this book:
http://djjr.net/dan/crss/soc055/resources/coser-pleasures-of-sociology.html
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