Sociological Sampler
Sociology Today, Problems and Prospects.
by Robert K. Merton, Leonard Bloom, and Leonard S. Cottrell, Jr.
Basic Books. 623 pp. $7.50.
The editors of Sociology Today have put together thirty-five readable papers which serve to update us on many of the problems of method that make it so easy for sociologists to pick a bone with one another. The book’s purpose is not to provide a conspectus of sociological knowledge as it stands today, nor to investigate its goals in social action and community policy. It is to provide an idea of what the editors call sociology’s “strategic” concerns.
The result is a collection of papers which few general readers would want to wade straight through, but which does invite a sampling. The prospective sampler should know that the volume is developed in five major sections—an introductory note on problem-finding in sociology, supplied in lively fashion by Robert Merton; a lengthy section on methods in the study of institutions; a shorter section on the “group and the person”; another long section on population and social structure; and a concluding group of papers on a few contemporary applications of sociology.
Two papers in the sociology of institutions serve as an example of how useful these essays are to anyone working in the field. Seymour Lipset’s review of research in the sociology of politics is clear, packed, and comprehensive. Everett Hughes’s discussion of the study of occupations is marked by the deceptive ease and informality with which Hughes usually passes on to his reader an encyclopedic grasp of the literature, a trap-shooter’s sense of the way the intellectual target is moving, and an originality so profound that it almost throws its lines away. These are merely two instances of a high level of thinking and writing found in many papers.
The remarkable thing about the collection, however, is that it genuinely serves the purpose suggested in the title—it conveys to the reader, with a great deal of fidelity, the very tone of sociological concerns in the last decade or so. This tone is struck at once, by Merton, in an introduction that gracefully induces the reader to re-think the relation between sociological questions and sociological answers. As Merton says: it is not merely a matter of how certain questions, once stated, become widely taken for granted as questions of importance by the profession as a whole. It is a matter of how curiosity and interest get stirred up in the first place.
One of the reasons, as Merton suggests, is that previous researches prove to be inconsistent with one another in this or that respect. For example: the results of researches on the effects of authoritarian and democratic climates of education on learning are not by any means harmonious in their findings. Why this should be so—and the why is not yet forthcoming—emerges as one of the more interesting sociological problems of our time.
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A question that one American often asks another—frequently as a rhetorical introduction to a non-scholastic lecture on the topic—is whether the American family is changing. By the time this sort of topical question is formulated in the papers that make up this book, it has changed its shape. In William J. Goode’s contribution on the study of the family, it has become the question of whether the available theory of the family, as propounded by the specialists, has “the sweep, the drama, and the ear-compelling sonorities” that any good general theory should have. Goode’s answer, put forward with force and persuasiveness, is simply “No.”
In the first place, Goode observes, there are sociological classics in many adjacent fields, but none that deals principally with the family. Some of the most systematic work on the family is in the field of kinship structure and nomenclature; but this deals with only one aspect of the family, and its adaptability to symbolic precision in theory-building is rather a special case. Again, the family is such a central and all-functional institution that it is not detached readily for analysis. Mr. Goode himself is content, in his paper, to present an inventory of the various functions of the family. He concludes, not illogically, with an interesting four-fold classification of families as they exist in all cultures roundabout the globe. We are in the fourth class, the class in which love is integrated more freely with mate-choice than in the other three. His major point is that he sees the other three types discouraging romantic love not by culturally defining it out of existence (a theory held by many observers) but by recognizing it, and controlling it overtly by various measures of suppression.
Not every article is as clear as this one in summarizing the preoccupation of a particular area of study, and evaluating its present state of fertility, connectedness, and consistency. But Goode’s piece stands as an example of what most pieces in this book do quickly and do well. Among fields with which I myself happen to keep in touch, I found Lipset’s article on political sociology extraordinarily rewarding as an analytical review of developments. I quibble, indeed, with his comment that Peter Drucker is “the only industrial sociologist who deals with industrial bureaucracies both internally as political systems and externally with reference to the prerequisites of a democratic political order.” Cetrain sections of The Lonely Crowd—sections that, as I recall them, were based on the collaboration of David Riesman and Nathan Glazer—seem to me to have said significant things along this line. Lipset’s reference would do better to honor the intensive case-historical exploration of this line of research in Drucker’s The Concept of the Corporation without making him a wizard. In that way he would justly emphasize the centrality of the corporation in Drucker’s interests, the originality of Drucker’s contributions on that topic, and the consequent opening up of a whole field of significant theory-building.
Lipset is at pains to remind us that much American and European political sociology has been concerned with conflict—rather than harmony—but that recently it has swung around to asking how it is that certain situations of stability arise and are maintained. Some credit for this goes to Tocqueville and his modern readers. Lipset finds in such a writer a notion of institutionalized dissent which is now seen to be ripe for more empirical investigation. One aspect of the question is basically this: how is it that some conflicts are so dramatically and fully “aired” that they serve the purpose of stability—rather than overt and violent conflict?
As for a sub-field in which the reviewer has a stake, it is not so much merely customary as inevitable that the reviewer look closely. John Riley and Matilda White Riley, who, with Samuel Flowerman, have done some of the most ingenious research and “model-building” in the study of mass communications, present a paper here. Its main purpose is to remind students in the field that “communication” is a total process involving something more than the mere deliberate aiming of a message at an imagined receiver. It does not convince us, as some might hope, that “communication” is an autonomous field of research. It need not. The ancients thought the study of communication was autonomous and so did the medievals: they called it Rhetoric. Modern sociologists know as much about Rhetoric as Aristotle and Bernardo Sylvestria did; and know more than they did about “communication.” The Rileys tell us what it is we know and do not yet know.
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