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Words About Numbers About People
by David Raney
“Teaching has forced me to learn the connections between things.”
Roberto Franzosi was born and raised on farmland near Genoa,
Italy. When he was nineteen his family sold the property, and
Roberto and a friend dug up the ancestral cornerstone, loaded
it into a tiny Fiat (“I was afraid it would go through the floor”)
and drove it away. That road led eventually to Atlanta, where
the stone now stands in his Decatur living room surrounded by
antique maps and copper pots, graceful furniture and other
relics, united only by a collector’s interest and the rare quality
of being both beautiful and useful.
Franzosi, Emory’s new professor of sociology, comes to the
College from teaching and research positions at the universities
of Reading, Michigan, Wisconsin and Oxford (Trinity College).
One ongoing scholarly interest is the study of social protest,
which has yielded numerous scholarly articles and two books.
The first, The Puzzle of Strikes: Class and State Strategies in
Postwar Italy (1995), centers on “the power of numbers,” but
Franzosi says he had a revelation late in its composition that
has affected all his work since. “I had finished the research that
would become Puzzle of Strikes,” he said over lunch recently,
“and while I thought the statistics were sound, I suddenly realized
all the people had disappeared. There were four groups
involved in my study—state, employers, employees and unions
—and all I had were regression coefficients.”
He rewrote that book and wrote his next, From Words to
Numbers: Narrative, Data, and Social Science (2004), guided
by the principle that “one needs to balance analytic rigor
with the role of social actors.” Numbers alone, he believes,
cannot adequately represent strikes and other complex social
phenomena —which, reduced to frequency distributions and
variables, often “seem to happen in a vacuum.” Blending
econometric analysis with art, linguistics, history and literature
(his undergraduate major), Franzosi tries to restore the
human dimension. His antique collection may hint at his
approach to scholarship: quantitative and qualitative; narrative
and numbers. The useful and the beautiful.
Franzosi traces another turning point to a chance remark by
an Oxford colleague that the title (From Words to Numbers) suggested
a journey. “That,” he says, “is how I spent a rainy summer
in the Rhodes Library reading medieval pilgrims’ accounts of their
travels to the Holy Land and the conquistadores’ journeys to the
new world.” Eventually the journey metaphor became central to
the book. Franzosi concedes that “to some readers it may seem
like writing flavor, like icing on the cake. But in fact it is integral
to the book, its very driving force.”
Another of Franzosi’s interests is cooking, which, he notes,
is one of two things at Emory that continually remind him of his
time at Oxford. “There’s food at nearly every function here,”
he says, recalling the Oxford “high table” that drew together
colleagues from different disciplines to dine, drink and debate.
The other commonality, he says, is still more vital: “A passionate
defense of teaching.”
His own teaching prompts similar passion in students.
“Professor Franzosi creates an environment that stimulates and
encourages creative thinking,” says Sharon Nieb, a graduate
student and program director in the school of medicine. His
approach “expands the landscape for creative thought,” echoes
Matthew Mathias. “I can’t say enough about Roberto. He has
had a profound influence on my first semester here.”
First-year sociology graduate student Kali-Ahset Amen,
asked for a defining quality, chooses “Humble erudition.
spring 2007