Abstract
‘I’m not actually a sociologist’. This common rejoinder resounds around sociology departments the world over as academics studying gender or the environment rub shoulders with those trained in languages, politics, specific regions, media, migration, power, philosophy, race and diaspora, statistics, technology, transport and many more specializations all vying for space in shrinking departmental budgets. John Scott’s Conceptualising the Social World: Principles of Sociological Analysis, which is both monograph and sociology primer, makes some headway in broaching the partisanship extant in the discipline. It is at heart a conciliatory piece; the substance of an illustrious career spanning subjects abutting the many sides of sociology: social network analysis, power and the history of sociology. In many ways this book is a social network analysis of sociology itself, without the technical visualizations, identifying principal nodes and edges of the discipline and joining them up with others. This is perhaps the most satisfying aspect of this book – it reads not only as a handbook but also mollifies anxieties about the death of sociology by a thousand disciplinary (or is it budget) cuts.
Conceptualising the Social World lays out a sociological panorama of eight key tenets: culture, nature, system, space-time, structure, action, mind and development. These are the length and breadth of sociology (the far-reaching corners of its world) as a discipline and encompass many specializations: migration, transport, gender to name a few. Those familiar with a structural functionalist viewpoint of social worlds, now a dinosaur-like, vintage and out-of-date disciplinary specialization, might feel some nostalgia at this sub-division of sociology. Indeed, perhaps Scott is having a paltry joke here, performing a structuralist analysis of sociology’s own ‘world’ in the same way 1960s scholars broke up social movements or rituals into various social concepts. However, it would be a mistake to see Scott overlooking the issues that structural functionalist techniques were critiqued for omitting, namely, gender, race and class. Scott’s eight principles aim to bring together disciplines that are currently divorced, such as economics and sociology, or unyoked, such as sociology and religion.
Scott, acting as a marriage counsellor for sociology, does beneficent work here. Of particular merit is Scott’s revisionist account of the rift between sociology and geography, a cry of ‘stand and fight’ remarkable for its absence in disciplinary skirmishes. By highlighting the almost identical streams of research going on in these two camps Scott not only empowers an embattled sociology; as well, he reinforces a geography much suffering from its disciplinary bouts with geosciences sitting in the other corner. Geography and sociology should, by all accounts, be best of friends and this is a point Scott stresses in the conclusion.
Perhaps the chapter that stands out most, at least for this reviewer, is the one on social action. Reconciling peripheral work, such as Foucault’s, with Parsons and Mead certainly shows a combination of deftness and ambition. Foucault also gets an airing in the chapters on structure and nature although some might argue that his work could also feature in other chapters too.
This brings the review to the weaker aspects of the book, taking care to note that even the house with the strongest foundations can have a few loose tiles on the roof. The book’s genius is the rendering of a peaceful pastoral landscape from a prosaic and madding crowd; however, at the same time this is also one of its flaws. The book gives the impression that sociologists all get on just fine together and are busy collaborators, rowing the boat in time, so to speak. This is far from the case in many institutions where recently merged specializations, often dethroned from their own disciplinary demarcations due to budget cuts or lack of research funding, make odd bedfellows of each other. Of course, it is not Scott’s fault if the machine does not work like it says on the box. And after reading his book it almost seems like it should. To be sure this is the impression that should be given to those holding the carving knife in universities’ senior executives, who are ill-disposed to infighting and intrigue where there should be cohesion and unity and the sending out of interdisciplinary rovers to other worlds: science, technology, engineering or mathematics.
Perhaps this is Scott’s message. Sociology needs a boost of self-confidence if it is ever going to return to the big league. And this strategy has certainly worked with management and psychology. Conceptualising the Social World is an ambitious book with many of the chapters having the potential to be stand-alone, perhaps in university course readers for undergraduates. Of particular worth is its vision for sociology as a unified and powerful discipline with the power to range over far and wide social issues. Now it remains for the sociologists to take on board Scott’s challenge.