VoE - Eric Schoon 02.13.2025_mixdown
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Eric Schoon: So when we think of legitimacy, I argue that legitimacy is not just something that an object, a state, a person, an organization has.

And it's not just a perception by others. It's embedded in a relationship. I talk about it in dyadic terms- you have to have an audience, you have to have an object, and you have to have some sort of a relationship between them. And legitimacy resides in that relationship. 

Jen Farmer: From the heart of The Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work of Arts and Sciences faculty and staff with departments as wide ranging as art, astronomy, chemistry and biochemistry, physics, emergent materials and mathematics and languages, among many others. The college always has something exciting happening. Join us to find out what's new, now.


David Staley: Joining me today in the [00:01:00] ASC Marketing and Communications Studio is Eric Schoon, Associate Professor of Sociology at The Ohio State University College of the Arts and Sciences. He identifies his research fields as sociological theory, cultural sociology, political sociology, comparative historical sociology, organizations and research methodology.

Dr. Schoon, welcome to Voices. 

Eric Schoon: Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here. 

David Staley: Such a broad range of interests , which already already draws my interest, but as we were talking before we started recording, you said that you were interested in how social scientists produce knowledge, that maybe that's what describes your entire research agenda.

So you have to tell me more about that. What does that mean about how social scientists produce knowledge? 

Eric Schoon: Well, it's an interesting question. I have struggled at times to explain how all of the different projects that I'm working on fit together. I think for me, what ties them together is this interest in how we produce knowledge about the social world. And by we, I mean social science. How do our social scientists doing [00:02:00] what we do? And I'm interested in thinking about how we can expand both what we learn and how we learn it by really digging into methods and the concepts we use in our research and, you know, linking method and theory .


If I were to identify a through line through the various projects that I have been working on, that I'm working on now and that I have worked on over the past several years. I think that that's sort of the broad scope. 

David Staley: I'm going to put you on the spot. 

Eric Schoon: Sure. 

David Staley: Do you have a definition of knowledge or maybe what isn't knowledge?

Because this is a question that I've been wrestling with, so I'm hoping to gain some insights from you. 

Eric Schoon: I do not. 

David Staley: I'm especially trying to figure out what's anti knowledge. 

Eric Schoon: Yeah. 

David Staley: And doesn't count as knowledge and maybe doesn't work its way into the university. 

Eric Schoon: Yeah, that's interesting. I honestly I'm not prepared for that question.

So, gosh, what is knowledge? I suppose the way that I have been thinking about knowledge is the information and ideas that we generate through our research, the understanding of the social world. Your question though, I mean, and this is [00:03:00] something, when I think about how do we develop concepts, and this is something that I teach in our graduate research methods class, how do we develop concepts?

Do we define them? We operationalize them, kind of move through these processes in a big question that you have to ask yourself when you're developing a concept is what's the negative pole, what is the opposite? And so your question, what is anti knowledge I think is the part that I'm a little less sure of.

Which makes this a challenging construct for me to define on the fly, because you want to have something that you can sort of define the opposite of. And I think I could, if you give me a second, I could postulate about it. 

David Staley: Maybe we could call it dark knowledge, like dark matter or dark energy, but that would be really stretching the metaphor, wouldn't it..

Eric Schoon: You know, it depends on if what you're thinking about is the absence of knowledge, you know, a lack of understanding about something. And there's certainly an element of that in the social sciences, we're developing an understanding of things that we maybe don't understand, or we haven't really understood before, how certain things work or, social relations or things like that.

So that's one option [00:04:00] would be to focus on the absence, but you can also, depending on how you're thinking about it, there could be alternate constructs that are sort of the opposite pole. So you might think about knowledge is contrasted with again, off the top of my head, something like emotion or feeling.

But just by contrasting it with that, you get a really different sense of what knowledge is, it suggests sort of a cognitive framework, a logical sort of structure as opposed to an emotional structure. And I think a lot of cultural sociologists would contest that there is a lot of knowledge that shapes emotions.


Emotions are informed by knowledge structures and cognitive functions. So I don't have an answer for you, but I think that there are, you know, do you have the anti knowledge be, another concept that's an opposite pole or is it simply the absence of knowledge, the absence of something that we know or understand?

David Staley: Well, that sounded like an answer to me. And again, thank you. Thank you for helping me think that through. 

Eric Schoon: Yeah, you bet. 

David Staley: Let's talk about some of your more specific projects where you're working through this. I know that one of the projects you're working on, one of the problems you're working on is legitimacy or the study of [00:05:00] legitimacy.

Let's start there. Maybe first of all, tell us what you mean by legitimacy, what is it that you're studying? 

Eric Schoon: Yeah, so legitimacy is a really widely used concept. One of the things that fascinates me about it, before I tell you what I think it is, I'll tell you why it's complicated to say what it is.

It's a concept that social scientists but also academics, I mean, people in the arts, the humanities my work has been cited in journals, physics journals and biology, you know, I mean, on legitimacy, people talk about this in a lot of academic disciplines, but we also use it in our everyday language.

It's a part of the vernacular. It's something that we kind of intuitively understand people talk about, people know about, but in the social sciences in particular, that's the area that I'm focused on, we. Well, some people, I being one of them, seem to think that it matters and to get at legitimacy we have to have a definition that we need to be able to operationalize it.

The most common definition in the social sciences, or at least the most widely cited definition, is by Mark Suchman. And Mark Suchman published an article in [00:06:00] 1995 called _Managing Legitimacy_. I don't have notes on this, but you can go back and check the tape and see if I remember it correctly.

He says that legitimacy implies that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper, or appropriate within the bounds of some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions, or something to that effect. And so, within that definition, that has been critiqued to some extent for being very broad desirable, proper, or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions, something like that.

And so that's one very general definition that I think does a good job of capturing the fact that it's a multidimensional concept. So legitimacy has been defined by some people as the right to rule. By other people, like political legitimacy is talked about as the right to rule. Other people talk about legitimacy largely in terms of perceptions and equate it with things like popularity, or trust, or approval, or support. There are other literatures that talk about legitimacy in terms of something that an entity [00:07:00] has legitimacy as a characteristic and define it in those terms. 

David Staley: Inherent, not ascribed. 

Eric Schoon: Exactly. It's not just, somebody else's perception.

It's something that you can possess. And so that is something that I got interested in partly because I was doing work on trying to understand the role of legitimacy in political conflict and contentious politics or violent conflict. So I was studying my background is in political and cultural sociology, and I thought legitimacy was sort of an interesting problem in that context.

And there have been a lot of arguments made that legitimacy matters in that context, but the way that we define legitimacy becomes quite challenging because from a lot of early work that cites Weber will talk about legitimacy is something that you have. It's something that can be possessed. But I was reading in this context where you have rebel groups and you've got the state and the state has legitimacy because it just possesses legitimacy.

You know, this is The state is defined by the legitimate use of force or this sort of the [00:08:00] Arian definition, these boundaries of the state. When I was in graduate school, this was around 2008 to 2015 I was reading a lot of literature saying that for rebels or insurgents or revolutionaries to be successful, they needed legitimacy. And that struck me as a little odd. If we think of legitimacy in those terms, then. How can an anti state movement have legitimacy and a state have legitimacy if it's just something that they possess?

Because clearly the state doesn't think that the anti state movement has legitimacy. And clearly the anti state movement doesn't think that the state has legitimacy. And so thinking in terms of, is it perceptions? Is it something you possess? Is it just sort of out there in the ether? Do you fit in?

Do you, are you unquestioned? There are a lot of different ways of thinking about measuring legitimacy. So, that's one of the problems that as I got further into my work trying to understand legitimacy and how it mattered in one particular context, I started to just read a lot more broadly and explore a lot of different areas and think about how do we [00:09:00] define and measure legitimacy.

And so this is something that I published on, and my argument is that legitimacy has three components, there are three sort of empirical dimensions to legitimacy, and then it requires three things. So when we think of legitimacy, I argue that legitimacy is not just something that an object, a state, a person, an organization has.

And it's not just a perception by others. It's embedded in a relationship. I talk about it in dyadic terms- you have to have an audience, you have to have an object, and you have to have some sort of a relationship between them. And legitimacy resides in that relationship. But for a relationship to have legitimacy, my argument is that you have to have three conditions.

First, You have to have some sort of expectations that define the terms of what is legitimate. What we might consider to be the rules of the game, so to speak. So the rules of the game for a state are going to be different than the rules of the game for a corporation. The rules of the game in a marriage are going to be different than the rules of the game in a [00:10:00] workplace environment.

And so the rules of sort of the relationship. There have to be some sort of expectations. And they define the relationship itself. So you have to have expectations. At the same time, the object of legitimacy has to conform to those expectations. They have to behave according to the rules. And the audience, the other side of the dyad, has to assent to being a part of the relationship within those terms, so it has to be voluntary. We don't think of legitimacy as being present when it's coerced, right? So I might be in a relationship with a state or you might have a group or a corporate entity in relation with a regulator or something like that. If they're being coerced to be a part of that relationship, we tend not to think of that as legitimacy.

And so there has to be some voluntary element to it. There has to be a scent. I published an article a few years ago, is that legitimacy, I think, is most productively understood in terms of relationships.

And within those relationships, for there to be legitimacy, you have to have expectations, [00:11:00] assent, and conformity. 

David Staley: How did you come to this conclusion? In other words, what was your methodology? Is this observational? Is this theoretical? Is it a combination? 


Eric Schoon: It started out observational and theoretical to some extent, just trying to think these things through.

And then I realized I probably need to be a little bit more systematic and rigorous about this. So actually, what I did was I use annual review articles. And I went through annual review articles, I in seven fields in the social and behavioral sciences. And I looked at how they define legitimacy and what definitions.

And depending on the article, they ranged from one to seven different definitions of legitimacy that they talked about. And they often would present synthetic definitions of legitimacy. And I liked that approach so then I compared, how do these different disparate approaches, psychology, sociology, social psychology, political science, organizations and management studies, these different fields, how are they thinking about legitimacy?

And is there anything that they all have in common? And so I focused on the commonalities. What are sort of the points of [00:12:00] agreement in how we think about legitimacy? And so my framework emerged from those points of agreement. 

David Staley: So you and a co author published a book recently, _Regression Inside Out_.

Eric Schoon: Yes. 

David Staley: And so I'm very interested to know more about this. So you were studying linear regression analysis, or at least an approach to this. Tell us about the book, first of all,_ Regression Inside Out_. 


Eric Schoon: Well, so _Regression Inside Out _was published with two co authors Dave Melamed and Ron Breiger.

I want to make sure to be clear _Regression Inside Out_ has been pioneered by Ron Breiger. So Ron was my mentor in grad school, my advisor and Dave Malamud, who is a colleague here at OSU also happened to be Ron Breiger's research assistant with me. We were in grad school together and we're working together.

And in 2010, Ron has been working on this project, trying to develop this way of thinking about regression, linear regression, which is how linear regression is a statistical tool that's very commonly used in the social sciences and beyond. It's kind of the bread and butter statistical method.


We look at the relationships between [00:13:00] variables and see how they co vary with each other. So what's the effect of X on Y? This is an important tool for a lot of fields. And for several years, Ron was working on developing this idea of how do we think about the inner workings of the regression model?

How do we understand what a coefficient is really doing? How does it relate to the inner workings of this? And in 2010, he invited Dave and I to work with him as his research assistants. So over the next decade or so. We were working on different papers and projects related to these ideas, and ultimately _Regression Inside Out_.

The book itself is an introduction to this way of thinking about statistical analysis of thinking about linear regression and to give sort of the brief overview of the method and the purpose of the book. In broad terms, when we think about a regression analysis, we're thinking about the relationship between variables.

So we might think of a variable like age or [00:14:00] gender or income or something like that. And so if you imagine an Excel spreadsheet, you've got columns, right? Each one of these columns could represent a variable. And that's how we typically structure our data when we're doing a statistical analysis.

So, regression is intended to tell you about the relationship between the columns of your data, the variables. But what happens is the rows, the observations, the cases wind up being rendered invisible. We can't really see what's happening. We just get the average effect. And if you are conducting a regression analysis, following, meeting all of the assumptions of the regression model, you've sampled appropriately, you've got a representative sample of a known population, you've got appropriate distributions, independence of errors, you meet all these assumptions.

Then every observation should be what's called exchangeable, or essentially interchangeable. It doesn't really matter when we're running a regression to try to understand what predicts voter turnout or something like that. It doesn't matter if I'm in the survey, or if you're in the survey, or if anybody here at Ohio [00:15:00] State is even in the survey.

What matters is how it was sampled. And essentially, all of those observations are exchangeable. But we really, we use regression to study a lot of things that are not necessarily exchangeable. For instance, people use regression to study patterns in countries or organizations or other entities where we might think of these things, we can look at them from a distributional standpoint, we can look at how variables operate within those contexts, but if you're studying social movements and you have a data set that has the NAACP and the Ku Klux Klan, the regression model treats those as completely exchangeable, but substantively, they might be quite different. Or similarly, if we've got a regression model looking at the determinants of poverty in countries around the world, the United States is not exchangeable with Papua New Guinea, substantively. We don't think of those as being just interchangeable units. And so regression doesn't really allow you to [00:16:00] look at the cases as a whole.

We've got a lot of great diagnostic methods that allow you to look for problematic cases. But in a lot of contexts, what we want to understand through the variables is the cases themselves. We run a regression about a country, we want to understand something about countries. And we're interested in the cases.

So what _Regression Inside Out_ does, is it allows you to see what each case, or what each observation, a case can be one observation, it can be multiple observations, so multiple rows of the data set. What each one is doing, or how it's contributing to the regression coefficient and the variance in the model.

And what that allows you to do is to actually dig down into what are the cases themselves doing, and how do they affect the shape of the model? How do they affect our findings? Is the United States really behaving in a similar way to Papua New Guinea, or is it doing something really different?

And so in the book, we outline a number of results where we show that in some cases, you wind up with [00:17:00] very different patterns. You're looking at a group of countries and you find that these five countries are doing one thing, and these five countries are doing another thing.

And they average to what we get from the regression coefficient. But in fact, there are different processes at play, and you can start to dig into that more substantively. And so the idea is you take the regression model. You turn it inside out so that you can see what's happening on the inside. 

David Staley: How's this been received by social scientists and others?

Eric Schoon: Well, I mean, it came out, gosh, eight months ago or so. So far we've gotten positive feedback I don't think that there have been any reviews published at this point, but we got really great blurbs on the back, so. 

David Staley: Well, you're not suggesting in the book that somehow there's a deficit here that regression analysis has.

Problems to it. You're not making that sort of. 

Eric Schoon: No. If anything, the entire method depends on regression. The idea is that you run the regression _Regression Inside Out_, gives you a tool for better understanding what's happening inside the regression model, [00:18:00] but you have to start with regression. So we're clearly committed to the value of regression modeling, but what the book is doing, what it's showing how to do is to go beyond sort of the conventional interpretation. The way we frame it is that we expand what you can learn from a regression model by rethinking how we learn from regression models. 

David Staley: Very interesting. I want to ask you about the work you've done. with ethnographers in Turkey, and we have to set this up, because you were supposed to be one of those researchers in Turkey.

Tell us about how you came to this line of research. 

Eric Schoon: Yeah, this has been a really exciting project. So in 2019, my wife, Danielle Schoon is an ethnographer who did all of her fieldwork in Turkey. And I have published on Turkey. I did research on the Kurdish conflict in Turkey, and we had been planning to do a project together.

And so in 2019, we went back to Turkey. We did some preliminary field work. We were going to develop this project [00:19:00] and the plan was to go back in the summer of 2020 and continue the project.

COVID 19 made travel not that feasible. The idea was that we were going to work on something together, but we both kind of had our own angles to it.

And as she and I were talking, and I was talking to other friends who have done fieldwork in Turkey, about the questions that I was interested in, I realized that they actually had a ton of insight into the things that I was fascinated by, the political dynamics and the ethnic politics in Turkey.

And I started to think, I can't go to Turkey, I wonder if it would work to interview ethnographers and use them as sources to understand Turkey. When an ethnographer goes into the field, they collect, I'm spreading my arms out real wide here, that much data, you know, a lot of data.

And then they publish this very little bit of the data. They wind up using a lot less than what they gather. And I thought, I wonder if that could be a way to get at these questions that I'm interested in about Turkey. So I started interviewing ethnographers who had conducted their fieldwork in Turkey.

But Unsurprisingly, given sort of my own interests in these big questions [00:20:00] that we talked about at the beginning, but also unsurprisingly, because I am interviewing ethnographers about their fieldwork, the project evolved more into a study of ethnographers and their experiences in the field.

That wound up being the data that I really got. And as people were sharing their stories there was a lot that came up that was really fascinating to me. There's an element of cheating to it where I mean, it feels like cheating to me that, I was talking to people about things like the challenges that they had faced in the field and things that the significant events that had come up.

And in a lot of cases, I started to hear similar phrases like, this happened and I just had to improvise or I just had to make it up or, my training didn't prepare me for this. And when one person tells you that, that sounds sort of anomalous. But when you've got, I wound up interviewing 60 ethnographers, when you've got 20, or 30, or 35, or 40 people telling you that they encountered very similar things and they reacted in very similar ways, but that each one of them improvised and each one of them felt that their [00:21:00] training hadn't prepared them for it, they're identifying for me areas that suggest that these are topics that maybe need more elaboration that we need to study.

And by looking at how they responded, how they adapted, the way that they engaged in flexibility, their sort of interactions in the field, and looking for patterns in that, this work has sort of started to look at how ethnographers are engaged in fieldwork. And ultimately, the idea is to understand knowledge production within and about Turkey, there are elements of this that are very much linked to the political and historical context that all these people were working in. But at the same time, there are these broader methodological insights where, the ethnographers I interviewed were in the field over the span of about 50 years, dating back to the 1970s, 1980s. They were conducting fieldwork in all kinds of contexts. They covered all seven major regions of Turkey. There were urban ethnographers, people working in rural villages. People doing kind of corporate work, like organizational ethnography, people [00:22:00] doing neighborhood ethnography.

And so there's also a lot of diversity in terms of what's covered in the temporal timeframe. And Turkey's an interesting country because you go from periods of military rule to, in the early 2000s, it was being hailed as the model for democracy in the Middle East. And now, you've got this autocratic or authoritarian turn in the country.

And so being able to look at how that context affected ethnography over time, I think provides some insights into the country, but also it provides a nice variation that suggests that if I'm finding patterns, it's not just about patterns in Turkey. It's depending on the time period and the context that someone was in, their experiences were actually in many cases, very similar to what other people are experiencing in other nations.

David Staley: You said that in interviewing these ethnographers, you were finding a lot of them were saying that they were improvising in the field, or they had to improvise. Were they improvising in the same way? In other words, did you see patterns in their improvisation? 

Eric Schoon: I did, [00:23:00] yeah. That was when I started to clue in on the fact that a lot of what they were talking about, there were patterns in the way that they reacted to things, but that each one was kind of forced to reinvent the wheel.

So I've published two articles on this right now up to date, I'm working on another one. The first article that I published was on losing access to field sites. So I had. Gosh, I forget the exact number. A little over 30 ethnographers report that at some point during the research process they had lost access to their field site.

Either they got kicked out or they were even preempted. Ethnographers go through years of preliminary field work. Often they do initial site visits. And for many of them, they did all this work for some people, I mean, they're learning a language, they're making connections.

I mean, it's a lot of work and then it gets to the time when they're supposed to go and their visa is denied or the organization where they were supposed to study gets shut down or something like that. And what I found was that depending on when during the fieldwork process it hit these disruptions hit.

The [00:24:00] ethnographers responded in pretty consistent ways. So most people, if they were preempted, would turn to a new field site, but one where they had preexisting relationships, where they didn't have to do all of that sort of background work of learning a new place. So I called it turning home.

They went to field sites that were already familiar to them as opposed to places that were a little less familiar. People who had their fieldwork disrupted in the middle once they had started data collection or shortly after they had started data collection, tended to pivot shifting the project, often shifting their research questions, things like that.

But really staying in the same place because at a certain point with funding and connections and things, the geographical stability. Mattered a great deal. And so they would kind of pivot to a new project and start asking different questions or focusing on a different population. 

And then the third group of people, if they were really deeply into their data collection, so, the people who were able to pivot were pretty early. They were in the field, feet on the ground, in the place, but they hadn't really dug [00:25:00] deep into their original data collection yet.

But there was another group of people where they lost access to their field site after they had already collected a lot of data. They had really, been there for a while and then suddenly they got cut off. And what they did was, I called it following. They followed the people from the site or they switched methods in some way.

So for instance, one ethnographer actually literally followed the people from their research site because the neighborhood got demolished and everybody got kicked out. And so instead of doing a neighborhood ethnography, they wound up , going and maintaining the same connections, but following those people around the city.

Another person was unable to continue their access to a work environment. And so they started to shift to an online ethnography and switched to new methods so that they could continue to follow through with their data, but using different methods. And so I thought that this was interesting, and it makes intuitive sense, depending on how far in you are, you wind up responding differently.

You adapt by going someplace familiar because in a lot of cases there are institutional constraints. [00:26:00] Ethnographers can't just decide, well, I'm going to go take another couple of years because we have time to graduation or time to tenure, or all of these academic issues that come up.

And so they have to adapt quickly. And they do that by going someplace with a lower cost of entry. Or, similarly, if they're already there and they have constraints of like, they got a grant. They've been funded. They have in a lot of cases to go for foreign researchers, you have to have an institutional affiliation.

So you're locked in in some ways. And so there are these structural constraints that were shaping the way that ethnographers responded to these disruptions. And those, those constraints were consistent enough across people's experiences that it resulted in very similar adaptations. But each ethnographer felt like they were adapting on their own, that they were working on the fly.

But they were doing it in ways that were very similar to other people, even in different places and times. 

David Staley: I'm curious to know, Why you're a sociologist? Did you know since the time you were a kid that you were gonna study [00:27:00] sociology? Did sociology come late? What was your journey? 

Eric Schoon: No, well, I mean it depends on how late you're gonna define late.

So I as an undergrad went to college as a viola performance major. So I played the viola. Yeah, I did my undergraduate degree and I have a Bachelor of Music in viola performance And while I was there, I added, a dual degree program with a bachelor's in philosophy. And how I came to sociology, I think that there were a lot of things kind of leading me there.

I had my best friend in college kept on saying you really should take some sociology classes, I think you'd be interested. but I had other things that I was doing and focusing on, and I was doing these two degrees, and I was really interested in the philosophy, but what really sparked it was that I was writing a thesis for my philosophy degree.

And it was an interdisciplinary thesis, and I kept on reading articles that I just really liked. I realized that there was a pattern in the research that was really drawing me in, and it was that they were, all these papers were written by sociologists.

And so that was the summer before my senior year, and it was this, like, aha moment, [00:28:00] and I quickly enrolled in a minor in sociology, took a bunch of classes, applied to grad school, and I graduated in 2008, and so the economy was in the process of collapse, politics were reshaping and I got into grad school and I thought, I'm not a hundred percent sure that this is what I want to do, but let me go, I'll get a master's degree figure things out. I knew at that point that I wasn't going to pursue music as a career. And so I went to grad school and it was everything that I hoped it would be. One of the things that I love about sociology that I still love is that there's room for people like me.

There's space to explore a lot of different topics and a lot of different ideas. And there's space for connecting theory and methods with really interesting substantive insights. And it allowed my eclectic interests to all fit under one umbrella. And so that's how I landed on sociology.

David Staley: Do you still play the viola?

Eric Schoon: I do. I still play the viola. Yeah. 

David Staley: [00:29:00] Eric Schoon. Thank you. 

Eric Schoon: Thank you.


Jen Farmer: Voices of Excellence is produced and recorded at The Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Marketing and Communications Studio. More information about the podcast and our guests can be found at go.osu.edu/voices. Voices of Excellence is produced by Doug Dangler. I'm Jen Farmer.