Abstract
In Conceptualising the Social World John Scott encourages sociologists to move beyond their disagreements and see that there is a set of core principles that underlies sociological thought. These principles are: culture, nature, system, space-time, structure, action, mind and development. Each gets a chapter-length discussion in the book. According to Scott, sociologists often take a one-sided approach, with many having believed, for example, that they have to choose between theories of structure and action (p. 144). Instead, Scott recommends a synthetic approach in which these principles are understood to be complementary rather than competing. Scott argues that there would be internal and external benefits of accepting the complementarity of these different principles: sociologists would spend less time pursuing pointless disagreements; we would learn from past work rather than pursuing new fads or mistakenly believing in the novelty of current developments; and those outside sociology would start to see that it is not a confused discipline in which an answer to any question produces a diverse set of incompatible responses. Although I share some of Scott’s anxieties over the state of sociology, I am going to underline my status as a sociologist by questioning aspects of his overall approach. But before doing so, I want to consider one of the positive aspects of Conceptualising the Social World.
One notable feature of Scott’s book is his determined invocation of a wide and historically deep range of thinkers when considering each sociological principle. Some of these thinkers are well known – Parsons gets a lengthy treatment in the chapter on system, Freud and Mead are discussed in the chapter on mind. But many others are less familiar, at least within a sociological context. The chapter on structure, for example, features Renner, Pashukanis, Ekeh and Takata alongside the standard figures of Marx, Durkheim and Giddens. The appearance of such un-usual suspects may well inspire readers to delve into the past in a way that enriches their own work.
Scott’s useful insistence that we should not forget our antecedents and their contribution to sociology encourages us to locate the context of his own work. In Scott’s case this is not so much a self-conscious ‘tradition’ as a range of social theorists with whom he shares a key impulse: when faced with two or more theories that are engaged in disagreement and contention, these thinkers try to resolve the dilemma by incorporating the central elements of each theory within a single synthetic account. As Holmwood has noted, this impulse is found in a range of approaches from structural functionalism to structuration theorists to critical realism. These approaches are built on incorporation: although the terminology varies, structure, culture, agency, system-relations and other concepts are, for these thinkers, best drawn into a (potentially rather baroque) single framework. To locate his work in this way is not to say that Scott simply reproduces others’ ideas: his set of theoretical concerns is unusually wide in scope and his range of historical reference-points gives the book a certain distinctiveness.
The general problem with the synthetic approach, however, is that it tends to underplay, and can unintentionally obscure, the contradictions between the concepts that are being brought together. To avoid this criticism, synthetic approaches need to convincingly critique the arguments of those who see contradiction where synthetic thinkers see complementarity. Unfortunately, Conceptualising the Social World rarely does this. Indeed, the arguments of thinkers who would dispute the synthesis produced by Scott are often given little or no consideration. For example, Scott’s synthetic claim that ‘cultural formation must always be considered in relation to natural conditions’ (p. 84) is at odds with that of prominent thinkers like Butler, for whom invocations of nature are always infused with culture and power. Yet Butler is treated as if she is one-sidedly emphasising ‘culture’ rather than as a thinker who is trying to rework the conceptual division between culture and nature. Butler may not be right but her arguments against the existing division are worthy of consideration. Likewise, no real consideration is given to the arguments of those who find the structure-agency divide problematic. Certainly, Scott gives a lengthy exposition of the view that the two concepts are compatible, going so far as to say that Archer’s (putative) success in theorizing the connection between structure and agency means that the ‘question can now be regarded as closed’ (p. 174). But Scott’s own position would be much more powerful and persuasive if he actively engaged with the arguments of critics like Holmwood and King who see the division as deeply problematic.
In sum, I would suggest that Scott’s book gives a solid and historically rich exposition of the synthetic approach to social theory. But to persuade critics that his approach isn’t simply denying genuine problems and contradictions between sociological concepts he needs to engage more deeply with alternative viewpoints.