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Beyond Sociology's Tower of Babel:
Reconstructing the Scientific Method
Bernard Phillips
In memory of C. Wright Mills
who gave us a vision for sociology's future
(New York: Aldine, 2001)
PREFACE
PART ONE THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD: BUREAUCRATIC AND INTERACTIVE PARADIGMS
Chapter 1 SOCIOLOGY AND THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD
Problems with Bureaucratic Science
Orientation to Problems
Moving up Language’s Ladder of Abstraction
Moving Down the Ladder of Abstraction
Integrating Knowledge
Worldviews
A Scientific Method for Sociology
Definition of the Problem
High Level of Abstraction
Low Level of Abstraction
Integration of Knowledge
Reflexive Analysis and Interactive Worldview
Chapter 2 CULTURAL AND SOCIOLOGICAL PARADIGMS
Cultural Paradigms and Worldviews
John Dewey
Thomas Kuhn
Harold Kincaid
Sociology’s Paradigm
David A. Snow
Thomas J. Scheff
PART TWO ILLUSTRATING THE WEB APPROACH TO THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD
Chapter 3 THE INVISIBLE CRISIS OF MODERN SOCIETY
Anomie
Alienation
Social Stratification
Relative Deprivation: A Missing Link
Chapter 4 ADDRESSING THE INVISIBLE CRISIS
Interaction and the Crisis: General
The Idea of Interaction
Interaction among a Web of Sociological Concepts
Interaction and Feedback Loops
Interaction and the Crisis: Specific
Revolutions
Satyagraha
The Individual and Awareness of Emotions
PART THREE SOME IMPLICATIONS FOR SOCIOLOGY
Chapter 5 REFLEXIVITY
Toward a Reflexive Sociology
Gouldner’s Vision
Carrying Forward Gouldner’s Vision
Social Technology for a Reflexive Sociology
Basic Research
The Reconstructed Method as a Tool for All Social Scientists
Some Programmatic Ideas for Using a Web Culture Lag Theory
The Iron Law of Oligarchy
The Pygmalion Effect
The Process of Secularization
The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Action
Increasing Divorce Rate
The Life Cycle of the Church
The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
The Change in Emphasis from
Production to Consumption
The New Social Movements of the Twentieth Approach: Social Change Illustrated
Century
Applied Research
Teaching
A Negative Example: Consultants Using System Dynamics
Dewey, Freire, Illich, Pecotche and Gandhi
John Dewey
Paulo Freire
Ivan Illich
Carlos Bernardo Gonzalez Pecotche
Mohandas Gandhi
Toward Reflexive Teaching
Chapter 6 LANGUAGE AND EMOTIONS
Strengthening Linguistic Tools
Abstract Concepts
Causal-Loop Diagrams
Allegories for Understanding Language
Nineteen Eighty-Four
The Languages of Pao
Back to the Future
Part One The Scientific Method: Bureaucratic and Interactive Paradigms
Part Two Illustrating the Web Approach to the Scientific Method
Part Three Some Implications for Sociology
Some Concluding Remarks
PREFACE
C. Wright Mills, who turned me as a student at Columbia College in 1950 from medicine to sociology, embodied Auguste Comte’s Enlightenment dream as to the promise of sociology. If the biophysical sciences had created the basis for problem-solving technologies now known as the industrial revolution, surely the discipline of sociology could manage to do the same for the enormous social problems facing society. If the scientific method had been the chief instrument for transforming societies from the seventeenth century onward, why couldn’t that same instrument help us to direct that transformation toward ends that human beings desire? The attention given to Mills by the discipline, despite the fact that he was a loner who wrote mainly for a popular audience, is illustrated by the rating given to The Sociological Imagination in 1998 by the members of the International Sociological Association. It achieved the second highest rating among books published in the twentieth century considered to be the most influential for sociologists, preceded by Weber’s Economy and Society and followed by Merton’s Social Theory and Social Structure, Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Berger’s and Luckman’s The Social Construction of Reality, Bourdieu’s Distinction, Elias’ The Civilizing Process, Habermas’ The Theory of Communicative Action, Parsons’ The Structure of Social Action and Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
Despite that rating along with the widespread lip service given to the idea of “the sociological imagination,” Mills’ methodological achievements in that book and elsewhere have been barely noticed relative to his contributions to political sociology. He gave us a vision of a sociology that would dare to define the most fundamental problems facing the human race as research problems. I recall a day in the Spring of 1958 when we were both on a plane to Champaign-Urbana where he was to deliver a lecture based on his book, The Causes of World War III. In addition to his defining basic research problems, the breadth of the approach he advised for all of us sociologists, and others as well, is suggested by this familiar quote:
. . .that imagination is the capacity to shift from one perspective to another-- from the political to the psychological; from examination of a single family to comparative assessments of the national budgets of the world. . . [1959: 7].
And there is also his reflexive orientation, illustrated in his Appendix--”On Intellectual Craftsmanship”-- with these words: “the most admirable thinkers within the scholarly community you have chosen to join do not split their work from their lives.” This was an orientation strengthened in 1970 by Gouldner’s call for a “reflexive sociology” in The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology.
What is the state of modern sociology with respect to Mills’ orientation to basic problems, to intellectual breadth and to a reflexive orientation? In the early 1940s while still a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, Mills analyzed some fifty textbooks on social problems in order to learn about “the style of reflection and the social-historical basis of American sociology”:
The level of abstraction which characterizes these texts is so low that often they seem to be empirically confused for lack of abstraction to knit them together. They display bodies of meagerly connected facts, ranging from rape in rural districts to public housing, and intellectually sanction this low level of abstraction. . .Collecting and dealing in a fragmentary way with scattered problems and facts of milieux, these books are not focused on larger stratifications or upon structured wholes [1943: 166].
Mills’ criticism could just as easily apply to contemporary sociology. We now have some forty Sections of the American Sociological Association with their “meagerly connected facts.” And a basis for this state of affairs is still a “low level of abstraction,” given our orientation to Merton’s “theories of the middle range.” The problems we tend to define for study are no more fundamental than “rape in rural districts” and “public housing.” And despite Mills and Gouldner, our research is characterized by little reflexivity.
It appears that at this time in history we have experienced a century of sociology’s failures to achieve the rapid cumulative development sought by Comte, Mills, Gouldner and the rest of us, and this has been coupled with a century of awesome and apparently escalating problems in modern society. Given this state of affairs, it is no wonder that almost all of us have turned to “the falsification of memory” and “the technique of particularization,” procedures described by Vidich and Bensman in their 1960 study of Springdalers. We have largely succeeded in burying our Enlightenment dreams for the promise of sociology by immersing ourselves within highly specialized areas of study. We behave much like the Springdaler who “instead of entertaining the youthful dream of a 500-acre farm, entertains the plan to buy a home freezer by the fall.” And the result for us appears to be much like that for the Springdalers:
Because they do not recognize their defeat, they are not defeated. The compromises, the self-deception and the self-avoidance are mechanisms which work; for, in operating on the basis of contradictory, illogical and conflicting assumptions, they are able to cope in their day-to-day lives with their immediate problems in a way that permits some degree of satisfaction, recognition and achievement. . .[1960: 320].
Yet as we examine our situation in the 21st century, we contemporary sociologists find ourselves in a position to open up to those falsified memories and to challenge our techniques of particularization by building on Mills’ ideas, such as his emphasis on basic problems. For example, the very fact that modern problems appear to be increasing--such as the escalation of technologies for delivering weapons of mass destruction--makes it ever more difficult for us to continue to bury our heads in the sand. It is becoming more and more obvious to us sociologists that we have failed to give society the platform of knowledge it needs as a basis for constructing social technologies in all institutions which can confront our complex social problems. If we look outside the discipline we find little credibility given to us as scientists, And we are learning to see ever more clearly the contradiction between our scientific ideals and what we have in fact achieved within the discipline. Instead of sociological knowledge based on the full range of our findings, what we have are separate pieces of knowledge located within the diverse areas of the discipline. Instead of knowledge that is rapidly cumulating, we have fads and fashions in the ideas and terms we use with relatively little cumulative development. And we even have questions raised by some postmodernists as well as others as to the possibility of any “scientific method” that can be applied to human behavior.
In addition to this increasing attention to fundamental problems outside and inside of the discipline, we are now in a much better position to follow Mills’ lead of shuttling up and down language’s ladder of abstraction, giving us increasing ability to integrate our “bodies of meagerly connected facts, ranging from rape in rural districts to public housing.” For example, the very fragmentation of sociology into forty Sections has yielded greater understanding of the enormous complexity of human behavior, suggesting that pessimism and cynicism about the discipline’s achievements and potential is premature. Further, a new sociological understanding of the limitations of positivism’s quantitative one-sidedness opens up a much broader approach to the scientific method. Abstract concepts and theory have come to the fore as essential ingredients for developing a science of sociology, just as they have proved to be essential for the biophysical sciences. And the contemporary philosophy of science and social science points up alternatives to positivistic assumptions, such as the inevitability of being carried to truth by the scientific method, the importance of isolated hypotheses and the centrality of exact prediction. Instead, we emerge with a web orientation to the scientific method, where no proposition is seen in isolation from all others and where--following Mills--we shuttle up and down language’s ladder of abstraction.
It is also possible to go beyond Mills’ and Gouldner’s ideas about reflexivity. To illustrate, we might begin with Kuhn’s view of scientific revolutions as stemming from awareness of contradictions within an existing scientific paradigm that are resolved within an alternative one. By extending his idea of scientific paradigms to cultural paradigms, his thesis implies that cultural revolutions also require awareness of existing contradictions that are resolved within an alternative cultural paradigm. Reflexivity points us exactly in this direction, examining our work and life with an eye toward uncovering contradictions and coming up with an alternative cultural paradigm where they could be resolved. Such reflexivity need not be limited to a vague metaphor. Instead, the concept of “cultural paradigm” can become a highly systematic one when linked to other abstract concepts within the reconstructed scientific method suggested by Mills’ notion of shuttling up and down the ladder of abstraction. From this perspective, we can proceed systematically to question--reflexively--our taken-for-granted assumptions, following the direction suggested metaphorically by Gouldner:
The historical mission of a Reflexive Sociology. . .would be to transform the sociologist, to penetrate deeply into his daily life and work. . .and to raise the sociologist’s self-awareness to a new historical level [1970: 489].
The difficulties involved in reconstructing our present approach to the scientific method appear to be extraordinary, for that approach is nested within our cultural paradigm. Just as we have relatively isolated Sections within the American Sociological Association, so do we have institutions within society along with organizations within the economy and occupations within organizations which have little contact with one another. Granting that a reflexive approach would raise up this nested relationship to full view, we would then be presented with an enormous contradiction between scientific ideals and practices that are supported by our fundamental way of life. And just as in the case of the Springdalers, we would be presented with youthful ideals which we have failed to reach. Under these circumstances, what would prevent us from reverting to our present cultural paradigm which gives us procedures for the falsification of memory through techniques of particularization? By so doing, we would at least be able to obtain “some degree of recognition, satisfaction and achievement.” This is exactly the difficulty I am facing as author of this book. I am asking readers to raise to the surface taken-for-granted assumptions about the scientific method and to examine their departure from scientific ideals, a task that also will show the departure of our cultural paradigm from our basic cultural values.
Yet if we follow Kuhn’s argument further--an argument strengthened by much that sociologists have learned about society--we find that awareness of such contradictions can yield changes in a scientific paradigm. If a new paradigm is developed within which those contradictions are resolved, then we can expect a shift to that paradigm, and this is exactly the approach I take in the following chapters. I outline new scientific and cultural paradigms and sketch their potential for resolving contradictions within the old ones. I do this not because I believe that I have succeeded in demolishing our present scientific and cultural paradigms. Rather, I believe it essential for a reader to be presented with these alternatives in order to even consider the possibility of such drastic and all-encompassing changes. Indeed, in my own view I do no more than open a door to the possibility of such shifts in our approach to the scientific method as well as modern culture. Fortunately from my own perspective, I am not alone in this approach, for it is the basis for the work of a group made up largely of sociologists, the sociological imagination group, introduced in a web site at <www.uab.edu/ethicscenter/SI.html>. We ask other sociologists and social scientists to join us in our present efforts to test the utility of this approach to the scientific method. We feel that it is worthwhile to abandon our present degree of “recognition, satisfaction and achievement,” given the urgent problems in sociology and society.
In Part One, “The Scientific Method: Bureaucratic and Interactive Paradigms,” I present in Chapter 1 a direction for reconstructing the scientific method. It builds on C. Wright Mills’ work and is oriented to shuttling far up and down language’s ladder of abstraction, by contrast with “grand theory” or “abstracted empiricism” which emphasize the top or the bottom, respectively, of that ladder. His analysis includes his vision of the centrality of developing a sociological imagination, and here he points beyond sociology to society as a whole, just as his books were written for a popular as well as an academic audience. Chapter 2 uses Kuhn’s analysis as a basis for taking up our cultural paradigm as well as our sociological paradigm, with the latter nested within the former just as any given epistemology is nested within a metaphysics. This chapter carries further Chapter 1’s analysis of the contrast between bureaucratic and interactive cultural and scientific paradigms. We look to the ideas of John Dewey, Thomas Kuhn and Harold Kincaid for philosophical and historical insights. David Snow and Thomas Scheff --devoting particular attention to sociology’s methods and theory--give us further understanding of sociology’s present situation as well as its future possibilities. Overall, Part One presents an outline of a reconstructed scientific method, taking into account some of its implications for modern society.
Part Two, “Illustrating the Web Approach to the Scientific Method,” aims to exemplify both the substantive fruitfulness and the applied implications of that approach. Yet the focus of Part Two remains on the web approach to the scientific method, and not on the validity of the few substantive and applied illustrations presented. Chapter 3 centers on anomie, alienation, social stratification and relative deprivation, all aspects of one fundamental social problem which might be called “the invisible crisis of modern society.” The web approach to the scientific method may prove to yield understanding of very broad and basic problems, as well as those of limited scope, that encompass the full range of substantive questions within the discipline. Whereas Chapter 3 centers on the utility of the web approach for understanding problems, Chapter 4 focuses on its utility for moving toward solutions. There we begin with a general examination of what it would take to change both sociology’s research paradigm and the cultural paradigm within modern society. We follow this with specific analyses of three illustrations: revolutions in general, the Gandhian technique of satyagraha, and change in a two-person social relationship. Both parts of Chapter 4 are oriented to the problem of how social structures can be altered so as to yield a higher degree social interaction.
Part Three, “Some Implications,” looks to several implications of the foregoing chapters for the discipline of sociology. In Chapter 5 we center on Gouldner’s idea of a reflexive sociology and point toward procedures which would carry forward Gouldner’s vision. In particular, we take up a number of approaches to social change along with educational procedures. In both cases we examine the impact of reflexivity. Thus, for example, we look to what a reflexive approach would yield for culture lag theory. And we also carry forward the reflexive implications of some of the educational ideas of Dewey, Freire, Illich, Pecotche and Gandhi. Chapter 6 centers on language as a key thread tying together earlier chapters. In an initial section, “Strengthening Linguistic Tools,” we introduce additional concepts to help us integrate earlier material, and we carry further our understanding of causal-loop diagrams. Also, we summarize two allegories--Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Languages of Pao--for penetrating the nature of language. Then, in a second section, we apply these linguistic tools to earlier chapters, centering on the problem of emotional repression and the possibilities for emotional expression.
If the arguments in this book for the problematic nature of our present interpretation of the scientific method prove to be credible, and if the alternative interpretation sketched here proves to be fruitful, then the implications of those arguments and that interpretation extend far beyond the few that are examined in Part Three. For example, the conclusions drawn for every single social science study that has ever been conducted would be open to reinterpretation. This would result from past failures to take into account systematically the enormous complexity involved within any given instance of human behavior. Our present piecemeal and specialized approach assumes implicitly that the pieces of the human jig-saw puzzle can at some point be put together so as to yield a coherent picture of human behavior. Yet if each piece is itself deficient, then no coherent picture emerges when we attempt to put the pieces together. Shifting from this metaphor to research procedures presently in use, one example has to do with the impact of the investigator on the investigation at every stage of the research process. These “investigator effects” are not taken into account by our non-reflexive approach to the scientific method, and we continue to publish studies which almost invariably include no information about such effects despite occasional questions raised as to the unscientific nature of such practices. This is much like a trial where neither the prosecutor nor the defense attorney is allowed to cross-examine witnesses yet where we expect an accurate verdict.
Carrying this implication one step further, if all of our conclusions from the social sciences become suspect, then so does the worth of all of the actions based on those conclusions which we have performed as individuals and societies. This includes past and present decisions made within every one of our institutions, and this is not limited to the relatively few decisions based on proposals by social scientists. They extend to the subtle influences of the social sciences as a result of their location within our formal and informal educational systems at all levels. All of this is also implied by the limitations within the cultural paradigm of modern society, a paradigm that encompasses the scientific paradigm governing our research procedures. In one sense this far-reaching critique of modern society is not a new idea, since much of postmodernist literature suggests the importance of deconstructing present assumptions within all aspects of society. Yet what is new is the acceptance of such deconstruction coupled with an alternative approach to the scientific method that is optimistic in its assessment of human possibilities and that promises to resolve fundamental contradictions within our scientific and cultural paradigms.
That alternative approach also gives the social scientist a special role within contemporary society, as illustrated by Gouldner’s vision of the future of the social sciences:
. . .At decisive points the ordinary language and conventional understandings fail and must be transcended. It is essentially the task of the social sciences, more generally, to create new and “extraordinary” languages, to help men learn to speak them, and to mediate between the deficient understandings of ordinary language and the different and liberating perspectives of the extraordinary languages of social theory. . . .To say social theorists are concept-creators means that they are not merely in the knowledge-creating business, but also in the language-reform and language-creating business. In other words, they are from the beginning involved in creating a new culture [Gouldner, 1972: 16].
Following Gouldner’s vision, perhaps the twenty-first century will not come to be seen as the century which witnessed an acceleration of the catastrophes of the twentieth century. Instead, perhaps it will come to be seen as the age of the social sciences, where the Enlightenment visions of Comte, Mills, Gouldner and the rest of us for a society able to confront its fundamental problems became a reality for the first time in human history.
In a book where I attempt to build bridges linking sociological knowledge, everything I have ever read inside and outside of the discipline has influenced me. But in particular I am indebted to every individual cited in the following chapters for making this book possible. Earlier ideas from Marx, Simmel, Durkheim, Weber, Nietzsche and Korzybski have been particularly influential, as is the case for more recent ideas from Mills, Gouldner, Kuhn and Williams. I owe a great deal to Harold Kincaid, whose philosophical ideas helped to start me on this journey, to Tom Scheff, whose part/whole methodology and publications helped to broaden my orientation, to Richard Koffler for his faith in my ideas and to Louie Johnston for his unflagging enthusiasm. I want to thank those who read parts of this manuscript at one stage or another or who encouraged me to proceed, including Dave Asavanond, Steve Baran, Stu Bennett, Larry Busch, Lee Cass, David Christner, Hank Everett, Joe Feagin, Sandy Klein, Marty Kozloff, Jack Levin, Felice Levine, Tony Levy, John and Joanne Livingstone, Clem Malin, Marvin Nadel, David Phillips, Seymour and Phyllis Pustilnik, John Rice, Dave Stearns and Emek Tanay. And I have learned much from all those who are a part of the sociological imagination network, with special thanks to Dave Britt, Tom Conroy, Dick Edgar, John Hall, Matt Hoover, Joe Hopper, Chanoch Jacobsen, Jim Kimberly, Richard Lachmann, Lauren Langman, Donald Levine, Bronwen Lichtenstein, Dave Maines, John Malarkey, Stjepan Mestrovic, Alfonso Morales, Gil Musolf, Joe Perry, Gary Reed, Jay Weinstein, Doris Wilkinson and Andy Ziner.
PART ONE THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD:
BUREAUCRATIC AND INTERACTIVE PARADIGMS
It is in Genesis that God punishes the human race for attempting to build “a town and a tower with its top reaching heaven”:
Now Yahweh came down to see the town and the tower that the sons of man had built. “So they are all a single people with a single language!” said Yahweh. “This is but the start of their undertakings! There will be nothing too hard for them to do. Come, let us go down and confuse their language on the spot so that they can no longer understand one another.” Yahweh scattered them thence over the whole face of the earth, and they stopped building the town. It was named Babel therefore, because there Yahweh confused the language of the whole earth. It was from there that Yahweh scattered them over the whole face of the earth [Genesis 11: 5-9; The Jerusalem Bible, 1966: 14].
From the perspective of the Old Testament, the tower of Babel becomes a metaphor for the division of the human race into groups unable to communicate with one another. Applying that metaphor to contemporary sociology, we appear to have achieved a more subtle procedure than speaking languages from different cultures. We have learned to speak the languages of different subcultures within our discipline. Unless an individual learns the language of a given field by becoming familiar with its literature, he or she will remain unable to communicate with others in that field.
Part One is about an approach to the scientific method which aims at building bridges across our subcultures or fields of sociology, changing our tower of Babel into a discipline where we can all gain from learning to follow the scientific ideal of communicating with one another. God’s fears as to the result might in fact actually be fulfilled: “This is but the start of their undertakings! There will be nothing too hard for them to do.” Following the work of Thomas Kuhn, we should not underestimate the difficulties confronting any major shift in our discipline. This is particularly true when a scientific paradigm is itself nested within a cultural paradigm. Yet also following Kuhn, scientific revolutions can indeed occur when a discipline becomes aware not only of its fundamental contradictions but also of a direction for resolving them. In Chapter 1 we sketch a contrast between our present interpretation of the scientific method and an alternative interpretation, with the former labeled “bureaucratic” and the latter “interactive.” Granting the achievements we have made with the aid of our past interpretation, the method appears to be unable to cope with the enormous complexity of human behavior. Our interactive interpretation or “web approach” aims to take fully into account that complexity. In Chapter 2 we pursue the paradigmatic basis for making a fundamental change to that web approach. For example, we examine the nature of our cultural paradigm as well as a cultural alternative. And we also look to an approach to sociological theory which can enable us to follow that cultural alternative.
CHAPTER 1
SOCIOLOGY AND THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD
The work of C. Wright Mills, someone who I was fortunate enough to know personally and who envisioned both what our discipline lacks and what it might proceed to achieve, plays an important role in this chapter. Mills is known largely for his contributions to political sociology as well as his metaphor of “the sociological imagination,” yet it is time that we begin to take seriously what he contributed to our understanding of the scientific method in sociology. In the first section, “Problems with Bureaucratic Science,” I sketch--within the context of other materials--his profound critique not just of the sociology of his own times but also of how we are presently going about our business. To complete the picture which he drew, I also bring in aspects of what we have learned since his time from the history and philosophy of science as well as from sociology. This critique of bureaucratic science constitutes the basis, in the second and final part of this chapter, for a more systematic presentation of the approach to the scientific method which I believe we desperately need for substantive progress and which society urgently requires. Mills somehow succeeded in giving voice to the aspirations for sociology which continue to lie buried under layers of cynicism and pessimism within the rest of us sociologists, waiting to take wing. Yet we must go beyond Mills’ insights and metaphors and build on his work in a highly systematic way if we are to chart a direction for contemporary sociologists and social scientists in general. That chart is begun in this chapter and this book, yet it remains for the discipline as a whole to carry it further.
PROBLEMS WITH BUREAUCRATIC SCIENCE
Many of us are familiar with Mills’ concept of the sociological imagination:
. . .that imagination is the capacity to shift from one perspective to another--from the political to the psychological; from examination of a single family to comparative assessments of the national budgets of the world; from the theological school to the military establishment; from considerations of an oil industry to studies of contemporary poetry. . .[1959: 7].
Mills reveals the same breadth of vision which characterized the classical sociologists and is so central to the present ideals of the discipline [see for example Horowitz, 1983; Chasin, 1990]. He saw that kind of breadth as essential for fulfilling the Enlightenment “promise of sociology.” Although he never developed a systematic direction for just how sociologists should proceed to employ the scientific method, the body of his work suggests five components: (1) We should not shirk from addressing absolutely fundamental problems within society. (2) We should move far up language’s ladder of abstraction so as to utilize very abstract concepts. (3) We should come far down that ladder so as to examine the concrete evidence that bears on our ideas. (4) We should work to integrate our knowledge so that our approach is broad enough to enable us--as indicated in the above quote--to shift from one perspective to another. (5) We should develop ourselves as individuals with the ability to think in this broad way, developing a “sociological imagination” that suggests a new vision of society. We take up these five components in the following subsections, emphasizing critiques of our present approach to the scientific method.
Orientation to Problems
Mills’ orientation to problems is illustrated by a body of work that included an examination of the power of elites in subverting democratic ideals [1948; 1956], interest in the alienation of “the new middle class” [1951], concerns about the coming of World War III [1958], and an analysis of the personal troubles of the individual in modern society [1959]. We can begin to understand his zest for conflict--expressed in his relationships to sociological colleagues--from a story he told a class about an encounter with Eisenhower, then President of Columbia University. When Eisenhower walked into his classroom one day unannounced and quietly took a seat in the back row, Mills unhesitatingly altered his lecture, presenting a systematic plan for a violent revolution to overthrow the U. S. government. The class would operate as a key cell in directing the course of the revolution, which he claimed would be opposed by the ruling class. Eisenhower sat stonily silent as Mills proceeded. Finally, Eisenhower stood up and quickly walked out, with Mills never seeing him again. Mills told this story with a broad smile on his face, apparently having no particular ax to grind against Eisenhower but simply as a joke he managed to play on the powers that be within the university.
We can understand more fully Mills’ interest in avoiding trivial problems from a study he completed during World War II while still a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin. He analyzed some fifty textbooks on social problems in order to learn about “the style of reflection and the social-historical basis of American sociology,” a rather tall order even for an eminent professor. These texts generally centered on how the individual might “adjust” to society in order to solve his or her problems rather than on how society might change in response to those problems:
Use of “adjustment” accepts the goals and the means of smaller community milieux. At the most, writers using these terms suggest techniques or means believed to be less disruptive than others to attain the goals that are given. They do not typically consider whether or not certain groups or individuals caught in economically underprivileged situations can possibly obtain the current goals without drastic shifts in the basic institutions which channel and promote them. The idea of adjustment seems to be most directly applicable to a social scene in which, on the one hand, there is a society and, on the other, an individual immigrant. The immigrant then “adjusts” to the new environment. . .[1943: 179-180].
For Mills, the idea of adjustment works to foreclose the aspirations of the immigrant. An alternative would be for the immigrant to retain those high aspirations and for society to undergo “drastic shifts in the basic institutions which channel and promote them.”
Mills also cites the emphasis of these texts on the idea of “cultural lag,” based on the work of Ogburn [1957] with his idea that “adaptive” or “nonmaterial culture” lags behind “material culture”:
. . .The model in which institutions lag behind technology and science involves a positive evaluation of natural science and of orderly progressive change. Loosely, it derives from a liberal continuation of the enlightenment with its full rationalism, its messianic and now politically naive admiration of physical science as a kind of thinking and activity, and with its concept of time as progress. . .[1943: 177].
This use of the idea of cultural lag is analogous to an emphasis on the adjustment of the individual. Not only must the individual adapt to existing norms of society but the institutions of society must adapt to the physical and biological technologies built on the continuing development of the biophysical sciences, for continuing “progress” supposedly depends on such adaptation. Yet we can construct alternatives to this approach, just as Mills saw alternatives to accepting the goal of the adjustment of the immigrant as one that sociologists should adopt. Society need not bow down to physical and biological technologies involving “material culture.” Rather, it is possible for us to create the kind of society in which those technologies move in directions that strengthen “nonmaterial culture.”
Mills’ approach to the scientific method within sociology preceded Thomas Kuhn’s analysis of scientific revolutions within the physical and biological sciences [1962, 1977, 1992] by several years, yet the two orientations are similar in their view of the forces blocking us from confronting basic problems. Kuhn’s argument was based on an intuitive application of the sociology of knowledge. He saw a community of scientists as being swayed not just by evidence alone but also by such factors as tradition, social hierarchy and the personality of the scientist. For Kuhn, the problem of achieving a scientific revolution is a massive one, for the very subculture of a science or its “scientific paradigm” must be challenged and not just particular studies. Mills is also concerned with the subculture of a science. For example, he suggests that “academic departmentalization may well have been instrumental in atomizing the problems which they [the authors] have addressed” [1943: 166], thus yielding the failure to confront the question of changing our institutions. Mills also suggests that those authors came from similar backgrounds, shared common perspectives, and thus tended to conform to relatively conservative norms when it came to any question of fundamental changes in society. As for hierarchy, Mills points to the relationship between teacher and student or author of a text and students who read the text. The result is an emphasis on the systematization of existing ideas rather than on questioning those ideas or attempting to discover new ones.
If we take Kuhn’s analysis one step further, then we can discover problems which are even more fundamental than subcultural ones, namely, cultural ones. Extrapolating Kuhn, research can succeed in confronting contradictions within the researcher’s cultural paradigm. For an example we turn to Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Gay Science:
The greatest recent event--that “God is dead,” that the belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable--is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe. . . .how much must collapse now that this faith has been undermined. . .for example, the whole of our European morality. . . .we philosophers and “free spirits” feel, when we hear the news that “the old god is dead,” as if a new dawn shone on us. . .at long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again. . .[(1887) 1974].
Mills no less than Nietzsche was most interested in investigating major transformations of society. He believed that “The existence of mass estrangement among workers, anxiety among professionals, and anomie among middle sectors invalidated the ‘modern’ period.” And he suggested that the new epoch that was dawning might be labeled the “postmodern era,” most likely the first usage of that term. And just as Kuhn wrote of contradictions which come to light within the old paradigm, Mills wrote of the end of an epoch: “When what is happening in the social world as well as what is widely felt and widely thought can no longer be satisfactorily explained by the received principles, then an epoch is ending and a new one needs to be defined [1960; quoted in Horowitz, 1983: 323, 327].
Moving Up Language’s Ladder of Abstraction
Yet just how are major problems, such as our present failure to understand “what is happening in the social world as well as what is widely felt and widely thought,” to be addressed? Or using Nietzsche’s example, just how is the “death of God” to be understood and confronted? Mills’ analysis suggests an answer when he employs the concept of “anomie” and when his usage of “estrangement among workers” and “anxiety among professionals” implies the concept of “alienation.” It is, then, sociology’s abstract concepts which come to function as a basic part of the scientific method within the discipline. Alvin Gouldner, in a reply to a review of his The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology [1970]--quoted in the preface--explains more clearly what Mills was implying:
At decisive points the ordinary language and conventional understandings fail and must be transcended. It is essentially the task of the social sciences, more generally, to create new and “extraordinary” languages, to help men learn to speak them, and to mediate between the deficient understandings of ordinary language and the different and liberating perspectives of the extraordinary languages of social theory. . . .To say social theorists are concept-creators means that they are not merely in the knowledge-creating business, but also in the language-reform and language-creating business. In other words, they are from the beginning involved in creating a new culture [Gouldner, 1972: 16].
Concepts like anomie and alienation are, then, the sociologist’s most powerful tool for understanding the fundamental problems of society.
From this perspective we can draw an analogy between ordinary language and the language of sociology, looking to both similarities and differences. On the one hand ordinary and sociological concepts are tools for understanding our world and addressing problems, and both can be employed within sentences or propositions that state the nature of the world and how we might proceed to solve problems. Also, both are abstract to at least some degree, being at least one stage removed from our nonverbal experiences with phenomena: they are linguistic and reflect on experience, as distinct from the tools used by other forms of life. On the other hand the linguistic tools of the sociologist carry along with them the weight of sociological knowledge, and such knowledge can be most useful in understanding the world and addressing our problems. In addition, the concepts of sociology--like anomie and alienation--generally are more abstract than our everyday concepts, which tend to stay closer to whatever we experience concretely. As a result, sociological concepts tend to cover far more ground. When we speak of anomie, for example, we can refer to contradictions within any culture, past or present. Yet if the sociologist remains unaware of the importance of these differences then it will be all too easy to rely far too much on ordinary usages, using sociological language only in passing. Also, the sociologist will fail to define sociological concepts in a sufficiently abstract way, thus losing generality.
Mills wrote about such deficiencies within sociological usage in his analysis of texts on social problems:
The level of abstraction which characterizes these texts is so low that often they seem to be empirically confused for lack of abstraction to knit them together. They display bodies of meagerly connected facts, ranging from rape in rural districts to public housing, and intellectually sanction this low level of abstraction. . . .Collecting and dealing in a fragmentary way with scattered problems and facts of milieux, these books are not focused on larger stratifications or upon structured wholes [1943: 166].
Mills suggests--in this quote repeated in the preface--that we require abstract concepts like social stratification, concepts general enough to apply to a very wide range of situations, if we are to avoid the “bodies of meagerly connected facts” to be found in those texts. Yet usage of abstract concepts has immediate implications for our approach to problems. If patterns of social stratification are a partial cause of social problems, then solutions will require fundamental changes in society. By avoiding such usages, the sociologist is able to maintain a more conservative stance on addressing social problems. What Mills succeeds in doing here is to confront sociologists with contradictions between their scientific ideals and their actual research procedures. In Kuhn’s terms, he alerts us to paradigmatic contradictions within the subculture of sociology as well as within modern culture.
Mills is taking on not just sociologists who center on social problems but rather an emphasis within the discipline as a whole, as illustrated by what Merton has called “theories of the middle range”:
Every effort should be made to avoid dwelling upon illustrations drawn from the “more mature” sciences--such as physics and chemistry. . .because their very maturity permits these disciplines to deal fruitfully with abstractions of high order to a degree which, it is submitted, is not yet the case with sociology [1968: 139-140].
Merton’s approach appears to be a classic illustration of what he himself called a “self-fulfilling prophecy.” By defining sociology as immature and unable to employ “abstractions of high order,” we create that very situation of immaturity. Some three decades ago Willer and Webster launched a profound critique of Merton’s approach to the scientific method, basing their argument largely on the philosophy of science [1970; see also Peirce, 1955; Hempel, 1965; Willer, 1967]. They maintained that the more developed sciences, versus sociology, construct abstract concepts. For example, there are assertions about “mass” and “specific gravity” in physics, about “bonds” and “valences of molecules” in chemistry, and about “heredity,” “natural selection” and “genes” in biology. They argued that sociology’s “immaturity” derives in large measure from its failure to use abstract concepts and theory. This approach taken by Willer and Webster has been updated by a variety of analyses pointing in the same direction [see for example Phillips, 1972, 1979, 1980, 1985, 1988, 1990; Lauderdale, 1990; Wallerstein, 1980, 1991, 1998].
Sociology’s failure to emphasize concepts at a very high level of abstraction also derives from the relationship between the disciplines of sociology and philosophy coupled with the pragmatic stance of much of American sociology. As a discipline, sociology has in large measure distinguished itself from philosophy by emphasizing its empirical stance. That stance has been seen as enabling it to confront the practical problems of everyday life. Mills saw this situation as follows:
The ideal of practicality, of not being “utopian,” operated . . .as a polemic against the “philosophy of history” brought into American sociology by men trained in Germany; this polemic implemented the drive to lower levels of abstraction. A view of isolated and immediate problems as the “real” problems may well be characteristic of a society rapidly growing and expanding, as America was in the nineteenth century and, ideologically, in the early twentieth century. . .the practice of the detailed and complete empiricism of the survey is justified by an epistemology of gross description . . .[1943: 168].
Mills reveals the contradiction between ideals for practical action and scientific procedures which tend to atomize problems and prevent the sociologist from understanding them. The very tools required for such understanding come to be seen negatively as “philosophical” and are as a result avoided. The result is the kind of fragmentation of problems which Mills noted in his analysis of textbooks on social problems.
Moving Down the Ladder of Abstraction
Let us bear in mind as we proceed to examine movement down language’s ladder of abstraction how intimately it is linked to both commitment to a problem and the use of abstract concepts. It is useful to return to Nietzsche at this point, for he conveys the spirit of science’s empirical achievements by contrast with the situation of humanity prior to the rise of science:
It is a profound and fundamental good fortune that scientific discoveries stand up under examination and furnish the basis, again and again, for further discoveries. . .To lose firm ground for once! To float! To err! To be mad! That was part of the paradise and the debauchery of bygone ages, while our bliss is like that of a man who has suffered shipwreck, climbed ashore, and now stands with both feet on the firm old earth--amazed that it does not waver [(1887) 1974: 111].
Nietzsche here captures science’s ability to discover firm knowledge--not necessarily absolute truth--which far transcends pre-scientific opinions. It is this ability which is fundamental to the motivation of sociologists in their efforts to move down language’s ladder of abstraction to obtain facts. Yet when that motivation becomes isolated from commitments to solving major problems and using abstract concepts in the process, then it yields what Mills criticized as trivial research despite its helping us to plant “both feet on the firm old earth.”
Sociologists often move down the ladder of abstraction by using procedures which oversimplify the complexity of human behavior. Implicitly, this appears to be an effort to imitate both the simplicity and predictive power of much of the physical sciences, as illustrated by the simple yet powerful formula, F = ma, or force = mass times acceleration. Herbert Blumer criticized this approach many years ago:
The objective of variable research is initially to isolate a simple and fixed relation between two variables. . . .This is accomplished by separating the variable from its connection with other variables through their exclusion or neutralization.
A difficulty of this scheme is that the empirical reference of a true sociological variable is not unitary or distinct. When caught in its actual social character, it turns out to be an intricate and inner-moving complex. To illustrate, let me take what seems ostensibly to be a fairly clear-cut variable relation, namely between a birth control program and the birth rate of a given people. . . .For the program of birth control one may choose its time period, or select some reasonable measure such as the number of people visiting birth control clinics. For the birth rate, one merely takes it as it is. . . .
Yet, a scrutiny of what the two variables stand for in the life of the group gives us a different picture. Thus, viewing the program of birth control in terms of how it enters into the lives of people, we need to note many things such as the literacy of the people, the clarity of the printed information, the manner and extent of its distribution, the social position of the directors of the program and of the personnel, how the personnel act, the character of their instructional talks, the way in which people define attendance at birth control clinics, the expressed views of influential personages with reference to the program, how such persons are regarded, and the nature of the discussions among people with regard to the clinics . . .[ Blumer, 1956: 688].
Blumer is here criticizing the simplifying assumptions, largely invisible, which lie behind what he calls “analysis of the variable” within quantitative sociology. Granting the importance of moving down language’s ladder of abstraction to concrete measurements of particular factors, we sociologists should have learned enough from our research to realize that we cannot learn much by centering on only two variables within a complex context of factors and ignoring the rest with some phrase like “other things being equal” or ceteris paribus. And we can even add many other factors to Blumer’s example that emphasizes situational factors close to his own symbolic-interactionist perspective. For example, there is the matter of cultural values and norms as well as patterns of social organization in society as a whole like social stratification and bureaucracy. Most of quantitative methodology pushes aside such considerations, for they would interfere with the tools of measurement which we presently have and which yield definite findings. Those tools build on certain aspects of what quantitative sociologists take to be the basis for the successes of the physical sciences. If we return to the simple formula, F = ma, only a very few variables have sufficed to yield extremely accurate predictions. Such formulae can help us sociologists to understand the importance of using concepts defined at very high levels of abstraction, of linking concepts with one another systematically--although not necessarily mathematically--and of testing theoretical ideas. Unfortunately, we have learned instead to isolate phenomena from their complex contexts so as to yield the kinds of measurements that prepare the way for using mathematics to help us make predictions.
None of the above arguments should be taken to imply that measurement procedures, including those based on a quantitative approach, are necessarily deficient. Problems arise, however, when such procedures are not combined with important theory, and thus the researcher remains at a low level of abstraction. This is illustrated by efforts which follow the direction of employing as much mathematics as possible--remaining unconcerned with theoretical questions--and thus conform to the interests of early philosophers of science who were steeped in mathematics. We have paid little attention to the pragmatist doctrine put forward by Abraham Kaplan:
It is one of the themes of this book that the various sciences, taken together, are not colonies subject to the governance of logic, methodology, philosophy of science, or any other discipline whatever, but are, and of right ought to be, free and independent [Kaplan, 1964, quoted in Diesing, 1991: 82].
Instead of such independence, which would look to assess the actual achievements resulting from methodology, we have quantitative measurement procedures geared to the movement from nominal to ordinal to interval to ratio scales, supporting a focus on mathematical prediction. Further, the focus often is on increasing the reliability and precision of measurements while ignoring the range of contextual factors involved. For example, there is interest in specifying the “operational definition” of a given concept, moving down language’s ladder of abstraction, without moving up that ladder as well..
Yet another aspect of efforts to move down that ladder has to do with procedures for obtaining probability samples, typically for surveys of a given population. Such procedures employ mathematical assumptions which enable the researcher to conclude, say, that a given sample of individuals represents a much larger population of individuals to within a specified degree of sampling error. And this in turn becomes the basis for quantitative analyses of the resulting data. However, the focus of such sampling procedures is generally quite narrow, employing concepts at a low level of abstraction. Once again this serves to simplify enormously complex situations and enables the researcher to move down the ladder abstraction and draw simplistic conclusions about the relationship between two or several variables. For example, it is a rare study that takes into account populations in the past as well as the present; the focus is on the present. Even the rare “panel study” takes place over a limited number of years, avoiding very long-term change like that from preindustrial to modern society or oral to literate society. If culture is indeed an important concept, then how are probability samples to tell us anything of significance about basic cultural change, granting the very rare sampling of written materials over long periods of time? Sampling procedures were originally developed not by sociologists but within other disciplines. For example, agricultural economists were interested in improving crop yields, geneticists wanted to learn about heredity, and the U. S. Armed Forces wanted to plan bombing runs during World War II [Schutte, 1977: Appendix I]. None of this speaks to our own problem of attempting to understand cultural change.
Integrating Knowledge
We turn now from sociology’s movement down language’s ladder of abstraction to its movement across the discipline’s specialized fields, as illustrated by the forty Sections within the American Sociological Association. Overall, what becomes obvious as we proceed with this analysis is the way in which all aspects of the sociologist’s usage of the scientific method are intimately tied together within the same scientific paradigm. For example, tied closely to the above analysis of our orientation to problems and our movements up and down language’s ladder of abstraction are our procedures for drawing statistical inferences about the relationship between two variables. Here once again we make substantial use of mathematics and attempt to move toward prediction. This generally results in statements with very limited utility either for understanding phenomena or for solving practical problems. For example, we may be able to reject the null hypothesis that there is no relationship whatsoever between, say, the number of people visiting a birth control center and the birth rate of a given people. In other words, we find that the birth control program “works” at least to a very limited extent, and this has at least some utility in efforts to evaluate its effectiveness. But what have we learned as a result? Theoretically, we have learned little more, for example, about the impact of cultural values and norms, about patterns of bureaucracy and social stratification, about anomie and alienation, of patterns of conformity and deviance, or about relative deprivation and reinforcement. And there appears to be little practical impact for our conclusion, since we surely did not really previously believe the null hypothesis that the birth control program had absolutely no effect on the birth rate. And what have we learned about comparing this program with many others as well as how to improve any of these programs?
In an effort to answer at least some of these questions, quantitative analysts have utilized procedures for correlation and regression, both of which encourage precise measurement procedures. Efforts at correlation quantify the degree to which variation of a given variable is accounted for by variation in another variable, getting beyond the simple statement that there is at least some relationship between the two which could not easily arise as a result of sampling error or chance. And regression procedures specify mathematical formulae which we can use to make predictions from what we know about one variable to what we don’t know about another. In our birth control example, correlation would tell us just how much the birth rate would be affected by a birth control program, and regression would enable us to make a prediction as to the change in birth rate from our knowledge of the existence of birth control programs. One problem, however, is that use of such more sophisticated quantitative procedures--which also require more assumptions that may not hold true--does not necessarily yield high correlation’s or accurate predictions. Arguably, sociological efforts to correlate and predict have generally yielded low correlation’s and inaccurate predictions. This is quite understandable once we take into account Blumer’s critique of the analysis of variables as well as the general failure of such quantitative research to conceptualize variables at very high levels of abstraction. Rather than yield sophisticated knowledge, sophisticated tools generally have shown up our enormous ignorance.
One response on the part of quantitative sociologists to these problems is to move further in a quantitative direction. If high correlations and accurate predictions cannot be made from knowledge of one variable, how about many variables? For example, they use such procedures as factor analysis, cluster analysis, partial and multiple correlation, multiple regression, path analysis and discriminant analysis. There are definitely occasional instances in which such procedures, when coupled with abstract theoretical concepts, have advanced our understanding, and one illustration will be presented in Chapter 4. And there are also instances when such analyses have yielded better bases for evaluation research, where higher correlations or more accurate predictions aided in the overall assessment of certain projects or procedures over others. Yet it is arguably the case that such quantitative approaches have, in general, further diverted attention from abstract conceptualization and theory and taken us still further away from developing a sociology which is integrated, credible and cumulates rapidly. Such a sociology requires us to face up to our present divorce between methods and theory. Quantitative procedures, by contrast, generally place mathematics once again in the saddle, riding the horse of a long-dead philosophy of science.
Efforts to integrate knowledge have not been limited to such relatively complex mathematical procedures. For example, we might have reference here to the cross-tabulational tradition within sociology, primarily based on procedures for the analysis of surveys. Historically, many of such procedures grew out of research sponsored by the U. S. Armed Forces during World War II, followed by great interest in survey research and accompanied by electrical-mechanical inventions for the analysis of data with the aid of punched cards. “Cross tabulation” is simply a way of obtaining the distribution of one variable within the categories of another. In a simple example, we might determine whether a greater percentage of those attending birth-control clinics had a lower birth rate than those not attending them. Sociologists have emphasized cross-tabulations, even to this day, in their search for cause-and-effect relationships between variables. Perhaps the greatest influence on procedures for examining such relationships was “the elaboration model,” developed by Paul Lazarsfeld and his co-workers at Columbia University in order to interpret data obtained on the American soldier [Stouffer, 1949] during World War II [Lazarsfeld and Rosenberg, 1955; see also Hyman, 1972; Phillips, 1985, 430-442]. Such procedures often focus on secondary analyses, and they generally involve the introduction of a third variable and a detailed cross-tabulation of three variables. Many such analyses have yielded considerable insight, but generally they have contributed to the imbalance between theory and methods.
Worldviews
The fact that all of these problems associated with our present approach to the scientific method are intertwined with one another suggests not only the existence of a scientific paradigm or subculture which yields them but more generally a cultural paradigm within which that scientific paradigm is located. As for the nature of that cultural paradigm we can turn to several analyses, taking into account what sociology as a whole reveals about this matter. Let us begin with a different quote from Nietzsche, who appears to have captured much of the nature of our worldview:
On the doctrine of poisons--So many things have to come together for scientific thinking to originate; and all these necessary strengths had to be invented, practiced and cultivated separately. As long as they were still separate, however, they frequently had an altogether different effect than they do now that they are integrated into scientific thinking and hold each in check. Their effect was that of poisons; for example, that of the impulse to doubt, to negate, to wait, to collect, to dissolve. Many hecatombs of human beings were sacrificed before these impulses learned to comprehend their coexistence and to feel that they were all functions of one organizing force within one human being. And even now the time seems remote when artistic energies and the practical wisdom of life will join with scientific thinking to form a higher organic system in relation to which scholars, physicians, artists, and legislators--as we know them at present--would have to look like paltry relics of ancient times [(1887) 1974: 173].
For Nietzsche, “God is dead” implies the end of an entire way of life, granting that it will take some time for mankind to understand the nature of its new situation. As for the nature of our old way of life, Nietzsche’s vision is that of a bureaucracy--granting that he did not employ that concept--where its various elements are unable to interact with one another. Nietzsche saw such lacks of integration as “poisons.” And his vision of an alternative involved not just the unification of those poisons within an overall approach to the scientific method but also a unification of that scientific method with “artistic energies and the practical wisdom of life.” Here, he saw science uniting with all other efforts to penetrate the mysteries of the universe, and here we can more fully understand his vision of “gay science” as anticipating postmodern critiques of Enlightenment science’s emphasis on the rational at the expense of the emotional. Yet he viewed any such occurrence as taking place in the future: “And even now the time seems remote. . . .” We contemporary sociologists need not, however, be dependent on Nietzsche’s insights or metaphors to understand our situation, granting their usefulness up to a point. We can turn to our own concepts, such as bureaucracy, and our own analyses. Here we can go back to the above analysis of our own utilization of the scientific method. What does it tell us about our worldview?
For example, let us not ignore the deep aspirations within the discipline, even today despite growing cynicism and pessimism, for fulfilling Enlightenment cultural values. Those values--such as equality, freedom, democracy, science and secular rationality, and the ultimate worth of every single individual [see Williams, 1970]--appear to have grown far stronger since the eighteenth century, not only within sociology but also throughout contemporary society. Yet since we sociologists are not accustomed to taking culture seriously as a powerful structure in its own right, we generally pay little attention to those values. After all, this concept is the key conceptual tool of anthropology, whereas patterns of social organization like stratification, bureaucracy and group point us toward a distinct from all others. And if indeed bureaucracy is a powerful force in our lives as research seems to demonstrate, then we have learned to divide up the academic labor--as good bureaucrats should--between anthropology and sociology. And in the bargain we need not concern ourselves with the nature of preindustrial society or oral society. We can still allow some sociologists to form a Section on the sociology of culture, and we can still teach culture in our introductory courses, yet by and large we can continue to ignore that concept as a central one within our discipline. And we can continue to ignore the impact of that concept, revealed by studies in anthropology as well as sociology, for understanding our worldview.
Turning to key concepts revealing our patterns of social organization --social stratification, bureaucracy and group--when we link them to changes in cultural values we can begin to grasp the dynamic behind our worldview. For example, it appears that we have contradictions between, on the one hand, our egalitarian openness to knowledge which the cultural value of science and secular rationality proclaims, and on the other hand, bureaucratic patterns of organizing our discipline, where studies of culture and social organization remain separated from one another. This contradiction seems to be played out within modern society as a whole, where aspirations for fulfilling those cultural values are limited by patterns of stratification and bureaucracy within our variety of groups. Further, if we take into account cultural change, where egalitarian and other humanistic values are emphasized more and more, what emerges is a growing gap between aspiration and fulfillment. For example, there is stratification within society as well as among ourselves of biophysical scientists over social scientists, given the incredible technological achievements based on knowledge from the former. Never mind the complexity and dynamism of human behavior, never mind how the de-emphasis on the importance of the social sciences has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and never mind the enormous amount of knowledge which we social scientists have uncovered.
If our worldview is, then, structured by a bureaucratic ethos encouraging a growing gap between aspirations and fulfillment--as illustrated by the growing gap worldwide between the rich and the poor--we can also apply the concepts of anomie and alienation to our situation. Beyond Durkheim’s dated view of anomie as normlessness--given our present understanding of the pervasiveness of cultural norms--we might well invoke a revision of his concept, as suggested by Merton [1949], to point toward our failure to fulfill basic cultural values even when we are acting in conformity to cultural norms. Here we would do well to include material along with nonmaterial cultural values, where anomie is illustrated by the failures of millions of workers to fulfill values of achievement and success, settling instead for temporary employment without health insurance, with the ever-present threat of unemployment and with rates of pay that make it very difficult to support a family. And given a growing gap between aspirations and fulfillment, we have increasing anomie within modern society. As for alienation, with our bureaucratic approach to sociology we generally relegate this concept to voting studies or Marxist sociology, just as we relegate anomie to studies of suicide or crime. Yet a more abstract view would tie these concepts to contradictions between cultural values and patterns of social organization within modern society, and also to an increasing gap between the two.
It might be argued that the implicit approach to sociology and the social sciences within these pages is overly optimistic, given our failures to develop a platform of knowledge for cumulative technologies by comparison with the biophysical sciences. Haven’t we already had enough time to test the Enlightenment dream of the classical sociologists, and isn’t our present situation the best that we can expect? In my own view such questions are entirely legitimate, yet they fail to take into account the devastating impact of a bureaucratic worldview on sociology--given the enormous complexity of human behavior--in comparison with the physical and biological sciences. It is one thing to divide up knowledge in fields where mathematical relationships work underneath the surface to integrate less complex fields and yield the basis for useful and accurate predictions employing very few variables. But it is quite another thing to chop up sociology and the social sciences with all of the complexities of human behavior where no such formulae are available. And our situation is worsened by our unbalanced emphasis on those mathematical tools instead of abstract concepts, illustrating our continuing allegiance to a long-dead philosophy of science. Granting the complex nature of human phenomena, such concepts can enable us to take into account that complexity, and they can be coupled with a systematic and broad approach which arguably would parallel what the physical and biological sciences have achieved.
A SCIENTIFIC METHOD FOR SOCIOLOGY
In the preceding section our focus has been on the problematic nature of our present interpretation of the scientific method. Here, by contrast, that focus shifts to an examination of an alternative to that interpretation. Following Kuhn, is it is the lack of a clear alternative to our present scientific and cultural paradigms which holds us back more than anything else, one where the problems and contradictions within those paradigms promise to be resolved. Yet it is essential that we build on the foregoing material and not simply deal with that alternative by itself. It appears to be true that most of us have come to accept the status quo with respect to research methods, giving in to a sense of helplessness relative to earlier ideals yet succeeding in burying such pessimistic feelings. However, the foregoing material can help us to raise those feelings to full view and develop the motivation to alter our situation, provided we have what appears to be a viable alternative to our problematic research procedures. Just as in the case of our reconstructed approach to the scientific method, the foregoing material can help to imbue us with a deep sense of problem, in this case about the status quo with respect to the scientific method.
In this section we focus on a single problem, implied by the foregoing analysis of the contradiction between cultural values and patterns of social organization, in order to illustrate how our reconstructed scientific method works. Yet it should be understood that it is that reconstructed method and not the illustration which is our focus. It should also be understood that the selection of this particular problem, which happens to be a very broad and fundamental one, should not imply that mundane problems have no place within this approach. For the approach is open to all of the problems defined within the sociological and social science literatures. The approach works to eliminate the distinction between the mundane and the fundamental--as well as the narrow and the broad--problem by yielding a web of abstract concepts which moves toward linking problems with one another. Thus, fundamental problems also come to imply mundane problems, and vice-versa, and this is also the case for broad and narrow problems. We shall proceed with five subsections describing elements of the scientific method covering topics that are much the same as those in the above five subsections criticizing our present approach to the scientific method. Following Nietzsche’s analysis, the above five elements are “poisons” insofar as they are kept apart by our bureaucratic worldview. Yet also following Nietzsche’s ideas, combining these elements can place us on the same “firm ground” achieved within the biophysical sciences over the past four centuries.
Definition of the Problem
Following the analysis in the above section, our worldview implies a fundamental contradiction between cultural values and patterns of social organization, with that contradiction apparently increasing over time. No small aspect of our patterns of behavior is involved, but rather the two basic aspects of social structure. How are we to understand this state of affairs, granting that evidence for it will be presented in Chapters 3 and 4? If the scientific method calls for the definition of a problem, then this contradiction within the social structure of modern society certainly passes the bar. This problem involves not just one small aspect of culture or of social organization, but a great deal of each. Further, we must look to the distant past, the present and the future. Overall, given the breadth of this problem, if we are to develop an adequate definition of it then our usual specialized approach to the scientific method will prove to be ineffective. Once again, our selection of this broad and fundamental problem for modern society does not rule out the selection of mundane problems for our reconstructed scientific method. For definitions of mundane problems come to be linked with fundamental problems within a web of abstract concepts. We have already sketched how this works within the foregoing section, but here we hope to develop the approach more systematically. Thus, any defined problem can be converted into a problem that is fundamental for modern society. Conversely, the implications of any fundamental problem that is defined can be carried forward so as to suggest relatively trivial problems attached to it.
One illustration of the increasing contradiction between cultural values and patterns of social organization derives from an international study of the change from preindustrial to industrial society [Lerner, 1958, especially 23-25]. In the early spring of 1950 an interviewer named Tosun B. who lived in Turkey's capital city of Ankara journeyed several miles away to the village of Balgat. Since there was no road between Ankara and Balgat the trip took two hours by car. Tosun asked the village chief how satisfied he was with life. He replied:
What could be asked more? God has brought me to this mature age without much pain, has given me sons and daughters, has put me at the head of my village, and has given me strength of brain and body at this age. Thanks be to Him.
The village grocer presented a different picture of his contentment:
I have told you I want better things. I would have liked to have a bigger grocery shop in the city, have a nice house there, dress nice civilian clothes.
He had seen a movie portraying the kind of shop he wanted, with "round boxes, clean and all the same dressed, like soldiers in a great parade." But the grocer also sensed his limitations: "I am born a grocer and probably die that way. I have not the possibility in myself to get the things I want. They only bother me."
Tosun described the village chief, a 63-year-old man, as "the absolute dictator of this little village." What would he do as President of Turkey? He would seek "help of money and seed for some of our farmers." The village grocer was "the only unfarming person and the only merchant in the village." According to Tosun "he is considered by the villagers even less than the least farmer." In their eyes he had rejected the worth of the community and even the supreme authority of Allah. His response to Tosun's question, by contrast with the chief, was not limited to what he would do for Balgat: "I would make roads for the villagers to come to towns to see the world and would not let them stay in their holes all their life."
Tosun's interviews with the chief and the grocer included this question: "If you could not live in Turkey where would you want to live?" The chief's response was "Nowhere. I was born here, grew old here, and hope God will permit me to die here." Only the grocer was able to imagine himself living outside of Turkey, and he responded with an alternative: "America, because I have heard that it is a nice country and with possibilities to be rich even for the simplest persons."
If we employ the chief and the grocer as metaphors for stages--not necessarily inevitable ones--of the industrialization or modernization process, then they suggest the schematic diagram in Figure 1-1, "Thev Invisible Crisis: The Escalating Gap Between
Figure 1-1
The X-axis ("Time") has "Preindustrial Society" on the left and "Modern Society" on the right. The Y-axis charts two curves: "Revolution of Rising Expectations" on top and "Fulfillment of Expectations" on the bottom. The top curve accelerates rapidly from low expectations in preindustrial society to very high expectations in modern society. The bottom curve, moves upward much more slowly. The result is an increasing gap between expeectations and their fulfillment as we move from preindustrial to modern society.
Expectations and Fulfillment." The grocer's heightened material aspirations ("I would have liked to have a bigger grocery shop in the city, have a nice house there, dress nice civilian clothes") and nonmaterial aspirations ("I would make roads for the villagers to come to towns to see the world and would not let them stay in their holes all their life") illustrate the dramatic increase in the top curve or the revolution of rising expectations. By contrast, we have the chief's "What could be asked more?" his limited view of what he might do as President of Turkey (seek "help of money and seed for some of our farmers"), and his failure to conceive of ever living outside of Turkey ("I was born here, grew old here, and hope God will permit me to die here"). The chief's level of aspiration locates him at the lower end of the revolution of rising expectations.
Here, then, is a graphic view of the problem we are defining as a basis for illustrating our reconstructed approach to the scientific method. The reader may believe that a strong case has not been made for this as an important or manageable research problem. For example, she or he might feel that it is much too broad, encompassing far too wide a range of phenomena. It is certainly far too broad to be addressed by our present specialized approach to the scientific method, yet that is not the case for our reconstructed approach. By ruling out such problems as not researchable ones we simultaneously rule out the very problems which are a matter of life and death for modern society. Another question which a skeptical reader might pose is whether or not we can in fact bring to bear sufficient data to shed light on this problem. For example, would we be able to assess whether or not the contradiction between patterns of culture and social organization, as sketched in Figure 1-1, is in fact escalating? This is indeed an entirely legitimate question, since our reconstructed method requires that we are able to move far down a conceptual ladder of abstraction so as to invoke concrete data or particular operational definitions at a variety of points. However, our focus on this empirical question will be deferred to our third subsection where we shall focus on moving down that ladder of abstraction.
What Figure 1-1 suggests is that we take into account two curves simultaneously: the revolution of rising expectations, and the fulfillment of those expectations. One way to do this is to focus on the gap between the two curves. The chief’s expectations appear to be quite limited, and generally they have been fulfilled, yielding a very small gap between the curves. He stated, “What could be asked more?” We might locate him on the left side of Figure 1-1 in the preindustrial period. By contrast, the grocer’s aspirations are quite high and they remain largely unfulfilled, creating a large gap between the curves. Let us recall his statement, "I have told you I want better things." We might locate him within modern society on the right side of Figure 1-1. To the extent that we are in fact dealing with the change from preindustrial to modern society, then Figure 1-1 suggests the existence of an exponentially deepening crisis, for the gap between the curves is growing exponentially. And to make matters far worse, it is the kind of crisis which is largely invisible and therefore will generally be ignored. Expectations are relatively intangible, especially when we are referring to widely shared ones. Further, it is the relationship between expectations and fulfillment which is at issue, and this relationship is more intangible than each curve taken separately. Still further, we are examining this gap over a very long historical period, making the idea in question quite invisible.
Historically, the top curve for the revolution of rising expectations refers to the dramatic cultural changes accompanying the shift from preindustrial to modern society, as illustrated by the grocer's "I have told you I want better things." We might look to the development of biophysical science and technology in the seventeenth century as fostering materialistic values. And we might also look to that development as the basis for eighteenth-century Enlightenment optimism about human possibilities. That Enlightenment era encouraged people-oriented values such as "liberty, equality, fraternity," and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have expanded an emphasis on those values and extended them worldwide. If we shift from the top curve of Figure 1-1 to the bottom curve which depicts our opportunities for fulfilling values, perhaps the central finding of sociology as a whole is the existence of social stratification--a species of social organization--in all aspects of modern life, whether it be in the form of classism, ethnocentrism, racism, sexism, ageism or other isms that have received less attention. This pattern restricts people’s ability to fulfill their cultural values, and it is not limited to restricting the opportunities of just some individuals. The values involved here are not merely material ones but people-oriented ones as well. And here, even billionaires suffer from forces limiting the fulfillment of those values, granting their far greater ability in the materialistic area.
High Level of Abstraction
What we have outlined above is the definition of what appears to be a very broad, fundamental and increasingly urgent problem within modern society, illustrating the first step of our reconstructed scientific method. Our most powerful tools for addressing that problem are the abstract concepts of sociology, concepts that are linked together systematically rather than employed in isolation from one another. Yet to understand more clearly just how we can accomplish this and fly in the face of our bureaucratic approach to the scientific method, let us turn to an image which can yield insight into our ideals for the scientific method. Figure 1-2, The Globe Metaphor for the Languages of Science and Literature, can help us to understand language’s levels of abstraction as well
Figure 1-2
Figure 1-2 is a globe with its Equator dividing the sciences in the northern hemisphere from literature in the southern hemisphere. The sciences in turn are divided into physical and biological science on the west of the northern hemisphere and social science on the east. At both the North Pole and the South Pole are the phrases, "Concepts at a High Level of Abstraction, while along the Equator is the phrase, "Concepts at a Low Level of Abstraction." The lines of longitude and latitude are solid for physical and biological sciences, dashes for social science, and dots for literature.
as links among various areas of specialization. This metaphor is partly based on an idea advanced by Lev Vygotsky [(1934) 1965: 112], a social psychologist whose work included a deep interest in how language works. As we move down lines of longitude reaching from the North Pole to the equator within the northern hemisphere, we are also moving down language’s ladder of abstraction from concepts that are very abstract to concepts that are very concrete. This movement works in the same way for the physical and biological sciences and the social sciences. Similarly, the South Pole represents a high level of abstraction for literary concepts, and movement up to the equator is movement to concepts at a low level of abstraction. However, no actual phenomena are depicted at the equator, but only concepts at a very low level of linguistic abstraction.
For example, within sociology we might move from “social stratification”--defined broadly enough to encompass racism, classism, ageism, sexism and ethnocentrism--to the concept of racism between blacks and whites in American society, and still further down, black-white racism within American society after the Civil War. Within physics we might have concepts like “force” at the North Pole--defined broadly enough to include the force of gravity along with mechanical and other forces--and the force of gravity of objects in free fall near the earth still further down. Literature, by contrast, does not emphasize technical terms but communicates with ordinary language. And ordinary language is also organized by levels of abstraction, such as “human being” at the South Pole, “men” closer to the equator, and “Hamlet” at the equator. And literature with its metaphors can illustrate the power of language to jump from the concrete to the abstract, where “Hamlet” can come to mean the indecisiveness of all human beings when we are faced with problems demanding action. Metaphorically, we can all come to see ourselves as Hamlets to a degree. From the perspective of the globe metaphor, all language works in similar ways, where its utility derives in large measure from its helping us to move from the general or abstract to the specific or concrete, bringing general experience to bear on any specific situation or problem, and vice-versa.
Let us note the sharp distinction in Figure 1-2 between the biophysical sciences with their solid lines of longitude and the social sciences with their dashes comprising their lines of longitude. This distinction suggests the relative successes of the biophysical sciences in shuttling up and down the ladder of abstraction and the relative failures of the social sciences in this regard. The globe metaphor provides us with a clearer picture of what Willer and Webster attempted to teach us over three decades ago: that it is concepts at a very high level of abstraction which we sociologists desperately need if we wish to learn from the achievements of the biophysical sciences. Movement up the ladder of abstraction creates concepts that can function as broad umbrellas which enable us to then move very far down that ladder to concrete experience. We see this in the physical concept “force,” where we can come down to invoke any concrete force whatsoever, whether it be a falling apple or the motion of our galaxy. The globe metaphor gives us, then, a clear direction for sociology and the social sciences, one that sharply contradicts Merton’s emphasis on theories of the middle range: to conceptualize at very high levels of abstraction and use those concepts to carry much of the weight of what we have learned through our research over the years. Here, then, is a direction for a second step in our reconstructed scientific method: that of achieving a high level of abstraction for our concepts. As we shall see, this step is absolutely vital if we are to develop a web of concepts which will help us to build bridges across specialized fields.
Figure 1-3, A Web of Sociological Concepts, presents 26 key concepts generally
Figure 1-3
Figure 1-3 is divided into three rows: social structures on top, the situation in the middle, and the individual on the bottom, with the concept socialization linking the top row with the bottom row. Social structures in turn are divided into culture on the left and social organization on the right. Within culture we have norms and anomie on the left, values on the right and institutions in the middle. Within social organization we have social stratification on the left, bureaucracy on the right and group in the middle.
The situation is divided into a left-hand side and a right-hand side. On the left-hand side we have a left-hand column (directly under norms and anomie) with definition of the situation and label and a right-hand column (directly under values) with relative deprivation and reinforcement, As for the right-hand side, we have conformity, deviance and social interaction.s
As for the bottom row, we start individual at the bottom and read upwards, and once again we have two columns on the left-hand side and one column on the right-hand side. worldview is on the left-hand column of the left side (directly below definition of the situation and label), whereas alienation is on.the right-hand column of the left side (directly below relative deprivation and reinforcement). Addiction is located on the right-hand side. As for the middle of the bottom row (directly above the individual) we have personality structure and self image. Below the individual within the bottom row we have biological structure on the left and physical structure on the right..
taught in introductory sociology, studied in graduate school and given at least lip service in sociological research. We have already used some of them--social structure, culture, social organization, cultural values, social stratification, bureaucracy, anomie, alienation --in our analysis of the research problem we have selected as an illustration. These 26 concepts have been chosen because of their importance within the discipline, their abstract conceptualization, their readiness to form links with one another and their range of coverage. Within the literature of sociology there is and has been a great deal of controversy over which concepts are crucial and which ones are less important, with the positions sociologists have taken generally following their specialized interests. Similarly, there have been and remain controversies over the definition of each of these concepts. The approach adopted here--following our reconstructed scientific method--is to emphasize sociology’s most abstract concepts and even to convert some concepts often used in a relatively concrete way into abstract concepts as well. Also, this approach looks to selecting those concepts which can most easily form a web that encompasses the range of sociology’s fields of knowledge. Further, definitions which appear in the glossary have been developed to facilitate this emphasis on abstraction as well as systematic relationships among concepts with minimal overlap.
Many key concepts, such as ageism, authority, classism, collective behavior, community, crime, cultural change, demography, discrimination, ecology, economy, educational system, emotions, ethnic group, ethnocentrism, family, gender, industrial society, law, mental health, migration, occupations, political system, power, prejudice, race, racism, rational choice, religion, role, sex roles, sexism, social change, social class, social conflict and social movements have been omitted. Yet the inclusive concepts in Figure 1-3 are meant to encompass many of the less inclusive concepts within the discipline. For example, “institutions” would include “family,” “educational system,” “economy,” “political system” and “religion.” Also, “group” includes “community,” “ethnic group,” “race” and “social class.” And “label” along with “social stratification” can come to include “ageism,” “classism,” “discrimination,” “ethnocentrism,” “prejudice,” “racism” and “sexism.”
Many of the omitted concepts--along with still others that have been omitted but have not been listed above--are closely linked to those in Figure 1-3. For example, “authority,” “power,” “caste system” and “class consciousness” are linked to “social stratification” and “bureaucracy” along with the political and economic “institutions.” “Ecology” is related to “physical structure” and “population” along with “race” and “gender” to “biological structure.” “Emotions” are linked to “values,” “relative deprivation,” “reinforcement” and “alienation.” “Law” and “crime” are tied to “norm,” “value,” “conformity” and “deviance.” “Occupations” are related to “bureaucracy,” “social stratification” and “group.” “Role” and “sex roles” are linked to “norms” and “values” as well as “group” and “institutions.” The approach to be adopted will emphasize change, taking up some of the slack resulting from the omission of “collective behavior,” “cultural change,” “migration,” “social change” and “social movements.” Other concepts were not added to this original list largely for the sake of brevity and simplicity. There is nothing holy about the list: to move beyond vague generalities about the importance of abstract concepts it is essential to choose some concepts and develop illustrations based on those concepts. In Chapter 4 we will add two concepts, and Chapter 6 will see seven more concepts, adding up to a total of 39 for the book as a whole. Yet our discussions in this and the following chapters will not be limited to these sociological concepts, including others as well.
A key to using Figure 1-3 as well as to the web approach in general is an interest in applying simultaneously as many of these concepts as possible to any given situation or problem. For example, let us note the three rows in Figure 1-3: social structure, the situation and the individual. A wide-ranging approach to any given phenomenon would require that we dip into all three rather than divide up our scientific labor bureaucratically. In this way we combine a situational analysis with a structural one, and we also combine an interest in both social structure and structures associated with the individual. This kind of approach helps us to understand social and cultural change, for we are dealing with the momentary scene as well as long-term and short-term structures. Further, we should also look to all three columns in our analysis, as indicted by the vertical lines of dashes. There are the two headed by cultural “norms” and “values” and that headed by “social organization.” We saw, for example, the importance of viewing both culture and social organization in our foregoing analysis of problems in modern society, where the two together enabled us to see a growing gap between aspirations and fulfillment. Metaphorically, these three columns have to do with the “head,” the “heart” and the “hand,” or The Wizard of Oz’s Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion. By dipping into all three columns simultaneously we are responding to some postmodernist critiques of sociology in terms of its supposed overemphasis on rationality.
In Chapter 5’s Figure 5-1 we will carry further this idea of emphasizing the achievement of diversity among these three rows and columns which together form nine distinct cells. Our analysis there will open up the possibility of employing concepts entirely different from those in Figure 1-3, provided that they are defined abstractly, form systematic relationships with one another and carry the weight of social science knowledge. In this way sociologists accustomed to using diverse sets of concepts can employ this reconstructed scientific method without abandoning their concepts. Further, other social scientists with entirely different concepts can do the same. What is crucial is certainly not the usage of only those concepts in Figure 1-3 or only those used in the discipline of sociology. Rather, it is the usage of a set of concepts which helps the user to expand her or his coverage of those nine cells so as to deal with more of the complexity of human behavior. Also, it is the demonstration of the utility of any set of concepts for invoking the weight of social science knowledge, for achieving understanding of substantive and applied problems, and for uncovering new insights into human phenomena. Thus, the reader can view the concepts emphasized throughout this book as no more than illustrative, just as the defined research problem that is the focus of this chapter--the hypothesized accelerating gap between aspirations and fulfillments--as no more than an example. What remains crucial, however, is our general approach to reconstructing the scientific method.
Several of the concepts in Figure 1-3 have not been emphasized within the contemporary sociological literature, yet they are useful for achieving wide coverage of phenomena. “Worldview” or Weltanschauung is a case in point, helping us to tie together the range of concepts in Figure 1-3, linking to the concepts of culture and cultural paradigm, and strengthening our conception of the nature and importance of the individual. Several earlier sociologists, such as Karl Mannheim [1952], saw the potential of this concept, but it takes an understanding of how it relates systematically to other concepts to realize that potential. “Biological structure” strengthens our understanding of the nature of the individual without any necessary tie to biosociology, and “physical structure” links to the importance of ecology as well as the physical sciences and the physical universe in general. We might recall here that Karl Marx’s approach to the idea of alienation, which typified the breadth of the classical sociologists, included physical and biological structures along with structures centered on society and the individual. As for “addiction,” following its placement in Figure 1-3 it provides insight into patterns of individual action--similar to “habit” for psychology--which is missing from the sociological literature. Its abstract orientation goes beyond its link to physiological addiction, pointing to any outer-oriented compulsive behavior emphasized to such a degree as to block out broader behavior, such as watching television, shopping or running. We might note that these four concepts all are about individual structures, helping to repair sociology’s one-sided focus on social structure.
It is important to understand that the concepts in Figure 1-3 are all very abstract, bearing to a degree on all human phenomena rather than limited in time and space to certain eras or certain cultures, subcultures or groups. With reference to the globe metaphor, they are all located at the North Pole. Given our tendency in everyday thought and speech to emphasize more concrete concepts--given their relative closeness to our sensory experiences--it is difficult for us to hold in mind that high level of abstraction. For example, many of us have been accustomed to seeing situational concepts--those located within the middle row of Figure 1-3--as being located further down those lines of longitude at a more concrete level. We can more easily experience momentary scenes than we can experience, for example, cultural values or bureaucracy. Yet those scenes cannot be understood without abstract conceptualization any more than large-scale changes throughout society. For example, W. I. Thomas employed visible examples in developing his concept of “definition of the situation,” such as a mother’s admonitions to her daughter to “Sit up straight,” “Mind your mother” and “Be kind to sister” [1923: 42]. Yet on the basis of our present knowledge, “definition of the situation” also includes patterns of social stratification, cultural values, her own worldview, and much more besides. And this high level of abstraction appears to be absolutely vital to developing links among the different fields of our own discipline or any other discipline.
We can see, for example, such stratification illustrated by the mother’s commands to her daughter. We can also see indirectly that mother’s adherence to cultural values emphasizing equality and individual worth in her saying, “Be kind to sister.” And her outer-oriented worldview also comes through indirectly in her concern for her daughter’s behavior and her effort to influence her daughter to look outward as well. Of course, there are a great many other ways of interpreting that mother’s statements. What solid empirical basis is there for making these interpretations by contrast with other possibilities? What gives us the right to invoke patterns of social stratification, cultural values and worldviews on the basis of such limited knowledge of the mother’s definition of the situation? Couldn’t she have been invoking a much different definition? Of course, the scientific method guarantees no certainty nor even the promise of eventual certainty. But the above interpretation is based not merely on Thomas’ quotes but on our entire web of sociological concepts and knowledge. We know a great deal about the patterns of social stratification and cultural values which were prevalent in the 1920s and are still widespread today. And we also are beginning to learn about the nature of our worldview then and now. We need not proceed from a bureaucratic approach to the scientific method with its focus on isolating each study and making precise predictions. Instead, we can adopt a more interactive approach.
This web of concepts suggests a more interactive scientific and cultural paradigm than our present bureaucratic ones. Scientifically, it points us away from our specialized tower of Babel and invokes the body of knowledge within the discipline as a whole. Both credibility and rapid cumulative development are at stake here. To the extent that we can indeed invoke that knowledge, then what we have to say will carry far more weight than the pronouncements of any specialized expert. Although it will not yield precise predictions, it should nevertheless give us the implications of many thousands of investigations and should yield much more profound understanding of the modern world than we presently employ. As for cumulative development, the language of sociology depicted in Figure 1-3 encompasses directly or indirectly current work throughout the discipline. It will not replace specialized languages but rather interact with them, and it should suggest both their further development as well as that of the general language of sociology. More concretely, it should open up paths for us sociologists to communicate with one another instead of hiding within our own special fields. To the extent that we buy into the importance of all three rows and all three columns of Figure 1-3 for understanding human behavior, then the work being done within every single one of our forty Sections becomes relevant for every sociologist. As for the rationalization that we hardly have time to keep up with our own specialty, let alone other specialties, that would become equivalent to the statement that we have no time to be sociologists.
Low Level of Abstraction
It is our ability to move down language’s ladder of abstraction to concepts that are close in time and space to our concrete experiences--such as the colors and shapes that we see at this moment--that is so basic to the usefulness of ordinary language as well as literature. As for science, it is this very orientation which is the basis for achieving the “firm ground” that Nietzsche saw as contrasting with the millennia of prescientific thought. Does our emphasis on highly abstract concepts somehow take away from the importance of moving far down language’s ladder of abstraction? Within a bureaucratic worldview we tend to see movement up and movement down this ladder as working against one another. This is illustrated by the attitudes to philosophy as well as abstract theory held by many sociologists, following our tower-of-Babel perspective. Yet within an interactive worldview we can come to see movement up and down the ladder of abstraction as swings of a pendulum, where the further we move in one direction, the further we can move in the other direction. Is this in fact possible? The above illustration of Thomas’ concept, “definition of the situation,” exemplifies this insight. When we see the mother’s “Mind your mother” as illustrating social stratification, this alerts us to a great many other aspects of the situation which might otherwise escape us, such as her tone of voice, her volume, the rapidity of her speech, where she is located in relation to her daughter, her stance, her facial expression, her daughter’s facial expression and stance, and so on.
We can extend this approach to any phenomenon whatsoever, using any of the highly abstract concepts in Figure 1-3--like social stratification --to gain concrete insight into any phenomenon or situation whatsoever. And when we move from just one abstract concept to a web of 26 such concepts, we emerge with possibilities for gaining a great deal of insight into any given phenomenon. For example, we might link Thomas’ illustration to our own analysis of escalating problems within modern society. From that perspective we can begin to understand more fully the contradiction between the mother’s cultural values of equality and the worth of the individual, exemplified by her “Be kind to sister,” and her patterns of social stratification, illustrated by her “Sit up straight” and “Mind your mother.” She appears to be reflecting, following our earlier analysis of this contradiction, a fundamental and escalating problem throughout modern society. That analysis invoked several abstract concepts in addition to that of social stratification: “cultural values,” “bureaucracy,” “anomie” and “alienation.” And the other concepts among the 26 presented can flesh out this analysis much further, such as the worldview which keeps this growing contradiction in place as well as the mother’s “addiction” to “conforming” to our outer-oriented and bureaucratic “worldview.” In this way we can move further down the ladder of abstraction for any phenomenon whatsoever, opening up to concrete details we would have otherwise ignored.
Yet our heritage from an earlier period when we looked to quantitative sociology as the basis for fulfilling the Enlightenment dream would argue against such a role for abstract theory. For example, one question that might be raised is that of obtaining agreement on specific operational definitions for any given concept. Other questions might have to do with the difficulty of obtaining valid, reliable and precise measurements of abstract concepts. Such an orientation suggests a focus on prediction, which is certainly admirable as a long-term goal but which appears to distort our research efforts in the short run. We appear to require most immediately the ability to gain insight into complex problems with the aid of a system of abstract concepts that carries much of the weight of sociological knowledge. There exists an approach to measurement which points exactly in this direction.. The idea of developing the “construct validity” of any given concept is an approach to measurement, developed within psychology [Cronbach and Meehl, 1955], which points in this direction. Construct validity involves an assessment of just how well the empirical implications of a given abstract concept reflect what we have already learned from our web of abstract concepts. For example, does our concept of anomie suggest the same kinds of phenomena that are also suggested by our understanding of the growing contradiction between cultural values and patterns of social organization? Does it also reflect what we have learned about alienation and addiction?
Over the past several decades interest in ethnomethodology, rational choice theory and symbolic interactionism has yielded a great deal of knowledge about concrete situations as well as procedures for learning about them. Mundane subjects such as conversations, greetings, arguments and accounts of past experiences have been shown to reveal a world of complexity as well as patterns of behavior. Much of this knowledge has centered on small-group situations, as suggested by concepts in the middle row of Figure 1-3. Without such detailed situational knowledge we remain largely helpless in understanding social and cultural change. With it, we can combine structures with situations and penetrate the nature of change far more fully, yielding the potential for a genuine breakthrough in understanding human behavior. However, the problem with much of this work--in common with research within the rest of the discipline--is a failure to employ abstract concepts along with concrete ones. For example, there is a general avoidance of paying attention to culture and social organization, structures that we have learned a great deal about over the history of our discipline. To the extent that we come to see both situational and structural concepts as useful for analyzing any given scene--by contrast with our narrow bureaucratic interpretation of the scientific method--we should be able to probe ever more deeply into the complexities and dynamism within any given situation.
There is one area of concrete phenomena which we sociologists have tended to avoid, and we can understand this because of our outer-oriented worldview: past sociological research, as embodied in articles and books. Doing secondary analyses of such phenomena is similar to the hermeneutic tradition within philosophy, which originally centered on the interpretation of biblical and other sacred texts as well as on Roman law. Later, this approach was extended to any text whatsoever, with the definition of “text” extended to include any human action or product. Some hermeneutic approaches have emphasized texts relevant to the social sciences [see for example Gadamer (1960) 1975; Apel, 1980; Habermas, 1971; Ricoeur,1970]. What hermeneutics points us toward is the importance of language in concretizing any momentary scene, for that scene suggests the existence of an entire world. Yet we who interpret that text come from a different world, and what we have learned since that text was written can help us to understand both worlds. For example, we can look back at Marx’s work and see, with the benefit of many decades of sociological research, the importance of culture and the situation in addition to patterns of social organization. And we can also see our failure to alter the worldview which deeply concerned Marx. This “secondary” or hermeneutic analysis of Marx becomes a research study in its own right, one that is reflexive relative to sociological knowledge.
In addition to examining such classical research, we can perform secondary analyses of the full range of articles published in our journals along with our books. But doesn’t this suggest concern with the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin rather than genuine sociological research? Shouldn’t we be gathering new empirical data rather than rehashing old and dead material? Isn’t such “research” no more than an exercise in navel-gazing? On the contrary, such research appears to be exactly what we need most in our situation of unconnected bits and pieces of knowledge and procedures that fail to follow the scientific ideals of openness to knowledge and the achievement of rapid cumulative development and a high degree of credibility. Secondary analyses can devote time and energy to conceptualization as well as the links among concepts rather than to the collection of still more data. They can point us in the very direction we have generally failed to follow in this century: toward movement far up language’s ladder of abstraction. If we have already created a great imbalance favoring concepts at a low level of abstraction, then secondary analyses are urgently required to redress that imbalance. The fact that so few of them are published suggests the depth of that imbalance, for they generally emphasize abstract concepts more than primary analyses. Following this argument, they should be granted much higher priority than primary analyses at this time in history. Yet primary analyses are needed as well, for they have the advantage of developing measurement procedures centering on a given research problem.
Integration of Knowledge
Just as our language consists not only of words but also of sentences and paragraphs, so does the language of science include hypotheses, propositions and theories which link concepts with one another. Such statements make claims about the nature of the world, granting that they can never guarantee certainty. They can include existential or descriptive propositions, such as “Social stratification is widespread,” as well as propositions pointing toward cause-effect relationships among phenomena. And just as it is a web of concepts which is needed to assess the construct validity of any given concept, so is it a web of concepts within which any proposition about the nature of the world can be located. Within a bureaucratic approach to sociological research we do not look for that web, preferring instead to see propositions as isolated from one another. And we look toward using those propositions to make accurate predictions about phenomena. Further, we generally see those concepts as pointing in one direction only--from a given independent variable to a given dependent variable--yielding a relatively static approach to society. By contrast, our interactive orientation includes not only the impact of the independent variable but of the dependent variable as well. Also, our concern is with explanation far more than prediction. This is similar to our usage of concepts in ordinary language, where they yield insight without being located within propositions giving us precise predictions.
We can understand more clearly the nature of this fourth step within our web approach to the scientific method by looking to its philosophical origins in the work of Duhem [1954] and Quine and Ullian[1970] and their critique of approaches to positivism, as summarized by Kincaid [1996]. Here, our globe metaphor can give us an image of that critique. Quine maintained that we cannot obtain concrete truths in isolation from abstract concepts. He saw the testing of propositions in a holistic manner, just as Mills saw the importance of shuttling up and down language’s ladder of abstraction. Further, neither can we test propositions in isolation from one another, for it is an entire web of propositions that is tested simultaneously. Thus, any given concept or hypothesis should be seen as located within a “web of belief,” with all parts of the web indirectly related to one another. Given this view of concepts and evidence, we sociologists have been interpreting the scientific method in a way which lost credence within philosophy long ago. Yet our general ignorance of this state of affairs is understandable, given the prevalence of a bureaucratic worldview. At this point, however, we can afford to be most optimistic. If our own interpretation of the scientific method has hurt us, then this is not any inherent barrier to understanding human behavior. Knowing this, we are now in a position to develop an interpretation closer to what we have learned about the way the physical and biological sciences have in fact worked. This requires that we return to what much of postmodernism suggests: a questioning of our understanding of the scientific method.
We are now in a position, given our web of concepts, to return to the first step in our illustration of the scientific method, our definition of a problem. There we defined a mammoth and escalating problem within modern society: an accelerating gap between aspirations and fulfillment of those aspirations. What are the forces generating the long-term revolution of rising expectations as well as the fulfillment of those aspirations? Now, however, we have a web of concepts, and we can use some of them in a schematic diagram of forces behind those curves of aspiration and fulfillment. Here as before we shall present a schematic diagram meant to be suggestive. As for solid evidence, that is reserved for Chapters 3 and 4. Our approach will be to follow Kuhn’s analysis of scientific revolutions, applying it to our sociological analysis of the problem depicted in Figure 1-1. We begin, using a pendulum metaphor, by pushing our pendulum as far as we can toward understanding the depth of that problem, taking into account social structures, individual structures and situational forces. For example, given our accelerating gap between aspirations and fulfillment, just where does this appear to be leading us, considering in particular the possibilities of accelerating terrorism? And then in our final subsection on our worldview and a reflexive approach, we allow that pendulum to gather momentum in the opposite direction, taking into account the powerful forces involved in both our scientific paradigm and our cultural paradigm.
Within the present bureaucratic approach to the scientific method, we would focus on one-way or unidirectional hypotheses or propositions in an effort to test and explain what is depicted in Figure 1-1. Such hypotheses or propositions are still useful within our reconstructed approach. For example, the relatively concrete one-way propositions that make up much of the literature of sociology can come to be seen more systematically within broader propositions employing more abstract propositions. In this way we can proceed to integrate much of existing knowledge and move away from isolated pieces of knowledge. In addition to this unidirectional approach, it is also possible to get at more of the complexity of human behavior by moving beyond the limitations of the distinction between “independent variables” and “dependent variables.” Instead, we can take into account the back-and-forth interaction among variables with interactive versus unidirectional propositions. Within the overly strict requirements of a bureaucratic approach to the scientific method, it would be exceedingly difficult to obtain data which yield acceptable knowledge as to the interactions that take place. However, a more pragmatic and web-oriented approach to the scientific method can come up with credible findings about the nature of such interactions. If indeed human behavior involves such interactive relationships among variables or concepts, a scientific approach requires that we attempt to understand them even if our data do not yield near-certainty, and that is the approach adopted here.
Figure 1-4, Structural and Situational Forces Linked to the Accelerating Gap between Aspirations and Fulfillment, is a causal-loop diagram based on an interactive
Figure 1-4
This figure has an upper loop (arrows going clockwise) emphasizing social and individual structures, and a lower loop (arrows going counterclockwise) emphasizing situational forces. Both are positive loops in that all of the forces continue to move in the same direction. Bureaucratic worldview is the key concept here: it is both at the bottom of the upper loop and at the top of the lower loop. Going clockwise around the upper loop from bureaucratic worldview we have physical and biological sciences and technologies, cultural values, anomie, alienation and addiction, and back again to bureaucratic worldview. There is also an additional loop within this upper loop: from physical and biological sciences and technologies, to social stratification, and bureaucracy, and from there to anomie, alienation and addiction.
As for the lower loop, once again we begin with bureaucratic worldview, Moving counterclockwise we have bureaucratic sociological paradigm, limited sociological knowledge, relative deprivation, negative reinforcement, conformity, and then back to bureaucratic worldview..There is a + sign between each pair of variables, indicating movement in the same direction, which characterizes a positive loop.
approach versus a one-way approach to the relationships among phenomena [see for example Maruyama,1963; Forrester, 1968, 1969, 1971; Meadows et al., 1972; Phillips and Senge, 1972; Phillips, 1980; and Phillips, 1985: 84-95; see especially Roberts et al., 1983, for a concrete explanation and illustrations of the procedures involved]. The top loop centers on some social and individual structures and the bottom loop emphasizes several situational forces. Both are “positive loops,” as conveyed by plus signs surrounded by tiny loops in their centers, meaning that all of the forces involved continue to move in the same direction. The top loop points toward society as a whole, whereas the bottom loop centers on our situation within the discipline of sociology. The plus signs next to all of the arrows around the perimeters of the circles indicate a direct versus an inverse relationship between the two concepts connected by a given arrow. Thus, for example, increased feelings of “relative deprivation” are hypothesized as yielding more--not less--”negative reinforcement.” Implicit in our joining the two loops is a conviction that what we do or fail to do within our own discipline has a marked effect on what happens within society as a whole.
The problem under analysis actually is far more complex than this sketch suggests. For example, forces opposing those depicted are in fact operating, preventing the continuing acceleration of each loop. Such complexities are discussed in relation to Figure 4-1 in Chapter 4, where the focus is on the upper loop of Figure 1-4. Just as the simple schematic diagram in Figure 1-1 helped us to gain insight into the nature of this problem by omitting complexities, the simple schematic diagram sketched here can also be useful in helping us to understand the forces behind that problem by omitting complicating factors. There is a methodology that has been well developed which can take us from this relatively simple diagram to highly sophisticated procedures for computer simulation, as illustrated and explained in the above references to the work of Forrester, Roberts and others. Such simulation procedures offer the possibility of carrying further the systematic approach to the scientific method adopted here. Specifically, they can deal with highly complex feedback relationships among a set of variables. However, the introduction of that methodology might well await further commitment within our discipline to a scientific method which emphasizes abstract theory. We already have too many examples within sociology of quantitative procedures which push us further and further away from a balance between abstract theory and methodology.
Beginning with the bureaucratic worldview in the center of Figure 1-4 and going around the top loop clockwise, that worldview gives impetus to the development of the physical and biological sciences and their technologies. Those technologies include procedures for constructing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. At the top of the loop we see the accelerating cultural values--for example, achievement and success along with equality and the worth of the individual--associated with our continuing industrial revolution, and these forces lie behind the revolution of rising expectations in Figure 1-1. Yet just below those cultural values are our patterns of social stratification and bureaucracy limiting the fulfillment of those values, as suggested by the bottom curve of Figure 1-1. Together, these forces of culture and social organization produce the widening gap depicted in that figure, a gap that is associated with anomie within social structure and alienation and addiction within the individual. These relatively invisible problems are linked to far more visible ones, such as a widening gap between the rich and the poor, patterns of discrimination, crime, terrorism, substance abuse, suicide and divorce. Yet without an alternative worldview, these invisible and visible problems fail to yield serious questioning of our present worldview, and the latter continues to be reinforced as we go around the loop since it constitutes what we see as our only direction for solving those problems.
Proceeding counterclockwise from the bureaucratic worldview around the bottom loop, we come to our bureaucratic sociological paradigm and the limited sociological knowledge it produces, as we have argued above. We sociologists then come to feel relative deprivation, relative to the biophysical sciences, for we are neither rapidly cumulating our knowledge nor developing a platform on which powerful social technologies can be constructed. The result is negative reinforcement, bearing in mind that our Enlightenment ideals still live and call for the development of our disciplinary knowledge in those ways. The resulting discouragement, cynicism and pessimism in turn push us in the direction of hiding from this failure, yielding conformity to the norms within a given specialized field in our tower of Babel. And such conformity in turn serves to reinforce our bureaucratic worldview which, unfortunately, remains the only game in town. And in this way we continue to go around the bottom loop, all the while that anomie, alienation and addiction continue to increase. Most of us continue to do our best in our efforts to develop knowledge and to apply that knowledge to social problems, and many of us raise questions about the existing structures of society or the existing procedures used within sociology. But our voices are easily drowned out in society, since we have gained little credibility and we speak more as individuals than with the voice of sociology.
Following Kuhn’s argument and extrapolating it, we require not only a more interactive sociological paradigm but also a more interactive cultural paradigm or worldview as the broad framework within which that sociological paradigm is located. Figure 1-4 suggests that we sociologists can indeed have the impact on society called for by our Enlightenment ideals, provided that we are able to come up with alternative paradigms for sociology and society. That figure certainly does not offer us any detailed blueprint for how we might proceed, but its linking of situational and structural forces points us in a crucial direction. It is only in recent decades that we have come to stress the importance of situational factors, yet what we have failed to do is to link them with structural forces. When we proceed to do so we invoke the wide range of sociological concepts within the discipline. And that link appears to be fundamental to an understanding of social and cultural change. These feedback loops do not yield what most of us would like to have: an ability to make predictions with precision about the occurrence of a phenomenon or the solution of a problem. Yet an emphasis on exact prediction takes us away from gaining insight into how a number of structural and situational factors might come together to yield a given phenomenon. Pragmatically, this is much the way we appear to approach phenomena and problems in our everyday lives: not with predictive formulae but with sensitizing ideas.
Reflexive Analysis and an Interactive Worldview
Figure 1-5 sketches the potential impact of an interactive worldview and
Figure 1-5
Figure 1-5 combines two separate figures which provide an optimistic view of the situations depicted in Figures 1-1 and 1-4. The figure at the bottom of the page is much like Figure 1-4, with the key exception being that interactive worldview substitutes for bureaucratic worldview. Moving clockwise around its top positive loop from interactive worldview, the only two differences from Figure 1-4 are that (1) there is LESS social stratification and bureaucracy and also LESS anomie, alienation and addiction. The bottom loop reverses the bottom loop of Figure 1-4. As for the inner portion of this top positive loop, we have LESS social stratification and bureaucracy. Moving counterclockwise from interactive worldview at the top of the bottom loop, we have interactive sociological paradigm, sociological knowledge, less relative deprivation, positive reinforcement, social interaction, and then back to interactive worldview.
The result of these optimistic positive loops is portrayed at the top of the page, paralleling Figure 1-1. But instead of a widening gap that results from a top curve (Revolution of Rising Expectations) accelerating much faster than a bottom curve (Fulfillment of Expectations), we have the reverse: the bottom curve is accelerating more rapidly, moving to close the gap between the two curves. The diagram takes us from Present to Future instead of fro Preindustrial Society to Modern Society.
sociological paradigm on the problem depicted in Figures 1-1 and 1-4. The approach points toward continuing reduction of the gap between aspirations and fulfillments, as depicted in the graph at the top of Figure 1-5. The analysis of the forces involved parallels the analysis in Figure 1-4, where the basic change is the shift of the concept in the center of the two positive loops: from “bureaucratic worldview” to “interactive worldview.” Moving counterclockwise from the latter concept around the bottom loop, it is an interactive worldview which provides a framework for an interactive sociological paradigm, just as the bureaucratic worldview in Figure 1-4 encouraged the development of a bureaucratic sociological paradigm. Throughout the above materials we have argued that it is exactly this kind of scientific approach which is essential for the rapid cumulative development of sociological knowledge and the achievement of greatly enhanced scientific credibility. In turn, that achievement would yield greater recognition of the importance of sociology and less relative deprivation felt by sociologists in relation to physical and biological scientists. That in turn is a species of positive reinforcement, which should help to open up the sociologist to more social interaction with colleagues, given that the scientific method that works for us points to building bridges between specialists, and this in turn strengthens his or her interactive worldview.
The plus or minus signs around the perimeter of the bottom loop indicate once again whether a relationship between two concepts or variables is a direct one or an inverse one. Thus, a more interactive worldview and cultural paradigm shapes a more interactive sociological paradigm, leading in turn to greater sociological knowledge. But that increased knowledge yields, inversely, “less” relative deprivation, as indicated by the minus sign. Ordinarily, causal loop diagrams eliminate the “less” or the “more” in parentheses, since that can be determined by using the signs around the perimeter appropriately, but in this initial example of our usage of negative signs we wish to help the reader understand what is hypothesized. Continuing around the lower loop, less relative deprivation leads to “more” positive reinforcement, as indicated by the minus sign, and such reinforcement yields more social interaction and, in turn, strengthens the existing interactive worldview and cultural paradigm. We might note that the existence of an even number of minus signs around the perimeter of a loop yields a double reversal, thus making for a positive loop. Yet we must bear in mind that Figures 1-5 and 1-4 are no more than hypothetical or schematic. The extent to which these figures are backed up by data remains to be seen. And we should also bear in mind that these figures oversimplify complex situations, granting that they do succeed in opening up to much more of that complexity than results from the isolated propositions sociologists are accustomed to employing. Again, Figure 4-1 will open up to still more complexity.
Moving clockwise from the concept of interactive worldview around the top positive loop, there is continuing impetus to the development of the physical and biological sciences and their technologies. However the development of highly credible sociological knowledge will increase awareness of threatening problems, and that awareness will play a role in decisions on the kinds of technologies which are developed. As for cultural values like achievement and success as well as equality and the worth of the individual, they will continue to be emphasized, but the developing interactive worldview will point toward “less” stratification and bureaucracy throughout society, and hence the minus sign indicating an inverse relationship. If this approach works well within our own discipline, there is reason to believe it would also work elsewhere. As a result, we might expect “less” anomie, alienation and addiction (the plus sign indicates a direct relationship between less stratification and less anomie) and further support for and development of an interactive worldview (an inverse relationship between less anomie and such further support). Although Figure 1-5 centers only on sociology among the various social sciences, there is also reason to believe that achievements within our own discipline based on our reconstructed scientific method will influence the other social sciences to follow our lead. This need not involve adoption of our own concepts but rather any set of concepts emphasizing the importance of a wide range of factors, such as social structure, the situation, the individual, culture and social organization.
It is easy enough to draw optimistic diagrams, but is it in fact possible for sociologists to come up with the kind of powerful knowledge which in fact can affect forces as large and as invisible as anomie, alienation and addiction within modern society? Even more difficult, can we hope to alter the very worldview and cultural paradigm which are basic to modern society? Following Figures 1-4 and 1-5, a key to understanding social and cultural change is our ability to take into account both structural and situational factors. To change our worldview, then, we require an alternative structure--another worldview--which promises to solve problems which could not be solved within the old worldview, such as anomie, alienation and addiction. Further, from a situational perspective we must have a direction for how we can act in any given situation so as to follow the new worldview. Figure 1-5 begins to illustrate this for work within sociology. Yet there is much more we must learn if we are to follow what is hypothesized in Figure 1-5’s lower loop. And there is also the upper loop of that figure, which has to do with all of the situations which we all face in everyday life that are not directly related to our work. The new worldview must prove to be equally effective in all of those settings. More specifically, if we sociologists can learn to achieve positive reinforcement from developing sociological knowledge, we must learn to do the same from applying that knowledge in other situations. Here, Gouldner’s call for a reflexive sociology and Mills’ vision of the sociological imagination both point us exactly in this direction.
By contrast, our present bureaucratic ethos points us in an outer-oriented direction. We look outward, working to develop knowledge and communicate it to students as well as specialists attempting to solve problems within all of our institutions. Yet just as we have up to now failed to take a very hard and sustained look at our own interpretation of the scientific method, so have we also failed to examine our own bureaucratic role in society. Of course, many of us--such as C. Wright Mills--have criticized that role, yet we have yet to see a direction for an interactive cultural paradigm which would alter it profoundly. If we began to adopt a more interactive approach to replace our outer orientation, then we would begin to look to our own usage of our abstract sociological concepts within our own everyday thoughts, feelings and actions, following Gouldner’s call for a reflexive sociology. And if we are to follow Mills’ vision of the sociological imagination, then there is no reason why any individual could not follow along the same path. Such changes would not destroy existing bureaucratic organizations but would rather make them more and more interactive. And is it a utopian dream to expect that, if this occurred, all of our institutions would become increasingly effective in solving their basic problems, just as the technologies based on the physical and biological sciences continue to become more effective?
Our analysis in this chapter is limited in its ability to communicate the exact nature of an interactive worldview as well as a reflexive approach to the scientific method and everyday life. Nevertheless, we have at least made a beginning in these directions. Given our deep involvement in a bureaucratic scientific and cultural paradigm, it is indeed difficult to speculate about an alternative worldview. Yet following the interactive relationships depicted in Figures 1-4 and 1-5 along with our pendulum metaphor for the scientific method, continuing efforts to uncover our fundamental problems can be expected to yield further understanding of an interactive and reflexive worldview. Following Gouldner, we cannot afford to restrict such efforts to sociological activities, for that restriction follows a bureaucratic ethos that separates work from life. And following our own analysis of the accelerating gap between aspirations and fulfillment, we must pay attention to our own structures of alienation and addiction which have developed largely in response to that gap. More concretely, this translates into our learning to accept and deal with emotions like fear, guilt, shame and anger. To the extent that we are successful there, we will be in a position to accompany our research with a reflexive analysis of our own impact on that research, and vice-versa. And this would depart from our traditional bureaucratic and outer orientation, taking into account and learning about investigator effects.
Such a reflexive analysis should be seen as part and parcel of a scientific approach to sociology, for it follows scientific ideals of openness to all phenomena. If our justice system emphasizes the importance of self-interest in the acceptance of evidence and in the selection of jurors, how can we sociologists--who have learned so much about the impact of social interaction--ignore the self-interest or investigator effect of the social scientist as he or she proceeds to engage in social research? We might conceive of two kinds of secondary analyses or reflexive approaches, both of which fall within the hermeneutic tradition in philosophy and sociology, and both of which enable us to question the limitations of our worldview. One has to do with our taking a second look at some published material or some “text” defined far more broadly, and this involves an analysis from a different temporal and spatial perspective. This yields cumulative development in that we pay attention to a previous analysis, but we add to that analysis the understanding gained since it was completed. A second has to do with a secondary, hermeneutic or reflexive analysis of one’s own situation within the context of doing the research, yielding in a sense a double study: one on the external phenomena under examination, and one on the research situation itself. Both kinds of reflexive analysis are important within an interactive sociological paradigm and worldview, and both kinds are discouraged within our bureaucratic paradigms.
To illustrate briefly the beginnings of a reflexive analysis of the research situation, I might refer to my own hesitations, fears and shame relative to the research problem of the accelerating gap between aspirations and fulfillment sketched in this chapter. Given all that I have learned about the importance of focusing on very manageable research problems, how can I proceed to go against that education and define a research problem that is so broad and difficult to test with precise measurements? Where do I get the nerve to point toward an alternative paradigm for the entire discipline of sociology, given my own background in only some fields of the discipline? And far beyond this, who am I--a nonentity among the leaders and experts throughout the world--to propose nothing less than a change in our worldview if we are to achieve that alternative paradigm? Such hesitation, fear and shame manifest themselves in many ways, such as burying my writing in endless qualifications, hiding behind the statements of a great many other sociologists and philosophers, writer’s block, repetitive material, numerous drafts and overly intellectualized writing. Those feelings as I proceed with my work are reinforced over and over again throughout my everyday life. For example, it is not I who appears in the media but others. My own life will end at some point, but society will continue onward. My ignorance in most fields is driven home to me by the pronouncements of experts in those fields. My personal failures to fulfill many of my aspirations are evident to me as I proceed to live my life.
Yet an understanding of the content of this illustration of the accelerating gap can help me to open up to these problems. For I am not alone in having them: if that gap is indeed wide and widening, then we all are under increasing pressure to avoid facing that gap if we have no way of reducing it. Or, to use sociological concepts, we have all become victims of anomie, alienation and addiction If I can recognize such problems even slightly, then I can increasingly open up to such problems. I can learn to recognize more easily the existence of my fears and feelings of shame, coming to see such recognition as something positive rather than as something negative. And in this way, perhaps I can free up my emotions in this way so as to develop the motivational energy to act on the basis of my sociological knowledge as to the existence of this accelerating gap between expectations and fulfillment throughout modern society. I certainly do not want to believe that this is happening, for it suggests that we are all teetering on the edge of a cliff, and that perhaps the end of civilization as we know it lies just around the corner. My preference along with what I believe is true of almost everyone else is to avoid thinking of such matters and to get on with my narrow concerns. Yet if indeed this hypothesis proves to be credible, then I cannot continue to bury my head in the sand. There is far too much at stake for me to do that. What is crucial initially is that I explore the credibility of that hypothesis. That is what the following chapters point toward, using that question as the key illustration for a reconstructed approach to the scientific method.
However, let us be clear about the central focus of this chapter and the book as a whole. That focus is not on the question of whether or not there is an escalating gap between expectations and fulfillment in modern society but rather on that reconstructed scientific method. The former question, no matter what interest it has or does not have for the reader, is presented as no more than an illustrative example for that reconstruction. In this chapter we have given that illustration some prominence in its initial presentation. Some illustration is essential if we are to go beyond generalized statements about a methodological approach. And in this chapter we were able to introduce that approach as well. We are now in a position to go beyond that introduction, and Chapter 2 aims at yielding greater understanding of it. It is there that we shall bring in some philosophical as well as sociological background to the nature of our reconstructed scientific method. Part Two, however, will return to that illustration, and there we aim to bring to bear a number of studies which are consistent with and support it. There, as in the case of Chapter 1, our focus will remain on our reconstructed scientific method, and the hypothesis as to an escalating gap between expectations and fulfillment will remain no more than an illustration of that method.
GLOSSARY
action individual behavior
addiction the individual’s subordination of individuality to dependence on external phenomena
alienation persisting feelings of isolation from self, others, one's own biological structure and the physical universe
anomie the failure of society's norms or rules to guide the individual's actions toward the fulfillment of values or interests
biological structure a system of elements which interacts to a relatively great extent with its environment
bureaucracy a group with limited yet persistent interaction up and down its hierarchy and across its specialized fields
conformity legitimate behavior as defined by norms and values for a given situation
culture the widely-shared interests and beliefs of a people that (1) are learned with the aid of language and persist, and (2) shape and are shaped by people's momentary behavior
definition of the situation the individual’s understanding of the momentary scene
deviance illegitimate behavior as defined by norms and values for a given situation
domination the exercise of power or control over the behavior of others--against their will if necessary--in a given situation
expressive orientation the individual’s commitment to awareness and expression of emotions
group a collection of individuals who share certain characteristics
image of the situation the individual’s view of the momentary scene
imaginative orientation the individual’s openness to learning
individual a system of social, personality, biological and physical structures
institutions systems of norms and values centered on solving a given problem throughout society.
interaction individual action that yields environmental response
label assigning an individual or group to a given linguistic category within a particular situation
norms shared beliefs or expectations within a group
personality structure the individual’s patterns of action, interaction, interests and beliefs
physical structure a system of elements which interacts to a relatively small extent with its environment
praxis orientation the individual’s commitment to interaction which shapes self and world
reinforcement the fulfillment of the individual’s interests, motives or needs within a given situation
relative deprivation the individual’s feeling of unjustified loss or frustration of value fulfillment relative to others who are seen as enjoying greater fulfillment
scientific method a procedure for achieving deepening understanding of problems that builds on prior knowledge and is gained through patterns of social interaction
scientific technology a procedure for solving problems that builds on prior knowledge and is gained through patterns of social interaction,
self image the individual’s view of self.
situation any phenomenon located in time and space
social interaction momentary action that mutually affects two or more individuals and encompasses a given range of phenomena
social organization persisting and shared patterns of action or interaction
social relationship a continuing pattern of social interaction
social stratification a persisting hierarchy or pattern of inequality within a group
social structure persisting and shared patterns of action, interaction, interests and beliefs
socialization a learning process where the individual develops a personality and culture is transmitted
structure a persisting system of elements
substantive rationality the individual’s orientation to the full range of cultural values
values shared interests or ideals within a group
worldview The individual’s Weltanschauung or global outlook that is widely shared throughout society
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