Sociology’s Next Steps? 1

Vision

In Doris Kearns Goodwin’s new book, Leadership in Turbulent Times (2018), she tells a story of how President Roosevelt in 1940 set a target for the production of warplanes that appeared to be absolutely impossible. Yet he succeeded in igniting the imagination of the aviation industry with his vision, and the industry actually exceeded his goal. When he contracted polio and wondered whether to go on with a political career, he was buoyed by William Ernest Henley’s poem, “Invictus.” Its last stanza reads:

It matters not how straight the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

Granting the full range of modern problems, sociologists desperately need to recapture the vision of Auguste Comte, who dreamed of a powerful science of sociology. Another way of capturing the importance of a dream may be found in the song “Happy Talk,” from the musical “South Pacific”: “If you don’t have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?”

Now let us turn to C. Wright Mills, my mentor at Columbia, who envisioned the possibility of one’s developing a “sociological imagination.” That imagination would give us the ability “to shift from one perspective to another—from the political to the psychological; from examination of a single family to comparative assessment of the national budgets of the world; from the theological school to the military establishment; from considerations of an oil industry to studies of contemporary poetry” (1969:7).

Mills’s trilogy of The New Men of Power (1948), White Collar (1951), and The Power Elite (1956) centered on the power of social structures. Yet his Character and Social Structure (1953), joint with Hans H. Gerth, focused on the individual, helping to prepare the way for The Sociological Imagination. That book was voted by the members of the International Sociological Association as the second most influential book for sociologists published during the entire twentieth century. The first was Max Weber’s Economy and Society ([1922] 2013).

Within sociology there were a number of classical writers in addition to Mills who focused on the individual. For example, we might recall Simmel’s initial sentence in his “The Metropolis and Mental Life”: “The deepest problems of modern life flow from the attempt of the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society, against the weight of the historical heritage and the external culture and technique of life” ([1903] 1971:324). Yet Simmel and Mills—along with other theorists such as George Homans (1964), Dennis Wrong (1961), Thomas J. Scheff (1997), and Jonathan H. Turner (2004)—have been given lip service but largely ignored by the “advance” of sociological specialization. See for example my own treatment of Simmel (1990). Instead of the six Sections of the American Sociological Association in the 1950s, we now have, can you believe, fifty-two.

What I criticize is by no means the importance of all the knowledge in our Sections, but rather their limited integration of knowledge. Newton claimed, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Standing on the shoulders of no more than the giants within a given specialty is a clear violation of the scientific method. Just as the six blind men failed to understand the nature of the whole elephant when they were only touching selected parts, so do our Sections fail to put together their particular knowledge into a comprehensive vision of the whole.

Focusing further on contemporary sociological theory, let us look to the work of Jürgen Habermas and Anthony Giddens. Habermas is a modern critical theorist who has built on earlier work within the Frankfurt School based on the ideas of Freud and Marx. His Theory of Communicative Action (1981) centers on the individual no less than society. His cultural breadth might invoke Jung’s concept of archetypes no less than Jung’s and Freud’s focus on the unconscious. Like earlier critical theorists, Habermas is most interested in achieving the emancipation of the individual.

Habermas’s concept of “communicative competence” centers on the power of language to help one achieve such emancipation. He thus establishes ties with linguistic philosophy and anthropology’s treatment of language. And his approach advances the pragmatism of Peirce and Dewey. Neither should we forget that his treatment of the importance of the individual parallels a corresponding orientation within symbolic interactionism, exchange theory, and ethnomethodology.

Turning to Anthony Giddens, we have his theory of “structuration,” as developed in The Constitution of Society (1984). His focus carries forward an absolutely central idea to be found throughout the social sciences: the power of social structures. For Giddens, “agency” is nothing less than the individual! And it is the individual who continues to produce and reproduce social structures. Thus, it is individuals who shape society, but they are at the same time shaped by that reality. Giddens’s idea of structuration can be extended to include not just one’s creating social structures, but also creating one’s own personality structure. And such creation can yield a personal emancipation from what Simmel called “the sovereign powers of society . . . the weight of the historical heritage and the external culture and technique of life.”

Personal emancipation can be understood more concretely by turning to the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education, which opened public schools to African American children. Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s psychological experiments proved to be a crucial factor in that verdict. Their doll experiments (1950) centered on African American children’s self-images or self-perceptions, contrasting those from integrated schools in New York City with those from segregated schools in Washington, D.C. A child was presented with two dolls, identical except that one was white with yellow hair and the other was brown with black hair. There was a clear preference for the white doll among all the children. And there was self-hatred or a poor self-image that was more acute among the children attending segregated schools. The Supreme Court decided that segregated public schools were unconstitutional because they resulted in African American children developing “a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community.”

Suppose, now, that our present way of life structures self-images of limited ability in all of us, granting that some self-images are structured with more ability than others. We might as a result prefer dolls that look like famous or wealthy individuals instead of those looking like ourselves. Following Giddens’s theory of structuration, we would be reconstructing the patterns of stratification in society, just as those patterns have shaped our own self-images. Following Habermas, we would remain victims of society rather than learning to achieve personal emancipation.

Alternatively, suppose that we could learn to move away from conformity to society’s patterns of social stratification by educating the individual to achieve a series of self-images with ever-greater ability to make progress on personal and world problems. In that way we would be extending Giddens’s idea of structuration to include the continuing development of the individual, for self-image is indeed a structure, a personality structure. And in that way we would be achieving what Habermas called personal emancipation. This would call for a vision of continuing personal development extending far beyond the achievements of those at the pinnacles of our stratified social structures. Such a vision would recapture the optimism of the Enlightenment and the utopian era of the nineteenth century. Among social scientists, it would call for a new focus on the individual without excluding attention to social structures.

The foregoing pages have briefly sketched a bureaucratic vision and an evolutionary vision for human society. The former has emphasized structures of social stratification or persisting hierarchy, habits or rituals of personal conformity, and narrow specialization with little integration of knowledge. The latter, an alternative to bureaucracy, has pointed toward egalitarian structures, habits that develop personal autonomy, and the integration of specialized knowledge. How can sociologists, and society as a whole, actually move away from the former vision and learn to fulfill the latter?

Action

Beginning with our bureaucratic patterns of conformity, the enormous number of ideas developed within our 52 ASA Sections makes visible what is normally invisible to our eyes. For we cannot see concepts like stratification, self-image, social structure, and personality structure. No longer need we conform to unconscious beliefs. Jung might congratulate sociologists for having made conscious what was previously unconscious, which was his formula for solving modern problems in his 1957 book, The Undiscovered Self. Nevertheless, this is only a beginning on a path toward our own realization of our patterns of conformity, plus helping others do the same.

But how could any human being possibly become conscious of the millions of pages of print encompassed by our many Sections? It was possible to be a Renaissance man or woman during the fifteenth century, but the explosion of modern knowledge is making that impossible today. Yet Mills hinted at a direction for pulling together our understanding with this statement: “The capacity to shuttle between levels of abstraction, with ease and with clarity, is the signal mark of the imaginative and systematic thinker” (1959:34). He castigated the absence of concreteness within “grand theory.” Equally, he pointed out the absence of general theory within “abstracted empiricism.” This suggests that we can make use of both theoretical and methodological contributions by shuttling up and down the ladder of linguistic abstraction.

To illustrate further this idea, on the one hand we have an emphasis on abstract theory within Sections of the ASA such as Theory, Sociology of Culture, Sociology of Emotions, Marxist Sociology, and Social Psychology. Theorists can move further up language’s ladder of abstraction, even to paradigmatic or metaphysical assumptions.

For example, Marxist sociologists might make use of Marx’s early essay on alienation ([1844] 1964) to point a direction for focusing on the wealth of data that document the widespread existence of both stratification and conformity inside and outside of the workplace. As a result, they might come to see—as sketched by Robert Reich’s Saving Capitalism for the Many, Not the Few (2016)—that their enemy is bureaucracy and not capitalism.

On the other hand, we have a focus on empirical data in Sections such as Racial and Ethnic Minorities, Disability and Society, Inequality, Poverty and Mobility, and Sex and Gender. From the height of those paradigmatic concepts, one can become quite selective in locating empirical data that enable one to develop close relations between possible causes of problems under investigation. There is no need, then, to master those millions of pages of knowledge. Shuttling far up that ladder of abstraction to concepts like stratification can enable us to become highly selective in tackling any given problem.

The theoretical and methodological approach that I’m advocating is much like the practice of medical diagnosis that ties symptoms to the underlying illness as a basis for treating the disease. We might see symptoms as paralleled by concrete empirical findings. And we might view the disease as invoked by paradigmatic or general bureaucratic patterns.

As for treatment of our bureaucratic way of life, I have in mind an evolutionary direction with an emphasis on egalitarian structures replacing hierarchical ones. Personality structures such as the development of one’s self-image over time would replace patterns of personal conformity, and the integration of particular specialized knowledge would bolster these abstract ideas. Our research methods can be improved not only by this link between theory and methods, but also by our ability to assess our own impact on the research process, given a deeper understanding of our own personality structures. Our present near-universal failure to assess our investigator effects must be changed in order to further develop a powerful science of human behavior. Alvin W. Gouldner pointed in this direction with his focus on “a reflexive sociology” in his The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (1970), an approach that I attempted to carry further (1988).

Let me summarize these ideas for how sociologists can carry forward the work within our Sections so as to make progress on society’s escalating problems. We can learn to move far up language’s ladder of abstraction to the paradigmatic or metaphysical level. This would establish a broad basis for coming down that ladder to the specific relevant data buried throughout the publications within all 52 of our Sections. In this way we not only move toward the integration of our knowledge of the symptoms that are caused by the disease of bureaucracy. Given our evolutionary vision that is an alternative, we can also integrate our understanding of the forces that enable us to actually move forward. These procedures will in turn yield deeper understanding of our problems.

Back in 1968, Robert K. Merton advised us to stick with “theories of the middle range,” for he believed that our discipline was not yet ready for an emphasis on very abstract theory. Yet I am convinced that the time has come for commitment to the importance of theories of the upper range, given that we can link them with empirical data. It is our complex language that sharply divides us from all other organisms throughout the known universe. And it is language’s “ladder” of abstraction that can enable us to integrate present knowledge within our 52 Sections by moving far up that ladder, thus fulfilling the requirements of the scientific method and the promise of sociology.

At present, social scientists tend to be satisfied when they achieve a statistically significant relationship between an independent and dependent variable. Such a relationship is, however, far from being truly significant, for it almost invariably indicates a low correlation. Its minute size throughout the full range of our publications indicates our present limitations. Greater knowledge, however, will yield coefficients that can impress any audience. A more profound understanding of how to make progress on our problems is exactly what we sociologists need. This is what Auguste Comte and sociology’s other founders had in mind when they looked to the development of our discipline.

Yet if we are to address not only our sociological colleagues, we must learn to move beyond our own journals to the mass media. Here we will be challenged to confront the pressing problems of society, and here we can demonstrate the growing power of a science of human behavior. One of our Sections already points in this direction: “Sociological Practice and Public Sociology.” Mills illustrated this approach, and we can learn to follow in his footsteps. Michael Burawoy’s “Open Letter to C. Wright Mills” (2008) helps us focus on the overriding importance for sociologists of engaging in public sociology. He saw Mills’s The Sociological Imagination as having “roused generations of sociologists to engage in the big issues of the day.” Yet Burawoy also understood that Mills was a loner who failed to recognize the potential power of groups such as the women’s movement, which has morphed into today’s #MeToo movement. It is a demonstration of what sociologists have emphasized all these years: the power of the social.

In addition, I see a potential for developing the incredible power of personality structures. It is the two structures, working together, that can fulfill the dream of our founders as well as the rest of us: the vision of a powerful science of human behavior. To illustrate, one might learn to carry further Mills’s approach to avoiding “grand theory” and “abstracted empiricism” by shuttling, as he said, both far up and far down language’s ladder of abstraction. Moving up to the paradigmatic level for the individual and society yields a potential for continuing intellectual, emotional, and problem-solving development. As for moving down that ladder, one can come to see one’s everyday behavior as opportunities for solving problems. For example, those solutions could range over the fields of work or economic structures, understanding or educational development, physical and mental health—including a more meaningful life—deeper relationships with others, and potential service for improving society. By so doing, we would learn to move away from our present bureaucratic vision, which isolates our understanding of society from that of the individual. It also isolates the insights within the hundreds of social science specialties. This would point toward fulfilling Habermas’s movement toward personal emancipation as well as extending Giddens’s idea of structuration to include individual development.

This is what sociologists can accomplish, given the incredible ideas within our discipline. This is what sociologists must accomplish, given the problems that we all face at this time in history. This is what sociologists will accomplish, based on our understanding of this combination of our powers and the present needs of society.