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Usage of ‘tipping point’ in academic journals from 1957 - 2009
Bhatanacharoen P, Greatbatch D and Clark, T. ‘The Tipping Point of
the ‘Tipping Point’ Metaphor: Agency and process for waves of change’.
http://wp.me/p13wbQ-6r
‘Metropolitan Segregation’ published
in Scientific American in 1957.
Tipping Point first became popularised by Malcolm Gladwell
in his book The Tipping Point.
The birth of tipping point
What is it about metaphors that make them stick
and what allows them to continue long after their
first use? In order for a metaphor to be used in
different ways it needs to be grounded in some
commonality, but be loose enough to describe
a diverse variety of things. As words travel from
person to person and culture to culture they
often transform into something else; they create
something new for the people that use them.
This brings into question to what degree words
themselves actually affect us and whether they
influence the world in really big ways, which
brings us to ‘tipping point’.
In the social sciences, the story of tipping
point begins in the US when it was coined by a
sociologist named Mortin Grodzins in 1957 who
published a study from the University of Chicago
called ‘Metropolitan Segregation’ in the journal
Scientific American. In this study, Grodzins
described what is known today as ‘white-flight’ –
when white people leave a neighbourhood after a
certain number of black people move in. Grodzins
called this social phenomenon a ‘tip point’, which
would later evolve into ‘tipping point’. This was
the first time tipping point was used formally
in sociology. Grodzins actually picked up the
term ‘tip point’ from urban planners and other
housing professionals who observed how a certain
percentage of black people (30 percent) would
cause the neighbourhood to ‘tip over’ and become
all black. Researchers in the Tipping Points project
were the first to come upon this interesting finding
that provided a clue to how words (including the
ideas they refer to) spread.
A study led by social scientists Dr Pojanath
Bhatanacharoen, Prof David Greatbatch and Prof
Tim Clark did a citation analysis that searched for
academic articles that used the term tipping point,
but it also went a bit further than that.
The problem with citation analysis alone is that
it doesn’t give you an accurate measure for
how words actually spread. Researchers used
an alternative approach known as ‘discourse
analysis’. This of course contains another puzzling
term – ‘discourse’. To put it briefly, discourse often
refers to discussion or speech, something that
has been said. However, discourse can also imply
much more than this in academic literature, as
it refers to people’s representation of the world
that is made up of ideas and concepts they have
acquired socially over time. “Discourse analysis
is a plethora of approaches which is based upon
the premise that social realities are constructed
through language”, says Bhatanacharoen. Events,
people or things represented in the media from
newspapers to film and the internet are often
framed in different ways creating new realities
of what they appear to be. For example, wellknown political leaders are framed as tyrants,
liberators, or even fools through different kinds
of media discourse.
Discourse analysis can provide a much deeper
understanding of how tipping point and other
terms are used within and outside of their
respective contexts because, as we know, tipping
point is not limited to only one context and can
be interpreted in many different ways. Like plants
and animals, words do not grow in isolation, which
is why discourse is important to finding out how
they evolve and are copied over time.
The research team are looking at how urban
planners themselves first started using ‘tip point’,
and how it began outside of academia as well as
how researchers that use tipping point reference
each other. ‘This helps us to understand what
features of the term make it plastic and so enable
it to travel between very different discourse
communities’, says Clark.
What makes tipping point unique is that its recent
usage by academics from a range of different
fields originates not with an obscurely known
sociologist from the 1950s, but a journalist with
the New Yorker by the name of Malcolm Gladwell.
It was Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point:
How little things can make a big difference that
led a diverse variety of researchers in medicine,
sociology, climate science and many other fields
to use the term ‘tipping point’. Since 2000,
when The Tipping Point was first published,
the metaphor’s use sky rocketed and it literally
became a buzz word over night. Tipping Points
researchers discovered that in some cases the
only thing that academic studies using tipping
point had in common was referencing Gladwell’s
book. Before Gladwell, this term appears to be
virtually non-existent in scientists’ and humanities
researchers’ fields and suddenly it is part of their
regular vocabulary. How could this happen so
quickly and will it continue this way or will tipping
point eventually go the way of the dinosaur as
many metaphors before it? In order to find out, the
Tipping Points project, along with other researchers
from around the world, are studying how ideas
spread both socially and culturally.