Abstract
It has always been a challenging endeavor to evaluate the intellectual creativity of prominent scholars. The act of evaluation carries a potential danger in terms of turning it into a series of eulogies or texts that serve to relegitimize or revisit the epistemological nature of current sociological debates. However, Robert K. Merton: Sociology of Science and Sociology of Science, edited by Craig Calhoun, opts for opening up a discussion on highly delicate matters on the sociology of sociology. The authors of this collection of various different articles about Merton do not offer apologetic arguments about the so-called persistent misinterpretation of Merton, which seems to have been one of the important motives behind articles on this highly influential scholar.
Calhoun, arguing that Merton has been one of the ‘one of sociology’s most remarkable and polymathic intellectuals’ (p. 1), has compiled articles about Merton that provide two different layers of contributions: on the one hand, there are articles written by prominent scholars that enlighten the dark epistemological and empirical debates regarding Merton’s sociological understanding; on the other hand, the authors eloquently draw a theoretical map about the ways in which Mertonian pluralities of paradigm (Merton, 1976: 148–153) help us understand theoretical puzzles as well as sociological dilemmas. All these articles not only buttress attempts to re-evaluate the vices and virtues of those sociological dilemmas through the Mertonian approach, but also they remind us of the necessity of avoiding sociological and methodological reductionisms. Although the authors acknowledge the ambivalences in Merton’s work, they formulate their articles as an opportunity to enrich today’s sociology through adapted and revised versions of Mertonian arguments.
The 12 chapters of this book are introduced in Calhoun’s chapter, ‘On Merton’s legacy and contemporary sociology,’ which describes the three reasons that obscured the importance of Merton’s work: a broad turn against functionalism in the 1960s, the shift in focus of the sociology of science, and different forms of revisiting his writings about theory and research. Calhoun then invites the authors to outline their own narratives about positioning possible causes of such misunderstandings.
As a sociologist who has been socialized in an academic environment dominated by the dualities of functionalism and Marxism, and qualitative and quantitative research, I must confess that the variety of Merton’s work re-evaluated by these authors has surprised me. In this context, Portes considers the similarities between Merton and Weber as important in the sense that both were interested in using heuristic devices as is exemplified in the operation of middle range theories and ideal types. Tilly focuses on ‘mechanisms of the middle range’ by relating them to the nature of social processes. Sampson argues that Merton was able to develop a theory about how the world works by enhancing a sociological inquiry about macro-level processes. Neither sociology’s historical ambivalence to the study of crime nor Merton’s theory on anomie, Sampson argues, provide a remedy for a ‘stereotyped and fundamentally misleading distinction between basic and applied approaches’ (p. 67). Nevertheless, Merton’s work attempts to link theory and research, and reminds us that ‘theory bears on empirical research, just as much as empirical research bears on theory’(p. 68). Merton’s approach, Sampson argues, can be described as ‘realism’ in the language of today’s social science.
According to Epstein, cultural theory constitutes another area of investigation that has been de-emphasized by several generations of academicians. Epstein accepts Merton’s work on the sociology of science as having the characteristics of a sociological work that also includes the analysis of culture. The meticulous work on ‘opportunity structures, reference groups, names, social roles, status conflicts, networks’ (pp. 84–85) all depict a contribution to cultural practices that has been defined through terms such as ‘the plane of sociographer,’ ‘sociological ambivalences,’ ‘status sequences,’ and ‘anticipatory socialization.’ Although Epstein’s goal is to highlight the lack of visibility of Merton’s contributions in cultural theory, she accepts Merton as a ‘wordsmith’ (p. 90), which, to my knowledge, is a status that has not previously been applied to any sociologist. Zelizer underlines an important continuum for positioning Merton both as a structuralist and as a cultural analyst, and thus helps us position different dimensions of Merton’s work.
The linkage between theory and history is covered in two chapters: first, Merton’s interpretation of Mannheimian sociology by Sica, who sets out to investigate Merton’s analysis of the new way of looking at social knowledge. Sica also tries to understand Merton’s turn against the strong current in European thinking. His interpretation highlights the importance of the influence of Lazarsfeld on Merton, in terms of focusing on Big Science, and his suspicion of the merely theoretical work, as well as his preference for studying mass communication rather than the history of ideas. Camic, in his chapter, investigates ‘how Merton sociologizes the history of ideas’ (p. 274). According to Camic, Merton speaks forcefully of the need to make a difference between the ‘systematics of theory’ and ‘history of theory’ (p. 275). Camic claims that, although Merton is understood as having de-emphasized the role of history of ideas for the sake of ‘advancing the present day systematic of sociological theory’ (p. 282), his work on words, concepts, neologisms, distinctions, maxims, and other linguistic expressions all comprise a baggage for a sociology of semantics. Camic also draws a sociological program by which Mertonian principles can be employed in various fields of sociology: for example: ‘ideas, as well as their linguistic carriers, constitute a wide and important area for sociological inquiry’ (p. 282), an area of investigation that cannot be ignored as a mere descriptive analysis for a sociological investigation.
One of the themes most comprehensively covered in the book is the sociology of science (Gieryn, Kalleberg, and Panofsky). Gieryn, who also accepts science as cultural space, describes the significance of a sociology of knowledge perspective in considering a Mertonian approach to science. The conflict between the institutionalization of science and autonomous scientific efforts has created a tension for today’s scientific establishment that can be observed in several different organizations. Gieryn points out that the paradoxical situations to which scientists are exposed have changed: the distinction between universalism versus localism, autonomy and embeddedness have not been foreseen, a situation that has affected the theorization of the sociology of science. Kalleberg also makes his point about changing conjuncture, which requires us to rethink the Mertonian approach without delegitimizing his whole investigation on science and scientists. Kalleberg uses a reconstructive approach to discuss contributions from Merton in order to improve our understanding of the relationships between science and democracy. He acknowledges Merton’s underdeveloped conceptual apparatus for documenting and analyzing the formation and change of opinions in social interaction as one of the weaknesses in his theory. Both Kalleberg and Panofsky seek to achieve a balance among the market, civil society, and the state through a redesigned scientific ethos.
The book also includes glimpses of some biographical sketches as well as his scholarly achievements: Merton’s article ‘Social structure and anomie’ (1938) has been one of the most cited articles in sociology. Not only was he the inventor of the focus group interview, but he owned hundreds of dictionaries and files of linguistic data in order to be able to assess rhetorical and semantic idiosyncrasies in social life. He had a good knowledge of Latin, German, French, and Italian. After the McCarthy years, he revitalized his studies in the sociology of science. The book also provides extracts about such complex themes and topics, some of which had been ‘issue-tized’ long before many of us went to college. Nevertheless, I must admit that there is one theme that is noticeably absent throughout the book: Merton’s reception by non-American scholars. Parsonian and Mertonian approaches have been so influential on the construction of modernization theories in so many developing countries that theses, books, and papers based on these approaches have long been one of the prominent theoretical frameworks for many sociologists. Therefore, readers may have appreciated the inclusion of a chapter investigating how Merton was (mis)understood in other societies. Thus, the reconstruction of Mertonian narratives could have been flavored through different understandings and critiques from a wider range of academic environments. For, what enriches sociologists is the way in which these conceptual clashes and tensions give birth to new ideas and struggles. Our great regard and respect for Merton and his work may also be attributed to his desire to know, which is a valuable but a rare virtue in today’s world.