Abstract
In response to Jerry Lembke’s comments on our article, I respectfully disagree that the problem is one of “holism” and not “interdisciplinarity.” The assumption that social phenomena can be greater than the sum of its individual parts is well established. Durkheim’s “social facts” are well demonstrated in how we use empirical methods to discover new truths about social patterns that remain invisible on the individual level. Indeed, this is the task of sociology—to look for such patterns, and then to recognize how those patterns fit within the larger social issues of power, wealth, and status. It is one of the reasons we call sociology a social science. Of course, individual patterns will vary, but we can still examine how those patterns may reveal something in the aggregate, apart from their individual status. Epidemiological studies do this as a matter of course.
We agree that sociology’s turf claim has always been the social whole and that, indeed, the social whole does give meaning to its parts. The fact remains that getting lost in the presumed social whole as we saw with the misplaced concreteness of structural-functionalism critiqued by C. Wright Mills has now been replaced by the passion for specific interdisciplinarity projects but without the social whole that is accorded to sociology. In this, I share Jerry’s lamenting of the decline in Marxist perspectives within the field. For example, sustainable environmental projects may be put in the Science and Technology (STEM) areas without adequate regard to sociology, anthropology, or political science, much less the Humanities—biology may link with chemistry, geography, and geology—but making the larger link to a more radical critique of a sustainable political economy is moved to the margins. That is, the use of interdisciplinarity is not as a complement to thinking holistically, of seeing the bigger picture in the small, but rather as a way to fragment knowledge to increase greater control. And yet, the contradiction for administrators is that interdisciplinary areas of study drain budgets which could be better served, in their eyes, in established disciplines with strict boundaries. I would still claim that while we give lip service to interdisciplinary projects, the money still flows to established fields which have their own disciplinary agendas to keep faculty and graduate students on the straight and narrow path. What may be required is something larger, perhaps a social or political movement, as we saw in the 1960s which can prevent the marginalization of interdisciplinary pursuits and the thinking through of new ways to breech established paradigms of doing social science.