Just received this on a list... might be of interest to our members.
Greg Smith (Research Fellow at Centre for Institutional Studies in UEL)
http://homepages.uel.ac.uk/G.Smith/
34 Broadgate
PRESTON
Lancs.
PR1 8DU
Phone no. 01772 827987
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> From: [log in to unmask][SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: 30 September 2002 15:18:57
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: [ACTS-TALK] What happened to sociology?
> Auto forwarded by a Rule
>
This was in the October First Things. I'm wondering if it would initiate
discussion?
Whatever Happened to Sociology?
Peter L. Berger
The title question has been asked frequently in recent years, both within
and outside the field. I think that it can be answered rather easily:
sociology has fallen victim to two severe deformations. The first began in
the 1950s; I would label it as methodological fetishism. The second was part
of the cultural revolution that started in the late 1960s; it sought to
transform sociology from a science into an instrument of ideological
advocacy. As a wider public became increasingly aware of these changes,
sociology lost the prestigious status it once occupied in American cultural
life, lost its attraction to the brightest students, and, not so
incidentally, lost a lot of its funding.
I am not a disinterested observer of these developments. As a young
sociologist, still full of enthusiasm for my chosen discipline, I wrote
Invitation to Sociology. It was published in 1963, before the second
deformation began and while the first one still seemed containable. The
little book is still in print and still gets students interested in
sociology. My own view of the discipline has not changed fundamentally since
then, and I do not regret what I wrote at the time. But whenever I am asked
about the book (especially by students), I have to say that the picture I
painted of the discipline bears little relation to what goes on in it today.
The relation is a bit like that of the Marxian utopia to what used to be
called "real existing socialism."
The 1950s were a sort of golden age for sociology, even as the first
deformation was beginning to develop. There were three powerful academic
centers from which eager young teachers fanned out across the provincial
hinterlands. At Harvard there was the imposing figure of Talcott Parsons,
putting together, book by book, the theoretical system known as "structural
functionalism" and producing a growing body of active disciples. Parsons
wrote terrible prose (it read like a bad translation from German), but he
dealt with the "big questions" that had been the subject matter of sociology
from its beginnings: What holds a society together? What is the relation
between beliefs and institutions? How does change come about? What is
modernity? At Columbia University there were two other figures, almost as
impressive-Robert Merton, who taught what could be called a more moderate
version of "structural functionalism," and Paul Lazarsfeld, who helped
develop increasingly sophisticated quantitative methods but who never forgot
the "big questions" that these methods were supposed to help answer. And at
the University of Chicago there was still the lively presence of two
distinctively American traditions of sociology-the blend of sociology with
social psychology, called "symbolic interactionism," which began with the
work of George Herbert Mead (who had taught at Chicago most of his life),
and the so-called "Chicago school" of urban sociology, which had produced a
whole library of insightful empirical studies of many aspects of American
life. Columbia and Chicago also sent out their young graduates across the
country and, increasingly, to foreign universities; Europeans came to study
sociology in America and European sociology for a while had the character of
an American missionary enterprise.
What I mean by "methodological fetishism" is the dominance of methods over
content. In principle this could happen with any method in the human
sciences; in fact the methods have been invariably quantitative. Statistics
became the mother science for sociologists. Now, there can be no question
but that statistical analysis has been a useful tool in many areas. We live
in a society comprising millions of people and statistics is designed
precisely to make sense of such a society without having to interview every
one of its members. To say this, however, is a long way from assenting to
the widespread implication that nothing is worth studying that cannot be
analyzed quantitatively.
In order for data to be analyzed statistically, they must be produced by
means of a standardized questionnaire. This means, inevitably, that people
are asked to reply to a limited number of typically simple questions.
Sometimes this works; sometimes it does not. Take the example of the
sociology of religion. One can get useful data by asking people how often
they have gone to church in the last four weeks (leave aside the fact that,
as has been shown, they sometimes lie about this). But then such
questionnaires try to cover beliefs as well as behavior, and there the
meaning of the replies is much less clear. Even such a seemingly simple
question as "Do you believe in God?" will be interpreted by respondents in
so many different ways that their replies are hard to analyze, let alone
capable of helping a researcher construct something like, say, an index of
orthodoxy. This does not mean that the intentions behind these replies could
not be clarified; it only means that survey research is not a good way of
doing so.
The reasons for this worship of quantitative methods are probably twofold.
As often happens in intellectual history, there is a mix of "ideal" and
"material" factors (the sociology of knowledge is the attempt to sort out
such mixes). On the level of ideas, there is the enormous prestige of the
natural sciences, in which quantitative methods are indispensable, and
little sociologists want to be as much as possible like their big brothers
in physics. On the level of material interests, many of those who fund
social research (such as government agencies) want results that are within
very small "margins of error" and can therefore be presented as unassailably
scientific arguments for this or that course of action. This too pushes
toward quantitative methods. In sociology as in many other areas of
endeavor, he who pays the piper calls the tune.
Methodological fetishism has resulted in many sociologists using
increasingly sophisticated methods to study increasingly trivial topics. It
has also meant that sociological studies have become increasingly expensive.
Earlier sociologists (such as those of the "Chicago school") would go into a
community, check into a cheap hotel, and spend the next months observing and
talking to their neighbors. Latter-day sociologists, as a joke has it, need
a million-dollar grant to find their way to the nearest house of ill repute.
Inevitably, the "big questions" tend to get lost in this version of
sociology. Its results can still be useful to this or that institution (say,
a government agency that wants to find out how many people are making use of
one of its programs, and perhaps even what those people think about it), but
they are unlikely to be of interest to a wider public.
The ideologization of sociology has been even more devastating. However
trivial or simplistic have been the results of methodological fetishism, at
least they have been produced by objective investigations that merit the
name of science. The ideologues who have been in the ascendancy for the last
thirty years have deformed science into an instrument of agitation and
propaganda (the Communists used to call this "agitprop"), invariably for
causes on the left of the ideological spectrum. The core scientific
principle of objectivity has been ignored in practice and denied validity in
theory. Thus a large number of sociologists have become active combatants in
the "culture wars," almost always on one side of the battle lines. And this,
of course, has alienated everyone who does not share the beliefs and values
of this ideological camp.
The ideological amalgam that is transported by this propaganda campaign is,
broadly speaking, of Marxist provenance. But the adherents of Marxism proper
have considerably shrunk in numbers. (In the wake of the demise of "real
existing socialism," those who remain have a certain heroic quality, like
adherents of flat earth theory in the wake of the Copernican revolution.)
The ideology is not so much Marxist as marxisant in its antagonism to
capitalism and to bourgeois culture, in its denial of scientific
objectivity, in its view of the combatant role of intellectuals, and, last
but not least, in its fanaticism. In recent years this version of sociology
has intoned the mantra of "class, race, and gender."
The first term of the mantra is still the most visibly marxisant, except for
its substitution of the working class by other categories of alleged
victims, such as, notably, the people of developing societies as described
by theories of neo-imperialism. The anticapitalism of the ideology is also
expressed by way of environmental concerns and, most recently, in opposition
to globalization. "Race" and "gender," of course, refer to a variety of
victimological categories-racial and ethnic minorities, women, gays and
lesbians (recently expanded to include transvestites and transsexuals-one
wonders whether there are enough of those to make up a credible group of
victims). The ideological amalgam here draws from the theorists of
multiculturism and feminism. Unlike the doctrines of orthodox Marxism, some
elements in the amalgam are in tension with each other. For instance, how do
multiculturalists and feminists negotiate a topic like "Islamic modesty"?
But logical inconsistency has only rarely been an obstacle to ideological
dominance (the Leninists were an exception in their insistence on relentless
conformity). And, as has been amply documented, this particular ideology,
with its stultifying mantra, has become dominant not only in much of
sociology but in many of the other human sciences. Along with methodological
fetishism, this ideological propaganda has been a crucial factor in the
decline of sociology, and not only in America.
I don't want to exaggerate. Here and there one can still find sociologists
doing excellent work. Since I mentioned the sociology of religion, let me
refer here to the work of Nancy Ammerman, Jose Casanova, James Davison
Hunter, and Robert Wuthnow. And there are still sociologists who, in one way
or another, address the "big questions," such as Irving Louis Horowitz and
Orlando Patterson in America, or Anthony Giddens and the recently deceased
Niklas Luhmann in Europe. But the contributions of these sociologists, none
of whom have created anything resembling a school of thought, only serve to
underline the overall depressing condition of this discipline. It would take
an enormous and sustained effort to reverse this condition. I'm relieved to
observe that I am both too old and too occupied elsewhere to participate in
such an effort.
Sociology originated in the attempt to understand the profound
transformations brought about by the processes of modernity. Its basic
question, to paraphrase the question asked in the Passover ritual, was "Why
does this age differ from every other age?" In its classical period, roughly
between 1890 and 1930, sociology flourished principally in three
countries-France, Germany, and the United States. In each country the basic
question took somewhat different forms, due to differing intellectual and
political milieus. Sociology produced such intellectual giants as (mile
Durkheim and Max Weber, and powerful schools of thought derived from their
work. Given the structure of modern academic life, sociology became a
distinct discipline and a profession. However, one could argue that, unlike
other disciplines (such as political science or economics), sociology does
not concern itself with a delineated field of human life. It is a
perspective rather than a field (a perspective which, incidentally, I tried
to describe in Invitation to Sociology). This perspective (sometimes
misunderstood, often correctly applied) has greatly influenced virtually all
of the other social sciences as well as the humanities. Perhaps, then,
sociology has fulfilled its purpose and its eventual demise should be seen
as less than an intellectual catastrophe.
PETER L. BERGER is Director of the recently founded Institute on Religion
and World Affairs at Boston University.
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