Practicing Social Science

Sociologists and their Craft

Devorah Kalekin-Fishman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317055358
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

How is the process of globalization effecting changes in the structure of knowledge in sociology? This path-breaking volume looks at the human dimension of developments in the discipline by compiling a set of interviews that exemplify the life and work of a sociologist today. Their ideas and conceptualizations show to what extent a "paradigm shift" has taken root, answering questions such as whether sociology still remains a differentiated, relatively autonomous social science. The chosen interviewees are about equally divided according to gender and have been selected from among professional sociologists in different parts of the globe, with an emphasis on areas that are under-represented in English publications, such as East Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Analysis focuses on changes which are becoming clear from the on-going confrontation between "traditional" sociology which emerged as a project of modernity, and the sociology practiced by sociologists who are called upon to adapt the discipline to the upheavals of the twenty-first century.

Part I

Declarations and dilemmas

1Discipline, career, profession

Sociology in practitioners’ lives

Science may refer to any knowledge which has been reduced to an algorithmic system, and does not involve the need for an indescribable skill or mastery, such as a fine art.

Social science – a field of academic scholarship that explores aspects of human society. A social issue (also called a social problem or a social illness or even a social conflict) refers to [an aspect of human society and to] an issue that influences and is opposed by a considerable number of individuals within a society.

Sociology can be described as all of the following:

Academic discipline – a body of knowledge given to – or received by – a disciple (student); a branch or sphere of knowledge, or a field of study, that an individual has chosen to specialise in.

Wikipedia, “Science, Social Science.” (https://en.wikipedia.org, accessed October 10, 2015)

Career: a person’s “course or progress through life (or a distinct portion of life).” In this definition career is understood to relate to a range of aspects of an individual’s life, learning and work.

Oxford Dictionaries (www.oxforddictionaries.com, accessed October 10, 2015)

Profession:

a: a calling requiring specialized knowledge and … intensive academic preparation;

b: a principal calling, vocation, or employment;

c: the whole body of persons engaged in a calling.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary (www.merriam-webster.com, accessed October 10, 2015)

As a social science and a discipline that “explores aspects of human society,” sociology deals with questions that are of crucial importance to human life, among them, themes such as: social behavior, institutions, empirical investigation, social structure, agency, and social policy. The popular wisdom (Surowiecki, 2005) in the definition of a “social issue,” however, underscores the insight that as a science the study of society is doubly challenged. While the heart of all scientific endeavor is the ongoing concern with clarification and critique which may cause differences of opinion and even academic conflicts (Kuhn, 1970/1962), the consensual object of study for sociology, society, is a collection of entities that are incessantly moved cognitively and affectively by “social issues.” Thus, incisive debates and prickly controversies are inevitable in the evolution of sociology.

In the following, I will begin by looking at how, from its initiation in the 1830s, sociology as a discipline was involved in social issues and presented problems for the lives of practitioners. Then I will look at the discipline’s acceptance into academe, which shapes sociologists’ careers bureaucratically, and at the impulse to set up associations that clarify the meaning of sociology as a collection of practices and reinforce its status as a profession.

Sociology: dawning of a discipline implicated in social issues

In his Cours de Philosophie Positive, Comte (2010) elaborated on his understanding of social science as the queen of the sciences, one that could only emerge after sufficient knowledge had been accumulated in mathematics, astronomy, biology, chemistry, and physics. His philosophical objective was to profile a positivistic science that could be studied with “a laboratory attitude”¹ in order to acquire true knowledge about society (McNeely and Wolverton, 2008: Ch. 6). By articulating a strict dedication to logic and coherence, Comte intended to free sociology from vestiges of what he theorized as deficient, albeit necessary prior phases of social thought, the “theological” and the “metaphysical.” It soon became clear, however, that the attempt at enforcing strict scientism could not ensure the “purity” of the newly crowned social science (Shapin, 2010). Defining a broad vision of the tasks of sociology, Comte combined his attempt to define a scientific approach to society as a discipline, a field of academic endeavor, with a conception of sociology as a profession-in-the-everyday-work-world. Moreover, for Comte, the new science embodied a political program. He viewed his philosophical and scientific life project as the basis for training a class of intellectuals with superior understandings of practical politics. They would be capable of leading French society efficiently and justly after the failures of the bourgeois revolution of 1789 and the monarchic revolution of 1830. Thus, all the potential activities associated with the study of sociology foretold struggle.

Indeed, aspiring students of sociology were involved in controversies and confrontations on several planes. Keenly aware of the sociological and ideological fact of the modern, European sociologists of the nineteenth century agreed that it is important to seek systematic definitions to guide the documentation of emerging social changes. All acknowledged the analytic challenge of rationally confronting the upheavals induced by the spread of modernity and the policies of modernism: industrialization, urbanization, the distinction between the private and the public, as well as the distinction between the human and environing nature (Lefebvre, 1962: 169–225). Moreover, as a science, sociology was seen as a body of knowledge destined to be extended. There was little agreement, however, on principles of description or on methods of determining what data would best explain the workings of a society in the throes of a deep-seated transformation.

The legendary, betimes adored, betimes maligned, “fathers of sociology” – Durkheim, Weber, and Marx – whose work elaborated on Comte’s ideas, resided in different parts of Europe, and, in regard to modes of doing a scientific sociology, held ideas that were in conflict with one another. They differed as to the appropriate tools for gaining verifiable knowledge of the social but also in regard to deciding what to consider as the object of study, society. In their publications, they each indicated a different aspect of social living that was to be considered the best point of departure for achieving an agreed-upon goal – understanding the workings of society as a whole. They persisted in implementing widely different practices in attempts to arrive at a true foundational description and explanation of what was being investigated (cf. “Introduction,” Seidman and Alexander, 2001).

Durkheim defined society as the locus of “social facts” (Durkheim, 1982/1895) and he studied them through the prism of binary structures that could distinguish between eufunctions and dysfunctions of the social. On the basis of this perception, he investigated suicide as a social fact about the impact of community (Durkheim, 1951/1897) by means of straightforward numerical calculations. He proposed a description of core issues of culture as expressions of a “collective consciousness” in which shared times, spaces and behaviors of the sacred turned a group into a collective, and the arbitrary distribution of behaviors over times and spaces, grounded the profane of individualized everyday life (Durkheim, 1915/1912). Similarly, core socio-economic issues, dilemmas about how to understand the rise of new kinds of industry were framed as dichotomous schematic distinctions between traditional production effected by identical, mechanical techniques and modern production as a coordinated organic division of labor among different stages of industrial fabrication (Durkheim, 1964/1893).

By contrast with Durkheim’s reliance on the externals of social facts as operationalizable means to study society, Weber viewed the formation of society as a meshing of relationships among individuals diversely oriented to social action. To describe and explain outcomes of constantly emerging entanglements, he focused on key slices of social life, and on empathic understanding, Verstehen. In his conceptualization, a researcher has to have a general appreciation of the principles of a social phenomenon in order to begin to fathom its full meaning. The initial generalization enables her to articulate a formal model for reviewing observed phenomena, an ideal type that lays bare key components and their relationships. Comparisons of actual observations with the ideal type formulated in advance of the research were, to his mind, the best scheme for enabling the discovery of useful social truths. The grand accomplishments of religious civilizations, for example, could be distinguished from one another on the basis of a dynamic analysis of their values and the relations between values and other aspects of social life (Weber, 1968). A variation of Weber’s approach was Simmel’s (1950) focus on the many facets of sociation in the micro – from manipulating coalitions of different breadths to convergences into intimacy. Simmel’s contribution to “understanding” was his emphasis on the efficacy of symbolization in governing the various forms of sociability.

For Marx (2010/1867, 1885, 1894), social research had to be rooted in dialectical analyses of material conditions, namely, of how human beings take advantage of nature in order to support life. Marx sought to understand society by tracing historical changes brought about in relations of production which are always riddled with contradictions. He was convinced that through the resolution of successive configurations of incongruities and ambiguities creating passage from one era to the next, humankind is steadily advancing toward universal justice. The nineteenth-century accomplishment of capitalism, for example, was at once the outcome of contradictions in prior modes of production and a giant step forward in terms of productive efficiency and abundance. But the new system was also rife with inbuilt paradoxes. Capitalist owners of land, buildings, and advanced machines were employing large numbers of workers who had to sell their energies, their actual lifetimes, for a return that at best enabled (minimum) self-maintenance. The products consequent on the workers’ efforts have a higher value than their livelihoods, a surplus reaped as profit by owners of the means of production. But in Marx’s analysis, this asynchrony was destined to last for a limited time only before giving way to further progress. For among the accomplishments of the inexorable capitalistic exploitation of workers was the demarcation of social classes that share interests across the boundaries of sovereign states. Marx firmly believed that once workers became aware of the injustices perpetrated against them, they would become conscious of themselves as a unified class and would find ways to take control of the means of production to remake society. Within a foreseeable period of time, it was, to his mind, inevitable that in the most progressive capitalist economies, the exploited class would revolt and set up a society based on egalitarian relations of production. Thus, Marx proposed a motivated evolutionary description of means of production and the dynamic dialectic relations that each type of material reality fostered. Clearly, his definition of society and his concerns with the dynamics of change, as well as his conviction of how to expedite change, were at odds with the work of both Durkheim and Weber. In addition, he was engaged in heated debate with Spencer (1898), whose quasi-biological explanation of social development was based on the Darwinian insight that biological evolution favors the survival of the fittest. Spencer’s approach could only promise that domination by elites would always prevail.

As noted, the pioneers who were designing a systematic study of society were located at a distance from one another in both the physical and the metaphoric sense. Their differences were an ongoing basis for substantive disputes about the discipline-in-formation. But in addition, they all had to face active opposition by intellectuals associated with other fields of study. In the views of many, the contribution that sociology could make to an understanding of social life was already being carried out far better by literature (Jones, 1986). This thesis was sustained by debates ostensibly related to style rather than substance that developed in intellectual circles in England, France, and Germany (Lepenies, 1988). In retrospect, it is clear that the venom was, in terms of method, a preferential defense of impressionistic idiographic affect over sociologists’ struggles to institutionalize rational nomothetic study. Militant controversies were also fueled by political and economic events of the time. In both Germany and France, for example, there were claims that sociology had no right to the status of a science because it was a dubious product of an unsavory foreign state (for example, Lepenies, 1988: 235). A sign of how pervasive nationalistic loyalties were, even among sociologists, were the ardently patriotic stances of Durkheim in France and of Weber in Germany at the outset of the world war that erupted in 1914. Over time, controversies in England, as in Germany, centered on the differential value of the truths embodied in poetry and the alleged truths achieved in social science. The debates between “science” and “culture” were politicized, and although there were some rightist sociologists (witness Comte himself), in France and Germany, the “culturalists” were generally partisans of conservative politics while the social scientists were associated with the political left. In England, on the other hand, the development of “cultural studies” signaled a pallid mix of literature and science (Lepenies, 1988: 195).

Still, interest in sociology as a distinct scientific study did not abate. Growing numbers of students justified the ambitions of sociologists for academic recognition.

Sociology: from discipline to career

Sociologists’ motivations for penetrating the halls of academe were both practical and professional. But achieving entrance required involved series of negotiations with state authorities over a lengthy period of time. Adherents of the new discipline had to convince those in control of the European market for the sciences that the production of knowledge about society was worth supporting; that like proponents of the hoary professions of law and medicine, social scientists should be admitted to university appointments and allowed to build academic careers.

Persistent refusals were rationalized by inserting sociology into different fields. In the 1890s, for example, Durkheim was given a chair at the University of Bordeaux, but it was a chair in education. He had permission to lecture on sociology only as an “extra” on Sundays (Jones, 1986). When, after fifteen years at Bordeaux, Durkheim became a lecturer at the Sorbonne in Paris, he was again appointed professor of education, and in 1913 a glimmer of recognition was accorded by defining the appointment as “education and sociology.” In Germany, Weber was appointed to the University of Freiburg as a lecturer in law and economics in 1894. Two years later, he became a professor of political economy at the University of Heidelberg. Because of his nervous illness, Weber retired from lecturing (but not from doing research) in 1903, and returned to the podium as a sociologist only in 1919 at the University of Vienna and later at the University of Munich, where he had not yet been appointed professor before his death of pneumonia in 1920. During the early decades of the twentieth century, Simmel did lecture in sociology, but only as a Privatdozent, a lecturer paid directly by interested students whose numbers varied from year to year. Despite Weber’s repeated intervention on his behalf, he was never appointed to a chair in any German university (Giddens et al., 2013).

While gaining recognition for sociology as a legitimate field of study was a slow and often agonizing process in Europe, the discipline was welcomed in the USA. Somewhat ironically, the first full-fledged Department of Sociology in the world was founded at the University of Chicago in 1892. Albion Small was invited to chair it on the basis of an education in the US and Germany that combined theology, social economics, politics, and a doctorate in history. During the thirty years throughout which he served as department head, Small furthered the institutionalization of sociology as a career. He supported the education of young sociologists and promoted their employment in other universities, founded a journal (the American Journal of Sociology), and established a professional association (Abbott, 2001). Promoting the spread of sociology as a course of study in the US was not blocked by discourse about advancing “pure” science. For some groups, among them vested clerics, sociology was heralded as a gateway to raising standards of morality in a highly unsettled, hectic society. For others, sociology was a kind of academic camouflage for groups who conducted statistical surveys supporting the government, on the one hand, or for groups that supported “muckraking” campaigns, in which journalists opposed establishment corruption, on the other (Sinclair, 1906; Steffens, 1904; Turner and Turner, 1990/1980). Because, moreover, new departments of sociology were often supported by private agencies, lecturers had to commit themselves to doing research that realized the donors’ agendas. Thus, career structures in US sociology copied the ethical and substantive debates that pursued the science in its countries of origin, and also reflected political antagonisms in the still relatively New World. Eventually, however, appointments to chairs in sociology on both sides of the Atlantic did clear the way for the discipline to acquire a front-stage presence, a legitimate platform for mobilizing funds and for marking positions toward bona fide careers.

Academic careers in sociology, however, turned out to be far from an unmixed blessing. They are beset by structural constraints. By contrast with the medieval format of universities as autonomous meeting grounds for guilds of learned men and guilds of students...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsment
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of contents
• Notes on interviewees
• Preface
• Introduction: Practicing social science
• Part I Declarations and dilemmas
• Part II Practitioners and their craft
• References
• Index