5 h Reviewing the Literature O nce upon a time, in the days when canonical social science was all that there was and information was scarce and costly, doing a review of the literature was a stroll in the park. Your adviser told you what the main writings were in your specific area; your task was to master the oldies but goodies and the up-and-comers. You went out and gathered data (theory-testing data, that is), and after you did most of your analysis, you went back and checked over the relevant literature one last time, just to make sure that you were up to date with anything new that had been published in the interim. And because of the rules of canonical social science, you didn’t really have to cite everything—you just needed to cite the canonical writings in your subfield. That is, your contribution was assumed to build upon a series of prior contributions, and there was a very high consensus (at least among the heavy hitters in your area) regarding who should be cited as the “authors” of each of the previous contributions that you were going to build on. But we salsa dancers have no such luck. Your article that eases its way into a journal and subtly changes the conversation, or your book that creates a new field or area of inquiry, likely covers not one, but 80 SALSA DANCING INTO THE SOCIAL SCIENCES est. In fact, if you were one of the few people outside of professional librarians trained in either of these systems, you knew there was a set of volumes available for your perusal which permitted you to locate a single term describing your area of interest (a “frame,” if you will) known as a Library of Congress Subject Heading (LCSH); each LCSH was described carefully and precisely within a hierarchy of broader and narrower terms, signaled to you by the notation BT (Broader Than) and NT (Narrower Than) in relation to the term you were looking for. If I sound nostalgic, it’s because that system has in large part been superseded, for lots of different reasons. First, an increasing amount of information is now found not in books, but in other formats: articles, congressional hearings, government reports, international statistics, Web pages, and the list goes on and on. Next, the system assumed that knowledge was like countries, cleanly separated from other areas of knowledge by nice, clean borders. As Thomas Mann shows, and as I have been arguing throughout this book, knowledge just isn’t like that any more.3 The example that Mann chooses to prove his point is a wonderful book written by the late Barbara Christian, Black Women Novelists.4 Is this a book about African-Americans? Women? Novelists? Literary criticism? Short answer: yes. Today, instead of a human intelligence thoughtfully sifting through and coding all available information, we have tons of stuff out there, and no one has put a label on it, anywhere. (This is, in short, the problem of “full text” databases—it’s all there, but unless you can remember a reasonably uncommon word in the article, or some key proper nouns, it’s likely to be very hard to find.) The whole process is like being in the world’s best and most interesting tag sale with trash and treasure all mixed up together and no road map in sight. The advice I’ve been giving you is to go to the literature to find a 81 Reviewing the Literature “frame.” But the literature is a mess, and so is your case study. Where are we going to begin? After many years of trial and error, I think I have an answer and a set of tips to go with the answer. It involves what I call the “bedraggled daisy.” Take a deep breath, sit down with your juicy case study, and pull out a piece of clean paper and a pen or pencil. To get the Zen of the “bedraggled daisy,” you have to know something about Venn diagrams. A Venn diagram is a visual representation of two or more “sets” of things. Going back to Barbara Christian’s book, there are three “sets” involved: blacks, women, and novelists. Think about this for a minute. The set of “black” includes men and women, novelists and non-novelists. Likewise, the set of women involves blacks and non-blacks, novelists and non-novelists. Finally, novelists can be white or black, male or female. In a Venn diagram, the subject of Christian’s book would look like this: Black Novelists Women 82 SALSA DANCING INTO THE SOCIAL SCIENCES But what Christian’s book is really about is the intersection of those three sets, that is, the set where everyone is black AND female AND a novelist, or, that place on the Venn diagram where the three larger sets intersect, and only where they intersect. To expand this idea into finding a frame for your work, you need to write down all the things that your case study is about. To use the “flirting in the workplace” example, a study about flirting in the workplace is (or could be) about: • • • • • • • • Sex Sexual orientation Gender Work Organizations Emotions Sexual harassment The law Then put all of these areas into a Venn diagram. Unlike Barbara Christian’s lovely and neat example, yours (ours) looks more like a bedraggled daisy. We, like Christian, are looking ONLY at the intersection of the sets, that is, the places where the relevant literature addresses sex AND sexual orientation AND gender AND work AND organizations AND emotions AND sexual harassment AND the law. Well, guess what? This is probably what the symbolic logic types call a “null set”—there isn’t anything in it, or at least not at this writing. Of course not! You are the pioneering person writing in this area. But there will surely be some intersecting sets where two or more of the petals of the daisy overlap: sex and gender, perhaps, or sex and work, or sex and organizations and the law. What the daisy does is to let you focus on where those interesting intellectual conversations adjacent to, but not exactly the same as, 83 Reviewing the Literature sex work sexual orientation gender sexual harassment emotions organizations the law your work are taking place. Now you need to go out and evaluate those conversations in the literature and hook your frame to the smartest ones that are also most relevant to your field. Here’s an example: “Most of the research to date has focused on how the law conceptualizes sexual harassment, but it implicitly assumes that (a) sexuality is heterosexual and (b) that it is really gender domination in disguise. The present study will show . . .” Unfortunately, because the intellectual classification system has broken down to such an extent, you can’t just go to your friendly computer, type in “sex and gender and work,” and get what you need. This is where you need to work smarter, not harder. Here are some key tips about how to get started before you go to the computer: Reviewing the Literature 85 just suggested is not, in fact, what I’m trying to say. But in the process of telling my friends and colleagues what I’m not interested in, I get closer and closer to articulating in a lucid way what I am interested in. 2. Make friends with a reference librarian. To my mind, this is the single smartest thing you can do to advance your research. The reason more people don’t do this, I suspect, is because of ancient prejudices. When I was coming up as a young scholar, it was thought be faintly shameful to ask a librarian for help. Weren’t you a researcher? And didn’t researchers do research? What were you doing hanging out with a librarian? Trying to cheat or something? Librarians, along with pediatricians, are among the greatest human beings in the universe. One of my colleagues at Berkeley calls them the “pit bulls of democracy”—as our government increasingly tries to hide things from us, librarians are among the few souls fighting back.5 They love the thrill of the chase as much or more than you do. More to the point, they are experts in what is now being called “information retrieval and storage.” In fact, in my own university, the library school is now part of the computer information program. If it was stupid thirty years ago to avoid reference librarians, it is downright suicidal now. Information has become a commodity—it is being bartered, sold, and arranged in more ways than anyone except a professional librarian can keep up with. Your job is to analyze information; a librarian’s job is to help you find it in the first place. So once you have started talking to your intellectual nodal points, go and find your own personal reference librarian. Information these days is like Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. It’s entirely in disarray: every little principality mints its own money, passes its own laws, speaks its own language, and has its own rituals. Imagine trying to be a trader selling your wares as you go from town to town, each one under the sway of another prince (or princess) and his/her personally tailored ways of doing business. 86 SALSA DANCING INTO THE SOCIAL SCIENCES It’s the same thing with information. It is being sold, purveyed, arranged, and contracted by so many different “vendors” that you couldn’t begin to name them if you wanted to. More to the point, some of them are “full text,” some of them have their own idiosyncratic subject headings (often known as a “thesaurus”), and they all have their own rules. Take “truncation,” for example. If you want to search for “adolescent pregnancy,” for instance, and you want to include the words “adolescent,” “adolescence,” “adolescents,” and “pregnant,” “pregnancy,” and “pregnancies,” most systems will let you “truncate,” that is, use some form of adolescen* and pregnan* which would include all six terms. This is sometimes called a “wild card” convention and will permit you to look at all phrases that have the letters before the asterisk, hence pulling up all the terms you are interested in. In the systems I regularly use, truncation is signaled sometimes by an asterisk (*), sometimes by an exclamation point (!), and sometimes by a tilde (⬃). You can’t just take your conventions from one system to another. Only a reference librarian can teach you the tricks of the various systems and direct you to the ones you most need. I often say, and I am not entirely joking, that you should court your reference librarian as you would court your future (or present) spouse. They are as overloaded as anyone else these days, all the more so being the pit bulls of democracy. So say “thank you” often. Write thank-you notes. Bring them coffee and cookies and chocolates. When they help you a lot, write a letter to the head of the library about how inventive, creative, and helpful this person was. Always thank them in the “acknowledgments” section of your book or articles. Behind every good research project written by a salsa-dancing social scientist stands a great librarian, and maybe even a phalanx of them. Keep this in mind as we navigate the next tips. 3. Find a “synthetic article.” Now that you’ve narrowed down at least what the questions adjacent to yours are, and found yourself a good reference librarian, you can go look for what I call a “syn- Reviewing the Literature 87 thetic” article. You have a short list of places to start, so look to see if someone has written about those places where at least two or more of the petals on your daisy overlap. I’m a great fan of the Annual Review series.6 As the name implies, these are journal-like articles which, rather than being bent on bringing new information to the reader, provide their own reviews of the literature on important, controversial, or emerging fields. As we will see later when we come to your own personal review of the literature, they are not just recitations of what’s out there. Annual Review articles are deeply theoretical, showing you the topography of an area, or sketching out a new frontier of an emerging idea. If you are lucky enough to find an Annual Review article which covers two or more of the petals on your daisy, or covers an adjacent topic, you can be sure that if you read the cited material, you will be in command of the key literature in this area. You will probably also get some smart ideas about what kinds of things we don’t know (but should) in this area, ideas that cannot help but make your own research better. Here’s another tip that I spent far too many years of my life ignoring. Every social science discipline has a bevy of encyclopedias and dictionaries dedicated to that very discipline, and on top of that there are a number of general encyclopedias of the social sciences. I like to keep a couple of these paperback dictionaries on my shelf, because you’d be surprised how often I think I know what I mean when I use a social science concept, and then when it comes down to operationalizing it for something I’m researching, I find that I don’t. In addition, the “work smarter, not harder” mantra can be deployed by using these dictionaries and encyclopedias to get a smart overview of the development of the literature in either a theoretical or an empirical area. Of course, these tools are just a starting point, but I, at least, do much better when I have a road map and I know how and where to plug things in. That’s what these resources are for. You don’t need to buy all of the many dozens of dictionaries and 88 SALSA DANCING INTO THE SOCIAL SCIENCES encyclopedias that might be on point. The reference section of your closest research university will have a shelf of them, and what you don’t find in one encyclopedia, you’ll likely find in another. Better yet, since you are a boundary-transgressing type of person, you will find, shelved not that far away from the encyclopedias and dictionaries dedicated to your discipline, dictionaries and encyclopedias for the other social sciences—political science, politics, anthropology, and the like—so you can “contrast and compare” if you want. By the way, any good dictionary or encyclopedia will have a bibliography attached to each entry with the most classical works cited there, so if you want to find out, for example, where Anthony Giddens first explored “structuration theory” (the idea that social structures and individuals are reciprocally and mutually constituted), you can find that out, too.7 Because the entries are so brief, I have to admit that reading just one dictionary or encyclopedia is frustrating, but after I’ve looked at three or four, each of which looks at a concept or a person from a slightly different angle, I feel that I at least know where to start building my own road map. 4. Find a relevant journal article, or articles, or books. Remember when I told you earlier that journal articles had to review the literature in an economical way and thus cite only the most accepted sources? Use this fact to your advantage. If your nodal point or reference librarian, or your encyclopedia or dictionary, refers you to an article or book, go and read them. If there is an Annual Review article which is helpful, read all the literature it cites, and—working smarter, not harder—glean from this Annual Review article which articles are being cited over and over again. These articles in leading journals in your field will tell you two things. First, if you read the “introduction” part carefully, you will get a feel for how published articles in areas that you care about are framing related questions. What kinds of frames are being used? How do they introduce the question? How would you slide your Reviewing the Literature 89 topic into the intellectual conversations(s) that these articles are addressing? Second, because of the implicit guidelines that shape canonical social science, the review of the literature in these articles will tell you what is considered the crème de la crème of “the literature” in that particular area. Once you have read these articles, and absorbed their frames, you are well on your way. Books, in contrast, being less attached to the “normal science” model of scholarship, are generally more leisurely in their attempts to review the literature, but more often than not, they will also be more theoretical.8 More theoretical, that is, not only about the substantive material that the book is about, but more theoretical about the literature itself. To take just one recent example that has crossed my desk lately, Gene Burns has written a book, The Moral Veto, about the role of the Catholic Church historically and at present on such touchy topics as birth control, abortion, and so forth.9 (As you may gather from the title, he argues that the Church has expressed its opinion on these matters by exercising a “moral veto.”) The point for us here is that if you happen to be interested in social movements, Burns provides a splendid, smart, economical review of social movement theory in just a few pages in his book. It’s like taking the best and smartest professor’s seminar in social movements, and all you have to do is read a few pages! Now you may in fact disagree with the way he thinks about “the literature” in social movements, but what you have after you’ve read this section of his book is a road map for understanding that literature, and you can plug in your own landmarks, even redraw the map if you want to. Burns is not alone. Many (one would hope most) books by people who really love what they are writing about will have these kinds of smart, broad-reaching overviews of the material that they think is important. If you ask around, you will find a treasure trove of books that can educate you about a particular area. Books that do this very well are often, like Burns’s book, outstanding books in other 90 SALSA DANCING INTO THE SOCIAL SCIENCES ways, so the “greatest hits” in your field, if at all relevant to your question, may well have these kinds of concise, succinct reviews of the literature. Unlike journal articles, books like Burns’s will give you more of a theoretical road map of the literature. Thus books, and dissertations in particular, are very good places to get a “looking down from the mountaintop” view of a particular body of literature. (If you didn’t know this already, a good place to find out if there are dissertations in your area is to check the University Microfilms—now known as Digital Dissertations-ProQuest—for materials that match the overlaps of the petals in your daisy.)10 5. Use your discoveries to track down the key suspects. Let’s say that someone—a nodal point, a friend, your professor—happens to steer you to a book or an article that really moves you intellectually. Gosh, if only you could have written that book or article! Boy, (or girl), does this person understand where you are coming from! Here is an intellectual kindred spirit, one you could just read all day. Should this lucky accident happen, there are several ways to make sure that your excitement doesn’t stop there. First, you might try to write or e-mail the author of that book or article. Now, don’t get your hopes up. Most teachers and researchers are quietly going crazy these days with overload and a speedup of the pace of things. Where once I carefully answered questions about my research, and engaged in wonderful correspondence with long-distance colleagues-to-be, I mostly don’t these days. For me, given that I was trying to mentor my graduate students in the way they deserved, raise a family, keep up with the literature, do my own scholarship, and be a good citizen in my department and university, something had to give, and what gave was thoughtful e-mail exchanges with other scholars. But not everyone has my priorities, and rumor has it that some people actually have wives to help with the “second shift.”11 On the other hand, given how rare that intersection of particular petals on the daisy probably is, you and this other person may be the Reviewing the Literature 91 only two people on the planet interested in flirting in the workplace, or the privatization of water, or whatever your passion is, and he or she may be as excited to hear about you as you were to read his/her work. So give it a try. If that doesn’t work, however, you can still use this key book or article as an “open sesame” to the place where other work like this may be hiding. If this wonderful piece of work is a book, then we have one of the few places where that beloved but overwhelmed system of intellectual organization, the Dewey Decimal System or the Library of Congress Subject Headings, can help you. (For the rest of this example, I will assume that it is the LCSH that you will be using, since that is more common in research universities.) Remember I said earlier that while almost everyone has used the LCSH system, practically no one uses it well? Here’s an example of just what I meant. When you find a book that is so on target you just can’t believe it, that book has a hidden (well, not so hidden, but mostly overlooked) code tucked within it which will direct you to the place where other books like it are stored. (In most cases, that means “digitally stored.”) Again, harking back to our earlier discussion about how once upon a time, actual human intelligences arranged information into logical and orderly categories, it turns out that for books, they still do! If you call up the book that you have found so interesting, and ask for the “full record” of that book, you will find (often hyperlinked) all the Library of Congress Subject Headings that apply to that book. Now, you can do one of two things. You can use those terms to refine your own daisy, knowing that at least as far as books are concerned, you will be using the most appropriate terms. And, better yet, you can click on all of those subject headings which seem relevant to you. As an example, let’s take the flirting at work case. When I put in the title of a book that seemed on point, and clicked on the “long record,” I found a new Library of Congress Subject Heading I hadn’t 92 SALSA DANCING INTO THE SOCIAL SCIENCES known about, “Sex in the Workplace.” Clicking on that gave me four more titles located in my UC Berkeley library. Then I did something that I recommend to everyone who has Internet access:12 I put that same subject heading into OCLC: WorldCat (a consortium of research university libraries) and got 353 more books. If I were in a more adventuresome mode, I would have moved on to the Library of Congress itself, which by congressional decree holds every book published in the United States, and a lot more besides. It’s a little more complicated, but you can do the same thing with journal articles, sort of. Because journal articles build on the model of normal science, you will find that your key article, if it is as central as you think it is, is cited again and again in subsequent journal articles, most of which will presumably in some way be addressing the material or question which you are interested in and which this article is about. It turns out that you can track who is citing the article which excites you, provided, of course, that it wasn’t published just this month. Using the ISI Web of Knowledge, you can enter what used to be called (and somewhere in this digital terrain, still is) the Social Science Citation Index. You put in the name of the person who wrote the article, the journal where the article was published, and presto, you get a list of all the people who have cited it. Those citations are, in theory, related to what you are interested in. In addition, in my own library at least, I can access the full text of some and maybe many of those citations by just clicking something called “e-links.” In much the same way, when I access the electronic journal database known as JStor (www.jstor.org), which most research libraries subscribe to, a pane to the right of the article accommodatingly shows me, via Google Scholar, all of the articles that cite the article I am reading. Once you have found one way into the forest of “the literature,” the job just gets easier and easier. You can follow the trail of bread crumbs (like Hansel and Gretel) to find almost all of the people who are interested in that small center section of your daisy. Reviewing the Literature 93 And if you keep good records (see the next tip), before long you will have a very good sense of who the most-cited “experts” in your area of interest are, not to mention a good feel for what the fights and debates are. 6. Keep good records. This one should be obvious, but you’d be surprised how long it took me to find it, and how grateful even my graduate students are to be reminded of it. For many years, especially with the explosion of info-glut, I never kept very good records of where and what I searched. Oh, sure, I kept good records of what I found, but not what I was looking for, nor where I had found my prize items. Big mistake. There are certain elaborate searches that I have done at least three times, if not four. And no one has that kind of time. One of my colleagues told me about a great website, designed by the librarians at UCLA. (Didn’t I tell you that librarians are the nicest people on the planet?) It’s an incredibly helpful, user-friendly guide to doing research, called “Bruin [that’s what UCLAers call themselves] Success with Less Stress.”13 Along with terrific material on intellectual property, and how to use the various kinds of information you can find on the Web with discernment, they also suggest creating a Search Log to remind yourself of how and what and where you searched, and what worked and what didn’t. In short, you need to write down the database, the search terms you put in, whether or not the search was successful, and ideas about what to do next. Start doing this tomorrow and you will thank me later, I promise. (I have provided an example of a blank search log in Appendix Four.) 7. “Harvard,” don’t read. A dear friend of mine went to Harvard, and within the very first week of his time there, he discovered that the faculty gave (and probably still give) poor unsuspecting students more reading assignments than a human person could ever read. It took most of them just about a week to figure out that it couldn’t be done (the rest had nervous breakdowns), and the smart ones learned how to work smarter, not harder. 94 SALSA DANCING INTO THE SOCIAL SCIENCES So I married this very dear friend of mine, and that is how I found out about what I call “Harvarding.” You cannot imagine how depressed I used to get before I learned how to “Harvard,” confronted with stacks of books four feet high, knowing that I would never get around to reading them all, and feeling like a failure. Often enough, confronted with such a huge pile, I just took a nap. From here on out, you must never, ever read a book again unless you have “Harvarded” it first. If you are like me before I learned to “Harvard,” you read a book with painful intensity. You underline things; you put notes in the margins; you take notes on your computer or in longhand. And you move very, very slowly. It was not uncommon for me in the old days to spend the better part of an afternoon on ten pages of a book, unless, of course, I fell asleep first. This is nonsense! Very few books deserve that kind of attention, probably including this one. Even the relatively few books that are well written and to the point are often hard to follow, because it’s a great leap of imagination for the author, once she has been immersed in an area for many years, to figure out what her reader needs to know. At this point, the author probably knows everything there is to know about the topic, and sad to say, most academic authors seem totally incapable of making that leap of imagination. (A mistake you will not make in your own book!) So here is your mantra, which I want you to repeat before you sit down with any book, including this one: “If I’m not getting it, it’s her (or his) fault.” If you’re like me, you flagellate yourself when you read a dense, badly written book, especially if it’s one that your colleagues hold in high regard. Such a book has failed in its most elemental job, namely, that of bringing you to the point where you can understand what’s at issue. (In all fairness, in a globalizing world of info-glut, I suspect that no author can truly connect with all possible readers, but I’m struck by how rarely most scholarly authors even bother to try to connect to any readers, except three or four that the author considers his or her peers.) Reviewing the Literature 95 For these reasons, this is the time when you should “Harvard” a book. You know what your question is, because of the previous steps. You know what the adjacent areas are because of your “daisy” diagram. You have found a particular book in one of your searches, and you should not spend very much time on it unless it is totally, entirely, on point for your project. By being on point, I mean two things specifically: it has a theoretical “frame” that could be useful for you at least in one section, and/or it has some empirical data that could be useful. So how do you find out whether the book has a theory or data that would be relevant to you? You “Harvard” it. You look at the Table of Contents and the Index, focusing your laser-like attention on those topics closest to what you care about. You skim the introduction and conclusion. You skim the chapters that might seem relevant. If, and only if, this book seems to be exactly what you were looking for, come back to it; but for the moment, treat all books as if you had only twenty minutes to get everything useful to your study out of it, and then it will disappear in a puff of smoke. Make a book earn more of your precious time. Sometimes, by the way, a book is held in very high regard, and you can’t figure out why. Chances are that it either solved a theoretical problem in the field or advanced the state of play in an area. But it’s a little hard to figure that out when you are a newcomer to the territory. What to do? My advice is to put the title of the book into JStor’s search engine, and restrict the search to reviews. Read four or five reviews of this book, if you can find them. A good review will not only tell you what the book is about, but it will also usually tell you why the book matters (or doesn’t). However, academics, like everyone else, get tics about things, so it’s important to read three or four, or ideally six or seven, reviews. At the end, you will know how this book fits into the literature, and you can come back to it. Once you’re back to it, you can still “Harvard” this highly regarded book, if you like, but you can also use it to clarify how your own 96 SALSA DANCING INTO THE SOCIAL SCIENCES thinking differs from the author’s, and whether any of your data contradict hers or his. While we are on the topic of “Harvarding,” I’d like to suggest a great resource. Reading is a key practice in academia, but, as this section has made clear, “reading” a book can mean many things. I advise you to go out this minute and buy yourself a copy of Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren’s How to Read a Book, originally published in 1940.14 Adler and Van Doren have some great tips. One that I will be forever grateful for is the idea of writing your own index on a blank page in the back of the book or elsewhere for ideas or data that really grab you, so that you can find them again when you need them. How many times have you needed to know where an author discusses (fill in the blank here), and you can’t find it in the index and you really, really need it? This will not happen again once you learn to write your own index. 8. Be kind to your readers. Let’s jump ahead some months into the future. You have carefully refined that neat area within the heart of your daisy; you’ve got a much clearer sense of the various frames that other people are using to address questions like yours; you are happily corresponding with people who are similarly interested; and you’ve discovered a number of relevant and exciting books and articles. You have “Harvarded” the relevant books and articles, and you have come back to a very, very few and have read them carefully and thoughtfully. Congratulations! But keep in mind that this is just the first of many times that you will be doing a review of the literature. As your project progresses, and you gather data, it’s entirely possible that your frame will shift as well. (T. H. Huxley speaks of the “tragedy of a fact killing a theory,” and the same thing happens to frames. Once you get into the field, and find some actual, factual data, you may well shift your frame.) But let’s say, just for argument, that you haven’t shifted that much; you have gone out and gathered your data, and you are now at the Reviewing the Literature 97 happy place where you want to write up your book. (Remember? You are writing a book, no matter what anyone else says or thinks.) Eventually you will come to the point where you have to provide an official review of the literature, one that is written up. (In fact, in dissertations, it is traditional to have a whole chapter on the review of the literature. I don’t always agree, but I do think that somewhere you need to show how your work advances the state of play.) What I’m about to say may seem totally obvious, but you’d be surprised by how many of my very smart students get a block when they come to writing this part up. Here’s the flash: you don’t have to write about every book and/or article ever written that is remotely relevant to your question. You only have to do what Gene Burns did when I recommended him to you as a model, namely give readers an intellectual road map of the existing literature in a smart and critical way, and show us that, however elaborate or intelligent or extensive it might be, that literature doesn’t really answer the question that your book will answer for us. I also find myself wanting some information in the “review of the literature” that is not considered canonical. Because I argue throughout this book that it’s important to talk about our work as an example of something larger, I really want to be situated with respect to that “something larger” early on in your book. I want to know how much, how big, and how often. And I want to know, right at the outset, why I should care. So back to our example of flirting at work. Do we have any idea how much flirting at work goes on? (Probably not, since this is such a fresh take on a topic.) But are there any data, no matter how incomplete, that would give me a sense of the scale of the phenomenon? How many people work in gender-integrated jobs where there are both men and women? (Yes, I know, even when a work force is 99 percent one sex and 1 percent the other, there can still be flirting.) How about sexual harassment cases, which we might think of as flirting gone awry? How many of these are there? 98 SALSA DANCING INTO THE SOCIAL SCIENCES Finally, somewhere in this review, I want to be reminded why I should care about your question. If your case of particulars illuminates something about the more general world in which we live, make the connection for me. Show me why I, who may not have any particular interest in flirting in the workplace, should know about this as a good social scientist. I know that the first chapter of your book, the one entitled “Introduction,” “motivates” the research for me by telling me why your question passes the “so what?” test. Here, just refresh my memory. That’s it. If you’ve done all these steps, and maybe more than once, you’ve done your review of the literature. Exercise for Chapter 5 You guessed—the exercise for this chapter is to draw yourself a daisy. I know I asked you to do this earlier in the chapter, but I bet you didn’t. Here’s where you get to do it for the first time. Put in all of the items that you think your study covers as petals of the daisy, and then see where there are overlaps that someone is writing about or has written about. (I’m taking for granted that there probably won’t be an area in the center of your daisy that lots of other people are writing about, but I could be wrong.) If you really want to get a head start on your book, then label this daisy something like Daisy 1.0. Then update your daisy as your work goes along, and you’ll get to Daisy 2.0, 3.0, and so on. Writing the “review of the literature” section will be a cinch.
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