The Margins of Underdog Sociology: Implications for the "West Coast AIDS Project"

Abstract

Based upon participant-observation in a research project that conducted AIDS prevention among street-based drug injectors, this paper analyzes the challenges presented in the application of an underdog sociological perspective in a quasi-human service agency. The directors of the AIDS Project incorporated the principles of Becker's labeling theory (1963) and the epistemological foundations of naturalist ethnography into the agency's outreach and research design. As such, this paper explores the bounds of the promoted “underdog sympathy.” In addition, since the agency hired mostly former “underdogs” to conduct street outreach, the author examines conflicts in theoretical knowledge claims between the administration and staff. Whereas the outreach staff members embraced more lay-oriented psychological and therapeutic concepts, their experiential authority was dismissed by the sociologist administrators, belying formal claims to privileging underdog perspectives. Inasmuch as the directors dismissed the outreach workers' experiential knowledge, the directors were engaged in “ontological gerrymandering” (Woolgar and Pawluch 1985): selectively distinguishing objective reality from subjective claims. This paper focuses on two issues that represent the difficulty in applying an underdog sociology: 1) the dynamic construction of drugs, addiction, and recovery; and 2) collective representations of drug using clients. Employing Gouldner's (1967) critique of labeling theory, this paper deconstructs empirically the role of interests in the production of knowledge and contradictory sociological sentiments toward “deviants” in an applied setting.