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ONE
In Defence of Sociology
Thereâs something about sociology that raises hackles other academic subjects fail to reach. Economics may be the dismal science, full of obscure terms few can understand and seemingly irrelevant to the practical tasks of day-to-day life. Yet sociology is often indicted on all counts â diffuse and lacking a coherent subject-matter, as well as being jargon-ridden. What do you get when you cross a sociologist with a member of the Mafia? An offer you canât understand.
What is it with sociology? Why is it so irritating to so many? Some sociologists might answer: ignorance; others: fear. Why fear? Well, because they like to think of their subject as a dangerous and discomfiting one. Sociology, they are prone to say, tends to subvert: it challenges our assumptions about ourselves as individuals and about the wider social contexts in which we live. It has a direct connection with political radicalism. In the 1960s, the discipline seemed to many to live up to this firebrand reputation.
In truth, however, even in the 1960s and early 1970s sociology wasnât intrinsically associated with the left, let alone with revolutionaries. It came in for a great deal of criticism from Marxists of various persuasions who, far from regarding the subject as subversive, saw it as the very epitome of the bourgeois order they found so distasteful.
In some aspects and situations of its development sociology has in fact a long history of being bound up with the political right. Max Weber, commonly regarded as one of its classical founders, inclined more to the right than to the left and was savagely critical of the self-proclaimed revolutionaries of his time. Vilfredo Pareto and Robert Michels both flirted with Italian fascism towards the end of their lives. Most sociologists have probably been liberals by temperament and political inclination: this was true of Emile Durkheim and in later generations of R.K. Merton, Talcott Parsons, Erving Goffman and Ralf Dahrendorf among many other prominent sociological thinkers.
Sociology has currently been going through a hard time in the very country where it has long been most well developed, the US. A prominent American sociologist, Irving Louis Horowitz, recently published a book entitled The Decomposition of Sociology, a work which he reports was âmore a matter of pain rather than pride to have felt the need to writeâ. The discipline, he argues, has gone sour. Three sociology departments, including a distinguished one, at Washington University, St Louis â where Horowitz himself once worked â have recently been closed down. Yale University houses the oldest sociology department in the United States: its resources have just been cut by almost half.
Undergraduate student numbers in sociology in the US have fallen substantially over the two decades since the 1970s â from a record high of 36,000 students in 1973 to below 15,000 in 1994. According to Horowitz, however, the travails of sociology arenât just expressed in declining student appeal. They are to do with the parlous intellectual state of the discipline. Sociology, he says, might not in the past have been linked to an overall political standpoint, but since the 1960s it has increasingly become so. The subject has become the home of the discontented, a gathering of groups with special agendas, from the proponents of gay rights to liberation theology. Sociology is decomposing because it has come to be just what its critics always saw it as, a pseudoscience; and because there has been an outflow of respectable, empirically-oriented social scientists into other, more narrowly defined areas â such as urban planning, demography, criminology or jurisprudence. The deterioration of sociology doesnât imply the disintegration of social research, which is still flourishing in many domains; but much of such research has degenerated into pure empiricism, no longer guided by worthwhile theoretical perspectives. What has disappeared is the capacity of sociology to provide a unifying centre for the diverse branches of social research.
Shutting down of the sociology departments at Washington University and elsewhere has provoked a heated debate in the US â to which Horowitzâs is one among a variety of contributions. William Julius Wilson, well-known for his writings on the urban poor, has argued that sociology has become too detached from issues on the public agenda and should focus its concerns on matters of practical policy. After all, as he says, thereâs hardly a dearth of social problems for sociologists to study, with the cities falling into ruin, divisions between white and black as rigid as they ever were and violent crime a commonplace.
Is sociology in the doldrums? And if so, is this in some sense a peculiarly American phenomenon or something that applies worldwide? Or was sociology perhaps always the rag-tail affair its critics have long proclaimed it to be?
Letâs deal first of all with the old chestnut that sociology doesnât have a proper field of investigation. The truth of the matter is that the field of study of sociology, as understood by the bulk of its practitioners, is no more, but no less, clearly defined than that of any other academic area. Consider, for example, history. That discipline has an obvious subject-matter, it would seem â the past. But the past embraces everything! No clear or bounded field of study here, and history is every bit as riven by methodological disputes about its true nature as sociology has ever been.
Sociology is a generalizing discipline that concerns itself above all with modernity â with the character and dynamics of modern or industrialized societies. It shares many of its methodological strategies â and problems â not only with history but with the whole gamut of the social sciences. The more empirical issues it deals with are very real. Of all the social sciences, sociology bears most directly on the issues that concern us in our everyday lives â the development of modern urbanism, crime and punishment, gender, the family, religion, social and economic power.
Given that sociological research and thinking are more or less indispensable in contemporary society, it is difficult to make sense of the criticism that it is unenlightening â that it is common sense wrapped up in somewhat unattractive jargon. Although specific pieces of research could always be questioned, no one could argue that there is no point in carrying out, say, comparative studies of the incidence of divorce in different countries. Sociologists engage in all sorts of research which, once one has some awareness of them, would prove interesting, and be thought important, by most reasonably neutral observers.
There is, however, another, more subtle reason why sociology may appear quite often to proclaim what is obvious to common sense. This is that social research doesnât, and canât, remain separate from the social world it describes. Social research forms so much a part of our consciousness today that we take it for granted. All of us depend upon such research for what we regard as common sense â as âwhat everyone knowsâ. Everyone knows, for example, that divorce rates are high in todayâs society; yet such âobvious knowledgeâ, of course, depends upon regular social research, whether it happens to be carried out by government researchers or academic sociologists.
It is therefore to some degree the fate of sociology to be taken as less original and less central to our social existence than actually it is. Not only empirical research but sociological theorizing and sociological concepts can become so much part of our everyday repertoire as to appear as âjust common senseâ. Many people, for instance, now ask whether a leader has charisma, discuss moral panics or talk of someoneâs social status â all notions that originated in sociological discourse.
These considerations, obviously, donât help with the issue of whether sociology as an academic discipline is in a state of sorry decline or even dissolution since its heyday in the 1960s, if that period was indeed its apogee. Things have changed in sociology over the past thirty years, but not all for the worse. For one thing, the centre of power has shifted. American sociology used to dominate world sociology, but it does so no longer. Especially so far as sociological theorizing is concerned, the centre of gravity has shifted elsewhere, particularly to Europe. The major sociological thinkers now are over here rather than over there, authors like Pierre Bourdieu, Niklas Luhmann or Ulrich Beck.
Sociology in the US appears to have become over-professionalized, with research groups concentrating on their own patch, having little knowledge of, or interest in, anyone elseâs. Everyone in American sociology has a âfieldâ and whatever the sociologistâs speciality happens to be effectively defines that identity. Quantophrenia is rife in American sociology departments. For many if you canât count it, it doesnât count; the result, to say the least, can be a certain lack of creativity.
Thereâs a good deal of justification for William Julius Wilsonâs advice to sociologists to engage in research immediately relevant to public policy issues and to participate forcefully in the wide debates their work may arouse. After all, many questions raised in the political arena are sociological â questions to do, for instance, with welfare, crime or the family. Sociological work is relevant, not just to their formulation as particular types of policy question, but to grasping the likely consequences of whatever policies might be initiated in relation to them.
Reconnecting sociology to a public policy-making agenda wouldnât address the other issues raised about the so-called decline of sociology. What of the disaggregation of sociology, of which Horowitz makes so much? Is it a discipline without a common conceptual core, in danger of breaking up into unconnected specialities? And have the most innovative authors moved elsewhere? Most important of all, perhaps, has it lost its cutting edge?
If one compares sociology to economics, it has to be conceded that sociology is much more internally diverse. In economics there exists a variety of different schools of thought and theoretical approaches, but the neo-classical view tends to dominate almost everywhere and forms the basic stuff of virtually all introductory texts. Sociology isnât to the same degree in the thrall of a single conceptual system. However, this surely should be seen more as a strength than a weakness. I donât believe such diversity has produced complete disarray, but instead gives voice to the pluralism that must exist when one studies something as complex and controversial as human social behaviour and institutions.
Is there any evidence that talented scholars who might once have been attracted to working in sociology have now migrated elsewhere? Thereâs no doubt that in the 1960s some were drawn into sociology because they saw it, if not offering a route to revolution, as trendy and new; and it doesnât have that reputation any longer. But most such individuals probably werenât interested in a career within the confines of the academy. More relevant are factors that have affected the academic world as a whole, not sociology in particular. Many talented people who might once have gone into academic life probably wonât do so today, because academic salaries have fallen sharply in relative terms over the last two decades and working conditions have deteriorated.
Yet a good case could actually be made for saying that British sociology is doing better than in previous generations. Compare, for instance, the fortunes of sociology in Britain over recent years with those of anthropology. In the early postwar period, this country boasted anthropologists of worldwide reputation; no crop of comparably distinguished sociological authors was to be found at that time.
Now things are more or less reversed. There are few, if any, anthropologists of the current generation who can match the achievements of the preceding one. British sociology, however, can offer a clutch of individuals with a worldwide reputation, such as John Goldthorpe, Steven Lukes, Stuart Hall, Michèle Barrett, Ray Pahl, Janet Wolff and Michael Mann.
Moreover, in sheer statistical terms, sociology is not in decline in this country in the way it has been in the US. A-level sociology is extremely popular and flourishing rather than shrinking. University admissions in sociology are, at worst, stable in relation to other subjects.
Everything in the sociological garden isnât rosy â although was it ever? Funding for social research has dropped off sharply since the early 1970s; there isnât the scale of empirical work there once was. But it would be difficult to argue that sociology is off the pace intellectually, especially if one broadens the angle again and moves back to a more international perspective. Most of the debates that grab the intellectual headlines today, across the social sciences, and even the humanities, carry a strong sociological input. Sociological authors have pioneered discussions of postmodernism, the post-industrial or information society, globalization, the transformation of everyday life, gender and sexuality, the changing nature of work and the family, the âunderclassâ and ethnicity.
You might still ask: what do all these changes add up to? Here there is a lot of sociological work to be done. Some of that work has to be investigatory or empirical, but some must be theoretical. More than any other intellectual endeavour, sociological reflection is central to grasping the social forces remaking our lives today. Social life has become episodic, fragmentary and dogged with new uncertainties, which it must be the business of creative sociological thought to help us understand. William Julius Wilsonâs argument is certainly important: sociologists should focus their attention on the practical and policy-making implications of the changes currently transforming social life. Yet sociology would indeed become dreary, and quite possibly disaggregated, if it didnât also concern itself with the big issues.
Sociology should rehone its cutting edge, as neo-liberalism disappears into the distance along with orthodox socialism. Some questions to which we need new answers have a perennial quality, while others are dramatically new. Tackling both of these, as in previous times, calls for a healthy dose of what C. Wright Mills famously called the sociological imagination. Sociologists, donât despair! You still have a world to win, or at least interpret.
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TWO
Living in a Post-Traditional Society
In the social sciences today, as in the social world itself, we face a new agenda. The end not just of a century but of a millennium: something which has no content, and which is wholly arbitrary â a date on a calendar â has such a power of reification that it holds us in thrall. Fin de siècle has become widely identified with feelings of disorientation and malaise, to such a degree that one might wonder whether all the talk of endings, such as the end of modernity, or the end of history, simply reflects them. No doubt to some degree such is the case. Yet it is certainly not the whole story. We are in a period of evident transition â and the âweâ here refers not only to the West but to the world as a whole.
In this discussion I speak of the emergence of a post-traditional society. This phrase might at first glance seem odd. Modernity, almost by definition, always stood in opposition to tradition; hasnât modern society long been âpost-traditionalâ? It has not, at least in the way in which I propose to speak of the âposttraditional societyâ here. For most of its history, modernity has rebuilt tradition as it has dissolved it. Within Western societies, the persistence and recreation of tradition was central to the legitimation of power, to the sense in which the state was able to impose itself upon relatively passive âsubjectsâ. For tradition placed in stasis some core aspects of social life â not least the family and sexual identity â which were left largely untouched so far as âradicalizing Enlightenmentâ was concerned.1
Most important, the continuing influence of tradition within modernity remained obscure so long as âmodernâ meant âWesternâ. Modernity has been forced to âcome to its sensesâ today, as a result of its generalization across the world. No longer the unexamined basis of Western hegemony over other cultures, the precepts and social forms of modernity stand open to scrutiny.
The orders of transformation
The new agenda for social science concerns two directly connected domains of transformation. Each corresponds to processes of change which, while they have their origins with the first development of modernity, have become particularly acute in the current era. On the one hand there is the extensional spread of modern institutions, universalized via globalizing processes. On the other, but immediately bound up with the first, are processes of intentional change, which can be referred to as the radicalizing of modernity.2 These are processes of evacuation, the disinterring and problematizing of tradition.
Few people anywhere in the world can any longer be unaware of the fact that their local activities are influenced, and sometimes even determined, by remote events or agencies. The phenomenon is easily indexed, at least on a crude level. Thus, for example, capitalism has for centuries had strong tendencies to expand, for reasons documented by Marx and many others. Over the period since World War I, however, and particularly over the past forty years or so, the pattern of expansionism has begun to alter. It has become much more decentred as well as more all-enveloping. The overall movement is towards much greater interdependence. On the sheerly economic level world production has increased dramatically, albeit with various fluctuations and downturns; and world trade, a better indicator of interconnectedness, has grown even more. âInvisible tradeâ, in services and finance, has increased most of all.3
Less evident is the reverse side of the coin. The day-to-day actions of an individual today are globally consequential. My decision to purchase a particular item of clothing, for example, or a specific type of foodstuff, has manifold global implications. It not only affects the livelihood of someone living on the other side of the world but may contribute to a process of ecological decay which itself has potential consequences for the whole of humanity. This extraordinary, and still accelerating, connectedness between everyday decisions and global outcomes, together with its reverse, the influence of global orders over individual life, form the key subject-matter of the new agenda. The connections involved are often very close. Intermediate collectivities and groupings of all sorts, including the state, do not disappear as a result; but they do tend to become reorganized or reshaped.
To the Enlightenment thinkers, and many of their successors, it appeared th...
