Getting Sociology Right: A Half-Century of Reflections 9780520958487

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Getting Sociology Right

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Getting Sociology Right a half- century of reflections

Neil J. Smelser

university of california press Berkeley

Los Angeles

London

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2014 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Smelser, Neil J. Getting sociology right : a half-century of reflections / Neil J. Smelser. pages cm Summary: “Neil J. Smelser, one of the most important and influential American sociologists, traces the discipline of sociology from 1969 to the early twenty-first century in Getting Sociology Right: A Half-Century of Reflections. By examining sociology as a vocation and building on the work of Talcott Parsons, Smelser discusses his views on the discipline of sociology, and how his perspective of the field evolved in the postwar era”—Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978–0-520-28207-0 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978–0-520-28208-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn 978–0-520-95848-7 (e-book) 1. Sociology. I. Title. HM585.S5294 2014 301—dc23 2013040291 Manufactured in the United States of America 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Introduction (2013)

part i

1

early searching

1.

The Optimum Scope of Sociology (1969)

15

2.

Sociology and the Other Social Sciences (1967)

35

3.

Some Personal Thoughts on the Pursuit of Sociological Problems (1969)

82

part ii 4.

later explorations Biography, the Structure of Explanation, and the Evaluation of Research in Sociology (1980)

105

5.

External Influences on Sociology (1990)

116

6.

Sociology’s Next Decades: Centrifugality, Conflict, Accommodation (1990)

131

7.

Sociology as Science, Humanism, and Art (1994)

148

8.

Problematics in the Internationalization of Social Science Knowledge (1991)

163

9. 10.

part iii 11. 12.

Social Sciences and Social Problems: The Next Century (1995)

191

The Questionable Logic of “Mistakes” in the Dynamics of Knowledge Growth in the Social Sciences (2005)

210

some recent reflections Looking Back at Twenty-Five Years of Sociology and the Annual Review of Sociology (1999)

235

Sociological and Interdisciplinary Adventures: A Personal Odyssey (2000)

258

Afterword (2013)

299

Index

315

Introduction (2013)

Over a period of nearly four decades covering most of my professional career (1967–2005) I wrote a dozen-plus essays on the nature, status, methodology, problems, current situation, and future of the academic discipline of sociology. The topics of these essays were very different from one another and they were published in the greatest mix of accessible and inaccessible places. Yet they all had one characteristic in common: I initiated none of them. Every essay was written at the behest of an organizing committee of a scholarly meeting, an editor of a journal, or the reigning president of the American Sociological Association for presentation in a symposium. In every case a topic was assigned, but I was given freedom to develop that topic as I chose. These circumstances do not bode well if one is searching for a systematic pattern in those essays. After all, they were externally initiated at different times, for different occasions, by different people with different agendas on their mind, and in different environments. The essays stimulated varying levels of interest and response at the time of delivery and publication, but for a long time they have resided as discrete and barely visible items in my formal bibliography, which almost nobody sees, much less reads. 1

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In the spring of 2012, during the course of interviews for my oral history (Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley), it occurred to me that there is a heretofore-unrecognized continuity in the essays. It also occurred to me that it might be of some interest to draw them together in one place and venture some reflections. I assembled and read them and confirmed that they reveal a certain pattern in their development. The reason for this, moreover, is that while each essay was on an assigned topic, I wrote what was on my mind at the moment, though I did not do this as a matter of assertion or defiance of my assignment. What was on my mind, moreover, reflected where I was in my sociological career and the influence of my intellectual, academic, and political experiences in the period leading up to each episode of writing. The overall pattern is this: the emphases of the earliest essays (late 1960s) were somewhat formal, treating sociology and the other social sciences as autonomous enterprises, driven by the ideals, norms, and methods of science. In retrospect, these essays reflected the idealism of my training in the 1950s and my early career enthusiasm. As the later essays unfolded, I extended this limited view and explored one “extrascientific” influence on the discipline after another, yielding a much more complicated, kaleidoscopic version of the nature of the sociological enterprise. I explain the logic of this development in the remainder of this introduction. Interestingly, cumulatively complicating my early views of the sociological program did not weaken my commitment to my own discipline, as one might expect as one’s idealism diminishes and one’s realism grows. I remain a fully committed and enthusiastic sociologist and social scientist, convinced of the fundamental value of the scientific mission of the larger social science enterprise. Chapter 1, “The Optimum Scope of Sociology,” was presented in 1967 to a gathering of mainly senior sociologists, virtually all of whom had been or were destined to be presidents of the ASA. It was organized by the American Academy of Social and Political Science in Philadelphia, and the proceedings were printed in the Academy’s journal. The format was formal presentations by three sociologists regarded as young Turks at the time—James S. Coleman, Peter Blau, and myself—each commented on by two wise seniors and then thrown open for discussion. My assignment was a “normative” one, presupposing sociology to be a kind of purposeful, objective endeavor and daring me to define its nature

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and lay out its intellectual contours. This was, of course, a mission impossible for me, because every aspect of my assigned topic had a contested history, and the late 1960s were a period of especially vigorous contestation. In writing about this conference in 1999 (see pages 245–6), I remarked that it was “rash” on my part to respond to this assignment as defined; today I might strengthen that and say “foolhardy.” Nevertheless I made an effort to lay out, more or less systematically, (a) the five major frameworks that inform genuine sociological inquiry—the demographic-ecological, the psychological, the group, the social structural, and the cultural; (b) the subdivisions of the field and what has produced them; and (c) the proper nature of sociological explanation. I still regard this effort as informative and relevant within its own scope, but it rested almost exclusively on an autonomous, self-contained, and limited vision of the nature of sociological inquiry, and it ignored almost altogether the “nuts and bolts” of what one does as a sociological investigator and the multiple influences on sociological inquiry from outside the discipline, narrowly conceived. I think I was simultaneously reflecting in part the hopeful view of sociology I had inherited from my training in the 1950s, the formalism of the course on sociological theory that I had been teaching at Berkeley for seven years (see my book Sociological Theory—A Contemporary View, published originally in 1971 and again in 2011 by Quid Pro Quo Press), and, more generally, the optimism and muscularity of Berkeley sociology in its golden years of growth, 1952 to 1964. Two years earlier I had undertaken another “mission impossible” for Paul Lazarsfeld, who was president of the American Sociological Association and had chosen as his presidential theme the uses (applications) of sociology. After the meetings Lazarsfeld wished to publish a sizable number of delivered papers in a volume to be entitled The Uses of Sociology. He enlisted the services of William H. Sewell and Harold L. Wilensky as coeditors. It occurred to them that, without stretching the idea of “uses” too far from the practical, sociology might be “useful” to the other social sciences. A relevant essay would presumably refer to the intellectual and other benefits sociology brings to its sister disciplines. They asked me to write this essay (chapter 2). To accept an assignment of such scope and complexity also now occurs to me as foolhardy, but I took it on. To execute this task, I had to articulate a number of “dimensions” on which the various social sciences could be compared with one another. For this

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purpose I chose four dimensions—favored dependent variables, favored independent variables, models of explanation, and research methods primarily employed—and gave concise expositions of sociology, economics, political science, anthropology, history, and psychology according to these dimensions. I extended the analysis and attempted to pinpoint specific kinds of “services” or articulations that sociology and these other social sciences could provide one another, given their contrasting emphases. I still regard this enterprise as useful and relevant, but limited in several ways. First, it represented the various social sciences as they were then and necessarily ignored what has happened in all of them in the ensuing decades. Second, and related, I overrepresented the functionalist view (my own training) within sociology, which was just coming under fundamental attack. Third, it also was an “idealized” essay in many respects, in that I treated the social sciences as largely autonomous intellectual enterprises. The chapter manifests my love for analytic neatness, which still exists but has been tempered over time. Fourth, like the “optimum scope” essay, it represented the various social sciences as being “driven” mainly by scientific aims and methods, and it downplayed the insularities, jurisdictionalism, sectarianism, conflicts within and between them, and outside pressures—all of which surely influence their usefulness or lack of usefulness for one another. Finally, I had the idea that all the social sciences were striving for and moving toward scientific “maturity” and because of that would display certain maturing tendencies; that was also an idealized and limited view, even though I noted lack of consensus and conflict from time to time. Both essays expressed a certain optimism and serenity that has not been justified by the succeeding half century of the history of the social sciences. To record these observations now is not an act of renunciation on my part but a recognition of the limits of those early enterprises. As it turned out, I had an opportunity to extend and qualify these formal expositions almost immediately. In 1968 the editors of a special issue of the journal Sociological Inquiry, entitled “The Craft of Sociology,” asked me for a contribution. The issue was designed to give recognized authors an opportunity to reflect on and provide a biographical account of their own sociological work. I chose to focus on the evolution of my thinking and strategic intellectual choices in my first two single-authored books, Social Change in the Industrial Revolution and Theory of Collective

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Behavior. Responding to the invitation to take a biographical approach, I discovered how important “accidental” influences were on my thinking and choices, and how “messy” the research process is in terms of its unfolding of false starts and dead ends, as well as productive lines of research and “methodologically correct” presentation of arguments. I did not reflect very much at the time on the relations between this exposition and my earlier theoretical-conceptual-methodological thinking on sociology and the other social sciences, but in retrospect this essay, reproduced as chapter 3, simultaneously marked an expansion of those earlier perspectives and an extension of my understanding of social science scholarship. Ten years later I accepted an assignment from Hubert M. Blalock to present a paper in one of his presidential sessions at the ASA annual meetings. His general theme was the relation between theory and research in sociology. In preparing this paper I did not think of it as having any special relation to my earlier biographical essay. But it did; it was a formal extension of thinking begun in that essay. I argued basically that there are three stories to be told in the understanding and assessment of sociological work: 1. Biographical, or what in the ongoing life of the investigator determines choice of problems, polemics, emphases, and styles of sociological work. This process is not systematic and involves many diversions, redirections of inquiry, and often arbitrariness in selecting what lines of research to pursue and not to pursue. 2. Formal, or how one constructs and refines an interpretative architecture to present the results of research. Examination of this process reveals the basic theoretical, methodological, and evaluative options chosen to explicate the research. It is how the biographical meanderings are converted into more systematic presentations, polemics, and conclusions. 3. Evaluational, or the ex post facto operation of bringing the formal standards of scientific inquiry—theoretical, empirical, and methodological norms—to bear in assessing the research results. Much of this activity, of course, emanates from reviewers and critics.

In this essay, reproduced as chapter 4, I argued that each of these stories has its own autonomous significance, reality, and integrity and that, above all, the stories should not be assimilated to one another and mistakenly compressed into one story. Social scientists, who generally regard themselves as

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belonging to the rational classes, tend to subordinate unsystematic biographical stories to formal-scientific standards and to represent their work as idealized rational exercises. I challenged that kind of idealization in this essay, and in the process I sketched a more contingent and, I believe, more realistic account of what scientific investigation entails—and certainly a revision and extension of my earlier views. As usual, however, at the time I neither explained nor even recognized this as the intellectual shift from my earlier formulations. Ten years later I expanded my account in yet another direction, again without conscious recognition that I was doing so. One of the unspoken assumptions of my earlier expositions was that sociologists and other social scientists choose their own problems, and that by implication this choice is informed by a dialogue with past researchers, unsolved problems in the sociological paradigm(s) within which one is working, and the free pursuit of new problems. The occasion was yet another invitation by a president of the ASA—Herbert Gans in this case—to contribute a general essay on understanding sociology in America. I do not remember how or why I thought of the specific topic, but I chose to write on external influences on sociology, thus acknowledging the field’s embeddedness in its larger society. This essay appears as chapter 5. I chose cultural influences (decisive in shaping different “national sociologies”), influences emanating from large and decisive social changes in society, and political influences, including those affecting research funding. To focus on these marked a further departure from the posture of relative innocence that had informed my earlier essays. I am also convinced that the recognition and choice of this emphasis reflected fundamental changes in my professional career. My early years were dominated by determined efforts to establish myself as a research scholar in my own field, and my main audiences were my sociological colleagues at Berkeley and the larger professional world represented by the ASA and, less visibly, the International Sociological Association. As time went on I became more and more involved in the “real world,” initially in the politics of my own university and later in the social science “establishment.” The stories of many of these engagements appear in this book, especially in chapter 12, so I only tick them off here. The 1980s were especially significant. I had become involved in the rough-and-tumble of University of California politics in my services as chair of the Berkeley and

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UC systemwide academic senates; I was immersed in the politics of the International Sociological Association in co-initiating the research committee on Economy and Society and as a member of the ISA’s executive committee; and I was mobilized in the organized efforts of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences to resist the efforts of the Reagan administration to reduce support for the social sciences in the early 1980s. All these involvements exposed me—firsthand, involuntarily, and sometimes brutally—to the “external influences” affecting my field and the larger social science scene. Chapter 5 is an effort to identify and reflect on the significance of the external forces involved. About the same time I was asked by the editors by the Canadian journal Cahiers de Recherche Sociologique to contribute to a special issue on the future of sociology. My assignment was relatively open-ended. I had referred in past writings to the incessant fissiparous (specializing and fragmenting) tendencies in sociology and the other social sciences and other disciplines, but by now I saw that process as providential and as continuing to change the basic nature of the field. In that essay, which appears as chapter 6, I tried to identify the forces that produced these splintering effects, the conflicts that accompanied them, and some theoretical and organizational efforts to strive toward reintegrating the discipline. The last motif was something of a sentimental reminiscence on my part—looking toward the systematic efforts to synthesize and unify the field that were so much a part of my sociological apprenticeship. The strongest word I could muster for these integrative efforts in the 1990 essay was accommodation. I cannot identify all the trends, situations, and events in my life that combined to produce that essay, but I would have to imagine that my experience of a quarter century of deep division and conflict in my own department at Berkeley (beginning with the Free Speech Movement in 1964) was a major sensitizing influence. A couple of years later an old friend and colleague, Kai Erikson, asked me to contribute to a symposium at Yale, which he called “The Art and Science of Sociology.” Again, my assignment was open-ended. But as it turned out, the essay dealt with the same issues of division and conflict in our field as did the Cahiers essay. This time, however, I took a new tack. I argue in that essay (chapter 7) that three fundamental visions or impulses have informed the field of sociology from its beginnings and that the

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tensions among these visions have never been resolved and can be evoked to explain fundamental and enduring conflicts in the discipline. These visions are (a) the scientific, judging the intellectual work of sociology’s practitioners according to criteria evolved in the natural sciences and adapted to the social sciences, and valuing above all the creation of knowledge that measures up favorably to the theoretical and methodological standards of science; (b) the humanistic, giving priority to the amelioration of social problems and the improvement of society through reform and/or revolutionary change; (c) the artistic, to which I assigned two meanings—first the aesthetics or elegance of intellectual formulation, referring to originality and beauty of insights and theories, and second, the “art” of applying sociological knowledge to practical decision making, social problems, and social policy. Taken together, chapters 6 and 7 take on the unity-diversity and consensus-conflict issues once again, but this time in more textured ways than I had previously thought about. Also by 1990 I had become deeply immersed in international sociology, largely through my involvements in the International Sociological Association and my leadership in organizing three conferences on sociological theory as joint enterprises of the American and German Sociological Associations. So, when I received an invitation to write a piece on internationalization of knowledge for Current Sociology, I felt ready to do so. The starting point was to ask in what sense sociology (or any other social science) could be regarded as producing knowledge that was valid comparatively at least and universally at best. I also wanted to ask what facilitated the international applicability, diffusion, and uses of social science knowledge. The result (chapter 8) is a series of analytic and empirical reflections on these questions. To remind the reader of the larger significance of this adventure, it marked a further branching out, even a departure, from my initial orientation to sociology as a field that manifested formalism, positivism, and scientific standards and marked an extension of my inclinations to portray it as much as an evolving “art of the possible” in an uncertain environment. Chapter 9, on the application of sociology to social problems, parallels chapter 8 in an important sense. Like that chapter, its starting point is the knowledge created by social scientists. In this chapter, however, I reach out in a very different direction and address the “artistic” issue of applying

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that knowledge. Two sources of sensitization to that issue should be made explicit. The first was my decade-long leadership in the National Research Council in its efforts to demonstrate the applicability of the social sciences in the past, present, and future (see pages 283–7). The second, quite accidental, was my membership, beginning in 1988, on the President’s Advisory Committee (University of California) on the national laboratories at Los Alamos, Livermore, and Berkeley, which involved me deeply in applications of natural science knowledge, initially in weapons research and national defense and later in a range of other areas as the laboratories began to diversify their activities at the end of the Cold War. It was, in fact, my acquaintance with numbers of physicists and other natural scientists that resulted in an invitation for me to deliver a paper at a conference at Sigma Xi, the scientific honorary society, that celebrated the fiftieth anniversary report of Vannevar Bush report on science and the nation. Again the topic was left more or less open, but I decided to reflect as systematically as I could on the issues involved in the application of social science knowledge to social problems. The result is seen in chapter 9. In that essay I make some prognostications about what kinds of social problems seem likely to appear on the horizon. But more fundamentally, I undertake to redefine the nature of a “social problem,” refusing to define it as a “thing” in society in keeping with positivistic view of social problems, and regarding it as the result of a complicated social and political “process.” Having thus redefined its nature, I could then move to a discussion of the ways that social science research could provide useful insights and guidance. I regard that reformulation as important, somewhat novel, and reflecting in part an influence from the perspective of social constructivism, but I tried to turn the discussion in a positive direction, as many social constructivists do not do. The final essay of Part II—chapter 10, entitled “The Questionable Logic of ‘Mistakes’ in the Dynamics of Knowledge Growth in the Social Science”—is out of temporal place in that it is the most recently published (2005) of all essays in this volume. The chapter deals with the distinctive features of the growth, transfiguration, and “death” of social science knowledge, and, as such, is an effort to systematize the often-bewildering patterns of change in that knowledge. I wrote it in response to a request to write an article on “big mistakes” in the social sciences—a concept meant

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to correspond to major errors in the history of the natural sciences. I initially declined to write such an article for a special issue of Social Research because I thought that the logic of “mistakes” in that sense could not apply to the social sciences. The editors of that issue did not accept my initial decision and argued that I should, instead, write an article explaining why that logic did not apply. In the end I accepted their reasoning and produced an essay on some principles of acceptance, rejection, and alteration of knowledge in the social sciences. The three essays in Part III contain the most recent reflections and depart in many ways from most of the others. The first resulted from an invitation from the editors of the Annual Review of Sociology. I had played an important role in the creation of that publication in the late 1960s and served as associate editor and member of its editorial board in its early years (see page 237). When the publication decided to celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary in the 1990s, they asked me to review its history of publishing progress-report essays on different sociological topics and to offer some additional reflections on the changing character of sociology and of the journal’s way of recording these developments. My efforts appear in chapter 11 and offer some ideas on the contingencies and difficulties of “reflecting” the developments of a field as complex and changing as sociology. Chapter 12 is a kind of capstone essay for all the rest, though I did not write it as such. I wrote it as a response to an invitation from the editor of the American Sociologist to produce a general article of my choosing. I chose to write an autobiographical-intellectual essay focusing on the tension between being a “disciplinary” sociologist and an “interdisciplinary” social scientist, a main theme in my career. The first part of the essay goes well beyond that topic itself and attempts to reveal the circumstances of my childhood and youth that might have given rise to this particular style in the social science world. In the main part of the essay, I chronicle, in an autobiographical way, the alternation of disciplinary and interdisciplinary emphases in my own research and other professional activities, a constant and recurring theme. This essay also makes much of the complex mix of personal motivation, opportunities taken and foregone, and “chance” in the unfolding of one’s career. I wrote chapter 13, the “Afterword,” in 2013, to add some final reflections and afterthoughts on the essays. It has three parts. First I review my intel-

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lectual projects and publications in the first decade of the twenty-first century, commenting on their intellectual substance and their “interdisciplinarity.” Second, I reconsider the sources that influence the choice of sociological problems and shape the contours of the field. Finally, I reflect on some past and ongoing trends in society and the discipline, concluding with some observations on trends and troubles in the country’s system of higher education and their implications for the future of the social sciences. In the end these essays, taken together, can be regarded as having both an unsystematic and a systematic quality. They are unsystematic in that they were produced as a result of changing career involvements and the accidental circumstances of being invited by different people with different agendas. But they are systematic in the sense that they reflect a gradual process of learning, of fanning out my intellectual interests and producing, in sequence, a different, more contingent view of the circumstances that have conditioned the existence and evolution of the academic subject of my life’s calling.

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part i

Early Searching

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1

The Optimum Scope of Sociology (1969)

The word optimum in the title of this communication to my colleagues suggests two guidelines that I shall follow. First, the word implies that sociologists have a number of different ways to define the scope of the field and that some ways are better than others. It suggests, therefore, that I should strike an evaluative note in this essay. My account of sociology’s scope should not be only inductive; it should be neither a distillation of definitions from textbooks, nor a recapitulation of the giants of the sociological tradition, nor a descriptive survey of what sociologists do. Rather, my account should explore critically the relations between what sociologists are doing and what they ought to be doing. I am confident that this evaluative emphasis is acceptable, since even those who insist that sociology be value-free acknowledge by that very insistence that we may relax the taboo on evaluation when we converse about the values and norms around which our inquiry should be organized.

From A Design for Sociology: Scope Objectives, and Methods, edited by Robert Bierstedt, 1–21. Philadelphia: American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1969.

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Second, optimum implies that we sociologists should conceive of ourselves as agents who proceed deliberately, if not always consciously, in creating the scope, limits, and divisions of our field, not merely as passive “discoverers” of an aspect of social life that is given in nature and remains only to be recorded and studied. I shall elaborate this implication later. The word scope also has two connotations, both of which I shall consider in this essay. The first connotation concerns the range of empirical subject matter of the field and the ways in which this subject matter is subdivided. The second connotation concerns the level of generality of propositions, models, and theories in sociology. At one extreme, the scope may be bound closely to identifiable data and limited in theoretical relevance; at the other extreme, the scope may be extended to abstract, comprehensive “grand theory”; or the scope may be pitched at some intermediate or “middle-range” level. It should be evident from these introductory remarks that my emphasis will be academic. I shall examine the discipline as a social science, mentioning its use in society and its applications to social policy only in passing.

th e c o n c ep tua l stat us o f s o c i o lo g y One Field, Many Frameworks Sociologists frequently—though often implicitly—assume that their discipline, like other disciplines, covers a determinate range of empirical data. If this assumption were extended, the empirical world would be viewed as consisting of biological data (births, deaths, digestion, and elimination), psychological data (gratification and frustration of needs, expression of emotions), economic data (investments, purchases), and sociological data (interpersonal behavior in institutionalized roles). Following this kind of assumption, we would proceed to define the scope of sociology in an empirical way—that is, by identifying the appropriate range of data. Even cursory examination reveals, however, that such an assumption is not warranted. To illustrate its vulnerability, let us consider a single empirical datum—the act of a man purchasing tickets for four to Hawaii, where he plans to spend two weeks on vacation. Clearly this act has psy-

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chological significance, since the man has motives for purchasing the tickets and for choosing Hawaii as a vacation spot. In addition, the act has economic significance, since the individual is spending his funds for tickets rather than for other goods and services; moreover, his purchase, when aggregated with others, constitutes the economic demand for the airline industry. Finally, the act has sociological significance, in that the other three passengers are the purchaser’s wife and children, and in that his purchase was preceded by a decision-making process within the family that led to the choice of Hawaii. The datum itself, then, can be a datum for at least three disciplines, and it cannot legitimately be limited to one discipline. From this, it must be concluded that sociology does not deal with a special class of empirical data; instead, it deals with data as interpreted within a special type of conceptual framework. Sociology and the other behavioral sciences arise from a common body of empirical data rather than several separate classes of data. With respect to characterizing the subject matter of sociology, then, I hold to the position that its subject matter is not in any natural way given in social reality but is the product of a selective identification of aspects of the empirical world for purposes of scientific description, classification, and explanation. Without a conceptual framework, it is not possible to identify ranges of empirical variation that are scientifically problematical. Given this epistemological position, the problem of defining the scope of sociology changes from a search for empirical boundaries to an effort to outline the distinctive conceptual frameworks to which empirical data are referred to for assessment. What are the frameworks—or lines of conceptual abstraction—that are commonly found in sociology? In reviewing the preoccupations of those who call themselves—or are called—sociologists, I have been able to locate at least five distinctive conceptual frameworks for identifying and describing the subject matter of the field. (And these five might easily be multiplied by further subdivision.) The first framework is found mainly in the special fields of demography and ecology. It involves the interpretation of events as aspects of human organisms considered in their physical and biological environments and in relation to the coordinates of space and time, without reference in the first instance either to the psychological systems or to the social relations

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of the organisms. The preoccupation of demography and ecology is to explain regularities and variations in the size and composition of human populations, as well as regularities and variations in births, deaths, physical movements, and spatial arrangements. To be sure, investigators in these fields frequently have recourse to psychological and social variables in attempting to explain these regularities and variations. But at the present time, I am considering the subject matter only as the phenomena to be explained. The second framework is found mainly in the long-standing (if still sprawling and indefinite) special field of social psychology. It involves the interpretation of behavior in terms of its psychological significance to the individual considered as self or person. Stated another way, the conceptual framework used to organize the study of behavior is the psychological system of the human being—for example, his motives, his attitudes, his cognitions, his skills, and his sense of identity. This framework is the focus of psychology, but it also has a solid place in academic sociology. These two frameworks focus on the individual person, either in his significance as a biological organism or in his significance as a psychological system. A third framework—that which concerns the group—arises when we consider numbers of individual persons who become aggregated, more or less purposively, as members of a collectivity with some common orientation or orientations. When sociologists refer to primary groups, voluntary associations, or class groupings, for example, they usually think of them as being made up of numbers of persons considered as members. Sometimes sociologists study social groups as units in their own right, interacting with one another without reference to their individual members—as in the case of competition among political parties, conflict among racial groups, or status-striving among cliques. A fourth and quite different perspective emerges when social life is considered, not from the vantage point of the persons involved, but rather from the vantage point of the relations between persons. The familiar concept of “role” characterizes these relations—the roles of husband and wife, politician and voter, employer and employee, businessman and consumer. The concept of person and the concept of role are analytically separate, even though both are based ultimately on a common body of behavioral data. The two concepts cut across one another. A person occupies many

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different roles; and a role cannot refer to a complete person but only to selected aspects of his behavior. The equally familiar concept of social structure refers to identifiable patterns of roles that are organized primarily around the fulfillment of some social function or activity—for example, religious structure, educational structure, or political structure. The concepts of group and social structure, then, refer to different aspects of social data. Or, to emphasize the conceptual aspects, they are different ways of looking at social data. Furthermore, the same behavioral phenomena can be legitimately characterized according to both aspects. For example, a trade union can be described both as a group with individual members and as a system of interrelated roles—officers, shop stewards, representatives of locals, and the like. In the present state of sociology, both group analysis and structural analysis are widely employed; but it has not yet been settled whether either, both, or neither is the best basis for organizing sociological knowledge. The fifth framework concerns a variety of cultural phenomena that regulate, legitimize, and lend meaning to all social behavior—whether this behavior be conceptualized according to the “person,” “group,” or “structural” perspectives. Norms, for example, are standards that regulate the interaction among persons and groups; values are standards that provide legitimacy for social arrangements and social behavior; ideologies and cosmologies provide a context within which values and norms are grounded in meaning. As a first approximation, then, we may affirm that the scope of the subject matter of sociology is found in the several conceptual frameworks I have sketched. The sociological enterprise is to account for regularities, variations, and interdependencies among the phenomena that constitute these frameworks. By way of qualification, I should add that these several frameworks are not always neatly set off from one another conceptually, that in many studies the investigator operates within more than one of the frameworks, and that, occasionally, a sociologist may venture into still other conceptual territories than those mentioned. This view of the conceptual scope of sociology yields evidence for a conclusion that many of us share—that sociology, by comparison with some other sciences, lacks a single conceptual framework. The field is difficult to distinguish from others because it contains a diversity of frameworks,

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some of which it shares with other fields such as psychology and anthropology. If anything, then, sociology is too comprehensive, diffuse, soft in the center, and fuzzy around the edges. These qualities make for a field that is enormously complex and engaging but less scientifically adequate than might be optimal. It follows that if sociology continues its movement toward scientific maturity, it must be expected that it will shed certain aspects of these frameworks and consolidate others. This is a natural consequence of the development of a specialized field of knowledge from a more diffuse tradition of thought. Unsettling as it may be for those of us who like sociology as we know and practice it, this prospect seems to be in the historical cards. After all, sociology has already had a history of severing some of its connections with social philosophy, social policy, and social ideology— connections that are far from completely severed in the mid-twentieth century (Lipset and Smelser 1961). It also appears that some special subfields of sociology, such as demography, may now be heading toward separate disciplinary status, if we take as evidence the consolidation of a theoretical framework, the growth of a specialized literature, the growth of a separate professional association, and the establishment of separate programs, and even departments, in institutions of higher learning. The future relations between the various social psychological perspectives— such as symbolic interactionism, social behaviorism, and the new “ethnomethodology”—and the other frameworks of sociology seem uncertain: some may be assimilated in modified form to other disciplines; others may remain attached in modified form as parts of a discipline oriented primarily to the “group” and “social structural” perspectives; and still others may become specialties on their own. Despite some uncertainty about the precise lines of future development, it seems evident that future generations will know many sociologies and will view the work of our own generation as hopelessly broad in its sociological preoccupations. It may be correct to view the growth of sociology as the spinning off of some frameworks and the consolidation of those that remain. But I do not view this pattern of growth, considered alone, as optimal. The growth of new specialties, however scientifically adequate they may be, always raises new questions about their relations with other bodies of knowledge. More specialization will aggravate the already pressing problem of the insula-

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tion of the various branches of the behavioral sciences from one another. Optimally, a new pattern of integrating knowledge should arise simultaneously, a pattern whereby the implications of one discipline or subdiscipline for the work of others become a subject of disciplined inquiry in itself. Even in the present state of specialization of the behavioral sciences too little is known of the potentially profitable interchanges among the various disciplines [see chapter 2—NS]. As knowledge becomes more specialized, the need for new synthesis and coordination will become even greater. Without the growth—indeed the specialization—of intellectually synthesizing activities, it will become more likely that scientific specialties will tend to paint themselves into corners, exhausting their potentialities through excessive refinement rather than opening their assumptions to the theories and research of neighboring zones of inquiry. I would hope, then, that two processes will dominate the future growth of sociology—the inevitable fragmentation and consolidation into more specialties, and the intellectual coordination of these specialties on a new level of interdisciplinary integration. I shall conclude this discussion of conceptual frameworks in sociology with a brief comment on some of the intellectual controversies within the discipline. Many of these derive in part from the fact that some sociologists have committed themselves to one framework or another and have assumed a more or less polemic stance as regards its value for sociology as a whole. Ready examples could be provided for frameworks like the ecological, the psychological, and the structural-functional (see Duncan and Schnore 1959; Homans 1964; Merton 1957). But I should also like to mention another controversy—perhaps the most widespread one in the field at the present time—in this context of commitment to different conceptual frameworks. I refer to the continuing and multifaceted controversy between those who tend to stress conflict and change in their approach and those who tend to stress integration and stability. The first position has historical roots in figures like Karl Marx and Georg Simmel, and its contemporary representatives are figures like Lewis Coser and Ralf Dahrendorf; the second position has historical roots in figures like Émile Durkheim and A. R. Radcliffe Brown and is most conspicuously identified with the name of Talcott Parsons at the present time. Many read this controversy in almost completely ideological terms—that is, in terms of

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whether the theorist is assuming a radical or a conservative stance toward the status quo. This interpretation may have some merit. But I should like to add that to identify the respective conceptual frameworks adopted by the representatives also contributes to an understanding of the roots of the controversy. One of the differences between these loosely defined approaches is that the “conflict and change” approach tends to rely more on the “person” or “group” perspective and the “integration and stability” approach tends to rely more on the “social structural” or “cultural” framework. Because of an initial emphasis on different frameworks, the two types of theorists become more capable of, and more disposed to, analysis of situations of instability and stability, respectively. Indeed it is individuals and groups that come into conflict, not relational qualities such as structures; it is persons and groups that have clashing interests, not roles and structures; and concepts like roles and normative expectations, by their very logic, refer to the ways in which persons and groups routinely— and in a regulated way—interact with one another. To generalize this observation, commitment to a given conceptual framework tends to focus the attention of the social investigator on certain types of topics and scientific problems. Talcott Parsons has made a pertinent observation on this issue in a discussion of dynamics in sociology: “Dynamic analysis is . . . not possible in terms of the systematic treatment of institutional structure alone. [It] involves the possibility of generalized treatment of behavioral tendencies of the human actors, in situations in which they are placed and subject to the expectations of their institutionalized roles. In the most general terms such generalization depends on a theory of ‘motivation’ of human behavior. The ultimate foundations of such a theory must certainly be derived from the science of psychology” (1954, 233). I would add only that a theory of dynamics must be derived from a theory of group action as well as a theory of personality. In this connection, it is interesting to note that in the thought of Karl Marx the forces that make for integration and resistance to social change are found in the relations among the various elements of the economic structure and the superstructure (for example, the temporarily stabilizing influences of law, religion, and the state during any given historical period); and the forces that make for conflict and change are found in groups of motivated indi-

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viduals (class-conscious organizations, revolutionary parties). The relational structure provides the historical contradictions that give rise to conflict and change, but political groups actually enter into conflict and effect processes of change. Marx, in short, used both the “structural” and the “group” perspectives, depending on the issue he was addressing. The conclusion I draw from these various observations is that future advances in the study of social change depend, in part, on the attainment of a more profitable synthesis of these two perspectives than we have been able to effect in the past.

Subdivisions in Sociology To this point I have considered sociology in terms of the several conceptual frameworks that constitute its subject matter. My account also suggests why the commonly listed subdivisions of the field frequently appear to be overlapping, inconsistent, and confusing. The difficulties in subdividing arise because, with diversity of frameworks and approaches, many different principles of division are available. It is not surprising, therefore, that even a casual inspection of the fields appearing in textbooks, catalogs, and programs of the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association reveals a number of cross-cutting bases of classification for the field: 1. Some subfields correspond more or less to the major conceptual frameworks listed above—for example, demography, social psychology, social organization, and sociology of culture. 2. Additional subfields arise when the major conceptual frameworks are subdivided by empirical illustration. For example, in the “group” framework we find the sociology of small groups, voluntary associations, formal organizations, and so on. Within the “structural” framework we find structures identified according to type of function—sociology of religion, medicine, law, medicine, and so on. Within the “cultural” framework we find the sociology of literature, knowledge, popular culture, and the like. 3. Some subfields arise when investigators focus on some relations between the major conceptual frameworks. The focus of the subfield of socialization and personality, for instance, is the relations between the

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sociocultural structure and the formation of individual personalities; the subfield of deviance and social control refers to the same relations, studied from the standpoint of degree of conformity to the sociocultural structure. 4. Still other subfields refer to analytic aspects of social life that cut across the frameworks listed above. Stratification, for example, refers to the study of the hierarchical organization of roles, persons, and groups in social life; and political sociology refers to the generation, allocation, and utilization of power in social life. 5. Some subfields refer to a process, such as collective behavior or the sociology of economic development. 6. A few subfields refer to the logic and techniques of conceptualization and empirical research—for example, theory and methodology. 7. Finally, some subfields arise as a result of sociology’s historical tendency to focus on social problems that are pressing in the larger society—for example, the sociology of prostitution, mental illness, or poverty.

Since all these criteria of classification are used—and each is used incompletely—in the internal division of sociology, the contemporary scene yields a bewildering patchwork of fields that is anything but scientifically optimal. Furthermore, it seems reasonable to expect that two shifts in the bases of classification will accompany the increasing scientific maturation of the field. First, while sociology will undoubtedly continue to be called upon to address itself to society’s moral, political, and social problems, its approach to them will be, not to create subfields around specific types of problems, but rather to bring understanding to these problems from more general principles of social structure and group processes. Consider an analogy. Economics does not have subfields of “inflation” or “depression”; rather, it throws light on these phenomena by applying more general principles from the theories of consumption, production, and price. Similarly, insights on delinquency, civil disorder, and other social problems will, in the future, come not from concrete subfields of sociology named after these problems but from general knowledge concerning processes of deviance and social control. Indeed, sociology shows some signs that this kind of change has already occurred to a degree, as courses in principles of

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deviance have come to displace courses organized around a variety of “social problems” in many educational institutions. Second—and related to the first point—the naming of subdivisions after specific groups and social structures will probably give way to more general characterizations of structures and processes. The main reason for this is that subdivisions identified with particular historical circumstances inhibit the development of a discipline with truly general principles. The subfield of race relations, for example, seems to be a very appropriate one for societies like the United States, South Africa, and Indonesia, where racial groupings play a salient role; but it does not seem to apply readily to racially and ethnically homogeneous societies. Again, the sociology of law seems to be an appropriate subfield for societies like ours, where law is such an important social institution; but, for societies governed largely by unwritten mores, the sociology of law has little relevance. A more general, analytic characterization, such as social control, would be preferable, since it encompasses both legal and nonlegal types of social regulation. The upshot of these observations is that sociological subdivisions will probably evolve toward fewer, more analytic areas concerning basic structures and processes and that this is desirable in the interests of developing a science that is genuinely theoretical and broadly comparative. But this kind of development will not occur without creating serious dilemmas for the discipline. I have been arguing for sociological subdivisions that are not tied to particular social problems or to concrete groups or structures. But it remains the case that most of the sociological data with which we must deal are recorded by, and refer to, concrete social units, such as societies, communities, formal organizations, and individual persons. Governments conduct censuses, municipal or county agencies record most suicide and crime statistics, business firms keep records, and so on. Moreover, these units tend to emit, collect, and record more data about problems that preoccupy them in any given historical period. Because such units are the source of much of our necessary data, it is tempting to use them as the basis of our sociological frameworks. In comparative sociology, for example, most comparisons are made among national or social units. In one way this makes sense, since most aggregated comparative data are generated by societies. But for many purposes “the society” may not be the best comparative unit. We may wish to organize our study

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around the comparison of regions with different religions, different languages, or different ethnic solidarities. Yet these kinds of regions scarcely produce data suitable for comparative analysis. These circumstances imply that the conceptual framework that the sociological investigator may wish to use to generate insights may lie on a different analytic level from the sociocultural contexts in which his available data have been generated. Further, the more analytic his categories, the more remote they are likely to be from these contexts. The lesson to be learned from this dilemma, however, is not that sociology should restrict itself to concepts that correspond to the context within which social data are available. To argue this would be to argue for a sociology as concrete as the social units that produce the data on which it relies. Rather, the lesson is that sociologists must expect to be preoccupied with methodology—defined broadly as the canons by which theoretically relevant scientific statements are assessed in the light of empirical data. As sociological concepts become more comprehensive, new methods for relating these concepts to social data must be invented. It is sometimes asserted that a preoccupation with methodology signifies an immature scientific discipline in search of itself and that this preoccupation will fade away as the science advances. I do not share this view. The peculiar relation between analytic concepts and much of the data with which the discipline deals suggests that new levels of methodological concern must arise as the field becomes theoretically and empirically more sophisticated.

the character of sociological explanation Thus far, I have attempted to delineate the optimum scope and optimum subdivisions of sociology, indicating at the same time some problems and dilemmas that arise in striving for these optima. The second connotation of scope to which I wish to address myself refers to the kinds of activities that go into sociological explanation—that enterprise of accounting for the regularities, variations, and interdependencies among the phenomena identified within the sociological frameworks. What should be the scope of these activities? At what level should they be pitched? Frequently, two alternative strategies are debated: either to investigate relatively modest

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hypotheses that remain close to the empirical data or to deal with more comprehensive and abstract “theory” that is more remote from data. I shall argue, however, that this distinction is not the best way to frame the issue of the appropriate scope of sociological explanation; and, simultaneously, I hope to formulate a somewhat different “principle of legitimacy” that should govern the various activities that enter into sociological explanation. The several sociological frameworks outlined earlier were advanced as ways to characterize the major dependent variables of the discipline— those phenomena, variations in which are to be explained. Explanation itself, however, begins with the search for independent variables (or causes, or determinants, or factors, or conditions) to which variations in the dependent variables are referred. What are the independent variables most frequently used by sociologists to explain variations in social phenomena? By and large, sociologists find their explanatory variables by turning to those very phenomena that, in other contexts, they may wish to explain. Variations in demographic behavior, such as fertility, are frequently explained by reference to attitudes, group members, positions in the social structure, or differential exposure to cultural values (for instance, religion). Similarly, variations in attitudes are frequently explained by turning to group, social structural, and cultural variables. Certain types of social structures (for example, the isolated nuclear family) have been accounted for by referring to other structural variables (for example, industrial bureaucracy); the persistence of extended family traditions in spite of industrialization is often attributed to distinctive cultural traditions. Again, cultural productions such as art forms or ideologies are often accounted for by referring to conditions obtaining in different parts of the social structure. Sociological explanation, then, looks to variables within the same or neighboring frameworks to account for variations. The form of sociological explanation that appears least complicated is the simple hypothesis—a statement of the logically, and presumably temporally, prior conditions under which dependent variables may be expected to vary in certain ways. Two simple examples of sociological hypotheses are the following: (1) the size of the nuclear family is an inverse function of position in the stratification system, and (2) the level of social

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violence of any group is a direct function of its level of economic deprivation. In the first case, one structural variable is explained by reference to another structural variable; in the second case, a certain type of behavior is explained by simultaneous reference to group membership and the group’s position in the social structure. Closer examination reveals, however, that even simple hypotheses of this sort involve a number of ancillary assertions, assumptions, and perspectives. Consider the second illustration from the preceding paragraph. If taken without qualification, the hypothesis implies that economic deprivation, measured by some objective criterion, has a direct effect on a group and its members. This assertion is questionable on psychological grounds, since different groups have different levels of susceptibility to economic hardship, depending on their cultural values and historical experience; and, within any group, individuals bring different meanings to economic deprivation and have different thresholds of tolerance for it. Furthermore, the hypothesis implies a number of psychological variables—affects (such as rage) and processes by which these affects are converted into action—that intervene between the independent and dependent variables. Finally, the sociological investigator frequently finds the empirical relation between variables like deprivation and violence to be weak; and he wishes to refine that hypothesis by considering additional determinants of violence that may interact with deprivation, as well as additional responses to deprivation other than violence. For all these reasons, it turns out that a relatively simple and innocent hypothesis invariably involves a whole family of statements that stand in some implicit but relatively determinate relation to one another. Put another way, any single hypothesis is nestled in a system of hypotheses. Put still another way, any hypothesis implies a more complex model or theory of behavior. Furthermore, the roots of this model are to be found, once again, in the various frameworks—ecological, psychological, group, structural, and cultural—that constitute the substance of sociology. If this is the case, what is the distinctive character of model building or theory construction itself? This process often involves a number of activities, but as a first approximation it might be said that it consists in making explicit the variables and relations that are often only implicit in simple

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hypotheses, and in setting these ingredients into some formal or logical— including mathematical—relation with one another. Taking a hypothesis as the initial point of reference, the specialist in empirical research looks in the direction of the world of facts and proceeds according to the logic of locating, measuring, and recording data; ensuring the reliability and representativeness of these data; and controlling for the operation of other possible independent variables by experimental, statistical, or other research techniques. The theorist looks in the direction of the world of concepts. He examines the conceptual rather than the empirical context of the hypothesis. He attends to such matters as the mutual exclusiveness and logical exhaustiveness of classes of variables and relations; the internal consistency of hypotheses, and their consistency with other bodies of knowledge; their economy of expression; and their power, when combined with other assumptions and assertions, to generate new hypotheses. By this characterization, I do not mean to personify the specialist in empirical research and the specialist in theory as separate breeds. The same investigator frequently attends to both empirical and theoretical issues. But the classes of activity are distinguishable from each other. From this characterization, it becomes clear that sociological theory borders very closely on logic and epistemology, as well as moral and political philosophy. Any sociological theory rests on definite epistemological foundations—indeed, my own presentation of the nature of a sociological fact and the character of sociological explanation belies a definite epistemological position. Furthermore, because the substance of sociology involves, above all, formulations of general assertions of man’s relation to man, it overlaps with religious, moral and political doctrines that focus on the very same classes of relations. One of the most common exercises in theoretical analysis is to relate the thought of a theorist to some ideological position or to some school of moral and political philosophy. In fact, some of the most heated controversies in sociology concern the ideological or philosophical foundations of a theory rather than the explanatory utility of a theory. Before moving on, I should like to digress briefly to examine a distinction employed in the preceding paragraphs—the distinction between theory and fact. In one form or another, this distinction is almost universally accepted by social and behavioral scientists. According to the distinction,

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the world may be divided into empirical facts (behavioral data) that are given in the “real world” and theories (concepts, constructs, models) that are in the “world of ideas”; and the core task of scientific inquiry consists in systematically generating explanations by bringing theory and fact into some appropriate relation with one another. I should like to raise some questions about this form of the distinction. In a classic statement, Lawrence J. Henderson defined a fact as “an empirically verifiable statement about phenomena in terms of a conceptual scheme” (quoted in Parsons 1937, 41). The important phrase for present purposes is “in terms of a conceptual scheme.” I argued above that there is no such entity as a “sociological fact” apart from the conceptual framework to which it is referred. Even such an apparently real and irreducible datum as the birth of a child or a market transaction depends on the selective identification of aspects of empirical phenomena; notions of instance and class; and grammatical conventions—in short, a conceptual framework that serves to select from, identify, and organize experience. When we refer to facts or behavioral data, then, we actually refer to a universe of statements, the rules for organizing which are commonly rooted in the unexamined structures of common language and common sense. There cannot be a fact without a conceptual framework. As I have indicated, sociological explanation consists in bringing constructions such as hypotheses, models, and theories to bear on factual statements. But in what do these constructions consist? They are also conceptual frameworks. They are composed of concepts that are related to one another by a certain logic, or rules of discourse that are usually more precise and rigorous than those governing the use of common language. Accordingly, sociological explanation has to be defined not as the relation between two different classes of things—theories and facts—but as a relation between two conceptual frameworks. It consists in comparing the linguistic and conceptual conventions by which we organize the phenomena that we call the empirical world with the linguistic and conceptual conventions by which we organize the phenomena that we call ideas. If a certain relation between the two frameworks is attained, we judge an assertion to be “valid” or “verified”; if another relation is attained, we judge the assertion to be “rejected” or “in need of modification.” This formulation constitutes a kind of correspondence theory of scientific truth, but the cor-

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respondence is between different kinds of conceptual frameworks rather than between conceptual frameworks and facts. This kind of conclusion is somewhat disturbing to those of us who like to think of a “real world” that is separate from our ideas about it; but it is more in keeping with the ways in which experience is organized and scientific investigation proceeds. This formulation underscores the principle that scientific innovation may arise from two principal sources. First, it may arise from a modification of the conceptual framework by which we regard the “factual world.” This may involve a new way of conceptualizing a fact (a “discovery”), a new way of measuring it, a new way of bringing it into relation with another fact. This change may then disturb a previous “correspondence” with an explanatory or theoretical framework and lead to modification of this framework and its relation with the framework by which we organize the “factual world.” Second, scientific innovation may arise by virtue of a modification of the relations among the theoretical constructs themselves, which may suggest new ways of looking at facts, which, in turn, may generate new methods of organizing facts to correspond with the new theoretical relations. Scientific advance consists in a continuous feedback between these two ways of organizing experience.

to wa r d a pr i n c i pl e of l eg i t i m a c y f o r sociological activities The history of social thought has witnessed the appearance and disappearance of many epistemological positions, each of which has advanced and defended a principle by which knowledge concerning human affairs can best be generated. Among these approaches are rationalism, positivism, and intuitionism. In the shorter history of the scientific investigation of social life, too, certain methods have been selected as favorite candidates in the race to advance scientific knowledge—for example, the experimental method, quantification, and clinical observation. Each of these approaches or methods possesses the characteristics of a value system, in that proponents of each have attempted to set up criteria to legitimize the scope and method of social inquiry. Unfortunately, they have manifested another feature of value systems as well—the tendency to

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harden into doctrinal schools, which form the bases on which cadres of scholars spend much of their energy in combating other scholars about the relative legitimacy of their respective approaches to knowledge. These conflicts are probably inevitable features of the human condition and will remain with us as long as we continue the effort to design the discipline. But the tendency to form schools around epistemological positions does exact a cost: it discourages the dispassionate examination of the synthetic relations that might obtain among the different approaches and methods. The version of sociological explanation that I have sketched—which is generally consistent with the method of empirical science that has evolved during the past centuries—is also a value position. As such, it attempts to sketch the broad lines of legitimacy for a variety of sociological activities. Moreover, this version of sociological explanation envisions no single, royal road to scientific knowledge about society. It does not give any special priority to the quantification of data, speculation, or the creation of theory at a given level of abstraction. It legitimizes a wide range of activities—recording data, designing measures, setting up experiments, analyzing data, classifying variables and relations, deducing hypotheses, speculating freely, and tracing the moral and ideological implications of a theoretical system. All can contribute—indeed, all are essential—to the sociological enterprise. Such a catholic approach appears to have the merit of being inclusive, tolerant, and nonpolemic. By virtue of these merits, however, it seems also to lose its power of legitimizing. To legitimize so much is almost to legitimize nothing, since it appears that “anything goes” in sociology. The approach I have sketched seems to run the danger of intellectual anomie, bred by an excess of permissiveness. A second, qualifying principle is therefore necessary. This is the principle that no investigative activity in sociology is scientifically legitimate unless it can be related to the core sociological enterprise: accounting for variations and interdependencies within a sociological framework. This criterion is a relational one. It implies that the legitimacy of a sociological activity cannot be determined from examination of this activity in isolation; the activity must also be examined in relation to the broader corpus of sociological theory and research. To illustrate:

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1. A small-group experiment may be flawlessly designed, but it is without sociological merit unless it can be brought to bear in some way— by confirming, rejecting, suggesting modification, and so on—on theoretically relevant statements within a sociological framework. 2. A field study may be extraordinarily rich and interesting in its anecdotal material, but if the material is not related to some theoretically relevant proposition it has no sociological merit. 3. A new method of estimating true crime rates may be ingenious, and useful for a community policy, but unless the new measure is incorporated into some theoretically relevant proposition, it has no sociological validity, 4. A new hypothesis may be elegantly derived from a complex set of mathematical relations—or even produced by a computer—but unless the mathematics can be related to substantive sociological theory, and unless the hypothesis can be related to sociological data, it has no sociological merit. 5. The discovery of a valid comparative association between institutional complexes—say, authority systems and division of labor—may be impressive; but unless it can be incorporated into a system of sociological hypotheses, it is of no sociological utility. 6. A scholarly treatise tracing the history of the concept of social cohesion may be informative and engaging, but unless the work is related to the current sociological enterprise of theory and research it is of no sociological value. 7. A critical examination of a theorist’s system, which demonstrates convincingly that he falls into the neo-Marxist tradition or that he has a conservative bias, may be both scholarly and gratifying on ideological grounds, but unless it can assist in the evaluation of some theoretical scheme or empirical research it has no sociological merit.

In short, the use of adjectives like flawless, rich, ingenious, rigorous, elegant, or interesting falls short of endowing sociological work with full legitimacy; the work must also be related to the central sociological enterprise—either by the perpetrator of the work or by someone else—before it can be said to constitute a contribution. This assertion requires one major qualification, however. Although I am convinced that the criterion is optimal for the growth of scientific sociology, it can be applied in only an approximate way. The reason for this is

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that the sociological frameworks and research procedures themselves are not completely final and fixed. They are in a continuous state of flux, and much disagreement obtains in the profession about the core of sociology itself. I see the application of the criterion of sociological legitimacy, then, as something not definitive. I see its application as part of the ongoing search of sociology, as a general guideline in the continuing evolution of the discipline. To conclude, the two criteria of legitimacy that I have suggested are an attitude of permissiveness for a variety of theoretical and empirical activities, combined with an obligation to relate these to the core of sociology. These criteria, like other optima suggested in this essay, constitute an effort to encourage the greatest specialization in the discipline but simultaneously to guarantee the continuing effort to synthesize its knowledge.

r e f e r en c e s Duncan, Otis Dudley, and Leo F. Schnore. 1959. “Cultural, Behavioral, and Ecological Perspectives in the Study of Social Organization.” American Journal of Sociology 65:132–46. Homans, George C. 1964. “Bringing Men Back In.” American Sociological Review 29:809–18. Lipset, Seymour Martin, and Neil J. Smelser. 1961. “The Setting of Sociology in he 1950s.” In Sociology: The Progress of Decade, edited by Seymour Martin Lipset and Neil J. Smelser, 1–13. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Merton, Robert K. 1957. Social Theory and Social Structure. Rev. ed. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Parsons, Talcott. 1937. The Structure of Social Action. New York: McGraw-Hill. . 1954. “The Present Position and Prospects of Systematic Theory in Sociology.” In Essays in Sociological Theory, rev. ed., 212–37. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

2

Sociology and the Other Social Sciences (1967)

An inquisitive layman will often ask a sociologist, “What is sociology, anyway?” The question is not an easy one. Moreover, after the sociologist replies—usually haltingly and in general terms—the layman may pose a second question, such as “Well, how is that different from social psychology?” or “Isn’t that what anthropologists do?” These, too, are likely to yield vague, unsatisfactory answers. Sociology seems to defy simple definition of itself and clear demarcation of itself from related endeavors. Somehow it seems more appropriate to ask the question of sociology than it does of some her sister social sciences. What Is Sociology? (Inkeles 1964) seems a reasonable title for a recent introductory text. The title What Is Economics? would appear to represent as undefined a field that has crystallized in the mid-twentieth century, so that its identifying features are generally agreed upon. What Is History? would signify more a foray into the philosophy of historical inquiry than an introduction to the field. But the query “What is sociology?” betokens an effort to locate the

From The Uses of Sociology, edited by Paul F. Lazarsfeld, William A. Sewell, and Harold L. Wilensky, 3–44. New York: Basic Books, 1967.

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distinctive focus of a field still in search of its identity, one that has only recently achieved solid institutional support. In this essay I aim to explore the distinctive character of sociology and its relations to the other social sciences. I shall proceed by opening four topics in sequence: 1. The criteria by which the various social science disciplines can be described and related to one another. 2. The contours of sociology according to these criteria. 3. The contours of several neighboring fields according to the same criteria—the fields of economics, political science, anthropology, history, and psychology (Berelson 1963). Some might object to the inclusion of the last two on grounds that history is in the humanities and psychology is scientific but not social, but I think that much can be learned by comparing sociology with these two fields. 4. Some possibilities of theoretical and empirical articulation between sociology and the other disciplines.

My emphasis will be conceptual. I am interested in the theoretical and empirical relations among the social sciences as they stand today. I shall not trace how these relations have developed in the history of thought. Nor shall I discuss, except by way of occasional illustration, the institutional relations among sociology and the other social sciences: for example, the consequences of the fact that sociology is departmentally linked here with anthropology, there with political science, and elsewhere with economics.

cr i t er i a f o r d e sc r i bi n g an d c o m pa r i n g t h e s o c i a l sc i en c e s The simplest way to characterize a discipline is to depict its subject matter concretely. Economists may be said to study businessmen and organizations, as they produce and market commodities, and consumers as they buy and use these commodities. Other social sciences are not so specific in their focus. Upon being asked to define anthropology, Malinowski is reported to have replied that anthropology is “the study of man, embrac-

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ing woman.” Likewise, sociology is very diffuse, covering behavior in families, hospitals, educational institutions, street-corner gangs, experimental small groups, armies, and religious revivals, to name only a few settings. To describe a social science concretely, however, does not yield a very scientific account, since it usually refers to the list of topics that, over a long period, have interested those who call themselves economists or sociologists or whatever. Such a description is likely to change, moreover, as new problems make their appearance in society—problems such as imperfect competition, race relations, mental illness, and poverty. A more analytic way of describing and comparing disciplines is to ask how knowledge is generated, organized, and verified in each. This, in turn, breaks down into a number of criteria. First, it is necessary to specify what about the concrete subject matter preoccupies the investigator. Economists are not interested in every aspect of the behavior of businessmen; they wish to discover specifically why businessmen produce different quantities of commodities at different times, why they change prices at different times, why they hire more or fewer workers under different conditions, and so on. Sociologists are not interested in every aspect of the family; they focus on patterns of rights and obligations of family members, changes in the rates of family formation and dissolution, differences in fathers’ and sons’ career patterns, and so on. By asking such questions, we identify the distinctive scientific problems, phenomena to be explained, or dependent variables of a discipline. Second, it is necessary to specify what each discipline treats as the distinctive causes (or determinants, or conditions) of variations in the dependent variables. In determining how much of a given commodity will be produced at a given price, the economist asks how much of the commodity the consumers are demanding, how much the businessman has to pay for raw materials and labor to produce the commodity, and how his competitors are behaving. In accounting for variations in divorce rates, the sociologist turns to the society’s degree of urbanization and industrialization; to its levels of interreligious, interethnic, and interclass marriage; and to laws affecting divorce. In this search for associated conditions, the social scientist attempts to identify distinctive independent variables. The focus of a scientific discipline, then, can be specified by listing the dependent and independent variables that preoccupy its investigators.

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But these lists of variables do not tell the whole story. It is necessary, third, to specify the ways in which a discipline imposes a logical ordering on its variables. Indeed, merely by distinguishing between dependent and independent variables, we elicit one instance of logical ordering—that is, specifying which variables are to be viewed as causes and which as effects. On the basis of this ordering, various hypotheses—statements of the conditions under which dependent variables may be expected to vary in certain ways—can be formulated. A more complex kind of ordering results when a number of hypotheses are combined into an organized system (often called a model). Suppose, for example, that the economist is equipped with three hypotheses: that private investment influences aggregate employment in specific ways, that government spending influences employment in other ways, and that foreign trade influences it in still other ways. A model is created when the economist states the interactions among these determinants, all in relation to employment, in a logically rigorous way (for example, in the form of simultaneous equations). An example of a cruder model is provided by psychoanalytic theory. Slips of the tongue are determined primarily by the strength of repressed instinctual conflicts. But in addition they occur more frequently when an individual is fatigued and thus inattentive. If it were possible to single out the precise strength of these two determinants—repressed conflict and fatigue—and combine them into a more complex form, a model would be at hand. Logical ordering does not end with complex models. These models are embedded in a number of definitions, assumptions, and postulates. The hypothesis that investment creates a higher level of employment, for example, rests on the assumption that laborers are motivated to respond positively to wage offers made by employers. The hypothesis linking repressed conflict and slips of the tongue rests on a complex set of assumptions about instincts and their manifestations, the defensive operations of the repressing psychic agency, and the relations between psychic conflict and motor activity. Such definitions, assumptions, and postulates constitute the theoretical framework of a scientific discipline. Within this framework the specific hypotheses “make sense.” To put it more strongly, the hypotheses and modes should be derived, as rigorously as possible, from the theoretical framework.

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Fourth, it is necessary to specify the means employed to accept or reject statements in the various scientific disciplines. These include the methods of scientific inquiry—such as the experimental—as well as specific techniques and instruments for collecting, measuring, and processing data. The several social sciences vary considerably in the research methods they can and do utilize. In this essay I shall use these four criteria—dependent variables, independent variables, logical ordering, and research methods—to describe, compare, contrast, and suggest ways of integrating the several social sciences. I shall digress momentarily, however, to comment one additional way to characterize disciplines: to list their component “schools of thought.” Generally the term school refers to an indefinite number of scholars who stress a particular aspect of or approach to a discipline. The term also implies that its proponents are emotionally committed to their approach and are prepared to defend it from attack and to deprecate different or competing schools. A school, then, is simultaneously a subdivision of a field and a species of cult or sect. Schools in the social sciences cluster around and can be classified according to the four criteria for defining a field: 1. What aspects of social life are to be studied? The “symbolic interactionist” school, for example, focuses on relatively microscopic units of social action and emphasizes various psychic processes that accompany acts; this contrasts, for example, with the “structuralist” approach, which studies institutional patterns without explicit references to the social psychological aspects of discrete acts. 2. What are the determinants of social behavior? Schools clustering around independent variables may be quite specific in focus, as in the case of the “overconsumption” approach to the business cycle, or quite general, as in the case of the schools of “geopolitics” or “economic determinism.” 3. What are the most appropriate models or theoretical perspectives? The “organicist” and more recently the “functionalist” schools of thought rest in part on a view of society as functioning like a biological organism; the “cultural relativist” school is based on scientific notions of how units may be compared with one another as well as on moral notions of how legitimate it is to claim that one

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society is superior to another; the “phenomenological,” “nominalist,” and “realist” positions are based on different philosophical views regarding the nature of reality. 4. What are the methods by which propositions are accepted or rejected? One feature of the “positivist” school, for example, concerns the procedures necessary to consider a statement verified; this school contrasts with the “Verstehen” and “intuitionist” approaches to inquiry. Sometimes schools are named after specific methodological procedures, as in the case of the “experimental,” “statistical,” or “survey” approaches to inquiry.

When a school is named after a man and his followers, this usually involves some distinctive combination of several criteria. For example, the Marxian approach is characterized by an emphasis on distinctive aspects of social life (economic and related institutional structures and processes), distinctive determinants (“economic determinism”), a distinctive theoretical and philosophical perspective (“dialectical materialism”), and a method of validating arguments (based mainly on logical demonstration and comparative historical analysis). The presence of numerous “schools” in a discipline generally betokens a relative scientific immaturity (though certainly not an immaturity in all kinds of scholarship). As it achieves scientific maturity, it more nearly attains consensus on the scientific problems to be posed, the relevant independent variables, a theoretical and philosophical perspective, and appropriate research methods. Simultaneously it witnesses a decline of distinctive schools, a decline in the quantity of polemic about the “nature” of the field and the value of different “approaches” to the field; a decline in propaganda, proselytization, and defensiveness; and an increase in discussion of findings in relation to accepted criteria of validation. The existing disciplines may be ordered according to the degree to which they currently manifest these several concomitants of this aspect of scientific maturity. At one extreme are mathematics and physics, and at the other are humanistic disciplines such as literary and art criticism. The social sciences occupy an intermediate position, with sociology manifesting more signs of this kind of immaturity than economics, but perhaps fewer than political science.

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s o c i ol og y Sociology, like many of its sister social sciences, is characterized by a proliferation of schools—such as functionalism, social behaviorism, symbolic interactionism, historicism, and so on (Martindale 1960; Wagner 1963)— and consequently great disagreement among sociologists about the fundamental problems, concepts, theories, and methods in the field. Moreover, the field displays an increasing number of subdivisions—sociology of the family, stratification, religion, medicine, leisure, law, deviance, and collective behavior, for instance—each of which differs in one or more respects from the others. Because of this internal diversity, it is a difficult, even presumptuous, task to present a single view of the character of the field. Necessarily, then, my characterization of sociology will have to be approximate; it will overemphasize some and underemphasize other aspects of the field; and it will gloss over many disagreements concerning fundamental features of the field.

Dependent Variables Sociological analysis begins with a problem. Posing a problem means identifying some variation in human behavior and framing a “why” question about this variation. Such variation becomes the dependent variable—that which is to be explained. This variation may involve a single event (Why did violence erupt in the Congo when it did?); it may involve presumed regularities in the occurrence of events (Why are colonial societies that are emerging from domination prone to outbursts of hostility?); or, at a higher level, it may involve questions of structural variation in large classes of events (Why do feudal land patterns arise and persist? Why do they break down, sometimes in one way and sometimes in another?). After isolating a certain problem, the sociologist specifies concrete units that identify the dependent variable. In the field of sociology these concrete units are most commonly found in the units of social structure and in variations of human behavior oriented to social structure. This common focus obtains in spite of the facts that (1) the types of social groupings in which structure is observed vary greatly—small face-to-face

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groups, formal organizations, voluntary associations, and diffuse collectivities such as ethnic groups; (2) the types of institutional settings in which social structure is observed vary greatly—familial, political, religious, medical, and educational. To characterize sociology as focusing primarily on social structures excludes, at first glance, several of its subfields: (1) those subfields at the “cultural” boundary of social behavior—the sociology of literature, music, ideology, and mass culture—which cannot be classified as units of social structure proper; (2) those subfields at the “physical” and “biological” boundaries of social behavior—specifically demography, ecology, and some parts of urban and rural sociology—where the units of behavior are not social structural but rather events and situations classified in terms of biological processes and spatial location; (3) those subfields at the “personality” boundaries of social behavior—for example, socialization, some aspects of deviance and collective behavior, and the catchall field of social psychology. Despite this difference from other fields that focus on social structure itself, the reason for including them in sociology is that, in the analysis of these kinds of behavior, social structure appears as an important independent variable. For example, in the sociology of knowledge, the major focus is on those kinds of social structures that give rise to distinctive cultural productions; in some parts of demography, the focus is on those kinds of structure (family systems, the rural-urban balance, stratification) that give rise to, say, differential fertility rates; and in the analysis of differential occurrence of attitudes and opinions, explanatory variables are frequently social structural in character (age, sex, socioeconomic position, and religious affiliation). “Social structure” is a concept used to characterize recurrent and regularized interaction among two or more persons. The basic units of social structure are not persons as such but selected aspects of interaction among persons, such as roles (for example, businessman, husband, church member) and social organization, which refers to structured clusters of roles (such as a bureaucracy, an informal clique, a family). The important defining feature of social structure is that interaction is selective, regularized, and regulated by various social controls. In connection with these controls, three basic concepts are particularly important:

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1. Values legitimize the existence and importance of specific social structures and the kinds of behavior that transpire in social structure. The value of “free enterprise,” for instance, endorses the existence of business firms organized around the institution of private property and engaged in the pursuit of private profit. 2. Norms are standards of conduct that regulate the interaction among individuals in social structures. The norms of contract and property law, for instance, set up obligations and prohibitions on the agents in economic transactions. As the examples show, at any given level of analysis norms are more specific than values in their control of interaction in social structures. 3. Sanctions—including both rewards and deprivations—involve the use of various social resources to control the behavior of personnel in social structures. Aspects of this control include the establishment of roles, the inducement of individuals to assume and perform in roles, and the control of deviance from expected role performance. Examples of sanctions are coercion, ridicule, appeal to duty, withdrawal of communication, and so on.

A concept that unifies the elements of social structure—including roles, collectivities, values, norms, and sanctions—is the concept of institutionalization. This refers to distinctive, enduring expectations whereby these elements are combined into a single complex. When we speak of the institutionalization of American business, for instance, we refer to a more or less enduring pattern of roles and collectivities (such as businessmen and firms), values (for instance, free enterprise), norms (laws of contract and property, informal business codes), and sanctions (profits, wages). Many questions about dependent variables in sociology are stated as follows: Why are the elements of social structure patterned the way they are? Another class of dependent variables is specified in terms of systematic variations in human behavior oriented to social structure. Given some structure, when can conformity be expected? What are the consequences of conformity for the social structure? When can deviance from social structure be expected? What are the different forms of deviance, and why does one type of deviance rather than another arise? What are the consequences for the social structure of different kinds of deviance? Specifying the possible “consequences” of conformity or deviance involves identifying a further range of dependent variables—reactions to deviance (social

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control), changes in social structure, persistence of structural patterns, collective outbursts. What are the major types of social structure? The question is usually answered by turning to some notion of the basic functions, or directional tendencies, of social systems. These functions concern the general orientations of social life. Or, as the question is often put: What are the exigencies that must be met in order for the social unit to continue functioning? Analysts who attempt to identify the basic directional tendencies of social units speak of “functional exigencies.” Typical exigencies include 1. Creation and maintenance of the cultural values of a system. For some systems, such as societies, this involves long periods of socialization and complex structures such as families, churches, schools, and training institutes. 2. Production, allocation, and consumption of scarce goods and services (sometimes called the economic function). Typical structures that specialize in this function are firms, banks, and other agencies of credit. 3. Creation, maintenance, and implementation of norms governing interaction among units in the system (sometimes called the integrative function), such as the law and its enforcement agencies. 4. Coordination and control of the collective actions of the system or a collectivity within it, in modern societies by the state, political parties, and associated agencies (sometimes called the political function).

The usual basis for classifying social structures is to indicate the main functions they serve: political, economic, familial, religious, educational. The classification of social structures in this way involves assigning primacy of function only. Even though religious structure is a concept applied to a clustering of rites or an organized church, the social significance of this bundle of activities is not exhausted by this concept. Analytically, the concrete religious structure has a political aspect, an economic aspect, and so on. The notion of structure, then, is used to identify theoretically significant properties of concrete clusters of activities devoted primarily, but not exclusively, to meeting some social exigency. This presentation of the central dependent variables in the field of sociology may convey the impression that there is uniform consensus as to these variables and the ways to describe and classify them. I do not mean

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to convey this impression. Much of contemporary sociological inquiry and debate does not involve systematic efforts to establish connections between these and other variables—in short, efforts to explain variations in dependent variables—but is a search for descriptive and classificatory languages for identifying various independent variables, as well as continuing argumentation about what the dependent variables of the field should be. The latter are necessary ingredients of scientific inquiry, but they alone do not constitute scientific inquiry.

Independent Variables The sociological concepts listed thus far—that is, those revolving around the notion of social structure—are used mainly to identify dependent variables and to frame scientific problems. As such they do not provide hypotheses to account for variation or to explain processes of social adjustment, maladjustment, and change. To generate these additional ingredients of sociological analysis, one must take account of several classes of independent variables. For any given dependent variable in sociology, the number and kinds of conditions that potentially affect its variation are, at first sight, discouragingly great. An individual’s ability to perform a simple task in a small-group setting is influenced most immediately by his intelligence, training, and motivation. These three immediate factors are further conditioned by his social class background, his ordinal position in his family, the presence or absence of others in the same room when he is performing the task, the behavior of the person assigning him the task, and many other factors. When we turn to the search for influencing social aggregates, such as changes in the divorce rate over the past century, the number and kinds of potentially operative conditions are even more complex. The initial picture, then, is one of a multiplicity of operating conditions, a compounding of their influences on the dependent variable, and an indeterminacy regarding the effect of any one condition or several conditions in combination. The corresponding problem facing the scientific investigator at this stage is to reduce the number of operating conditions, to isolate one condition from another, and thereby to make precise the role of each condition. How are these problems faced? The general answer to the question is that the sociologist, by virtue of his disciplinary commitments, tends to opt for social structural conditions

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Figure 1.

as explanatory variables. But in addition, the investigator must impose some sort of organization of the conditions. One of the simplest ways of organizing conditions is seen in the distinction between independent and intervening variables. Robert Michels, in his comparative study of political parties and trade unions (1959), was preoccupied with the problem of why large-scale organizations, even those with liberal and socialist ideologies, tend universally to develop oligarchical authority systems. For Michels this problem constituted the dependent variable, or that which demanded explanation. According to Michels’s account, three sets of independent variables produce oligarchy. The first are found in the technical and administrative characteristics of organizations themselves— the impossibility of direct communication and coordination of decisions by the many, with the consequences that responsibility falls into the hands of the few. The second are found in the psychological propensities of the masses to adulate and venerate leaders. The third are found in the superior oratorical, intellectual, and cultural skills of the leaders themselves. Oligarchy, once established, itself has consequences. In particular, Michels pointed out the tendency for leaders, once in power, to gain access to resources, to come to think of themselves as indispensable and to regard their right to office as necessary and sacred. These by-products of oligarchical leadership, moreover, feed back and further consolidate the original tendencies for power to become centralized. The several classes of variables identified by Michels thus constitute a set of independent, intervening and dependent variables, as shown in figure 1. The picture of the variables, thus organized, is much simpler than a picture of the lengthy list of associations among every combined pair of variables.

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The example also reveals that the distinction among independent, intervening, and dependent variables is a relative one and that the status of any given variable may change according to the analytic purposes at hand. For example, the variable “oligarchical structure” is dependent with respect to “technical and administrative features”; it is independent with respect to “leaders’ sense of indispensability”; and it is intervening with respect to the relation between “technical and administrative features”; and “leaders’ sense of indispensability” is both independent and dependent if we consider its feedback to the power structure. In sociological investigation, then, no given substantive variable can be considered as inherently independent, intervening, or dependent. When we proceed from more or less static accounts of variation in the analysis of processes of adjustment and change, different sets of explanatory variables must be brought to bear. Among the most important of these variables in sociology are the concepts of strain, reactions to strain, and attempts to control reactions to strain. 1. Strain refers to various kinds of malintegration in the relations among elements of a social system. Among the many types of strain that arise in a social system are ambiguity in role expectations, role conflict, discrepancies between expectations and actual social experiences, and conflicts of values. 2. The initial responses to situations of strain tend to be disturbed reactions that are frequently, but not always, deviant and malintegrative from the standpoint of the social system. A variety of specific social problems arise from deviance: crime, alcoholism, hoboism, suicide, addiction, mental disorders, and social movements, to name a few. 3. Attempts to control reactions to strain may involve either structuring the initial situation so as to minimize strain or attempting to control relations to strain, once they have arisen.

By arranging these three variables into different patterns, social investigators attempt to account for the persistence and change of behavior oriented to social structures. By way of qualification, however, it should be noted that these three sets of variables are not inherently independent variables but may themselves be the subject of explanation: for example, the investigator of the social conditions underlying strain makes it the

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dependent variable and the various social structural categories the independent variables.

Relations among Variables In discussing the hypotheses relating independent and dependent variables, I have already opened the discussion of the relations among variables. Indeed, most research activity in sociology is directed either toward the discovery or the establishment of empirical generalizations (which are not hypotheses as such, but rather data bearing on hypotheses) (for example, Jackson and Crockett 1964) or toward the establishment of quite specific and discrete relations between an independent variable and a dependent variable. The field still suffers from a shortage of full-scale explanatory models. Those models that do exist may be classified into three types: 1. Static models, which organize a number of different variables to account for structural characteristics. The work of Michels is an example. 2. Process models, which refer to changes of variables within a social structure. Process models are used, for example, in analyzing rates of social mobility, voting rates, and certain types of social control (for instance, psychotherapy, which often “rehabilitates” persons considered to be “disturbed”). In these examples the social structure is assumed to remain unchanged. 3. Change models, which refer to changes of the structure itself.

For example, when attempts to control strain fail, new structural arrangements may result. The movement to the new structure may be controlled (as when a new law is passed by the constituted authorities to meet a pressing social problem) or uncontrolled (as when a revolutionary party overthrows the authority and sets up a new constitution and government). The new equilibrium, moreover, may be precarious; changes may necessitate further changes. Repeated failure of social control mechanisms may result in the disintegration of the system. All these examples involve changes in the social structure (Smelser 1962). Most sociological models are framed in nonmathematical language. Mathematical models, rare in sociology, are employed mainly in the analy-

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sis of population movements and small-group processes and occasionally in the analysis of kinship (White 1963), voting behavior and social mobility, and collective behavior (McPhee 1963). Sociology also displays a certain amount of systematic effort to formalize the various ingredients of scientific explanation—variables of several types and their organization into definite relationships—into comprehensive theoretical frameworks. These efforts are most conspicuously identified with the names of Talcott Parsons and his associates, who have attempted to specify the nature of systems of social action and to state in very general terms the relations among the elements of these systems—relations that presumably form the basis for a great number of formal models (Parsons, Bales, and Shils 1953). Despite these efforts at formalization of theory, most models and theories in sociology rest on assumptions and postulates that are vaguely formulated and unexamined. For example, models of social mobility generally rest on a psychological postulate that individuals in a system of stratified positions and rewards are, other things equal, more or less uniformly motivated to move to as high a point as possible in the hierarchy. Such an assumption, while perhaps necessary for generating manageable models and specific hypotheses, is certainly open to doubt on empirical grounds and may contain hidden implications that would, if made explicit, lead investigators to modify their theoretical formulations. To choose another set of examples, theories of alienation, anomie, and conflict frequently rest on a variety of implicit assumptions about human nature, what sorts of experiences degrade the person, and how the person typically reacts to these experiences (Schneider and Lysgaard 1952). The field of sociology— as contrasted with economics, as we shall see presently—is notable for its extraordinary diversity of underlying assumptions concerning man’s social and psychological existence. This phenomenon of diversity, more than any other single factor, probably leads to the frequently expressed view that sociology is not a unified field and to the frequent and not always well-informed disputes about fundamental principles in the field.

Research Methods Sociology’s diversity of dependent variables, independent variables, and theoretical frameworks is matched by a corresponding diversity in

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research methods. Before proceeding to illustrate this point, I shall introduce a distinction by which the various methods of drawing inferences in the social sciences can be compared with one another. This distinction is between determinants treated as parameters and determinants treated as operative variables. Parameters are determinants that are known or suspected to influence a dependent variable but that, in the investigation at hand, are made or assumed not to vary. Operative variables are conditions that are known or suspected to influence a dependent variable and that, in the investigation, are made or allowed to vary so that this influence may be assessed. Making variables into parameters for purposes of analysis ensures that most of the potentially operative conditions will not vary and allows the operation of one or a few conditions to be isolated and examined. The distinction between parameters and variables is, of course, a relative one. What may be treated as a parameter in one investigation may become a variable condition in another. The field of sociology displays a plethora of research methods designed to accomplish the continuous and systematic transformation of conditions into parameters and variables in order to refine and generalize explanations. The experimental method, for example, which involves the direct manipulation of situations to create parameters and variables, finds widespread use in social psychological and small-group experimentation. Most often experimentation is conducted by establishing two groups—the experimental and the control—that are identical with respect to many known or suspected sources of variation, such as age, sex, intelligence, educational level, socioeconomic background, and the like; these conditions that are shared by the two groups are established as parameters. Then, with regard to the operative condition under investigation, the experimental group is stimulated, the control group not; this condition not shared by the two groups is thereby established as the operative variable. The statistical method, applying mathematical techniques to populations and samples of events containing large numbers, attempts to achieve the same manipulation of parameters and operative conditions as does the experimental method. The main difference between the two is that experimentation does so by situational manipulation, whereas statistical analysis does so by conceptual (mathematical) manipulation, which holds constant or cancels out sources of variation or shows them to be actually inopera-

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tive. An example of this type of analysis is found in the sociological analysis of intergenerational mobility. Over an intergenerational period, some social mobility (defined as differences in occupational status between father and son) is required simply by virtue of long-term structural changes in the occupational structure itself. If the tertiary sector is expanding, for example, more sons will necessarily move into service industries from other backgrounds. Investigators of mobility frequently wish to inquire into other determinants than changing industrial structure—determinants such as family size, ordinal position in family, or achievement motivation, for example. In order to isolate these other determinants, the investigator calculates some sort of mobility rate that is to be expected solely on the basis of structural changes alone, subtracts this rate from the gross mobility rate, and analyzes the difference in terms of the other suspected independent variables. In this way the effect of structural changes is held constant or made into a parameter for purposes of further analysis (for example, Ramsoy 1966). Using this method to rule out spurious relations and thus isolate genuine ones is best illustrated in multivariate analysis as it is practiced in survey research. Suppose that in a national survey it is found that age is positively correlated with intolerance. Suppose also that level of education is found to be negatively correlated with intolerance. Since age and educational level are themselves correlated (above the age of completed education, young people are more educated than old people), it is impossible to know, on the basis of the two correlations alone, if either or both or neither is a determinant of intolerance. To gain this knowledge, a method of partial correlation is applied: Holding education constant, what is the apparent influence of age? And holding age constant, what is the apparent influence of education? By carrying out a succession of such operations, both on the two variables in question and on other variables that are associated with them, the investigator makes parameters out of a number of possibly and apparently operative conditions and arrives at a truer picture of the actually operative conditions (for example, Stouffer 1955). The method of statistical manipulation of historical data finds widespread use in sociology, both when the data are “given”—as in census reports—and when they are measured specifically for research purposes— as in attitude surveys. Sometimes, however, the number of cases is too

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small to permit manipulation by statistical methods: for example, when research involves the comparisons of large, complex nation-states. Under such conditions the sociologist has recourse of the comparative method. Because of the restricted number of cases, the investigator is forced to rely on the method of systematic comparative illustration. Despite this unique restrictive feature of the comparative method, its logic is identical to the methods just reviewed in that it attempts to yield scientific explanation by the systematic manipulation of parameters and operative variables. A classic example will show this identity. One of Durkheim’s (1951) central findings in his study of suicide was that Protestants persistently display higher rates of suicide than Catholics. The variable he employed to explain this finding was differential integration of the two religious groupings: Protestants, with their antiauthoritarian, individualistic traditions, are less integrated than Catholics and hence less protected against selfdestruction. On examining the countries on which his religious data were available, however, Durkheim noticed that the Catholics were in the minority in every case. Could it not be, he asked, that minority status rather than religious tradition is the operative variable in the genesis of lower suicide rates among Catholics? To throw light on this question, he examined regions such as Austria and Bavaria, where Catholics are in the majority; in these regions he discovered some diminution of the religious differences between Protestants and Catholics, but Protestant rates were still higher. On the basis of this examination, he concluded that “Catholicism does not owe [its protective influence] solely to its minority status” (157). In this operation Durkheim used no statistical techniques, yet he was approximating their uses though systematic comparative illustration. He was making minority status into a parameter in order to isolate the distinctive influence of the religious variable. A fourth research method that finds wide application in sociology is the case study, in which a single social unit becomes the focus of intensive description and analysis with respect to certain variables. Examples of this kind of research are found in the classic study of the Bank Wiring Room in the Hawthorne studies (Roethlisberger and Dickson 1947); the studies of behavior related to social class in a single local community (Warner et al. 1963); and the studies of behavior and interaction in a single mental hospital (Goffman 1961). The case study is methodologically inferior to

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the other methods just reviewed because, being based on a single case, it presents no basis for the systematic control of conditions by the manipulation of parameters and operative variables. Nevertheless, the case study has proved to be of great value in discovering and illustrating important new variables in sociological investigation. A further characteristic of the case method is that it is commonly—though by no means intrinsically— associated with participant observation and with using relatively few informants as sources of data. A further method of transforming potentially operative variables is the crude but widely employed method of heuristic assumption. For example, in an experimental small-group setting in which the influence of different leadership structures on morale is being investigated, the investigator makes use of a number of important but unexamined heuristic assumptions—that the subjects speak the same language, that they operate under many common cultural assumptions, that they are more or less uniformly motivated to participate in the experiment, and so on. All these variables, if treated as variables, would certainly influence the outcome of the experiment; but they are implicitly assumed not to be variables—that is, to be parameters—for purposes of the analysis. To choose another example, mentioned above, it is a convenient heuristic assumption that individuals in a stratification system are motivated to move upward. Necessary as such assumptions are, and widely as they are employed, this method is inferior to the methods of experimentation, statistical analysis, and comparative analysis; the reason for this is that the method of heuristic assumption rests on no situational or conceptual manipulation other than making a simplifying or convenient assumption. Seldom if ever are serious attempts made to establish the empirical validity of the assumptions or to correct for the degree to which the assumption is not valid. The method of heuristic assumption accomplishes by making believe what the other methods accomplish by situational or conceptual manipulation in light of some known or suspected empirical variation. Nevertheless, despite these shortcomings, the method of heuristic assumption provides the investigator a service that is logically the same as the experimental, statistical, and comparative methods: systematically to manipulate operative conditions and parameters to permit the isolated investigation of a limited number of selected independent variables.

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In sociology no single method of research just reviewed can be said to predominate; sociology is relatively hybrid in this respect. As we shall see later, many of the other social sciences can be more readily characterized by a typical or favorite method of organizing data and drawing inferences.

e co n o mi c s The following “informative introductory description” of economics appears in the best-known text on the subject: “The study of how men and society choose, with or without the use of money, to employ scarce productive resources to produce various commodities over time and distribute them for consumption, now and in the future, among people and groups in society” (Samuelson 1961, 6). From this definition we may build a description of economics in terms of the ingredients of a scientific theory—dependent variables, independent variables, and relations among these variables in economics.

Dependent Variables A first set of dependent variables is found in the term commodities. What is the level of the total production of goods and services in a society? What different kinds (shoes, guns, butter) are produced, and in what proportions? Economists thus attempt to account for variations in the level and composition of production. A second set of dependent variables is found in the term scarce productive resources. Goods and services are produced by the application of the following factors of production: (1) land, or the state of the natural resources, cultural values, and technical knowledge; (2) labor, or the level of motivation and skill of human beings; (3) capital, or the level of resources available for future production rather than immediate consumption; and sometimes (4) organization, or the principles of combination and recombination of the other factors. Organization involves the operation of institutions such as property and contract as well as the activity of entrepreneurs. Economists are thus interested in explaining the lev-

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els and relative proportions of these resources in productive use and the techniques by which they are combined. A third set of dependent variables in economics, then, is production, techniques of organizing resources, and distribution of wealth. In the Keynesian system, the basic dependent variables are the volume of employment (or the proportion of available labor in productive use at any given time) and the national income (or the total level of production) (Keynes 1936). Even in small subfields of economics the specific problems posed turn out to be instances of the basic dependent variables. In the study of wages in labor economics, for instance, the following elements generally need explaining: (a) the general level of wages in the nation and its movements during past decades; (b) the wage spread between occupations and changes in the spread from time to time; (c) wage differentials between regions and areas, and alternations in such differentials over the course of time; (d) interindustry differentials and shifts in them; (e) interfirm differentials in a locality and changes therein; and (f ) differentials between persons working in the same occupation within a plant (Lester 1951, 53).

Independent Variables How are the level and composition of production, the allocation of resources, and the distribution of wealth determined? In the broad comparative sweep these may be determined by political regulation, custom, religious decree, and so on. Formal economic analysis, however, has traditionally stressed supply and demand in the market as the immediate independent variables. For any given commodity, such as shoes, a person will be willing to buy much if it costs little, little if it costs much. The producer of this commodity will be willing to supply much if the price is high, little if the price is low. The price of a commodity falls at that point where the demand curve and the supply curve intersect.

Relations among Variables By constructing various combinations of these dependent and independent variables, economists have created a whole variety of equilibrium

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models to explain price levels, business cycles, economic growth, and other economic phenomena. One of the most famous models in economics concerns the prediction of the quantity of a given commodity that an individual firm will produce under conditions of perfect competition. Given a certain level of demand, the firm can expect to receive a given price (revenue) for each item it produces. But the firm itself has to pay for the factors it utilizes in production. These costs determine the conditions of supplying its commodities to consumers. By a series of constructions, economists have built a model that predicts that the firm will produce that quantity of a commodity at which the cost of producing the extra unit of the commodity (marginal cost) equals the revenue that it will receive for that extra unit (marginal revenue). Basically, this model says that the value of the dependent variable (quantity of the commodity produced by a firm) is a function of the values of the sets of independent variables (demand and supply). Turning to the analysis of aggregates, the Keynesian model identifies the independent variables—in the first instance—as the propensity to consume, a demand category; the marginal efficiency of capital rests on expectations about profits to be returned for investments, and the rate of interest rests on the supply of money and the demand for liquidity. By manipulating the values of these independent variables, Keynes established a set of predictions leading to unemployment of society’s resources and reduction of its national product (dependent variables). In these illustrative economic models, the behavior of the various dependent variables—prices, level of production, and so on—rests on the operation of the economic forces of supply and demand. But as a matter of empirical fact, many dozens of variables—economic, political, legal, religious—affect prices and production, and if a complete picture of economic life were to be given, many of these kinds of variables would have to be incorporated into the theoretical framework of economics. How do economists deal with these noneconomic variables? A common method is to realize that while they affect supply and demand conditions, it is necessary for purposes of analysis to assume that they do not change. This is the meaning of Samuelson’s statement that economic analysis takes institutions and tastes as given (1951, 15); by given he means that potential sources of influence are assumed to be constant.

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To illustrate: in constructing his equilibrium system Keynes considered several things as given—the existing skill of the labor force, the existing equipment, the existing technology, the existing degree of competition, the existing tastes of the consumer, the existing attitudes of people toward work, and the existing social structure. All of these, if varied, would affect the independent variables (for example, the propensity to consume and the marginal efficiency of capital) and through them the dependent variables (employment and national income); but they are assumed not to vary. One of the most important givens in traditional economic analysis is that of economic rationality: if an individual is presented with a situation of choice in an economic setting, he will behave so as to maximize his economic position. As an investigative device, however, economic rationality allows the economist to proceed as if the only independent variables were measurable changes in price and income. By employing givens such as those just reviewed, the economist simplifies the theoretical framework within which he operates. His world thus simplified, he is enabled to create theoretical solutions, often expressed in mathematical language, to economic problems.

Research Methods Several of the research methods that receive wide application in sociology find much more limited use in economics. The experimental method is seldom if ever employed by economists. The comparative method is limited mainly to its use by economic historians and those interested in the development of the emerging nations (for example, Habbakuk 1962). And finally, the case study method is restricted to accounts of single firms, industries, banks, and so on. The main research methods in economics, then, are the statistical method and the method of heuristic assumption. As an example of the former, let us say we wish to trace the influences on the long-term trend of potato prices. It is known that potato prices vary seasonally as well as year by year, but it is necessary to remove these influences. So the average seasonal variation for fifty years is calculated, and adding or subtracting the average seasonal variations from the actual prices cancels out seasonal

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fluctuations for each individual year. In this way one influence on prices is removed by statistical manipulation, and a truer picture of uncontaminated long-term price trends emerges. This sort of statistical analysis, as well as various tests of association, receives wide application in economics. The multivariate analysis of survey data, however, is found much less frequently in economics than in sociology, being limited, by and large, to surveys of consumers’ and investors’ attitudes (Katona and Mueller 1956). As indicated in the discussion of the economists’ theoretical framework, the typical method in economics is the method of heuristic assumption. The most familiar version of this method is the famous explanatory strategy of ceteris paribus—other things equal. By assuming tastes and institutions to be given for purposes of analysis, and by assuming that certain factors do not change during a given time period, economists make parameters out of variables. By using this method to simplify sources of variation, economists have been able to reduce the number of operative variables to a manageable number and to create relatively simple and elegant models of economic processes.

Relations between Sociology and Economics From the accounts of the central concerns of sociology and economics reviewed thus far, it would appear that the two disciplines have little in common. Their concerns with dependent variables diverge: economics is concerned especially with variations in the level of production, techniques of production, and distribution of goods and services; sociology is concerned with variations in social structure and behavior. Even when sociologists focus on economic behavior and institutions, as in the subfield of industrial sociology, they choose different aspects of these phenomena than do economists. Furthermore, there is little overlap in independent variables. And finally, the characteristic economic models are built on vastly different assumptions and logical ordering than are sociological models. Despite these differences, the two disciplines can and should articulate at a number of critical points, to the profit of each. The most evident contribution that sociological analysis can make to economics is in the area of “givens.” The various simplifying economic assumptions about human

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motivation and social structure are subject to widely divergent degrees of empirical accuracy; some persons “economize” much more than others, and some societies display much more economic rationality than others. The degree to which persons adhere to the postulate of economic rationality, moreover, is dependent on their social structural moorings (for example, their religious doctrines and memberships, their position in the stratification system, and their past and present family involvements). Insofar as sociological theory and empirical research are sound in these areas, sociology can begin to provide more informed bases for the simplifying noneconomic assumptions that economists necessarily make in their discipline (Parsons and Smelser 1956). The need for systematic sociological supplementation of economic theory and research is especially evident in certain sub-branches of economics: consumption theory, which is so obviously influenced by family and class memberships; labor economics, which is so clearly influenced by family and voluntary organization memberships; comparative economics, in which it becomes obviously unfeasible to assume tastes and social structure constant from one society to another; and economic development, in the analysis of which it becomes progressively less permissible to treat tastes and institutions as constant when the periods of time and magnitudes of change considered involve vast social and psychological reorganization. In a number of areas economists have begun systematically to introduce noneconomic variables. To illustrate, organizational decisionmaking theorists have explicitly challenged the traditional economic assumptions that firms are free from internal conflict and that they possess full information about the market (March 1962); game theorists see organizations (such as firms, trade unions, and government agencies) standing in political as well as economic relations to one another (Shubik 1959); consumption theorists have begun systematically to introduce considerations of imitation, race, age, and marital status into their formal models (for example, Duesenberry 1949); and theorists of imperfect competition see firms standing in political relations to one another and to government agencies. Likewise, sociological theories, insofar as they involve assumptions about economic life, can be systematically informed by economic theory and research. If, for example, an investigator of the family is interested in

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the impact of unemployment on a society’s family system, he can inform himself of the magnitude of unemployment by reference to trade cycle theory, investment theory, and the theory of economic development. In general, however, the codification of sociologists’ assumptions about economic behavior and institutions is neither simplified nor systematic enough to permit specification of the precise points of contribution of economics to sociology; it is much more possible to specify the contributions of sociology to economics. In addition to gaining substantively from economic theory and research, sociology stands to profit in a formal sense from economics. Of all the behavioral sciences, economics has reached the highest point of theoretical development, with the possible exception of certain branches of psychology, such as learning theory. It has done so by simplifying the number of variables via the method of heuristic assumption, combining these variables into simplified models, expressing these models in mathematical terms, and representing variables in quantifiable terms. Difficult as these operations are to perform in some branches of sociology, the field is in need of reducing the scatteration of variables and creating simpler, more concise models. Sociologists can profit from studying the formal aspects of economic theory in meeting this need, probably more than they can profit from the formal aspects of psychology, biology, and the physical sciences, since economics, among all these possibilities, deals with social systems of one type, and social systems are the stuff of sociological analysis. Unfortunately, contemporary academic arrangements in universities are not the best for encouraging active collaboration between economists and sociologists. Departments of economics and sociology are infrequently conjoined, and few joint courses are given. Also, there is a subtle tendency for economists to view sociology as soft and for sociologists to be frightened away from using economics by the technical aspects of economic theory and research. The main points of contact between the two disciplines are in various professional schools and institutes, such as schools of business administration and institutions of industrial and labor relations; and promising points of active collaboration between economists and sociologists have appeared in the past two decades with the establishment of various interdisciplinary centers and institutes concerned with economic development.

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political science In principle, political science should be as amenable to formulation in theoretically elegant terms as economics. Its focus on the creation, organization, distribution, and utilization of power parallels and is potentially as specific as economics’ focus on the production, distribution, and consumption of wealth. Models concerning the principles by which the components of power—legitimacy, public support, administrative skill, financial resources, and so forth—are combined conceivably could parallel models of market equilibrium so typical of economics. In practice, however, theoretical formulations in scientific terms have not reached anything near the level of development that has been reached in economics. Only in recent decades can the study of political life—despite its traditional name of political science—be said to be becoming a social science at all, in the sense that it possesses the ingredients of a scientific framework as outlined earlier in this essay. Therefore, while I shall use the same list of scientific ingredients I used in characterizing sociology and economics, I shall have to indicate those areas of activity in political science to which they do not apply.

Dependent Variables I have already indicated the central substantive focus of political science: behavior and institutions that are concerned primarily with the creation and exercise of power. The ways in which political scientists define and describe this behavior of those institutions, however, vary greatly. One tradition of political science is concerned with describing formal political institutions at different political-geographical levels. American government, for example, customarily has been taught as an account of how American political institutions work, according to the Constitution, statutory law, and customary practice. The same could be said for traditional treatments of state government, federal-state relations, and county and municipal government. The same applies to the traditional approach to international relations, except that it has also been characterized in part by an emphasis on diplomatic history. In these traditional areas of political science, the literature also displays some concern with policy

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implications—for example, the pros and cons of various forms of city government, such as mayor, city council, and city manager. An offshoot of this historical-descriptive tradition in political science is one type of comparative government, preoccupied, by and large, with Western constitutional governments and large-scale political institutions such as legislatures, civil services, and judicial systems. In recent decades, a new emphasis in political science has emerged: the behavioral approach. Given impetus by the conceptual frameworks and research methods of the other behavioral sciences, this approach has given quite a different definition to the subject matter of political science (Kirkpatrick 1962). One contrast with the traditional approach is that the behavioral emphasis concentrates more on the behavior of individuals in political situations and less on the formal structure of political institutions. This behavioral approach, moreover, is relatively more interested in explaining behavior in terms of social and psychological determinants and less in simply describing behavior. Moreover, the behavioral approach leans toward quantitative measurement and statistical manipulation and away from qualitative accounts of political phenomena. In addition, especially insofar as the behavioral approach has invaded comparative politics, it has not only concentrated more on the dynamics of political behavior than on the structure of institutions but also enlarged the kinds of settings in which political behavior occurs to include tribes, clans, quasideveloped parties, and so on, as well as formal systems of representative government and bureaucracy (Almond and Coleman 1960). Finally, the language associated with the behavioral approach, in both its noncomparative and its comparative aspects, is considerably more abstract and analytic—employing terms like political socialization and interest articulation—than the language specific to the particular political institutions under study.

Independent Variables Insofar as the traditional approach to empirical political science is descriptive of the history, workings, and effectiveness of various formal political institutions, it can be said that there is very little explicit interest in explanation via the use of independent variables. From time to time explana-

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tions are given—for instance, the paralysis of the political process in the French Fourth Republic may be attributed to the fragmentation of parties or to the French electoral system—but such explanations tend to be based on ad hoc and historically specific considerations rather than on the systematic specification of factors making for political effectiveness. Investigators using the behavioral approach to politics are concerned explicitly with the determinants of political behavior. A list of these determinants, moreover, reads very much like a general catalog of determinants in sociology and psychology. Voting behavior, for example, has been shown to be influenced by race, education, socioeconomic level, religion, and family, as well as by various psychological variables (Eulau 1961). Indeed, it is somewhat arbitrary to assign this new tradition of research to political science, sociology, or psychology, since variables from all three disciplines are liberally intermingled, and very similar research is conducted by those who call themselves sociologists, political scientists, and psychologists.

Relations among Variables Political science shows great diversity with respect to models and theories. In the essentially descriptive tradition of empirical political study, models and theories as I have characterized them can scarcely be said to exist, since the major thrust of the study is historical and descriptive, rather than formally explanatory. In addition, what has gone by the name of political theory in political science is usually not theory in the scientific sense of the word but rather the study of moral and political philosophy. This type of traditional theory is more akin to the study of intellectual history or the study of ethics than it is to any of the social sciences. The growth of scientific theory proper in political science is very recent and is also associated with the behavioral revolution in the field. To choose only a few illustrations, Harold Lasswell’s (1936) early efforts at accounting for the distribution of power in a political system possess the embryonic ingredients of formal theory. Anthony Downs’s endeavors (1957) to create a theory of democracy are considerably more formal—in fact, his model of political behavior imitates economic theory by postulating a version of political rationality and building a theory of political process on this and other simplifying assumptions. David Easton (1953), building

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mainly on the work of social systems analysts in sociology, has developed a comprehensive and methodologically self-conscious theory of the political system, and a number of analysts have attempted to systematize the structure and processes of international relations into a variety of theoretical frameworks (Kaplan 1957). In varying degrees of completeness, these models and theories contain the ingredients of formalized statements of relations among variables, explicit attention to guiding assumptions, and (to a lesser extent) derivation of testable hypotheses.

Research Methods In most of the traditional branches of political science, the research methods resemble those of the historian and philosopher more than those of the other social sciences. These methods include the examination and qualitative description of formal constitutional documents, laws, and historical events and an attempt to draw from these sources adequate characterizations of institutional political structures, as well as the examination and textual analysis of the writings of political philosophers in an effort to interpret, criticize, and synthesize their views on the broader philosophical aspects of politics and ethics. In the newer branches of political science that have been grouped loosely under the heading of the behavioral approach, the methods of research are, except for relative emphasis, almost indistinguishable from the methods of sociology and social psychology. Experimental research finds little use in political science (see, however, Verba 1960), but political scientists have employed a vast array of methods of data gathering, statistical manipulation, and comparative methods that are commonly used in sociology (Lipset 1964).

Relations between Sociology and Political Science In reviewing the relations between sociology and economics, I emphasized the differences in dependent variables, independent variables, and theoretical models and frameworks. Given these differences, the appropriate relations between the fields appeared to be complementary articulation. With respect to political science—and now I refer only to the behavioral approach—the story is different. Political sociologists and political scien-

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tists often study the same empirical phenomena: voting behavior, political attitudes, the structure of political parties, social mobility through political channels, social and political unrest, and so on. As we have seen, they explain these phenomena by using very similar types of independent variables. Research methods in the two fields also show striking resemblances. And insofar as political scientists have developed formal models of behavior, they tend often to resemble the theoretical frameworks employed by sociologists. Correspondingly, the relations between the two fields have not been so much those of complementary articulation as those of overlapping of common preoccupations. Indeed, it strikes me that were it not for the historical fact that the behavioral approach to politics grew up in the context of existing academic departments of political science, there is little reason to believe that it would not be a special division of sociology, similar to social stratification or the sociology of religion. One exception to this general characterization of the two disciplines as overlapping should be noted. As formal theories of the political system continue to develop in political science, they will undoubtedly come to resemble formal economic theories, insofar as they will deal with the creation and exercise of power and will rest on a relatively formal series of assumptions regarding the givens within which political processes occur. As this type of analysis of specialized social processes advances, the need for mutual articulation will grow correspondingly, and the relations between sociology and political science will come to resemble more those that now obtain between sociology and economics. In terms of academic arrangements, the linking of departments of sociology and political science is probably no more frequent than the linking of sociology and economics. The spirit of collaboration on both sides of the disciplinary boundaries, however, is more congenial than is the case with sociology and economics, and it seems safe to predict that the new few years will see the growth of joint courses and seminars and joint appointments in departments of sociology and political science. Other areas of interaction between the two fields are in survey research centers, area study programs (especially those dealing with nations with totalitarian governments), and various comparative study centers, such as the Center for the Study of Internal War at Princeton University and the Center for the Comparative Study of New Nations at the University of Chicago.

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a n t h r op ol og y If we leave physical anthropology, archaeology, and the anthropological study of linguistic systems aside, we may be very brief in our treatment of anthropology. The reason for this is that the similarities between social and cultural anthropology on the one hand and sociology on the other vastly outweigh the differences; and the differences are frequently matters of shading. By and large, sociology and anthropology are preoccupied with the same classes of dependent variables: social structure and behavior oriented toward social structure. Within this basic similarity, however, it is probable that anthropologists focus more on socialization and personality than sociologists; but even this generalization is subject to question, particularly in the light of growing interest in socialization and personality in the sociology of the family and the sociology of mental health and illness. It is also probable that the influence of Freudian psychology is more marked in anthropology than it is in sociology, though it is by no means absent in the latter. Again, anthropologists—particularly American anthropologists influenced by the work of scholars like Ruth Benedict and Clyde Kluckhohn—focus on cultural values and meaning systems more than sociologists do, but the existence of sociological interest in art, literature, religion and mass culture qualifies this generalization. And finally, anthropological research has centered more on certain institutional sectors—especially kinship, magic, and religion—that have been thought to infuse the simpler societies they have studied; but these subjects are not without interest to sociologists, and, especially in modern times, anthropologists have interested themselves in economic structure, political structure, stratification, economic development, and other aspects of social life. Anthropologists and sociologists traditionally have studied social life in different settings. Anthropologists have concentrated on small, simple, often-nonliterate societies, whereas sociologists have chosen to study large, complex, literate civilizations. Particularly in the past two decades this distinction has been breaking down, as sociologists and anthropologists alike study caste in Indian villages, as anthropologists take up investigations of places like East London, and as sociologists generally widen their comparative scope.

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Perhaps the most pervasive difference between the two fields resides in divergent styles of conceiving societies. Both anthropologists and sociologists do tend to think of societies as interrelated systems; the solid place of structural-functional thought in each discipline testifies to this commonality. Within this broadly similar framework, however, certain differences appear. Anthropologists tend more to think in unique-pattern ways about society. Perhaps this tendency results from the historical fact that they have concentrated on small, relatively undifferentiated societies; perhaps it stems from the dominance of the relativistic viewpoint during the interwar period, in which “[emphasis] was placed . . . on the unique and contextual. The search for internal coherence between institutions, or coherence between individual psychology and social form, or the coherence between belief and behavior all within a single and often arbitrarily defined unit was the fashion of the period” (DuBois 1963, 31). This characterization must be qualified, however, by mentioning the considerable body of anthropological cross-cultural analysis that focuses on connections between a few sets of variables in a wide range of cultural settings (Murdock 1949). By contrast with anthropologists’ predominantly uniquepattern approach, sociologists’ preoccupation with the interrelatedness of social phenomena tends to be—but is not always—characterized more by a search for aggregated connections among a limited number of variables and less by a focus on totality of patterns as such. Related to these different styles of interpreting social interrelations are further differences in research methods and outlook. Anthropology tends to be characterized mainly by the case study method, in which the investigator actually immerses himself in the single culture to be studied. In many cases he becomes a participant observer and more often than not relies on informants for much of his data about the culture. One outgrowth of this kind of involvement is that the anthropological investigator comes to appreciate the richness and complexity of social life in the culture under study; he tends to focus more on the broader meaning context of social behavior. At the same time and for the same reasons, he is likely to be unfriendly to objective methods of measurement that pull items of behavior from the meaning context of the culture under study. By contrast, the comparative sociologist (as well as the comparative economist and the political scientist), being more concept and variable centered,

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tends to be more willing to apply objective comparative measures and to lift items of behavior from their unique cultural contexts. So much for some of the contrasts in substance, method, and style between anthropology and sociology. In all cases these contrasts appear to be subtle shadings rather than clear-cut differences. We might conclude this brief section by suggesting the ways in which these two quite similar fields might interchange usefully with each other. Certainly the possibilities of mutual interchange of empirical data are great, since anthropologists and sociologists still tend to study different types of society and different institutional contexts within these societies. In particular, the comparative analysis of social structure and the study of social change can profit as sociologists inform themselves better on the character of social life in less complex societies. The opportunities for complementary theoretical articulation, however, are considerably less, simply because the variables and theoretical frameworks of the two disciplines are so fundamentally similar. The tendency, therefore, would seem to be one of consolidation of the theoretical frameworks of sociology and anthropology rather than complementary articulation of distinct frameworks, as is the case between sociology and economics. In fact, it is not unreasonable to suggest that as theoretical refinement and codification advance in the social sciences, the differences between anthropology and sociology will be the first to be absorbed into a common theoretical framework.

history During the past century many opinions have been ventured on the general relations between history and sociology (or the social sciences in general). These notions range widely. At one extreme is the view of a number of German writers toward the end of the nineteenth century that sociology is a generalizing science in search of uniform laws of social life and that history is a particularizing study dealing with the unique occurrences of human life, and that, as a consequence of this distinction, the two enterprises are completely separate from each other. At the other extreme is the recent view expressed by S. D. Clark that “nothing today would appear to set off [sociology and history] from one another other than the biases and

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prejudices inherited from the past. The . . . explanation of what occurs by comparing a particular occurrence with other occurrences is the task which the historian performs and it is a task which must be performed by the sociologist the moment he turns to examine the processes of change in society” (1959, 400). Writers on the philosophy of science and the sociological study of change take various positions between these two extremes (Gardiner 1959). In treating history as a social science, it is possible, as with anthropology, to be quite brief, though for a different reason. History, more than any of the disciplines here considered in this essay, lacks the ingredients of a formal scientific method, so it would be inappropriate to attempt a point-by-point comparison with sociology in terms of these ingredients. Nevertheless, it is possible to compare the two disciplines from the standpoint of the data to be explained, the approach to causal explanation, the interpretative frameworks employed, and the research methods used. History and sociology share a catholicism with respect to data that may legitimately be studied within their respective disciplines. It is literally true that there can be a history of anything: industrial capitalism, French doorknobs, or misspellings in New England cookbooks. And because the range of sociological variables is so great—including social structure and behavior oriented to social structure—it is virtually true that there can be a legitimate sociology of anything, so long as it can be encompassed by these broad categories. Certainly there could be a sociological treatment of industrial capitalism, French doorknobs, and even misspellings in New England cookbooks. Thus, in principle, historians and sociologists are immersed in a common mass of raw material. In practice, however, their attention is directed toward data that have been recorded at different points in time. Most historians choose data that have been recorded in the relatively distant past, whereas most sociologists choose data that have been recently or are being currently recorded. Not all historians and sociologists behave in this way, however, and there is no inherent reason in either discipline why they should do so. Despite their common comprehensiveness of data, history and sociology are subdivided in ways so different that ready comparisons between the two fields are quite difficult. As a rule, historians use three criteria to subdivide their field—chronological time, cultural or national tradition,

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and aspects of social life. The familiar phrases “British social history of the nineteenth century” and “western European intellectual history of the eighteenth century,” exemplify these criteria. Sociologists tend to divide their field by somewhat more abstract terms: types of social structure, types of behavior oriented to social structure, types of social groupings, and so on. It is true that some sociologists are regional or area specialists and thus focus on a distinctive cultural or national tradition. It is also true that the familiar institutional subdivisions of sociology—religion, law, military, and so forth—correspond with some of the subdivisions of history—religious, legal, or military history, for instance—but these correspondences are only very approximate. In their methods of identifying problems for study, sociologists and historians also display different, though overlapping, emphases. A historical problem, generally speaking, is rooted in and emerges from the logic of events of a given place and period: for example, Why did the French monarchy and aristocracy become so unresponsive to demands for social reform during the eighteenth century? By contrast, a sociological problem, generally speaking, tends to be rooted in and is generated by some conceptual apparatus: for example, What are the relations between blocked social mobility and social protest, as illustrated in the eighteenth-century French case? This is not to say that the approach of the historian is inductive and that of the sociologist deductive. Both necessarily rely on preconceived concepts, assumptions, and suspected associations among historical happenings. The relative differences are in degree of explicitness of preconceptions and in degree of abstraction from a particular historical context. In their concern with explanations, a similar difference in emphasis between sociologists and historians emerges. By contrast with a field like economics, both tend to be comprehensive and eclectic in their concern with causes (or independent variables). This eclecticism, however, stems from different sources. For sociologists, it arises not from any commitment to diversity or complexity of causes—as a rule sociologists are as committed to determinate causal explanations as other social scientists—but rather from the inability of the field itself to specify these causes and hence its display of a great proliferation of independent variables. The eclecticism of historians stems from the fact that their historical problem is rooted in a particular place and historical period. A historical period itself, however,

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being quite indiscriminate in the way it unfolds, does very little by way of isolating, specifying, and organizing causes of events; it requires the machinations of human investigators—machinations that take the form of experimental, statistical, and other methods of research—to manipulate causes and assess their general operation in a variety of different historical situations. The historian, attentive to a problem and period, interprets the causes of events as he finds them, as it were, and thus takes on the natural eclecticism of causation in an uncontrolled historical sequence of events. Thus the historian is prepared to admit invasions, personality characteristics of kings, population increases, changes in land ownership patterns, and social protest movements as causes if these appear to be important for his particular historical problem. The relatively more systematic social scientist, on the other hand, attempts to hold constant various of these events by diverse means of situational and conceptual manipulation, thus isolating, simplifying, and making less eclectic his concern with causes. To summarize, a sociologist’s approach to data, problems, and causes of events—in contrast to a historian’s—tends to rest on a more formal explicit conceptual apparatus that is more self-consciously selective of facts. Insofar as the historian adopts such an apparatus, and insofar as he adopts the relatively systematic methods of manipulating data utilized by the sociologist, the difference between the two disciplines tends to disappear. Given these contrasting emphases, what types of interchange might prove profitable between history and sociology? A first type stems from the fact that sociologists and historians emphasize present and past, respectively, in their studies of society. Particularly in comparative analysis and in the study of social change, each discipline stands to profit from examining the data produced and analyzed in the other. A second type of exchange involves the use of historical investigations to formulate sociological problems and vice versa. A careful reading of a historical monograph—even one on a subject remote from the sociologist’s substantive interests—indubitably will reveal empirical connections between events that can inform his sociological preoccupations. Similarly, a careful study of sociological theory and research will instruct historians in new connections, new kinds of data to be sought, and new kinds of historical questions to be asked. As indicated above, historical problems have tended to be rooted in specific empirical contexts, and sociological problems have tended to be generated from

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conceptual frameworks, though this generalization does not apply unequivocally to either discipline. Insofar as it is correct, however, both sociologists and historians will gain from studying each other’s problems, since the origins of their respective problems complement each other. A third type of exchange involves the respective methods of research and data assessment in history and sociology. Historians, like archaeologists, often confront isolated historical fragments in their work, from which they must, in the absence of more complete data, draw inferences about the historical period in question. Clearly it is impossible to use formal research methods such as statistical analysis in these circumstances. Instead, historians have developed an art of seeking out and piecing together isolated items to delineate a picture of society’s past structure and activities. By and large, the skills involved in this art have remained implicit; indeed, the art is almost intuitive. Certainly it would be of enormous service to both historians and sociologists if a historical investigator would set down a definitive methodology of historical inference from fragmented data. In particular, the sociologist could profit from such a methodology, since it would better enable him to turn to empirical situations that are relevant and important for his investigations but meager in their supply of data. Historians, on their side, stand to gain from adopting—to a greater extent than they already have—the formal research techniques of sociologists, particularly in their analyses of historical data that can be represented quantitatively. These techniques are especially appropriate for the study of modern history, which is more abundant in formal, written records of human transactions.

p s yc h ol og y Despite the differences I have noted, it is correct to say that sociology, economics, political science, and anthropology are social sciences. The reason for this is that the overarching focus of these disciplines is on interpersonal relations that emerge when two or more persons interact with one another. The units of analysis are the relations among persons—or roles, or structures—and behavior oriented to these relations. In this respect, all four disciplines contrast with psychology, which studies the

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same mass of behavioral data but has a different analytic focus. The analytic focus of psychology is the individual person as a system of needs, feelings, aptitudes, skills, and defenses, or on one or more processes, such as the learning of skills, considered in detail. In all cases the organizing conceptual unit is the person. The four social sciences differ in various ways in the kind of social structures and systems they study; psychology differs from all of these in that it lies at a separate analytic level altogether. This fundamental contrast not only epitomizes the differences between psychology and the social sciences but also suggests the distinctive ways they may contribute to one another. Within its overarching analytic focus on the individual person, psychology studies a number of different kinds of variables. Among the most important of these are the concept of needs, which is a construct referring to the internal motivational forces that give direction, intensity, and persistence to behavior; the concept of capacities, including intelligence and skills by means of which the individual arrives at some resolution of tensions resulting from these motivational forces; the concept of personality structure, which refers to the individual’s combination of patterns of needs and capacities into relatively enduring modes of adaptation to his environment; and various more dynamic concepts, including stress and psychic conflict, response to stress and conflict, attempts to control these responses, and resulting processes of personality change. In attempting to account for variations in these, psychologists tend to focus on the psychic system itself; but they frequently do make use of social units as independent variables: for example, size of family, order of birth in family, socioeconomic status, ethnic and religious group memberships, and so on. In this essay I shall not review the various ways in which psychologists organize their variables into models and systems, except to note in passing a contrast within psychology that parallels one of the contrasts between anthropology and sociology. I refer to the contrast between the clinical or unique-pattern approach versus the aggregated-variable approach. Within psychology the clinical psychologist tends to focus on the single individual, interpreting his behavior in the meaning context of his personality pattern, whereas many experimental and social psychologists focus on a more limited number of personality variables and attempt to discover connections among these variables—connections manifested by

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an aggregate of individuals with different unique personality configurations—by using the formal research methods of experimental control and statistical analysis. It would be an instructive exercise in intellectual history to compare and contrast the tensions between anthropologists and sociologists, on the one hand, with the tensions between the clinical and experimental social psychologists, on the other. In the light of this briefest of characterizations of psychology as a science, what can be said about the possibilities for exchange between it and sociology? The possibilities are both formal and substantive; the substantive exchanges, in turn, break down into empirical and theoretical ones. With respect to formal interchanges, it is evident that many psychological variables resemble sociological variables, but at a different analytic level. For example, the concept of need parallels the concept of functional exigency of a social system in many ways; the concept of individual capacities parallels the concept of social resources; the concept of personality structure parallels the concept of social structure; the concept of ego control parallels the concept of social control; and so on (Smelser and Smelser 1963). Furthermore, various models of personality adjustment, growth, and disorganization parallel models of social change (Parsons and Bales 1955). Careful study of psychological models by sociologists, and vice versa, is likely to produce new issues for both, since the analytic levels at which they have been generated are quite different. This formal interchange between variables and models at different levels should not be confused with psychological or social reductionism, which marks an attempt to translate, without loss, all statements at one analytic level into statements regarding the operations of variables at another level. An example of a reductionist statement would be “Society is no more than the sum total of the psychological states of its members.” The general consequence of reductionist reasoning, if pushed far enough, is to deny the independent conceptual status of one analytic level. In this respect reductionist reasoning is the opposite of reasoning by analogy. Analogy involves no claim of causal influence between two analytically independent levels, but only a claim of formal similarities between the levels; reductionism involves a claim of total determination of processes at one level by reference to variables at another level. The status of the reduced process is that of an epiphenomenal by-product with no causal feedback.

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With respect to substantive exchanges, it is evident that social and psychological perspectives can be fruitfully combined into explanatory frameworks. For any given empirical problem—for example, the study of suicide rates in different settings—different social variables, such as religion, family structure, and ethnic group membership, can each account for some variation. If combined into a more complex interactive model of determinants, the explanatory power of these social determinants is even greater. After a certain point the continuous refinement of social variables becomes subject to diminishing returns. The investigator must ask how the various social influences are processed intrapsychically if he is to account for more variation and if he is to discover why some individuals do and others do not commit suicide under identical social conditions. Similarly, psychologists interested in the importance of early childhood experiences on personality development are able to enhance the adequacy of their explanations if they can be informed as to the influence of, say, family structure and social class level on the probability of diverse kinds of childhood trauma. To appreciate the possibilities of substantive exchange between sociology and psychology at the theoretical level, we may refer to the problem of givens once more. As we have seen, sociological concepts, hypotheses, and theoretical frameworks always rest on a number of assumptions about human motivations, skills, and so on. And psychological explanations inevitably rest on certain presuppositions regarding the kinds of social framework within which these explanations apply. Too often these underlying assumptions are vague, implicit, and unexamined appendages to the theory in question. Some of the most promising avenues of collaboration between sociologists and psychologists are through mutual enlightenment as to the psychological and sociological underpinnings of their respective theories, mutual instruction as to the questionable assertions that these underpinnings may conceal, and mutual exchange of findings so that assertions may be made more adequate theoretically. I shall conclude this section with an observation on research methods in psychology. One distinguishing feature of psychology is that it makes much more extensive use of the experimental method than the other disciplines here considered. Another is that, because of its historical connection with psychotherapeutic and psychiatric practice, it makes very extensive use of

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the method of clinical case study. So pronounced is each of these features that research strategies in the field tend often to be thought of as either clinical approaches to depth variables or socio-experimental approaches to surface variables such as attitudes or overt behavior. I suggest that psychologists would benefit greatly by giving careful study to the uses of the comparative method in sociology, which stands between these two extreme alternatives in the sense that it does not deal with enough cases to permit approximations to such control even with depth variables. Adaptation of this method to intraindividual comparisons would do much, in my opinion, to permit more systematic investigation of variables not considered inextricable from the richness and complexity of a single clinical case and to reduce conflicts among psychological investigators, who now tend to opt exclusively for either the clinical or the socio-experimental approach.

i n te g rat i on an d c ol la b o rat i o n a m o n g th e s o ci a l s c i en c es To pull together the various strands developed in this essay, let me summarize the interchanges that may be expected among the various social sciences. This summary should provide the reader with an indication of the several analytic uses of sociology for the other social sciences, but I shall present the summary as it should be presented—in terms, not of a one-way flow of “uses,” but of two-way interchanges. 1. Insofar as sociology and the other social sciences take an interest in common data, each discipline should be able to provide a partial account of empirical variations in these data. With reference to sexual behavior and attitudes, for instance, sociological research can provide insight as to the types of class background and family structure associated with distinctive patterns of sexual behavior; psychological research can provide evidence as to how social and other variables are processed intrapsychically, thus contributing more microscopic kinds of insight; and historical and anthropological research can shed light on how these social and psychological determinants have worked out in diverse cultural contexts. These relations among the various disciplines, it must be stressed, are not competitive but essentially complementary.

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2. Insofar as every discipline necessarily restricts its range of inquiry and makes simplifying assumptions about—that is, treats as given—those areas outside this range, each discipline stands to be informed as to the adequacy of these assumptions by referring to the empirical research and theoretical work of neighboring disciplines. These more general relations among the disciplines are also of a complementary character. 3. Insofar as common problems are faced by theorists in different disciplines, they stand to profit from studying formal solutions generated in neighboring disciplines. Equilibrium theory as formulated in biology and economics, for example, has proved of value in formulating principles of equilibrium in sociology and psychology. Great care should be taken, however, to avoid wholesale importation of theoretical models from other disciplines, and the social scientist should always temper analogically derived formulations with qualifications appropriate to new empirical and theoretical settings. 4. Insofar as the various disciplines face common problems of drawing inferences from data, they stand to gain from studying the diverse research methods employed in neighboring disciplines. Sociologists, for example, when they meet a problem that demands tracing the course of quantitative indices over time, would do well to turn to the well-developed techniques of analyzing time series in economics. And, as indicated, psychologists can profit by developing research methods similar to the comparative method in sociology and anthropology.

These various types of interchange raise the more general problem of the integration of knowledge in the social sciences. This problem is a perennial one. Ever since the social sciences began to develop, scholars have repeatedly expressed apprehension about the increasing fragmentation of knowledge through specialization. Correspondingly, they have sounded the call for greater integration—even unification—of scientific knowledge. Justified as these demands are, they are not without their utopian elements; indeed, the hopes expressed for the unification of scientific knowledge often resemble the hopes for the unification of the world religions. The utopian element lies in the overemphasis on ends and the underemphasis on means. During the past twenty years, scholars have expressed much misty-eyed enthusiasm about a number of words, all of which refer in one way or

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another to the end of unification: terms such as codification, integration, cross-fertilization, interdisciplinary research, and the multidisciplinary approach. As is often the case, this proliferation of inexact synonyms signifies a search for something, the exact nature of which we are not aware. Moreover, a vague romanticism often seems to govern thinking about the numerous interdisciplinary arrangements of the past two decades—institutes, centers, regional study groups, seminars, conferences and panels— which has rested on the belief, even hope, that if only scholars from different specialties are placed in one another’s presence, some process of integration will occur spontaneously. Unfortunately, the endeavors based on this hope are usually quite barren, yielding mainly general talk about integration rather than the results of integration. Just as it is true that people of different nations will not reach sympathetic understanding of one another by virtue of being placed together in an international exchange program or seminar, so it is true that scholars will not integrate their specialized branches of knowledge merely by talking with one another about their subjects or even reading one another’s books. If spontaneous combustion is not the path to integration of scientific knowledge, what is? I hope I have indicated some guidelines in this essay. A major requirement of integration is that some common language be developed so that the elements of the different social sciences can be systematically compared and contrasted with one another. The language I have employed is the language of the ingredients of science: dependent variables, independent variables, theoretical frameworks, and research methods. Having developed this language, we may better see what kinds of integration are possible and what kinds are not. And in examining the relations between sociology and the other social sciences in terms of the scientific ingredients of each, we turned up a variety of types of integration. In the relations between sociology and anthropology, for example, we discovered an essential identity of scientific enterprise; in the relations between sociology and economics, we discovered possibilities of complementary theoretical articulation at different analytic levels; in the relations between sociology and history, we saw possibilities of exchange mainly in terms of problems, data, and research methods; and in some cases—for example, in the relations between scientific sociology and traditional political theory—we discovered such a difference in approach and

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methods that the question of integration is probably irrelevant. In short, by employing this common language to compare and contrast the various social sciences, we have seen that integration of scientific knowledge is a complex and diversified rather than a unitary thing. This enterprise of comparing and contrasting the social sciences within a common language is a very laborious and disciplined one. So, also, is the process by which social scientists may actually profit from the theory and research of a neighboring social science. Unfortunately, it is not possible for a sociologist (or any other kind of social scientist), upon reaching a blind alley in his analysis, to ask, “How can (say) economics help me here?” and come up with a simple, satisfactory answer by reading a text in economics. In order to call upon the assistance of a sister discipline, he must become in some degree disciplined in that discipline, so that he may appreciate the context and significance of its contribution, rather than lift it from its disciplinary moorings and thus distort it. To insist upon this kind of continuing education as a precondition for successful interdisciplinary exchange is to insist upon a great deal of work for social scientists. But in the end such work is necessary if interchanges between the other disciplines is to be profound and rewarding, rather than superficial and disappointing.

r e f e r en c e s Almond, Gabriel, and James S. Coleman, eds. 1960. The Politics of the Developing Areas. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Berelson, Bernard. 1963. “Introduction to the Behavioral Sciences.” In The Behavioral Sciences Today, edited by Bernard Berelson, 1–11. New York: Basic Books. Clark, S. D. 1959. “Sociology, History, and the Problem of Social Change.” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 25, no. 4:385–400. Downs, Anthony. 1957. An Economic Theory of Democracy. New York: Harper. DuBois, Cora. 1963. “Anthropology: Its Present Interests.” In The Behavioral Sciences Today, edited by Bernard Berelson, 26–37. New York: Basic Books. Duesenberry, James. 1949. Income, Savings, and the Theory of Consumer Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Durkheim, Emile. 1951. Suicide. Translated by John A. Spaulding and George Simpson. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

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Easton, David. 1953. The Political System. New York: Knopf, 1953. Eulau, Heinz. 1961. Recent Developments in the Behavioral Study of Politics. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gardiner, Patrick, ed. 1959. Theories of History. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Goff man, Erving. 1961. Asylums. New York: Doubleday Anchor. Habbakuk, H. J. 1962. American and British Technology in the Nineteenth Century: The Search for Labour-Saving Inventions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Inkeles, Alex. 1964. What Is Sociology? An Introduction to the Discipline and Profession. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Jackson, Elton F., and Harry J. Crockett Jr. 1964. “Occupational Mobility in the United States: A Point Estimate and Trend Comparison.” American Sociological Review 29:5–15. Kaplan, Morton. 1957. System and Process in International Relations. New York: Wiley. Katona, George, and Eva Mueller. 1956. Consumer Expectations, 1953–1956. Ann Arbor: Survey Research Center, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. Keynes, John Maynard. 1936. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Kirkpatrick, Evron M. 1962. “The Impact of the Behavioral Approach on Traditional Political Science.” In Essays on the Behavioral Study of Politics, edited by Austin Ranney, 1–29. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Lasswell, Harold D. 1936. Politics: Who Gets What, Where, When, How. New York: McGraw-Hill. Lipset, Seymour Martin. 1964. “Sociology and Political Science: A Bibliographical Note.” American Sociological Review 29:730–34. March, James G. 1962. “Some Recent Substantive and Methodological Developments in the Theory of Organizational Decision-Making.” In Essays in the Behavioral Science of Politics, 191–208. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Martindale, Don. 1960. The Nature and Types of Sociological Theory. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. McPhee, William N. 1963. Formal Theories of Mass Behavior. New York: Free Press. Michels, Robert. 1959. Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy. Translated by Eden and Cedar Paul. New York: Dover Publications. Murdoch, George Peter. 1949. Social Structure. New York: Macmillan. Parsons, Talcott, and Robert F. Bales. 1955. Family, Socialization, and Interaction Process. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Parsons, Talcott, Robert F. Bales, and Edward Shils. 1953. Working Papers in the Theory of Action. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

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Parsons, Talcott, and Neil J. Smelser. 1956. Economy and Society. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Ramsoy, Natalie Rogoff. 1966. “Changing Rates of Mobility.” In Social Structure and Mobility in Economic Development, edited by Neil J. Smelser and Seymour Marin Lipset, 213–34. Chicago: Aldine. Roethlisberger, Fritz J., and William J. Dickson. 1947. Management and the Worker. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Samuelson, Paul A. 1951. Economics: An Introductory Analysis. 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill. . 1961. Economics: An Introductory Analysis. 5th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill. Schneider, Louis, and Sverre Lysgaard. 1952. “ ‘Deficiency’ and ‘Conflict’ in Industrial Sociology.” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 12:49–61. Shubik, Martin. 1959. Strategy and Market Structure. New York: Wiley. Smelser, Neil J. 1962. Theory of Collective Behavior. New York: Free Press, 1962. Smelser, Neil J., and William T. Smelser. 1963. Personality and Social Systems. New York: Wiley. Stouffer, Samuel A. 1955. Communism, Conformity, and Civil Liberties: A Cross-Section of the Nation Speaks Its Mind. New York: Doubleday. Verba, Sidney. 1960. Small Groups and Political Behavior. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wagner, Helmut R. 1963. “Types of Sociological Theory: Toward a System of Classification.” American Sociological Review 28:735–42. Warner, W. Lloyd, et al. 1963. Yankee City. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. White, Harrison C. 1963. An Anatomy of Kinship: Mathematical Models for Structures of Cumulated Roles. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

3

Some Personal Thoughts on the Pursuit of Sociological Problems (1969)

The editors have invited us to try our hands in the search for that elusive phantom, “The Craft of Sociology.” Even worse, they have given us complete freedom, except for suggesting that we might wish to venture both some biographical observations and some reflections on the state of the discipline. The invitation has proved both gratifying and frustrating. It is gratifying because it has provided the occasion for stepping back and reflecting calmly on the intellectual activity that has been so important a part of my professional life—an occasion that rarely presents itself in the rush of daily affairs. It is frustrating, however, because “the craft of sociology” is clearly a multifaceted and perhaps not even a unified thing, because it can be approached from so many angles, and because it calls for an exploration into the subtle recesses of the mind where ignorance is abundant and self-deception is easy. After a somewhat painful period of contemplating the invitation, I decided it would be most fruitful for me to contribute to the search by addressing one question: What has determined my choice of sociological

From Sociological Inquiry 39 (1969): 155–69.

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problems? I shall take a piece of my intellectual biography and attempt to elucidate the major influences on my selection of sociological problems and to identify the ways I went about attacking them. In this paper I shall refrain from more general comment on the discipline of sociology, for during the past year or so I have had occasion to speculate both on the scope and future of sociology as a science (Smelser 1968a, 1969) and on some major intellectual, social, and political influences on sociological research. I do not know how much I could add to these statements at the moment. Following Merton (1959), I regard a “sociological problem” as including a number of ingredients: (1) a statement of what one wants to know, which involves ascertaining the existence of facts and perhaps relations among facts, and posing an explanatory question about them; (2) a statement of why the initial question is important, which involves ascertaining the theoretical or practical framework within which the question assumes significance; and (3) a statement of specific questions, which, if answered properly, will provide answers for the initial question within the context of its rationale. The first poses the problem; the second identifies its theoretical context; and the third addresses ways—research design, techniques of gathering and analyzing data, et cetera—of solving the problem. In this essay I intend to retrace my steps along one path of my intellectual career—that path that links two books, Social Change in the Industrial Revolution (1959) and Theory of Collective Behavior (1962), and a number of recent articles and papers on sociological theory and psychological theory. In doing so, I shall attempt to identify the major questions that preoccupied me and to reflect on why I came to ask them.

p e r s ona l i n flu en c es on t h e s e le c t i o n o f p r o bl em s In attempting to sort out the major influences on my choice of sociological problems, I shall resort to a device that I find congenial and helpful: to arrange these influences in a series extending from very general, predisposing influences that have steered my intellectual interests to very specific, immediate influences that have determined a particular strategy of analysis

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in working on a sociological problem. The predisposing influences provide a circumscribing context within which the more particular ones operate.

A General Predisposition toward Social Scientific Analysis My intellectual disposition toward the social sciences was established before I had any formal contact with them as an undergraduate at Harvard. My family environment was mainly responsible. My father was a junior college teacher who bridged many subjects, but his main interest was in political and moral philosophy. My mother was a secondary school teacher of language and literature; and, when I was in high school, my older brother developed strong interests in philosophy and psychology. The academic atmosphere of the family was pervasive; every member of the family—father, mother, and three sons—all found their way ultimately into some kind of academic position, and all in fields dealing with the study of human affairs. In addition, my father, whose intellect is a forceful one, had a style of consistently raising the general social and political implications of any subject under discussion. Scarcely any topic—a drama, a movie, a local community controversy—arose in family discussion without some exploration of its broader social meanings. I feel that this particular aspect of my father’s intellectual style made an enormous imprint on my own style and, moreover, provides one clue to my subsequent interest in the work of Talcott Parsons, whose style is also dominated by the tendency to view human affairs in a larger, systemic context. I mention these facts about my family background to indicate that before ever entering college I had affirmed that I would enter an academic career and that my field of study would be in or around the behavioral and social sciences. During my freshman year I contemplated the possibility of concentrating in philosophy for about a semester but decided definitely in the middle of that year to major in social relations—a field containing instruction in clinical psychology, social psychology, social anthropology, and sociology.

The Influence of Teachers, Colleagues, and Critics To speak of “influence” after one has made a basic commitment to a field is perhaps a bit misleading, for, in some measure, a student or scholar has

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a good deal of power to pick and choose among possible influences. “Influence” is, in part, the result of one’s own choices. For example, I have never really developed a pressing interest in formal demography, even though I have had occasion to read in that literature for one purpose or another. But because this interest has never been strong, I have not put myself in a position to be influenced by formal demographers. Given some interest in a subject, however, the influence of another can work in a variety of ways. Obviously instruction in the theories and facts of a field constitutes an influence, because it provides a supply of raw materials for one’s own future scholarship and teaching. Reflecting on what has interested me about important teachers and colleagues, however, I tend to think the substance of what they have had to say to me has perhaps mattered less than their style of saying it. For example, one of the many aspects of Talcott Parsons’s thought that I have found fascinating is a quality of mind that can best be described as “architectural.” I refer to his intellectual style of ordering concepts at a very abstract level and, on the basis of this ordering, opening new questions and lines of inquiry. I have always found this rare combination of logical structure and originality to be inspiring. To take another instance, I have always felt great admiration for the style of the late Samuel A. Stouffer—though I never worked with him as closely as I did with Parsons. The qualities of his style I have in mind are his tough-mindedness; his intellectual restlessness, which never permitted him to be satisfied with what was claimed to be an established fact or verified proposition; his relentless pursuit of new ways of producing data; and his intellectual modesty. Even when the content of a man’s approach did not carry much appeal for me, his style often exerted a considerable impact. I recall, for example, a course in the sociological analysis of political phenomena, taught by Barrington Moore Jr. when I was a sophomore at Harvard. The writings of Marx and Lenin figured heavily in this course, and Moore himself continuously returned to the Marxian preoccupations with the incompatibility between industrial capitalism and democratic ideals, and with the phenomenon of worker revolution. Though I rejected much of the substance of Marx and Lenin—as well as that of Moore—his style of posing questions and his dogged refusal to accept easy answers imprinted themselves on my mind and have shaped my selection of problematic issues in the field of social change ever since.

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From time to time a very particular point or comment—as contrasted with a whole intellectual style—has exploded like a small bomb in my mind and continued to reverberate until, in the end, it has led to a great deal of theoretical thinking and empirical research. For example, I would say that the general intellectual style of neither Gordon W. Allport nor Everett Hughes has influenced my work very much. Yet I recall with particular vividness an incident with each—an incident that no doubt passed unnoticed by them. In a lecture and demonstration on rumor in a freshman class in 1948, Allport stressed in a particularly imaginative way the importance of ambiguity in the transmission of rumors (Allport and Postman 1947). The presentation made a profound impression. It became one of those insights that arises again and again, like a friendly ghost, to remind me of its importance and pervasiveness as a principle. Years later, in my work on collective behavior, I found myself returning to the point continuously, extending and elaborating it, and applying it more widely than to rumor alone. Allport’s original idea was a kind of spark, which ignited and combined with many other ideas, thoughts, and perceptions to produce my own ideas on the importance of ambiguity in the formation of beliefs that accompany episodes of collective behavior (Smelser 1962). In the fall of 1958 I paid a brief visit to the University of Chicago, with an eye to the possibility of accepting an appointment there. During the course of the visit, Everett Hughes and I fell to discussing the subject that inevitably dominates such occasions: what kind of research I was doing. I talked about my work on collective behavior, which was just beginning in earnest at that time. During the lively conversation that followed he happened to ask me—almost as an aside—why it was that panics were almost always followed by episodes of scapegoating. I doubt if he even remembers asking me the question, but it struck me with great force and in the coming months served as one of those orienting questions that conditioned much of my reading and provided a basis for a substantial amount of theoretical formulation. Which men have influenced me most in a general way? Among the classics the European theorists have been much more important than the American sociologists. I have in mind Karl Marx, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Robert Michels in particular. For some reason not entirely clear to me, the intellectual style of the French—

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including not only Durkheim and Tocqueville but also others like Paul Mantoux, Elie Halevy, Hippolyte Taine, and Georges Lefebvre—has seemed to possess a profundity, brilliance, and elegance that set their work apart as a very special and exciting kind of aesthetic experience for me. Among the Americans who have influenced me the most, Talcott Parsons stands far above others. (Of course, much of his work has been an attempt to synthesize the work of the major European theorists.) I should also mention the importance of the generation of teachers who pioneered the interdisciplinary Social Relations Department when I was there—particularly Stouffer, Allport, Moore, Henry Murray, Clyde Kluckhohn, Robert White, Gardner Lindzey, and Daniel J. Levinson. Subsequently I have profited much from the works of Robert Merton, Paul Lazarsfeld, and Wilbert Moore. Years of colleagueship, joint teaching, and friendship with my Berkeley associates also yielded important and continuing influences that are too numerous to detail; but among these the work of Seymour Martin Lipset has meant the most for my intellectual career.

The Vicissitudes of Grappling with Intellectual Problems With few exceptions the influences I have mentioned thus far have been quite general. They have conditioned my choice of sociological problems— problems dealing with the interrelations of different institutional complexes; the determinants and typical processes of collective behavior and social change; the character of theory in the social sciences; and the systematic relations among the various behavioral and social sciences. A more specific kind of influence—one emanating more from within than without—is the vicissitudes, both successes and failures, that I have experienced once I have attempted to come to grips with a sociological problem. Regarding these vicissitudes generally (I shall illustrate them concretely later), I think they fall into three main groups: 1. On dozens of occasions—writing term papers, preparing lectures, tracking down a tradition of literature, or composing a chapter of a book—I have experienced episodes of inquiry that have proved fruitless and frustrating. I have often been in hot pursuit of some suspected theoretical relationship or empirical association, only to discover later that I have been following a blind alley or sinking myself

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into an intellectual morass. While by no means pleasant psychologically, these episodes have nonetheless often proved indirectly productive, in that they have led me to turn—in a fit of frustration—to some new and more productive line of inquiry that attempts to avoid the pitfalls and disappointments of the one that has failed. 2. On the other hand, when I have experienced what I am convinced is a productive solution of a problem, the gratifications are enormous, and the impulse to press on for more solutions of a similar kind is very powerful. The principle of “reinforcement” that arises when I have experienced a feeling of creativity has also influenced my selection of subsequent problems. 3. In the last analysis, of course, no solution to an intellectual or scientific problem is ever final, and the gratifications are only relative. After grappling with a problem and reaching a state of relative closure or exhaustion (and sometimes both), I have always been beset with a gnawing recognition that many questions remain unanswered and that many theoretical gaps remain, even though the book or article is finished. Many of the new problems I have encountered have arisen from my awareness of the imperfect solution of past ones.

a personal history of scanning and s e ar c h i n g f o r p r ob le m s So much for a partial listing of factors—some very general and some very specific—that have influenced my career and my choice of sociological problems. At any given time, these influences combine and recombine in complex and seemingly fortuitous ways. To illustrate this principle of combination and recombination, I should like to give an account of the origin of my interest in structural differentiation in the Industrial Revolution, my interests in collective behavior, and some links among these interests.

The Industrial Revolution and Structural Differentiation My PhD thesis, later published as Social Change in the Industrial Revolution, focused on a number of sociological problems, but all of these flowed from my attempt to account systematically for the directions of structural change in the British cotton industry and in the family struc-

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ture of the working classes in that industry between 1770 and 1840. Many influences over several years built up to my selection of that set of problems and my attempt to carry out a study that would throw light on them. I shall try to identify the main turning points. As I indicated, my interest in becoming a social scientist developed early, and my undergraduate years at Harvard strengthened this intention. When I graduated I knew I wanted to enter graduate school in either sociology or psychology. But I was also quite concerned—as many others of my generation seemed to be—about the danger of intellectual narrowing if I were to proceed immediately into graduate training in the same subject— and especially at the same institution. So in 1952 I applied for a variety of opportunities to go abroad for a year or more to gain some contrasting experiences before going on to graduate school. The first turning point that began to lead me in the direction of my study of structural differentiation in British society was my decision on a course of study while on a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford. My firm intention not to specialize further in sociology at Oxford was strengthened by Oxford’s notable weakness in that area at that time. So I decided to devote two years of study to some branch of the social sciences that would differ from and perhaps be more rigorous than any subsequent major interest in sociology or psychology. The two viable means to this end that I saw at Oxford were Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) or Philosophy, Psychology, and Physiology (PPP). In the end I chose the former because of my strong—but unverified—impression that psychology at Oxford was not sufficiently “human”—that is, that it was too experimental and too much devoted to the study of animals. PPE meant reading in six areas— general philosophy (mainly post-Cartesian with an emphasis on linguistic analysis); moral and political philosophy (also with the linguistic emphasis); economic principles; economic organization; comparative politics; British political history since 1832; and two additional elective papers. Wishing to expose myself to the more rigorous aspects of these fields, I elected logic and economic statistics. Toward the end of my first year at Oxford an event turned me in the unlikely direction of economic history. Up to that time, economic history would have had to receive my nomination as the dullest subject on earth. I still recall history courses in high school and college—and especially those

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parts that dealt with technological change in the Industrial Revolution—as exceptionally dreary and uninspiring. In the spring of 1953, G. D. N. Worswick, my tutor in economics, recommended that I compete for the George Webb Medley Prize in economics of that year. Competition for the prize meant sitting for twelve hours of written examinations on four subjects, one of which was economic history. I accepted Worswick’s invitation and spent much of the summer of 1953 grudgingly exposing myself to the works of George Clapham and numerous other scholars of British and continental economic history. During that summer I sensed I was beginning to develop, almost against my will, an interest in not only the facts but also the problems of economic history. The next in the series of important—and seemingly accidental—turning points was Parsons’s appointment as visiting professor at Cambridge University in 1953–54 and his decision in the fall of 1953 to lecture on the subject of the relations between economic and sociological theory. As an undergraduate, I had taken and audited courses with Parsons, and we had become acquainted with one another. He sent me a copy of the Marshall Lectures in the winter of 1953, and when he came to Oxford a few weeks later we met for him to hear my comments, criticisms, and suggestions for possible revision. One of the reasons why Parsons had sought my reactions was that he was aware that I had been exposed to recent developments in economic theory more than he and that I was more familiar with the contemporary literature on economic growth and economic history. On the basis of our conversations in Oxford—and on the basis of a more thorough written criticism subsequently prepared by myself and William R. Moffat (my college roommate and graduate student in economics at Harvard who also happened to be in Oxford in 1953–54)—Parsons invited me to the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies in the summer of 1954 to work for ten days to assist him in revising the Marshall Lectures for publication. I remember those days at Salzburg as being enormously exciting and productive. At that time Parsons asked me to continue working with him on the lectures during the following year at Harvard, where I had been accepted as a graduate student in social relations. In the fall of 1954 Parsons suggested that we collaborate in writing the book that was eventually published under the title of Economy and Society (Parsons and Smelser 1956).

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In the spring of 1954, even before the work with Parsons had begun, I had given some thought to devoting some future research on a topic involving the interpretation of social changes during the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain. At that time, however, my interest in such a topic was mainly a pragmatic one: it would permit me to combine my sociological interests with my knowledge of British economic and social history that had been acquired at Oxford. My collaboration with Parsons on Economy and Society, however, crystallized and refashioned this interest in several ways. First, the collaboration was an exceptionally rewarding experience. All those who have worked closely with Parsons are aware of the vitality and originality of his mind, and I consider myself particularly fortunate to have been so intimately involved in an ongoing intellectual enterprise with him. In particular, I was struck with the free-ranging qualities of his mind and his ability to draw a multitude of theoretical observations from what appeared at first sight to be an obvious and straightforward fact or proposition. I also noticed a persistent difference in our intellectual styles. As we would pursue some line of theoretical reasoning, Parsons would be inclined to carry it forward relentlessly to the last of its logical implications. By contrast, my inclination would be to pause from time to time in these intellectual flights to look downward toward the empirical implications of what we were doing. Even at the time I sensed that the tension generated by these differences in style was very helpful for our collaborative efforts. More particularly, the collaboration channeled my interest in pursuing research on processes of social change during the Industrial Revolution in Britain. In chapter 5 of Economy and Society Parsons and I developed the model of structural differentiation as it might apply to economic institutions. The treatment was mainly a theoretical one, and we supplied only a minimum of empirical information from the recent history of American business corporations. I took an active part in drafting and reworking this chapter and became greatly impressed with the potential empirical applications of the model. I was also aware of the limitations of our single empirical illustration, and I came to feel that conducting a really substantial historical investigation within this framework would be much more telling than extending the number of casual illustrations. Another less positive factor increased my enthusiasm for the empirical study of structural differentiation. As I recall, the mid-1950s were the

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heyday of two types of criticisms of Parsons’s theory of action (though these criticisms have continued to this day). The first is the criticism that the theory of action focuses almost exclusively on static phenomena and is unable to shed light on processes of change. The second is the criticism that the theory of action is too abstract and “grand,” unable to be applied systematically to empirical problems and empirical data. I felt then—and continue to feel—that many variants of these criticisms are erroneous or misplaced. On the other hand, I was—and continue to be—keenly aware of the general significance and partial validity of these lines of criticism of existing action theory. I envisioned my study of structural differentiation as an effort to do something constructive in response to these criticisms. I wanted to assess the potential of the theory of action for analyzing social dynamics in a concrete historical setting. This vision has persisted in one way or another ever since that time and has been one of the concerns that have conditioned my choice of new sociological problems. Two other factors influenced my research on the problem of structural differentiation. The first was the suggestion of Walter W. Rostow, then of the Massachusetts of Technology, that I limit my study to the cotton industry. Rostow argued forcefully that I could learn more about the processes I wanted to study by an intensive examination of an important case than by a relatively superficial coverage of all British economic and social history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I owe a great deal to Rostow for this suggestion, since it permitted me to cover a mass of data in detail and to illustrate the model of differentiation intensively in very specific historical manifestations. I accepted his argument with some reluctance at the time, because I remembered my earlier exposure to the story of the jennies, the mules, and the rest with distaste and boredom. Oddly enough, however, when I went to the British Museum and began to plunge myself into the technological history of the British cotton industry, I found it fascinating! I was astounded to find myself searching through treatise after treatise on machines and productive processes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and even spending some Sunday afternoons studying old jennies and water-frames in the museums. I think what made this dreary stuff fascinating was the fact that I was now regarding it not as descriptive history but within a novel perspective of social change. I had to conclude, ironically, that there are no such things as

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intrinsically interesting or uninteresting facts, but rather that facts gain their interest mainly from the perspective in which they are viewed. Finally, I think my definition of the problem was conditioned by the ghost of Karl Marx and by his earthly representative, Barrington Moore, who had brought Marx’s work alive for me. Marx had much to say about the behavior of workers in the Industrial Revolution, and I took the occasion to criticize his formulations and explanations in my monograph. I undoubtedly would have read Marx for my study in any case, and commented on the adequacy of his scholarship, but I also feel that my keen interest in the issues posed by Marx is in part a result of the considerable influence that Moore’s treatment of Marx had on me. To generalize from this biographical sketch, it seems to me that the choice of a sociological problem—in this case the problem of explaining the structural changes in industrial and family structure during a given historical period—invariably is determined at a multiplicity of levels and has a myriad of meanings. My definition of the problem and my method of attacking it involved a complicated synthesis. I was not only attempting to apply my current ideas to an empirical situation but also reacting continuously to many unresolved questions, unanswered criticisms, undigested insights, and unlaid ghosts that had accumulated during my years of exposure to teachers and authors, as well as my general experience. Moreover, much mystery shrouds the process by which one synthesizes these ingredients. With effort I can enumerate some of the influences on my own choice of the problem, but the nature of the synthetic process itself, as well as principles by which only a few among thousands of possible influences are selected for synthesis, lies beyond recollection or insight.

The Transition to a General Interest in Collective Behavior Within a few months after the completion of the monograph on structural differentiation in the Industrial Revolution, I decided to embark on an ambitious theoretical and empirical treatment of the causes and characteristics of collective outbursts and collective movements. This shift in interest also coincided with my completion of graduate training at Harvard and my move to a faculty position at the University of California, Berkeley.

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My selection of this enterprise was conditioned by a residue of gratifications and frustrations that remained after the completion of the monograph on the Industrial Revolution. I was satisfied that I had partially attained my explicit objective of extending some aspects of the theory of action in the direction of explaining social dynamics, and supplementing it with a disciplined, large-scale empirical investigation. I was eager to press forward with further extensions along similar lines. I was especially gratified with historical insights I had been able to generate about the content, symbolism, timing, and course of development of the social movements that had gripped the British working classes during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I felt that my effort to explain those movements by reference to the exigencies created by ongoing structural changes constituted one of the most novel, original, and controversial parts of that book. I was also eager to extend this kind of analysis further. For both of these reasons I was propelled in the direction of a general theoretical and empirical treatise on collective behavior. My interest in collective behavior was shaped by frustration as well as gratification. I was aware at the time of its completion that my monograph on structural differentiation bristled with unsettled questions. In some cases this awareness was quite explicit. For example, I was not satisfied with the assumption that cultural values do not change during an episode of structural differentiation. While perhaps necessary to make the model manageable, this assumption clearly made difficult the application of the model to historical sequences involving changes in cultural values. I wanted to extend the model to cover cases in which values as well as social structures change. Again, I was well aware of the limitations of the assumption that “symptoms of disturbance” in groups are always effectively handled and channeled by agencies of social control; it was obvious to me, even though I had made use of this simplifying assumption, that agencies of social control vary in their response to social disturbances and that their response is an important determinant of the subsequent direction of social change. I wanted to relax this assumption as well, and to inquire into situations in which social disturbances were not brought under control by public authorities and other agencies of control. In both these cases I wanted to transform some of the fixed assumptions of the model of differentiation into operative variables.

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Sometimes, however, the frustration took the form of a vague, gnawing dissatisfaction. One instance of this kind of frustration was triggered by a comment by Robert Merton when he was reviewing my thesis for publication by the University of Chicago Press. He remarked that the model of differentiation was “consistent with but not derived from” the framework of action I had adopted from the work of Parsons and his associates. I was aware that the model of differentiation, as applied in Social Change in the Industrial Revolution, was an extremely powerful device for sorting out and partially explaining historical sequences, but I was also aware that my account of structural change in the British industrial revolution was not, strictly speaking, derivable from the categories of the framework of the theory of action. I was vaguely aware, in short, that the categories of the theory of action required some supplementation if that framework were to be brought closer to the desideratum of being a deductive, explanatory model. I was also dimly aware of a certain amount of what might be called “theoretical hedging” that I had done in applying the model of structural differentiation. On the one hand, I had presented the model as a temporal sequence of steps; but on the other hand I had acknowledged the possibilities of “skipping steps,” “regressions to earlier steps,” “truncated sequences,” et cetera—all of which could be used as theoretical escape hatches if some particular historical sequence did not happen to match the one that was called for by the model of differentiation. I felt a vague uneasiness that the representation of the model of differentiation as a sequence of temporal steps or stages was theoretically unsatisfactory, but as yet I didn’t know how it might be represented in any better way. Such were some of the satisfactions and dissatisfactions I inherited from my monograph on the Industrial Revolution. They influenced both my choice of collective behavior as a topic and my modifications of theoretical approach. The theoretical product that emerged—the “valueadded” model—evolved largely in response to these influences. But I should also mention two “false starts” in my work on collective behavior that were very important in the formulation of the value-added model. As I began to work on the theoretical aspects of collective behavior, I wanted to make my account of the field not only “consistent with” but more nearly “derived from” the theoretical framework within which I was working. To explore this possibility, I undertook to refine some of the

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ingredients of the theory of action—in particular the “resource table” (Parsons and Smelser 1956; Smelser 1959)—and to attempt to derive from it some empirical propositions concerning the causes underlying collective outbursts and collective movements. I spent several months trying systematically to exploit these ingredients of the theory of action. Much of this work was rewarding, for the table of components of action proved to be a useful device in classifying the types of collective behavior, as well as the types of strain and types of belief systems that give rise to episodes of collective behavior (Smelser 1962). But that framework was not helpful in providing variables that might identify the determinants of these kinds of episodes. The lack of success—and the accompanying frustration—of this search also lies behind an important passage in the book: “[The framework of the table of components of social action] is a language for describing and classifying action. It is a ‘flow chart’ for tracing the course of action, and not a direct source of explanatory hypotheses” (383). That sentence affirmed my conviction that a theory of collective behavior was not directly derivable from the components of the theory of action, even though those components are very useful as a descriptive and classificatory device and as a basic grounding for theory construction and systematic empirical investigation. The second false start concerned my early conceptualization of the empirical determinants of the different kinds of collective behavior. Early in my work on the book—though after I had arrived at the classification of types of collective behavior and types of strain—I entertained the notion that the two classifications could be matched in terms of independent and dependent variables. For example, I believed that strain on situational facilities (ambiguity) could be linked causally to those types of collective outburst that envisioned a reconstitution of facilities (panic and craze); that normative conflict could be linked causally to the norm-oriented movement; that value-conflict could be related causally to the valueoriented movement; and so on. I began my exhaustive survey of the conditions underlying episodes of collective behavior with the belief that strong historical associations between definite types of strain and definite types of movement would be evident. Unfortunately the historical literature didn’t oblige. After months of voracious reading on collective outbursts and movements, I came to the somewhat tiny and painful conclusion that

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any kind of strain could play a causal role in any kind of collective behavior. The literature had forced me to beat a retreat to a position of almost complete indeterminacy. My value-added model was born in the context of this double disappointment—disappointment in my failure to derive causal propositions directly from the components of action, and disappointment in my failure to establish strong empirical associations between a type of strain and a type of collective behavior. As for the variables in the value-added model itself—structural conduciveness, strain, generalized belief, precipitating factor, mobilization, and social control—these were taken from at least three sources: (1) the notion of generalization and respecification that had proven important in the model of structural differentiation; (2) the Parsonian model of deviance and social control (Parsons 1951); and (3) my own observations on the hundreds of empirical accounts of episodes of collective behavior I had been reading. The logic of the combinatorial accumulation of variables—which was not entirely original but which had not been brought to bear as systematically on collective behavior before—came to me originally from economics but occupied a central place in the notion of hierarchy of control in the theory of action and had played a role in my earlier work on structural differentiation. Mainly, however, it grew from my desire to acknowledge the indeterminacy of the connection between a single type of movement (e.g., hostile outburst) and a single type of strain (e.g., deprivation), but at the same time to explicate in a determinate way the conditions under which an episode of collective behavior develops. The value-added model was an effort to gain an increase in explanatory determinacy by combining a number of variables—each indeterminate by itself—into a number of different patterns, each one of which would be associated with a distinctive type of collective behavior. And finally, the value-added model was conceptualized as a purely analytic rather than a temporal sequence, and this was an attempt to avoid some of the problems that arose in connection with the notion of temporal stages in the model of structural differentiation. As I read the retrospective accounts of my interest in the process of structural differentiation and in collective behavior, respectively, I am struck by a contrast. The former is characterized by an “accumulation of accidents”—for example, influence and suggestions by teachers and

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scholars, the fortuitous presence of a supervisor, and so on—whereas the latter is characterized by a more deliberate and independent attempt on my part to work out promises and unsolved problems that grew out of my prior work. Why this contrast? In one way the contrast is not surprising, since one research project emerged in my formative student days, which are inevitably more diversified, open, and tentative from the standpoint of professional commitment and choice of sociological problems. These are years of absorption and learning, whereas the latter period is one of independent pursuit of sociological problems. However, I think another element underlies the contrast. With publication of Social Change in the Industrial Revolution, I had for the first time committed myself publicly to stand by the fruits of my individual thought and research. A book of one’s own is much more an act of commitment than a seminar paper, a classroom discussion, or even a jointly authored article or book. To publish under one’s own name is an act of considerable professional and tremendous personal significance. To publish a book adds a new and powerful “intellectual influence” on oneself. Not only is it gratifying, but its residue of gaps and unsolved problems tends to generate increased self-criticism and to guide new research toward improved solutions.

the oretical gaps and further work In 1966 I was asked to deliver a paper on the topic of research frontiers in collective behavior before the social psychology section at the meetings of the American Sociological Association in Miami Beach. On that occasion I took the opportunity to reflect on the theoretical gaps in the field. It will come as no surprise that in a “think-session” of this sort my reflections were in large part autobiographical, and I was thinking of the unresolved problems in my own work as much as those of the field as a whole. The main emphasis in the paper was on the need for a determinate synthesis of the several classes of variables that are essential for the explanation of collective behavior—cultural, social, psychological, ecological, and other variables. In particular, I singled out what I considered to be the unfortunate tendency for the social and psychological approaches to col-

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lective behavior to have bifurcated in recent decades. In the paper I gave the following programmatic exhortation: It is essential that a closer marriage between the social and psychological approaches be attained if theoretical and empirical advances are to be made in the study of collective behavior. This marriage requires the development of interactive models, whereby various social-structural factors are seen as impinging on the psyche, which processes these factors, gives them new meaning, and modifies them. The social factors, thus redefined, excite new psychological tendencies, which in turn further condition the social factors. In such models, the whole interaction process moves toward some kind of behavioral or action outcome. I personally like to think of such models in terms of the various kinds of factors that impinge on the meaning-systems by which individuals relate themselves to the world. (Smelser 1966)

What lay behind this statement? One set of background factors was my long-standing interest in psychoanalytic psychology and, more immediately, my experience as a research training candidate in the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute. As an undergraduate I had taken more work in personality psychology than in any other subfield of social relations. I was also aware that a number of my “role models”—Murray, Kluckhohn, Parsons, Lindzey, and Inkeles—had undertaken psychoanalytic training. From my undergraduate years on I held the intention, sometimes vague and sometimes firm, to enter psychoanalytic training, but for a number of personal and financial reasons my decision was delayed until 1962. Among the many influences of this intensive training on my life has been a growing recognition of the importance of depth-psychological variables in the genesis of episodes of collective behavior and a growing conviction that the dynamics and symbolism of such episodes cannot be understood without close reference to these variables. In addition to this general movement toward the psychological, my statement was based on a number of specific dissatisfactions with my own work, which had been predominantly sociological in approach. Among these, the following were most important: 1. Because I had focused on sociological determinants of collective episodes, I had made a number of psychological assumptions that served

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as “constants” or “parameters” of the theory. For example, in both the monograph on the Industrial Revolution and the book on collective behavior I had assumed that conditions of social strain manifest themselves psychologically as anxiety, hostility, and fantasies of a better world, and that these psychological reactions would in turn lead people to join in various kinds of collective action, such as reform and revolutionary movements. Such gross psychological assumptions are likely to be oversimple, wrong empirically, or both. They assume a common reaction to social strain, and they do not envision any kind of individual psychological processing that would influence both the reaction to strain and the propensity to enter a collective movement. Surely an adequate theory of collective behavior requires incorporation of both classes of variables, with specific feedback relations between them. 2. In Theory of Collective Behavior I argued that the several variables in the value-added model constitute a series of diminishing levels of generality and that the influence of the less specific variables could be considered as operating within the scope established by the more general ones. This scheme was advanced as a way of increasing the determinacy of explanation of episodes of behavior that are conditioned by a large number of factors. But the conditions under which each successive variable is activated were not made clear. For example, structural conduciveness is a permissive variable and has little if anything to do with the conditions that create structural strain. Strain, however, is a direct causal factor in the development of a generalized belief, and a generalized belief is a direct causal agent in the mobilization of individuals for some sort of collective effort to relieve the situation of strain. Given these circumstances, the following question arises: If a variable in the model is not activated by the variable immediately “preceding” it in the value-added series, what are the conditions that activate it? This question was not satisfactorily answered in Theory of Collective Behavior, and I have not been able to answer it to my satisfaction since the book’s appearance. Any answer, however, must take account of the psychological characteristics of the individuals that become involved in episodes of collective behavior, as well as the social situations that influence them. 3. Granted the need for well-founded psychological principles to supplement the account of social conditions that give rise to collective behavior, an additional problem immediately arises: By what means can the variables of these two analytical levels—the social and the psychological—be combined to provide a more comprehensive

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account of episodes of collective behavior? In thinking about this problem I have concluded that its satisfactory resolution can be based neither on any variant of sociological reductionism (such as an extension of my theory in Theory of Collective Behavior would entail) nor on any variant of psychological reductionism (such as Homans’s [1964] solution to the ambiguities in my monograph on the Industrial Revolution). Some kind of interactive model is essential.

These kinds of questions nagged me throughout my work on collective behavior and have continued to nag me since. One line of my professional work for the past seven or eight years has been conditioned by my awareness of these unanswered questions. In 1961 and 1966 I wrote papers attempting to clarify the respective roles of the social situation and the personality in the genesis of psychological stress (Smelser 1961, 1966); one motive for writing these papers was the desire to come to terms with the phenomenon of strain as a variable in the genesis of psychological stress. In 1963 my brother and I undertook to survey the literature on the relations between personality and social systems and attempted to order the best research on these relations into a collection of articles (Smelser and Smelser 1963). In 1966 I wrote an essay on the usefulness of the social and psychological—especially psychoanalytic—approaches to the explanation of collective behavior (Smelser 1968a). And within the past year I have written two theoretical papers on the relations between sociological and psychological theory (Smelser 1968b, 1968c). These several efforts, however, constitute only preliminary forays into social psychology, and I do not consider that the theoretical gaps and problems have been much resolved as yet. The unanswered questions are many, and they continue to haunt me. I suppose, if my personal history is any guide, that a considerable portion of my future work will be devoted to unscrambling the mysteries that shroud the relations between sociology and psychology.

r e f e r en c e s Allport, Gordon W., and Leo Postman. 1947. The Psychology of Rumor. New York: Henry Holt.

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Homans, George C. 1964. “Bringing Men Back In.” American Sociological Review 29:809–18. Merton, Robert K. 1959. “Notes on Problem-Finding in Sociology.” In Sociology Today, edited by Robert K. Merton, Leonard Broom, and Leonard S. Cottrell Jr., xii–xxix. New York: Basic Books. Parsons, Talcott. 1951. The Social System. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Parsons, Talcott, and Neil J. Smelser. 1956. Economy and Society. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Smelser, Neil J. 1959. Social Change in the Industrial Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. . 1961. “Social and Psychological Sources of Stress.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, New York. . 1962. Theory of Collective Behavior. New York: Free Press of Glencoe. . 1966. “1970 Frontiers of Research and Collective Behavior.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Miami Beach, FL. . 1968a. Essays in Sociological Explanation. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. . 1968b. “Personality and the Explanation of Political Phenomena at the Social-System Level.” Journal of Social Issues 24:111–25. . 1968c. “Sociological Theory and Psychological Theory.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Boston. . 1969. “The Optimum Scope of Sociology.” In A Design for Sociology: Scope, Objectives, and Methods, edited by Robert Bierstedt, 1–21. Philadelphia: American Academy of Political and Social Science. Smelser, Neil J., and William T. Smelser, eds. 1963. Personality and Social Systems. New York: John Wiley and Sons.

part ii

Later Explorations

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Biography, the Structure of Explanation, and the Evaluation of Research in Sociology (1980)

One of the maxims that my teacher and friend Talcott Parsons was fond of repeating was this: in dealing with any theoretical topic, it never fails to repay one’s efforts to go first to the great classical thinkers on that topic. Parsons himself observed that principle repeatedly, revisiting and recasting the original insights of Durkheim, Weber, or Freud as he continued his lifelong struggle to conquer the mountainous obstacles to systematic sociological theory. In considering once again—at the request of Tad Blalock—the relation between theory and research in sociology, I decided to attend to this principle as well. And the classic that beckoned first and foremost was the pair of essays written more than three decades ago by Robert Merton—“The Bearing of Sociological Theory on Empirical Research” (1968b) and “The Bearing of Empirical Research on Sociological Theory” (1968a). I daresay that these essays constitute the most widely read methodological statements in the history of sociology. And in consulting them again, I became convinced why they should be regarded as classics. They remain unsurpassed in From Sociological Theory and Research: A Critical Approach, edited by Hubert M. Blalock Jr., 23–30. New York: Free Press, 1980.

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crispness, clarity, and soundness of thinking. And Merton captured the essential mutuality between the two facts of scientific knowledge, as he traced the data-organizing capacities of different orders of sociological ideas, ranged in a scale of explicitness and formality, on the one hand, and the stubborn power of empirical data to divert, recast, refocus, and clarify sociological ideas, on the other. In my restudy of Merton’s essays I developed three distinct reactions, which, taken together, constitute the point of departure for the few ideas and distinctions I want to develop in this brief essay. My reactions were these: 1. In introducing his first essay, Merton distinguished between sociological theory, “which has for its subject matter certain aspects and results of the interaction of men and is therefore substantive,” and methodology, which deals with “the logic of scientific procedure” (1968a, 153). While based on a true difference, this distinction between substantive theory and methodological canons, if regarded as marking two mutually exclusive categories, begs for correction and reformulation. Methodology—or the application of the canons of correct procedure—surely pervades the entire structure and process of scientific thinking, and one can be as rigorous methodologically in assessing the clarity, consistency, and elegance of substantive theory as in evaluating the design and execution of empirical research. Moreover, the theorist’s substantive preoccupations surely condition, if they do not dictate, his use of research methods and procedure. 2. In many respects, Merton’s essay struck me as more nearly a statement of scientific ideals than an effort to describe how social investigators actually proceed. Or, to put the point more precisely, he set apart those two facets of the scientific enterprise from one another only incompletely. While from time to time Merton pointed to deviations from the ideal of scientific explanation—for example, in his sensitive account of the limitations of post factum interpretations—his essays stand more firmly as a statement of how theory and research ought to affect one another than as a statement of the way they do in practice. 3. My last reaction is most impressionistic of all. Although Merton stressed the interplay of theory and organized factual knowledge, I found his account to be more precise and compelling with respect to the power of discovered or established facts to influence substantive

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formulations than with respect to the influence running in the opposite direction. I believe that Merton’s statement can best be further developed by deepening and sharpening our understanding of the power of our sociological ideas to shape what we try to know about the empirical world.

These three reactions lead me to a formal statement of departure: the need to press further and specify the actual operations of bringing general sociological explanations (or theory) to bear on the organization of empirical research.

an illustration from ongoing historical r e s e ar c h I wish to base my explorations on historical research, not necessarily because I am convinced that historically based sociological explanations are really that different from any other explanations, but rather because I am currently engaged in an effort to generate a systematic understanding and explanation of certain historical processes. For the past two years I have been residing part time once again in the British Museum Library, in an effort to generate a sociological account of the vicissitudes of British primary education in the nineteenth century, particularly in comparison with developments in the United States during the same period. My main points about the research will be methodological. But to make them I must write a little about how I am thinking—or, if you wish to dignify it, the model I am using—in approaching this problem. Several features of the spread of primary education in Britain are striking and fascinating to the historical observer. The first is its sluggishness. Both contemporaries and historians stress this, forever comparing it unfavorably with educational developments in Prussia, the United States, Holland, and to some extent France. The second is its unevenness, building by episodic bursts in the Sunday school period of the late eighteenth century, the Bell-Lancaster period of the early nineteenth century, the fifteen years following the period of government initiative in 1846, and the fifteen years following the parliamentary legislation of 1870. Between these episodes could be observed signs of floundering and stagnation. And the third

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remarkable feature of the century was the tendency of primary education to proliferate in separate, almost exclusive streams along certain lines of primordial division; British schools were neither common nor universal but were consistently segregated by class, religious grouping, nation (i.e., England, Scotland, Ireland, and to some extent Wales), and sex. As my research on British educational development has proceeded, a certain explanatory scheme has been crystallizing. Its origins are diverse, being based in part on other statements of social change, in part on my own theoretical predilections and knowledge, and in part on what is being suggested by the historical record. The central feature of this scheme is as follows: the political and economic pressures to educate the British population were enormously strong in the nineteenth century, as they were elsewhere. But the precise pattern of educational development itself can best be accounted for by a pervading principle: British primary education developed in the way it did—with the remarkable features I have mentioned—because it was prevented by a context of social structure and group conflicts from developing otherwise. Lest this principle seem both simple-minded and circular, let me say immediately what it meant historically. Through a series of battles in the early and middle nineteenth century it became clear that the Church of England could not enforce its avowed historical monopoly on the education of the young; the Nonconformist and later the Catholic protests effectively beat down the church’s efforts along these lines. Yet the church was sufficiently powerful to enforce its argument either that the state should stay completely out of education or that, if it should tax to support education, education should be managed by the church. Nonconformists and others, however, protested against supporting a system—either by paying taxes or by sending their children to it—based on a religion they rejected. Ireland’s Catholics refused to support established Church of Ireland schools, and that church beat down state support for Catholic schools. Segregation by class and sex was so deeply rooted early in the century that providers and clientele alike assumed that education should be stratified and segregated along both lines; reformers scarcely suggested otherwise until the end of the century and later. Faced with these various structural and group rigidities, the state and others interested in educational reform navigated precariously among

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them and evolved minimalist policies that were barely acceptable to all; such were the structural origins of the principle of voluntarist growth that characterized British education for so long—a matching-fund system that left management of the schools in the hands of competing religious and national groups, who pressed educational development forward through a process by which each strove aggressively to expand or defend its turf. Only after these structural rigidities and group relations had shifted significantly, later in the century, could other kinds of educational development occur, and even then their influence on that development continued to be important. So much for an indication of the kind of theoretical framework I am attempting to bring to bear on my historical subject. One day I shall write a whole book on this topic and expose the explanatory potential of this scheme to critical appraisal. But in the meantime I would like to present a few ideas about what appears to have gone on, at several levels, in the development of what I have sketched.

th r e e l ev el s of p r oc e ss i n s o c i a l s c i e n c e s c h o l ar s h i p The Biographical Level: Meanderings The first level of process to identify in the research enterprise is the biographical one. A biographical story would include an account of how I first approached the problem of primary education from the perspective of age grading and age stratification as it has recently developed in American social science literature but found myself being pulled increasingly toward other perspectives, especially religious and other group conflict. It would include an account of my encounter with various revisionist and Marxist writers on British primary education and the complicated pattern of my acceptance and critical rejection of their explanations. It would include perhaps a dozen encounters with audiences of sociologists and British historians who listened to what I had to say—at various stages of my thinking—and who applauded, qualified, and shot down various ideas and thus further shaped my thinking. It would include an account of the moments of frustration over time spent in false starts, moments of euphoria as new

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interpretative insights flashed into my mind, and moments of disappointment as I later discovered how limited were these insights. But above all, the biographical story is an unsystematic, even untidy one. It cannot be readily ordered into a progression of refinements that ultimately result in more scientifically adequate statements. It cannot be chronicled as any inductive movement from facts to theory or any deductive movement in the opposite direction. Rather, it is a somewhat chaotic bouncing around among fantasies, hunches, hypotheses, factual accounts, and disputations and debates among other scholars about facts and interpretations. Certainly it cannot be assimilated, as process, to any formal account—for example, that of Walter Wallace (1971)—of the ingredients of the scientific method.

The Level of Building Explanations: Operations Required In building up the explanatory sketch about British primary education in the nineteenth century, one must first acknowledge that it is necessary to select certain problems and certain ranges of data and to exclude others. The perspective I outlined selects and highlights specific sociological categories such as institutional arrangements (especially those with ascriptive salience), group conflicts that swirl around those arrangements, and individual and collective strategies that take those arrangements and conflicts into account. It also selects and highlights historical events and situations subsumable under those categories. At the same time it diminishes interest in, even excludes, other problems and facts. My perspective evokes little interest in the marginality of the nineteenth-century schoolmaster and his striving for respectability; little interest in government account keeping and budgeting; and no interest whatsoever in the state of health of the children or the ventilation of the schools—all facts that were important in the minds of some historical actors and that would be important to me if I were bringing another kind of explanatory framework to bear. This process of selection and exclusion is, moreover, necessary if we are to strive for any kind of general and determinate theoretical explanation. Theoretically based explanation calls for ruling out all but a few potentially interesting problems, all but a few explanatory factors, and all but a

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few types of potentially available data. Everything does not and cannot pass as fair game for study and analysis. The less discriminatory we become in identifying problems and explanatory variables, the more we permit theoretical structure to melt away, and the more nearly we approach shapeless eclecticism on the explanatory side and vacuum-sweeper description on the factual side. In sum, to bring theoretical explanation to bear is simultaneously to select, exclude, and thereby distort the whole historical record. The next operation involved in theoretically based explanation is that, for the range of historical facts selected and highlighted, we as investigators endow those facts with special meanings for the historical actors involved. This process of endowment is seen clearly in the special psychological assumptions and assertions in my explanatory sketch. To illustrate: in my presentation I revealed a number of psychological generalizations. I assumed, for example, that location in a given corner of the social structure (e.g., membership in a church) carries with it a jurisdictional interest in that corner; I also assumed that educational reformers and government bureaucrats had a historical memory of what had failed as reform in the past, and what was possible and not possible; and, more generally, the “image of human nature” that emerges from the sketch is of historical actors as purposive, goal-seeking, adaptive, compromising, more or less “satisficing” individuals—not maximizing, but doing what can be done. All these psychological assumptions and images are fair game for criticism and rejection; and certainly one family of assumptions may prove more useful than another in generating historical explanations. But we cannot forget the general point that systematic explanation necessarily requires some kind of meaning to be endowed, or else we do not have an explanation. We cannot deny this truth, however Durkheimian and positivistic we strive to be in relating social regularities to other social regularities in lawlike fashion. For example, to link fluctuations in the price of wheat to fluctuation in rates of collective violence—both eminently qualified social facts—is possible as a matter of empirical association without recourse to some kind of psychological or meaning connection. But to explain the association requires reference to a principle of absolute deprivation, a principle of relative deprivation, or some other intervening psychological connection.

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By pointing to the centrality of the meaning-endowing operation as essential to explanation, moreover, I have brought us to the point of being able to identify a fundamental basis of difference and conflict among several interpretative styles in the social sciences. A strict phenomenologist would assign meaning to historical facts as nearly as possible as the historical actors themselves appear to assign meaning to them; so might a symbolic interactionist. Likewise, an investigator with an emphasis on Verstehen might wish to honor the historical actors’ own endowment of meaning to events, but he or she might wish to amalgamate these meanings into more general, ideal-type categories. Others might seek to be faithful to historical actors’ meanings—as, indeed, my own sketch seeks to do—but might wish to transcend those actors’ renditions and seek a somewhat grander logic. Still others might regard the assignment of meaning to historical actors as a matter of convenience or a heuristic assumption; the endowed meaning (e.g., economic or political rationality) might or might not have anything to do with actors’ own accounts, but might be admittedly relied upon as a simplified conceptual device to render consistent wide ranges of behavior. Still others might regard the historical agents’ assignment of meaning to their actions as positively erroneous or false; the nineteenth-century debates over Bible reading in schools, for example, might be interpreted as distorted renditions of positions that were really dictated by the agenda of class or national interest. These intellectual postures differ from one another with respect to the source from which explanatory meaning is derived; but all alike are forced to the operation of endowing some kind of meaning to weld the selected facts of history into a common explanation. The issue of assigning meanings to others’ minds will forever be with us in the search for sociological explanations. But at the same time, it seems erroneous to chase this truth to fruitless philosophical ends and imagine that really knowing others’ minds (especially when those others are now in the historical past) is achievable or even to be striven for. The operation of knowing others’ minds from the standpoint of social scientific explanation is a matter of the active imposition of some perspective by the investigator, and this operation is to be assessed, not in terms of some kind of “correspondence” between the investigator’s perspective and the mind of the other, but rather in terms of the utility of this operation in generating adequate explanations.

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I also believe that at this point I have reached the heart of the group of issues that George Homans raised fifteen years ago in his presidential address entitled “Bringing Men Back In” (1964). In that address, he scolded various functionalists—he included me among them—for focusing on functional exigencies and on regularities at the social system level. These efforts, he argued, were misguided because they left out the real engine of individual and institutional behavior, which is men and women acting according to definite psychological laws. On the basis of what I have observed, it is possible to weigh the merits of this argument. Insofar as Homans was asserting the necessity of taking some stand on the psychologies of human beings in the construction of sociological theories, he was absolutely right. I would go even further: it is impossible for it to be otherwise—even for the most abstract and unreconstructed functionalist—and still to have any kind of theoretical explanation. It is possible, of course, to downplay and obscure those psychological ingredients. But as is often the case, the carrier of a valid observation often, in enthusiasm, runs too fast and too far with it and in the process overshoots the limits of validity. Homans went too far in his presidential address in two respects: 1. He argued that an essential part of reasserting the importance of the psychology of the human being was to insist that social regularities are derivations from, if not reducible to, psychological laws. Certain psychological assumptions and assertions are essential ingredients of sociological explanations, but they are not the sole basis of their construction. 2. He argued that the basis of this derivation is a specific type of learning theory resting on rewards, costs, and resultant behavior patterns. Such a theory is not without its merits, but surely is not the exclusive ingredient of all valid explanatory theories in sociology at all levels.

The Level of Evaluation: Methodological Questions During the process of research, the investigator engages in—or should engage in—a kind of constant monitoring process, in which he continually asks questions of himself, questions that are generated by the methodological canons of social science research. Are the historical facts authentic? Are they appropriately to be considered as representative instances of the general categories (social groups, social forces, etc.) that are being employed?

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How is it possible to assign causal priority to one of several co-occurring historical facts or trend? Are the causal propositions being invoked rooted in or, better yet, in some way derived from a general theoretical scheme? Is that scheme specified and is it theoretically consistent internally? After the research is completed and written up in book or journal form, others comb over and assess it—or should assess it—with the same order of questions. Posing these kinds of questions enables reviewers to assess the adequacy of the operation and to establish its worth as a scientific product.

a c o n clu d i n g r em a r k In these few pages I have attempted to review some of the processes and levels of activity that transpire in the execution of social science research. I conclude by observing that much confusion has been created in the literature on the methodology and philosophy of the social sciences in compressing the several levels to some statement of the scientific process and thus failing to acknowledge that each of these levels has an independent and legitimate place in that execution. The most common reduction is an overformalization or over-rationalization of the process, in which one imagines that the biographical flow of research should somehow correspond to formal posing of some methodological question (e.g., the question of whether a proposition is supported by the available facts) and then imagines that the biographical flow of activity is, say, deductive or inductive in character. Such reductions obscure the complexity of the research process itself and often lead to misdirected philosophical questions, such as “What is the process of deduction or induction?”—misguided because they confound the process of methodological criticisms of research with the flow of the research process itself. Both processes would probably be better understood if their separate character were acknowledged and honored.

r e f e r en c e s Homans, George. 1964. “Bringing Men Back In.” American Sociological Review 29:809–18.

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Merton, Robert K. 1968a. “The Bearing of Empirical Research on Sociological Theory.” Ch. 5 in Social Theory and Social Structure, 156–71. Rev. and enl. ed. New York: Free Press. . 1968b. “The Bearing of Sociological Theory on Empirical Research.” Ch. 4 in Social Theory and Social Structure, 139–55. Rev. and enl. ed. New York: Free Press. Wallace, Walter L. 1971. The Logic of Science in Sociology. New York: Aldine.

5

External Influences on Sociology (1990)

It is common—and helpful—to distinguish between internal or autonomous forces that shape the development of scientific inquiry on the one hand and those that arise externally in the cultural and social milieus of that scientific enterprise on the other. By the former we refer to the power of unsolved paradigmatic puzzles and implications to drive scientific thought. The readiest of examples come from the “pure” sciences of mathematics, logic, and philosophy. Efforts to solve Zeno’s paradox, efforts to fathom the nature of infinity and the logic of negative numbers, and (perhaps) efforts to divine the existential characteristics of an omnipresent God come to mind. By the latter we refer to those factors that are subsumed under the heading of the sociology of knowledge; these include the influences found in the larger cultural and linguistic contexts within which scientists work, the influences imparted by the social origins and positions of scientists, the hostility or receptivity of the political environment, and the organizational setting (e.g., university, research academy, industry, government) in which the scientific work is executed. From Sociology in America, edited by Herbert Gans, 49–60. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1990.

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It is not always easy to observe this distinction in practice. For example, it is apparent that the main “forces” that have shaped neo-Marxist sociological thought have been scholars’ efforts to come to terms with the fact that many of the predictions that Marx derived from his theoretical diagnosis of capitalism have apparently not come to pass historically—the failure of the major capitalist classes to polarize because of the internal differentiation of each, the failure of the proletariat to develop into a world revolutionary force, and so on. That is to say, new theoretical work has arisen as the original Marxian paradigm has been adapted or elaborated to account for these evident predictive failures. But are those “forces” internal or external to Marxian thought? They are internal in that they are logical parts of the organized corpus of that theory, and any change in their validity status ramifies out and presses for change in its theoretical foundations. They are external, however, in the sense that they are the products of independently generated historical processes that are observable in the development of capitalist societies. This apparent ambiguity complicates any neat effort to identify the precise status of the factors that have influenced the historical development of a field like sociology. In this essay I will allude to the ambiguity from time to time but will make an effort to identify factors that appear to be primarily external to sociology. There is a certain tradition of inquiry in the sociology of sociology with respect to these external factors. We have interpretations of early industrial sociology (that of Mayo [1949] and Roethlisberger and Dickson [1944]) as “managerial sociology” (e.g., Burawoy 1979), suggesting either a direct or an indirect domination of the subfield by the ideology and interests of the business classes; we have Gouldner’s critique (1970) of Parsons’s sociological theory as directed toward fending off, if not denying, the crisis-revolutionary forces in American society associated with the Great Depression and subsequent developments; we have a general book on Western sociology (Reynolds 1977) that is also critical in tone, suggesting the domination of the field by establishmentarian forces; we have the critique by Habermas (1973) and other critical theorists, who regard mainline (i.e., positivist) sociology as a kind of handmaiden of the instrumental/rational/technological interests of the postindustrial state apparatus; and we have at least one example of an analysis that regards

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sociological developments mainly as a result of sociometric and generational dynamics (Mullins 1973). Most of these treatments—and my illustrations are not exhaustive—are critical in character and focus on the business and/or political establishment as the main determining forces in question. As such they tend to be somewhat one-dimensional in character, and can be thus criticized. Reflection alone should tell us that there is a multiplicity of cultural, economic, political, and organizational influences involved in the evolution of a field of knowledge as large and complex as sociology. In keeping with this critical remark, I will develop not one line of analysis but several, and these will fall under the headings of cultural, social, scientific, and political influences on the development and status of sociology. Some general observations will be included, but consistent with the theme of the Presidential Symposium—“America’s Impact on Sociology”— at which this essay was originally presented, most points made will apply to the American scene.

cu ltu ra l i n f lue n c es To speak of cultural influences is to suggest that major motifs and emphases in any national sociological tradition will reflect the implications of the major value and ideological components of the larger culture that harbors it. Several examples come readily to mind: • In Latin American sociology, there is a special emphasis on the political

and class dimensions. It has been declared that even though the starting points of inquiry are work, health, or social protest, all sociological analysis in Latin America ends as political analysis. This is clearly an exaggeration, but any review of the theoretical writings and research in these countries reveals the salience of that theme. • In Great Britain is found a special scholarly fascination with social

stratification and social classes, and the manifestation of these in all other areas of social life, such as education, culture, and family. • Sociological theory in the Soviet Union and the socialist countries in

eastern Europe was for a long time under the ideological shadow of

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often orthodox Marxist-Leninist doctrines and provided only official interpretations of capitalist and socialist societies that left little room for the development of alternative lines of thought; as that shadow has lifted and as other “cultures” are infusing those societies, sociological theory is becoming increasingly varied. • American research on social stratification has stressed individual

mobility more than collective mobility, and upward mobility more than downward mobility. Theses emphases can be seen as manifesting a special preoccupation with the American cultural value of individual achievement. That research has also focused on rates of individual mobility over time and above all on obstacles to mobility (e.g., racial discrimination), which no doubt reveals a sensitivity to the degree to which the American cultural value of equality of opportunity is or is not being realized (Blau and Duncan 1967).

Turning to the American value system more generally, it is possible to cull from the insights of various observers and analysts (Tocqueville 1841; Parsons 1951; Williams 1963) a number of recurrent themes: • Individualism, with an assumption of responsibility for one’s

conduct • Mastery of nature and of one’s fate • Voluntary cooperation as the basis of interaction • Social order based on moral consensus as contrasted with hierarchical

ordering, class, or authority (consistent with early Republican rejection of European patterns of monarchy and aristocracy) • Pragmatism, incrementalism, and reform as principles of social

change • A resultant optimism

It would be a serious oversimplification to argue that these themes have dominated American sociology and, more broadly, the behavioral and social sciences in general, but it would also be a mistake to ignore them. Perhaps the case could best be made for two of our sister disciplines of economics and psychology, with the former’s emphasis on voluntary exchange, freedom from constraint, entrepreneurship, and survival through success, and the latter’s emphasis on individual adjustment, competence, and coping. It

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might also be remembered that one of the distinctively American adaptations of Freudian psychoanalytic theory (largely pessimistic in character) was ego psychology, which stressed individual adaptation and flexibility above all. Similar continuities might be observed in many schools of thought that have had indigenous American origins. It can be argued, for example, that role theory is based on the assumption of socialization into and more or less voluntary compliance with the “expectations” of others, and that the mechanisms of social control associated with role theory stress conformity rather than obedience to authority or submission to coercion. The school of symbolic interactionism, rooted in the pragmatic philosophies of Dewey, Mead, and Blumer, conceives of the actor as an agent, an active user and manipulator of his or her symbolic environment and not in any way enslaved by the structural forces of society, by instinct, or by mechanical principles such as behavioral conditioning; in this sense the tenets of symbolic interactionism can be regarded as a kind of celebration of individual mastery and freedom, in contrast to the more deterministic theories against which it is counterpoised. Much of exchange theory, too, while it has origins in economic theories of competition, shares with these the underlying assumption that exchange is a matter of freely supplying and demanding resources to and from others. And, finally, the central features of Parsonian sociology and functionalism in general are voluntarism and consensus around a moral order. To point out these continuities, of course, is to simplify matters greatly. American sociology has also been characterized by theoretical formulations that stand in critical dialogue with these strands and stress themes of inequality, domination, and coercion. Many of these theories are of European origin and have made their way into American sociology through the works of those who came from Europe (e.g., Sorokin 1928) or studied in Europe (e.g., Parsons 1937) or were otherwise inspired by the European masters (e.g., Mills 1956). These system/collectivist/critical/radical perspectives have themselves come to constitute a major part of sociology in this country and continue to be nourished by the more contemporary contributions of European scholars such as Habermas, Touraine, Bourdieu, Giddens, and others. The field can be regarded as a kind of continuous dialogue and ferment among

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these strands of thought, some consonant with and some in critical opposition to the dominant themes of the American cultural tradition. This notion of a continuous cultural dialogue within the discipline is closely connected with an observable but not very well understood phenomenon of the periodic rise and fall of the great historic figures of the field in sociological research and explanation. Durkheim and Freud held great sway in the two postwar decades in American sociology and social science generally, but the fortunes of both, especially the latter, have now faded somewhat and the neo-Marxian and neo-Weberian themes have risen in salience. European sociology has witnessed an ebbing of Marxian sociology as such but continues to generate and nurture theories that cannot be described as Marxian but that retain some distinctive thread of Marxian thought, such as the idea of domination and protest (new critical sociology and the new social movements school, for example). As indicated, we do not understand the vicissitudes of the masters very well. Some of these might be generational matters; one cohort of sociologists may embrace and make productive use of the insights of a Tocqueville or a Freud, while the next, facing new intellectual problems and perhaps eager to distance itself from the work of its teachers, will forsake those figures and resurrect others; still another cohort will call up the heroes of their teachers’ teachers. In any event, this invocation of the notion of myriad cultural dialogues within sociology that mirror larger cultural themes brings into question once again the strict distinction between internal and external influences on the evolution of a field of inquiry.

k e e p i n g u p wi t h s oc i e ty One of the key influences in the development of sociology—if not the social and behavioral sciences generally—is the fact that much of its subject matter is dictated by real and perceived social trends in the larger society. If one examines the rise of new areas of interest in the past several decades, one will find the family and unemployment emerging in the years of the Great Depression, propaganda and public opinion and rumor in World War II, a burst of new interests in the sociology of poverty, sociology of education, sociology of youth, and feminist sociology in the 1960s

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and immediately thereafter, and environmental sociology, the sociology of energy, and the sociology of risk more recently. All these are evident reactions to social problematics, and a quantitative study might reveal a quite real correspondence between the appearance of these problematics and a flurry in the literature, if the appropriate time lags for funding, research, execution, and publication delays are taken into account. The rise and fall of major figures, mentioned before, might also be explained in part by the changing historical circumstances of any given society. The evident rise of interest in Marx and Weber in this society in the 1960s and 1970s can be regarded as a kind of intellectual mirror of the group conflict and political turmoil of those decades. It also makes sense to observe that as colonial countries struggle under the yoke of the colonial powers and subsequently fight to consolidate their own independence, they may turn to the Marxian notions of exploitation and domination to enlighten their understanding; when they move actively into the phase of building and promoting economic growth, the theories of a Joseph Schumpeter might appear more attractive. A closely related tendency to these is for our subject matter to run ahead of the frameworks under which we study it. The most important illustration of this concerns the study of international relations and international dependencies. If we examine our major sociological heritage, it is apparent that most of our theories are based on the postulate that most of what transpires in social life does so within single societies and, indeed, that intrasocietal forces are the main operative determinants. Put another way, sociologists have tended to regard the single society, nation, or culture as the principal unit of analysis for their studies. When we look around the contemporary world, however, it is apparent that the relevance of this kind of approach grows less and less. Nations grow more dependent on one another; the major forces affecting the decisions of national governments are not within the hands of national decision makers but lie outside their control; in short, it is systems of societies, not single societies, that constitute the most important level of analysis. Accordingly, analyses built on the idea of single societies, states, nation-based ideologies, and the like are less powerful. But with very few exceptions the corpus of our inherited traditions does not provide very many theories and frameworks for moving to the higher systemic levels.

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i n flu en c es f r o m s c i e n ce One of the remarkable features of human history during the past several hundred years is the extent to which science as a culture has come to be such a dominant feature of Western culture in general. Its conquest has been selective, with the early strides being in astronomy and physics and with subsequent developments being made in chemistry and the life sciences, and, finally, beginning in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in economics and psychology, then in political science, anthropology, and sociology. In all instances the scientific impulse displaced a preexisting religious or philosophical one, and in no case was that transition an easy one, involving as it did a threat to established claims to legitimacy and to individuals and groups who represented those claims. It is important to recognize, moreover, that as the scientific impulse emerged in one intellectual area after another, it arose in a unique historical context, and its character was influenced by that context. Here the contrasts between the histories of European and American sociology are instructive. The emergence of the field in continental Europe—associated above all with the efforts of Émile Durkheim and Max Weber—occurred in two principal contexts: first, the distinctive emphases in European social thought, and second, the simultaneous emergence of the scientific impulse in economics and psychology. With respect to the first, European sociology oriented itself to the intellectual traditions of European thought as represented in the study of history, philosophy, law, and the classics in the academy and in the critical intellectual traditions focusing on the state, social classes, and the economy, to be found both in the academy and in the more general intellectual life of those countries. It also oriented itself to the emerging social scientific emphases of the day, Durkheim’s negative polemics toward psychology and economics and Weber’s suspicions of the assumptions of formal economics reveal this second stress. The current preoccupation of European sociology with macroscopic and critical issues—phenomenology excepted—of the state, classes, and the economic system, and the critical traditions of each, bears witness to the power of these legacies. (England is something of an exception here. While not totally exempt from continental traditions, English sociology arose in the context of first

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liberal and later labor reformist politics and in the peculiar context of English empiricism, manifested in the early “survey” techniques of Booth [1892] and Rowntree [1922]. This gave a permanent, somewhat left-wing but simultaneously fact-oriented stamp to British sociology.) America is also something of an exception. Just as its nation arose without the necessity to fight off the burdens of European feudalism, so its sociology arose in a context that did not include (with exceptions to be noted presently) the peculiar intellectual history of European nations. Our sociology grew up in two major intellectual and social contexts. First, it made its appearance in the public institutions of higher education in this country several decades after the passage of the Morrill Act of 1862, which solidly established the scientific and applied impulses (mechanical and agricultural) in American higher education; a related part of this development was that economics and psychology preceded sociology and had fully adopted the scientific “definition” of their own fields. Second, in the 1890s the reform theme was in the air, and sociology picked up that theme from both the social gospel and the Progressive movements. It is not surprising that sociology, struggling to establish its legitimacy in those days, picked up the twin themes of scientific respectability and social reform as its motifs to be broadcast to the academy and to the larger society. Those themes, which persist to the present day, fit comfortably into the American emphases on pragmatism, reform, and optimism identified in the previous section. American sociology also appears to have had an odd preoccupation with how scientific or unscientific it is and upon what model of the scientific method it is or should be built.

political influences We know enough about the systemic character of societies to be able to assert with confidence that sociology—or any other field of inquiry, for that matter—never exists in isolation from the polity but is embedded in complex ways. In particular, sociology’s general relations with national governments and its many publics are always fraught with uncertainty and ambivalence. These relations may be likened to a troubled marriage. The two partners may constantly irritate one another as governments and

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publics raise ideological concerns and pressures that threaten to compromise the freedom of thinkers and researchers in the discipline, and sociologists forever generate information and ways of describing social events and situations that have an unsettling, needling, and even debunking effect. At the same time the two may find that they cannot live without one another, governments and publics being dependent on the data, information, and perspectives for their policies and their interpretations of the social world, and sociology requiring autonomy as well as financial and institutional support. This inevitable ambivalence can be resolved in a variety of ways. Sociology may be afforded a free and happy welcome as part of the academy; it may be given only low status and a bad press in the public eye; or it may be constantly hounded to be something that it is not or driven underground altogether by oppressive measures. One of the remarkable features of American sociology is that it has been housed in academic departments in universities, which as a matter of historical fact have been institutionally sheltered from the political winds, despite periodic forays of interested legislators and right-wing political groups that have imperiled academic freedom in the universities. This is a relative statement, of course, but if one compares the American case with others—including those of eastern European societies—the field has emerged as one that is, by and large, nonpoliticized from the standpoint of its environment. (The field is in another sense a very political one because it sometimes manifests skeptical if not critical views of its subject matter—the institutions of its country—views that perforce trigger political reactions; in still another sense it is a political field in that it manifests political striving within its own ranks.) As the functions of the state have grown, and the welfare state in particular, sociology and the other social sciences have taken on a different kind of political significance. Government agencies, pursuing their various missions, are inevitably called upon to justify both their concerns with societal problems and their policies relating to these problems in terms of some kind of factual base. For example, in order to define teenage pregnancy as a “problem,” it is necessary to establish some kind of empirical scope of its incidence, and presumably to hold this scope up to some kind of standard that would make it a “problem.” In establishing this kind of empirical scope, various political agencies have borrowed both methods

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(mainly survey) and findings from sociology and the other social sciences, giving them applied or political significance, if you will. In many respects the research carried out by some agencies is very similar to social science research in general. Where sociology has come under greater political influences is not in its significance as an academic discipline in the university setting but in its significance as a science based on research, with the support for that research coming from the science establishment (and ultimately from Congress and the executive branch); it is the case, furthermore, that the phenomenon of research has a political dimension. I would like to spend the remainder of my remarks on this topic. Organizationally, the behavioral and social sciences are a part of the National Science Foundation and are supported by the same general budget that is appropriated for the Foundation annually by Congress. Yet it is apparent that these disciplines occupy a minor place in that agency. The Science Board (its policy-making board of trustees) has few behavioral or social sciences as members. The director of the division known as the Biological, Behavioral, and Social Sciences is invariably a biological scientist. Furthermore, the sums available to the behavioral and social sciences within the Foundation are minuscule in comparison with the total budget. Perhaps more decisive, however, and perhaps the ultimate reason for all of the above, is the fact that many of the “hard science” leaders of the National Science Foundation, while they grant a place for the behavioral and social sciences, still regard these enterprises as basically “soft” and not really “scientific.” The other important point to mention about the National Science Foundation—and all other government granting agencies—is that they are publicly visible and come under annual review at budget time by the Office of Management and Budget in the executive branch and both houses of Congress. The view of the behavioral and social sciences in the halls of government, moreover, is fraught with ambivalence. On the one hand, government officials are forever faced with and must deal with pressing social problems of poverty, unemployment, crime, mental health, economic instability, and so on, all of which are most directly related to and informed by behavioral and social science research. This concern tends to generate a positive attitude toward the behavioral and social

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sciences and to incline government officials to support research in those areas out of the conviction that increased knowledge about those problems will be enlightening and will lead to more effective attacks on them. On the other hand there are pockets of hostility toward the behavioral and social sciences on the part of government officials, and while these vary in importance and salience over time, they are identifiable and take the following forms: • Research in the behavioral and social sciences produces trivial, obvious,

and unimportant results, and expenditures on that kind of research are wasteful of public funds. This attitude is symbolized in the annual “Golden Fleece” awards named by Senator William Proxmire, the intent of which is to show that the government has been fleeced of its gold by studies funded to study the sex life of goats, the sociology of love, and other such subjects. • Research in behavioral and social science subjects is of no use to the

government and therefore should not be funded; this opinion is associated with public statements by David Stockman, President Reagan’s former budget adviser, made during congressional budgetary hearings in the early 1980s. • Research in the behavioral and social sciences is basically unscientific—

according to the canons of “hard” science—and, therefore, undeserving of support. This is a kind of spillover of the above-mentioned attitude on the part of many physical and life scientists. • Research in some branches of the behavioral and social sciences (such as

the study of race relations, fundamentalist religious beliefs, family life, and other areas) is basically dangerous ideologically, because it is likely that suggesting changes in such areas will generate criticism of institutions and practices that are either considered sacred or uneasily taken for granted.

This kind of hostility is difficult to document, because it is often shrouded in one of the less frank forms just listed. Nevertheless, it exists and reflects both right-wing political sentiments and the fact that social scientists themselves are more politically liberal and critical than other groups in the political spectrum. From time to time this ideological hostility breaks into the open and results in direct assaults on certain kinds of social science research. In the early Reagan years, for example,

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budget cuts in the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Mental Health, and elsewhere were directed toward discouraging research that focused on system (class, race, for example) accounts and explanations of social problems, but budgets in other areas were left alone or encouraged research that involved genetic and psychogenic understandings of them. It is difficult to conceive how the behavioral and social sciences could be simultaneously trivial, useless, unscientific, and threatening. Be that as it may, these attacks surface from time to time, and as such they constitute a source of embarrassment and difficulty for the leadership of the National Science Foundation and other funding agencies. To them the behavioral and social sciences appear as a minor part of their operation from an organizational and budgetary point of view but as a major source of criticism and headaches from those quarters that matter. It follows from this account that the main temptations generated by these pressures on the behavioral and social sciences are two: first, to maintain as low a profile as possible, to avoid political notice and to survive thereby; and, second, to present themselves as respectable and unthreatening and thereby to curry political and budgetary support. The main response to these temptations, according to my observations, is for the spokesmen of the behavioral and social sciences to represent themselves as adhering to the model of positive science, as using methodologically sound techniques, and, therefore, as being supportable on the grounds that they are legitimately scientific. This strategy emerges— whether it is, in the end, effective or self-defeating—as the one that is most likely to blunt criticism both within the donor agencies and on the part of other government officials. In the end, of course, this response emerges as a victory on the part of the positive-science emphasis and as a kind of marriage of convenience between the behavioral and social science investigators in the academy on the one hand and the Washington social science establishment on the other—a marriage that encourages funding agencies to give research grants to such investigators because it provides evidence that their own standards are strictly “scientific.” The only cautionary qualification to this diagnosis is to note that, if the liberal voice in the Democratic Congress presses, and the accommodative voice of the Bush administration responds, a more supportive stance toward a greater

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diversity of social science research—including research that has politically more critical implications—may resurface. This “sociology of knowledge” diagnosis has perhaps gone on too long, but its implications are clear. Unless we witness major changes in the structure and prestige systems of universities, and/or major changes in the politics affecting the behavioral and social sciences, the model of the social sciences—including, of course, sociology—as sciences will be the dominant voice of the future. Empirical science models of study and explanation will be center stage and will call the tune, as it were, for those voices that will continue to reassert the concern with philosophical, moral, and social problems that in the past has been salient in sociology. The content and tone of the empirical science voice in counterpoint with subordinate protesting voices will change with changing times, but I would predict that it will carry the main melody of the future.

r e f e r en c e s Blau, Peter, and Otis Dudley Duncan. 1967. The American Occupational Structure. New York: Wiley. Booth, Charles. 1892. Life and Labour of the People of London. New York: Macmillan. Burawoy, Michael. 1979. Manufacturing Consent. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gouldner, Alvin Ward. 1970. The Coming Crisis in Western Sociology. New York: Basic Books. Habermas, Juergen. 1973. Theory and Practice. Boston: Beacon. Mayo, Elton. 1949. The Social Problems of Industrial Civilization. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Mills, C. Wright. 1956. The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press. Mullins, Nicholas C. 1973. Theories and Theory Groups in Contemporary American Sociology. New York: Harper and Row. Parsons, Talcott. 1937. The Structure of Social Action. New York: Macmillan. . 1951. The Social System. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Reynolds, Larry T. 1977. The Sociology of Sociology. New York: McKay. Roethlisberger, Fritz, and William Dickson. 1944. Management and the Worker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rowntree, Benjamin C. 1922. Poverty: A Study of Town Life. London: Longman, Green.

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Sorokin, Pitirim. 1928. Contemporary Sociological Theories. New York: Harper. Tocqueville, Alexis de. 1841. Democracy in America. New York: J. and H. G. Langley. Williams, Robin. 1963. American Society: A Sociological Interpretation. New York: Knopf.

6

Sociology’s Next Decades centrifugality, conflict, accommodation (1990)

Within the past two years, a book bearing the title of The Future of Sociology (Borgatta and Cook 1988a) made its appearance. In that volume, some thirty sociologists surveyed the present and gazed into the future. Some commented on the field as a whole; some on institutionbased subfields such as historical sociology; some on subfields dealing with social control and social change; and some on subfields dealing with stratification (for example, race relations). Not surprisingly, sociology’s future looks like the proverbial elephant being described by several people touching its various parts. In another way it is like a Rorschach ink blot, possessing only vague objective characteristics but stimulating a myriad of idiosyncratic fantasies on the part of its viewers. The reader is told that the field is simultaneously fraying around its edges (Borgatta and Cook 1988b), losing theoretical validity (Turk 1988), and needing salvation by applied research (Berk 1988). Glimpses into the future of subfields found demography thriving and expanding (Pullum 1988), mass communication emerging from decline into resurgence (Ball-Rokeach

From Cahiers de Recherche Sociologique, no. 14 (Spring 1990): 35–50.

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1988), urban sociology remaining sluggish substantively but active methodologically (Lee 1988), educational sociology becoming more policy oriented (Gordon 1988), and social psychology spreading from cognition toward affect, emotion, and motivation (Cook and Pike 1988). Interestingly, however, none of these seers regarded the field as moving toward integration or intellectual synthesis; rather, the opposite trends were seen everywhere. This theme merits a central place in any prognosis for the field, including the one I will develop in this essay. The reasons for the disparity of these prospective accounts are not difficult to discern. For one thing, different subfields will indeed differ from one another in their future development and location within the larger field. Second, each prognosticator brings his or her individual preferences and prejudices to bear. These are likely to be especially salient because the future is in fact unknown. And finally, prediction about the future means, above all, making selective assumptions about the stability or change of parameters affecting the field or its subfields; depending on the pattern of those assumptions, predictions about the future will vary widely. In this essay, I will try my own hand at forecasting. I will proceed by three steps: first, to identify some broad societal trends affecting sociology, including some trends within higher education; second, to suggest broad directions of change for the discipline suggested by these trends; and third, to locate certain bases of conflict and bases for accommodation and integration. The picture will be complex, presenting a myriad of independent, convergent, and divergent trends. My remarks will apply mainly to the American scene because I know that scene best; but at the same time, it should be noted that some of these observations are generalizable, in varying degree, to sociology in other parts of the world.

s o m e c on t ou r s of s o ci e ta l c h a n g e Sociology has always been a field that has been responsive to social forces and social changes. Its subject matter—social behavior, institutions, and culture—is the focus of normative, ideological, and moral sensitivities in the larger society, and these sensitivities constitute pressures on the field.

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In addition, social changes constitute changes in the subject matter of the field, forever inviting it to keep pace through understanding and analyzing them. Any view toward the future of sociology, then, should specify the broad directions of those changes that are most likely to constitute factors conditioning the evolution of the field. In this connection, the following trends can be identified: • The long-term trends toward societal differentiation, in progress for

centuries, will not be reversed. This trend toward increasing complexity will continue to create problems of integration of society and to increase the role of integrative agencies, including government. The established governmental functions, including big welfare, big administration, and big government involvement in the economy, will not recede. For that reason, the great administrative-state-rational complex noted by Habermas (1975) will continue, though one can be less certain about the validity of all his claims regarding its impact on the human condition. • The trends toward increasing internationalization of production, trade,

migration, and travel—all making for increased interdependency of nations—will continue. This will generate a paradoxical result with respect to national states: on the one hand, governments will lose direct control over conditions affecting their economies and societies because these conditions will be generated more by international forces; on the other hand, governments will be called upon to intensify their activity because of the need to deal with the internal consequences of these international forces. (These trends, plus the two aforementioned ones, suggest that despite trends toward deregulation and privatization in Western economies and tendencies toward de-administration and market principles in socialist economies, the state will not recede in salience). • On the economic front, new technologies, especially information

technologies, will continue to grow, with a further growth—at various rates—of productivity, dominance of the service sector, and increase in leisure. • The tendency to permit free intellectual inquiry in the academy—

including sociology—will continue where it is strong and increase where it is weak. The basis for this assertion is the continuing worldwide pressure for democratization, including free expression and free inquiry. This pressure will prove difficult to stem in the long run, despite episodes of backsliding and repression.

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• At the same time, the tendency for governments to mobilize, attract,

and provide opportunities for scholars to provide data and knowledge relevant to governments’ needs will strengthen. Those needs will be complex, and the information and knowledge needed to deal with them will be uncertain, by virtue of the first three trends noted in this section. • For the academy, these economic and political trends will involve a

buildup of pressures for more applied emphases, augmenting the role of applied research institutes and professional training, and intensifying the rearguard battle on the part of universities and colleges to protect their commitment to the mission of the general pursuit of knowledge and truth in all fields.

These diverse trends constitute an important set of determinants for the future development of sociology, as well as other social science disciplines. I will note the significance of these trends in the discussion that follows. By way of qualification, however, it should be said that their influence is of a general character—and therefore highly specific predictions on the basis of them are not warranted—and that their influence is mediated by their complex interplay with the discipline’s past tradition and ongoing autonomous developments within it.

ce n t r i f ug a li t y a n d r e lat e d t r e n d s Many of the likely future trends in sociology are captured under the broad heading of centrifugality, a concept that encompasses the processes of specialization, differentiation, and fragmentation. As indicated, this direction will be influenced both by the external trends noted and by processes internal to the discipline.

Emphasis on Applications Most of the trends noted above imply an augmentation of applied work in sociology. Much of this impetus will come from government demands and provision of research opportunities, but other large organizations may find themselves calling more on behavioral and social scientists as well. With

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respect to the intellectual life of the discipline, this will probably highlight the already long-standing distance, if not a complete split, between “theory” and “methods” and between “basic” and “applied” emphases, as the latter in each set gain salience. This change will be reflected in manpower statistics as well, as a higher proportion of sociologists will find their livelihoods in applied settings—government agencies, professional schools, research institutes with applied missions, and business and other organizations— and a lower proportion in college and university faculties. In fact, there may develop a sharper organizational differentiation as well, with theorists and basic researchers in professional schools and other nonuniversity organizations. This differentiation may also reverberate into professional and sociological associations, deepening the differences between academic and applied sociologists.

Continuing to Play “Catch-Up” with Change in Society As indicated, one part of the history of sociology is a story of its adaptation to social changes and emerging social problems. The following illustrate future instances of this principle: • In the area of family sociology, there will be an increased focus on step-

parenting, households with multiple members employed, “computer marriages,” and family implications of new “cottage industries,” such as working at home with computers. • In the area of the sociology of religion, more research will focus on

fundamentalism and other developments that have challenged the “secularization hypothesis” of modernization theory, new forms of religious conflict, and various manifestations of “privatized” religions (Shupe and Hadden 1988). • In the area of medical sociology, there will be an increased emphasis on

the problems of large organizational medicine, the implications of occupational oversupply for the profession, and the future economic and ethical implications of complex medical technology for professional practice. • In the area of sociology of social movements, there will be a further shift

away from the study of movements as revolutionary or otherwise disruptive, and toward their study as purposive political behavior and as

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ingredients of civil society, as governments and other agencies institutionalize mechanisms to accommodate and respond to movements. • In the area of theory, the themes of the state as system, the management

of instability in complex societies, and social integration will generally retain their salience. We may also expect a further recession of classical Marxian theory as economic classes themselves continue to recede as the organizing basis for stratification, group consciousness, and social protest. And finally, the phenomena of international interdependency, international conflict, and global society will constitute a focus for theoretical activity. The major bases for the last prediction are that the international dimension will continue to grow more important and that scholars will strive to modify and go beyond the existing theories of dependency and world-system, whose historical specificity and corresponding limitations are already acknowledged. • With respect to emergent social problems, examples of future emphasis

will be on international sex tourism, the social epidemiology of AIDS, new forms of occupational and technological risk, and the social dimensions of environmental threats.

The implications of all these examples are centrifugal, in the sense that they create new foci of research interest in subfields of sociology that pile upon longer-standing research concerns, create new specialized subgroups of researchers with common interests, and, in some cases, spawn new subfields. As such, these kinds of developments will extend long-standing tendencies within sociology toward specialization and fragmentation.

A Complication from Theory One of the developments in various sociological subfields that resulted from the theoretical turmoil of the 1960s and early 1970s was that some new theoretical approaches arose (for example, dependency theory, ethnomethodology) and some older ones were revitalized (for example, neoMarxist and neo-Weberian perspectives). In addition, each new approach tended to “invade” specific subfields and generate different and competing approaches to their subject matters. This can be illustrated with respect to family, deviance, and social ecology, among others. This proc-

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ess will no doubt continue, as the double process of emerging subfields and topics on the one hand, and emerging theoretical emphases and shifts, on the other, continues apace. The result is a sort of two-dimensional grid—one dimension of substantive subfields and the other of competing theoretical perspectives—that impels these chopping-up tendencies.

Activity around the Edges Given these tendencies for intellectual specialization and division, it might be supposed that sociology would manifest some tendencies to hive off specialties such as demography, social psychology, or development and change into separate organizational entities, such as academic departments. There is precedent for this in the biological sciences, for example, with fields like biochemistry, genetics, biophysics, and molecular biology emerging into new departmental units. In their short history, however, the social sciences have shown little of this. A likely candidate for separation, demography, has been organized on a few occasions into an independent department, but only rarely have such departments become permanently established. The main tendency, rather, is for demographers to spread themselves around existing departments (sociology, economics, and statistics) and existing professional schools (medical, public heath) rather than forming new units. The reasons for this organizational rigidity are not entirely understood, but these are likely to be found in the institutional inertia of universities, the vested interests of departments in protecting themselves, and the need for a disciplinary label to succeed in the occupational market for social scientists. With respect to the intellectual boundaries of the field, however, we see more fluidity. The history of sociology shows a continuous process of exportation into other fields. Examples are the rise of behavioral political science in the 1950s and 1960s, which relied heavily on methodological tools (for example, survey research), specific theoretical formulations (modernization), and general theoretical orientations (structural-functionalism), all borrowed from sociology. Similarly, the rise and consolidation of a new social history in the past three decades, including, more recently, a new history of the family, has drawn on sociological frameworks

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and theories as well as demographic methods. These developments tend to blur the disciplinary boundaries of both sociology and other fields, so that political sociology and historical sociology cannot properly be located within a disciplinary province. There are examples of importation as well. The sociological study of family and socialization in the 1940s and 1950s was influenced by a psychoanalytic perspective and the “culture-and-personality” emphasis in anthropology. Homans’s (1974) behavioral sociology was an explicit importation from psychological learning theory and economic theory. Other, more concrete illustrations include the possible takeover of some areas of the field of marriage and the family by applied agencies such as the National Council on Family Relations, the “takeover” of industrial sociology by psychologists (Borgatta and Cook 1988b), and the shift in the center of gravity in the study of formal organizations from sociology departments to schools of business administration. At present, perhaps the most vivid challenge in the area of sociological theory is found in the work of Gary Becker (1976), an economist from the University of Chicago, who for two decades has engaged in a program of generalizing the principles of economic theory to many subject matters not previously within the scope of economic analysis—racial discrimination, crime, education, childbearing, and marriage. The main principles of this line of analysis are to posit stable preferences and to analyze the principles of rational choice and calculation in accord with those preferences. In building his program, Becker has incorporated certain novel elements, such as the cost of information seeking, which replaces classical assumptions of complete knowledge of market conditions. Up to this point the adaptations of economic theory to sociology have been modest. Homans’s theory is seen as one facet of the “microsociological revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s but has generated neither significant theoretical work nor substantive empirical applications by others. The study of “public choice”—the analysis of social policies along modified principles of economic analysis—has appealed to a number of sociologists, but work in the area has been dominated by economists and political scientists. Becker’s influence in sociology has been notable among demographers, particularly those interested in fertility, but very limited in the areas of family, education, and crime; and it has also had a certain

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negative impact in that it has generated some hostile reactions among sociologists. The debate over economic theory in sociology may be expected to warm soon, however. James Coleman’s forthcoming treatise on social theory, the application of rational-choice logic in research on networks and other areas, and the appearance of the new journal Rationality and Society will crystallize attention on that line of theory. In addition, the nascent development of “socio-economics,” manifested concretely in the work of Etzioni (1988), is, in its significance, partly an attack on rational-choice theory and “economic imperialism” and should spark debates. We should not expect this theoretical foray to conquer much territory in sociology; the field is a large, complex, and pluralistic aggregation from a theoretical point of view, and most sociologists will continue to follow their own predilections and/or continue in their mode of theoretical eclecticism. Nevertheless, a dialogue over the promises and limitations of rational models will be a significant feature of the landscape in the coming decade.

Interdisciplinary Work Academic fields, including sociology, have a certain institutional reality. This reality is reproduced and renewed year after year in the existence of undergraduate teaching, graduate training programs and degrees granted under the disciplinary name, academic departments that sustain their legitimacy and command resources within colleges and universities, research institutes, learned journals with disciplinary appellations, and professional associations organized along disciplinary lines. So strong is the momentum to maintain disciplines as fixed institutional forms that we are continuously invited to view them almost as Durkheimian “social facts.” Much ongoing work by social scientists, however, belies this view. If this work is examined in detail, it is seen to deal with problems that defy strict disciplinary identification—problems such as the differential distribution of rewards and power in society, or the origin and consequences of revolutionary movements. Such work is interdisciplinary (or multidisciplinary) in that a researcher makes use of materials, concepts, and theoretical frameworks from a variety of disciplines, develops theoretical approaches that synthesize ideas from many disciplinary sources, or

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actually collaborates with scholars from other disciplines. In a recent survey of promising research developments in the behavioral and social sciences, a national group commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council (Gerstein et al. 1988) reports that the most innovative and dynamic lines of research were interdisciplinary in character. Examples touching sociology reported by this group included health and behavior, information and decision making, and the internationalization of social, economic, and political life. The group recommended that funding and the development of research infrastructures should be developed along these interdisciplinary kinds of lines—in addition to existing disciplinary ones—in the coming decade. From the standpoint of an academic discipline, interdisciplinary work is yet another example of the kinds of centrifugal forces dealt with in this section of the essay. It means a diffusion of disciplinary rigor—such as that might be—in the interest of comprehensively solving a scholarly or scientific problem. It weakens, furthermore, any effort to identify any given piece of work as disciplinary and any effort to characterize a discipline like sociology as a recognizable “thing.” To summarize the line of argument to this point, it appears that the various specified centrifugal forces—an emphasis on applications, the “chasing” of new social changes and emerging social problems, theoretical pluralism, blurring around the edges, and interdisciplinary work—may accelerate in the next decades. If so, this will make it more difficult to characterize sociology and perhaps other social science disciplines as distinctive and intellectually unified enterprises. This centrifugal diffusion will continue to occur, moreover, in the context of inertia and continuity with respect to the organizational and institutional realities of disciplines in the colleges and universities and in the professional associations. In this way, the discrepancies, if not contradictions, between the intellectual and the institutional faces of sociology will be intensified.

a s s o c i at e d li n e s of t e n si o n a n d c o n f li c t Whenever some kind of identifiable theoretical position, disciplinary subfield, “hot” area of research, or methodological innovation results from the

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centrifugal processes noted, the potential for intellectual and organizational conflict also arises. Whether their vision is correct or not, many sociologists and other academics regard their discipline as a kind of intellectual turf, to be expanded by aggrandizement and defended against invasion or capture. They also regard the subparts with which they are identified in similarly jurisdictional terms. The modes of conflict may be aggressive, especially on the part of those who regard themselves as innovating and seeking a territorial place, or defensive, on the part of those who experience themselves as under polemic attack or otherwise threatened by competitors. The supposed stakes—the victor’s spoils and the vanquished’s losses—are scientific and intellectual prestige and whatever enhanced power in the discipline that might bring: perhaps augmented research funds; appeal to graduate students–in-training; power to press for faculty positions in departments; a conspicuous place in scholarly meetings; and access to journal space. The strategies employed in these conflicts include attempts to demonstrate the scientific soundness of one’s own theoretical approach, area of research, or favored method in relation to others; to persuade by argument and/or assertion that one’s area is scientifically or socially important; and to claim that one’s area is up-and-coming or not declining and that others are declining or not rising. That evidence is slim and decisive scientific proof or disproof is not possible with respect to the kinds of statements that emerge from these strategies probably encourages, rather than discourages, their employment. Earlier in this essay it was argued that, as a result of the dominant trend emerging from the changing needs and demands of government and society, empirical methods and applied emphases would move toward becoming more mainstream than they are, and theory and basic research would move becoming more rearguard. This is no doubt true as a general statement, but to gain a more textured sense of the dominant bases of future tension and conflict, it is necessary to disaggregate these into a series of overlapping emphases, of which the following are identifiable: • Scientific versus humanistic emphasis, or the effort to relate research

and conclusions to the normative canons of one or another model of science, on the one side, as against referring to considerations of equality, social justice, morality, or some other dimension of the human condition of the persons, institutions, or societies under study, on the

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other. The first emphasis stems from sociology’s efforts to legitimize itself as a science, and the second from the philosophical and reformist concerns from which the field arose. • Value-free versus critical/activist. This dimension is closely related to

scientific-humanistic but refers more directly to the investigator’s moral posture. • General research versus policy-oriented research. This distinction

is a difficult one to maintain in practice and should probably be regarded as a kind of continuum involving the degree of explicitness of social concern or public policy toward which the research is oriented. • Within the arena of research methodology, quantitative/statistical

analyses of systematically gathered or constructed databases versus the array of “other” methods, including ethnographic study, archival/ historical research, and the method of systematic illustration in the comparative study of societies. • Within the arena of theory, formal/ mathematical theory (adaptations of

econometric theory, computer simulations, etc.) versus “other” types of qualitative theorizing, analysis of the history of sociological thought, and drawing out of the moral, political, and ideological dimensions of sociological knowledge.

In all cases, we may expect that the scales will be tilted in the direction of the first term of each of these equations, because of the continuing effort of sociology to strive toward scientific legitimacy and because of the demands for quantitative, applied, and policy-oriented research emanating from the state and other institutions. These broad conflicts will take place in the context of both ongoing conflicts among those who speak for sociological subfields (e.g., sociology of family, sociology of education) and continuing conflicts among those who speak for different theoretical perspectives (e.g., phenomenological sociology, neo-Marxist sociology). With respect to the latter, it is my impression that we have witnessed a change in atmosphere from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Both periods have manifested much theoretical conflict, but the tone seems to have changed. In the former period, the picture of theory in American sociology—and to some degree elsewhere— was one of embittered polemic attack and defense, with the accompanying claims that the competitors represented exclusive alternatives and that

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there was little room for accommodation or synthesis. Now the picture is more one of peaceful pluralism, with the perspectives existing in a kind of side-by-side toleration, and there are limited signs of theoretical synthesis on the horizon, to be mentioned presently. “Peaceful pluralism” also implies that no particular perspective is clearly dominant, and I believe this to be the case, despite some claims to the contrary. I also sense that this situation, along with its more subdued mode of conflict, will continue into the coming decades, if for no other reason than the fact that institutionalization of a peaceful-pluralism culture makes for a general expectation that a representative of a new or revitalized theoretical perspective will be regarded as one of many claimants rather than the dominant one.

i n te g rati v e an d s yn t h et i c t h e m e s The above account constitutes, in my mind, most of the story regarding the future of sociological work over the next ten to twenty years. The story would not be complete, however, without mention of a few countertrends toward integration and synthesis. These are weaker than the centrifugal and conflictual forces I have identified, but not negligible. In these final remarks I will again refer mainly to the situation in the United States, and my observations should be regarded as only partially applicable, at best, to other nations and regions. The themes of integration and synthesis can be discussed at two levels: the organizational/institutional and the intellectual. At the former level, there are many forces making for organizational continuity of the field and for accommodation of diversity. Perhaps the most important of these is the existence of the academic departments as seats of graduate training and collegiate teaching. Departments will maintain their organizational independence within the college and university setting, by and large, and will continue to go by the name of “sociology.” Those who are professionally trained in them are constrained, moreover, to identify themselves professionally as sociologists, mainly for market reasons, since professional social scientists who do not have a disciplinary label signifying their type of training are at a disadvantage in the occupational market. Within departments,

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there are three identifiable pressures that encourage accommodation. The first is the great difficulty for an academic in the college or university setting to break away from his or her department and either join another department or become an independent scholar and teacher within the institution. The second is the evident pressure for departments striving for a high place in the prestige hierarchy of the university to “cover the field”: that is, to stress comprehensiveness and balance in their faculty composition (thus accommodating a diversity of theoretical and research orientations). The third is the pressure for departments to include a certain theoretical and methodological core in their graduate training programs—to cover the past masters and current leading theorists and to bring the student to a level of acquaintance, if not mastery, of the major techniques for sociological research; if a department is negligent in these respects, its reputation as a training institution for sociologists is likely to suffer. All these pressures make for a common organizational membership in a department and a certain level of cooperation and consensus in the preparation and execution of teaching and training programs. Some accommodative tendencies are found in the professional association as well. The American Sociological Association experiences a certain amount of tension between the specialized “sections” (medical sociology, theory, sociology of education, for example) and the organizational center (represented by the Council); at the same time, it must be remembered that the mechanism of section formation is itself an accommodation, a way of honoring the specialized interests of sociologists and providing a meaningful intellectual base for them, while at the same time keeping them within the association. There are additional exigencies working against the splitting off of multiple associations of sociologists, among them the considerable infrastructural costs of establishing a new organization and the loss of a single disciplinary presence in lobbying for research funding and for or against legislation affecting the profession. On the intellectual side, one must take care not to predict more efforts at integration and synthesis than are actually justified by present trends. However, some signs can be noted. In a general sense, the aura of pluralistic peace is more encouraging of integrative thinking and collaborative work than the atmosphere of embittered polemics that preceded it. The diverse efforts to find common ground, theoretical linkages, and empirical

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connections between the microscopic and microscopic levels that have been in evidence for the past several years probably could not have developed twenty years ago. The same atmosphere of pluralistic peace is also more permissive of cooperation in empirical research. Beyond this general point, a few more specific observations are in order. In my estimation, ambitious efforts at theoretical synthesis on the model of the Parsonian program at midcentury are not on the horizon. For one thing, the increasing complexity and centrifugality of the field renders such comprehensive efforts more difficult. In addition, the Parsonian mode suffered a long season of profound criticism in the 1960s and 1970s, and the generations of sociologists trained in those decades are neither sympathetic to nor well versed in that theoretical style. In fact, in the past fifty years, the center of gravity of general theoretical thinking has shifted from the United States to Europe, and this shift is represented in the works of scholars like Alain Touraine, Pierre Bourdieu, Juergen Habermas, Niklas Luhmann, and Anthony Giddens. Much of the current theoretical thinking in the United States stems from the influence of these figures on faculty and graduate students. Other efforts will be more modest. We may expect additional effort to accommodate and integrate along the lines of the micro-macro relationship, as well as in other areas. The series of conferences jointly sponsored by the theory sections of the American Sociological Association and the German Sociological Association on the micro-macro link, theory of modernity, and theory of culture are perhaps models for this. Finally, interdisciplinary research on specific analytic topics and empirical phenomena generate a different kind of synthesis. For example, insofar as collaborative work among economists, psychologists, and sociologists generates empirical findings and theoretical formulation of individual behavior in the face of risk and uncertainty, this knowledge is synthetic in that it generates certain principles that comprehend phenomena that are of interest to several different disciplinary lines of inquiry. All these efforts represent different kinds of counterbalances to the centrifugal and fragmenting tendencies stressed earlier. The spirit of this essay has been to avoid global proclamations—“a field in crisis,” “a field in decline,” “a new dynamism”—about sociology and instead to honor its complexity by identifying a number of probable trends working in different directions. One general word, however, might be in

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order. That is that the road ahead does not seem an easy one for the discipline. Sociology has always been a field that has experienced some difficulty in settling on its own identity. It appears that in the future this difficulty will become even greater because of the trends described in this essay. At the same time, however, the evident organizational stability and the continuity in the professional designation of those who practice in it will continue to force the issue of identity upon sociologists. To seek this identity at a time when the field shows many signs that its common ground is receding is a challenge that is not exactly welcome.

r e f e r en c e s Ball-Rokeach, S. J. 1988. “Media Systems and Mass Communications.” In The Future of Sociology, edited by Edgar F. Borgatta and Karen S. Cook, 317–32. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. Becker, Gary S. 1976. The Economic Approach to Human Behavior. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Berk, Richard A. 1988. “How Applied Sociology Can Save Basic Sociology.” In The Future of Sociology, edited by Edgar F. Borgatta and Karen S. Cook, 57–72. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. Borgatta, Edgar F., and Karen S. Cook, eds. 1988a. The Future of Sociology. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. Borgatta, Edgar F., and Karen S. Cook. 1988b. “Sociology and Its Future.” In The Future of Sociology, edited by Edgar F. Borgatta and Karen S. Cook, 11–17. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. Cook, Karen S., and Kenneth C. Pike. 1988. “Social Psychology: Models of Action, Reaction, and Interaction.” In The Future of Sociology, edited by Edgar F. Borgatta and Karen S. Cook, 236–54. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. Etzioni, Amitai. 1988. The Moral Dimension. New York: Basic Books. Gerstein, Dean R., R. Duncan Luce, Neil J. Smelser, and Sonja Sperlich, eds. 1988. The Behavioral and Social Sciences: Achievement and Opportunities. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Gordon, Leonard. 1988. “Sociology of Education.” In The Future of Sociology, edited by Edgar F. Borgatta and Karen S. Cook, 86–104. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. Habermas, Juergen. 1975. Legitimation Crisis. Boston: Beacon Press. Homans, George C. 1974. Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.

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Lee, Barrett A. 1988. “Urban Sociology.” In The Future of Sociology, edited by Edgar F. Borgatta and Karen S. Cook, 200–223. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. Pullum, Thomas W. 1988. “Demography.” In The Future of Sociology, edited by Edgar F. Borgatta and Karen S. Cook, 224–35. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. Shupe, Anson, and Jeffrey K. Hadden. 1988. “Sociology of Religion.” In The Future of Sociology, edited by Edgar F. Borgatta and Karen S. Cook, 120–37. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. Turk, Herman. 1988. “Sociological Theory.” In The Future of Sociology, edited by Edgar F. Borgatta and Karen S. Cook, 18–41. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.

7

Sociology as Science, Humanism, and Art (1994)

It was about 150 years ago that William Graham Sumner was born, the son of an English machinist who endowed him with a work ethic, a sense of personal integrity, and a stubborn independence from the world—qualities that were cloned on the son in such a way that they were never shaken. Later in his life, Sumner developed a love for what he called the “forgotten man”—the independent citizen who worked hard, paid his debts and taxes, dutifully raised his family, and perpetuated community values. Sumner might have been reviving the ghost of his father. It was about 120 years ago that Sumner, after having been trained for the Episcopalian ministry, read Herbert Spencer, and that momentous occasion began his conversion to the infant field of sociological studies. And it was at Yale, about 100 years ago, that Sumner offered the first academic course—in the world, it is believed—with the title of “sociology” in it. This was an event whose great symbolic import we can celebrate today but whose full significance was, no doubt, scarcely perceived by Sumner himself.

From Tocqueville Review 15, no. 2 (1994): 5–18.

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Sumner believed his sociology to be a science—at least the beginnings of one—and certainly not an art. But a number of his formulations fit the theme of the field as both art and science, and I will refer to them from time to time.

th e ma i n a r g um e n t: s oc i olo g y i n t h e la r g e r picture of human inquiry As many students in college recognize, one clever and sometimes effective ploy in confronting a question on a final examination—especially a question whose answer does not occur to them immediately—is to redefine the question. “Before we can consider the question, it is necessary to clarify its meaning,” begins the answer. If pursued creatively enough, this strategy can consume the entire time devoted to the question and throw enough dust in the eyes of the examiner to earn a decent grade. I promise not to take up my entire remarks with clarifications. I will, however, make an initial clarification of the assigned theme of “sociology as art and science” and in doing so will reveal my major argument. Here is the clarification. Instead of addressing the topic of “sociology as art and science,” I will maintain that over the past century the major debates and dilemmas in our field—right up to the present—can be understood in terms of sociology’s proximity to three intellectual outlooks. These may be referred to as the scientific orientation, the humanistic orientation, and the artistic orientation. At the risk of anthropocentrism, I put sociology in the center of the map and represent the three neighboring orientations as surrounding it (see figure 2, next page). First, a few definitional notes: • Sociology I will not define for the moment, and by not doing that I

shorten my remarks considerably. • By the scientific orientation I refer to inquiry that focuses on natural

laws and logically closed theoretical formulations; on causal, even deterministic analysis; on a dispassionate attitude toward the subject matter under study; on empirical study; on precision and measurement; and on a method of inquiry that isolates and controls many possible causes in order to arrive at the decisive ones.

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Figure 2.

• By the humanistic orientation I have in mind inquiry that focuses on

the human being; includes a preoccupation with the human condition (including human suffering); and deals above all with human meanings, systems of which constitute culture. What I am calling humanism overlaps in complex ways with humanitarianism, humaneness, and the disciplines in the humanities, but I will forego trying to explicate this complex conceptual geography. • In the artistic orientation I include two rather different connotations—

first, an aesthetic orientation toward subject matter, or an emphasis on pattern; and, second, an emphasis on the application of knowledge, as in the “art of medical practice” or the “art of the possible.”

My basic thesis is the following: sociology, having differentiated in complex ways out of all three of these orientations, still maintains connections with all of them. Indeed, all three orientations not only constitute the significant moral/intellectual environments of sociology but also are simultaneously parts of the sociological enterprise itself. Because of sociology’s separateness from and interpenetration with these several orientations, we can note immediately two kinds of intellectual phenomena that sociology as a discipline experiences: • From outside the field come assessments that originate from standards

deriving from the viewpoints of these other orientations. Natural scientists frequently take on bemused or hostile postures because sociology—or the social sciences in general—are not really as scientific as their own enterprises: that is, they are “soft.” Humanists or those in the humanities may find sociology territorially offensive—that is, intruding on their traditional turf—or may find it arid and inhumane. Those who are artistically oriented may find sociology ugly or useless,

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according to which of the two connotations of the artistic orientation is invoked. • From inside the field, its complex composition—deriving from its

neighboring and penetrating orientations—leads sociologists to raise doubts about the field’s mission, unity, and identity and to foster debates and conflicts within the field. These debates and conflicts express the tensions and antagonisms that arise from the differences among the three orientations. The net result is that sociology has never been able to make up its mind quite what it is. This internal dynamic has both a cost and a benefit. The cost is recurring crises of identity and self-doubts, and the benefit is living in a field that refuses to seal itself into a closed paradigm that threatens to exhaust itself and that instead retains the qualities of intellectual openness and imagination.

In the remainder of my remarks I will illustrate this basic argument by interpreting some central dilemmas and conflicts in sociology by locating them in the context of the map I have constructed. Among these are valuefree versus value-relevant orientations; basic versus applied; knowledge for its own sake versus active intervention; positivistic versus phenomenological emphasis; quantitative versus qualitative emphasis; causal versus configurational analysis; and finally, “mainstream” versus “marginal” in the field.

a general comparison: european and american sociological traditions It is possible to gain some general insights about the different emphases of European and American sociology—ignoring many variations in each, of course—by contrasting the intellectual traditions in which the two originated. In the late nineteenth century, European sociology oriented itself above all to the intellectual traditions of European thought as represented in the study of history, philosophy, law, and the classics and in the critical intellectual traditions focusing on the state, social classes, and the economy. The current preoccupation of European sociology with macroscopic and critical issues—phenomenology excepted—and with the critical treatment of each bears witness to the power of these traditions. American sociology, by contrast, grew up in two different intellectual and social contexts. First, it made its appearance in the public institu-

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tions of higher education in this country several decades after the Morrill Act of 1862, which solidly established the scientific-practical impulse in American higher education. Second, in the 1890s the reform theme was in the air and sociology picked up that theme from both the social gospel movement and the Progressive movement. It is not surprising that sociology, struggling to establish its legitimacy in those days, elaborated ideas of scientific respectability and social reform as its motifs to broadcast to the academy and to the larger society. Those themes persist to the present day. They fit comfortably into the American cultural emphases on pragmatism, reform, and optimism. Also, American sociology appears to have an odd and persisting preoccupation with how scientific it is or is not, and upon what model of the scientific method it is or should be built. Reading these observations in the context of my intellectual map, American sociology began with a closer identification with the scientific orientation, European with the humanistic. Insofar as both carried a humanistic impulse—that is, a preoccupation with the human condition— the European was more critical and potentially revolutionary, whereas the American tradition was tamer and more ameliorative. During the twentieth century that picture has become more complex, as American sociological thought has become infused with European theoretical influences, and European sociology has developed, partly under American influence, empiricist and moderate strands. The two traditions, coming from different origins, have tended to converge in some degree.

evolutionary naturalism versus progressive e vo lu ti o n i s m The evolutionary perspective, propagated mainly through the influence of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, was dominant in American sociology in the late nineteenth century. Within this context a debate developed between advocates of two variants of evolutionary thought: evolutionary naturalism and progressive evolutionism. To put the matter simply, the debate was between Sumner on the one side and most of the other founding sociologists on the other. All were committed in varying ways to sociol-

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ogy as a science, as might be expected from my earlier observations. The issue, rather, was one of humanism. On the one side stood Sumner, the evolutionary naturalist who believed in the immutable natural laws of evolution—including the survival of the fittest—that lie beyond human intervention, even though he did envision the possibility of incremental improvement of the human condition through technological and material advance. Consistent with this deterministic position, Sumner took a hostile stance toward reformists and socialists alike, regarding them as unrealistic dreamers and defiers of the laws of evolution. He also took what we would now regard as a heartless, unhumanistic position with respect to social problems, social welfare, and social reform. In a dramatic moment, Sumner penned the following words about vice in society: Vice is its own cure. If we let nature alone she cures vice by the most frightful penalties. . . . A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be. Nature is working away at him to get out of the way, just as she sets up her processes of dissolution to remove whatever is a failure in its line. Gambling and less mentionable vices all cure themselves by the ruin and dissolution of their victims. Nine-tenths of our measures for preventing vice are really protective towards it, because they ward off the penalty. (Sumner 1963, 122–23)

At the theoretical level, the progressive evolutionists criticized both the materialism and the determinism of Sumner’s position, and held, to the contrary, that human evolution had reached such a state as to have liberated humanity from the dictates of nature and that at the contemporary stage of civilization mankind had achieved a degree of freedom that permitted improvement, by deliberate and purposive efforts, of the lot of civilization and humanity. The debate between the naturalists and the progressivists—which the progressivists clearly seemed at the time to win—was not, I suggest, a debate about science. Both sides advertised themselves as scientific. It was a debate about humanism (i.e., sensitivity to the human condition) and about art (the improvement of that condition through purposive application of knowledge). Sumner tended to reject the humanistic impulse, whereas the progressivists, in their optimism, found a way to combine the

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scientific and humanistic impulses in a way that nestled more comfortably into the moral and political context of the times.

th e i n tra c ta b le d i le m ma : s c i e n t i f i c d i s pa s s i o n versus interventionism Perhaps the most repetitive dilemma in the history of sociology—right up to the present day—is the tension between watching and recording the natural laws of science and intervening in the social world, in the name of alleviating suffering, solving social problems, or reforming society. This dilemma, of course, is between the scientific orientation and a kind of amalgam of the humanistic and artistic orientations based on caring about the world and ameliorating or eradicating its ills through the application of knowledge. Again Sumner provides a good lead on this issue. Given his stark Darwinian insistence on natural laws, his sympathy with human suffering appears to be minimal. By the same token, his naturalistic-scientific orientation also predisposed him to argue against purposive human intervention, including state intervention, in things. Some have characterized Sumner as a somewhat crude apologist for laissez-faire and a sociological champion of the business interests of American high capitalism, and find many passages in his work to support this view. Others challenge this interpretation as simplistic and find other passages of their own. Be that as it may, one can see the coherent connection between Sumner’s naturalism and his stress on passivity with respect to intervention. On this score Sumner was in the minority. Most American sociologists during the first half century of the field were ameliorationists and reformers, while at the same time arguing that their fledgling discipline was or ought to be a science. That moral/ameliorative strain in early American sociology has been noted often and traced both to the religious origins of the founders and to the Progressive spirit of the era. Interpreters of a Marxist persuasion would also view their tame ameliorationism as an apology for capitalism— that is to say, focusing on the victims of the system rather than the system itself. There may be some merit in this, but I think it is perhaps more valuable to invoke Max Weber’s perspective on the matter. Most of the early

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sociologists—including the early Chicago School’s—were consciously aware of and wrote critically about the social problems and evils of industrialurban society, and they often attributed them directly to industrial capitalism. Their writings also reveal a continuing romance with a vision of sturdy and rigorous rural life. But it should be understood that the early sociologists were something of an aspiring priestly class, seeking to establish some legitimate territory for themselves. Moreover, there were other claimants for that territory—Progressive Era reformers, the socialists of the late nineteenth century, and more remote exponents of revolutionary Marxism. It has frequently been noted that early American sociology was hostile to both socialism and Marxism. My point is this: the amalgam of positions taken by early American sociology can be understood when it is appreciated that the founders were a new priestly class striving for legitimacy in two distinct arenas. The first arena was the university system, in which science had been given great legitimacy and in which economics and psychology already had a head start as human sciences. The sociologists’ claim for scientific legitimacy derives above all from this context. At the same time there were good historical reasons for these sociologists to have moral and humanistic concerns, and they were striving for legitimacy as moral and reformist entrepreneurs as well. When we acknowledge this, the special formula of amelioration through the application of sound scientific knowledge makes sense. That formula was the amalgam of the scientific, humanistic, and artistic orientations, and it constituted a complex appeal for legitimacy in both the academic and public arenas. An interesting variant of the dilemma between dispassion and intervention appeared in the Chicago School, personified in the tension between Robert Park and William Fielding Ogburn. Park himself was committed to the scientific enterprise, was an empiricist, and was impatient with what he called “do-gooders,” but at the same time he retained the preoccupation of the early Chicago School with the social problems of those who suffered in the urban laboratory. Ogburn, the quintessential antitheoretical and empirical statistician, criticized the enthnographically inclined Chicago School for not being scientific enough and simultaneously launched his campaign for empirical precision, measurement, and quantification. Yet Ogburn was an ameliorationist of sorts himself. If one reads his texts in Recent Social Trends (President’s Research Committee 1933), one observes a strict,

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nonpartisan remove and neutrality with respect to the great political issues of the day (especially the Great Depression), yet at the same time the argument that the accumulation of knowledge on a scientific basis would lead to social improvements and solutions through his own variant of social engineering. Again, the priestly advantages are apparent in Ogburn’s position: one protects oneself from partisan criticism by standing away but promises in a general way the means to ease or solve the problems and ills around which partisanship swirls. The two catches in this formula, of course, are (1) that the farther away from the world one stands in the posture of dispassion, the more nonspecific and difficult it is to apply one’s promised knowledge—that is, the artistic component; and (2) that if one holds out promises of amelioration through the application of sound knowledge, these promises, if not kept, are likely to result in disappointment in and discreditation of the field. The 1930s witnessed a sharpening of the tension between scientific dispassion and interventionism in the dialogue between George Lundberg and Robert Lynd. Lundberg, with the friendly company of Percy Bridgman in physics and A. J. Ayer in philosophy, was the pure positivist and operationalist, going much further than Ogburn in his scientism, yet at the same time holding on to a remote ameliorationism, as the title of his main book—Can Science Save Us?—reveals. Lynd, radicalized by the economic contradictions and suffering he observed in Middletown in the Great Depression, launched an attack on the aridity of scientism and called for an attitude of concerned humanistic criticism and political activism. His answer to his book title—Knowledge for What?—was certainly not knowledge for itself but knowledge for a troubled society. Among those sociologists who champion the interventionist or humanistic-artistic wing of sociology, one can identify three variants: • The criticism of society that arises in identifying with the unprivileged

or suffering subjects one is studying—a special sociological variant of “going native.” Many of the early sociologists in the Chicago School manifested this in their study of the prostitute, the hobo, and what was then called the jack-roller. The same impulse is found in the “labeling” approach to deviance, which portrays the “deviant” as the victim of a kind of conceptual manipulation on the part of those with authority or in power. This kind of identification is not very radical, as Alvin

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Gouldner once complained, because it doesn’t really focus as much on the system as it does on the system’s victims. • The criticism implied by the ameliorationist approach itself. Most

moderate reformers do start with some kind of identifiable social problem or human suffering, and much of the reformist impulse does call for some modest alteration of the system—such as a new regulatory agency or a new law. This ameliorationist impulse is probably the most common one in American sociology, shared by the founders, the Chicago School, many positivists, and the small army of sociologists engaged in “applied sociology” and “policy-relevant” research. • The criticism implied by the special American variant of radical sociology.

In this group I include the closely related messages of Thorstein Veblen, Lynd, C. Wright Mills, and the radical sociologies that emerged in the 1960s and have persisted in radical feminism, radical theories of race, and other subfields of sociology. Most often this been, not a Marxist radicalism—Mills himself was a critic of Marx—but a more generalized critical attitude that includes a preoccupation with oppression, injustices, alienation, and contradictions. The approach also merits the term radical because the inequities and other societal ills at hand are characterized as faults of the system, with the implication that change must be systemic in character. Specific utopias beyond the goals of greater democracy and greater justice are not often found in American radical sociology, however.

Except for the ameliorationist posture, most of these critical-humanist stances tend to assume a posture that, while not frankly antiscientific, is nonetheless hostile to the presumed disembodiment, coldheartedness, or political conservatism of the advocates and practitioners of positive science. As such, therefore, the critical or radical positions in sociology are reflective of the tensions between the scientific orientation and the humanistic-artistic orientations.

the oretical and methodological versions o f t h e d i le mma I have just mentioned the tension between positive science and concerned intervention as a special case of the tension between the several orientations

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that border on and are part of the sociological enterprise. I now turn to a number of repetitive dilemmas of a theoretical-methodological character. These overlap with one another and with the dispassion-intervention dilemma in various ways, furthermore, and the overlaps can be traced to the basic thesis I am advancing. The following are the variations of the conflicts I have in mind.

1. Positivism versus Phenomenology Ever since the advent of Comtean positivism, one of the connotations of that term is a focus on facts, positive facts. A close corollary, espoused vigorously by Émile Durkheim in The Rules of the Sociological Method, is a corresponding hostility toward “inner states” such as human motivation and human meaning, as experienced by the subject under study. The phenomenological approach lets the subjects speak in their own words, as Kai Erikson put it in his ethnographic study of the Buffalo Creek disaster. Considered as such, the phenomenological impulse is one that frequently ennobles the subject: that is, it does not reduce him or her to “behaviors” that are thought to be “determined” by external biological or social forces. Such is Herbert Blumer’s view of the actor, who is master of things insofar as they are not real and external but endowed with his or her own meanings. Such are Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological actors, who negotiate reality rather than being subjected to it like so many “cultural dopes.” Such also are Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s social constructors of reality, who interact to produce and reproduce the social environment they inhabit. The examples reveal the humanistic and frequently antiscientific posture of the phenomenological approach.

2. Quantitative versus Qualitative Analysis I have never been able to find a consistent meaning for this distinction: for example, words like more or less or the majority often appear in analyses that are otherwise considered qualitative. Nevertheless, the distinction continues to be a part of our discourse, and the merits of one are often compared with the demerits of the other. One meaning of the contrast that is relevant to my theme is that quantitative measures and statistical

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representations standardize facts about individuals and thus pull those facts from the contextual richness of individual meaning in which they are embedded, meaning that can be appreciated only through rich or thick qualitative description. This is the brunt of Herbert Blumer’s classic attack on the standardized survey questionnaire, which he regarded as fundamentally distorting of psychic and interactional reality. In this dialogue the tension between the scientific and humanistic orientations seem clear. There appears to be an artistic complaint, too, when it is held that quantification of facts is essentially unaesthetic because it destroys a psychic reality, which can be “grasped” and “appreciated” only through Verstehen or some other kind of sympathetic understanding.

3. Formal Statistical Analysis of Social Data versus Ethnographically Based Analysis This overlaps with the contrast between quantitative and qualitative analysis, but the tenor of debates often differs. Most discussions stress the more representative nature of statistical analysis and the limited generalizability of the case study, or the abstracted quality of statistical analysis and the richness and depth of the case study. At the same time, an ethnography is more likely to represent the social world as the subjects represent it, and ethnographic reports have an affinity with literary or aesthetic representations of interactional and cultural patterns: that is to say, they approximate the novel, the drama, and the biography more than the scientific report does.

4. Aggregative-Causal versus Pattern or Clinical Analysis Both experimental and social psychology are often variable centered, taking one psychological variable (e.g., tolerance of ambiguity), measuring that variable in a large number of subjects, and determining how strongly this variable correlates with some presumed effect (e.g., level of racial prejudice). An alternative mode of explanation, often referred to as clinical inference, refers to interpreting a vast range of personal material about a single individual and arriving at a complex and coherent statement of why it is that the individual harbors such strong feelings of prejudice. The

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same contrast appears in political science and sociology: for example, many cross-national analyses deal with quantitative associations (e.g., between economic development and political democracy) in a large sample of nations; case studies of the political process in a single nation focus on the interplay of a multiplicity of forces that generate a democratic or undemocratic polity. Edmund Leach once went so far as to contrast sociology, with its statistical-aggregative approach, to anthropology, with its ethnographic-pattern approach. This line of contrast, which is known generically as the nomothetic mode versus the ideographic mode, is simultaneously, I would suspect, a methodological and aesthetic one, with advocates of the respective modes occupying different places on my map of sociology and its contexts.

f i na l i llus trat i on : m ai n s t r e a m v e r s us n o n ma i n st r ea m s oc i o lo g y One of the terms that occurs repeatedly in sociologists’ discourse about their field and about one another is the term mainstream—implying the existence of a big river in which some of us float, and smaller rivulets for the rest of us. The term also implies some kind of core and some kind of periphery. Finally, the term connotes a certain advantage or privileged place for the mainstream and a certain deficit in these regards for those on the margin. In a field that has grown so complex—if not fragmented—as ours, it is difficult nowadays to find a consistent meaning of mainstream. Gerald Marwell, editor of the American Sociological Review, reported to me that among those who submit articles for consideration, almost everyone claims to be and perhaps apologizes for being marginal in the field—even those who submit path-analytic models of status attainment bolstered by a large, quantitative database. Marwell exaggerates, perhaps, but the point is made: any “core” of sociology is problematic, fuzzy, and frayed around the edges. Notwithstanding this difficulty of consistent definition, I believe it is possible to locate two general dimensions for which mainstream is a kind of convenient, if unreflective, shorthand:

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• By and large, the term mainstream in the American sociological

tradition refers to that complex of orientations that lie toward the “scientific” edge of sociology on my map—that is to say, reliance on systematically gathered and representative data sets that are empirically observable and hopefully quantifiable; a search for regularities if not laws; and a posture of scientific neutrality, with an ameliorationist orientation at most. “Nonmainstream” is not a single entity but is constituted of all those variants I have identified that lie on the humanistic and artistic sides of the sociological universe. I would venture to say that, if interviewed, most “nonmainstream” sociologists would define themselves as possessing one or more of those humanistic or artistic orientations. This general statement is subject to many qualifications, of course, given the vagueness of discourse on the matter. • There is a second sense in which the term mainstream implies

“establishment.” Funding agencies, led by the National Science Foundation (its name says that it is “scientific” in orientation), tend to stress excellence of research design, hypotheses, samples, and methodology in evaluating proposals. These agencies generally send out the message that “hard science” is the thing and, correspondingly, tend to look less favorably on that which is “soft”— speculative (i.e., theoretical), qualitative, humanistic, ethnographic, and clinical. There are some exceptions, but the generalization holds. The same might be said with respect to the elite “mainstream” sociological journals, whose criteria for acceptance are primarily scientific, though one may identify some notable exceptions here as well. The resulting differential access of those in the “mainstream” to resources and recognition feeds into resentments within the discipline, with those in the mainstream being regarded as “fat cats” and those in the nonmainstream as underprivileged and underfed outsiders (a circumstance that might provide another reason for their hostility toward scientism and their affinity with those who suffer unjustly).

co n c lu si o n It can be argued that sociology has some sort of intellectual core (e.g., the study of institutional life) and continuity with respect to subject matter. But with respect to intellectual orientations, it is forever struggling with conflicting images of itself, images that can be traced both to its origins and to its intellectual boundaries. Perhaps my arguments have provided

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you with some degree of understanding of why it is that sociologists have a running preoccupation with defining themselves and finding an intellectual home. The truth is that they have many homes, but it is difficult for them (us) to tolerate this kind of perpetual ambiguity in the context of an intellectual tradition that holds out an expectation that a science should have unity and coherence above all. It is equally certain, moreover, that any effort to define in certain and simple terms is likely to cause disputation because the field itself is, in reality, so ambiguous and complex in its orientations.

r e f e r en c e s President’s Research Committee on Social Trends. 1933. Recent Social Trends in the United States. New York: McGraw Hill. Sumner, William Graham. 1963. “The Forgotten Man.” In Social Darwinism: Selected Essays of William Graham Sumner, 110–35. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

8

Problematics in the Internationalization of Social Science Knowledge (1991)

My objective in this essay is to develop a statement of those conditions that facilitate and those that obstruct the internationalization of social science knowledge. The topic merits investigation, if for no other reason than that the internationalization of culture of all forms is an increasingly visible and salient phenomenon in our time. The process is evident at many levels: • The spread of science and technology, fueled by the intensity of

international economic competition • The diffusion of ideologies, notably those of democracy and

modernization • The growth of common norms associated with growing economic and

political interdependence • The growing flow of persons through migration and tourism • The diffusion of culture, especially popular culture, through the

expanded international system of the media, especially television

From Current Sociology 39, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 21–46.

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From this list I select the internationalization of social knowledge, that special type of culture that involves theory, empirical claims, and lore about culture, society, and the person. My topic, thus identified, seems simple enough, but several of its terms are sufficiently vague and complex that they demand an initial set of distinctions and specifications.

three orienting clarifications First Clarification: Facets of Knowledge I distinguish among three aspects of knowledge—research, training, and learning—and the content and quality of knowledge. Research refers to the formal creation and codification of knowledge. Considered analytically, this activity is not attached to any special kind of social structure; knowledge has been created and solidified informally, for example, in peasant agriculture and traditional crafts, and chroniclers and historians have accumulated facts and lore about societies for many centuries. Since the development of formal scholarship and scientific research, however, research tends to be lodged and carried out in libraries, institutes, universities, academies, laboratories, and field stations. Much research is also carried out in institutions not dedicated primarily to that activity—for example, businesses and government agencies. Teaching and learning refer mainly to the transmission, exchange, and critical evaluation of knowledge in a setting involving teacher and student or trainer and trainee. Again, much of this transpires in informal contexts, such as the family, and in apprenticeship and other occupational settings. Modern society, however, has created a wide range of specialized institutions devoted primarily to teaching and learning—schools, academies, colleges, and universities. In this essay I will consider mainly this formal infrastructure for research and for teaching-learning—that is, academic arrangements in their international aspects. Even there, however, it is not clear that the distinction between research and teaching-learning is a completely clear one. Much research transpires in the context of a teaching-learning setting (for example, the work of postgraduate research assistants and student laboratory assistants), and the conduct of research

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certainly involves the transmission and exchange of knowledge on a continuous basis. I will also focus on the actual content and quality of that cultural product called knowledge, and, in particular the degree and ways in which that product becomes internationalized. By content and quality I refer, among other things, to the metatheoretical assumptions and theoretical organization of knowledge: the substance of knowledge as summarized in assertions, propositions, generalizations, factual statements, explanations, and interpretations; and the methodologies (rules and procedures) by which knowledge is generated, assessed, and critically evaluated. I will give greatest attention to these aspects of knowledge. (By way of a final parenthesis, it should be acknowledged that there is always a mutual influence between the content and quality of knowledge on the one hand, and the infrastructure and processes of research and teaching-learning on the other.)

Second Clarification: The Many Meanings of Internationalization One of the characteristics of the English language—and others—is that a noun is thought to be denotative, to refer to a definite thing. As often as not, however, it is difficult to locate that thing empirically, and, furthermore, with usage a noun comes to refer not to one but to many things. Such is the case with the noun internationalization when applied to knowledge. The term is a relatively new one, but it has already accumulated a troublesome complexity and vagueness. In reading and reflecting, I have been able to discern seven meanings of the internationalization of knowledge, which, with little effort, could be even further subdivided and specialized: 1. The development of general principles of knowledge that are everywhere applicable, without reference to specific national, regional, or cultural boundaries. This characterization applies most evidently to the content of mathematics and the natural sciences, but as we will see, this statement requires some qualification with respect to those bodies of knowledge. With regard to this kind of universalization of knowledge in the behavioral and social sciences and the humanities, its degree of realization remains a debated and unresolved issue.

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2. The development of universal and general variables that have applicability without reference to national and other boundaries but that must be specified and particularized with respect to different national-cultural settings and different historical periods. The concept of social stratification would be such a variable. 3. The first two meanings refer mainly to the cognitive validity of knowledge across international lines. It is also necessary to refer to the degree to which knowledge is granted international consensus. This raises a range of issues different from that of validity. The distinction is best illustrated with respect to medical knowledge. It may be claimed that the principles of “Western” medical knowledge, based on the natural and life sciences as they have developed in the West, are generally applicable to the health and illness of the human organism, no matter where it is situated. Be that as it may, the principles of Western medicine by no means enjoy universal consensus, as the existence of “Oriental” medicine, various kinds of folk medicines in both complex and simple societies, and faith healing amply demonstrate. The anthropological study of “ethnomedicine” (and more generally, “ethno-science”) takes this phenomenon of nonuniversal consensus formally into account. 4. The development of specific institutional infrastructures for the development and transmission of knowledge that are institutionalized on an international basis. The universities and academies of the world constitute the readiest examples. 5. The development of organizations and associations of an explicit international character. The readiest examples are international scholarly associations dedicated to the promotion and spread of science and scholarship in their respective disciplines. 6. The development of international interacting and networking of scholars on a less formal basis than in (5), mainly through international collaboration on research, migration of research scholars into foreign settings, and the international exchange of students. 7. The international diffusion of formal knowledge. This process can be characterized at two levels: (a) diffusion of knowledge among the relevant scholarly communities in different societies; (b) the diffusion of knowledge into the cultures and populations of the world—that is, the entry of codified knowledge into a developing common culture of the world. The mechanisms for the former are largely scholarly books and journals, symposia, and conferences; the mechanisms for the latter involve the mass media.

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Third Clarification: Types of Knowledge The final point to call to attention is that the conditions of internationalization of knowledge will differ according to the type of knowledge involved. In this connection I refer to the standard distinctions among natural (physical and life) sciences, the social and behavioral sciences, and the humanities. I note that these distinctions are often unclear themselves, with some lines of inquiry (e.g., history) assignable to more than one tradition and some areas of inquiry (e.g., neurological psychiatry) bridging two of them. In the discussion that follows I will focus on the behavioral and social sciences—my areas of knowledge and interest—and make passing reference to the others.

the international applicability of knowledge: tw o i llu s t rat i on s In their brief histories, each of the behavioral and social sciences has modeled itself after the natural sciences in one way or another. That group of thinkers classified roughly under the headings of “philosophical radicals” and “utilitarians,” for example, explicitly avowed that they were creating a science of economy, society, and morality that conformed to the model of classical Newtonian physics (Halevy 1928). A corollary of this program was that it was possible to discover and define scientifically based principles and laws that would be generally—indeed universally—applicable to human societies. Yet the history of the behavioral and social sciences has proved problematical in this regard, as the following two examples illustrate.

Classical Economics In simplified outline, classical economics, advanced as a general science, took as its basic units of analysis the individual buyers and sellers of resources and products (individuals, households, firms). Certain assumptions were made about the motivation of these. The most evident is the assumption, bred by the utilitarian tradition, that an economic actor behaves in such a way as to maximize his or her material well-being or utility. An additional assumption is that both buyers and sellers possess

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full knowledge about the availability and prices of products, job opportunities, and other market conditions. These first two assumptions were linked by a third, a postulate of rationality, whereby both buyers and sellers, possessing preferences and full information, act rationally on the basis of these. They will not make errors, they will not forget what they know, and they will not act irrationally (that is, on bases counter to their interests and information). Certain other assumptions were made about the interaction between buyer and seller. They will meet in a peaceful setting in which it is understood that neither will engage in transactions other than economic exchange (e.g., coercion, violence); the terms of exchange are understood (labor for wages, commodities for money); each will make offers on the basis of his or her own preferences (supply and demand schedules); and on this basis an equilibrium price point will emerge. It was also assumed that the exchange would not be negotiated (haggled over) but would be a more or less automatic intersection of the schedules of the actors. In addition to these assumptions about psychology and exchange, classical economics also built—often implicitly—a number of assumptions about the larger society into their analyses. Among these was the assumption of the “frictionless” market, in which perfect mobility was posited for people, resources, and commodities upon demand. Another was the assumption of incapacity of either firms or consumers to exercise control over others with respect to output and prices; this is an assumption of the independence of actors and virtually rules out the exercise of power and influence in economic transactions. Still another—this one completely implicit—was that culture (information) is equally and fully available to everyone. Certain further assumptions had to do with the existence of institutions, such as a credit or banking system, a political system to guarantee conditions of stability in processes of exchange, and the absence of war. While these assumptions and derived economic processes were originally advanced as general laws, it has become apparent that they were highly specialized and restricted to a specific set of (at best) historically specific market situations or (at worst) completely fictional circumstances. In fact, much of the history of economic theory has involved the acknowledgment that the assumptions of classical economics were limited and that more realistic explanations could be generated only by relaxing those

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assumptions and substituting alternative ones for them. The development of imperfect competition theory, for example, dropped the assumption of “independence of actors” and explicitly built in the possibility that buyers and sellers—especially the latter—could exercise control over output and prices. One of the core features of the Keynesian reformulation was that it modified the “rationality” assumptions of buyers, laborers, savers, and investors and dropped the assumptions of “frictionlessness” of the market in order to generate explanations of chronic unemployment and inflation, which neoclassical economics could not explain. Modern economic developments have also altered the conditions of perfect knowledge and introduced assumptions of uncertainty and risk into the analysis of economic behavior. In modifying classical economics in these ways, theorists were, in effect acknowledging the restricted character of the “laws” of classical theory and, correspondingly, establishing limits on their universality, even in Western market economies. More serious challenges to the universality of the principles of economics were to come from anthropologists and historians. In classical critiques, Malinowski (1922) and Firth (1966, 1971) demonstrated that in preliterate societies markets did not exist, that the “rationality” of mutual reciprocation rather than economic calculation appeared to dominate, and that the motivation to work did not seem to correspond to the theories posited by economists. This critique of the inapplicability of formal economics to simple societies came to constitute the central theme of that subfield of anthropology known as economic anthropology (Herskovits 1952; Dalton 1967). An equally profound critique of classical economics is found in the works of Karl Polanyi and his colleagues (Polanyi 1944; Polanyi, Arensberg, and Pearson 1957). These critiques share the arguments that (1) principles and mechanisms such as economic rationality and the market, thought to be universal by economists, are specific products of Western economic development and are limited in their applicability to Western market economies; (2) all economic systems are embedded in institutional and cultural systems, which are highly variable from society to society; (3) different forms of embeddedness of economic systems yield different kinds of exchange, such as reciprocative and redistributive, in addition to market exchanges; (4) as a result of all of the above, Western economic theory cannot be supposed to be universal in its applicability

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but is only one historically specific form of explanation. However persuasive these arguments might be, they have not totally deflected the further development of economic and other theories based on rational-choice assumptions (Becker 1976; Coleman 1990).

Development Theory The last decades of the nineteenth century were dominated by classical evolutionary principles, which were presented as a “universal” theory in that it conceived of all societies as passing through the same unilinear set of stages from primitive or savage to modern and civilized (Morgan 1963). According to this theory, moreover, currently existing societies could be understood in terms of how far they had advanced along this line. In the first two or three decades of the twentieth century, classical evolutionary theory was challenged by diffusionists (Boas 1928), functionalists (Radcliffe-Brown 1952), and cultural relativists (Benedict 1934). The arguments were that societies could “skip stages” or otherwise deviate from some preassigned evolutionary sequence because of the diffusion of technology and other cultural items; that “vestiges” from past histories of society persisted because they continued to play active and useful functions in contemporary societies; and that the idea that evolutionary history culminated in some high moral center in western Europe was absurdly ethnocentric. These attacks constituted, in effect, a challenge to the universality of “internationalization” of evolutionary theory. After the Second World War, Western social science witnessed a certain revitalization of some elements of evolutionary theory in some representations of “modernization theory.” While rejecting naive “stage theories” of development, some modernization theorists did envision a kind of common developmental path. Daniel Lerner (1964), for example, defined modernization as “the process of social change whereby less developed societies acquire characteristics, for example, common to more developed societies” (386). Kerr et al. (1960) argued that modern industrial relations systems, while beginning from very diverse origins, were evolving to a common modern type in developing societies; and Goode (1963) advanced an essentially similar argument with respect to modern changes in family structure. Expressed as such, modernization theory assumed a modified

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kind of universalist cast. In one of its guises, it was called “convergence theory.” In subsequent decades modernization theory suffered a critical fate similar to that of classical evolutionary theory, though the sources of criticism were very different. Gusfield (1967), for example, rejected the idea that “traditional” societies (which are themselves heterogeneous) are in any way “replaced” by modern institutions and culture; rather, traditional and modern blend together in syncretic and idiosyncratic ways in the process of development. Gerschenkron (1962) argued that the economic development of the “late developers” (Germany, Russia) was essentially different from the early pattern established by England, in that banks and the state took a much more aggressive entrepreneurial role in the “follower” nations. Both Bendix (1967) and Dore (1973) stressed the international system, arguing that the latecomers engage in a competitive process of “catch-up” with the leaders and in doing so borrow the most modern technology in engineering their own economic and social transformations. (In this particular, the arguments of Bendix and Dore resemble those of diffusionist critics of classical evolutionary theory.) Two other lines of theory also constituted an assault on the universal validity of modernization theory. A number of theories of Latin American development (Frank 1967; Cardoso and Falleto 1979) argued that the developmental process (or lack of it) was to be found, not in mechanisms internal to societies (entrepreneurship, resistance from “traditionalist” institutions, for example), but rather in the international situation of the country in question. In particular, these theorists—called “dependency theorists”—argued that the developmental process of dependent societies (former colonies, newly developing countries) was frequently blocked and/or warped by the fact that dominant societies (the United States, western Europe) constrained their economies and class/political systems by policies of domination through multinational corporate penetration and manipulation of international capital and credit. In a related formulation, Wallerstein (1974) argued that the history of Western development is best understood in terms of the international centrality and peripherality of nations rather than internal developmental dynamics. In subsequent developments, the “universality” of dependency theories has also been challenged by scholars such as Evans (1979) and Gold (1986), who have

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argued that some countries (for example, Taiwan and Korea) have experienced rapid if not spectacular economic development under certain kinds of dependency situations. As these examples of economic theory and development theory illustrate, the social and behavioral sciences appear to experience a kind of internal tension, if not dialectic alternation. On the one hand theorists have a predilection for generating principles that are framed in general, universal—and by implication, international—terms. On the other hand, the limitations of such theories become evident through the accumulation of theoretical critiques and empirical research that demonstrate their inapplicability—that is, their lack of universality in situations, societies, nations, and cultures that do not meet the parametric assumptions under which they were generated. By such a process the general theories are demonstrated to be historically and comparatively specific rather than universal. The examples also demonstrate the tentativeness and frailty of efforts in the behavioral and social sciences to generate knowledge that attains the status of international applicability.

f or c es en c ou ra g i n g t h e i n t e r nat i o na li z at i o n o f s o ci a l s c i en c e k n o wl ed g e My argument now takes a change of course. I leave the subject of the universal or transnational validity of social science knowledge and turn to those conditions affecting its degree of consensus, acceptability, and diffusion among nations and cultures. I consider facilitating factors first and obstacles second, though it will become apparent that some items have both a facilitating and an inhibiting significance.

The Universal Human Tendency of Societies to Generate Accounts of Themselves As generations of anthropological, historical, and sociological scholars have documented, there is no known society that does not develop a “theory” about its origins, its distinctive features, its place in nature, and its people and their group or national character. Just as every individual car-

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ries his or her personal “sociology” about the surrounding world, so do all societies invent their own folk economics, political science, sociology, and psychology about themselves. Throughout most of history such accounts have not been very systematic and have consisted of complex congeries of myth, superstition, religious belief, folklore, and common sense (Geertz 1983). The development of modern behavioral and social science can be regarded as a kind of extension of this universal tendency. The main difference between these bodies of thought and the centuries of selfdescription and self-assessment is that they are organized more or less systematically according to the canons of scientific theory, scientific methods of investigation, and empirical verification that have been borrowed and adapted from the traditions of natural science that have preceded them in their development. I regard this universal societal tendency to self-characterize as a potential asset to the internationalization of social science knowledge. That is to say, peoples cannot resist being self-reflective about their social and cultural circumstances, and this makes them unable to resist thinking about this kind of knowledge if it is presented to them. If there ever were, in some time and place, a society that did not think about itself self-consciously, that society would be completely impervious to the possible penetration of social scientific knowledge. The tendency of societies to generate accounts of themselves, then, is an essential condition for their receptivity to general accounts based on scientific methods and procedures. A second, equally universal tendency of societies is to convert their selfcharacterizations into sacred absolutes. Societies’ self-characterizations themselves become reified as natural, right, and moral, and consequently those who hold these beliefs react negatively to alternative versions. A corollary to this tendency is the predilection of societies to isolate, punish, and regard as heretical those who do advance such alternatives. Most of the history of human cultures is a history of intolerance, and only recently in human history has the principle of tolerance been invented, institutionalized, and given positive valence. This tendency to absolutize self-characterizations into systems of self-congratulation and self-worship is a fundamental obstacle to international diffusion of and consensus about knowledge informed by social science work. I will return to some further implications of this observation later in the essay.

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Contemporary World Trends and Their Conduciveness to Scientifically Based Ways of Thinking about Society In the preceding section I reviewed the essentials of the theory of modernization and indicated some of the intellectual pitfalls that that theory has faced. Without adopting a strong “convergence” version of that theory, it is possible to point out that those countries that now commit themselves to economic development and the associated processes of social transformation—and what country in the world does not now make that commitment in some degree?—will experience certain commonalities with respect to social change and social problems. Among these trends are the following: • The drive to improve economic productivity and material progress

will affect all nations; accompanying this will be efforts, greeted with varying degrees of success, to rationalize and systematize their economies. • The long-standing trends toward societal differentiation, in progress for

centuries, will not be reversed. This trend toward increasing complexity will continue to create problems of integration and to increase the role of integrative agencies, including government. The functions of the state, including welfare, administration, and involvement in the economy, will not recede. For that reason, the great administrativestate-rational complex noted by Habermas (1975) will continue to thrive, though one can be less certain about the validity of his pessimistic claims. • The trend toward increasing internationalization of production, trade,

migration, and travel—all making for the increased interdependency of nations—will continue. This will generate a paradoxical result with respect to national states: on the one hand, governments will tend to lose control over conditions affecting their economies because these conditions will be generated more by international forces; on the other hand, governments will be called upon to intensify their activity because of the need to deal with the internal consequences of these international forces. • The importance of the market as an institution for exchange will no

doubt increase in salience. Three sets of forces work in this direction: (1) the increasing internationalization of markets, which necessarily penetrates into nations’ internal economies, no matter what their

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principles of organization, and tends to “marketize” those internal economies; (2) continuing trends toward deregulation and privatization in Western economies; and (3) trends toward de-administration of the economy in favor of market principles in socialist economies. For reasons suggested by the first two points, however, the state will not recede in salience even though the market principle will become more salient. • New technologies, especially information technologies, will continue to

grow, with a further growth—at various rates—in productivity, dominance of the service sector, and leisure. • Accompanying—and in complex ways determined by—these changes

will be a certain “internationalization” of social problems as well—the generalization of urban congestion and pollution, crime, divorce rates, and sex tourism.

All these observations are meant to assert that in these respects societies will become more like one another, despite the persistence and even revitalization of national, regional, and local cultural peculiarities. Insofar as that is the case, it is conducive to the dissemination and consolidation of a common knowledge base—a social science knowledge base—to deal with these common problems. To choose one example: if the trends toward privatization, freedom, and deregulation continue as they have begun in countries like Poland, then the principles of economics as they have developed in Western market economies will better apply to those economies than they did earlier, when they were closely administered on nonmarket socialist principles. To choose another example, as crime, vice, and other social problems associated with political freedom, urban growth, increased tourism, and lessened police surveillance begin to generalize—as they are reported to be doing in Moscow and other capitals of eastern European countries—then the knowledge generated in the fields of criminology and deviance will become of greater interest to political and social leaders in those countries. To generalize the examples: insofar as economic and social trends of the world make for greater similarities in the structures and social problems of the nations of the world, the knowledge relevant to the understanding and amelioration of these phenomena will also tend to be more similar than in the past. As a result, the pressures for the international diffusion of social scientific knowledge will be increased.

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One additional consequence of the internationalization of culture, mainly through television and the written word, must be mentioned. This process makes world cultures more similar—or more American, as unfriendly critics of the process have complained. This characterization is generally accurate. However, from the standpoint of the individual countries affected, this penetration of foreign cultures and/or a new world culture makes for increasing internal diversification of their own indigenous cultures: new assumption, values, and preferences work their way into the society alongside traditional ones. This increasing cultural diversification of individual societies is conducive to the spread of social science knowledge for two different reasons. First, like the other trends noted, this trend toward internal cultural diversification will make for more common “problems” faced by all nations—the problems of cultural pluralism, intolerance, countercultures, and cultural conflict. This commonality of problems will make for a greater commonality in search for solutions, and a greater interest in and borrowing from knowledge applied to those problems in other societies. Second, greater internal cultural diversification tends to demystify and deobjectify inherited cultural values. Under competition and threat from “modern” assumptions and values, they tend to become problematic issues for society rather than taken-for-granted principles. This circumstance constitutes an encouragement to the spread of social science thinking. If any single canon characterizes the social sciences, it is that they select out the taken-forgranted ingredients of a society’s way of life and make them the object of more dispassionate, problematic study. This feature of social scientific study leads defenders of inherited culture to regard social scientific theory and research as inherently “debunking” or even radical. Be that as it may, the connections remain: increasing cultural diversification leads to demystification of inherited cultures and social institutions, and this leads in turn to a more receptive environment for social scientific thinking about them.

Infrastructures Conducive to the Internationalization of the Social Sciences: Research and Exchange Facilities A necessary and facilitative condition for the internationalization of research is the existence of structural arrangements that involve commu-

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nication, learning, and the design and execution of research among scholars of different nations. The mechanisms involved here are familiarization of students and scholars with the ideas, intellectual (including behavioral) traditions, and cultures of other societies; the generation of knowledge by scholars of different traditions meeting and coping with common intellectual problems; and the international diffusion of research results. The following are examples of such infrastructures: • International scholarly associations such as the International Economics

Association and the International Political Science Association. These are obvious avenues for internationalization of knowledge, but their effectiveness is hindered by small budgets, infrequent meetings, and the tendency of some of them—constructed along “United Nations” political national membership and representation—to experience the same kinds of national and regional divisiveness experienced in the United Nations. • Research branches of other international organizations, such as

UNESCO and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. • Research organizations explicitly devoted to the conduct of international

research, especially survey research. • Exchange arrangements for faculty and students, typically arranged by colleges and universities of different countries.

The impact of work in these infrastructures on the international diffusion of social science knowledge (internationalization meaning no. 7 above) is clear: it facilitates that diffusion. It is less clear that such international work facilitates the development of common general theory (meanings nos. 1 and 2) or consensus about social science knowledge (meaning no. 3). International mingling through exchange and cooperation always involves an ambivalent mix: a tendency to heighten mutual appreciation, affection, and common thinking and a tendency to reinforce already existing stereotypes (even though their content may become somewhat richer and more elaborated). There is no reason to believe that international collaborative research would not generate some of the same mixed effects. Finally, we will observe below that the tendency of such knowledge to be selectively adapted, assimilated, or distorted (as the case

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may be) in specific national and regional contexts presents strong counterforces to international homogenization.

The Continued March of Democracy Early in the nineteenth century Tocqueville (1987) foretold repeatedly the inexorability of the advance of democratic principles such as liberty and equality. The ensuing century and a half has not proved him in error, despite the rise and fall of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes and their continued existence in many parts of the world. The last years of the twentieth century have witnessed a special vitality of the democratic impulse internationally, with the collapse of authoritarian communism and socialism in most countries that had these forms; the unsuccessful or semisuccessful pressure on such regimes in countries such as China and Albania; the pressure on apartheid in South Africa; the continued invigoration of democratic forces in Latin America; and the continued preoccupation with injustice and inequality in already democratized countries in North America and western Europe. The march toward democratization has many facets, but Marshall’s (1950) specification of the civil (liberty and conscience), political (institutions such as the franchise and representative government), and social (such as the provision of education, welfare, and other services) is still a valuable one. It is the civil variant that is of special interest in this paper. As we will note, the social sciences (some more than others), despite their protestations of neutrality and objectivity, are seldom regarded as neutral in their host societies. As such, they have everywhere been regarded with ambivalence and have sometimes been the object of ridicule, repression, sustained official criticism, and thought control. Insofar as the civil-democratic impulse develops, it diminishes these repressive forces and encourages freedom of expression and investigation, the publicizing of research results, and the increasing national and international mobility of scholars and students. The implications for the internationalization of social science knowledge are clear: the civil democratization of universities, academies, and related institutions makes for a greater flow of social science theory and research (because it is freed), reduces the strictures on content and style of research, and thereby works to reduce its level of politicization and ideologization.

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f or c es ob st ruc ti n g th e i n t e r nat i o na li z at io n o f s o ci a l s c i en c e k n o wl e d g e The Cultural and Political Threat of Such Knowledge To initiate this observation, I return to the point that societies create lore and knowledge about themselves and at the same time lock that knowledge into systems of absolute and sacred truths and principles and resist alternative or competing versions of thought and belief. The tendency to sacralize extends to views of nature as well as society; as a result the history of the natural sciences has been one of constant struggle between the scientific worldview (whatever its variant) and received religious and other cultural views of nature. The most obvious examples are the religious resistance to the views of historical giants such as Copernicus, Galileo, and Darwin, the discoveries of each of which came into direct contradiction with established, religiously based cosmologies. The history of the natural sciences has also been one of their gaining victories largely through the explanatory power they attained, their practical applications, and the decline of the power of competing interests and institutions (mainly the church) for reasons other than the rise of the sciences. Such struggles, however, are still in evidence: note, for example, the political opposition to Mendelian genetics in the Soviet Union for many decades, the current “creationist” hostility to scientifically based evolutionary biology, and the widespread rejection of scientifically based “Western” medicine in many other areas of the world, as well as in the West—for example, by Christian Scientists, by some spiritualist groups, and by individuals such as Ivan Illich (1976). In the contemporary world the social sciences are constantly involved in this kind of struggle. Moreover, it is more widespread and intense than in the natural sciences for a number of reasons. First, the social sciences are newer on the scene than the latter. Second, with few exceptions their theoretical and empirical results have not proven so irrefutable or so demonstrably useful from a practical point of view. Third, the social sciences— with variations among them—experience more internal diversity and disagreement over their fundamental principles and paradigms than do the natural sciences. Fourth, the practitioners of the social sciences have not attained the same level of established social status as have natural

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scientists and medical practitioners. For all these reasons the social sciences are not as formidable in their threat to alternative worldviews, and controversies about their vitality, their usefulness, and their dangers are more visible and further from being settled. The threat from the social sciences to existing cultural, ideological, and commonsense predispositions and pretensions is forever present, if for no other reason than that they constitute competing alternatives to them. The several social sciences differ from one another in this respect, however, in the following ways: • Formal economics is perhaps the least threatening of the contemporary

social sciences (despite its controversial past as the “dismal science” in the West), largely because of the increasing need of national governments for economists and economic advice, particularly as they become involved in the instabilities of international markets and derived instabilities of their own internal markets. It should not be forgotten, however, that Western, “bourgeois” economics experienced prolonged periods of ideological hostility in societies based on communist and socialist ideologies and some Third World countries, as well as domestic hostility from practical-minded businessmen and other social scientists critical of economics’ restrictive assumptions and unrealism. • In principle, psychology is a less threatening and destabilizing

ideological force than the other social sciences because it tends to focus on individuals as the objects of study and as the source of problems; this dilutes the critical focus of psychology on social institutions and social systems. However, we must not forget the enormous worldview struggle precipitated by the arrival of Freudian psychoanalysis on the Victorian scene, as well as the prolonged hostility of some Marxist-based regimes to Western social psychology and psychiatry. • The threat of anthropology and ethnography to domestic cultural and

social arrangements is also somewhat diminished by the fact that, historically, they have focused on the foreign, the different, and the exotic. By the same token, however, such knowledge has the potential of exciting admiration and emulation on the part of those alienated from domestic culture and institutions (the “noble savage” myth of Rousseau and other Enlightenment thinkers of the late eighteenth century is the readiest example). In addition, anthropologically derived ideologies such as cultural relativism are by nature threatening to all kinds of

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cultural representatives who embrace any given worldview and its associated values as absolute. • In principle, history enjoys the same kind of remoteness from present

institutions and their criticism, but in practice this is not the case. All cultures include some kind of sacralized history of their own past (myths of origin, revolutionary moments of creation [contemporary French, American, and Mexican societies]), and any attempt to write history in ways contrary to these becomes controversial. In addition, those alienated from society’s culture and institutions often invoke real or imagined histories as critical points of reference. For example, one of the elements of Engels’s (1987) critique of bourgeois society’s evils was to invoke the imagery of somewhat simple, conflict-free, precapitalist village communities. • For specifically historical reasons sociology has earned the reputation as

perhaps the most critical and threatening of all the social sciences. Its theoretical origins are in the critical traditions of Western social thought (Marx, Weber, Simmel, for example) and American reformism. It focuses on many institutions—religion and family, for example—that are sacralized and on many others (class and inequality, for example) that are at the seat of deep conflicts in society. All these factors make for a very widespread social ambivalence toward—and often political repression of—sociology. • Political science is, in principle, as critical of social institutions as

sociology—politics always has its sacred side as well—but in practice this has not been the case. The historical reasons for this are not entirely clear, but at least one factor is the tendency of political scientists to identify positively with those in power that they investigate—as well as their political institutions—and this tends to diminish their critical impulse.

It follows from these illustrations that every one of the social sciences will be regarded with some ambivalence—a balance between attraction to its insights and its possible practical or ameliorative aspects on the one side and its threatening quality on the other. The positive pole expresses itself in the hiring, consulting, and interviewing of social and behavioral scientists as “experts” on a great range of topics, and on the more or less solid institutionalization of those fields as academic subjects in colleges, universities, research institutes, and academies. The negative pole, which commands my greater interest at the moment, also finds expression in a variety of ways:

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• A “bad press,” for example, toward sociology in Great Britain, which is

sometimes stereotyped and ridiculed in the media as silly, troublesome, far-out and countercultural, and undesirably left-leaning. • Periodic outbursts of negative public sentiment, as in the wake of the

acquittals of John Hinkley, who attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan, and Dan White, who assassinated Harvey Milk and George Moscone in San Francisco—both of which were based in part on psychiatric testimony and psychiatric reasoning. • Criticism from those very agencies that support them, such as the

“Golden Fleece” award presented by Senator William Proxmire for the most trivial piece of social science research funded by the federal government; and the assault on the social sciences in the early 1980s by Ronald Reagan and David Stockman as useless for social policy. • Dismissal or vilification on at least partly ideological grounds. One

example is the pervasively hostile attitude toward the theories of Karl Marx in the American social sciences in their early formative years in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; another example, already noted, is the ideological assaults by socialist and communist governments and scholarly communities on “bourgeois social science” over many decades. • Outright political repression, including the banning of subjects from

universities and other academic institutions and the punishment of ideologically unacceptable social scientists. The notable examples are in the eras of Stalin and Brezhnev in the Soviet Union, the Cultural Revolution in China, and periods of repression and expulsion in Argentina and Brazil.

The implications of this national ambivalence toward the behavioral and social sciences are mainly negative from the standpoint of the internationalization of knowledge.

Selective Adaptation and Distortion in the Transfer Process When social science knowledge does flow across boundaries it seldom does so in pure form; it is typically altered in the process. The determinants of this process is threefold: (1) obstruction because of the threatening character of knowledge, as discussed; (2) the selective preferences of borrowers; and (3) selective perceptions of the usefulness or relevance of

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the knowledge in question. I cite three examples of the process of preferential selection and distortion. 1. the favored status of methodology

There are a number of reasons that suggest that the internationalization of social science methodology (measurement techniques, research designs, statistical modes of analyzing data) is easier to effect and more widespread than the diffusion of substantive knowledge. The first is the increasingly common need of governments to know about social data and assess their meaning. In one respect this need is a by-product of the modernization process. As indicated above, societal complexity associated with socialeconomic development—and internationalization—generates a certain range of potential and actual instabilities and social problems. Moreover, governments in modernizing, modern, and postmodern societies alike have an interest in minimizing destabilization and social problems, both of which are likely to generate dissatisfactions and protests that are politically threatening to them. One mode of control over instability and social problems is to gain an adequate base of knowledge about them. Proper methodology is an asset in this regard and appeals to governments without regard to their ideological basis for legitimization or their particular political system. The second impetus to the internationalization of methodology is also connected with the process of modernization and its attendant values. Among other things, modernization has rested on the application of science to economic production and other activities, and at times science has been heralded as the handmaiden to evolutionary progress. Insofar as the efforts of countries to improve themselves have a “scientific” component— they almost invariably do—then scientific rigor becomes a basis for legitimizing various groups’ claims on resources and demonstrating the methodological rigor and exactitude as a part of those claims. Such circumstances create a particularly conducive atmosphere for the diffusion of the “best” and the “latest” methodological techniques in all the sciences. The third reason for the easier spread of methodology is closely connected with the political ambivalence toward the social sciences. Whatever might be the long-term effects of the application of “scientifically” based

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methodology in the consideration of social conditions—for example, exposing unwelcome social problems such as crime, unemployment, or homelessness—these consequences are more remote and indirect than the threat of the intellectual substance of the social sciences and their possible moral and political implications. To put the point in a single sentence, methods of social study are usually less threatening than its substance. Methods are more easily cloaked in an apolitical mantle of “objectivity,” “dispassion,” and “neutrality” than knowledge claims about and evaluations of social institutions and culture. Those who have pressed the social sciences, as sciences, have been the same ones who have stressed and praised quantitative techniques for measuring and analyzing social data. In addition, in those societies where the social sciences have had the most troubled existence—most notably, the Soviet Union and other eastern European countries—one of the adaptations of social scientists was to define their work as “logic,” “methodology,” and “social engineering,” presumably to neutralize it and thus render them less vulnerable to political criticism and repression. This kind of political process also works toward making methodology generally acceptable and therefore more likely to diffuse internationally. 2. selective borrowing

Because different societies have different points of vulnerability to potentially critical knowledge, they will resist the adoption of different elements of social science knowledge and thereby impede its spread. The most obvious example is the decades-long bifurcation of the field of economics (and in some degree political science and sociology) into “Western” or “bourgeois” on the one hand and “socialist” or “Marxist” on the other—a split reinforced both by the intellectual and political predilections of practitioners and by the Cold War mentality. Within this context, however, a certain amount of selective borrowing occurred. For example, in the 1950s and 1960s numbers of Soviet political leaders and economists took a great interest in that line of American economic theory known as “input-output analysis,” associated with the name of Wassily Leontieff. That line of theory involved the systematic analysis of flows of resources and products among scores of sectors in the economy. Soviets were interested in this as a line of analysis that was relevant to problems of coordination in their adminis-

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tered economy. It should also be noted that input-output analysis was not the most central strand of “Western” economics at the time and that the Soviets did not borrow—indeed were antagonistic to—most other strands of Western economics that dealt with markets. Other instances of selective borrowing and diffusion could be identified, such as the warm reception of psychoanalysis in Germanic countries, the United States, Argentina, and (recently) East Asian countries such as Taiwan and Korea, and the general indifference to psychoanalysis in Britain (despite the existence of a few small groups in London) and in socialist and communist countries. 3. adaptation and distortion of knowledge

A common form of institutional diffusion into the previously colonial nations of the world was that of legal systems, political parties, civil service systems, and trade unions. However, these typically assume a form that differs from that in the societies in which they were initiated. The infusion of tribal politics into the African trade unions, generally devised on the British model, is an example. The principle is a general one and applies to the diffusion of knowledge as well. Two examples will suffice. The selective migration of psychoanalytic theory and practice has already been mentioned. One of the interesting features of the adoption of Freudian psychoanalysis in the United States was that it tended to lose the kind of “pessimism” about the person and civilization that informed Freud’s formulations. Psychoanalysis in the context of American psychology came to stress the more optimistic note of active mastery, as attested in the “ego psychology” or “adaptive psychology” of American psychoanalysis. A second example is “dependency theory,” also already mentioned. An original product of a number of Latin American scholars, this line of thinking about modernization became popular in the United States in the 1970s, but it tended to be assimilated to the new strands of neo-Marxist thinking there. The double processes of selective borrowing and adaption/distortion constitute barriers to the diffusion of common bodies of social science knowledge.

Language The problem of internationalization cannot be covered without considering the issue of language. Language differences have constituted a barrier

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to the diffusion of natural science knowledge, but this has been mitigated in part by the expression of that knowledge in mathematical form, by the use of cognate scientific terms that find a place in many languages and are thus readable, and by the widespread use of English as a scientific language. The social sciences have not moved as far toward the development of common or easily understood languages, so their situation is more difficult from the standpoint of the internationalization of knowledge. The early historical development of the social sciences was mainly in English, German, and French languages, and to a lesser degree in Spanish, Italian, and Russian. Current work is expressed in virtually all the written languages of the world. Scholars cannot master even the major languages in which work is done, even in countries (e.g., Holland, Israel) in which multilingual training is a normal part of the education system. And because the social sciences have not developed a common language, scholars either do not acquaint themselves with research in other tongues or do so only after language training or translation. Insofar as any “international language” is developing in the social sciences, that language is English. Part of this stems from the recent eras of political domination of the United Kingdom and the United States in world affairs, and part from the dominant role of the United States in the recent development of the behavioral and social sciences. That role is being challenged in many ways, but English remains the evolving lingua franca. That process may be difficult to reverse, moreover, for several reasons. Scholars from certain nations (e.g., Japan, Italy, Greece) can speak with nationals from few other nations in their own tongues, and their preferred adaptation is to speak a tongue that is the native language of neither but in which both can communicate. That language is usually English. Scholars in many countries now believe that it is important to write in English to attain an international reputation—not only small countries but major ones such as Germany as well. International conferences are now held mainly in English, even though other “official” languages may be recognized. In my own association, the International Sociological Association, the official languages, adopted in the late 1940s when the association was formed, are English and French [subsequently Spanish—NS]. Ninety percent if not more of the official correspondence, presentations, and discussions are,

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however, in English. As this becomes the general case, it increases the probability that it will remain so in the future, because scholars have invested in learning English and know that it is appropriate to do so in order to maximize their own ability to understand and communicate generally. This phenomenon is not without its complications. French-speaking sociologists are resentful, sometimes openly so, of the domination of English and have formed a loose grouping of “French-speaking sociologists.” And in the past decade, when two of the three World Congresses have been held in Spanish-speaking cities (Mexico City and Madrid), a movement to include Spanish as an additional official language of the association has strengthened and will probably prevail, even though its victory will be largely symbolic. One can envision similar movements in the future on behalf of German-, Russian-, and Chinese-speaking sociologists, and such movements, if successful, would constitute minor countertrends to the general tendency to develop a common international language for the field.

Infrastructural Barriers I noted above the generally facilitative efforts on the internationalization of the social sciences by international research organizations, exchange programs, and collaborative arrangements. At the same time, the geographical, financial, and political barriers to the effectiveness of these infrastructural forms were also underscored, and on the basis of these limits they must by considered as obstructing factors as well. More important than these positive limits on international work, however, is that the great bulk of work in the behavioral and social sciences is national in character. It is financed (whether publicly or privately) by nationally based agencies; it is organized in national disciplinary associations; most individuals make their careers with the national group of scholars in their own discipline as their main audiences; and most rewards and prestige are granted within the national arenas (the important exception is that being “internationally known” and “internationally active” often adds to status). With all the resources and incentives thus “loaded” into the national mold, scholars and students are discouraged both directly and indirectly from making the international arena their major point of reference. That many

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do is a gratifying phenomenon, but the infrastructural cards are usually stacked against it.

co n c lu si o n In moving through this essay, the reader will have noticed that the main feature of the accumulating picture of the internationalization of social science knowledge is its complexity. This process is not a simple or unitary kind of tendency but rather a kind of moving “equilibrium-in-tension,” a complex series of forces working for or against its advancement and realization. In many respects the process may be regarded as a larger contest between two great sets of forces: • Intellectual and political forces making for the internationalization of

scientific knowledge and the relevant infrastructures, including the institutionalization of norms of methodological correctness, validity of results, and systematic accumulation of common theory and research • Primordial forces of nation, region, religion, ideology, and political

loyalties, most of which constitute barriers to internationalization

Both sets of forces constantly assert and reassert themselves, thus making for a halting, irregular, and sometimes retrogressive movement toward the internationalization of social science knowledge.

r e f e r en c e s Becker, Gary S. 1976. The Economic Approach to Human Behavior. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bendix, Reinhard. 1967. Nation-Building and Citizenship: Studies of Our Changing Social Order. New York: Wiley. Benedict, Ruth. 1934. Patterns of Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Boas, Franz. 1928. Anthropology and Modern Life. New York: Norton. Cardoso, Fernando H., and E. Falleto. 1979. Dependency and Development in Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Coleman, James S. 1990. Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

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Dalton, George, ed. 1967. Tribal and Peasant Economies: Readings in Economic Anthropology. Garden City, NY: Natural History Press. Dore, Ronald. 1973. British Factory, Japanese Factory: The Origins of National Diversity in Industrial Relations. London: Allen and Unwin. Engels, Friedrich. 1987. The Condition of the Working Class in England. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Evans, Peter. 1979. Dependent Development: The Alliance of Multinational, State, and Local Capital in Brazil. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Firth, Raymond. 1966. Malay Fishermen: Their Peasant Economy. 3rd ed. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. . 1971. Elements of Social Organization. 3rd ed. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Frank, Andre Gunder. 1967. Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America. New York: Monthly Review Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1983. Local Knowledge: Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books. Gerschenkron, Alexander. 1962. Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective. New York: Praeger. Gold, Tom. 1986. State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle. Amonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Goode, William J. 1963. World Revolution in Family Patterns. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Gusfield, Joseph R. 1967. “Tradition and Modernity: Misplaced Polarities in the Study of Social Change.” American Journal of Sociology 72:351–62. Habermas, Juergen. 1975. Legitimation Crisis. Boston: Beacon Books. Halevy, Elie. 1928. The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism. London: Faber and Faber. Herskovits, Melville J. 1952. Economic Anthropology. Revised ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Illich, Ivan. 1976. Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemesis, the Expropriation of Health. London: Boyars. Kerr, Clark, W. Dunlop, F. Harbison, and W. Myer. 1960. Industrialism and Industrial Man. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lerner, Daniel. 1964. The Passing of Traditional Societies. New York: Free Press. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Marshall, T. H. 1950. Citizenship and Social Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morgan, Lewis Henry. 1963. Ancient Society. Cleveland, OH: World Publishing. Polanyi, Karl C. 1944. The Great Transformation. New York: Reinhart.

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Polanyi, Karl C., Conrad Arensberg, and Harry Pearson. 1957. Trade and Market in the Early Empires. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 1952. Structure and Process in Primitive Society. New York: Free Press. Tocqueville, Alexis de. 1987. Democracy in America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974. The Modern World-State: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy. New York: Academic Press.

9

Social Sciences and Social Problems the next century (1995)

Those with memory inform me that Vannevar Bush was not fond of the social sciences. To quote a historian of science writing on the fortieth anniversary of his famous report to President Truman, “[Bush] disrespected the social sciences intellectually and regarded them for the most part as just so much political propaganda masquerading as science” (Kevles 1990, xiii). In light of this, I am especially honored to be present, as a social scientist, at the fiftieth anniversary celebration of that report. I suppose a moral is to be found in the advice that French parents give their impatient children: “Avec de la patience, on arrive a tout.” I proceed with my task by three steps: • To look toward the next century, with an eye to identifying the lines of

social change and the ranges of social problems we can expect. • To sketch an inherited and persistent view of the application of social

science knowledge to problems; this view derives from a presumed analogy between engineering on the one hand, and the social sciences

From 1995: Vannevar Bush II: Science for the 21st Century, 117–32. Research Triangle Park, BC: Sigma Xi, Scientific Society, 1995.

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on the other and is based on utilitarian, instrumental assumptions. I will find this view to be wanting. • To revise that view radically, in light of our understanding of social

problems and of how social science knowledge bears on them. This revision will, I hope, yield a more realistic account.

s o c i a l ch a n g e a n d s o ci a l p r o b le m s : a lo o k a he ad It has been something of an American tradition to regard social problems as social pathologies. The list is familiar: crime and violence, alcoholism, divorce, drugs, poverty and homelessness, prostitution, mental illness, school dropout, chronic welfare dependency. One tradition has treated these as the collective results of individual maladjustments or moral failings—the “nuts, sluts, and perverts” approach, if you will—while other traditions have treated them more as products of the social system, or, more specifically, that system associated with industrial capitalism. In looking toward the future, I regard the systemic approach as the more fruitful, though it is also apparent that we will continue to live with social problems that derive from the psychological frailties of humanity in general. What, then, are the likely directions of future social change, and what are the kinds of social problems that are likely to accompany them? To gain initial insight into this question, we must turn to the economy and its continuing internationalization. The acceleration of three world trends seems inevitable. The first is the continuing drive toward economic productivity, growth, national wealth, and international competitiveness—the modern equivalents of the “idea of progress.” While some may rue this, we are hard-pressed to find any national actors who do not want it—the developed countries to protect their position, the new arrivals to secure theirs, and the undeveloped to break from their economic entrapment. The second is an immediate corollary of the economic drive, namely a pressure to improve technology and its applications in all spheres—agricultural, industrial, and service—with special emphasis on information technology. The third is the continued acceleration of the movement of

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the economy toward greater internationalization, along whatever dimension one wishes to specify—production, trade, credit and finance, and migration of populations. Closely related to these changes are a number of others that will reach, irreversibly, into the next century. I will simply list them to set the stage for identifying the major social problems that appear on the horizon: • Technologically based economic growth, as it has for centuries,

continues to produce greater social differentiation and complexity—a greater division of labor, both domestic and international; more specialized occupational roles; more bureaucracy and more complex organizations required to manage that complexity. • A concomitant of the drive toward technology and social complexity is

the greater premium that states and their constituent institutions will place on the application of knowledge. This impulse will extend to the application of knowledge to deal with social problems. • Internationalization will be evident in the cultural arena as well—the

accelerating diffusion of science and technology, the growth of common normative codes (including law) to deal with international interdependence and interaction, and the diffusion of mass culture through the mass media. • There is reason to believe that, in the political arena, we will witness the

accelerating march toward democracy in the coming decades, a march that includes rights of citizenship, inclusion, and participation in the polity, equality, justice, and welfare provisions. A concomitant of these will be the continuing rise of political expectations of most populations in the world. • A final trend concerns community life. All the trends I have mentioned

entail continuing long-term erosion of traditional bases of group solidarity and Gemeinschaft—church, community, neighborhood, and family. But at the same time we see—and will see—the increasing salience of other forms of solidarity, some old and some new. Among these are strengthened regional, ethnic, racial, linguistic, and cultural solidarities in our own society, in western Europe, in the countries of eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and in the developing societies. In addition, new bases of solidarity will continue to arise in social movement of various sorts, as we have seen in the areas of women’s rights, environment, animal rights, lifestyle, and

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countercultural movements. So pervasive are these developments that they might be referred to as a kind of neoprimordialism—that is to say, social groups and movements that possess the characteristics of social bonding, engrossing personal and collective identification, and timelessness of reference that we associate with traditional religious and nationalistic expressions. As often as not, these diverse groups and movements assume an antagonistic stance toward the bureaucratic state apparatus, and some regard the movements as a kind of reassertion—a protest—on behalf of that which is distinctively human in the face of a psychologically unmanageable globalism.

Can we extrapolate from these trends and predict the social problems we will carry into the next century? The answer is no, not with precision. But we can say something about their general character. First, we will witness a changing panoply of social problems related to improving technology. In our own time the invention and spread of credit cards has spawned new forms of theft and fraud, and nuclear proliferation would not be a social problem without the technology of fissionable materials. In the future we will witness the appearance of new forms of deviance in the computer world of virtual reality, and with the perfection of detection systems we may see the disappearance of common shoplifting as we know it. Second, the various environmental problems the world is facing— exhaustion of resources, spoilage, toxicity, pollution, and other damage— will probably grow worse before they grow better. This is a simple extrapolation from the point—recognized in various United Nations surveys and diagnoses—that population increase and economic development aggravate environmental dangers more rapidly than counterefforts—particularly in the developed countries—reduce them. Third, we may expect the continuation of the variety of social problems associated with both international inequality—bred by differential growth and power in the world—and different rates of nations’ population growth. Most of these problems have to do with human poverty and its multiple ramifications. Fourth, we may expect the persistence and spread of familiar social problems associated with Western market and urban development as the other nations of the world come to resemble the West and one another in

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economic enterprise and governmental apparatus, despite the persistence of distinctive cultural traditions. These problems include divorce and family instability, vice, crime, and drug abuse. Russia and eastern Europe already show these signs, and there is no reason to believe that these will not increase as universal problems. In some cases, such social problems will take on a distinctively international dimension. For example: • The increased traffic of people through world migration and travel will

tend to internationalize health problems. No country can escape AIDS for this reason, and the same will surely be true for any new infectious diseases that appear. • Much contemporary prostitution is becoming world prostitution; the

most dramatic example is the international sex tourism of South Asia. • Many of those vast urban centers that we have come to call “world

cities”—New York, Tokyo, London, and Los Angeles—are leading the way in the creation of low-skill and low-paid service-occupation masses, such as computer cottage workers, fast-food workers, and security employees, who constitute a new kind of “service proletariat” in the stratification system. • Many social problems will be “created” by social forces external to the

societies that have the political jurisdiction and responsibility to deal with them. International sex tourism is an example—generated in large part by male tourists from developed countries, but the responsibility of the Indian, Thai, and Philippine governments to deal with. The largescale employment of low-skill female workers by the multinationals in developing and Third World countries—with the attendant problems of job insecurity, poverty, and gender conflict—is another. In general, future generations will witness an increase in externally generated problems. This phenomenon is an extension of what we have seen within our society already—the pollution of Palm Springs by smog from the coastal conurbation, or the creation of severe unemployment in a locality by a decision made in distant corporate headquarters. • Social problems—and the activities of those who protest against them—

will become less and less localized, and more and more tried in the court of international public opinion, or, more precisely, the international press. The exposure of repression in Tiananmen Square, governmental impotence in eastern Europe, and starvation in Somalia are only the omens of the power of the media to internationalize political and social problems in an instant.

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Another way of making this point is to observe that many of the twentyfirst century’s social problems are going to be generated by the phenomena of increasing differentiation, complexity, and interdependency in the world. Both Herbert Spencer (1897) and Emile Durkheim ([1893] 1984) pointed out long ago that increasing specialization and interdependency in a society generate a corresponding fragility—that is to say, when there is a sneeze in one part, the whole system catches cold. The future will generalize this principle. Fifth, we may expect an increasing incidence of social problems and social conflicts along cultural lines. This is seen in the increase in the conflicts between the culture of modernity and traditional cultures in developing societies; in the greater exposure of world cultures to one another through the media and the international movement of persons; and in the “neoprimordialism” of social groups and social movements, which often generates cultural intolerance. We have seen evidence of this augmentation of the cultural in the late twentieth century—the gradual displacement of class conflict by cultural (especially racial-ethnic) conflict in the West; the corresponding decline of class-based (especially socialist) parties and, correspondingly, the increasing salience of social and cultural movements. This new cultural dimension will prove to be troublesome to democratic governments because political expression based on culturally defined demands often assumes an uncompromising, either-or character, making life more difficult for politicians, who make their living by forging compromises. Finally, and most generally, we will expect the future to bring more and heretofore unanticipated social problems, simply because the fact that both economic growth and democratic aspirations bring higher expectations implies that previously unnoticed social ills become social problems as people become more sensitive to them. For this reason if no other, those of us who make it our business to study social problems will surely not have to worry about being unemployed on account of the disappearance of our subject matter. That observation leads me to the central question: How will we, as social scientists, be able to contribute to the understanding and solution of the vast array of social problems that the future holds in store?

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a n i n s t rum en ta l v i e w I begin with a “just so” story: how the social sciences got their name. It is “just so” in the sense that it is not based on painstaking historical research. I can assure you, however, that it is historically sound and will serve us well in thinking about the question just posed. Where better to begin this account than with Vannevar Bush? In his famous report he affirmed the following article of faith: “Scientific progress is one essential key to our security as a nation, to our better health, to more jobs, to a higher standard of living, and to our cultural progress.” This view is still widely held in the scientific world and in the larger society, though it is no longer voiced with the same open confidence as it was fifty years ago. But for our purposes it reveals the essential components of a persisting ideology about the social sciences as well. What are these components? • The social sciences took over the natural sciences’ faith in the

establishment of truth through empirical observation, precise quantitative measurement, objectivity and dispassion, and discovery of laws by systematic application of the scientific method. This faith pervaded the main developmental lines in the social sciences in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: utilitarianism in political economy, experimentalism in psychology, and positivism in sociology. This faith is contained in the phrase “scientific progress.” • The social sciences—being relative latecomers—turned to the growing if

not already established natural sciences to generate their own claims to legitimacy. This is seen in the efforts of the social scientists—in the United States in particular—to secure a solid position in the growing university world in the late nineteenth century. This impulse probably carries us a long way in understanding why the early pioneers described their efforts as social science, rather than social something-else. • The social sciences picked up one or another version of the idea of

human betterment through scientific knowledge. This idea took the form of radical transformation of society in the continental European tradition and of social amelioration of a reformist character in the American tradition, but both envisioned the betterment of society. • These, then, were—and to a large extent still are—the core components

of social scientists’ self-definition: the faith in science as a preferred

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form of knowledge, the legitimacy of science and the scientific method, and the promise of science to better society.

When it came to the identification and amelioration of social problems, moreover, social scientists took over many assumptions and models of the natural sciences as well. At the risk of oversimplification, we might say that these assumptions and models were of two interrelated kinds: the utilitarian and the medical. The utilitarian view of social problems holds that they are identifiable, objective things, or what Durkheim would call “social facts,” and that the burden imposed by these problems can be relieved by the direct application of bits of science, in a way directly analogous to the use of physical sciences and engineering. A famous expression of this view is that of William Fielding Ogburn and his colleagues, set forth some sixty years ago in the report to President Herbert Hoover—himself something of a social engineer in outlook—contained in the massive volume Recent Social Trends (President’s Research Committee 1933). According to Ogburn, most social problems arise because of the lag of institutional changes behind technological changes: for example, the automobile, a materialtechnological advance, generated an outward drift of the population into suburban areas; the consequent problem was that the central districts were “left to the weaker economic elements and sometimes to criminal groups with resultant unsatisfactory social conditions” (xiii). Ogburn’s solution for social problems rested on a series of scientifically based steps: first, to document those problems by the most objective, scientific, and quantitative means available; then to come up with some sort of “social invention” (for example, a law or a new form of social organization), and then, by deliberate application through social policy, to ameliorate that social problem and achieve some kind of social betterment. Needless to say, this representation now seems hopelessly oversimple, and soon I will indicate the reasons why. For the moment, let me note only that the utilitarian model has appeared in many guises—notably technocracy and social engineering—and survives in the contemporary literature known as “applied social science.” The medical model is closely related. It regards a social problem as a kind of disease, which manifests an identifiable cause, definite symptoms, and

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perhaps a typical course of development, and which calls for a cure. Freud and other early psychiatrists incorporated this model into their theories of individual pathology and therapy, and the social science schools of “social pathology” and “social disorganization” also borrowed from the medical model. Even as late as the 1980s, my fellow Californian Assemblyman John Vasconcellos argued that raising the self-esteem of that state’s citizens would constitute a “social vaccine” against school dropouts, alcoholism and drugs, teenage pregnancy, and chronic welfare dependency (Vasconcellos 1989). Needless to say, the medical model has received a great deal of criticism in recent decades, but it still survives in social scientific and broader social outlooks. Without presenting the historical vicissitudes of the instrumental model, let me say that, on the whole, it has not served the social sciences or the broader society very well. Because of its oversimplifications, it has led to what might be called well-intended but false advertising. Larger society—itself influenced by the scientific worldview—certainly appreciates and demands simple solutions, and social scientists, if they genuinely believe in instrumental models and their amelioration, may promise to deliver such solutions. The likely consequence is that they generate high expectations, ask for support that these expectations justify, fail—inevitably—to meet expectations, and, finally, experience a season of disillusionment and criticism. This is the unhappy fate of searches for magic bullets and social vaccines. My reservations about the “fix-it” approach to social problems should by now be clear enough. I will now develop an alternative view of the role of social science knowledge.

s o c i a l pr o b l ems a n d so c i a l s c i e n c e k n o w le d ge To specify that alternative requires a systematic exposition of several different points of entry at which social scientific knowledge becomes relevant to the understanding of social problems. These points of entry are the following. What constitutes a social problem? Consistent with positivist traditions, we most commonly regard a social problem as a thing—a kind of

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carbuncle on the social body or tear in the social fabric that signals a malfunctioning in society and sets up demands for its amelioration. In a word, a social problem is a tangible, identifiable, unwanted social fact. As I have indicated, this view is unrealistic. A better definition of a social problem is a set of empirical assertions that are embedded in a complex of cultural, ideological, and political factors and are accepted publicly by a significant group.

1. Empirical Assertions At the simplest level, a phenomenon, to qualify as a problem, must be shown to exist. If child abuse is to be called a social problem, then there must be demonstrated child abuse in society. Furthermore, it must have a high enough incidence or prevalence to make it problematical. The isolated occurrence of murders by snipers, for example, is customarily defined not as a social problem but as a matter of individual psychopathology. If, however, it can be successfully linked to some more general, presumably prevalent phenomenon—violence in American society or the easy availability of guns, for example—then sniping, too, can be defined as a social problem.

2. Value and Normative Elements Phenomena we identify as social problems must be shown to be inconsistent or in conflict with some cultural value. Pregnancy out of wedlock, for example, is a problem not only because it exists but also because it stands in violation of the value we place on the family as the legitimate focus for childbearing and child rearing. Dropping out of the educational system is a problem because, among other reasons, we value learning, both in itself and as preparation for responsible participation in the labor force, which we also value. Phenomena regarded as socially problematical are also frequently regarded as deviating from some normative expectation. The clearest examples are violence and crime, deviant because they violate the law. Dropping out of school also may be illegal because it deviates from the established code calling for compulsory schooling up to, say, age six-

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teen. Other behavior, such as excessive drinking, may not be in itself illegal, but it violates other normative expectations regarding social conduct and social responsibility. The lesson to be drawn is that, even though a certain kind of behavior may be prevalent in society, it cannot be considered a social problem unless its link to social values and norms is established. Child labor, for example, has always existed, but it was not viewed as a social problem until moral crusaders espousing humanitarian values deemed it to be one and until child labor legislation supplied norms from which it could be considered deviant. Even more: a phenomenon may become a social problem not as a result of its coming into existence but as a result of changes in its value and normative context. Child abuse has also existed from time immemorial. At times it has been considered a virtue—“Spare the rod and spoil the child.” But because, in recent times, new and different humanitarian standards have been brought to bear on it, it is now a social problem. It is also true—as holders of public office have painfully discovered—that what might be regarded as “normal politics” in one era can be regarded as moral wrongdoing in another because of fluctuations in expectations about public morality in the press and in public opinion. In a word, it is the linkage between an empirical phenomenon and some relevant value and normative standards that makes it a social problem.

3. Cost Considerations One of the frequent social values that is appealed to in endowing a phenomenon with a social problem status is its economic or social cost. Crime is a ready example: paying for the long-term incarceration of convicted criminals is an expensive proposition, to say nothing of the cost in human lives and private property that crime involves. The social cost of premarital pregnancy—defined in terms of welfare costs for mothers and the presumed psychological costs to children—is another example. Again, it is the cost component of chronic welfare dependency—as well as its deviation from the work ethic—that establishes it as a social problem. And absenteeism, inefficiency, and low worker morale are among the high economic costs of alcoholism and drug dependency.

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4. Action and Mastery Considerations Another part of what defines a social problem is the conviction that something can be done about it. It has to be something at which we can throw resources; something we can ease by getting people to shape up; something that can be cured through social policy legislation and decisions and the application of knowledge; something that can be ameliorated. Otherwise, it is seen as one of those ineradicable scars on the social body that we have to live with, a necessary evil, one of those inevitable frailties of human or social nature. Consider a contemporary example: Is stress or “being stressed out” a social problem? If it is defined as the product of some incidental biological rhythm, or the collective inability of large numbers of people to cope psychologically, it is not likely to be regarded as a social problem. If, however, it is regarded as the inhumane consequence of stressful occupational roles, it is more likely to become a social problem because, it is believed, we can better attack its presumed causes. To put the point in the negative, if significant numbers of persuasive people can succeed in defining a social phenomenon as something we can do nothing about, it stands to lose its status as a social problem. One of the marks of a political conservative is his or her conviction that we can (and should) do little if not nothing about social problems; one of the marks of a political liberal is that we can (and should) do something. 5. Causal Assumptions The faith that we can do something about a social problem, in turn, rests on two frequently unspoken assumptions about causality: first, that we can understand the main causes of the social problem and therefore can target them in order to ameliorate the situation; and second, that we know that the recommended legal, policy, reformative, or therapeutic interventions will have an effect on those causes and thus will achieve that amelioration. It goes without saying that these assumptions are frequently not verified and are often not much more than matters of faith on the part of social diagnosticians and social reformers. Moreover, some of the sharpest differences and bitterest debates among those concerned with social problems are about the presumed causes and cures for them.

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6. Political Considerations This line of thinking reveals that, in the last analysis, a “social problem” is a matter of persuasion and a matter of politics. To get a social problem on the agenda, visible and powerful people have to persuade those who officially name social problems that a situation exists and that it has a harmful incidence in society—an incidence that is, better yet, on the increase. Furthermore, they have to persuade others that the problem constitutes an erosion of something we consider valuable or sacred and that it is a problem we can do something about with the right social policy and the right investment of resources. Part of this political process is the activity of “moral entrepreneurs” who take the initiative in promoting the social definition of some phenomenon as problematical, preferably outrageous (see Platt 1969). Another part of the process is the continual jockeying on the part of politically significant groups in attempts to have their favorite social ill officially defined as a social problem and therefore placed on the table before a legislature or other concerned body. Other groups simultaneously jockey to get the issue taken off the social policy agenda. Only some of these groups succeed politically. For this reason it is always highly problematic—and the outcome of a complicated political process—that a social problem ever gets to be defined as such, much less that it gets the public attention it presumably deserves.

points of entry of social scientific knowledge i n t h e p r oc es s o f i de n t i f y i n g a n d r e s p o n d i ng to s o c i a l pr o b l ems This line of reasoning also ought to inform us about how mistaken it is to talk about social problems as simple political entities, about “solving” them in instrumental ways, and about “applying” scientific knowledge to them. This is not to say that social scientists and social scientific knowledge are not relevant. On the contrary, they are of decisive importance. What is required is a serious revamping of our mode of understanding social problems and social policies that are responsive to them. Much of this revamping includes the identification of several different points of

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entry of social scientific knowledge into the complex social process that is conveniently but erroneously referred to as a social problem. Among those are the following.

1. Studying the Process Itself If our conceptualization of social problems has evolved from a “social fact” emphasis to a “social process” emphasis, it follows that one task for— and one contribution to be made by—social scientists is to provide for a better empirical and theoretical understanding of the dynamics of that process. This calls for research on the dynamics of the three-way relations among (a) changes in the social structure; (b) changes in cultural expectations; (c) the emergence of social problems—as a “function,” as it were, of the first two; (d) the work of moral entrepreneurs in “discovering” or even inventing social problems, as well as their strategies of persuading audiences of the reality and importance of their discoveries; (e) the dynamics of how political leaders come to be persuaded to define social phenomena as social problems, and how they turn that definition into supposed political advantage to themselves; (f ) the politics of decision making and compromise in “dealing” with social problems. The more settings in which such research is conducted—that is, the more comparative it is—the better we will understand the processes involved. And the better we understand the processes, the more enlightened we will be as we ourselves live out those processes in the ongoing flow of social and political life.

2. Arbitrating Empirical Claims As we have seen, empirical claims are an important ingredient in making legitimate the assertion that a social phenomenon is a social problem. Furthermore, these empirical claims are problematic and politically controversial. Consider again the social problem of homelessness. Advocates on behalf of that class of unfortunates have an interest in producing high estimates as a strategy of calling public attention to the problem; advocates of contrary persuasions have an interest in promoting low estimates as a strategy of diverting public attention from the problem. This circum-

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stance contributes to the great range of estimates of homeless numbers as much as the difficulties of identifying and counting them. During the taking of the 1990 Census, advocates for the homeless actually opposed the attempt to count that group, on grounds that the result would surely be an undercount. They even advised the homeless not to cooperate with census takers, thus ensuring—ironically—an undercount! That social scientists can play a productive role in breaking into the unhappy circle of exaggeration and counterexaggeration seems evident. Measuring, counting, and estimating social data are in their realm of expertise. They have developed sophisticated methods of sampling and surveying; identifying and correcting for measurement error; tracking less visible populations; and establishing the reliability and validity of measures—to say nothing of statistical methods of analyzing aggregated data. This contribution has two facets: first, to provide the most adequate empirical counts and estimates of the problematic phenomena in question, and, second, to serve as a kind of corrective methodological conscience for partisans who are interested in distorting those phenomena in one direction or another. An essential corollary of this role is the need for social scientists to maintain their long-standing commitment to dispassion and objectivity in carrying out their tasks. There is much heated discussion in the social science literature and elsewhere as to whether social scientists are, can be, or ought to be value-neutral and nonpartisan. Whatever the ultimate conclusion of this discussion—if there is one—it seems clear that in their role as arbiters of empirical claims they must strive for objectivity and neutrality. If they do not, they themselves become part of the social problem by entering the social processes that identify it and, by doing so, renounce their capacity and their claim to be useful as arbiters.

3. Identifying and Establishing Causal Relations Claims that a social problem exists are seldom made without concomitant claims about what has caused the problem. For example, among the imputed causes for the social problem of homelessness are the deterioration of the work ethic of poor people; the regressive trends of income distribution since the 1970s; unemployment due to the eradication of

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low-skill jobs; immigration; unenlightened housing policies; and inadequate welfare provisions. These claims of causality are also usually loaded ideologically and subject to partisan dispute. For this area, too, social scientists possess a range of techniques—including but not limited to multivariate analysis, time-series analysis, and event analysis. These techniques can, in various ways, isolate imputed causes from one another, indicate the relevant salience of different causal factors, and reveal different combinations of causes. Needless to say, the necessary corollary of maximum objectivity and neutrality obtains in this kind of analysis as well. Causal analysis is relevant in two other contexts. The first is in evaluating policy options available to leaders and decision makers dealing with social problems. Social scientists have accumulated knowledge about the unintended consequences of different kinds of policy interventions—how targeted deployment of resources often may miss the targeted groups, how efforts at regulation may end in cozy relations between regulator and regulated, how intensification of criminal sanctions may result in increases in plea bargaining rather than decreases in criminal activity, and so on. Our knowledge of such unintended consequences of policy making and policy implementation is far from systematic and complete. Nonetheless, it is of sufficient value to qualify as input to the deliberation about different policy options and their probable effectiveness. Second, social scientists can play an extremely important role in evaluating the actual results of interventions aimed at easing or solving social problems. That branch of research methods known as evaluation research has developed to more sophisticated levels during the past several decades. However, it, too, remains an imperfect art, as the ongoing efforts to assess the effectiveness of psychotherapy and the effectiveness of different classroom contexts testify. Despite this, it is now well known that the efforts to evaluate policies by those who are responsible for designing and implementing them are intrinsically flawed, if for no other reason than the fact that those agents are interested in the outcomes the policies they are evaluating. And again, if the cautions of objectivity and neutrality are observed and if social scientists’ efforts to evaluate can be insulated from the interests of interested parties, then they have a very constructive role to play in this arena of causal analysis as well.

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4. The Longer Haul: Generating New Ways of Looking at Social Phenomena The history of social science research reveals that in one area after another the accumulated results of decades of empirical research, interpretation, and theoretical analysis have produced major qualitative shifts in the standards for assessing social problems that social scientists, policy makers, and the general public bring to bear. Decades of research by economists and others have resulted in a general movement away from regarding unemployment as a result primarily of motivational failings of unwilling workers and toward more complex inclusion of systemic factors (including frictional adjustments in the market, structural changes of the economy, the incentive structure of wage and welfare policies, and the international market). The cumulative impact of research by anthropologists, sociologists, and social psychologists has, similarly, resulted in an evolution in our understanding of the nature of race relations—from regarding it as a natural consequence of biological differences toward stressing individual prejudice and, subsequently, toward seeing it as a product of systemic sources of discrimination in the market, in residence patterns, and in the structure of education (see Adams, Smelser, and Treiman 1982). To cite only one additional example, labeling theorists of deviance in sociology, whatever their excesses of enthusiasm, have served the useful purpose of stressing that the origins of social deviance are not to be found mainly in the motivational dynamics of deviant individuals and that deviance in society is instead a complicated interaction between “deviants,” agents of social control, and the normative standards that are invoked to identify deviance and classify deviants. These long-term effects of social scientific work are more difficult to discern than the other “points of entry” that I have identified, but they are the most fundamental because they are part of that process of cultural change that disposes us to pinpoint different social phenomena as problematical or nonproblematical in the first instance. •

•

•

•

•

All these points of entry I have mentioned are clearly valuable and demonstrate the ways that social science knowledge can make choices about

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social policy more informed and intelligent and can make social policies more effective. At this point, however, we must draw a line and acknowledge that neither “right social policies” nor “right investment of resources” can be derived, in any formal or exact way, from social science knowledge— or any other kind of scientific knowledge. Policy choices involve preferences and values that are not derivable from knowledge. Furthermore, those choices are properly generated in the crucible of an inevitably imperfect democratic process. They may be improved by right knowledge, but they are not directly derivable from it.

a c o n clu d i n g r em a r k My intent in these observations has been to present an understanding of social problems and the attempts to solve them in a way that departs radically from the received wisdom derived from the traditions of utilitarianism, positivism, and pragmatism. That intent involves changing our way of understanding the relations of knowledge to social problems and their solution but not diminishing that role. In fact, by emphasizing the multiple points of entry into the social problem “process,” I have laid out an account that is more realistic and that establishes the potency and complexity of the impact of knowledge in a way that traditional accounts have been unable to do.

r e f e r en c e s Adams, Robert McC., Neil J. Smelser, and Donald J. Treiman, eds. 1982. Behavioral and Social Science Research: A National Resource. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Durkheim, Emile. [1893] 1984. The Division of Labor in Society. New York: Free Press. Kevles, Daniel. 1990. “Principles and Politics in Federal R&D Policy, 1944– 1990: An Appreciation of the Bush Report.” Preface to Science: The Endless Frontier, by Vannevar Bush, 40th Anniversary ed. Washington, DC: National Science Foundation. Platt, Anthony. 1969. The Child Savers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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President’s Research Committee on Social Trends. 1933. Recent Social Trends in the United States. New York: McGraw-Hill. Spencer, Herbert. 1897. The Principles of Sociology. New York: D. Appleton. Vasconcellos, John. 1989. Preface to The Social Importance of Self-Esteem, edited by Andrew M. Mecca, Neil J. Smelser, and John Vasconcellos, xi–xxi. Berkeley: University of California Press.

10

The Questionable Logic of “Mistakes” in the Dynamics of Knowledge Growth in the Social Sciences (2005)

Upon receiving an invitation to contribute to this special issue on errors in science, I immediately responded to the editors that I did not wish to do so because it was a big mistake to think that the logic of “big mistakes” applies to the history and dynamics of the behavioral and social sciences.* I gave them a few reasons why I thought that my reasoning was correct. The editors promptly came back to me and said what a great contribution it would be if I developed a case for my point of view. The editors turned out to be cleverer than I, for in reflecting on their revised request, I came to believe that something useful could be said. And, as is frequently true, I ended up developing a more qualified and contingent view than I had originally and somewhat flippantly shot back at the editors when they first approached me.

From Social Research 72, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 237–62. * For the sake of economy, I will use the term social sciences as shorthand for “behavioral and social sciences,” but it should be understood that my accounts refer not only to psychology but also to the “behavioral” branches of sociology, political science, economics, and anthropology.

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th e emu l ati o n of t h e nat ura l s c i e n c e s i n the b e h av i ora l a n d s oc i al s c i e n c e s When the definitive history of the social sciences is written, it will have to be acknowledged that perhaps the dominant and most persistent motif is the effort to model those sciences after the physical and life sciences—or perhaps better, what the aspirants and practitioners of the social sciences believe the hard sciences to be. That effort is not the only or uniform story, because it has been challenged in so many ways, and so many alternative versions of the “human sciences” have been proposed over time. This emulative effort has not been a simple one, but it has occurred on many different levels, among which the following can be identified: • From an epistemological point of view the main assumption has been

that psychological and social phenomena should be studied as “natural” phenomena. The early political economists had the Newtonian model of physics before them (Halevy 1949). Karl Marx announced that he was studying the “natural laws of capitalist production” like the physicist who “observes physical phenomena where they occur in their most typical form and most free from disturbing influence” ([1868] 1949, xvi– xvii). The most eloquent and thoroughgoing defense of sociology as a natural science was given by Émile Durkheim in his The Rules of the Sociological Method ([1893] 1938), in which he staunchly laid out the subject matter of sociology as objective “social facts,” which are found in nature and which resist distortion and are correspondingly “to be treated as things” (xliii), or data outside the mind of the investigator. This positivistic view pervaded early American sociology as well and is the implicit informing logic of most empirical researchers in the social sciences to this day, despite the onslaughts of phenomenological and postmodernist critiques. Indeed, the persistence of the name social sciences testifies to the tenacity of this view. • Many substantive models of the person and society have also been

imported from the natural sciences—various mechanical causal models from physics, as well as models based on biological evolution, the biological organism, and ecology. Both social evolutionary theory and classical functional sociology, for example, appealed to explicit anatomical, physiological, and evolutionary analogues (see RadcliffeBrown 1952).

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• The early preoccupation with economic laws, psychological laws, and

laws of society were all modeled on some perceived version of natural laws that were thought to be characteristic of the physical and biological sciences. • The logic of discovery, the displacement of prior limited knowledge, and

the systematic accumulation of knowledge also have been envisioned by practitioners and proponents of the social sciences, though this stress has receded over time. Later in the essay I will attempt to give an account of what “accumulation” has meant in practice in the social sciences. • The social sciences have consistently emulated the scientific

methodology of the physical and life sciences. The most notable instance is the widespread and continuing use of the laboratory experiment in academic psychology (with more limited use in smallgroup sociology, economics, and political science). The aim of the experiment, we should remind ourselves, is to isolate and identify specific causes by holding constant other possible causes and varying the suspected operative cause. Quasi-experiments and field experiments have been devised by social scientists to approximate this model when laboratory experiments are not feasible. The widespread uses of techniques of statistical manipulation, especially various forms of multivariate analysis, are ways in which social scientists have attempted to gain the same kind of control over sources of variations, and the logics of less “rigorous” methods such as comparative systematic illustration, deviant case analysis, and even the mental experiment are directed toward the same end (Smelser 1976). It should be noted, finally, that social scientists’ preoccupation with measurement and quantification also derives from the perceived scientific power of these kinds of representation. • Most models of applied social science have followed utilitarian or

engineering models of applying findings of social science knowledge to the solution of social problems and to social policies in general (President’s Research Committee 1933). A second major type of applied social science derives from medical models, which are found in theories of individual pathology and therapy and in the social science schools of “social pathology” and “social disorganization.”

This representation of the ways in which the social sciences modeled themselves after the physical and life sciences is, I believe, a true account, but it is also an idealized account, for it does not take into consideration

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the multiplicity of influences on the social sciences and the great diversity within and among them. It is also something of a “just so” story in one sense: the emulation of the natural sciences has never worked out in the way that those who envisioned that model hoped. If it had, we would have clear analogues of discoveries, laws, and incremental accumulation of knowledge, accompanied by systematic dismantling of the scientific knowledge that preceded it. These elements, moreover, would correspond to the kinds of breakthroughs that we regard as typical of the natural sciences, including discrete theoretical reformulations that ramified into new ways of regarding the natural world, new laws, new hypotheses, and new accounts of observed regularities—for example, relativity theory, quantum theory, chaos theory. There would also be new “laws,” such as the law of gravity, the law of natural evolution, principles of chemical combination and recombination, and new methods that lead to new discoveries, such as the capacity to observe and measure submolecular processes. We would also see discrete applications of knowledge in principles of structural engineering, vaccines and inoculations, and antibiotics. In addition, we would be able to identify big and relatively unambiguous “mistakes”—analogous to phlogiston theory, certain kinds of alchemy, and classic Lamarckian genetic theory. The reasons why these mistakes could be identified would lie in specific and reliable methodologies that would lead to decisive experimental data and controlled natural observations inconsistent with the theoretical expectations of those theories, as well as practical failures in trying to apply them. This imagined picture of development has not materialized in the social sciences. The actual picture is, rather, one of a distinctive set of dynamics, some of which approximate elements of the idealized processes but others of which deviate from it in many ways. It is the purpose of this essay to trace some of those distinctive processes in the social sciences.

the idea of a “discovery ” In the late 1960s, more or less at the end of the post–World War II era of scientific optimism about the behavioral and social sciences, Karl Deutsch, the eminent political scientist, and two colleagues (Deutsch, Platt, and

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Sengaas 1971) made an effort to quantify definite “advances” in the social sciences over more than a half century (1900–1965). They used the word discovery only infrequently but did use several terms with more or less similar meaning—major advances, major achievements, breakthroughs, and major contributions (450, 457). Their chief preoccupations were not the character of the “advances” but rather the contexts and conditions that appeared to produce them—in fields, institutions, age of contributors, whether individual or team, whether capital was required, and delay of impact after the moment of breakthrough. Some interesting findings along these lines emerged—for example, the increasing incidence of team discoveries over time, and the increasing proportions of discoveries emerging from significant capital investments, that is, “big science.” From the standpoint of the focus of this essay, however, I will concentrate on the conceptual and methodological issues involved in identifying the advances. The authors were explicit as to how they identified their total of sixtytwo achievements. Their first criterion was “our personal judgment as to their importance for social science in this century” (450), which acknowledges a degree of subjectivity in their selection. This was made explicit later, when the authors commented that “other individuals and other schools of thought would have a different ranking for particular achievements” (455). Nevertheless, they hoped their choices would gain some consensus. As a supplement to these judgments, they asked colleagues in other fields for “opinions and advice” (455), though they did not indicate how they responded to this. They also consulted the newly published International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (Sills 1968) to see if their judgments matched entries in that publication. The authors also identified the criteria by which they decided that something was a “major achievement” or “breakthrough.” The idea had to meet one of several tests: • It was a “discovery,” that is, something not seen before, either in the

form of empirical facts or in the form of verifiable propositions. • It had to result in “new operations, including scientific operations.” This

meant the inclusion of new methods, such as public opinion polling. • It had to have “substantial impact that led to further knowledge,” but

simple impact on social practice or social policy was not included. They

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also omitted “purely technical achievements” (such as television), “purely political and organizational achievements” (such as the Manhattan Project and the British National Health Service), and “primarily practical innovations” such as the time and motion studies by F. W. Taylor and the studies of human relations in industry by F. J. Roethlisberger and his colleagues (450, 455).

Using these criteria, they also identified “borderline cases” that they decided not to include, such as the frustration-aggression hypothesis (John Dollard and Neil Miller), the theory of cognitive dissonance (Leon Festinger and others), and the concept and measurement of achievement motivation (David McClelland) because they “were not sure that the impact on broader areas of the social sciences has been as large and lasting” as those instances they included—allowing, however, that future judgments might reverse their decisions (455). Already, then, in their discussion of bases and criteria, there are some hints of subjectivity and arbitrariness. That impression is strengthened when we turn to the actual list of sixty-two advances. One is struck by a number of problems of arbitrariness, heterogeneity of inclusion, and ambiguity. The list includes entries such as Gandhi’s “large-scale nonviolent political action,” Lenin’s “Soviet type of one-party state,” and Mao’s “peasant and guerrilla organization and government.” Logic would suggest that these should count as “political and organizational innovations” and should be excluded on the basis of other practical and policy examples, but the authors defended their inclusion on the basis of the questionable assertion that these were “connected with explicit theories” (455). Some inclusions were entire schools of thought, such as “psychoanalysis and depth psychology,” “elite studies,” “learning theory,” and “game theory”—all of which were theoretical advances, it could be argued, but scarcely comparable to highly specific entries, such as “input-output analysis,” “scaling theory,” and “conditioned reflexes.” Some items, such as “gradual social transformation,” seemed more like slow drifts in theoretical emphasis than “advances” in the sense that the authors were using that term. A few of the inclusions did not appear to meet the authors’ criterion of having significant impact—for example, “sociometry and sociograms” and “authoritarian personality and family structure”—both of which had run their brief course of influence by the time the authors were writing.

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“ f i n di n g s ” an d “ law s ” Also in the 1960s, Bernard Berelson of the Population Council and Gary A. Steiner of the University of Chicago prepared a volume entitled Human Behavior: An Inventory of Findings (1964). This was the era of the dominance of the term behavioral sciences—a term given currency by the Ford Foundation that connoted a certain solid concern with the hard facts of behavior—meant to apply to most of anthropology, psychology, and sociology and the “behavioral” parts of economics, political science, and law (11). The effort was a massive one, producing some 1,045 numbered findings. In one sense their claims for this list of scientific findings were modest. They acknowledged some arbitrariness in selection of the findings; they affirmed that the list of findings would have been different a generation earlier and a generation hence, because of the constant accumulation of knowledge; they stressed conditionality (“other things equal”) and the culture-boundedness of the findings; and they noted that many of the statements contained the words “tends to” or “by and large” to indicate the tentativeness and variability of many of the results (7, 11). Simultaneously, the work expressed the view that the authors were dealing with “science.” They noted that their “findings” could also be called “propositions, generalizations, laws, or principles”; that they had importance for the disciplines and for the society at large; that they were of “proper” or middle-range generality; and, perhaps most important, that they were based on “scientific” or “hard” evidence (5). Chapter 2 laid out, in textbook fashion, the “methods of inquiry” by which the findings were established. In reading through the book, readers—including sympathetic ones— are bound to emerge with a sense of disappointment, even after discounting the introductory modesty and the disclaimers. This disappointment derives from the following impressions: • Many of the “findings” are not propositions but simply descriptive

generalizations—for example, “Human behavior is far more variable, and therefore less predictable, than that of any other species” (39); “[as] the child grows older, his behavior becomes successively more differentiated” (53); and “[The] large majority of adults in all societies are married” (304).

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• Some “findings” are so general as to lose circumstantial meaning: for

example, “By and large, the sequence of development is the same for all children” (51) and “[When] an external barrier stands between a motivated subject and his goal, he normally tries to circumvent, remove, or otherwise master it” (267). • Some generalizations appear to be based on frail data: for example, “The

higher a person’s education or socioeconomic status, the greater the diversity of his sexual practices” (302). • Some generalizations may have been incorrect at the time and certainly

have lost force with changing conditions: for example, “Lower-class children get less encouragement from their families to continue their education, and even downright discouragement” (470). More current research suggests that, if immigration is taken into account, the drive for education as an avenue for mobility is extremely strong in many lowerclass immigrant families.

The Berelson-Steiner effort enjoyed only limited success and limited influence, partly because of the noted irregularity and variability of the “findings” themselves but also because almost simultaneously with the appearance of book began the period of high turmoil in the social sciences that witnessed persistent attacks on the idea of a value-free, objective science, the rise of “humanistic” alternatives to positive science, and the political radicalization of many social scientists and students. To the best of my knowledge, no such comprehensive “inventory” of findings has been subsequently undertaken, though reviews of more restricted bodies of knowledge are common fare in annual reviews and learned journals. If such an inventory were to be taken today, it would certainly be different in content—as the authors acknowledged—and it would reflect “the times” differently. For example, in the area of race and ethnic relations, the perspectives of prejudice, discrimination, and acculturation— which dominated in the Berelson-Steiner volume—would have given way to an emphasis on structural, systemic, and cultural forces. Such a survey today would also be stronger substantively, as the conditions under which propositions and generalizations are valid are much better understood, thanks to the great advances in multivariate statistical methods and systematic comparative analysis. However, the same incompleteness and tentativeness would still hold, as would the remote

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correspondence with scientific “laws” as they are understood to hold in the natural sciences. One final observation is in order on the issues of consensus and generational differences in the identification of discoveries and findings— issues noted both by Deutsch et al. and by Berelson and Steiner. As we will see presently, the history of the social sciences has been one of intellectual ferment that produces increasing numbers of perspectives, schools, and approaches, few of which die, and all of which provide frameworks for identifying what counts as appropriate social science knowledge. Applying these different perspectives yields very different judgments about what is science and what is solid scientific knowledge. (A few of the emerging perspectives, especially in recent decades, have been actively antiscientific in their assertions and implications.) The result of this growth and diversification of perspectives is that consensus about the nature of discoveries and findings grows less likely over time. Certainly judgments in the early twenty-first century would be less uniform than in the era of relative scientific consensus in the decades following World War II. From the standpoint of my concern in this essay, the conclusion is that the logic of success and failure and the derived notion of “mistakes” are applicable in only a limited way to behavioral and social science knowledge. Many “findings” are specific to their times—neither “successes” nor failures” as such. In addition to standard assessment of the scientific validity of findings, shifting empirical conditions (such as globalization in its many manifestations), new social problems, and new and old ideological and political preoccupations are drivers in the changing salience and relevance of knowledge. It is the understanding of these multiple influences, in addition to the straightforward assessment of “findings” by received scientific standards, that will yield a more adequate assessment of the development of knowledge in the social sciences.

accumulation and displacement In its essence, the traditional model of accumulation in the natural sciences is that through constant building of theory, experimentation, and

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discovery science continuously builds on its own past but, at the same time, discards that past as prior knowledge is shown to be erroneous, limited, or a “special case” of something more general. As a result, the study of the history of science becomes largely a matter of curiosity. That model is a very rationalistic one, and in recent decades the issue of whether knowledge in the natural sciences accumulates according to that script has become a matter of continuous controversy, beginning with the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970) and extending right up through the continuing postmodernist assault on science from its vantage point of a radical epistemological relativism. Be all that as it may, the developmental picture in the behavioral and social sciences is not that of the earlier model of knowledge accumulation. Rather, it is a story of continuous invention of new or revived theories or perspectives that capture the imagination of a subclass of scientists and occasion a season of research activity and the consolidation of “schools” or “approaches.” At a certain point in this process, however, criticisms of the approach appear and lead to an appreciation of its errors, limitations, and biases. As often as not critics are inclined to invent or appeal to alternative frameworks designed to supersede the less favored one. The new approaches, moreover, become schools or approaches on their own, and they too become vulnerable to the same dynamic of invention, elaboration, consolidation, and attack. The peculiar character of this dynamic is that the older approaches seldom die altogether. Some do, but more often they persist or go underground for a time, only to reappear in altered forms, which then perhaps bring the prefix neo- in front of the older name and enjoy a new season of visibility. Consider the following illustrations: • Classical evolutionary theory was the dominant paradigm in sociology

and anthropology up through the beginning of the twentieth century. It was eclipsed by the diffusionist approach (which challenged the linearity of change processes and focused on cultural borrowing), and anthropological and sociological functionalism (which stressed contemporary systemic interrelations of structures in society, rather than evolutionary stages and survivals). In 1922 William Fielding Ogburn declared simply, “The inevitable series of stages in the development of social institutions has not only not been proven but has been disproven” (57). In the 1950s and 1960s, elements of classical

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evolutionary theory reappeared in theories of modernization and convergence in the study of development, and the theories of structural and functional differentiation—a central focus of the evolutionary theory of Herbert Spencer and the sociology of Durkheim—show some vitality to the present. • Functionalism, dominant for several decades in the middle of the

twentieth century, itself came under attack on the grounds that it was empirically flawed, that it could not explain conflicts, contradictions, and change, and that it was ideologically conservative. This occurred mainly in the 1960s and 1970s, which witnessed the simultaneous rise of conflict sociology, Marxist sociology, radical sociology, and a renewed stress on microsociology and ethnomethodology. Yet many functionalist assumptions of interdependence among societal sectors survive, and a school of “neofunctionalism” appeared in the 1980s. • Marxist economics, consolidated in the nineteenth century, had long

been discredited—though it is not even now completely dead—in economics, and Marxist sociology has been a subject of controversy in sociology from the beginning. Its revival in the turbulent 1960s and 1970s was followed by a precipitous decline, first in eastern Europe, then in western Europe, then in the United States. Some of its ingredients—especially the idea of oppression—have survived, however, in the “new social movements” literature, in the critical school and its recent offshoots, in cultural studies, and in the postmodernist literature. • In economics, the Keynesian critique eclipsed classical equilibrium

theory in midcentury. Keynsianism also underwent attack as new lines of monetary and fiscal policy developed, “supply-side” economics appeared, and a variety of lines of neo-Keynesian theory developed (Salais 2001). • The 1950s and 1960s witnessed an assault on traditional political

theory and comparative historical analysis of political institutions in the name of the new and more “scientific” behavioral and functional approaches. Then, in the 1980s and 1990s, the field witnessed another invasion, this time by the rational-choice approach (e.g., Coleman 1990). The net effect, however, has been, not to replace the prior perspectives, but rather to polarize the field around the diverse approaches.

A comment on the bases for discrediting perspectives is in order. Often an approach is attacked on the basis that it does not square with an accu-

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mulation of empirical research findings. Much of the assault on classical evolutionary theory by the diffusionists, for example, rested on the painstaking tracing of the movement of cultural traits and artifacts throughout the world—cultural borrowing, if you will—that ate away at the unilinear developmental assumptions of evolutionary theory. In addition, however, more ideological, philosophical, and cultural factors are involved. Certainly the discrediting of authoritarian-personality theory, for example, rested partly on the criticism that its ideological roots were narrowly antifascist and that authoritarian traits could be found on the political left as well as the right (Shils 1954). And finally, the “death throes” of classical functionalism and its temporary successor, neo-Marxism, were in large part political as well as scientific struggles for intellectual hegemony. The general point is that the vicissitudes of approaches in the behavioral and social sciences are an often-undecipherable mix of processes, only some of which can be considered scientific in character. The dynamic I have described, repeated hundreds of times in the history of our disciplines, yields an accumulation of sorts—in richness and diversity of paradigms, schools, approaches, and subapproaches. It is, however, not an accumulation of successive discoveries and discardings of the past on the basis of these discoveries. Furthermore, this process contributes to the diversity of the social sciences and their dispersion as more or less coherent paradigms. The dynamics of perspective creating appear to have a common polemic thread that contains both destruction and reconstruction. A perspectiveinnovating person or group typically engages in a struggle to “deobjectify” the perspectives of existing or competing approaches, to “objectify” or perhaps “reobjectify” a preferred alternative, and usually to claim some empirical, theoretical, ideological advantage for the preferred perspective. To illustrate this dynamic, the rise of “labeling theory” in the study of deviance (for example, Becker 1963) was an effort to render unimportant (and perhaps unreal) the stress on psychological tendencies to deviance (found in the functionalist deviance literature [for example, Cohen 1955]) and to locate more important (and perhaps more real) power of agents of social control who apply designations of deviance to less powerful victims, thereby changing the imputed psychological causes to by-products of the more fundamental social processes of labeling. The neo-Marxist “new

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criminology” revealed the same thread, arguing that the most fundamental causes that lead agents of control to “create” crime are to be found in the contradictions of capitalism and efforts to deal with those contradictions (see Taylor, Walton, and Young 1973). At the same time, the “older” psychological approaches to deviance did not go away; they were weakened or leavened, but they, too, reappear when some new situation arises—as we observed in the 1970s and 1980s, for example, in the brief but unsuccessful search for a “terrorist personality.” One aspect of these dynamics is that social scientists do not usually accept the idea that these various approaches might comfortably coexist, side by side, as so many alternative ways of pursuing knowledge. Instead, they tend to identify themselves with the paradigms they favor and to denigrate other approaches they regard as inferior. It is only a small step to begin to endow their own approach with a certain sacred quality, and as soon as this step is taken, the stage is set for the periodic outbreak of wars among competing schools. The picture I have just sketched applies best to the theoretical side of the social sciences, all of which are characterized by diversity of approaches, multiple paradigms, internal conflict, and sectarian competition. When we consider discrete traditions of research in specific subareas, some of the same dynamics appear, but closer analogies to the accumulation process can be observed. Many stories of advances could be told, for example, in the fields of stratification, formal organizations, demographic processes, and the study of social movements. I now give some details on another example, the recent history of the field of aging research, which has seen the emergence of a number of new perspectives and lines of research that have clearly come to dominate older perspectives in gerontology. The “older” viewpoints would include the treatment of aging as principally chronological in character; the treatment of aging as a process of loss of biological and psychological capacities of adults; the treatment of aging as “disengagement” from activities and social roles; the treatment of aging as a biological and psychological “problem” for the individual and as a “social problem” for society. Over the past several decades, sometimes dramatically but more often gradually, new perspectives have been brought to bear in the analysis of aging and have come to supplement (but only partially to displace) the

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long-standing perspectives and concerns mentioned. Among the most notable of these are • The linking of the study of aging to life-course analysis in general, thus

permitting the introduction of the perspective of lifetime human development and facilitating the comparison of the later years with other phases of the life course (Binstock and George 1996) • The linking of aging to social roles and social structure, as well as social

change, including the normative dimension of age grading, the study of age roles, and the study of age strata (see Riley, Foner, and Waring 1988) • The introduction of cohort analysis into the study of aging, which

proved to be a basis for analyzing important sources of variation in the aging process (i.e., variations in the life experiences of different cohorts) (Ryder 1965) • The cross-national and cross-cultural study of aging, which provides yet

another basis for the analysis of variation • The opening of the group dimension of the aging process, especially in

the identification of support groups and networks (including both kin and nonkin) as determinants of health and personal satisfaction of the elderly • The application of the perspectives of lifelong socialization, learning,

and plasticity into the study of the aging population (Baltes and Staudinger 1996) • The emphasis on the enhancement of some cognitive capacities in the

aging process (e.g., “wisdom”) in addition to the decline of other capacities (e.g., acquisition of practical skills)

The introduction of these perspectives displayed many of the dynamics of innovation described earlier in this section. But the cumulative impact of these changes in perspective was to move away from the biological, psychological, individualist, and moral (i.e., social problem) definitions and study of aging, and systematically to introduce broadened psychological perspectives and a diversity of social dimensions. The cumulative results for research were the introduction of new determinants of life experiences (including health), a vast enrichment of the understanding of the aging process, and a lifting of the stigmatization that the deterioration and disengagement perspectives often connoted.

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These are “successes,” to be sure, but in the special, complex sense I have stressed. At the same time, it is inappropriate to regard the older perspectives as “mistakes” in any simple sense. They were limited views of the aging process, but elements of those approaches are still applicable in qualified ways. The reader might excuse a biographical note at this moment. When Paul Baltes and I were constructing the intellectual architecture for the massive publication International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (Smelser and Baltes 2001), it did not even occur to us to organize the volume primarily on the basis of successes, failures, and the systematic accumulation and displacement of knowledge. The bases for this “nondecision” should be apparent from the reasoning I have developed in this essay. To have followed that “scientific” model would not have been faithful to the complex history and contemporary status of those sciences; it would have imparted to them an unacceptably distorted simplicity and artificiality. Instead we subdivided the contents of the encyclopedia into five large domains—(a) concerns that arched over all the sciences (for example, ethics of research, history of the social and behavioral sciences); (b) methods (for example, statistical, mathematical, comparative); (c) disciplines (for example, anthropology, geography, economics); (d) fields that intersected disciplines (for example, evolutionary science, gender studies, environmental sciences); and (e) applications (for example, media studies, public policy). We selected a section for each of the forty resulting topics and asked these editors to undertake the initial identification of entry titles (ultimately more than four thousand) and authors for each. Though we offered expositional guidelines to authors, the entries proved to be highly diverse. Within any given entry the author might describe major innovations and streams of research, some of them of cumulative or approximately so. But as often as not these ingredients were interlaced into accounts of internal discourse, persistence and change in perspectives, conflicts over intellectual orientations, and unpredictable intellectual offshoots (some productive and some not). The resulting representation of social science knowledge in the Encyclopedia is, I believe, less tidy but truer to reality than constricted efforts to write accounts from a narrow science perspective would have been.

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success and failure in the application of social s c i e n c e k n o w l ed g e One of the criteria for assessing a discovery in the natural and life sciences is whether it can be applied to some purposive enterprise that is useful for society’s purposes, however this usefulness might be identified. Examples are the usefulness of radar discoveries in military defense and civilian aviation; the application of atomic physics to military weaponry and the production of energy; the discovery and use of preventive vaccines; and the application of antibiotics to a variety of infectious disorders. Along with these successful applications unsuccessful ones (“mistakes”) may also be identified. Two examples would be the inability to develop sufficiently economical electric batteries that would completely eliminate the need for fossil fuel use in vehicles, and failure (at least in the judgment of most scientists) of “cold fusion” as a source of useful energy. In the history of every one of the social sciences the question of the practical value and usefulness of the science has occupied a place—for example, economics as a tool to promote growth, development, and welfare; political science as a means to improve democracy and political policies; sociology as a means to ameliorate social conditions and solve social problems; psychology as a means of contributing to the functioning and psychic well-being of individuals; and anthropology in its emphasis on “applied anthropology.” In the context of this essay, the question of the usefulness or applicability of social science knowledge is relevant. The following examples constitute the most evident examples of social science applications: • The development of intelligence, aptitude, and other cognitive tests and

their use as guides in placing and advancing (or holding back) children in schools and as aids in hiring people in jobs • The practice of psychotherapy, which is in many respects the application

of knowledge of personality and mental disorders • The design of instructional programs based on research about the ways

in which children learn • The application of economic knowledge to the execution of fiscal and

monetary policy

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• The application of knowledge about criminal behavior to law

enforcement practices and parole policies and practices • The very widespread use of certain methods developed mainly in the

social sciences, especially the survey method, regarded as extremely useful by politicians and businessmen as a measure of public sentiment and buyer intentions

The results (success or failure) of such applications are assessed first by an attempt to judge the effectiveness of the application by some measure of change and second by some estimate of that effectiveness in relation to the cost of the application. It should be noted at the outset that while all of these are bona fide examples of application, not one of them is without controversy about what is the appropriate kind of knowledge to be developed and applied and, derivatively, how effective are the results of application. This basic fact suggests that simple models derived from engineering (instrumental, utilitarian) or medical (prevention, cure) are not precisely applicable to the situation of bringing knowledge to bear on issues of social policy and social reform. The main reasons for this follow.

Disagreement on the Goals of the Application Some social goals are matters of relative consensus: for example, improving the health and well-being of the nation’s population, improving the quality and quantity of agricultural products, and promoting economic growth and prosperity. The word relative should be underscored. With respect to health, fundamental disagreements continue as to whether genetic counseling, genetic engineering, and therapeutic abortion are not overshadowed by ethical and religious considerations. With respect to agriculture, genetic modification of crops generates similar kinds of fears, reservations, and controversies. And consensus on economic growth has been challenged by a whole range of environmental (e.g., antipollution, resource exhaustion) considerations. However, when compared with areas of education goals for children, social welfare, improving family life, minimizing racial and class inequalities, eradicating homelessness—all areas where social science knowledge is relevant—the consensus is relatively greater. As a general rule, the identification of “social problems” to which

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knowledge can potentially be applied is rooted in contestations about empirical states of affairs (whether it is a problem at all; if so, how widespread it is; normative disagreements; and value conflicts—see Smelser [1995]). The consequence of these lines of reasoning is that, especially in the more controversial areas, the “success” or “failure” of applying relevant knowledge is frequently trumped by political and ideological controversies about whether purposive and informed policy changes are wanted in the first place and, derivatively, what kind of knowledge, if any, ought to be brought to bear.

The Nature of the Knowledge Applied In those areas of the application of information-gathering technologies (for example, sample surveys) and the direct application of clinical knowledge to practice (for example, in psychotherapy), the kind of knowledge that is used to achieve a result is relatively easily identified, even though, as we will see, the effectiveness of that knowledge is frequently difficult to assess. In many other areas of policy, however, social “knowledge” is appealed to, but it is in the form of general perspectives, or “ways of looking at things” (see Adams, Smelser, and Treiman 1982). Examples follow: • Much unemployment and social welfare policy is informed mainly by

two frameworks—different in implication and frequently opposed to one another. The first is that being unemployed is the result of inadequate motivation and that purposive intervention by public authorities is not indicated. The second is that unemployment is “structural”—that is, a product of systemic forces beyond the control of the individual—and that both relief for workers and economic reform are the responsibility of political authorities. Similar and contrasting ideological positions characterize debates about racial policies, namely whether racial disadvantage is determined by psycho-cultural factors or is the result of discrimination and structurally generated inequalities. • Debates about many economic policies are informed by two kinds of

frameworks, also contrasting in many respects. The first is that the most efficient and effective means of regulating economic activity is to leave it to free-market mechanisms. The second is that direct legal and/or administrative intervention is called for because the market mechanisms make for anomalies, inequities, or environmental harm.

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• Debates about environmental regulation are informed by two kinds of

contrasting frameworks. The first is that economic incentives, such as subsidizing people for installing solar heating, are the least intrusive and most effective. The second is that direct, administratively and legally coercive requirements are essential to gain general compliance. • Debates about law enforcement, prison, and parole policies are

informed by two kinds of frameworks. The first is that criminals are in some way “hardened” and will not respond to measures other than punishment and incarceration; the second is that criminal tendencies can be changed by a combination of less punitive educational and rehabilitative measures.

A certain amount of detailed social scientific knowledge can be assembled in support of all the frameworks mentioned. Yet it remains that neither has been decisively established as more valid than the other, with the result that there is no consistent, consensual, knowledge-based way of favoring one over the other. A consequence is that it is not possible to demonstrate decisively the success or failure of any of them. A further consequence is that it is not possible to regard any of them as unequivocally mistaken, even though partisans might argue that they are.

The Context of the Effort to Apply Social Science Knowledge This issue has two facets that bear on the issue of success, failure, and mistakes. 1. scientific-methodological

The context in which reliable scientific knowledge is generated almost always differs from the context in which it is applied. The aim in generating scientific findings (for example, the relations between socioeconomic status and rate of criminal activity) is to hold constant or otherwise neutralize as many other operative factors in the genesis of crime as possible, so as to determine the precise strength between the presumed cause and its effect. Even if a strong and regular relationship between the variables in question can be achieved, applying that knowledge concretely—for example, to strategies for policing or the reform of parole systems—can be only marginally effective, because all the other heretofore “controlled”

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variables in the research activity are never controlled in practice, so that in the process of application the tidy relationship between socioeconomic status and crime immediately enters into interaction with dozens of other variables in a way that subverts its neat application. 2. administrative-political

The organizational context in which social science knowledge is generated (a university, a research institute) is typically separated from the context in which it is applied (a business organization, a governmental agency). The exigencies influencing the scientists who generate knowledge may be a concern with the applicability of the knowledge, but usually they are the scientific-academic environment, with its distinctive freedoms, standards for assessing excellence of research, and largely internal prestige systems. The exigencies influencing leaders and policy makers are, to be sure, a concern with the quality of knowledge invoked to justify a policy action, but, in addition, they include multiple other sources of influence, such as the requirement to produce “results” for superiors, the exigency of staying out of trouble with those same superiors, the pressure not to cause political difficulties for the organization or agency, and the need to deal with the constituencies that are affected by policy decisions. These forces are all the stronger when political sensitivities and political conflict surrounding the relevant policies are salient. This means that there invariably exist structured motivations for policy makers to fail to act, to choose selectively among types of knowledge, to distort the knowledge base for policy making so that it appears more acceptable, and to appease different political constituencies by representing their decisions differently to each of them. All these considerations add to the muddiness of efforts to apply knowledge to policies and call for correspondingly textured accounts of the fate of knowledge in its application, accounts that cannot be captured by the relatively uncomplicated logic of success, failure, or mistakes.

Difficulties in Evaluation of Results of Policy Interventions There exists in the methodological literature of the social sciences a subfield called “evaluation research” or “evaluation studies” (Scriven 1991; Rossi and Freeman 1993). The main aim of the literature is methodologi-

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cal: to devise the most objective ways of assessing deliberate and directed interventions in social settings. While this line of research has gained in maturity over time, its practitioners stress the difficulties involved in and the imprecision of such research: in the assessment of educational innovations, for example, “evaluation is realized in systems which are so complex that most evaluation attempts meet fundamental difficulties” (Wottawa and Pult 2001, 4255). Many of these difficulties are subsumable under the heading of “unanticipated consequences”—failures of communication up and down the line of communication of agencies, self-protective strategies by implementers of policies, changes that occur in the context of implementation during a policy’s course of application, and strategies of those affected by policies to defeat, divert, or turn them to their own advantage. As often as not, these difficulties have the effect of making the impact of the policies different from that intended by those who initiated them. This effect can be labeled as a “failure” or a “mistaken” policy, but the application of such gross descriptive terms obscures the texture and dynamics involved in the application of knowledge.

co n c lu si o n Because of the repeated emphasis on the lack of fit between (a) certain imagined models of the generation of science and its applications in the natural sciences and (b) the actual processes involved in social science research, the reader might be tempted simply to conclude that the social sciences themselves are a “mistake” because of their failure to measure up to these models. That conclusion, however, is itself mistaken and remote from any intent in my exposition. The social sciences have demonstrated a vast and continuing increase in our knowledge of people and societies, and there is no prospect that this pace of advance will not continue. If there is any mistake involved, it is the mistake of supposing that the history of the behavioral and social sciences actually fits the imagined natural science model, despite the claims of its ambitious practitioners that it does or should do so. As I hope I have demonstrated, investigation in the social sciences has displayed a complex logic of its own in its development, and that logic should be described and evaluated in its own terms.

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r e f e r en c e s Adams, Robert McC., Neil J. Smelser, and Donald J. Treiman, eds. 1982. Behavioral and Social Science Research: A National Resource. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Baltes, Paul B., and Ursula M. Staudinger, eds. 1996. Interactive Minds: Life-Span Perspectives on the Social Foundation of Cognition. New York: Cambridge University Press. Becker, Howard S. 1963. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: Free Press. Berelson, Bernard, and Gary A. Steiner. 1964. Human Behavior: An Inventory of Scientific Findings. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. Binstock, R. H., and L. K. George, eds. 1996. Handbook of Aging and the Social Sciences. 4th ed. San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Cohen, Alfred. 1955. Delinquent Boys. New York: Free Press. Coleman, James S. 1990. Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Deutsch, Karl, John Platt, and Dieter Senghaas. 1971. “Conditions Favoring Major Advances in Social Science.” Science 171, no. 3970:450–59. Durkheim, Émile. [1893] 1938. The Rules of the Sociological Method. Edited by George E. G. Catlin. Translated by Sarah A. Solovay and John H. Mueller. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Halevy, Elie. 1949. The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism. Translated by Mary Morris. Preface by A. D. Lindsay. New York: Augustus M. Kelly. Kuhn, Thomas S. 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Marx, Karl. [1868] 1949. Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production. Edited by Frederick Engels. Translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. London: George Allen and Unwin. Ogburn, William Fielding. 1922. Social Change: With Respect to Culture and Original Nature. New York: B. S. Huebsch. President’s Research Committee on Social Trends. 1933. Recent Social Trends in the United States. New York: McGraw-Hill. Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 1952. Structure and Function in Primitive Society. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Riley, Matilda White, Anne Foner, and Joan Waring. 1988. “Sociology of Age.” In Handbook of Sociology, edited by Neil J. Smelser, 243–90. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications. Rossi, Peter H., and Howard E. Freeman. 1993. Evaluation—A Systematic Approach. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. Ryder, Norman B. 1963. “The Cohort as a Concept in the Study of Social Change.” American Sociological Review 30, no. 6:843–61.

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Salais, R. 2001. “Keynesianism and State Interventionism.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, edited by Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, vol. 12, 8089–92. Oxford: Elsevier Science. Scriven, Michael. 1991. Evaluation Thesaurus. Newbury Park: CA: Sage Publications. Shils, Edward H. 1954. “Authoritarianism: Left and Right.” In Studies in the Scope and Method of “The Authoritarian Personality,” ’ edited by R. Christie and M. Jahoda, 24–49. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Sills, David L., ed. 1968. International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. 17 vols. New York: Macmillan. Smelser, Neil J. 1976. Comparative Methods in the Social Sciences. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. . 1995. “Social Science and Social Problems: The Next Century.” In Vannevar Bush II: Science for the 21st Century, edited by John Ahearne, 117–32. Research Triangle, NC: Sigma Xi. Smelser, Neil J., and Paul B. Baltes, eds. 2001. International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. 26 vols. Oxford: Elsevier Science. Taylor, I., P. Walton, and J. Young. 1973. The New Criminology: For a Theory of Social Deviance. New York: Harper and Row. Wottawa, H., and D. Pult. 2001. “Educational Evaluation: Overview.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, edited by Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, vol. 6, 4255–59. Oxford: Elsevier Science.

part iii

Some Recent Reflections

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11

Looking Back at Twenty-Five Years of Sociology and the Annual Review of Sociology (1999)

In accepting the assignment for this essay I did not realize how complex it would turn out to be. If I had been given two or three times the space allotted, it would not have sufficed. Accordingly, I have had to be schematic in preparing my remarks. I will limit my comments to six topics: • An autobiographical note, as it relates to the Annual Review of

Sociology (hereafter ARS) • A brief overview of trends in sociological theory and research in the

past quarter century • Some descriptive data about the ARS • The theme of unity and diversity of sociology • The dynamics of “reflecting” the discipline in the ARS • Some concrete examples of “reflecting”

From Annual Review of Sociology 25 (1999): 1–18.

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a biographical and parental note There is a role in academia—partly created by oneself, partly assigned— that might be called “representing the discipline.” It takes several forms: (a) writing about the status of the field, including its trends and problems; (b) acting in a “canonical” capacity, such as editor of a publication of one’s professional association; and (c) serving in an organization whose work affects the world of knowledge and research. Although one does not always directly represent one’s discipline in this role—in fact, there is a taboo on being too partisan—it is not possible to avoid being identified as speaking for one’s field to some degree. This representative role has both symbolic and political dimensions, both stemming from the fact that it is oneself and not someone else doing the representing. By a variety of circumstances I have found myself in representative roles to an unusual degree. I became editor-in-chief of the American Sociological Review at a young age in 1962. Over a thirty-year period I have written or edited four texts representing general sociology (Smelser 1967a, 1973; Smelser 1981, 1984, 1988b, 1991, 1995; Smelser 1988a; Smelser 1994). On several “official” occasions—special sessions at the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association and a special conference of the American Academy of Political and Social Science—I have been asked to comment on the nature and scope of sociology and its relations to the other social sciences (Smelser 1967b, 1969). I compiled and edited a volume on citation patterns in the behavioral and social sciences (Smelser 1987). I served as chair of the Sociology Panel for the Behavioral and Social Sciences (BASS) Survey, sponsored by the Social Science Research Council and the National Academy of Sciences in the 1960s (Smelser and Davis 1969) and as a member and chair of a special committee of the Commission on the Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education (National Research Council) on the past, present, and future of the social sciences in the 1980s (Adams, Smelser, and Treiman 1982; Smelser and Gerstein 1986; Gerstein et al. 1988; Luce, Smelser, and Gerstein 1989). Over the years I have served on the governing boards of the Social Science Research Council, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the Russell Sage Foundation. And now I am the coeditor (with Paul Baltes, Max Planck Institute on Human Development,

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Berlin) of the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, a twenty-four-volume compilation to be published by Elsevier Science in 2001. This penchant for representing also appeared in the genesis and early history of the ARS. It was the Sociology Panel of the BASS Survey, which I cochaired, that called for the creation of an annual review of sociology, explaining that “the objective of this publication would be to review findings and trends from the various fields of sociology on an annual basis” (Smelser and Davis 1969, 168). The recommendation was not controversial. The ASA Council echoed it in 1972, a time when I was serving on the Council as vice president elect. The ASA approached Annual Reviews, Inc., of Palo Alto, California, publisher of most other such reviews, and after a feasibility study the first editorial committee was appointed to plan for the first volume, to appear in 1975. I was named one of the first associate editors (along with James Coleman), with Alex Inkeles as the first editor. I served in that capacity for volumes 1 through 3 and 6, and as a member of the planning committee for volumes 1 through 5 and 8. The conclusion of this biographical excursus is that, with this special personal history, it is appropriate that I comment on the first quarter century of the ARS. I am honored to do so, because this publication has had a very successful career and itself is now fully established as a major “representative” of sociology.

some threads in sociological the ory and r e s e ar c h , 19 75 t o t h e pr e s e n t The last quarter of the twentieth century is an engaging time in the history of the discipline. This period began after one of the most tumultuous decades of the century—from the early 1960s to the early 1970s. From the standpoint of sociology’s societal environment, it was the decade of civil rights, student protest, urban racial disturbances, the war on poverty, the crystallization of a new feminist movement, a souring of American society over the Vietnam War, and the assassination of several of the decade’s charismatic figures. Mirroring these conflictual events, sociologists squared off against one another in college and university faculties, in

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relations between faculties and students, and in the professional association. The divisions concerned those issues in the larger society, plus a number peculiar to the discipline—the “relevance” of sociological knowledge for social reform and revolution, scientific versus humanistic sociology, the proper training of graduate students, the role of students in the governance of academic departments, the political role of the American Sociological Association, and not least, the deification and vilification of particular sociologists, dead and living. Much of the turbulence in sociology during the 1960s was shaped by the rejection of a memory about the foregoing decade—the 1950s, which were portrayed by many as the affluent, complacent, and politically conservative Eisenhower years. Those years were also remembered as a period of hegemony—within sociology—of an uncritical sociological positivism and a functionalism insensitive to, if not apologetic for, problems and contradictions in American society. Similarly, many of the theoretical and ideological developments since the 1960s have been a matter of coming to terms with—embracing, rejecting, modifying, elaborating—the memory of that memorable decade. In both cases, the imaging of the past has included a motivated stereotyping of it by all parties involved that seems to be an unavoidable feature of generational dynamics. It is easy to overdramatize these generational shifts and conflicts and to mistake them for the whole story. To avoid that effect, let me make explicit my impression that the continuity of the sociological enterprise outweighs the dramatic theoretical and ideological debates. Most sociologists engaged in research and teaching continue to perceive and believe that the world consists of empirical social facts and social problems, and they continue to describe, analyze, and explain these phenomena from a variety of theoretical perspectives. They employ largely eclectic, not monolithic, frameworks, even though most sociologists have theoretical preferences. The discipline’s theoretical and ideological movements do condition their selection of research issues, their teaching, and their choice of sociological friends, but the big picture is one of laboring in the vineyards, not fighting mighty wars. We must keep this observation before us as we ask how a medium such as an annual review “reflects” the discipline. With this point in mind, we may remind ourselves that the 1970s were marked by the continuing vitalization of neo-Marxian, neo-Weberian, crit-

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ical theory, and radical-sociology perspectives. All of them took as polemic targets the functionalism, quietism, and conservatism of the 1950s as well as the sociologists thought to represent them. Similarly, modernization theory was criticized as too Western centered and too focused on internal dynamics of and obstacles to development. As alternatives, we witnessed the rise of dependency theory and world-system theory, both more internationalist and both to the political left of modernization theory. These macroperspectives, although they changed the focus of the sociological positivism of the foregoing decade, did little to challenge that position philosophically (neo-Marxist thinkers did reject “functionalist” positivism as subordinated to the capitalist class and state system, but they did not forsake their own brand of positivism). That task was taken up by the so-called “microscopic revolution,” which also crystallized in the late 1960s and 1970s. This revolution involved the vitalization of social behaviorism, symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, hermeneutics, and phenomenology generally. These perspectives differed from one another, but they shared an assault on sociological realism. They treated roles, social structures, and culture as produced by and reproduced in—or derived from—a crucible of microinteractions among persons. Except for social behaviorism, these perspectives also raised epistemological objections to a sociological science based on objective social facts. These theoretical developments ramified into subfields of sociology, creating differences of emphases and conflicts in them. We witnessed the appearance of labeling theory and radical criminology as alternatives to traditional views of deviance as rule breaking. Feminist sociology developed liberal, critical, radical, and Marxist subdivisions, as did family sociology. Stratification research developed a split between status attainment and cultural approaches to mobility, reflecting a liberal-radical split as well. Similar subdivisions appeared in the study of political sociology and community power relations, collective behavior and social movements, race and ethnic relations, and others. Research methods did not escape the turmoil. The 1970s witnessed not only advances in statistical methods, mathematical modeling, and computation but also a consolidation of and campaigns for comparative/historical/archival and ethnographic/field methods and semiotics as contenders for legitimate methodological status.

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The most significant theoretical development in the 1980s and 1990s was the precipitous collapse of the Marxist and related approaches—first in political and academic circles in both eastern and western Europe, then in the collapse of communism and the Soviet Empire, and then more generally. The Marxist impulse survived in diluted form in revisionist critical theory (associated with Habermas), focusing more on the state apparatus than on market capitalism, and on cultural capital (associated with Bourdieu). Notable but less dramatic developments included the following: • A continuing stagnation of interest in general theory—Parsonian “grand

theory,” systems theory, theories of society, and other variants that had enjoyed currency in midcentury and into the 1960s. Interest in general issues focuses more on phenomena that reach across disciplinary lines (for example, risk, rationality) and interdisciplinary research. • A vitalization of the sociology of culture, reflecting not so much culture

as a force for social integration (the functionalist stress) but rather culture as medium for hegemonic domination, as individual and group “project,” and as “industry,” producing and being reproduced. • A growing salience of rational-choice theory, stemming from writings by

some economists, game theorists, and political scientists, as well as the sociological work of James Coleman and others. • The spread of the intellectual movement referred to variously and

imprecisely as postmodernism (including poststructuralism and aspects of multiculturalism). This movement combined an alienation from “rational” aspects of modern society, an antiscience impulse, an identification with the oppressed, and a fascination with “difference” and the uniqueness of “the other,” which rejects general principles and grand narratives. Postmodernism has had a modest impact in sociology, compared with anthropology and several subjects in the humanities, but it has affected feminist sociology, the sociology of culture, and the sociology of science.

In addition to all these developments, sociology has, throughout the quarter century, continued to play “catch-up” with larger societal changes. By this I mean that when some dramatic change, trend, problem, or event rises to social and political visibility, it generates a flurry of theoretical discussion, debate, and empirical research in sociology, sometimes resulting in a new subtradition if not subfield of the discipline, particularly if the

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item resonates with ongoing sociological preoccupations. Illustrations of this phenomenon in the last quarter century include the bursts of research on student activism, the impact of the computer on the workplace, drugs, Satanism, esoteric cults, single-parent families, family violence, stepparenting, adult children living with parents, homelessness, immigration, identity politics, and globalism. All these developments—solidification of competing sociological perspectives, infusion of these perspectives into subfields, development of conflicts based on these perspectives, growth of new subfields, “chasing” of social problems, crystallization of different research methods—in large part lie behind the continuing trend toward specialization of the field. This specialization has been the subject of much agonizing among sociologists. Some acknowledge its inevitability and positive contribution to the accumulation of knowledge; others proclaim fragmentation, disarray, loss of identity, and crisis; others seek themes of unity and coherence; and still others heed but go on with their labors. At the same time, I sense a certain routinization of differences, with the shrill partisanship of the 1960s giving way to greater mutual tolerance—a kind of peaceful pluralism—in the 1980s and 1990s, even though inherited differences persist. As the century ends, I sense a deep ambivalence: a sure knowledge that sociology is a solidly institutionalized and enduring enterprise, but also a sense of profound unease and loss of mission. The unease is fed by gnawing doubts about the coherence of the enterprise of sociology, by internal conflicts, by periodic efforts and threats to phase out the field in a few private colleges and universities, and by the unsteady funding situation for the behavioral and social sciences in governmental and foundation circles. These few remarks on the status of sociology in the past several decades should serve as a background as we look at how the Annual Review of Sociology has reflected the discipline during its existence.

a few descriptive data The ARS has kept its “annual” promise by appearing every year since volume 1 was published in 1975. Its average size has been fairly stable. In

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Table 1

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Types of institution represented by author, Annual Review of Sociology, 1975–97 1975–79

US public US private Canadian Non–North American Other

1980–84

1985–89

1990–94

1995–97

no.

%

no.

%

no.

%

no.

%

no.

%

61 46 2 5

51.2 37.7 1.7 4.2

66 49 2 7

54.5 33.7 1.7 5.8

79 44 2 16

53.7 29.9 1.4 10.9

86 50 2 11

56.7 32.2 1.3 7.2

53 43 6 1

49.4 39.4 6.9 1.7

5

4.3

6

4.9

6

4.1

3

2.0

2

1.7

what might be called the “thin period” (1975–82) the number of articles averaged 16, with a low of 13 (1982) and a high of 21 (1978). In 1983, however, the number jumped to 26, the all-time high, and between that year and 1997 the average was 20.6 articles, with a high of 26 in 1983 and a low of 17 in 1994. These data are not remarkable, but the steadiness of the past fifteen years reflects the fact that the ARS has become a going concern in the world of academic sociology. What kinds of institutions are reflected in the Annual Review? I recorded the institutions of all authors from 1975 through 1997, using the categories of “US public,” “US private,” “Canadian,” “Non–North American,” and “Other” (nonacademic institutions such as government agencies). Table 1 reveals the breakdown. This display reveals an overwhelming dominance of American colleges and universities; no identifiable secular trends in the balance between American private and public institutions; and very low numbers of Canadian, non–North American, and others. The low level of non–North American institutions shows that ARS is not a perfect reflection of sociology if we make the reasonable assumption that the field has become steadily more internationalized in the last quarter of the twentieth century. International representation “bulges” slightly in the publication’s middle years. I believe this blip traces to the fact that in 1982 the editorial committee added three non-US sociologists—John Goldthorpe (United Kingdom), Natalie Rogoff Ramsoy (Norway), and Erwin Scheuch

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Table 2 Universities most represented in Annual Review of Sociology, 1975–97 University

Wisconsin-Madison Michigan Stanford North Carolina–Chapel Hill California–Los Angeles Harvard Chicago Duke California-Berkeley Washington State Cornell Indiana Washington-Seattle

No. of Authors

31 27 23 21 18 15 14 14 14 13 12 11 11

(West Germany)—as a “Corresponding Committee.” This arrangement continued, with changing membership, until 1993, when it was apparently discontinued. The existence of the Corresponding Committee coincides almost exactly with the small bulge of international authors. Which American institutions of higher education had highest representation? The cumulative count for institutions most represented (by author) is found in table 2. That table, too, reveals no surprises. The major research universities have dominated, and the “great Midwest empirical tradition” (including North Carolina) insofar as that is anything real, has a commanding presence. Some might regard Stanford’s position (third) as worthy of comment. I hesitate to make much of this, but geographical proximity (the ARS’s central office is in Palo Alto) and familiarity with local talent might be mentioned as factors contributing to its high ranking. Institutions producing fewer than twenty articles are numerous, diverse, and widespread, and they provide little information that would merit explanation or speculation. I also ran an “author/article” count to determine if there might be any trends toward increasing or decreasing multiple authorship. No real trend

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Table 3 Gender of authors, Annual Review of Sociology, 1975–97 1975–79

No. of men No. of women % of women

102 19 18.6

1980–84

105 16 13.1

1985–89

106 41 27.9

1990–94

106 46 30.7

1995–97

61 35 36.4

in either direction is discernable. The ratios were 1.44 for 1975–79, 1.32 for 1980–84, 1.41 for 1985–89, 1.2 for 199–94, and 1.64 for 1995–97. Finally, I calculated the percentage of women authors in the ARS from 1975 to 1997. Those percentages, represented in five-year intervals, are found in table 3. What is found is an expected trend, moving more or less steadily upward and certainly reflecting broader changes in the sociological profession and the society at large. One might ask why the numbers did not “take off ” earlier, because the feminist movement was by 1975 firmly in the minds of sociologists. The great jumps came between the first half and the second half of the 1980s. One factor in accounting for this change, I believe, was the appointment of Alice Rossi as a member of the editorial committee. Her term ran from 1983 to 1988, and she actively pressed for the inclusion of women authors.

o n t h e un i t y a n d d i v er s i t y o f s o c i o lo g y I vividly remember discussions by the first editorial committee on two related topics: how to represent sociology and how to organize the volumes of the ARS. The vividness of my recollection stems in part from the fact that I myself had been struggling with issues of scope, subdivisions, and unity of sociology for several years preceding the convening of the first editorial committee. A brief account of my struggle might set the scene for the committee’s discussions and resolutions. In the mid-1960s I wrote an essay (Smelser 1967b) in which I defined and set apart from one another the fields of anthropology, economics, history, political science, psychology, and sociology and attempted to specify

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some relations among them. In retrospect I regard that as a rash effort, even though I had already studied all of them at various points in my young academic career. I did not acknowledge it at the time, but this exercise presupposed that each of the fields was an identifiable entity, capable of specification of its relations with those other entities—disciplines—that surrounded it. I now regard that supposition as both naive and inadequate. Several years later I was asked to give a normative presentation on “the optimum scope of sociology” before an august gathering of sociologists that included Herbert Blumer, Philip Hauser, George Homans, Paul Lazarsfeld, Robert Merton, Wilbert Moore, Talcott Parsons, and Robin Williams. At the same meeting James Coleman was asked to speak on “methods” of sociology and Peter Blau on the “objectives” of sociology. As I recall that event, it also seems rash that I presumed to tell this score of established and rising people what our discipline was about, but I accepted the assignment. By that time I was slightly less naive, and I gave a more complex account of sociology. At the outset, I sought to disarm my variegated audience by saying, under the heading of “one field, many frameworks”: “Sociology, by comparison with some other sciences, lacks a single, accepted conceptual framework. The field is difficult to distinguish from others because it contains a diversity of frameworks, some of which it shares with other fields such as psychology and social anthropology. If anything, then, sociology is too comprehensive, diffuse, soft in the center, and fuzzy around the edges” (Smelser 1969, 5). Not content with this indeterminacy, however, I next ventured the view that sociology was in fact distinguished by five core perspectives or levels of analysis: • The demographic and ecological • The person in social context (social-psychological) • The group (including organizations) • The social structural (including roles and institutions) • The cultural

I suggested further that, in order for an investigation to be considered sociological, it had to choose some dependent variable falling within one

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of these perspectives and to explain variations in this variable by reference to some independent variable, also within the perspectives. In that way I addressed the issue of “optimum scope,” or the issue of diversity within the framework of unity. Robert Nisbet, one of the commentators on my subject, picked up the tension in my remarks and observed that they combined two versions of me: first, a Free Sociological Momentum (FSM—apt enough for its day) version, which permitted an almost unlimited range of activities under the heading of sociological investigation; and second, a more authoritarian streak that demanded that analysis, in order to be considered properly sociological, had to be related to and to draw from the core perspectives. Nisbet was worried that the latter would inhibit scholarly imagination and creativity. I could not fully answer his challenge to draw a firm line between permissiveness and constraint, but neither could he. He clearly preferred the FSM version but admitted, “Granted that for a discipline to exist worth the naming, there must be something distinctive in its naming” (Nisbet 1969, 33). This was the way that the tension between diversity and unity was worked out at that moment in 1967; it was basically unresolved. The editorial committee planning the Annual Review of Sociology was also constrained to make some decisions about the unity and the diversity of sociology. This was a different task from the one I had faced in my two previous efforts. My efforts were aimed at neatening the field conceptually, making sense of a vast array of research and writing. The editorial committee had a more directed task. It had to say how it was going to represent the field, in the form of research articles, to a diversified reading audience, by developing a common framework within which its peculiarities fit. We attacked our presentation of the field as follows. On the one hand, the complexity, dynamism, and evident disorderliness of much ongoing sociological work did not permit the portrayal of a field advancing each year in a systematic and orderly way as a field. On the other hand, none of us on the editorial committee was prepared to throw our hands up and confess that sociology is whatever sociologists do and that we would present some interesting but unrelated things each year. What line between these two extremes might be drawn? The committee had an advantage in answering this question, because we shared a commitment to sociology as a scientific enterprise. But there

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were differences as well. Renee Fox and I, with our Parsons training, leaned toward a more inclusive, integrative scheme for organizing the volumes. Alex Inkeles, Peter Rossi, and James Coleman, most influenced by Robert Merton and Paul Lazarsfeld, also preferred a systematic approach, but one less elaborate and inclusive. John Clausen, Ralph Turner, and Carl Taueber came from the more problem-oriented Chicago tradition, and they were less enamored of general organizing schemes than the rest of us. After long discussion and negotiation, we fashioned a solution of the unity-diversity issue that all could accept with varying degrees of enthusiasm. We laid out some ten foci of sociological analysis and decided that these foci would be headings to which all review articles, however specialized, could be assigned. Not every heading would necessarily appear in every issue, but we believed that the framework would be useful “for the next few years” (Editorial Committee 1975, v). The headings were the following: • Differentiation and Stratification • Political Sociology • Social Processes • Institutions • Individual and Society • Formal Organization • Urban Sociology • Demography • Policy • Theory and Methods

Looking back at this list, it strikes me that it was “macro” in emphasis, with “Individual and Society” as the only repository for social psychology; that urban sociology perhaps did not merit a full heading; and that “culture” was a conspicuous omission. The most obvious characteristic of our strategy of general headings for specialized articles, however, is that we were fashioning a compromise solution for the “unity versus diversity” issue. We were announcing to the readers that we were commissioning highly specialized articles on recognizable “strands of research.” But again,

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in making each issue selective rather than comprehensive, we acknowledged the unreality of the proposition that an annual review could track the movement of an entire discipline. As it turned out, the organizing framework enjoyed much more staying power than we might have predicted. In 1976 there was a never-to-berepeated addition of a “Bicentennial Article” heading under which we put two entries. In 1977 we added a heading of “Sociology of World Religions,” which became permanent but which has always contained few entries. In 1978 another category—“Historical Sociology”—was added. It again became permanent, but also with limited numbers of entries. In 1979 the editorial committee permitted itself a moment of self-congratulation on its formula: “We annually rededicate ourselves to a sociology defined around basic issues, sharing coherent paradigms and methods, which produces important findings and generates cumulative knowledge. Without denying that sociology is a house of many mansions, we see no reason not to give full play to the lasting accomplishments of our profession. And we see every reason to help all who are serious enough to desire an intellectual currency in subfields other than those in which they specialize” (Editorial Committee 1979, v). This statement called attention to the “unity” side of the tension. Two years later, however, the committee acknowledged that “in recent years specialized lines of research have proliferated, as have journals that focus on different topics.” It has become “more difficult,” it added, for every social scientist to maintain “a broad perspective and [keep] informed about developments over a wide range of activities” (Editorial Committee 1981, v). All the more reason, it argued, to have periodic stocktakings in the ARS. The committee also softened its “unity” emphasis a bit more by explaining that “we view the categories as a heuristic device rather than a rigid structure” and acknowledged that “any classification of subfields cannot be universally acceptable” (Editorial Committee 1981, v). By 1993 the committee seemed almost ready to throw in the towel, announcing that “volume 19 is one of our most diverse” and adding that “these articles have little in common but they provide an unusually broad sweep of contemporary sociology” (Editorial Committee 1993, viii). A few other changes in categories were made over the years. In 1979 “Political Sociology” became “Political and Economic Sociology.” In the

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same year, “Culture” appeared. It disappeared the following year but then reappeared in an “Institutions and Culture” category in 1984. Also in 1984 “Urban” became “Urban and Rural Community Sociology.” In 1986 a category called “Prefatory Chapter” appeared as the editorial committee decided to dedicate one chapter per volume to a reflective statement by a distinguished senior sociologist (George Homans was the first selection). Beyond those modifications—all of which expanded categories while keeping the total number around a dozen—the ARS has revealed a remarkable continuity of intellectual organization, at the same time reminding readers of the complexity, specialization, and breadth of the discipline. How change was built into this representative continuity is the next topic for inquiry.

th e pr o c es s of “ r e fl ec ti n g ” a d i s c i p li n e In one sense the issue of reflecting is almost trivial, perhaps uninteresting. In undertaking to publish a review of a discipline, the publishers and editors have already decided, as a matter of self-conscious mission, to reflect it. Certainly that role was in the minds of the BASS Panel of Sociology that recommended the establishment of a review for sociology. It was also in the minds of the ASA Council that endorsed that recommendation. Moreover, that role was made explicit in the editorial statement of mission found in the first volume: “The publication of this annual review provides the sociological community with a special opportunity for taking stock of progress in its various subfields at intervals. It is our hope that the articles in the Annual Review of Sociology will identify critical issues, sort out research evidence bearing on them, and then facilitate the systematic assessment of what we know” (Editorial Committee 1975, v). Several year later, in 1983, the editors commented that that year’s issue was the largest and most diverse yet and that it “reflect[ed] the state of the discipline” and “the continuing ferment in sociology.” The editors elaborated by calling attention to the fact that many traditional approaches were being “challenged”—sociology of science, family sociology, and the traditional writing of the history of sociology, for example—and noted the

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importation of perspectives from “outside the sociological mainstream” (Editorial Committee 1983, v–vi). Such assertions of a self-conscious mission to reflect, however, leave unanswered a number of additional questions that surface when one acknowledges that the editorial committee and the contributing authors are not completely passive agents in the reflecting process but are actually choosing ways to carry it out. More particularly, we should ask at least three questions: 1. By what criteria are different topics, aspects, or facets of ongoing research judged to be relevant for selection? 2. How does the choice process work? Does it involve systematic gaps in information or systematic biases on the part of those who organize and execute the review? 3. Does the actual process of selecting, writing, delivering, and editing affect the reflecting process?

I cannot answer these questions precisely in this retrospective essay and could do so only if I had been a permanent fly on the wall throughout all the deliberations, discussions, and writing and editorial activities that have produced the ARS volumes. I can, however, call on impressions from the pages of the review, on my own several years as one of the planners and editors of the ARS, and on a range of other editorial experiences.

What Makes for Relevance? Several factors might draw editors’ attention to the desirability of commissioning a review article: • The perceived importance or centrality of a line of research activities to

“core” areas of sociology. Such perceptions are not neutral; there is disagreement and controversy among sociologists about the core. Several years ago Joan Huber (1995) suggested that quantitative work in demography, stratification, and formal organization formed the “core” of sociology. That essay set off a ministorm of voices that criticized her assessment and argued for a different set of priorities. It seems best to regard the “core” of the field as a matter of continuous examination, conflict, and negotiation.

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• The perceived quality and quantity of research conducted in a given line

of work. As the editorial committee commented in volume 18: “There must be a literature for us to review. Not infrequently, our desire to do an important Annual Review essay founders on the lack of research on the topic” (Editorial Committee 1992, v). • The perceived novelty or importance of a research technique. • The perceived novelty of a statement by an individual or group of

scholars that initiates, revives, or revitalizes a line of theory and empirical research. • The perceived relevance of a line of research that works toward the

solution—or at least is relevant to—a sociological problem. • A perceived tension, controversy, or debate in the field. • The perceived importance in the larger society of (a) an important

trend—for example, regressive movements in income; (b) a dramatic event or set of events—the OPEC crisis, the Jonestown massacre, the Watergate crisis; (c) a social movement—the civil rights or the feminist movement, the Moral Majority—plus the development of research in the literature. Not all phenomena under these headings are chosen. They are more likely to be chosen if they resonate with some enduring sociological preoccupation (e.g., inequality, family stability). Earlier I referred to this tendency as sociology’s tendency to “chase social problems.”

In the process of editorial selection some combination of all these criteria are at least implicitly in mind as decisions are made.

Some Imprecisions in the Reflecting Process When an editorial board convenes to plan future issues, we may safely assume that it attempts, collectively and in good faith, to reflect the discipline and be true to the mission of the publication. Yet in these undertakings, the “true” process of reflecting immediately becomes imprecise. First, different committee members invariably give different weight to the different criteria of relevance listed above, and for that reason they will differ among themselves in assessing how interesting or important a line of research is and in arguing for or against its inclusion. Second, editorial committee members, individually and collectively, are limited in their

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knowledge of the discipline because they specialize in certain parts of it and not others. Third, editorial committees are not willing to pay the transaction costs of surveying and gathering information about parts of the discipline they do not know about. And finally, individual committee members, being human, will unconsciously or consciously push for inclusion of topics and research traditions that they know and love best or “grab” them and exclude others. The imprecision of reflecting is made greater in selecting authors and preparing manuscripts. Some authors decline invitations. The figures vary and are no doubt not available for the history of the ARS, but every commissioning editor experiences a mix of successes and failures. This factor affects the process of “reflecting” in unknown ways. Furthermore, acceptance of an assignment does not mean delivery of the product. The editorial committee for volume 1 (of which I was a member) acknowledged candidly that it had experienced a default and delinquency rate of 25 percent, and it apologized to its readers for resulting gaps in coverage. No other editorial committee has commented on that issue. We thought the rate was atypically high, but apparently delinquency and default remain significant issues. In any event, default and delinquency are two additional sources of the imperfection that accumulates in the journey from the ideal of truly reflecting the discipline to its actual representation in the published volume.

s o m e i llu s t rat i on s on r ef le c t i n g The name of the reflecting game, then, is imprecision, both in the ARS and in all other enterprises that try to reflect. It is subject to ignorance, unrepresentativeness, biases, lags, aborted efforts, and other sources of error. With that in mind, I have deliberately refrained from carrying out elaborate (to say nothing of quantitative) analyses of the contents of the ARS over the years. Nevertheless, in going over the two dozen volumes, I wrote down a heading I called “timeliness” and entered what I noticed in that category. Given all the imprecision I have emphasized, that seemed the most appropriate method. In the final section of this essay, I record, illustratively, some of these notes.

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A Few Obvious Illustrations of Reflecting The pages of the ARS give evidence that the editors took cognizance of noteworthy publications of sociological relevance, novel “traditions” of sociological work, visible situations in society, and dramatic social events. A few obvious examples will suffice: articles on biology and sociobiology (Barchas 1976; Boorman and Levitt 1980); countermovements in society (Lo 1982); resource mobilization theory (Jenkins 1983); homosexuality (Risman and Schwartz 1988); sociology of sport (Frey and Eitzen 1991); religious cults since Jonestown (Barker 1986); and homelessness (Schlay and Rossi 1992). There were no doubt some “misses” as well. For example, the early volumes show no entries on youth movements or students, with only two articles on generations (Kertzer 1983; Braungart and Braungart 1986), touching on the burst of sociological literature on students in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Theory and Methods Theory and methods have been major categories throughout the publication history of ARS. The treatment of the two topics, however, has been very different. Only two articles on general sociological theory appeared. The first was in volume 1, in which Bottomore (1975, 192) announced that there was no general theory but rather a competition— “Functionalism no longer occupies such a prominent place as a sociological paradigm.” The second (Sciulli and Gerstein 1985) noted the numerous cumulated assaults on Parsons from the 1960s through the 1980s but remarked on a certain amount of continued general interest in Parsons in German and American theoretical circles. Other observers have noticed the diminution of interest in general theory (e.g., Turk 1988), and the pages of ARS certainly show that. Theoretical articles continued to appear, but they focused on specialized subareas of sociology. A few illustrations are theoretical articles on formal (i.e., mathematical and logical) theorizing (Freese 1980), justice (Pepinsky 1986), social problems (Schneider 1985), industrialization (Walton 1987), and collective action (Oliver 1993). This development yields evidence of continuing specialization in sociology.

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With respect to methods, the editors’ choice of articles records increasing catholicity of research methods, noted earlier. An ample number of “mainstream” articles discuss statistics, surveys, and formal modeling (e.g., Sudman 1976; Hannan and Tuma 1979; Blalock 1984; Winship and Mare 1992). At the same time, “alternative” methods receive more attention. Illustrations are urban ethnography (Suttles 1976), observational field research (McCall 1984), evaluation research (Gordon and Morse 1975; Rossi and Wright 1984), and the life story approach (Bertaux and Kohli 1984).

Gender Changes in both the number and the content of articles on gender offer perhaps the clearest reflection in the ARS. In the very first issue, one article on “Sex Roles in Transition” (Lipman-Blumen and Tickamyer 1975) appeared, covering the literature available and devoting one and one-half pages to the feminist writings of Betty Friedan. A period of silence followed, but 1982 produced another article on sex roles (Miller and Garrison 1982), this one having a more evident feminist emphasis. Three more appeared in the late 1980s—one on women’s labor force participation and the distribution of income (Treas 1987), one on comparable worth (England and Dunn 1988), and one on sex difference in earnings (Marini 1989)—all reflecting a focus on economic and structural aspects of women’s experience. In fact, volume 15 (1989) aptly symbolized the “cultural turn” in gender studies, with both the article on women’s earnings and a second on “gender and social reproduction” (Laslett and Brenner 1989). By the mid-1990s articles on gender were a regular feature of the ARS, with nine of the thirty-nine articles in the 1996 and 1997 issues devoted to theoretical, institutional, and cultural aspects of feminist sociology and gender studies. I have similar reflective stories to tell about the representation of the microsociological revolution, race, and immigration in the history of the ARS, but they are roughly similar to the gender story and would add a lot of citations but few additional insights. Suffice it to say, in conclusion, that the editors, working through the imprecisions created by their own selective perceptions of sociology, their lack of information and their biases, and the failures experienced in persuading authors to write and to deliver

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manuscripts, nevertheless achieved an interesting and instructive reflection of sociology in the annals of the Annual Review of Sociology.

r e f e r en c e s Adams, R. M., N. J. Smelser, and D. J. Treiman, eds. 1982. Behavioral and Social Science Research: A National Resource. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Barchas, P. R. 1976. “Interface of Sociological and Biological Processes.” Annual Review of Sociology 2:299–333. Barker, E. 1986. “Cult and Anticult since Jonestown.” Annual Review of Sociology 12:329–46. Bertaux, D., and M. Kohli. 1984. “The Life-Story Approach: A Continental View.” Annual Review of Sociology 10:237–57. Blalock, H. M. 1984. “Contextual Effects: Theoretical and Methodological Issues.” Annual Review of Sociology 10:353–72. Boorman, S., and P. R. Levitt. 1980. “The Comparative Evolutionary Biology of Social Behavior.” Annual Review of Sociology 6:213–33. Bottomore, T. 1975. “Competing Paradigms in Macrosociology.” Annual Review of Sociology 1:191–202. Braungart, R. G., and M. M. Braungart. 1986. “Life-Course and Generational Politics.” Annual Review of Sociology 12:205–31. Editorial Committee. 1975. “Preface.” Annual Review of Sociology 1:v–vi. . 1979. “Preface.” Annual Review of Sociology 5:v–vii. . 1981. “Preface.” Annual Review of Sociology 7:v. . 1983. “Preface.” Annual Review of Sociology 9:v–vi. . 1992. “Preface.” Annual Review of Sociology 18:v–vi. . 1993. “Preface.” Annual Review of Sociology 19:vi–viii. England, P., and D. Dunn. 1988. “Evaluating Work and Comparative Worth.” Annual Review of Sociology 14:227–48. Freese, L. 1980. “Formal Theorizing.” Annual Review of Sociology 6:188–212. Frey, J. H., and D. S. Eitzen. 1991. “Sport and Society.” Annual Review of Sociology 17:503–22. Gerstein, D. R., R. D. Luce, N. J. Smelser, and S. Sperlich, eds. 1988. The Behavioral and Social Sciences: Achievements and Opportunities. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Gordon, G., and E. V. Morse. 1975. “Evaluation Research.” Annual Review of Sociology 1:339–61. Hannan, M. T., and N. Tuma. 1979. “Methods for Temporal Analysis.” Annual Review of Sociology 3:303–28.

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Huber, J. 1995. “Centennial Essay: Institutional Perspectives on Sociology.” American Journal of Sociology 100:196–216. Jenkins, J. C. 1983. “Resource Mobilization Theory and the Study of Social Movements.” Annual Review of Sociology 9:527–53. Kertzer, D. I. 1983. “Generation as a Social Problem.” Annual Review of Sociology 9:125–49. Laslett, B., and J. Brenner. 1989. “Gender and Social Reproduction: Historical Perspectives.” Annual Review of Sociology 15:381–404. Lipman-Blumen, J., and A. R. Tickamyer. 1975. “Sex Roles in Transition.” Annual Review of Sociology 1:297–337. Lo, C. H. Y. 1982. “Countermovements and Conservative Movements in the Contemporary U.S.” Annual Review of Sociology 8:107–34. Luce, D., N. J. Smelser, and D. R. Gerstein, eds. 1989. Leading Edges in Social and Behavioral Science. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Marini, M. M. 1989. “Sex Differences in Earnings in the United States.” Annual Review of Sociology 15:343–80. McCall, G. J. 1984. “Systematic Field Observation.” Annual Review of Sociology 10:263–82. Miller, J., and H. H. Garrison. 1982.“The Division of Labor at Home and in the Workplace.” Annual Review of Sociology 8:237–62. Nisbet, R. A. 1969. “Comment on Smelser’s Paper.” In Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 30–35. Philadelphia: American Academy of Political and Social Science. Oliver, P. E. 1993. “Formal Models of Collective Action.” Annual Review of Sociology 9:271–300. Pepinsky, H. E. 1986. “A Sociology of Justice.” Annual Review of Sociology 12:93–108. Risman, B., and P. Schwartz. 1988. “Sociological Research on Male and Female Homosexuality.” Annual Review of Sociology 14:125–47. Rossi, P. H., and J. Wright. 1984. “Evaluation Research: An Assessment.” Annual Review of Sociology 10:531–52. Schlay, A. B., and P. H. Rossi. 1992. “Social Science Research and Contemporary Studies of Homelessness.” Annual Review of Sociology 18:129–60. Schneider, J. S. 1985. “Social Problems Theory: The Constructionist View.” Annual Review of Sociology 11:209–29. Sciulli, D., and D. Gerstein. 1985. “Social Theory and Talcott Parsons in the 1980s.” Annual Review of Sociology 11:369–87. Smelser, N. J., ed. 1967a. Sociology: An Introduction. New York: Wiley. 1967b. “Sociology and the Other Social Sciences.” In The Uses of Sociology, edited by P. F. Lazarsfeld, W. H. Sewell and H. L. Wilensky, 3–44. New York: Basic Books.

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. 1969. “The Optimum Scope of Sociology.” In Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1–22. Philadelphia: American Academy of Political and Social Science. , ed. 1973. Sociology: An Introduction. 2nd ed. New York: Wiley. . 1981. Sociology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. . 1984. Sociology. 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. , ed. 1987. Contemporary Classics in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Philadelphia: ISI Press. , ed. 1988a. Handbook of Sociology. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. . 1988b. Sociology. 3rd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. . 1991. Sociology. 4th ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. . 1994. Sociology. Oxford: Blackwell and UNESCO. . 1995. Sociology. 5th ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Smelser, N. J., and J. A. Davis, eds. 1969. Sociology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Smelser, N. J., and D. R. Gerstein, eds. 1986. Behavioral and Social Science: Fifty Years of Discovery. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Sudman, S. 1976. “Sample Surveys.” Annual Review of Sociology 2:107–20. Suttles, G. D. 1976. “Urban Ethnography: Situational and Normative Accounts.” Annual Review of Sociology 2:1–18. Treas, J. 1987. “The Effect of Women’s Labor Force Participation on the Distribution of Income in the United States.” Annual Review of Sociology 13:259–88. Turk, H. 1988. “Sociological Theory.” In The Future of Sociology, edited by E. F. Borgatta and K. Cook, 18–41. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. Walton, J. 1987. “Theory and Research on Industrialization.” Annual Review of Sociology 13:89–108. Winship, C., and R. D. Mare. 1992. “Models for Sample Selection Bias.” Annual Review of Sociology 18:327–50.

12

Sociological and Interdisciplinary Adventures a personal odyssey (2000)

Every academic discipline, including those in the behavioral and social sciences,* presents a number of tensions that its practitioners must resolve, if only implicitly and by indecision. Three of these tensions are particularly salient for this essay: • What should be the disciplinary scope of one’s work—narrow, if one

carves out a specialization or subdiscipline, or broad, if one takes an interest in a wide range of subject matters or general issues facing the discipline?

From American Sociologist 31, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 5–33. * This distinction has worked its way firmly into the academic and organizational language of the scientific establishment, but it is difficult to be precise and consistent in seeking definitions. The term behavioral sciences was invented in the 1950s, largely at the initiative of the Ford Foundation. It would now include most of psychology and psychiatry, parts of the biological sciences (e.g., behavioral biology, behavioral neuroscience), and small parts of microeconomics, political science (e.g., voting behavior), and sociology (small-group research). The term social sciences would include most of anthropology, economics, political science, and sociology, as well as parts of many other fields—geography, law, education, and organizational studies, for example. History is part social sciences, part humanities. But it should be emphasized that no set of definitions is consistent or commands consensus.

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• How should one shift—or not shift—the focus and scope of one’s line of

substantive research interests over a professional career? • How much, and in what ways, should one step beyond the boundaries of

one’s discipline and engage in interdisciplinary endeavor?

Every academic professional who teaches and conducts research can be described in relation to where he or she lies on these dimensions of narrowness and breadth. Where one lies, moreover, is not a career-neutral matter. In the behavioral and social sciences, both lore and institutional reality suggest that career success is closely linked to success within a discipline. The term interdisciplinary has a generally positive ring, and periodic intellectual movements have promoted interdisciplinarity (Klein 1990), but the disciplines are still dominant. Our doctoral training programs and professional titles are disciplinary. Department chairs advise young scholars to become recognized in their disciplines and discipline-based departments. Interdisciplinary teaching programs in colleges and universities are difficult to fund within departmentally dominated budgetary procedures, and they are often the first to be cut back in difficult budgetary times. Disciplinary associations award most of the prizes. Interdisciplinary activity appears to be a luxury afforded to scholars already established in their disciplines or a risk to be taken by junior ones. As I hope to show in this essay, however, significant career recognition can result from interdisciplinary activity as well. To clarify at the beginning: I mean by interdisciplinary a loosely coupled range of activities that reach outside disciplinary boundaries (as far as these may be identifiable): • Importing or exporting concepts, methods, and approaches across

disciplinary boundaries (“borrowing” or “imperialism,” depending on one’s point of view); an example would be the application of rationalchoice theory (a staple of economic analysis) to the behavior of voters and legislators (political science) • Bringing different disciplinary perspectives to bear on the

understanding of an empirical or theoretical problem (for example, the simultaneous study of the economic, political, and social bases of revolutions) • Hybridization, or the creation of a new subfield out of several

disciplines (e.g., child development, public policy)

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• Synthetic theoretical activity (as an example, I note below the efforts of

Talcott Parsons and me to synthesize economic theory and certain strands of sociological theory) • Theoretical analogies (metatheory), or the effort to find a common

language and common properties of many theories; an example would be work in the tradition of “general systems theory” (Smelser 2001)

For me, “interdisciplinary” work also includes applied organizational and institutional activities undertaken to solve social problems (e.g., drug addiction) from an interdisciplinary point of view, or to promote the general position and interests of the several behavioral and social sciences. I will give illustrations of all these meanings throughout the essay. I do not hold any special illusions about the value of interdisciplinary activity. A great variety of results arise from what is called interdisciplinary work. At one extreme of effectiveness is its capacity to increase the richness and applicability of theory and the fullness of explanation of empirical phenomena. At the other extreme are unproductive conceptual tugging and hauling, renaming of things, and word games. Disciplines vary in the degree to which their practitioners engage in interdisciplinary activity. Because we do not have precise measures, however, several examples will have to suffice. Economics, having a long tradition of relying on assumptions deriving originally from utilitarian theory, has probably been the least active in borrowing from other disciplines, though new theoretical lines of inquiry such as institutional economics, evolutionary economics, behavioral economics, and agency theory should be mentioned as instances to the contrary. In addition, institutional subfields such as labor economics, the economics of the firm, the economics of crime, and the economics of the family touch other disciplines closely. Geography, by vivid contrast, has in recent decades been an inveterate borrower from other fields and intellectual traditions, as the labels Marxist geography, postmodern geography, cultural geography, political geography, and queer geography attest. In comparison with other disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences, sociology falls on the permeable side with respect to its disciplinary boundaries and interdisciplinary activity.

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autobiographical social science In the pages that follow I present an autobiographical account of my academic career, with special emphasis on the balance—perhaps better, tugof-war or ambivalence—between my professional activities as a sociologist and my interdisciplinary activities. There has been a great deal of both. My doctoral degree is in sociology, and I spent thirty-six years of my career in a sociology department. I have conducted sociological research, written textbooks in sociology, edited the American Sociological Review, and participated and held many offices in the American Sociological Association. At the same time I believe I am regarded as among the most interdisciplinary of sociologists. My research has clearly included many other disciplines— especially economics, history, psychology (in particular, psychoanalysis), and education—along with sociology. Furthermore, I have been institutionally involved in numerous transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary activities with publishers, private foundations, the Social Science Research Council, and the National Academy of Sciences. In this essay I will tell the story of these diverse adventures and elucidate some modest lessons to be learned. As is the case for all careers, the story will not be simple or orderly. It will be in part a story of my own motivations and personal bents generated largely by family circumstances and educational experiences. It will involve a number of chance moments, accidents, and coincidences. It will involve opportunities seized, initiatives taken, and skirmishes encountered. Finally, it will be a story of continuously capitalizing on momentum generated by past activities and accomplishments. Not every sentence in the essay will be devoted to the disciplinarity-interdisciplinarity dialogue in my career. I have decided to include a limited amount of additional autobiographical material that may be of interest in its own right. Nevertheless, that dialogue will be the major integrating theme. Being thus focused, the essay will also be seriously incomplete as an autobiographical statement. Although I will touch on personal aspects of my intellectual career, most of life’s more personal and intimate sides will not surface—deeper aspects of my childhood, youth, and family life; the vicissitudes of my loves and hates; my life as husband and father; and my relations with colleagues, students, and friends. I may write about these aspects sometime somewhere, but not in the present thematic reflections.

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As is almost always the case, a retrospective account of this sort will impart to readers too strong a sense of plan and pattern. Almost none of my career-directing and career-changing decisions have been made in the context of some mental representation of an overall life plan. They have been made in the context of different combinations of personal intentions, influences from others, and opportunities assessed in a given situation at a given moment. Any retrospective recapitulation of these decisions almost necessarily imposes more system and more rationality on them than they deserve.

family, education, and self Most of life’s experiences find their roots in one’s particular family drama, and the personal meanings one attaches to those experiences invariably hark back to that drama. My own academic life is no exception. I grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, in a family that was close-knit and by and large harmonious. It was certainly a cultured family. Both my parents had grown up on farms in Missouri (on one of which I was born). Both were the only children in their respective families to go to college. Both were from nineteenth-century German immigrant stock, and both of Protestant background. Their formal commitment to religion had weakened by the time they were adults, though my mother did send my brothers and me to Lutheran Sunday school for a time. At the time of my birth in 1930 my father had recently taken on a faculty position in speech and drama at Phoenix College (a community college), where he was to teach for thirtyfive years. Midway in his teaching career he changed his field to philosophy (having taken extensive summer course work in various midwestern universities). My mother was a part-time teacher in primary and secondary schools in my childhood, and from the time I was in high school she taught English and Latin in the Phoenix public high schools. The family atmosphere was by no means a pressure cooker (my childhood had ample time for play and games), but learning and academic performance were highly regarded, and as often as not a bored son would find himself being handed some kind of serious reading matter. During my primary school years I was a superior but not especially motivated pupil.

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My older brother, Bill, was a decisive part of the family drama. (I had another brother, Philip, three and one-half years my junior, who played a very large role in my psychological life but was less important from the standpoint of my intellectual development.) Bill was six years older than I, but we were exceptionally close, considering the difference in age and development. Bill was a gentle, saintly person even in his youth, and he was both accepting and supportive of his younger brothers. Almost all the competitive and conflictual elements remained buried under the surface. I was content to play the role of his devoted subaltern at home, at school (we attended the same grammar school in my first two years of school), on the playing fields, and in our neighborhood “gang” of boys. Bill encouraged my talents, praised my accomplishments, and, being six years ahead of me in school, filled me with facts about geography, history, and math (he was an outstanding student). For my part I believed almost everything he told me. I think Bill was responsible for many of the good feelings I had about myself as a child. When I was twelve years old, in Emerson School, I underwent a quiet but revolutionary change in personal outlook and ambition. It coincided with Bill’s departure for military service in 1942. Within a matter of months after that moment I informed my mother that I wanted to switch from piano to violin lessons (the violin was “Bill’s” instrument) and took up the violin with a passion. About the same time I came home from school one day and announced to my mother that from that moment forward I was going to be a straight-A student and would go to a first-class university after high school and then to Oxford (I had read about Oxford and Rhodes scholarships in some encyclopedia at school). I recall sensing that she thought this an odd announcement, not to be taken very seriously, much less to be believed, but not to be scoffed at or discouraged either. The announcement stuck. During seventh and eighth grades I threw myself into my studies, impressing in the meantime Bill’s former teachers at Emerson School, and was rewarded by being chosen as commencement speaker at eighth-grade graduation. I also eagerly sought after-school work as package boy and vegetable clerk in a supermarket where Bill had worked years before and prided myself on the independence I gained by my small earnings. High school continued this momentum. In the summer before my freshman year I took a typing class (which met from six to nine in the

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morning to escape the Phoenix heat). I excelled in all academic subjects in high school—including geography and commercial law, in which I had boring and less-than-competent teachers—ultimately earning valedictory honors. I became deeply involved in drama, speech, and debate (my father’s arenas); I took Latin, excelled in English and writing, and developed a self-propelled passion for opera and classical music (my mother’s arenas). I took courses and competed in journalism, becoming first sports editor for the high school newspaper, then editor-in-chief of the paper and yearbook editor (my father had told me years before that at one stage in his own college career he had aspired to be a journalist). I took physics, chemistry, and advanced math in summer schools (inspired by Bill’s studies in the service; he was an army meteorologist). I also carried on a “normal” social and dating life and participated in basketball, track, gymnastics, and golf (the latter with my father and brothers). Later in life I came to realize how fiercely competitive all this was on my part—a second son displacing the absent first—but this aspect was more or less completely hidden under a cloak of legitimacy: a smart, well-rounded son realizing his parents’ fondest ambitions. Readers may wonder how relevant this tale of high school success is for my subsequent predilections for stepping beyond my own disciplinary commitments. It is very relevant. My high school years were driven by a desire to be special in my parents’, my teachers’, and above all my own eyes. That seemed to be a main organizing principle of my young life. Furthermore, that motivation carried with it an expansive, voracious, almost limitless quality— to do well in everything, to rise above, to spread out, to round out, to stand out, and to arch over. That motivation was to be refined, altered, and pushed in new directions in later life, but it has always remained with me. My high school career was rewarded with a scholarship to Harvard College (I thus kept my first promise to my mother). I accepted this prospect with pleasure and anticipation, but my parents regarded it with some ambivalence. Of course they were proud, as always. Both were apprehensive, however, as most parents would be, about losing a son leaving for the other end of the country. My father had a more special reason for ambivalence. Part of it was no doubt to be found in his own competitive feelings toward me, but that was not the whole story. A child of Missouri farmers, he was a passionate agrarian radical, a dyed-in-the-wool Roosevelt

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Democrat, and a political liberal filled with negative feelings about Eastern capital (insurance companies in particular; an insurance company had foreclosed on his own father’s farm just before the mortgage had been paid off, leaving his father landless and poor in his older years). He disliked the rich in general, and this category included doctors, lawyers, and businessmen. I did not share these prejudices, but neither did I challenge my father’s views openly. For my father, however, my going east carried with it a threat that I might be lost to a world he despised. I experienced a mild career-decision crisis at Harvard. Only three career possibilities figured at all seriously in my mind. One was journalism, which remained a possibility but not a strong one. I had worked as a proofreader and newspaper reporter (at the Arizona Times and the Arizona Republic) for several summers before and during college, but I had been disaffected because of what I experienced as the cynicism of my older journalist colleagues. Despite encouragement from them, I decided not to compete for the Harvard Crimson. The other two career lines were academic. One was to become an academic philosopher (the father in me), the other something else. I took courses in the history of philosophy in my freshman year (from Rafael Demos) but found much of the material uninspiring (and in the process moved away from becoming my father). My brother Bill seemed to have gone through a similar process. By the late 1940s he was out of the army and had earned a BA and an MA in philosophy at Berkeley, but he had decided to change to psychology for his doctorate. All during my freshman year Bill and I kept up our frequent correspondence, and among other things he communicated a great enthusiasm for psychological studies. In this context the prospect of a major in Harvard’s new Department of Social Relations and a career in one of its lines seemed tailor-made for me. To go this way would be to leave philosophy—but not to travel too far from it—and at the same time to remain in academia. Bill had excited me about one of its wings, psychology. But what grabbed my attention was the mission and comprehensiveness of social relations. It was not one field, but many: cultural anthropology, clinical psychology, social psychology, and sociology. It was a way of spreading out, and that was appealing to me. I took Social Relations 1A (mainly psychology, with Gordon Allport) in the first semester of my freshman year and was inspired. I took Social Relations 1B (mainly sociology, with George Homans) in the second

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semester. Homans’s rendition of sociology did not inspire me, but I was deeply engaged in the subject matter, and in particular by three guest lectures in the spring of 1949 by Talcott Parsons, who seemed to embody interdisciplinarity itself. He was the leader and symbol of the Social Relations Department, then in the early, heady, pioneering phase of its existence. In those lectures he also outlined his developing theoretical thinking (to appear two years later in Toward a General Theory of Action [Parsons and Shils 1951]), and I was left breathless by his brilliance and above all his theoretical comprehensiveness. I also developed a brief love affair with social and cultural anthropology in my freshman reading. This led me to enroll in a course entitled “Anthropology and Modern Life” with Clyde Kluckhohn in the second semester of my freshman year. This love affair was dampened by Kluckhohn himself, who proved to be an uncommitted, uninteresting, and disorganized teacher. Despite the mixed character of my freshman experiences, my mind was fully made up at the end of the first year that I would major in social relations and make a career in some part of it. My undergraduate years at Harvard had some of the same themes as my high school years. My high school counselors had warned me that I had better get used to being a B student at Harvard because it was such a big pond and I was, after all, a small fish from the parochial West. Then, too, after the first semester of my freshman year at Harvard, when I had earned As in every course, a freshman dean asked me apprehensively in conference if I was not working too hard. Apparently Harvard’s academic prediction machinery had pegged me as some kind of B student as well. I must not have believed them. I excelled academically, winning prize after prize throughout college and ultimately graduating with highest honors. More relevant to this essay, I followed the compulsion to branch out and to cover and master as much as I could and rise above, as it were, specialized knowledge. Not only did I explore widely in the Social Relations Department, but also most of my electives were in general education courses. In my junior and senior years I took courses in economics, not because I liked the subject (much of it struck me as boring and artificial), but because I thought that economics, being the most analytic of the social sciences, would be good for me. The interdisciplinary impulse was in high gear even at this early stage in my academic experience.

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There was another, deeper reason, I believe, why I was drawn to the social science world. To embrace the social sciences at that very promising time in their history certainly involved intellectual passion on my part. But that passion—at Harvard and at that time—was tempered by a commitment to dispassion (in the form of scientific neutrality), and the Social Relations Department (certainly its anthropology) was distinctly relativistic in moral flavor. I liked all this. I think the reason I did was that it permitted me to have my father’s passion about the social world but not his rage and prejudices. I suppose I was enjoying a certain triumphant feeling that I could be simultaneously a person of passion and a better liberal than he. My choice of sociology as the subject for my graduate training (and life career) was in place by the end of my junior year. That choice developed gradually, not from an identifiable moment of conversion or inspiration. I cannot give a complete account of how it happened. Continuing and engaging course work in sociology with Parsons, Samuel Stouffer, and Barrington Moore Jr. certainly played a part. (I tried auditing a course with Pitirim Sorokin, but by this time he had reached a megalomaniacal phase of his remarkable career, and I was put off.) My strong but temporary freshman interest in cultural anthropology did not revive. I took and liked several courses in personality and social psychology, but, thinking retrospectively, I probably had unconscious reservations about going into the field that my brother Bill had already chosen. All this should not suggest that my choice of sociology came by default. My commitment to the field, from my undergraduate years to the present, has been strong and has not wavered. In my senior year at Harvard I was approved by the college to apply for a Rhodes Scholarship, and I competed first in Tucson (state level) and later in Pasadena (regional level). Readers will by now appreciate what an emotional and meaningful experience it was for me to return to Phoenix from Pasadena and tell my parents I had won the scholarship. Moreover, readers will not be surprised to hear that I chose to read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) at Magdalen College. Interdisciplinarity again. I knew by my senior year at Harvard that I was going on to graduate school in sociology and that studying those subjects for two years was perfect for me, both in and of themselves and because they were relevant

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and valuable background for a sociologist. My choice was made easier by the fact that sociology was nonexistent at Oxford at the time and that its psychology was of the narrowest experimental variety—scarcely my type. Two accidental events during my Oxford years were to shape my whole professional career. The first was Talcott Parsons’s appointment as Marshall Lecturer at Cambridge University in 1953–54, my second year at Oxford. Returning to an early interest in economics, he chose “Integration of Economic and Sociological Theory” as the topic for his lectures. Parsons did not know me well as an undergraduate at Harvard (I had taken one course, audited two others, and conversed with him a few times), but he knew enough to be aware that I was at Oxford, studying economics. He sent me a mimeographed version of his lectures after he had delivered them. In reading them I realized that his knowledge of economics was hopelessly outdated (he had not even read Keynes’s General Theory until just before preparing the Marshall Lectures). In an act of courage if not foolhardiness—how I permitted myself to do it remains a mystery to this day—I wrote a very direct, critical set of letters to Parsons, telling him how unfamiliar he was with economics since Keynes, criticizing his interpretations of Keynes, and even raising questions about his sociological formulations. To my surprise and relief Parsons responded positively to what I wrote. He invited me to Cambridge for a long conference and then asked me to come to Salzburg for ten days in June of 1954 to work with him on reformulating the Marshall Lectures. From that collaboration emerged his invitation for me to coauthor the volume that was to be based on the Marshall Lectures (Parsons and Smelser 1956). To me the invitation was incredible and overwhelming. The opportunity was a boost to my professional career beyond imagination. The frosting on the cake was that the enterprise was quintessentially interdisciplinary, realizing the fruits of my decision to learn economics at Harvard and Oxford. It was interdisciplinary in that it sought theoretical continuities and similarities from heretofore-separate traditions in economics and sociology, and it brought our new formulations to bear on topics such as markets and other economic institutions as well as economic and social change. In the fall of 1954 I returned to Harvard as a first-year graduate student in social relations, and Parsons and I completed the manuscript for Economy and Society in the spring of 1955.

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The second “accident” at Oxford was a suggestion on the part of my economics tutor, G. D. N. Worswick, that I compete for the George Webb Medley Prize in the summer of 1953. I had done well enough in economics to lead him to believe I would have a chance. The competition was a series of written examinations, one of which was in economic history. I had studied none of that, so in the early summer of 1953 I steeped myself in the works of John Clapham and T. S. Ashton and in the economic history journals in preparation. I didn’t win the Medley Prize, but that work in economic history—along with my work on British political history—provided a reservoir of historical knowledge and interest that was to become the basis for my doctoral dissertation. I proposed to Parsons the distinctively sociological approach to the British industrial revolution that I wished to pursue as early as the spring of 1954, and he was very encouraging. In the early months of 1954 Parsons nominated me for a Junior Fellowship in the Society of Fellows at Harvard, to begin in the fall of 1954. I did not make it. That was a disappointment for me, but it turned out just as well. Parsons and Barrington Moore Jr. nominated me again the following year, and this time the nomination was successful. It meant that I was able to finish all my doctoral requirements in 1954–55 and to have three clear years to complete my dissertation. That was a different kind of interdisciplinary adventure for me, involving a synthetic interpretation of the economic and social history of the British industrial revolution and drawing on materials from economic history, social history, the history of technology, and sociological theory (Smelser 1959).

the 1960s: a tension between sociological and o t h e r i n t e r es t s In the fall of 1957 I was invited to be a junior faculty member at several universities (it was a grand seller’s market at that time, never since reproduced). I chose Berkeley, partly because it was in the exciting early stages of its own golden era (1952–64), partly because Berkeley seemed a beautiful synthesis of my western cultural roots and my “cosmopolitan” ten years at Harvard and Oxford, and partly because my brother Bill was there and

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my parents and younger brother were closer by in Phoenix. I also knew at the time that I did not want to remain at Harvard any longer (I had been offered an assistant professorship there, too), and a large part of that decision was that I wanted to move out of Parsons’s shadow. He tried to persuade me to stay, and I told him directly that I wanted to “set up my own shop.” He was obviously disappointed, but I suppose he understood. In a way, the first years at Berkeley constituted an interlude of withdrawal from interdisciplinary interests. I was a full member of the Sociology Department, and Berkeley’s academic departments, unlike those at the University of Chicago, for example, were relatively insulated from one another. My colleagues and friends were primarily sociologists. My major research endeavor in those first years was Theory of Collective Behavior (Smelser 1962), an effort to draw the fields of collective behavior and social movements—long children of social psychology—into the mainstream of sociological analysis. Seymour Martin Lipset and I coedited a reader emphasizing the progress of sociology in the 1950s (Lipset and Smelser 1961). Between 1962 and 1965 I was editor-in-chief of the American Sociological Review, the flagship journal of the ASA. And by 1967 I had edited an advanced text in sociology (Smelser 1967b). I suppose all this productivity shows evidence of a savvy young assistant professor, aware of the necessity of disciplinary recognition for his professional career. At the same time, I kept some interdisciplinary interests alive. My brother Bill, who was now a practicing clinical psychologist and was teaching developmental psychology in the School of Social Welfare at Berkeley, and I coedited a very successful reader that collected work lying at the boundaries between psychology and sociology and penetrating both (Smelser and Smelser 1963, 1971). In 1959, at the initiative of Wilbert Moore, I joined the Committee on Economic Growth of the Social Science Research Council, a committee headed by Simon Kuznets and having economists, sociologists, and an anthropologist as members. In 1966 I formed a Berkeley faculty committee on theory and methods in comparative studies, composed of economists, sociologists, political scientists, and historians. I chaired this exciting committee for almost thirty years, and through it I maintained a continuous association with its parent body, the Institute of International Studies. Finally, I kept my link with economics alive in writing a general book on economic sociology (Smelser 1963,

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1976b). This work was interdisciplinary in yet another way: it added to the understanding of economic behavior, institutions, and processes by bringing sociological perspectives and research findings to bear on them. The significant interdisciplinary news of the 1960s, however, was my decision, in 1963, to seek psychoanalytic training. I had been heavily exposed to psychoanalytic thought in my undergraduate and graduate years at Harvard. Henry A. Murray was an important role model for me as an undergraduate. Most of my graduate mentors—among them Parsons, R. F. Bales, Gardner Lindzey, and Alex Inkeles—had taken advantage of the psychoanalytic training then available at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute. From my graduate years on I knew I wanted to do the same at some point in my career. The decision to do it in the early 1960s, however, was precipitated by a personal crisis—the painful end of my first marriage—and my deep unhappiness. I applied to the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, began my training in 1963, and remained in the program until 1971, when I graduated. My sociological colleagues couldn’t figure out why I would do such a thing. Some were hostile to psychoanalysis in the first place, and most thought psychoanalytic training would not help and would possibly deflect me from my career in sociology. I do not think that that happened, but I do know that it was a most important personal and interdisciplinary experience. It led to a time-to-time professional practice of psychotherapy on my part, to my writing of a dozen essays at the intersection of sociology and psychoanalysis (Smelser 1999), and to a permanent attachment to depth psychology as a part of my intellectual outlook. There was one other development in the 1960s—another accident— that was to reshape my career, including its interdisciplinary aspects, permanently. In September 1964 the Free Speech Movement erupted at Berkeley and set off six years of political turbulence on the campus. Like almost everyone else, I was swept into the engulfing political events of the fall and winter of that year. I was not an activist or a member of any faction during the fall months, except for momentary involvements. At the beginning of January 1965, Acting Chancellor Martin Meyerson (himself only just appointed after the unceremonious and forced resignation of Chancellor Edward Strong, who had proved incapable of dealing with the political situation) called me into his office and issued a momentous

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invitation. He wanted me to become his chief assistant in the area of student political activity on the campus, his point person in dealing with student activists and other political groups. I was stunned by his invitation and could not figure out why I should have been picked. I do know I was recommended to Meyerson by Marty Lipset, and I suppose it was to my advantage that I had not been publicly identified with any political faction during the heady months of late 1964. The assignment lasted for eight months, ending when Meyerson was not appointed chancellor and when I went on scheduled sabbatical leave. During those months I was in a hot seat every day. It was the most educational period of my life, and it was an education under fire. Later, from 1966 to 1968, the new chancellor, Roger Heyns, asked me to serve as assistant chancellor for educational development. That was something of a hot seat, too, because I was asked to deal with proposals from various groups to reform (including to radicalize) undergraduate education. In addition to that duty I served on Heyns’s cabinet, which we called the general staff on account of the atmosphere of continuous warfare on the campus. These several years of dramatic administrative involvement affected me in several ways. First, they accelerated my political maturity, perhaps faster than I would have liked. Second, they expanded my university horizons beyond the Sociology Department, within which I had been pursuing my academic career more or less quietly from 1958 to 1964. The work in the chancellor’s office made me a citizen of the campus, and my loyalties were transferred from sociology to Berkeley as a beleaguered institution. This transfer had its “interdisciplinary” aspects, in that my day-to-day interactions were with faculty from all departments and all corners of the campus. Third, the years in the chancellor’s office drove home to me that I did not want to move permanently into academic administration. Some feelers and offers for deanships, vice-chancellorships, and subsequently presidencies appeared in the late 1960s and afterwards. I declined all of them, recognizing that such positions had many features that alienated me, and reaffirming that my heart was really in continuing my academic career. Fourth, though I did not realize it at the time, the experiences in the chancellor’s office were to set the stage for later research on the sociology of higher education and reinvolvement in the institutional affairs of the University of California.

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digression: the tension between i n i t i at i o n a n d i n v i tat i on This might be an appropriate moment to comment on an issue that faces all academics whose works become known at all well. That has to do with the degree to which one devotes one’s energies to responding to criticisms, continuing work, and accepting invitations to elaborate on what has accomplished, or to put it another way, the degree to which one leaves behind what one has accomplished and decides on new directions. At the “continuing” extreme we find a scholar like Thomas Kuhn, who, after the appearance of his influential work on scientific revolutions (Kuhn 1962), spent much of the rest of his life reconsidering his own theory and making concessions to or fighting critics of it. At the other extreme—though I cannot think of a single perfect illustration—is the scholar who publishes the results of a major research effort, then forgets about it, does not respond to critics and coaxers for more, and moves on to something else. Where one comes out in relation to this tension, of course, affects one’s entire academic career, including the degree to which one branches out in interdisciplinary directions. The tension reflects itself differently, moreover, at different stages of a career. At the earlier stages one is more likely to make one’s own decisions, if for no other reason than that one is not known and that there are not yet others out there asking one to continue what one has done. For example, I was the agent in selecting an interdisciplinary major at Harvard, in deciding to read the interdisciplinary Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Oxford, in deciding on my interdisciplinary doctoral dissertation, and in moving next to research on collective behavior and social movements. At a certain moment, when one’s work becomes known, pressure builds, mainly through invitations, to engage in activities, including writing, that are stimulated by the work and others’ reactions to it. There is a certain temptation (deriving in part from narcissistic motivations) to respond to these opportunities because they center, after all, on one’s own work. In my own case I began receiving numerous invitations from others in the 1960s—to appear at sessions of professional and learned societies on historical sociology and social movements and to write “second thoughts” and elaborations on my publications. I did not want to be drawn into this

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too deeply, and, with a few exceptions (Smelser 1967a, 1972), I was not. In addition, because I was building a general reputation as a good sociologist, publishers and others began coming after me for new projects. For example, Lipset and Prentice-Hall Publishers initiated the coedited volume on the progress of sociology in the 1950s. Prentice-Hall and Alex Inkeles (editor of their Foundations of Sociology Series) asked me to do the book on economic sociology. Their interest was based in part on their knowledge of my earlier work with Parsons. The editors of John Wiley and Sons asked me to do the 1967 text on general sociology. These kinds of invitations have been a regular feature of my life for thirty-five years, and it is literally the case that during and after the 1960s I could have spent my whole career doing things along the lines of what I had already done. Despite the exceptions noted, I have always been inclined to regard my published books as finished products, not to be revisited. I left British history for several decades after the publication of my doctoral dissertation. I actively did not want to do more on collective behavior and social movements after my book appeared in 1962. I learned this the hard way a few years later, when I taught a graduate course in social movements at Berkeley. I assigned my book, along with a lot of other material, but I found myself alienated from the course because I felt that I had said everything I wanted to say on the subject. In the early 1970s Daniel Bell tried to influence me to revise Theory of Collective Behavior, explaining how my approach had been changed by all the social and political turbulence of the 1960s. I thought about his suggestion several times but always decided against it. I have always been inclined to shun my scholarly offspring after they have been born, and this bent has allowed me a much greater degree of freedom than I would otherwise have had. At this point I mention another response to an invitation that had an accidental element that ended in propelling me into entirely new directions in interdisciplinary activity. In 1966 the National Academy of Sciences and the Social Science Research Council launched a major survey of the behavioral and social sciences (it came to be called the Behavioral and Social Science Survey—BASS). The purpose of the survey was to yield an appraisal of knowledge in these sciences and to seek ways to inform national policy to strengthen them. The survey was guided by a Central Planning Committee, chaired by Ernest R. Hilgard and Henry W. Riecken.

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As part of the survey, the Central Planning Committee formed subpanels in the relevant fields (economics, anthropology, history, statistics, etc.), each of which was commissioned to prepare its discipline-specific survey to supplement the overall BASS report. William H. Sewell and Otis Dudley Duncan chaired the sociology subpanel and chose me to be one of its members. This invitation opened up a new kind of work for me, and I was honored to be asked. The “accident” occurred in 1967, when Sewell assumed the chancellorship of the troubled University of Wisconsin–Madison campus and resigned from the sociology panel. At the same moment Duncan announced that, without Sewell as cochair, he no longer wanted to continue in a leadership role. This minor crisis of leadership led Hilgard and Riecken to ask James Davis (Dartmouth College) and me to be cochairs. This appointment not only elevated me to a position of greater visibility (and, to be frank, premature statesmanship) in sociology but also made me a member of the thoroughly interdisciplinary Central Planning Committee, an assignment I relished. The BASS reports were published in 1969 (Hilgard and Riecken 1969; Smelser and Davis 1969) and were taken seriously at least for a while by the social science “establishment.” For me, the role into which I was accidentally thrust expanded my interdisciplinary experience into new lines and brought me to the attention of the establishment, especially its Washington branches (the National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Foundation). I believe it had something to do with a subsequent invitation (declined) that I become the principal social science officer at the NSF, and it certainly paved the way for my deep involvement with the National Academy of Sciences in the 1980s and 1990s, which I will describe later.

th e 19 7 0s : so m e c on t i n ui n g a n d s o m e n e w line s By the early 1970s I experienced the feeling that I had fully “arrived” in my academic career. I had been catapulted to a point of wide professional recognition and responsibility during the 1960s. This was dramatized by my appointment in 1972 as University Professor of Sociology by the

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University of California. I was the first person outside the natural sciences to be so honored. The appointment was triggered by an invitation to join Harvard’s sociology faculty, extended in 1970. It was at the time of Talcott Parsons’s retirement, and although nobody talked about my “taking his chair,” the symbolic significance of his concurrent retirement was not lost on me or others. The Berkeley campus was strongly motivated to keep me, and Roger Heyns asked me what it would take. I was the one who mentioned the University Professorship to him, and my rationale was interdisciplinary: I could “spread out” more, both to disciplines outside my own and to university campuses other than Berkeley. (The logic of the University Professorship was that its holders were expected to teach on the university’s campuses other than their home one—on their own initiative and with the concurrence of hosts on other campuses.) I did not realize at the time that what I explained to Chancellor Heyns—the desire to spread out—was an old theme in my life experience. Where to turn at this stage of professional “arrival”? This question did not pose a crisis for me, but I was genuinely uncertain. I should make clear that this was a personal career uncertainty, not significantly affected by the turmoil affecting sociology as a discipline in the late 1960s and the 1970s. The field had experienced two “heydays” in the previous two decades. The first was in the context of the general 1950s optimism about the behavioral and social sciences in general. The second was its popularity with students and others in the 1960s, a popularity derived from the general reformist impulse of that decade. By the end of the 1960s, however, the mainstream of the discipline (including Parsonian sociology) had come under siege, in part because of assaults from the Left and in part from general disillusionment. Many of its own practitioners proclaimed the field in crisis (e.g., Gouldner 1971). I was not pleased with these developments (and my work was sometimes the target of attacks). For one reason or another, however, this did not become a personal crisis for me, and it did not shake my professional commitment as a sociologist. I did experience periods of strong alienation from Berkeley’s sociology department in the 1970s and 1980s, but these resulted from its bitter in-fighting, not from a weakening of my commitment to the discipline. I continued to be a citizen of the department and participate in its affairs, and even though asked I was never really tempted to migrate to another department, as my

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colleagues Reinhard Bendix, Harold Wilensky, Guy Swanson, and later Philip Selznick had done. As of the early 1970s I did have one unfinished intellectual legacy. During our association both in Berkeley’s sociology department and in interdisciplinary faculty seminars in the 1960s, Lipset had suggested to me—sometime in the middle 1960s—that we write a book together. It was to be a methodological work, bringing together our respective ideas on the logic of comparative analysis. The idea appealed to me, partly because I had long harbored the belief that I had a methodological book in me, and because the project proposed by Lipset would, if properly done, entail an adventure into the comparative literature of sociology, anthropology, economics, political science, and history. Our project never came off. Lipset lost interest and in any event had accepted an academic appointment at Harvard. The impulse to do the methodological book stayed with me, however. I wrote a few essays on the subject for presentation at professional meetings, turned these presentations into publications, and continued to comb over the comparative literature in all the relevant disciplines. In the end I made the writing of the book the major activity for my sabbatical year 1973–74, spent in England, France, and Italy. The book appeared a couple of years later (Smelser 1976a). I was and am proud of this work, but, as in the case of many other books, I more or less dropped my interest in comparative methodology after the book appeared, to return to it only briefly twenty years later when I was asked to develop some additional thoughts for presentation in 1995 at the Free University of Berlin and the European University Institute (Smelser 1996). Three themes from the past dominated my other activities in the 1970s. They all involved reentries of persons and interests. In 1969 Talcott Parsons, who had been commissioned by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to prepare a monograph on the American university, approached me. He had already arranged to collaborate with Gerald M. Platt of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and he wanted me to cooperate in the enterprise as well. I had kept up my professional and personal friendship with Parsons in the years since 1958, when I left Harvard for Berkeley, but we had not worked together. Also, my work had moved away from the fundamentals of Parsonian sociology in important

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ways, though I had in no way publicly criticized, much less rejected, my former mentor. The idea was that I would work with them on what was to become The American University (Parsons and Platt 1973), and that I would undertake my own independent research in the area of higher education, also under the sponsorship of the American Academy. The idea appealed to me, in part because of my administrative experiences in the mid-1960s, and in part because it involved yet another “spreading out” into a completely new area of research. I chose for my emphasis a research project on the history of growth and conflict in California higher education, 1950–70, and secured a grant from the Ford Foundation to give me time to carry it out. The collaboration with Parsons and Platt did not work out in the way we had envisioned. Parsons and Platt were developing a thesis that the American university system could best be understood as an institutionalization of the values of cognitive rationality. Consistent with this emphasis, they were interpreting many of the social movements and conflicts of the 1960s as emerging from strains involved in the institutionalization of these values and in the context of strains involved in the socialization of undergraduate students. I found these emphases limited and, to me, unacceptable. I was convinced that more fundamental social structural contradictions in the university system had been at work, and my conviction had been solidified by battle scars accumulated from my work in the trenches of conflict at Berkeley. This difference in emphasis between Parsons and me developed into a disagreement, and for a brief time it appeared to be serious enough to imperil the collaboration. Platt came to the rescue—I shall be indebted to him forever—and suggested that in light of the divergence it would be wiser for me not to continue as full collaborator but to be responsible for preparing an epilogue, which would add my own analyses to those of Parsons and Platt. This solution proved satisfactory for both Parsons and me. After I had prepared the epilogue, however, Parsons wrote me a many-page letter, critical for the most part, expressing apprehension that by suggesting that he and Platt were downplaying the dimension of political conflict I was giving too much ground to his critics on the left (critics such as C. Wright Mills, Barrington Moore Jr., and Alvin Gouldner). I responded by making certain modifications to my chapter where I thought

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his criticisms were telling but resisted other points I could not accept. Parsons and I made peace at that point. The American University appeared with my epilogue, and my own work on California higher education was also published (Smelser 1974). Parsons did write an epilogue to the latter book, in which he criticized some of my formulations about strains and contradictions in the university system (Parsons 1974). So I suppose that equal time was had by all. Parsons and I remained professional and personal friends up to his death in 1979. Nevertheless, I have always had the feeling that the peace had residual elements of uneasiness that neither of us ever mentioned. The disagreement with Parsons had a substantive aspect, which I have just reviewed. It also had an interpersonal aspect. I think the conflict surfaced because both of us had changed in the time that had elapsed since our earlier collaboration. On Parsons’s side, I think he had become somewhat beleaguered by the savage criticisms he had received through the 1960s and into the 1970s. As a result he had become more sensitive and brittle in his ideas about cultural consensus and social integration. On my side, I believe that I—helped by my career successes and by my personal psychoanalysis—had become more my own person and was more capable of standing up to the great man. In the end good sense prevailed on both sides. I have always been happy that we were able to prevent the deterioration of a positive relationship that was meaningful to both of us. The second “reentry” had to do with a revival of my psychoanalytic interests and was intimately tied to the person of Erik Erikson. Early in his career Erikson had been a faculty member at Berkeley and a member of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute. After his retirement from Harvard he returned to the Bay Area. Robert Wallerstein, an eminent psychoanalyst with whom I had written an interdisciplinary essay on the relations between sociology and psychoanalysis (Wallerstein and Smelser 1969), set up a seminar that met monthly during the years 1974–76. The seminar had about fifteen participants from various disciplines—of whom I was one—but Erikson was the centerpiece. During the course of the first few meetings, Erikson and I were drawn to one another. After a time we began meeting separately, one on one, mainly for leisurely lunches at the Berkeley faculty club. At the beginning we talked mainly psychoanalysis, but gradually the relationship became

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more personal and indeed developed into a beautiful friendship for both of us. Subsequently my wife, Sharin, and I began seeing Erik and Joan Erikson socially, and it became a family friendship. I think Erik and I were each reenacting our own family drama. My father had died in 1975, and one of the things I had come to appreciate in my psychoanalysis some years earlier was not only how deeply I loved my aging father but also how this love had been submerged under the friendly but somewhat distant relationship we had with one another. By the time I had made this discovery about myself, it was too late for me to express it properly to my father, so the discovery had a tragic aspect. With Erik—who was about the age my father would have been had he lived—I was able to do so. On Erik’s side, it turned out that I was almost the exact age of his son, Kai (whom I had befriended earlier in life), and I can at least speculate that knowing me gave him the opportunity to have a loving tie with a son, unencumbered by the actual and complex history of a father-son relationship. In all events, Erik and I turned toward the idea of collaborating in some way. We settled on the topic of adult development. We approached the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and secured their sponsorship and financial support for a conference involving the leading psychological and sociological researchers in the area. The conference was held in May 1977 at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and eventuated in a coedited publication (Smelser and Erikson 1980). My work with Erikson was another gratifying interdisciplinary adventure and one of the happiest personal episodes of my life. The third “reentry” involved a revitalization of my interest in British social history. In the mid-1970s I found myself wanting to do another major project based on primary research, and I brought together a number of strands of my past and ongoing work to define the project. The first was a rekindling of interest in British history. The second was my recently developed interest in the life cycle, stimulated mostly by the work with Erikson but extending to adolescence and youth as well. I had already written a little about institutional influences on the life course (Smelser and Halpern 1978). The third was my interest in the sociology of education, stimulated by the work with Parsons and Platt and my own work on California higher education, but I wanted to extend that interest to the primary years. The topic I defined for myself was changes in the British

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system of age grading and child development in the nineteenth century, as it was conditioned by the growth of mass primary education. This was yet another interdisciplinary adventure that included research in history, sociology, and psychology. I applied for and took on the directorship of the University of California’s Education Abroad Program for the United Kingdom/Ireland for the years 1977–79, with the aim of doing much of the archival work in London’s libraries during that period. The project as I had defined it turned out to be seriously ill-conceived. I soon discovered that there was little material in the historical record that could be interpreted profitably under the heading of changing age grading in British society at the time. Worse, the historical sources on British education yielded almost no data that could be brought to bear in interesting ways on the psychological development of children and adolescents. As it turned out, the reformers and creators of British primary education did not seem to have cared much about the welfare of children at all. Instead they were working with an entirely different set of agendas: first, they were fashioning a system of education that was, above all, consistent with the dictates of social class differentiation in Britain in that century; second, religious groups in the country were engaged in a bitter struggle among themselves about what kind of religious education children should have (and, more generally, a struggle over who would control the hearts and souls of children); third, they were responding to periodic threats of idleness, crime, poverty, social protest, and imagined revolution on the part of the lower classes and hoping to create an educational apparatus that would produce stability in the social order. As I was seriously off the mark in defining what I could do in this research project, I had to change my own research agenda and try to make sense of British educational change in a way that the subject matter of my research was telling me I should. Accordingly, I had to become a sociologist of class, a sociologist of religion, and a sociologist of British regional culture in order to tell a coherent story and do a proper analysis. I did change my research orientation in these ways as I proceeded to engross myself in the materials. I accomplished a great deal of historical work in the two years of living in London, but as it turned out, the completion of this work and its publication (Smelser 1991a) had to wait a full decade because my life turned in many different other directions in the 1980s.

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th e 1 9 8 0s : n ew i n s ti t ut i ona l , i n t e r nat i o na l , and interdisciplinary directions The years 1977–79, when I was living in London and directing the Education Abroad Program, amounted to a moratorium from institutional life in the University of California. True, I was employed full time as director and supervised the academic work of some 135 UC undergraduate students studying in the United Kingdom and Ireland. But I was completely away from teaching sociology, from university colleagues and committees, and from the community of Berkeley. My supervision of students, though more rewarding than I thought it would be, was not full-time work, and I made good progress on the project on British primary education. When one is away from home routines for a time, one becomes vulnerable to requests to become reinvolved upon returning. This reaction may be due to a certain sense of guilt at having slighted one’s institutional duty. (One thing my work in the chancellor’s office in the 1960s did was to develop my strong and enduring loyalty to “Cal.” I was not an alumnus, but I came to feel like an Old Blue.) I was thus vulnerable in the spring of 1979, when the head of the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate tracked me down in London and asked me to chair the campus Committee on Educational Policy. I had seen plenty of action on the Senate Policy Committee—one year as member and one year as chair in 1970–72—but the new assignment was situated more centrally in the faculty’s academic work. I accepted, initiating a season of academic leadership that lasted almost through the 1980s. I agreed to serve as chair of the entire Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate from 1982 to 1984 and then was selected to be first vice-chair and then chair of the Academic Council, the steering body of the systemwide (nine-campus) Academic Senate for 1985–87. The last position entailed two years as faculty representative on the University of California Board of Regents. I also chaired several major task forces that resulted in “Smelser Reports,” one effectively recommending the discontinuation of the Graduate School of Education on the Berkeley campus (very controversial, as one might imagine), one on the reform of the first two years of undergraduate education in the nine-campus system, and, somewhat later, one on intercollegiate athletics on the Berkeley campus.

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As a result of all this work I became something of an academic statesman on the Berkeley campus and in the UC system. As the reader can imagine, the committee work and conflict management activities entailed by these assignments were often dull and frustrating, but I found it rewarding to be in the middle of everything without having the onerous responsibilities and paper-pushing chores of a line administrator. These assignments involved no scholarship—indeed, they took me away from it—but they had an “interdisciplinary” aspect in that I was engaged in the commonwealth of the university as a whole and working daily with people from all its corners. I was drawn into a second line of institutional work at the national level in the 1980s, this one with a direct interdisciplinary angle. At the end of the 1970s the behavioral and social sciences had been bruised from time to time by criticisms emanating from Congress that these sciences were irrelevant, useless, trivial, and in some cases dangerous. This line of criticism was vividly symbolized in Senator William Proxmire’s Golden Fleece award, singling out government-supported social science research that wasted public resources. One response in this atmosphere was the decision of the National Research Council (National Academy of Sciences) (through its Commission on Behavioral and Social Science and Education— CBASSE) to establish a national group of scholars in a Committee on Basic Research in the Behavioral and Social Sciences. Its charge was to prepare a report on the value, utility, and significance of behavioral and social science research. Shortly after the committee was formed, Ronald Reagan launched his campaign to slash funding for those sciences, so its work became all the more timely. I was selected to be a member of the committee, and I joined. Its work was a partial replay of that of BASS in the late 1960s. Shortly after it was formed, the committee experienced an internal division. One group (for which Peter Rossi, the sociologist, was the main spokesman) argued that the committee should emphasize policy research, and the other side (for which I argued) wanted to stress the utility of basic research. “My” side won the day, and Rossi resigned from the committee shortly thereafter. I worked as one of some twenty members of the committee, but at the end I took the lead in drafting so many parts of its report that Robert Adams, its chair, and Donald Treiman, its study director, asked me to be a coauthor (Adams, Smelser, and Treiman 1982).

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The report was well received, and it became part of the more general collective effort of the behavioral and social sciences to mobilize against and deflect if not defeat the Reagan administration’s assault on funding. Another aspect of these efforts was the formation of a Washington-based political lobby, the Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA). One of the gratifying aspects of our activities on the committee and the larger effort is that for the first time in history all the behavioral and social sciences, under common siege, pulled together. In particular, economics and psychology, the stronger and larger of the sciences, which had earlier tended to go their own individual ways in status protecting and political lobbying, joined the effort. The committee’s work seemed sufficiently important that CBASSE voted to continue its life. Its new charge was to assemble evidence of significant advances in knowledge during the fifty years following the publication of Recent Social Trends in 1933—that massive report of social scientists commissioned by the Hoover administration (President’s Research Committee 1933). This second assignment had its public relations aspects, but it also had a more academic stress—identifying and documenting distinctive strands of research. The committee had a membership that overlapped with but was not identical with its first incarnation. CBASSE asked me to be the sole chair, working with Dean Gerstein as study director. We capped our work with a scholarly conference at the National Academy of Sciences and published the results in 1986 (Smelser and Gerstein 1986). In the meantime the National Science Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences were pursuing yet another strategic line. This was to prepare a series of high-level reports attempting to identify research priorities of scientific disciplines, with an eye to providing guidelines to funding agencies (mainly federal) as they decided how to invest in research. The first report, on astronomy, appeared in 1982 and was immediately established as a model for others. The chemistry report came out in 1985 and the physics report in 1986. CBASSE and others believed it was important for the behavioral and social sciences to be represented in this activity, and in that context it decided to give the Committee on Basic Research a third life—to identify contemporary cutting edges of research and to come up with a statement of priorities for those sciences. This charge was more ambitious than the previous two had been and, as it turned out, much

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more difficult. CBASSE had been pleased with my work during the preceding five years and asked me to chair the renewed committee. But the commission also realized correctly that broader leadership—in particular, covering the “micro” areas—was needed. They identified R. Duncan Luce, the eminent mathematical psychologist from Harvard, and we agreed to do the job together. For its new assignment the committee was enlarged to twenty-three members to ensure breadth and coverage. Every member was some kind of star in his or her own field, and this created a chairing challenge for Luce and me—how to gain and keep consensus among a large group of important and sometimes assertive individuals, each “representing” one or more scientific constituencies. The problem gradually receded as the committee came to develop a culture of its own. Early on, the committee decided to expand its own intelligence by writing to and “surveying” some 2,400 behavioral scientists and 150 learned journals, asking them to identify major theoretical and methodological developments and the most promising lines of scientific innovation. Responses from this survey produced about one thousand topics or lines of research, many of them overlapping. Although these results produced a mass of helpful empirical data for the committee, they also challenged it to organize and systematize them. The committee was obviously interdisciplinary, given its inclusiveness and its composition. Its work also obviously involved interdisciplinary cooperation. Yet its status in those regards was problematic. In its early meetings, members wrestled with how it was going to organize its report and nearly split over the issue. One set of voices argued for observing conventional disciplinary lines—preparing separate chapters and making separate statements of priority for anthropology, economics, political science, and so on. There was force behind this position, given the pervasiveness of the disciplinary principle (see pages 137–9). There was also a precedent, for that was how the BASS reports had been organized fifteen years earlier by the predecessor committee most comparable to ours. The other approach was to devise some scheme to represent the “priorities” along interdisciplinary lines. As cochair and as a champion of the interdisciplinary principle, I was a strong advocate of the latter course. After long and sometimes heated debates, the committee decided to take the

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interdisciplinary line and identify topics and problem areas that were not specific to single disciplines. Another issue facing the committee was how to set priorities for the topical areas, whatever they might turn out to be. On the one side we had as a model the astronomy report, which had ranked a discrete number of specific priorities, to be addressed in sequence. We knew we could not achieve that outcome for our highly diverse and multidisciplined range of knowledge—claiming, for example, that the comparative study of kinship systems was “more important” than, for example, microeconomic aspects of decision making. At the same time we knew that we had to set some kind of priorities, or else the committee would be criticized for not carrying out its charge. In the end we fashioned a compromise. The committee decided to define a discrete number of high-priority areas and to represent them as important and worthy of research support. To do so did leave out scores of other possible areas, and thus we “prioritized,” but we believed it impossible to rank-order the list. To implement the compromise, the committee culled some thirty-one scientific problems and research topics, relying on both the survey responses and its own independent knowledge. Almost all were the concern of more than one discipline. Examples were seeing and hearing; language; behavior and health; markets and economic systems; human evolution; demographic behavior; and internationalization. Each of these constituted the basis of a chapter in the report, and for each the committee appointed an external panel of highly qualified scholars—with a committee member as liaison to each panel—to help us in identifying research trends and promising developments. Separate reports of these thirty-one committees were published in a companion volume (Luce, Smelser, and Gerstein 1989) to the committee report (Gerstein et al. 1988). In the latter we developed a description of each of the thirty-one topics and a rationale for its importance. At the end of the report we identified a number of crucial infrastructural needs for the behavioral and social sciences in general. The committee report was tough to write. Gerstein, Luce, Sperlich, and I involved various members of the larger committee in the drafting, and a great deal of disciplinary and personal politics was involved in including the right material and striking the right emphases. In the end the report was approved and hailed by the National Academy in a high-profile public

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meeting in Washington. It commanded a significant amount of attention from federal agencies and professional societies and established itself as a model for future stocktaking activities. Although there were stirrings of sentiment that the committee should continue into a fourth phase, little support materialized. The committee was discharged. I have lived with a great sense of satisfaction with the work done on behalf of the behavioral and social sciences during the 1980s and the central role I played in it. The third extension of my involvement was in an international direction. Beginning in the 1970s, I continued my activity in the International Sociological Association (ISA) in fostering programs and activities in economic sociology. My main collaborators were Alberto Martinelli (Italy), Harry Makler (Canada), and later Fernando Henriques Cardoso (Brazil). Together we built the Research Committee on Economy and Society, which continues as one of the most active and successful of the research committees of the ISA. The visibility created by that work led to an invitation for me to join the Executive Committee of the ISA in 1986, and to my election as vice president in 1990. In the latter office I was responsible for designing the program for the ISA’s XIII World Congress in Bielefeld in 1994. Working in the ISA has its frustrating aspects. It is an ill-organized and cumbersome organization, barnacled with United Nations–like political feuding and maneuvering. Nevertheless, my activities and successes in it were a further realization of the “spreading-out” theme of my life. Also on the international scene, I took the lead in collaborative work between the theory sections of the American and German Sociological Associations. This was to help organize, participate in, coedit the results of, and arrange for the publication of the proceedings of three GermanAmerican conferences—one on the relations between the micro and the macro levels in sociology (Alexander et al. 1987), one on modernity and social change (Haferkamp and Smelser 1992), and one on the theory of culture (Münch and Smelser 1992). What began to eat at me in the 1980s was the fact that, engaged as I was in the larger institutional and international scene of the behavioral and social sciences, my scholarly work had stalled. True, I had written and seen through five editions of a successful introductory sociology text (Smelser 1981, 1984, 1988b, 1991b, 1995); I had organized and edited a general handbook of sociology (Smelser 1988a); I had coedited and written

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theoretical essays for all three of the German-American theory projects; and I had completed essays on a variety of other subjects. None of these were full scholarly realizations in my mind, however, and I increasingly got the feeling that I was involved in too many distracting activities. Worst of all, my work on British working-class education lay fallow, inching forward periodically at best. I began to feel that I would never finish that project and to curse myself for that failure. At a certain moment, however, I pulled myself out of the morass. I decided to take a full year’s sabbatical in 1989–90, applied for and received a resident fellowship at the Russell Sage Foundation, extracted myself from virtually all my institutional commitments, and finished the monograph in that year. Its completion carried a feeling of personal salvation for me.

the 1990s: interdisciplinary culmination Early in this essay I indicated that one of the organizing principles of professional life is that one comes to capitalize on the momentum that derives from one’s past accomplishments. This principle was realized in full in the 1990s, the seventh decade of my life. I mention three lines of career involvement that embody it. The first was instigated by Gardner Lindzey, the psychologist, who had been a young faculty member at Harvard when I was an undergraduate and graduate student. I got to know him at the Harvard Psychological Clinic, where I was a “guinea pig” for two years in a psychological testing program associated with Henry Murray’s research. Lindzey took an interest in me, and during my senior year I asked him to supervise my undergraduate honors thesis, which he did. I subsequently took a graduate course in clinical psychology from him. We both left Harvard a few years later, but we remained friends. He was about ten years ahead of me in his career trajectory and, like me, was a person who liked to spread out. He was already active in the Social Science Research Council, private foundations, and the Washington social science establishment during my early years at Berkeley. Lindzey was my great booster. He made a point of recommending me and getting me appointed to one committee and organization after another throughout my career.

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In 1975 Lindzey was made director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. True to form, he tried to involve me in the Center in various ways, and in 1981 I was selected to be a member of its board of trustees. I served two terms (1981–86 and 1987–93). I was scheduled to spend 1993–94 as a residential fellow at the Center, but I withdrew because I had been invited by Jack Peltason, president of the University of California, to become his adviser on long-term planning for the university (an appointment generated, incidentally, by the momentum gained in my service to the university in the 1980s). By sheer coincidence, in 1993–94 the Center’s Board of Trustees was searching for a new director to succeed Philip Converse, who retired in 1994. I was nominated, and after a number of candidates were interviewed the trustees offered me the position. I had been in the running for the directorship in 1988 but had not been chosen. At that time I had been surprised that my strongest reaction to the news was not disappointment but relief. This reaction told me that I really was not ready to leave my career as university professor and researcher. In 1994, however, at the age of sixty-four, I was fully ready to make that move, and I was euphoric when chosen. The Center, of course, is a quintessentially interdisciplinary enterprise. It hosts about forty-eight resident fellows each year, who represent ten or more disciplines in and bordering on the behavioral and social sciences. The fellows represent the cream of the crop of researchers of all ages in these fields. It is generally expected that the director will involve himself in the intellectual life of the Center—in its seminars, in its informal groups, and in daily luncheons—and I was comfortable with this expectation. Given my past interdisciplinary history, the Center and I seemed to be made for one another. I will retire from the Center in September 2001 and return to Berkeley. I already know that my seven years at the Center will have been a true culmination of my continuous involvement in the interdisciplinary life. The second line of career involvement was instigated by Elsevier Science publishers, whose representatives visited me at about the end of my first year at the Center. They had taken up the idea of producing a third edition of an encyclopedia of the social sciences and asked me, as director of the Center, to host a meeting to explore the feasibility of the idea. The first such encyclopedia had been published in the early 1930s

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and the second in 1968. Time alone suggested that a new one should be done. In fact, I had been in discussions with American publishers as early as 1990 about a new encyclopedia, but despite the general feeling that it was a good idea they had backed away from the idea on account of the huge capital expense involved. The Elsevier meeting was held in October 1995 at the Center, with about twelve scholars and representatives from Elsevier. It took the assembled about ten minutes to decide that a new encyclopedia was an excellent idea and a needed enterprise, given the explosion of knowledge in the past four decades in the various behavioral and social sciences. We spent most of the rest of the meeting groping for organizing principles for the encyclopedia, and we made quite a bit of progress. Elsevier made no decision on the project at that moment, but we decided that a second preliminary meeting involving mainly European scholars was needed. Björn Wittrock, director of the Scandinavian Consortium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences, agreed to host the second meeting in Uppsala in September 1996. I agreed to go to the second meeting at the request of Elsevier, but even before that meeting the publishers had decided to commit to the project. They had also decided to ask me to be editor-in-chief, and one month before the Uppsala meeting Barbara Barrett of Elsevier, who was in charge of the project, came to visit me at the Center and put the question to me. It was an overwhelming request, and I couldn’t decide at the moment. To take on the editorship would be a huge commitment on my part. The new encyclopedia was to have twenty-six volumes and five thousand entries and was to be twice the length (in words) of the 1968 encyclopedia. Furthermore, to undertake an assignment of that magnitude might affect my performance as director of the Center adversely. I told Barrett I couldn’t decide (though I didn’t say no) and that in all events there would have to be a European coeditor-in-chief if the encyclopedia was to be a truly international enterprise. Needless to say, I consulted closely with my board of trustees before coming to a decision. Some members expressed reservations and concerns about my ability to assume the editorial responsibilities on top of my duties as director, but in the end they said it was my decision to make. After a final soul-searching, I decided to do it, informed Elsevier, and told them that my first choice for co-editor-in-chief was Paul Baltes, the

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eminent developmental psychologist and director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. Convincing him and working out contractual details with Elsevier took many more months, but we finally signed in September 1997. Before I even approached Baltes about the coeditorship, it had been arranged that he would spend the year 1997–98 at the Center. Nothing could have been better from the standpoint of the encyclopedia. That was the year that we had to consolidate the intellectual architecture for the project, decide whom to ask to be our three dozen section editors (i.e., editors in charge of the subdivisions we had fashioned for the encyclopedia), convince them to take on their editorial assignments, and arrange a crucial meeting of all the section editors and Elsevier staff at the Center (April 1998). I do not believe we could have done all that if both of us had not been in the same place. Baltes’s and my work on the encyclopedia has been not only enormous in scale but also completely interdisciplinary. We have had to do nothing less than carve up the total range of the behavioral and social sciences into categories that will reflect the “state of the art” of knowledge in those sciences at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This has meant deciding how much weight to give to which disciplines (anthropology, economics, geography, etc.), how to identify topics that overarch all the behavioral sciences, how to conceptualize interdisciplinary areas of research that intersect with the disciplines, how best to identify practical applications of the sciences, and how much salience (in numbers of entries) to give each section we created. We did all that, with a great deal of help from others. I have told the story of this work in another place (Smelser 2001), and Baltes and I will give a more circumstantial account in the introduction to the encyclopedia. I need write no more to convince readers that the encyclopedia, like my directorship of the Center, marks a full culmination of my interdisciplinary career, and I will be gratified in proper measure in September 2001, when the new International Encyclopedia of the Behavioral and Social Sciences (Smelser and Baltes 2001) is published. The third line of involvement is a more minor culmination. In 1995 I was asked to join CBASSE, the umbrella organization of the National Research Council that sponsors all its activities in the social and behavioral sciences and education and that sponsored and monitored all the work

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I did with the Committee on Basic Research in the 1980s. That invitation, quite evidently, arose from my earlier work with the Academy. I accepted the invitation and within a year was asked to succeed John Swets, the outgoing chair. The appointment was for three years and has been renewed for another three, so once again I am swimming in interdisciplinary waters as that committee does its work. One happy circumstance of the past five years is that, despite the other involvements, I have been able to keep my scholarly commitments alive. I have published one book on the problematics of sociology (Smelser 1997), written several articles on psychoanalytic sociology and brought all my essays on psychoanalysis together in one volume, edited several other volumes, written several theoretical essays, and “represented” sociology in major addresses before the American Sociological Association (Smelser 1998) and the Library of Congress. What is happy about this is that I have not experienced the same kinds of anguish I did in the 1980s when my scholarship came close to stagnating. When I return to Berkeley in 2001, many new opportunities will open up. I have done some research on the history of sociology in the twentieth century, and I may turn this into a major project. I may pursue some unexplored avenues in psychoanalytic sociology. I may write more on higher education. I may teach periodically. I may reinvolve myself—as invited— in the institutional affairs of the University of California and the national social science establishment. In all likelihood I will not be able to complete all that is demanded by these diverse lines of work, but all beckon as part of my third career.

a f e w f i nal r e fl ec ti o n s In concluding this personal odyssey, I would like to suggest the value of the kinds of interdisciplinary career I have described in the foregoing pages. Readers should not be surprised that I am a partisan of interdisciplinarity, if for no other reason than that I have invested much of my career in it. Consistent with that partisanship, I would like to suggest four positive “spillovers” that result from interdisciplinary work, considered broadly.

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First, I can testify that interdisciplinarity has been beneficial to me from a personal standpoint. The variety and range of separate avenues my work has taken—including the interdisciplinary paths—have kept me alive professionally. I have always had something new in the works or on the horizon. I can honestly say that I have never seriously experienced the feeling of being in a professional rut, churning my wheels through the same old mud. I would not argue that “spreading out” would have the same happy consequence for all—because everyone has his or her own preferences and sources of gratification—but I can offer my own personal testimony without reservation. Earlier I mentioned that the undertaking of interdisciplinary work, especially early in one’s career, frequently carries a risk and that one might be well advised not to venture into the territory. This may be true, but I cannot believe that my own career has been deflected or slowed by it. In fact, the contrary may be true. It cheered me when I heard the following read at my induction into the National Academy of Sciences in 1993: “Smelser has advanced our understanding of historical sociology, the dynamics of collective behavior, social change, economic development, and the sociology of economic life. His theory of collective behavior has illuminated both the psychological and the social aspects of human behavior.” Second, interdisciplinarity is beneficial from the standpoint of the scientific and intellectual status of sociology as a discipline. It is possible to “locate” disciplines on a number of overlapping continua: (a) tightly focused causal sciences (e.g., astronomy) to configurational (e.g., anthropology); (b) consensual to nonconsensual, referring to the level of agreement on subject matter, approaches, and methods; (c) more codified to less codified, referring to the organization of knowledge in the discipline; and (c) high-paradigm to low-paradigm, referring to the tightness of organization of models in the discipline (Klein 1990, 104). Various subdivisions of sociology (e.g., organizational sociology, sociology of culture) would themselves be placed at different points on the continua. The field as a whole, however, lies toward the configurational, nonconsensual, less codified, and low-paradigmatic ends, especially when compared to the natural sciences, some of the life sciences, and economics. The upshot of this observation is that sociology and sociologists should not make the mistake of pretending that they are tightly involved in working

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out the normal-science implications of their scientific field. We live in a more fluid intellectual environment than that. I regard it as an exaggeration when Donald Levine claims that the disciplines—including sociology—are in some kind of shambles because of the growth of new specialties and hybrid traditions. It is true, however, that the improvement of sociological knowledge is not achieved, except in certain cases, by the derivation of new hypotheses from highly constricted sociological models. Rather, it comes from borrowing perspectives, insights, and methods when we find them most helpful and applying them in the most creative ways we can. This means, finally, that sociologists, in their own self-interest, should look not only elsewhere in their own discipline for helpful knowledge but outside as well. Third, interdisciplinarity is beneficial from the standpoint of sociology in relation to the other behavioral and social sciences. From the beginning of its existence, sociology has experienced an uneasy legitimacy as a social science. It has always been an object of feelings ranging from bemusement to hostility from the hard sciences, many of whose practitioners regard it as a pretender to scientific status. Other behavioral and social sciences have shared this experience, of course. Within the spectrum of the behavioral and social sciences, sociology was a latecomer, encountering more established disciplines—philosophy, law, and history on the European scene, and economics and psychology in the American universities—in the late nineteenth century, and it had to fight for its place among them. While the competition among these various disciplines has varied over time, jockeying and skirmishing among them have been recurrent. Moreover, sociology is fated to be regarded with ambivalence by the larger public, because it analyzes and generates insights about arenas considered to be sacred or at least touchy—family life, class, religion, politics, and sexuality—and thus excites resistance and sometimes hostility. These reactions are augmented by the fact that sociology itself has always contained a critical, debunking, sometimes-radical impulse. From an institutional point of view, sociology at the beginning of the twenty-first century is certainly established in universities, as a professional association, and in the social science academy and establishment. But it still lives in an environment of ambivalent regard from some quarters outside. The understandable reaction of sociologists to this kind of environment is to return the favor and to develop attitudes that include a measure

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of defensiveness and official pride in their own discipline. My own view is that this response is mainly counterproductive and tends to exacerbate the very ambivalence against which they are reacting. I am convinced that the behavioral and social sciences are all in the same business and that the primary impulse should be cooperative—to borrow and lend freely of the knowledge they create, to try to make positive use of knowledge from sister disciplines whenever possible. Interdisciplinary work is part of this cooperation, of course, and contributes to the sense of common enterprise. Nevertheless, I believe my position may be in the minority. Certainly the sectarian tendencies in all of academic life are the strongest, and, as a result, it is more natural and comfortable to strike a competitive pose than a cooperative one. Fourth, interdisciplinarity is beneficial from the standpoint of sociology in relation to its institutional environment. Within universities, discipline-based departments live in an atmosphere of what might be called formal competitive equality, all reporting to a common administration (deans, provosts, vice-chancellors). They compete annually for budget allocations, and the main effect of this structural arrangement is to divide them from one another. This structurally induced adversarialness tends to isolate them from one another and to counter the kind of cooperative mentality that would surely be more advantageous in securing a solid and enduring institutional status. Similar observations apply at higher institutional levels as well. The various social and behavioral sciences are formally represented in the federal science establishment, namely the National Science Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences. There are other organizations that institutionalize the behavioral and social sciences on a suprauniversity level—the Social Science Research Council, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, for example, and, in a more political arena, the Consortium of Social Sciences Associations. What should be appreciated is exactly how frail this establishment is in relation to the physical sciences establishment, the life sciences establishment, and the medical establishment, to say nothing of larger political forces. Its voice is relatively weak, and it seldom speaks with one voice. When the disciplines do join ranks from an institutional and political point of view, this voice is strengthened, as can be seen by

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their successful collective efforts in the early 1980s when their funding base was threatened. Interdisciplinary intellectual activity does little to solidify the disciplines with one another, though it can work modestly in that direction by generating mutual interdependence and appreciation. But the kind of interdisciplinary institutional activities I have described in these pages— and in which I have participated extensively—is helpful and essential for the institutional protection and promotion of the enterprise as a whole.

r e f e r en c e s Adams, Robert McC., Neil J. Smelser, and Donald M. Treiman. 1982. Behavioral and Social Science Research: A National Resource. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Alexander, Jeff rey D., Bernard Giesen, Richard Münch, and Neil J. Smelser, eds. 1987. The Micro-Macro Link. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gerstein, Dean R., R. Duncan Luce, Neil J. Smelser, and Sonja Sperlich, eds. 1988. The Behavioral and Social Sciences: Achievements and Opportunities. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Gouldner, Alvin W. 1971. The Coming Crisis in Western Sociology. New York: Avon. Haferkamp, Hans, and Neil J. Smelser, eds. 1992. Social Change and Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hilgard, Ernest R., and Henry W. Riecken, eds. 1969. The Behavioral and Social Sciences: Outlook and Needs. Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences. Klein, Julie Thompson. 1990. Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory and Practice. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Kuhn, Thomas S. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lipset, Seymour Martin, and Neil J. Smelser, eds. 1961. Sociology: The Progress of a Decade. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Luce, R., Duncan, Neil J. Smelser, and Dean R. Gerstein, eds. 1989. Leading Edges in Social and Behavioral Science. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Münch, Richard, and Neil J. Smelser, eds. 1992. Theory of Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Parsons, Talcott. 1974. “The University ‘Bundle.’ ” In Public Higher Education in California, edited by Neil J. Smelser and Gabriel Almond, 275–99. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Parsons, Talcott, and Gerald M. Platt, with the collaboration of Neil J. Smelser. 1973. The American University. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Parsons, Talcott, and Edward A. Shils, eds. 1951. Toward a General Theory of Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Parsons, Talcott, and Neil J. Smelser. 1956. Economy and Society. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Glencoe, IL: Free Press. President’s Research Committee on Social Trends. 1933. Recent Social Trends in the United States. New York: McGraw-Hill. Smelser, Neil J. 1959. Social Change in the Industrial Revolution: An Application of Theory to the British Cotton Industry, 1770–1840. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Glencoe, IL: Free Press. . 1962. Theory of Collective Behavior. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York: Free Press. . 1963. The Sociology of Economic Life. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. . 1967a. “Sociological History: The Industrial Revolution and the Working-Class Family.” Journal of Labor History 1, no. 1:18–35. , ed. 1967b. Sociology: An Introduction. New York: John Wiley and Sons. . 1972. “Some Additional Thoughts on Collective Behavior.” Sociological Inquiry 42, no. 2:97–101. . 1974. “Growth, Structural Change, and Conflict in California Public Higher Education, 1950–1970.” in Public Higher Education in California, edited by Neil J. Smelser and Gabriel Almond, 9–141. Berkeley: University of California Press. . 1976a. Comparative Methods in the Social Sciences. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. . 1976b. The Sociology of Economic Life. 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. . 1981. Sociology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. . 1984. Sociology. 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. , ed. 1988a. Handbook of Sociology. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. . 1988b. Sociology. 3rd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. . 1991a. Social Paralysis and Social Change: British Working-Class Education in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press. . 1991b. Sociology. 4th ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. . 1995. Sociology. 5th ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. . 1996. “Riflessioni sulla metologia degli study comparati.” Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica 25, no. 1 (April): 3–20. . 1997. Problematics of Sociology. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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. 1998. “The Rational and the Ambivalent in the Social Sciences.” American Sociological Review 63, no. 1:1–16. . 1999. The Social Edges of Psychoanalysis. Berkeley: University of California Press. . 2001. “Interdisciplinarity in Theory and Practice.” In The Postdisciplinary History of Modern Academic Disciplines, edited by Charles Camic and Hans Joas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smelser, Neil J., and Paul B. Baltes, eds. 2001. International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Oxford: Elsevier Science. Smelser, Neil J., and James A. Davis, eds. 1969. Sociology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Smelser, Neil J., and Erik H. Erikson, eds. 1980. Themes of Work and Love in Adulthood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Smelser, Neil J., and Dean R. Gerstein, eds. 1986. Behavioral and Social Science: Fifty Years of Discovery. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Smelser, Neil J., and Sydney Halpern. 1978. “The Historical Triangulation of Family, Economy, and Education.” In Turning Points: Historical and Sociological Essays on the Family, edited by John Demos and Sarane Spence Boocock, 278–315. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smelser, Neil J., and William T. Smelser, eds. 1963. Personality and Social Systems. New York: John Wiley and Sons. , eds. 1971. Personality and Social Systems. 2nd ed. New York: John Wiley and Sons. Wallerstein, Robert S., and Neil J. Smelser. 1969. “Psychoanalysis and Sociology: Articulations and Applications.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 50 (1969): 693–710.

Afterword (2013)

A dozen years have elapsed since the publication, in 2000, of chapter 12 on disciplinarity-interdisciplinarity. That passage of time alone calls for some reflection, updating, and revision of observations made in the accumulated essays on sociology and the social sciences. In 2001 I retired as director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. At that time I moved from Stanford back to Berkeley, where I have taught one course a year ( jointly with an economist and a political scientist) to postdoctoral candidates carrying out research on health and health policy; have participated to a limited degree in affairs on the Berkeley campus; and have carried on actively in research and publication. In this final essay I undertake (1) to review my past decade’s work, continuing chapter 11’s theme of interdisciplinarity; (2) to evaluate, selectively, some of my observations about sociology and the other social sciences made throughout the volume; and (3) to update my account of forces impinging on sociology and to identify some probable continuities and discontinuities in the coming years.

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o n g oi n g sc h ol ar ly wo r k In 1997 I agreed to undertake a massive task: to serve as coeditor, with Paul Baltes of the Max Planck Institute of Human Development, Berlin, of a new international encyclopedia of the social and behavioral sciences (Smelser and Baltes 2001). This was the third rendition of such an encyclopedia, earlier versions having appeared in the early 1930s and in 1968 (Seligman and Johnson 1930–35; Sills 1968). I almost declined to accept this assignment for two reasons. First, the magnitude of the task seemed overwhelming: the new Encyclopedia (twenty-four volumes) would be twice the length of the 1968 edition and would involve coordinating the work of some forty section (associate) editors. In the end all this called for five years of scholarly, editorial, and administrative labor. Second, that work was to be added to my duties as director of the Center, and I (as well as a few trustees) feared that it would impair my performance as director; undertaking it was a personal risk. Seeing the Encyclopedia through was an apex for the interdisciplinary side of my career. In the first instance the project, by virtue of its very definition, had to cover all the social and behavioral sciences; in addition, my coeditor was a psychologist, and collaborating with him was an interdisciplinary enterprise. Also, Baltes and I discovered early that to organize the encyclopedia’s contents under established disciplinary headings would not do. Over the generations the intellectual viability of disciplines and discipline-based departments has been compromised (above, pp. 00–00). True, the inherited disciplines are still manifested concretely in academic departments and professional organizations that give them an administrative-intellectual home, a definition in the academic market, and a concrete institutional reality. But importing and exporting among them, the growth of hybrid fields, interdisciplinary forays, and, above all, internal specialization and fragmentation have conspired to make disciplines and departments obsolete as systematic representations of knowledge in the social sciences; some (e.g., Levine 1995) have written on the irrelevance and “malaise” of the inherited disciplines. Baltes and I faced this issue concretely in the need to identify sections (subdivisions) and section editors for the Encyclopedia. After seeking

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advice and struggling with that advice, we designed an architecture of classificatory categories (sections) that seemed to honor the combination of intellectual focus and intellectual sprawl manifested by the behavioral and social sciences at the end of the twentieth century. The following are the components of that architecture: • Sections for the established disciplines (for example, economics,

anthropology) and for other fields (for example, education, philosophy, law) that have significant social and behavioral science emphases in their ongoing work. • Sections on “overarching topics,” or topics applicable to and cutting

across all the relevant fields. Among these were statistics, ethics of research, applications of knowledge, and the history of the behavioral and social sciences; we included biographies of eminent deceased scholars in this category. • Sections on topics and ranges of intellectual inquiry that involved

“intersections” of one or more disciplines, such as gender studies, religious studies, health, evolutionary sciences, and area and international studies. • Sections on “applied” areas, such as management studies, health, and

public policy. • Finally, as residual categories, topical items such as multiculturalism

and affirmative action, included under headings called “Common Cultural Concerns” and “Integrative Issues and Concepts.”

Such were the strategies that we put forward as ways to capture both the institutional and intellectual realities of the behavioral and social sciences and the complex evolution of those realities over time. One might describe our efforts as a way of accommodating both the neatness and the messiness of the social and behavioral science world. We realized that ours was only one of many possible approaches to this fundamental issue, but we also realized that no simple solution to the issue could be devised. We also acknowledged that future efforts to represent our huge enterprise would have to be different from ours. In addition to the mighty effort involved in producing the Encyclopedia, I have, in the freedom of the retirement years, pursued (and written books) on a range of topics. These are

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• A book on social and psychological aspects of terrorism (Smelser

2007). I had not previously written on terrorism itself, though I had published on related and overlapping topics such as collective behavior and social movements. This work was an outgrowth of my participation in several National Research Council committees that produced reports in the two years following the attacks of September 11, 2001, dealing with understanding and contending with international terrorism. Writing the book involved me deeply in research in political science, history, and psychology as well as the limited sociological work on the topic. • A book on moratorium experiences (Smelser 2009). From the early

1990s I had intended one day to write a book on a generic form of experience in which people take leave of structured routines and embark on a “journey” of finite time and typically experience some form of regeneration. Illustrations are pilgrimages, tourism, leaves of absence, religious conversions, and periods of intense socialization and ordeal such as boot camp. I called these odyssey experiences. My observations of scholars’ experiences during their year of complete freedom at the Stanford Center provided further inspiration and data for this project. I completed work on the project during a stay at the Library of Congress in the winter of 2006. • A book of reflective essays on the University of California, about two-

thirds of which had not been previously published (Smelser 2010). Most of these emanated from academic and administrative assignments I had undertaken over the decades and dealt with a diverse range of topics including crises and conflicts, governance, lower-division education, and intercollegiate athletics. Many of these essays were administrative reports, but all involved considerable scholarship that informed their conclusions and recommendations. • A work on applied social science (Smelser and Reed 2012). Chapter 9

above is on applied social science, but it is mainly programmatic in character. In 2005 I turned to more substantive direction at the invitation of John S. Reed, former successful CEO of Citibank and a longtime supporter of the social sciences. I had known Reed for decades, largely through overlapping memberships on different boards of trustees. A few years after my retirement Reed suggested I take the leadership in preparing a major project on “usable social science,” which he would support through his own foundation and in which he would be closely involved. I agreed and spent several years in extensive exploration in all the social sciences, seeking

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substantive areas in which findings and perspectives can inform us in dealing with organizational decisions, social policy, and social problems. While almost all the research and writing was mine, Reed joined so actively in the project that we listed ourselves as coauthors. • In the fall of 2011 I received an invitation from the Center for Studies on

Higher Education, University of California, Berkeley, to present the Clark Kerr lectures at the university in January and February 2012. Delivered every two years, usually by a retired university president, the lectures carried only one stipulation, namely that they concern issues in higher education. I gave the lecture series the title “Dynamics of the Contemporary University: Growth, Accretion, and Conflict.” The major theme was that by understanding of the principles of growth of institutions of higher education one could elucidate its structure, its problems, its governance, its conflicts, its stratification, and its contemporary crises. The lectures, in revised form, have recently been published (Smelser 2013).

In composing this afterword, I took the occasion to do some reflecting on this postretirement decade of research and publication (reflection not done in the decade itself ). Like much earlier work, many of the projects came from my external involvements and from requests by others—a publisher hungry for an editor, colleagues in the National Academies, the offer and request from John Reed, and an invitation to deliver a lecture series. Once I took each project on, however, I went my own way. Only the odyssey book and the “reflections” book on the University of California were entirely my own projects. What struck me most of all is how thoroughly interdisciplinary all these enterprises are in emphasis. Part of this is explained by my general bent in that direction, elaborated in chapter 12. In addition, however, I surmise that my retirement status had something to do with this intensification of interdisciplinary emphases. Like that of most retirees, my life became more removed from audiences of real and imagined readers, organizational involvements, and professional commitments. Though I did not say this to myself, I also surmise that in the relative isolation of retirement I could be more birdlike, move about more freely intellectually, and be less bound by my own images of audiences on whom a career might depend.

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some second thoughts on observations and a r g um e n ts i n th i s v olu me The Representation of Sociology and the Other Social Sciences In the “author’s introduction” to these essays, I observed that my views of the social sciences, expressed in chapters 1 and 2, were, in the light of subsequent reflection, naive in two senses: first, they represented disciplines as autonomous, developing sciences, driven by the engine of improving them as sciences; and second, they represented disciplines as driven in large part by “maturing tendencies,” also expressing a certain progressive logic of scientific development. I was also much interested in the boundaries or borders of disciplines, and in how knowledge could profitably pass over these boundaries and be of use to other disciplines. In this section I would like to expand these observations in the light of my changing appreciation of the choice of problems and the resulting dynamics of the social science disciplines. I would not reject altogether the views I expressed in the late 1960s. The values and methods of science still manifest themselves continuously in teaching, in reference to the histories of the disciplines, in the attention to the canons of methodology, and in assessments of the importance, validity, and general quality of research. In addition, there is an abiding if often implicit concern with specifying the nature of inquiry in one’s discipline and how it differs from other disciplines (commentaries in economic sociology, for example, reflect this tendency). But these lines of discourse are only limited bases for the choice of problems to be investigated. At other places in the volume—and in my current thinking—I include a number of other sources. The first is the rise, consolidation, continuing presence, and fall of timely issues, topics, and approaches. In his presidential address to the American Sociological Association (Sorokin 1955) and in a separate volume (Sorokin 1956), Pitirim Sorokin wrote sarcastically of sociology as being dominated by “fads and foibles”—momentary episodes that are trivial in their impact and, by implication, deserve to pass from the scene. He mentioned both methodological refinements and “schools of thought” such as sociometry, group dynamics, and “functional-structural” approaches. Sorokin’s diagnoses were not widely read or well received, according to my professional memory, largely because of their dismissive tone and

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because they were seen to emanate from a bitter man neglected by his contemporaries. Despite this neglect, the dynamic of the rise, consolidation, and stagnation of topics and approaches is a real one in the social sciences. At different points in the essays I mentioned “chasing social problems” and detailed the parades of intensification of interest, over the decades, in unemployment, propaganda, economic growth and development, youth and generational conflict, gender, and environment in sociology. The salience of “stagflation” in economics in the 1970s is another example. If the innovation crystallizes into a group project and becomes a designated “approach” or “school” and finds representation in a “section” of a professional association, it achieves a further measure of visibility and permanence. The importance of these kinds of developments depends on many factors, including their relevance to the political and social dynamics of the larger society, their substantive importance for the discipline, and the effectiveness of researchers in promoting their priorities and imparting them to future generations of scholars. Over time, lines of scholarship on the “timely” topics develop their own distinctive histories— thriving, persisting, stagnating, or being consigned to history. Second, supplementing these internal influences on choice of problems and research directions is the phenomenon of careerism in one’s discipline and perhaps more widely. As new areas of excitement and research come into view, they are likely to be regarded as important or even “hot” by academic departments and department chairs, are advertised as such to university administrations who authorize new appointments, and thus find their way into recruitment. Graduate students seeking positions are not unaware of these dynamics, and at least some choices of areas of focus are influenced by them. In my own career I remember both positive and negative “buzzes” about “area studies” in the post–World War II period—on the one side touting them (especially Russian studies) as the coming things, and on the other side dismissing them as scholarly “dead ends” that scholars tended to desert after a time. These dynamics also affect the dynamics of social science disciplines. A third dynamic has to do with generations. Again as a biographical matter, one recurring reference point in my career was how I was coming to terms with the influence of a very powerful teacher and scholar and my mentor, Talcott Parsons. I do not regard this aspect as the major determinant of

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my life as a sociologist, but it is an inescapable part of it. I have also observed the careers of many other scholars (including my own students) as they embraced, modified, or rejected the theories and approaches of their seniors. Generational dynamics play a role in choice of problems, approaches, and emphases and, as such, constitute a shaping influence on a discipline. Fourth, and more subtly, I identify a value (or even a bias) that pervades perhaps all of academia, certainly the social sciences. Often unspoken, this attitude conveys a high priority (and high rewards) for apparent novelty, originality, and difference in scholarly and scientific work. I have heard the word neophilia used to communicate the fetishism that may accompany this posture; it is a bid to stand out, to be remembered as special. The able, even craftsmanlike execution of research, which may constitute a true and valuable contribution to the accumulation of scientific knowledge, tends to take a back seat to presumed or advertised originality or novelty that unseats some line of received knowledge or wisdom. I do not know the precise force of this motive, but it has to be mentioned as at least a minor strategy and dynamic in the choice of problems to be investigated, in how work is presented and advertised, and in the assessments of that work by review committees. As such, it constitutes yet another shaping influence on disciplines. Finally, I point to another shaping factor, also subtle. This concerns the one’s work extends beyond one’s professional discipline and the demands of one’s professional career and becomes “popular” in general public discourse. There is a small subcategory of academics—I mention the names John Kenneth Galbraith, David Riesman, Walter W. Rostow, Erik H. Erikson, Margaret Mead, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr.—whose writings spark widespread interest and stimulate discussion in the intellectual media and become part of educated discourse, at least for a time. At the same time, within each of these figure’s professions, a certain ambivalence is generated toward these writers, an ambivalence contained in the word popularizer, which connotes a mix of envy and resentment of the popularity, a dread of “watering down” scientific knowledge, and professional snobbishness. To me this phenomenon expresses a residue of a guild mentality, a final shaping force in disciplinary choices and relevant publics. All these additional determining factors fall into the categories of “sociology of knowledge” or “psychology of knowledge” and throw additional

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light on the dynamics of academic disciplines. They also remind us that scholars’ and scientists’ worlds are as mixed, contingent, and imperfect as others’. I make one further observation on the 1967 and 1969 essays. They represent the behavioral and social sciences as entities, with boundaries or borders that can be sealed or open in various degrees, and across which knowledge from other disciplinary lines of inquiry can move, usually for the good. I would now call attention to the limitations of this view, largely because the “borders” between disciplines have been rendered so indistinct by long-term processes of internal fragmentation, hybrid and multidisciplinary developments, exportation and importation, and free-ranging intellectual inquiry that ignores or violates imagined disciplinary boundaries. In fact, these “boundaries” are more like fuzzy areas of overlap and indeterminacy. Given the historical evolution from supposedly separate and distinct “disciplines” toward disciplines’ more contingent, historically conditioned fusion with one another, one wonders if and when the organizational realities of separate academic departments and distinct academic markets will adapt to these cultural changes.

Some Contemporary Trends changes in the environment of sociology and changes in the discipline

Reviewing chapter 6 on the future of sociology (written in 1990) and chapter 8 on social problems (written 1995), I would not, today, change my identification of the following major trends, except as a matter of relative emphasis. • The forces of specialization and fragmentation continue apace, as

established subdivisions of disciplines assert their individual importance and integrity and remain alive in the institutionalized subdivisions (sections) of the American Sociological Association, which establish their institutional reality by competing for space and time in annual meetings, increasing visibility through publications, and awarding prizes to scholars in their respective areas. • The growth of scholarly activity that cuts across strict disciplinary lines

continues apace as scholars in sociology and the other social sciences

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engage in interdisciplinary projects, create hybrid fields, and export and import approaches, methods, and concerns. • Interest in general theory and systematic integration of knowledge

continues to be weak and perhaps grows even weaker, as sociologists, in keeping with the tendencies to specialize, pay less attention to comprehensive concerns. Most interest in the “scientific” side of disciplines resides in methodological rigor, not theoretical soundness, elegance, and generalizability. • The world continues to generate new and different social problems,

many of them perhaps more intractable because they emanate increasingly from the tendencies and consequences of globalization and are thus less reachable by discrete community and national efforts to deal with them.

In addition to these basic continuities I identify what I perceive (with only impressionistic evidence) one special line of development that has become consolidated and that affects research, publication, and associational politics in sociology. This has to do with the increasing salience of choosing research topics on the basis of social problems, particularly those involving inequities affecting certain groups (the poor, racial and ethnic minorities, women, the incarcerated), as well as protest and social movement activities by and on behalf of these groups. Writing on environmental ruination and movements against it has also increased. In one respect this is not surprising, as it expresses the long-standing ameliorative impulse in sociology. But I think it has intensified over the decades and is fed by the following additional tendencies: • The aggravation of real social inequities in the nation and the world. I

refer to the long-term (from the early 1970s) trends toward the diminution of real income and the regressive income tendencies in our society, fed by multiple sources. (In large measure the vivid but disorganized Occupy movement expressed the outrage at such inequalities.) Further, despite dramatic advances by nations such as South Korea, China, and India in wealth and importance, international income inequalities also persist or worsen. • The heritage of the 1960s and 1970s, as reflected in sociology. That

decade marked a dramatic politicization of the field, highlighted by student protest movements; heightened preoccupation with racial inequalities (civil rights concerns and more radical extensions);

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generalization of this concern from blacks to other minority groups; discrimination on the basis of gender and sexual preference; and age discrimination. Sociologists and sociologists-in-training were especially drawn to these causes and came to constitute a generation of faculty committed in varying degree to the causes and reflecting that commitment in their choice of research, in their sensitization of students to diverse social inequities, and in their introduction of concerns into college and university politics. • An affirmation of these concerns in the politics of the American

Sociological Association, with the growth of caucuses, periodic attempts to involve the association officially in protest causes, and political mobilization to elect sociologists with “leftist” (Marxist, raceclass-gender) inclinations and research agendas to associational offices. The enthusiasm over “public sociology” associated with Michael Burawoy’s presidency in 2004 (see American Sociological Association 2008) reflected this as well, as did continued and engaged discussions of “cultural studies,” “activist sociology,” and “critical sociology.” So did the conflict over journal publication policy (especially that of the American Sociological Review) in the ASA Council that erupted in the late 1990s. While the debate focused explicitly on the dominance of quantitative methods and scientific (“establishment”) criteria in editorial policies, its political undertones were that certain classes of ASA members (largely unnamed but certainly “nonestablishment”) who relied on “alternative” methods were being disadvantaged. • Two other manifestations of this phenomenon are the continued

pressure to give “race-class-gender” priority in academic appointments in departments of sociology and new journals, as well as the increasing representation of books in these areas on the lists of commercial and university presses that appreciate the market for them. (For an example of these trends, see the discussion of how the Annual Review of Sociology has “reflected” sociology in chapter 10.)

As indicated, these shifts in emphasis in the profession mark an extension and intensification of long-term tensions and divisions in sociology, and a conquest of sorts of the long-standing reformist-ameliorative impulse in the field. It remains to be seen how enduring this conquest will be and whether the shifts will work to the advantage or disadvantage of the field in the larger political context and in the public’s regard.

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longer-term trends in higher education

We probably do not remind ourselves sufficiently often that sociology and the other social sciences, as academic disciplines, are embedded in the nation’s university and college system and that these disciplines are fundamentally affected by the fortunes of that system. I identify a number of relevant changes. • After an enormous growth of students and institutions from the end of

World War II onward, higher education experienced a period of excess capacity and stagnation beginning in the 1970s. Then, from the 1980s to the present, state appropriations to higher education have been progressively diminishing; that trend accelerated in the 1990s and continues to the present. Given the tenure system and low turnover rates in that system, the job market has become perpetually tight, especially for new doctorates entering the academic labor force. • This tightness aggravates another long-term pattern: the enduring fact

that the elite, doctorate-granting institutions grant more PhDs than they themselves can employ. As a result, greater proportions of their doctoral graduates find employment in institutions of lesser status (colleges, community colleges) than the institutions from which they receive their degrees. If we assume that these doctorates internalize the academic and status values of the institutions in which they have been trained, this means that many of those who are “placed” lower in the status hierarchy of higher education experience their placement as a species of downward mobility, diminished status, and relative deprivation (De Leo 2003). When budgetary times are hard and expansion slows, this effect is intensified as candidates compete for fewer positions, perhaps seek positions further down the hierarchy, find employment as temporary faculty, wait several years to land a ladder position, or experience academic unemployment. • External research funding, mainly for research universities, also creates

instabilities and inequities. The general pattern of this funding was a bonanza of federal and foundation funding of research beginning in the late 1950s, a drop-off of this in the 1970s, irregular fluctuations since, and, from the 1980s, increased corporate involvement in universitybased research in the form of funding, cooperative ventures, and spinoffs. The main driving forces for the external funders have been international economic, political, and military competition during the Cold War and more recently the intensified international competition and threat to the American economy associated with economic

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globalization. The critical point is that this external research largesse has been extremely selective. The greatest flow has gone to defenserelated projects, medical and bioengineering, new technology, computer sciences, and the natural sciences and engineering generally. Some but much less support from government agencies (National Science Foundation, National Institute of Mental Health) has spilled over into the social sciences, and very little has come to the humanities. • These developments have led to radical changes within externally

supported institutions in the form of salary differentials, time off from teaching, summer salaries, travel funds, research assistants, postdoctoral fellowships, and level of clout in university politics and governance. Put simply, the favored areas of the sciences and engineering have been glutted, the social sciences fed, and the humanities starved. These developments, along with declining enrollments associated with increased student vocationalism, have been major forces in the heralded “crisis of the humanities” (for an extreme view, see Readings 1996) and the threat to the “idea of the university,” namely to cover all fields of relevant and worthy knowledge. I submit that these forces have created something of a “crisis of the social sciences”—including sociology—as well, though this is less serious, less noticed, and less articulated in higher education circles. • All these changes work in the direction of creating a sense of second-

class citizenship and alienation—via the avenue of relative deprivation— of certain classes of academic citizens. Decades ago Clark Kerr (1963) wrote cryptically of “scientists affluent, humanists militant.” Humanist voices are loudest in complaining about the insidious invasion of commercialism and vocationalism in higher education (Zemsky, Wegner, and Massy 2005). Elsewhere (Smelser 2013) I have ventured the view that the postmodernist impulse—including its antiscience elements—has differentially invaded the humanities and the “soft” areas of the social sciences, expressing their disadvantaged status. I would also argue that all the trends I have identified have worked to intensify the split between “scientific,” “establishment,” and “mainstream” sociology on the one hand and reformist, ameliorative, and radical sociology on the other (see chapter 7).

a c o n clu d i n g n ot e This volume is in part a story of changes in outlook and interpretation about my own discipline over the decades. Some others have perceived

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these changes and have given their own interpretations of them (for example, Alexander, Marx, and Williams 2004). In another commentary, Sica (1998) remarked that after having established a reputation as a sociologist in the “golden age” (1950–70) of the field in the United States, I could afford to comment on its unseemly developments. This is the way he put it: “It seems a cardinal has noticed that the Vatican is weakening, and having reached a senior position in the College, can now risk saying as much” (1998, 1433). I suppose this is a compliment, but in concluding these reflections, I would like to reject one implication of Sica’s observation: that I perceive what I see as changes in sociology in a negative way, as some species of unhappy evolution, deterioration, or corruption. That interpretation is far from my outlook and intent. I regard my assessments as more nearly neutral—interpreting the evolution of the discipline in nonjudgmental terms, while at the same time attempting to fathom the larger meaning and consequences of changes in the discipline’s quest for scientific knowledge.

r e f e r en c e s Alexander, Jeff rey C., Gary T. Marx, and Christine L. Williams. 2004. “Mastering Ambivalence: Neil Smelser as a Sociologist of Synthesis.” In Self, Social Structure and Beliefs, edited by Jeff rey C. Alexander, Gary T. Marx, and Christine L. Williams, 1–16. Berkeley: University of California Press. American Sociological Association. 2008. “Symposium on Public Sociology.” Contemporary Sociology 37, no. 6:507–30. De Leo, Jeffrey R. 2003. Affiliations: Identity in Academic Cultures. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Kerr, Clark. 1963. The Uses of the University. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Levine, Donald. 1995. Visions of the Sociological Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Readings, Bill. 1996. The University in Ruins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Seligman, E. A. R., and Alvin Johnson, eds. 1930–35. Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. 5 vols. New York: Macmillan. Sica, Alan. 1998. Review of Problematics of Sociology: The Georg Simmel Lectures, 1995, by Neil J. Smelser. American Journal of Sociology 103, no. 6:1432–33.

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Sills, David, ed. 1968. International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. 17 vols. New York: Macmillan. Smelser, Neil J. 2007. The Faces of Terrorism: Social and Psychological Dimensions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. . 2009. The Odyssey Experience: Physical, Social, Psychological, and Spiritual Journeys. Berkeley: University of California Press. . 2010. Reflections on the University of California: From the Free Speech Movement to the Global University. Berkeley: University of California Press. . 2013. Dynamics of the Contemporary University: Growth, Accretion, and Conflict. Berkeley: University of California Press. Smelser, Neil J., and Paul B. Baltes, eds. 2001. International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. 24 vols. Oxford: Elsevier. Smelser, Neil J., and John S. Reed. 2012. Usable Social Science. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sorokin, Pitirim A. 1955. “Sociology of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,” American Sociological Review 30, no. 6:833–42. . 1956. Fads and Foibles in Modern Sociology. Chicago: H. Regnery. Zemsky, Robert, Gregory R. Wegner, and William F. Massy. 2005. Remaking the American University: Market-Smart and Mission-Centered. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

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Index

academic institutions: and academic freedom, 125, 133, 178; and democratization, 178; excess capacity in, 310; impact of economic conditions on, 310–11; integrative approach in, 143–44; knowledge produced and transmitted in, 164–65; represented in Annual Review of Sociology, 242–43; sociological analysis of, 277–79, 303; sociology in context of, 11, 124, 125, 128, 133, 134, 139–41, 143–44, 151–52, 295–96, 310–11; status of interdisciplinary research in, 259, 295–96. See also departments, academic accumulation of scientific knowledge, 212, 218–24 Adams, Robert, 283 Africa, trade unions in, 185 aggregative-causal approach, 159–60 aging, research on, 222–24 alienation, 49, 157, 180, 181, 240 Allport, Gordon W., 86, 87, 265 amelioration, social. See reform, social American Academy of Political and Social Science, 236 American Sociological Association (ASA): joint conferences with German Sociological Association held by, 8, 287; politics in, 238, 309; Smelser’s activity at, 2, 5, 6, 98,

236, 287, 292; Sorokin’s presidential address to, 304; subfields in, 23, 144, 307 American Sociological Review, 160, 236, 261, 270, 309 American sociology: academic institutions’ influence on, 124, 125, 128, 151–52; cultural influences on, 119–20, 124, 237–38; evolutionary perspective in, 152–54; mainstream vs. nonmainstream, 160–61; political influences on, 124–28, 237–40; and positivism, 211, 238; in relation to European sociology, 120–21, 123–24, 125, 145, 151–52; trends in, 237–41 Annual Review of Sociology, 10, 235, 241–55; academic institutions represented in, 242–43; creation of, 10, 237; gender research in, 254; multiple authorship in, 243–44; process of reflecting sociology in, 249–55; unity and diversity of sociology reflected in, 244–49 anthropology: applied, 225; compared to sociology, 66–68, 138, 244; and critique of classical economics, 169; and ethno-science, 166; functionalist, 219; Malinowski’s definition of, 36–37; Smelser’s undergraduate studies in, 266; as threat to established order, 180

315

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applied sociology, 8–9, 126, 131, 134–35, 141, 142, 151, 157, 198, 212, 225–29, 301, 302; examples of, 225–26; instrumental approach in, 192, 197–99, 226; medical model in, 198–99, 212, 226; and social problems, 203–8; success vs. failure in, 225–30. See also policy-oriented research area studies, 305 artistic orientation in sociology, 8, 149–50, 154, 161 Ashton, T. S., 269 assassinations, political, 182, 237 authoritarian personality, 221 Ayer, A. J., 156 Bales, R. F., 271 Ball-Rokeach, S. J., 131 Baltes, Paul, 224, 236, 290–91 Bank Wiring Room study, 52 Barrett, Barbara, 290 Becker, Gary, 138 behavioral sciences, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 119, 121, 216, 294; and Berelson-Steiner project, 216, 217; disciplinary boundaries in, 138; distinguished from social sciences, 258n; economics as, 60; “mistakes” in, 210, 218; natural science as model for, 167, 211–13; political influences on, 126–28; political science as, 62 Behavior and Social Sciences (BASS) Survey, 236, 237, 274–75, 283, 285 behaviorism, 20, 41, 239 Bell, Daniel, 274 Bendix, Reinhard, 171, 277 Benedict, Ruth, 66 Berelson, Bernard, 216, 217, 218 Berger, Peter, 158 Berk, Richard A., 131 biographical factors, in social science research, 4–5, 82–101, 109–10 biology: behavioral sciences as part of, 258n; as conceptual framework, 16, 17, 18; sociological articles on, 253; sociological models based on, 211; specialization in, 137 Blalock, Hubert M., Jr., 5, 105 Blau, Peter, 2, 245 Blumer, Herbert, 120, 158, 159, 245 Booth, Charles, 124 Borgatta, Edgar F., 131, 138 Bottomore, Tom, 253 Bourdieu, Pierre, 120, 145 Brown, A. R. Radcliffe, 21 Burawoy, Michael, 117, 309

Bush, George H. W., 128 Bush, Vannevar, 9, 191 business adminstration, 138 Cambridge University, 90, 268 capitalism, 69, 85, 117, 119, 154–55 Cardoso, Fernando H., 287 case studies, 52–53, 67, 76, 160 causal analysis of social problems, 205–6 Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, 236, 289, 295, 299, 300 centrifugality, as trend in sociology, 134, 141, 143, 145 change, social: Marx on, 22–23; models of, 48, 170–72; sociology influenced by, 132– 34, 135–36 Chicago School, 155, 156, 157, 247 China, 178, 182, 308 Clapham, George, 90, 269 Clark, S. D., 68–69 Clark Kerr lectures, 303 class, social, 18, 23, 45, 52, 59, 75, 76, 89, 94, 108, 112, 117, 118, 119, 123, 128, 136, 196, 281, 309 Clausen, John, 247 clinical analysis, 159 cognitive dissonance, 215 Cold War, 184 Coleman, James S., 2, 139, 240, 245, 247 collaboration, interdisciplinary, 60, 65, 71–72, 75–79, 145 collective behavior, 18, 24, 41, 42, 43, 44, 49, 83, 93–101 colonialism, 122, 171 Commission on Behavioral Science and Education (CBASSE), 283–85, 291–92 communism, 178, 180, 182, 185, 240 comparative method, 52, 53, 277 competition, economic, 120 complexity, social, 67, 133, 174, 183, 193, 196 Comte, Auguste, 158 conceptual frameworks, 16–23, 30–31, 72, 245 Congress, U.S., 126, 127, 128, 283 conservatism, political, 22, 33, 202, 220, 238 Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA), 284, 295 control, social, 47, 48, 94, 221 controversy, scientific, 21–22 Converse, Philip, 289 Cook, Karen S., 131, 132, 138 correspondence theory of truth, 30–31 Coser, Lewis, 21

index cotton industry, in Great Britain, 88, 92 crime, 25, 33, 47, 126, 138, 175, 184, 192, 195, 198, 200, 201, 206, 222, 226, 228–29, 260, 281. See also deviance, social criminology, 175, 221–22, 239 critical sociology, 117–18, 120, 121, 123, 125, 127, 129, 142, 151, 152, 155, 157, 181, 220, 239–40, 294, 309 cross-cultural analysis, 67, 223 cultural relativism, 39, 170, 180 culture: anthropological vs. sociological study of, 66, 67; as influence on sociology, 118– 21; internationalization of, 163–64, 166, 176, 177, 193; and levels of sociological analysis, 245, 249; modern vs. traditional, 196; and sociological subfields, 42, 240 Dahrendorf, Ralf, 21 Darwin, Charles, 152, 154, 179 Davis, James, 275 deduction, in social science research, 114 democracy, 163, 178, 193, 196 demography: in academic departments, 137; as conceptual framework, 17–18; as level of analysis, 245; as subfield, 20, 42 departments, academic: demography in, 137; integrative approach in, 143–44; and interdepartmental relations, 60, 65; as social facts, 139; status of interdisciplinary research in, 259. See also disciplinary boundaries dependency theory, 171–72, 239 dependent variables: in economics, 54–55, 56, 57; in political science, 61–62; in sociology, 4, 27, 37, 39, 41–45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 96, 245 Deutsch, Karl, 213, 218 development theory, 170–72, 219–20, 239. See also modernization deviance, social, 24, 25, 41, 42, 43–44, 47, 97, 136, 156, 175, 194, 200, 201, 207, 221–22, 239 Dewey, John, 120 dialectical materialism, 40 dialogue, sociological, 120–21, 139 Dickson, William, 117 differentiation: functional, 220; social, 117, 133, 174, 193, 196; structural, 88, 89, 91–95, 97, 220 diffusion: of culture, 163, 193; of ideology, 163; of knowledge, 8, 140, 166, 172, 173, 175, 177, 183, 185, 186; of technology, 170, 193

317

diffusionism, 170, 171, 219, 221 disciplinary boundaries, 137–40, 259–60, 304, 307; conflicts arising from, 140–43. See also interdisciplinarity discovery, logic of, 212, 213–15 disturbances, social, 94 diversity of sociological research and theory, 8, 19–20, 23, 41, 49, 77, 79, 129, 134, 143, 144, 179, 213, 220–22, 245–48 Dollard, John, 215 Dore, Ronald, 171 Downs, Anthony, 63 DuBois, Cora, 67 Duncan, Otis Dudley, 275 Durkheim, Émile, 21, 52, 86, 87, 105, 111, 121, 123, 139, 158, 198, 211 dynamics, social, 22, 92, 94 Easton, David, 63–64 ecology: as conceptual framework, 17–18, 28; as subfield, 42 economic determinism, 39, 40 economic development, 170–72, 174–75, 192, 196 economic policy, 227 economics: American culture as influence on, 119, 120; classical, 167–70, 220; and collaboration between Parson and Smelser, 260, 268, 269; compared to sociology, 37, 58–60, 119, 124, 180, 244; as conceptual framework, 16; definition of, 54; equilibrium models in, 55–56; and exchange theory, 120; and functional exigencies, 44; hypotheses in, 38; and input-output analysis, 184; and interdisciplinary research, 260; international applicability of, 167–70; Keynesian, 55, 56, 57, 169, 220, 268; natural science as model for, 212; and rational choice theory, 138, 139, 167–70; relations between sociology and, 138–39; and Samuelson’s work, 54, 56; and Smelser’s studies at Harvard, 266; and Smelser’s studies at Oxford, 89–90, 268, 269; and Smelser’s work as sociologist, 260, 268, 269, 270–71; Soviet reception of American, 184–85; subject matter of, 36, 37; as threat to established order, 180; variables in, 54–57, 59 education: and development of American sociology, 124, 151–52; historical research on, 107–9, 280–81. See also academic institutions educational sociology, 132, 277–79 ego psychology, 120, 185

318

index

Elsevier Science publishers, 289–91 empirical data: and conceptual frameworks, 16–17, 30–31; distinguished from theory, 29–30; and interchange between anthropology and sociology, 68; and relations among variables, 48; and research methods, 39, 106–7; and social problems, 200, 204–5; social sciences centered on, 129; subfields based on, 25–26 encyclopedias of the social sciences, 214, 224, 237, 289–91, 300–301 Engels, Friedrich, 181 engineering, in relation to social science, 191, 212, 226 England. See Great Britain English language, sociological scholarship in, 186–87 Enlightenment, 180 environmental problems, 194 epistemology: as conceptual framework, 17; and natural science as model for human sciences, 211; and postmodernism, 219; and sociological explanation, 29, 31; and value systems, 31–32 equilibrium models, in economics, 55–56 Erikson , Erik H., 279–80, 306 Erikson, Kai, 7, 158, 280 ethnography, 142, 158, 159–60, 161, 180, 239, 254 ethnomethodology, 20, 136, 158, 239 ethno-science, 166 Etzioni, Amitai, 139 Europe, sociology in, 120–21, 123–24, 125, 145, 151–52 evaluation research, 229–30, 254 Evans, Peter, 171 evolutionary thought, 152–54, 211, 219–20, 221. See also development theory exchange: economic, 120, 168, 169, 171; of knowledge, 164–65, 177, 187 experimental method, 29, 31, 32, 33, 39, 40, 50, 53, 57, 71, 74, 75, 76, 212, 218 explanation, sociological, 26–31, 29, 31, 48–49, 70, 110–13 external influences on sociology, 6–7, 116–29; cultural, 118–21, 150–51, 237–38; political, 122, 124–29, 221, 229, 237–40, 276, 308–9; scientific, 123–24, 150; social, 121–23, 132–34, 135–36, 237–41. See also internal dynamics in sociology fact: in behavioral sciences, 216; Comte’s concept of, 158; in relation to theory, 29–31,

110–12. See also empirical data; social facts family relations, 27, 37, 42, 44, 59–60, 135, 138 feedback relations, 31, 47, 74, 100 feminism, 121, 157, 237, 239, 240, 254 Festinger, Leon, 215 findings, scientific, 216–18 Firth, Raymond, 169 Ford Foundation, 216, 258n formalization, theoretical, 49, 114, 142 Fox, Renee, 247 Free Speech Movement, 7, 271–72 French language, sociological scholarship in, 186, 187 Freud, Sigmund, 105, 121 Freudian psychology. See psychoanalysis Friedan, Betty, 254 frustration-aggression hypothesis, 215 functional exigencies, 44 functionalism: contrasted with evolutionary theory, 219; critique of, 4, 220, 221, 238, 239, 253; and psychological explanation, 113; as school of thought, 39, 41, 120; and social deviance, 221 future of sociology, 7, 131–46, 191. See also trends, social-scientific fuzziness, conceptual, 20, 160, 245, 307 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 306 Gandhi, M. K., 215 Gans, Herbert, 6 Garfinkel, Harold, 158 gender, 195, 224, 244, 254, 301, 305, 309 general systems theory, 260 generational dynamics, 118, 216, 218; in sociological discipline, 121, 145, 238, 305–6 geography, disciplinary borrowing in, 260 German Sociological Association, 8, 287 Gerschenkron, Alexander, 171 Gerstein, Dean R., 284, 286 Giddens, Anthony, 120, 145 globalization, 218, 308, 311. See also internationalization Gold, Tom, 171 Goldthorpe, John, 242 Goode, William J., 170 Gordon, Leonard, 132 Gouldner, Alvin Ward, 117, 156–57, 276, 278 government, 38, 48, 59, 122; in relation to political science, 61–62; in relation to sociology, 25, 65, 124–28, 133–34, 182, 183 grand theory, 16, 240

index Great Britain: Industrial Revolution in, 88–89, 90, 91, 92–93, 94, 95, 269; primary education in, 107–9, 110, 280–81, 288; psychoanalysis in, 185; sociology in, 118, 123–24, 182 Great Depression, 117, 121, 156 groups: as conceptual framework, 18, 19, 22, 23, 25; historical research on, 108; as level of analysis, 245; neoprimordial, 194, 196; subfields based on, 23, 25 growth of sociology: compared to economics, 50; and conceptual frameworks, 20; and disciplinary boundaries, 137–43; and scientific maturity, 4, 20, 24, 26, 40, 304; and specialization, 20–21, 137, 307; and subfields, 24–26, 41, 307 Gusfield, Joseph R., 171 Habermas, Jürgen, 117, 120, 133, 145, 174, 240 Halevy, Elie, 87 “hard” sciences, 126, 127, 161, 211, 216, 294 Harvard University: Department of Social Relations at, 87, 90, 265–68; Parsons as professor at, 90, 266, 267, 268, 276; Psychological Clinic at, 288; Smelser’s graduate education at, 90, 93, 268–69, 271, 288; Smelser’s undergraduate education at, 84, 85, 89, 90, 264–67, 268, 271, 273, 288 Hauser, Philip, 245 Hawthorne studies, 52 Henderson, Lawrence J., 30 heuristic assumption, method of, 53 Heyns, Roger, 272, 276 Hilgard, Ernest R., 274, 275 historicism, 41 history, as social science, 68–72, 107–13, 137– 38, 181, 244, 248, 258n Homans, George C., 101, 113, 138, 245, 249, 265–66 homelessness, 205, 253 homosexuality, 253 Hoover, Herbert, 198, 284 Huber, Joan, 250 Hughes, Everett, 86 humanistic orientation in sociology, 8, 141– 42, 149–50, 152, 153, 154, 311; contrasted with scientific orientation, 154–60, 161 hypotheses, sociological, 27–29, 38, 48 ideographic mode of analysis, 160 ideology: and authoritarian-personality theory, 221; and conceptual frameworks, 19,

319

21–22; functionalist, 220; and government’s relation to sociology, 127, 182; and reception of social-scientific knowledge, 182; and scientific progress, 197; and sociological subfields, 42 Illich, Ivan, 179 independent variables: in economics, 55, 56, 57; in historical science, 70; in political science, 62–63; in sociology, 4, 27, 37, 39, 45–48, 49, 70, 96, 246 indeterminacy of collective behavior, 97 individualism, 119, 120 induction, in social science research, 114 Industrial Revolution, 88–89, 90, 91, 92–93, 94, 95, 269 industrial sociology, 117, 138 inequality, social, 120, 178, 181, 194, 251, 308–9 infrastructures for knowledge diffusion, 164, 165, 166, 177; barriers in, 187–88 Inkeles, Alex, 99, 247, innovation, scientific, 31, 285, 305, 306 input-output analysis, 184 institutionalization, 43 instrumental approach to social problems, 192, 197–99, 226 integration of scientific knowledge, 7, 21, 22, 39, 77–79, 132, 143–46, 308 interdisciplinarity, 21, 60, 78, 79, 139–40, 145, 240, 293–96, 307–8; and Smelser’s institutional and organizational activity, 282–88, 289, 291–92; and Smelser’s social-scientific research, 10–11, 87, 261, 266–82, 292, 293, 303 intergenerational studies, 51 internal dynamics in sociology, 179, 221–22, 238–39, 241, 304–7; and conflicts, 140– 43, 151, 276; and dialogue, 120–21, 139; and generational difference, 121, 145, 238, 305–6. See also growth of sociology; trends, social-scientific international applicability: of classical economics, 167–70; of development theory, 170–72 International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (Smelser and Baltes), 224, 237, 289–91, 300–301 International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (Sills), 214 internationalization, 122, 133, 136, 163–64; of culture, 163–64, 166, 176, 177, 192, 193; infrastructures for, 164, 165, 166, 177, 187– 88; of knowledge in general, 164–67; and

320

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internationalization (continued) social problems, 174, 175, 183–84, 194–95; of social science knowledge, factors facilitating, 8, 172–78; of social science knowledge, factors inhibiting, 179–88 International Sociological Association (ISA), 6, 7, 8, 186, 287 intolerance, social, 51 intuitionism, 31 Kerr, Clark W., 170, 311 Keynesian economic theory, 55, 56, 57, 169, 220, 268 Kluckhohn, Clyde, 66, 87, 99, 266 knowledge: content and quality of, 165; diffusion of, 8, 140, 166, 172, 173, 175, 177, 183, 185, 186; internationalization of (See under internationalization); production and transmission of, 164–65; sociology of, 42, 116, 129, 306; types of, 167; universalization of, 165–66 Kuhn, Thomas, 219, 273 Kuznets, Simon, 270 labeling theory, 221, 239 language, as barrier to internationalization, 185–87 Lasswell,Harold, 63 Latin America: democracy in, 178; political repression in, 182; socioeconomic development in, 171; sociology in, 118, 185 law, sociology of, 25 laws, scientific, 213, 216–18 Lazarsfeld, Paul, 3, 87, 245, 247 Leach, Edmund, 160 learning theory, 138, 164 Lee, Barrett A., 132 Lefebvre, Georges, 87 legitimacy, principle of, 27, 31–34 Lenin, V. I., 85, 119, 215 Leontieff, Wassily, 184 Lerner, David, 170 Levinson, Daniel J., 87 liberalism, 46, 124, 127, 128, 202, 239, 265, 267 Library of Congress, 292, 302 Lindzey, Gardner, 87, 99, 271, 288–89 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 87, 270, 272, 274, 277 literature, sociology of, 42 logic: of discovery, 212, 213–15; as “pure” science, 116; in sociology, 29, 38 Luce, R. Duncan, 285, 286

Luckmann, Thomas, 158 Luhmann, Niklas, 145 Lundberg, George, 156 Lynd, Robert, 156, 157 macrosociology, 123, 151, 239, 247, 287 mainstream vs. nonmainstream sociology, 160–61, 254, 311 Makler, Harry, 287 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 36, 169 Mantoux, Paul, 87 Mao Zedong, 215 market relations, 168–69, 174–75, 227 Marshall, T. H., 178 Marshall Lectures, Parsons’s, 90, 268 Martinelli, Alberto, 287 Marwell, Gerald, 160 Marx, Karl, 21, 22, 85, 86, 93, 181, 182, 211 Marxism, 22–23, 40, 85, 119, 121, 122, 154, 155, 157, 220, 239, 240, 309. See also neo-Marxism mass communication, 131 mass culture, 42, 163 mass media, 163, 166, 195 mathematical models, 48–49, 60, 142, 239 mathematics: and internationalization of knowledge, 186; as “pure” science, 116 maturity, scientific, 4, 20, 24, 26, 40, 304 Mayo, Elton, 117 McClelland, David, 215 Mead, George Herbert, 120 Mead, Margaret, 306 meaning, actors endowed with, 111–13, 158 medical knowledge and science, 166, 179 medical model in applied sociology, 198–99, 212, 226 medical sociology, 135 Merton, Robert, 83, 87, 95, 105–7, 245, 247 methodology, sociological, 26–31, 32, 38–39, 49–54, 105–14, 135, 149, 239; and applied sociology, 228–30; comparative, 52, 53, 277; continuity of, 238; dilemmas in, 157– 60; internationalization of, 183–84 Meyerson, Martin, 271–72 Michels, Robert, 46, 48, 86 micro-macro relations, 145, 287 Miller, Neil, 215 Mills, C. Wright, 157, 278 mistakes, scientific, 9–10, 210, 213, 218, 230 mobility, social, 49, 51, 119 models, sociological, 4, 16, 28, 30, 38, 48–49 modernization, 163, 170–72, 183, 185, 239 Moffat, William R., 90

index Moore, Barrington, Jr., 85, 87, 93, 267, 269, 278 Moore, Wilbert, 87, 245, 270 morality: and cultural relativism, 39, 267; and moral entrepreneurs, 155, 203, 204; and moral philosophy, 29, 63, 84, 89; and moral problems, 24, 129, 192, 201, 203, 204, 223; and social order, 119, 120, 170, 173; and social reform, 141, 154, 155; and sociological research, 142, 150, 155, 167 Morrill Act of 1862, 124, 152 motivation, human, 22, 54, 59, 73, 75, 132, 158, 207, 215 movements, social, 135–36, 193–94, 196, 253, 274, 278 Mullins, Nicholas C., 118 Murray, Henry A., 87, 99, 271 music, sociology of, 42 National Academy of Sciences, 7, 140, 261, 274, 275, 283, 284, 286, 293, 295 National Institute of Mental Health, 128 National Research Council, 7, 9, 140, 236, 283, 291, 302 National Science Foundation, 126, 127, 161, 275, 295 naturalism, evolutionary, 152–54 natural science, 9, 10, 150, 167, 173, 179, 186, 197–98, 218, 219; as model for social science, 150, 167, 179–80, 197–98, 211–13 neofunctionalism, 220 neo-Keynesian theory, 220 neo-Marxism, 33, 117, 121, 136, 142, 185, 221– 22, 238, 239 neophilia, 306 neoprimordialism, 194, 196 neo-Weberian theory, 121, 136, 238 Newtonian physics, 167, 211 Nisbet, Robert, 246 nominalism, 40 nomothetic mode of analysis, 160 norms, 19, 43, 44, 96, 200–201 Ogburn, William Fielding, 155–56, 198, 219 oligarchy, 46 operative variables, 50, 52, 53, 58, 94 organicist school, 39 organizations: as external influence on sociology, 116, 125–28, 134–35, 140; internationalization of, 166; and levels of sociological analysis, 245; oligarchy in, 46 Oxford University: Smelser as Rhodes scholar at, 89–91, 267–69, 273

321

parameters, in social research, 50, 52 Park, Robert, 155 Parsons, Talcott, 120, 240, 245, 247, 253; on American university system, 277–79; as Cambridge University lecturer, 90, 268; and collaboration with Platt, 277–79; and collaboration with Smelser, 90–91, 260, 268–69, 277–79; and conceptual frameworks, 21; critiques of, 117, 145, 276, 278– 79; and disagreement with Smelser, 277– 79; on dynamic analysis, 22; and formal models, 49; as Harvard University professor, 90, 266, 267, 268, 276; as influence on Smelser’s work, 84, 85, 87, 90–92, 99, 271, 305; Marshall Lectures delivered by, 90, 268; and personal relations with Smelser, 90–91, 105, 268–69, 305; Smelser as student of, 90, 266, 267, 268; and synthesis of economics and sociology, 260; and theory of action, 49, 92, 266; and voluntarism, 120 pattern variable analysis, 159–60 Peltason, Jack, 289 person: distinguished from role, 18–19; natural-scientific models of the, 211; in social context, 245; as variable in psychological science, 73 personality, study of, 22, 23–24, 42, 66, 73–74, 75, 101, 138, 221, 222 phenomenology, 40, 112, 123, 142, 151, 158, 211, 239 Pike, Kenneth C., 132 Platt, Gerald M., 277–78 pluralism, sociological, 143, 144–45, 241 Polanyi, Karl, 169 policy-oriented research, 61–62, 132, 142 political relations, 44, 46; and democratization, 178; as influence on sociology, 122, 124–29, 221, 229, 237–40, 276, 308–9; and reception of social-scientific knowledge, 179–84, 294; and social problems, 202, 203 political science: behavioral approach in, 62, 258n; compared to sociology, 64–65, 244; critical approach in, 181; research methods in, 64; sociological methods used in, 137; variables in, 61–64 popular culture, 163 popularization of social science, 306 positivism, 31, 40, 111, 117, 158, 199, 211, 238, 239 postmodernism, 211, 219, 220, 240, 260, 311 pragmatism, 119, 120, 124

322

index

prediction, in social science, 117, 136. See also future of sociology problems, social, 8, 9, 24–25, 47, 48, 126, 128, 129, 135, 136, 140, 153–55, 157, 191–208; causes of, 202, 205–6; determination of, 199–203; future of, 192–96; instrumental approach to, 192, 197–99; and internationalization, 174, 175, 183–84, 194–95; medical approach to, 198–99; political aspects of, 202, 203; as process, 9, 204, 208; social-scientific study of, 9, 203–8, 305, 308; and technological change, 192–93, 194, 198; utilitarian approach to, 192, 198 problems, sociological, 83–84, 87–88, 98, 110–11 process models, 48 progress, idea of, 174, 192, 197 progressive evolutionism, 152–54 Progressive movement, 124, 152, 155 propaganda, 40, 121, 191, 305 Proxmire, William, 127, 182, 283 psychoanalysis: American culture as influence on, 120; anthropological vs. sociological, 66; and collective behavior, 101; and family studies, 138; models in, 38; and Smelser’s interdisciplinary research, 261, 271, 279, 292; Smelser’s training in, 99, 271, 279–80; sociocultural factors in reception of, 180, 185 psychology: American culture as influence on, 119–20; compared to social sciences, 72–76, 124, 180, 244; as conceptual framework, 16, 18, 28; and deviance studies, 221–22; ego, 120, 185; and historical research, 111–13; natural science as model for, 211, 212; relations between sociology and, 138; and social mobility, 49; sociocultural resistance to, 180, 182; and stress, 101; variables in, 28, 99, 100. See also social psychology Pullum, Thomas W., 131 quantitative analysis, 62, 72, 77, 122, 142, 151, 158–59, 160, 184, 197, 212, 250, 309. See also mathematical models race relations, 25, 127, 207, 227, 308–9 radical sociology, 22, 120, 156, 157, 167, 176, 197, 217, 220, 239, 294, 311. See also critical sociology Ramsoy, Natalie Rogoff, 242 rational-choice theory, 138, 139, 167–70, 220, 240, 259

rationalism, 31 Reagan, Ronald, 7, 127, 182, 284 realism, 40 reductionism, 74, 101 Reed, John S., 302–3 reform, social, 8, 70, 100, 108, 111, 119, 124, 142, 152–55, 157, 181, 197, 202, 226–28, 238, 272, 276, 281, 309, 311 relativism, cultural, 39, 170, 180 religion, 44, 52, 108, 135, 179, 248, 253, 281 research, knowledge created and codified through, 164 research, social-scientific: biographical factors in, 4–5, 82–101, 109–10; in economics, 57–58; evaluation of, 5, 113–14; external factors in, 116–29; in historical science, 71, 72, 107–13; institutional support for, 126; and integration of scientific knowledge, 7, 78, 132, 143–46; Merton on, 105–7; in political science, 64; psychological meaning attributed to actors in, 111– 13; in psychology, 74, 75–76; in relation to facts, 110–12; in relation to theory, 105– 14; selectivity in, 110–11, 182–85; in sociology, 39, 49–54, 105–14 resource mobilization theory, 253 revolution, social, 8, 23, 48, 85, 100, 117, 135, 139, 155, 181, 238, 259 Reynolds, Larry T., 117 Rhodes Scholarship, 89, 267 Riecken, Henry W., 274, 275 Riesman, David, 306 Roethlisberger, F. J., 215 Roethlisberger, Fritz, 117 roles, social, 16, 18–19, 43, 120 Rossi, Alice, 244 Rossi, Peter, 247, 283 Rostow, Walter W., 92, 306 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 180 Rowntree, Benjamin C., 124 rural sociology, 42 Russell Sage Foundation, 236, 288, 295 Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, 90 Samuelson, Paul, 54, 56 sanctions, social, 43, 206 San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, 99, 279 Scheuch, Erwin, 242 Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 306 schools of thought, scientific, 39–40, 41, 120, 215, 219, 304 Schumpeter, Joseph, 122

index scientific orientation in sociology, 8, 141–42, 149–50, 154; contrasted with humanistic orientation, 154–60, 161 scientific status of sociology, 126–28, 142, 149, 150, 155, 167, 179–80, 197–98, 211–13, 294. See also maturity, scientific; natural science, as model for social science scope of sociology, 2–3; compared to other social sciences, 35–36, 58–60, 245; and conceptual frameworks, 16–23, 245; and disciplinary boundaries, 137–43; and empirical data, 16–17; and principle of legitimacy, 31–34; and subfields, 23–26, 41 selectivity in social-scientific research, 110–11, 182–85 Selznick, Philip, 277 Sewell, William H., 3, 275 Sica, Alan, 312 Simmel, Georg, 21, 181 Smelser, Neil J.: childhood of, 10, 262–64; Clark Kerr lectures presented by, 303; and collaboration with Baltes, 224, 290– 91, 300; and collaboration with Erikson, 280; and collaboration with Parsons, 90–91, 260, 268–69, 277–79; and collaboration with Reed, 302–3; and collaboration with Wallerstein, 279; as director of Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, 289, 299, 300; as director of Education Abroad Program, 281, 282; and disagreement with Parsons, 277–79; as editor of American Sociological Review, 236, 237, 261, 270; encyclopedia of the social sciences coedited by, 224, 237, 289– 91, 300–301; and engagement with Parsons’s work, 84, 85, 87, 99, 266, 268, 271; family relations of, 84, 262–65, 269–70, 280; as Harvard graduate student, 90, 93, 268–69, 271, 288; as Harvard undergraduate, 84, 85, 89, 90, 264–67, 268, 271, 273, 288; high-school education of, 263– 64; institutional and organizational activity of, 236–37, 282–88, 289, 291–92; intellectual influences on, 84–87, 99, 266, 267, 271; interviewed for oral history, 2; as Oxford student, 89–91, 267–69, 273; and personal relations with Erikson, 279– 80; and personal relations with Parsons, 90–91, 105, 268–69, 270, 277–79; psychoanalytic training and research of, 99, 271, 279–80, 292; as Rhodes scholar, 89–91, 267; as Russell Sage Foundation resident

323

fellow, 288; as student of Parsons, 90, 266, 267, 268; and University of California academic leadership roles, 6–7, 272, 282–83, 289; as University of California at Berkeley assistant chancellor, 272, 282; as University of California at Berkeley professor, 3, 87, 93, 269–82, 292, 299; as University of California national laboratories advisor, 9; and University of California systemwide University Professorship, 275–76; University of Chicago visited by, 86; works by: Comparative Methods in the Social Sciences, 277; Dynamics of the Contemporary University, 303; Economy and Society (with Parsons), 90–91; The Faces of Terrorism, 302; International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (coedited with Baltes), 224, 237, 289–91, 300–301; The Odyssey Experience, 302, 303; Problematics of Sociology, 292, 312; Reflections on the University of California, 302, 303; Social Change in the Industrial Revolution, 4, 83, 88, 95, 98; Social Paralysis and Social Change, 281, 288; Sociological Theory—A Contemporary View, 3; Sociology, 287; Sociology: An Introduction, 274; The Sociology of Economic Life, 270–71, 274; Theory of Collective Behavior, 4–5, 83, 100, 101, 270, 274; Usable Social Science (with Reed), 302–3 social action, 49, 92, 95, 96, 97, 266 Social Darwinism, 153, 154 social facts, 111, 139, 198, 200, 204, 211, 238, 239 socialism, 46, 118–19, 133, 153, 155, 175, 178, 180, 182, 184, 185, 196 socialization, 42, 44, 66, 223, 278 social psychology: and collective behavior, 98–101; as conceptual framework, 18, 20, 23; future of, 132; as subfield, 23, 42; variables in, 159 Social Science Research Council, 236, 261, 274, 288, 295 “soft” sciences, 20, 60, 150, 161, 311 Sorokin, Pitirim, 120, 267, 304–5 Soviet Union, 118–19, 179, 182, 184–85, 240 Spanish language, sociological scholarship in, 186, 187 specialization, 7, 20–21, 137–38, 144, 253, 307 Spencer, Herbert, 148, 152, 220 Sperlich, Sonja, 286

324

index

Stanford University, 243 state. See government static models, 48 statistical method, 50–52, 53, 58, 158–59, 239 Steiner, Gary A., 216, 217, 218 Stockman, David, 127, 182 Stouffer, Samuel A., 85, 87, 267 strain, as social variable, 47, 48, 96, 97, 100 stratification, social, 24, 27, 41, 42, 53, 59, 118, 119, 131, 136, 166, 195, 239, 247, 250 stress, psychological, 101 Strong, Edward, 271 structure, social: as conceptual framework, 19, 22, 23, 25; and dependent variables, 41–44; and explanation, 27–28; and functional exigencies, 44; and historical research, 108–9; and independent variables, 45; as level of analysis, 245; and social psychology, 99; and strain control, 47, 48; and structural differentiation, 88, 89, 91–95, 97; subfields based on, 23, 25 subfields, 20, 23–26, 42, 117, 131, 132, 136–37, 142, 239, 307 Sumner, William Graham, 148–49, 153, 154 survey resarch, 40, 51–52, 58, 65, 124, 126, 137, 159, 177, 226, 227 Swanson, Guy, 277 Swets, John, 292 symbolic interactionism, 20, 41, 120, 239 Taine, Hippolyte, 87 Taueber, Carl, 247 Taylor, F. W., 215 teaching, 164–65 technology: development of, 133, 163, 192– 93, 194, 198, 225; diffusion of, 170, 193 terrorism, 222, 302 theory, sociological: and conceptual frameworks, 30–31; dilemmas in, 157–60; diminution of interest in, 253, 308; and disciplinary boundaries, 137–43; distinguished from empirical data, 29–30; diversity in, 49–50; and formalization, 49; and integration of sociological subdivisions, 7, 132, 143–46, 308; and integration with other social sciences, 78–79; logical ordering in, 38; Merton on, 105–7; in relation to facts, 30–31, 110–12; in relation to methodology, 135, 253; in relation to research, 105– 14; social change as influence on, 136; systemic levels in, 122; variables in, 28–29 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 86, 87, 121, 178 Touraine, Alain, 120, 145

trade unions, 46, 185 Treiman, Donald, 283 trends, social, as influence on sociology, 121– 22, 237–41 trends, social-scientific, 11, 131–46, 191, 237– 41, 307–12 Truman, Harry, 191 Turk, Herman, 131 Turner, Ralph, 247 unemployment, 56, 60, 121, 126, 169, 184, 195, 205, 207, 227, 305 unity of sociological research and theory, 8, 244–49. See also integration of scientific knowledge universality: of development theory, 170–72; of economic theory, 169; of knowledge in general, 165–66; of social self-descriptions, 172–73 universities. See academic institutions University of California at Berkeley: Free Speech Movement at, 7, 271–72; Smelser as professor at, 3, 87, 93, 269–89, 292, 299; Smelser as assistant chancellor at, 272, 282; Smelser’s academic leadership roles at, 6–7, 272, 282–83; Smelser’s essays on, 302 University of California statewide system: Smelser as chair of Academic Council of, 7, 275–76; Smelser as member of President’s Advisory Committee in, 9; Smelser’s University Professorship at, 275–76 University of Chicago, 86, 155, 156, 247, 270 University of Chicago Press, 95 University of Wisconsin at Madison, 275 urban sociology, 42, 132, 247, 249 utilitarianism, 167, 192, 198, 212, 226 values, 19, 31–32, 43, 96, 151; and social problems, 200–201; and value-free analysis, 15, 142, 151, 217 variables: in anthropology, 66; in economics, 54–57, 59, 60; in historical science, 70; and integration of scientific knowledge, 66; and internationalization of knowledge, 166; in political science, 61–64; in psychology, 73, 74; in social psychology, 159; in sociology, 4, 27, 28, 37–38, 39, 41–51, 52, 60, 66, 70, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 228, 245– 46. See also dependent variables; independent variables; operative variables

index Vasconcellos, John, 199 Veblen, Thorstein, 157 Vietnam War, 237 voluntarism, 119, 120 Wallace, Walter, 110 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 171 Wallerstein, Robert, 279 weapons research, 9 Weber, Max, 86, 105, 121, 122, 123, 136, 154, 181. See also neo-Weberian theory welfare, social, 153, 226, 227

325

welfare dependency, 192, 199, 201 welfare state, 125, 133, 174, 178, 201 White, Robert, 87 Wilensky, Harold L., 3, 277 Wittrock, Björn, 290 women: in sociological profession, 244; sociological research on, 254 working class, 28, 89, 94 world-system theory, 239 Worswick, G. D. N., 90, 269 Zeno’s paradox, 116