For Sociology: May Our Arguments Unite Us

The Golden Age of Consensus?

House situates his account of crisis in relation to a golden age that (surprise!) coincided with his youth. He presents 1961–1981 as an era when sociology was internally coherent and cohesive and claims this is why it was popular. I see the era so differently that House’s account seems bizarre.

First, the dates only make sense in relation to House’s biography. They leave out much of the theoretical innovation and institution-building that gave postwar sociology its distinctive character and enduring influence – and also the first half of both the postwar boom and the Civil Rights movement. The rising affluence of the 1960s is bundled indiscriminately with the economic crisis of the 1970s; the optimism of the 1960s is ascribed to the much more anxious 1970s. House does not even look closely at his own data on students getting sociology degrees, or he would not speak simply of high enrollments in the 1970s and decline in the 1980s. Enrollments in sociology peaked near the crisis of 1973–1975 which ushered in tighter job markets, the ascendancy of economics, and neoliberalism.

Second, while it is true that Talcott Parsons seems to have believed there was an emerging consensus in sociology (to which he was central), the evidence for this is weak. Kingsley Davis (1960) did assert as the President of the American Sociological Association that ‘we are all functionalists now’. Yet, the symbolic interactionism of Herbert Blumer and Erving Goffman was hardly just functionalism. Parsons’ own student Harold Garfinkel launched a countermovement with ethnomethodology. There were commonalties, including an interest in ‘the problem of order’, but this was a basis for conversation and contestation, not consensus. In his own ASA presidential address, ‘Bringing Men Back In’, George Homans (1964) demonstrated his non-conformity and declared that Davis’ assertion was either trivially true or utterly false.

There was quite a lot of contention in the age of alleged consensus. Perhaps most famously, in The Sociological Imagination, C. Wright Mills (1959) was fierce in attacking both Parsons’ functionalism and ‘abstracted empiricism’ (his label for most survey-based quantitative sociology). Both made for tedious reading, Mills argued, and they cut sociology off from engagement in social issues and struggles. Sociology students rebelled. Richard Flacks, Harvey Molotch, and Todd Gitlin helped formulate the 1962 Port Huron Statement and found Students for a Democratic Society. In 1968, as Gouldner noted, the ASA made a concession to student activists’ demands for voice. The result was Martin Nicolaus’ (1968) plenary speech on ‘Fat Cat Sociology’, asserting that ‘sociology is not now and never has been any kind of objective seeking-out of social truth or reality’. Nicolaus exaggerated but obviously consensus did not reign.

Third, the appearance of consensus is enhanced by erasure and selection. Consensus sociology was very white. E. Franklin Frazier was elected President of the ASA in 1948, to be sure, but the more critical W.E.B. Du Bois and Oliver C. Cox were relegated to the margins. Du Bois was honored with a moment of silence during the 1963 March on Washington decades before his books became standard reading in elite sociology programs. ¹ Likewise, women had long been more important to the reality of sociology than to its official representations or power structure. In 1969, several hundred women sociologists gathered in a ‘counter-convention’ at San Francisco’s Glide Memorial Church rather than participate in an ASA that marginalized them.

Fourth, recruitment into sociology has long reflected not just its position in a disciplinary prestige hierarchy, but the engagement of students in social movements and public issues. Sociology was popular during the 1960s (more precisely from the 1950s and into the early 1970s) at least partly because it spoke to the defining conflicts of the day – despite the consensus orientation of functionalist theory and statistical positivism. It opened perspectives on how individuals might fit into society in an era when social mobility and cultural openness were shifting the relationship of biography to history Mills (1959) famously said was core. This was attractive to women, minorities, antiwar students, and romantic communalists. As always, sociology appealed particularly to first generation college students and to the upwardly mobile because it provided tools for social self-understanding.

House notes as a good thing that in the years he identifies with disciplinary decline, the numbers of women and people of color in sociology have grown. But it is important to be clear (a) that previously these were actively excluded, not simply absent; (b) that the exclusion was accomplished by their fellow sociologists as well as broader social forces; (c) that greater inclusion on the basis struggle; and (d) that for all the visible diversity of the ASA, there is still hierarchy.

Not surprisingly, new participants bring new perspectives – or more precisely, they bring some from their extra-sociological experience and they create some in their professional work as sociologists. Integrating these into a coherent sociological understanding of the world is a challenge. It demands intellectual work and conversation. But to force unity rather than encourage connections can only block creativity. This must sometimes be critical.

Take, for example, Dorothy Smith’s (1987) ethnomethodological and feminist analyses of research based on surveys and interviews. Her critical analyses are intended to be constructive. Their intent is not to disqualify but to improve. I am not sure how much impact they have had on House or other conventional survey researchers. But they are communications within a shared field and at least potentially part of its improvement. I strongly agree with House, therefore, that sociology needs more, not less, integrative discussion among sociologists across subfields, theoretical perspectives, and methodological approaches. This does not mean that we need consensus, but we do need to engage and inform each other.

Imposing Consensus

House does not consider that the apparent consensus he remembers might have been shaped hierarchy, power, and exclusion. House simply takes for granted that the sociology he knows from certain elite US universities is representative. In this, House ignores global sociology, but also a very large part of US sociology: that outside its elite centers, big grant competitions, and attempts to influence federal government policy. By uncritically equating the academic elite with the discipline, he deflects consideration of sociology’s internal hierarchies. Elites in the best institutional positions to declare the norms of sociology tend to articulate those that most reinforce their own high status.

Mills saw a sort of grand coalition among functionalists and abstracted empiricists, cooperating to control a disciplinary power structure. This may have made the discipline more powerful in competition – and I am sure this was one of the intentions of key leaders. But it also had the effect of limiting sociological imagination, obscuring both large-scale challenges and tensions in individual lives. Gouldner saw this coalition losing its grip.

As it happens, I think both Mills and Gouldner were unfair to Parsons and to sociology’s dominant empirical researchers (though not entirely wrong). In their anger at sociology’s dominant power structure, they failed to celebrate adequately the range of great sociology that was nonetheless being produced. Some of this came from the marginalized, but some from hegemonic centers. Power and resources helped attract good researchers, and while they might have a distorting influence, they were not intellectually disqualifying. Parsons’ influence was amplified by Harvard. If anything, the Columbia Department led by Robert Merton and Paul Lazarsfeld was even more influential in forming sociology’s ‘mainstream’.

Universities, departments, research centers, PhD programs, publishers, and funders all help create conditions for productivity – and for consolidation of schools of thought, audiences, and influence. No doubt House is well aware of this – for example, how the prominence of survey research was enabled by his own Institute for Social Research, the National Opinion Research Center, their university hosts, and their funders – not just devotion to science. But he sees it only as a practical problem. ² House is hostile to the sociological examination of sociology – he thinks it a polarizing, postmodern pursuit with a little relation to scientific progress. ³

House’s golden age of sociology was shaped by struggles and institution-building for decades before his arrival on the scene. Sociology had been reshaped by a 1930s crisis. There was conflict over ASA leadership. There were material stakes, including funds from the Rockefeller Foundation and participation in the ‘research planning’ efforts of the Social Science Research Council. Famously, the American Sociological Review was founded explicitly to rival the American Journal of Sociology and facilitate greater professional opportunity for sociologists outside the orbit of the University of Chicago. The Sociological Research Association was created to recognize and better network the initially insurgent but eventually dominant new elite. Despite pluralization and the embarrassment of younger members, aging heirs of the empiricist insurgency still find it a safe setting to complain that the ASA has gone to hell and call for a return to ‘science’.

Although ostensibly more democratic, the new project was anchored by faculty from Harvard and other elite universities. It helped to institutionalize the duopoly of ‘grand theory’ and ‘abstracted empiricism’ that C. Wright Mills (1959) would criticize. This came at the expense of many other varieties of sociology from ethnography to community studies and engaged or ‘action’ research on social problems. It also drove the separation of sociology from public life that Michael Burawoy would later address as ASA President – a position that perhaps ironically enabled him to publish ‘For Public Sociology’ in the American Sociological Review (Burawoy, 2005).

The normative structure and hierarchies of mainstream sociology shaped attempts to inform policy. House takes social indicators as a prime example of policy-relevant research, and I also value better indicators. But it is worth noting that this project rose to prominence under the Hoover administration as part of the largely Republican side of the early-20th century Progressive movement that focused on technocratic reform. It is telling that the nascent sociological elite was extremely active in this, but mostly absent from the projects of social transformation symbolized by the New Deal. During the 1930s, the sociologists who actively engaged with the trade union movement, anticipations of the Civil Rights movement, immigrant rights, women’s education, and even socialism almost never came from the Ivy League elite. They were those that the 1930s ASA’s reforms attempted to discipline.

Sociology enrollments and ASA membership rose through the entire postwar boom, which was also the era of both ‘organized capitalism’ and massive expansion in higher education. They have stagnated or declined in the ensuring era of neoliberalism, ever-more intense competition for admission to elite universities, escalating costs, and debt. There were dramatic new opportunities in elite universities for women and racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities. Much work focused on matching this with better cultural recognition. At the same time, deindustrialization reshaped geography, community, and life chances; inequality shot up; prison populations; and ‘deaths of despair’ (Case and Deaton, 2020) increased. Migration grew not just in the United States but around the world and resistance to it informed conflicts over cultural diversity, religion, and race.

There is terrific sociological research on each of these issues. This is the reason public sociology – including good teaching – is so important. It exists not just to boost the fortunes of the profession, but also to bring needed sociological knowledge to pressing issues. It informs both specific policy decisions and broader public discussions.

House rightly notes that the narrowly technical needs to be complemented by attention to ‘macrosocial forces’ transforming individual lives and institutions. Surprisingly, though, he asserts that sociology fails to contribute analyses of macro structures and processes – an assertion he makes without considering the contributions of any macrosociologist: not Immanuel Wallerstein, Charles Tilly, Michael Mann, Theda Skocpol, or Randall Collins (whose work distinctively is both macro and micro) just to name Americans close to House’s generation. All have good claims to be scientific and empirical sociologists.

Does Sociology Need Consensus?

House suggests that sociology must choose among the following three futures: (1) It can disintegrate, with sociologists or at least sociological agendas finding new homes in professional schools or other academic fields; (2) it can achieve internal consensus, coherence, and cohesion – and on this basis external respect and impact; and (3) it can split in two, with ‘scientific/empirical’ and ‘humanistic/philosophical’ sociologists parting ways.

House focuses on sociologists’ attitudes and choices. But institutional factors are also important. Start with the crisis of employment for younger academics including sociologists. Consider also the radical increase in the extent to which faculty members are expected to secure external research funding – which was still an exception, not the rule, in the 1960s. Consider that this pursuit of grants may not pay for itself, let alone contribute to the rest of the university, though it does contribute to competition for prestige. Then consider, not least, the costs of universities, the rise in student debt, and the search for fields of study likely to bring job market payoffs. Sociologists can and sometimes must migrate to professional schools (for better or worse) because this is where growth in research universities has been greatest since the 1970s. Elite universities embraced business schools, though business is largely taught in non-elite undergraduate programs. They invested in trying to build policy schools to match their schools of medicine, law, and other ‘learned professions’. Engineering and technoscience were major priorities. Social work was treated with more ambivalence. Criminology and careers in police, corrections, and what we now call ‘first response’ were seldom embraced by elite universities.

House himself would like applied and policy-oriented research to have higher disciplinary standing. He would also like more sociological engagement in interdisciplinary projects. I agree in both cases. But in this regard, House’s criticism should focus on his colleagues in the disciplinary elite – and he might learn from Abbott’s (1981) analysis of ‘professional regression’. In many different fields, elites gain status by distancing themselves from more practical work. And he could learn from Gouldner’s argument that to thrive sociology needs to offer adequate analyses of the basic contradictions and pressing issues of contemporary society.

Sociology’s elite has long imagined purely academic research should be at the top of the professional hierarchy (as against both applied research and teaching). It has marginalized criminology, marriage and family studies, rural sociology, and above all social work. Disciplinary sociology pushed social work away despite the close early links between the fields (Lengermann and Niebrugge, 2007). Denigration and separation were guided by the prestige of positivist science and the pursuit of disciplinary ‘coherence’ that House espouses. But the expulsion of social work was also driven by bias against women, immigrants, and the poor that he does not consider.

Pursuing self-definition by exclusion, sociology also failed to embrace communications studies even as it grew manifestly more important. Its greatest sociological founder, Paul Lazarsfeld, remained ambivalent, preferring to be known as a methodologist who just happened to study communication. As a result, sociology not only lost a thematic dimension, it helped create a direct competitor. Communications enrollments skyrocketed while sociology grew very slowly. Combined, the two fields would lead the social sciences in enrollment.

Sociology has been splitting since it was founded. Why does House imagine its next split would be along the ‘two cultures’ line of ‘scientific/empirical’ versus ‘humanistic/philosophical’? ⁴ Quite simply because he is part of an elite that finds meaning and reassurance in thinking of itself as truly scientific and empirical. What counts as ‘scientific/empirical’ is defined narrowly (so the elite can be exclusive). All other approaches are lumped together on the basis of their failure to conform with the elite project. ⁵ House’s choice of ‘humanistic/philosophical’ as a label says less about commonalties among the wide variety of non-positivist or incompletely positivist sociologists than about the distinction the elite finds status-conferring.

Disagreements, even fiercely argued ones, have been important throughout the history of sociology. Today, we celebrate Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and members of the ‘Chicago School’ as founders. Did they all agree with each other? Parsons included Weber and Durkheim in his attempt at a grand synthesis (not so much Marx or the Chicago sociologists). This was initially valuable as an effort to bring Weber and Durkheim into dialog. Turned into disciplinary orthodoxy, it became stifling.

Sociology’s founding dialogues didn’t separate theory from empirical analysis as either Parsons or the ‘abstracted empiricists’ did. They also included a wider range of sociologists. Du Bois was both a theorist who should have been considered part of the founding dialogue and a pioneering empirical researcher. His history of Black life in the United States should have been an effective counterpoint to Parsonsian functionalist consensus, but sociology impoverished itself by marginalizing Du Bois. His attention to experience, recognition, and double consciousness should have revealed the importance of Hegelian themes but also original contributions to interactionism and pragmatist sociology, filling gaps left by Mead, Cooley, James, and Dewey. His PanAfrican internationalism should have been an effective counterpoint to the insularity, exceptionalism, and neglect of imperialism of much American sociology.

Sociology has thrived with heterodoxy. It does not need the imposition of orthodoxy or consensus. Of course, this goes equally for new orthodoxies. Sometimes, in recent decades, sociologists have been too quick to settle on affirmations of standard critiques of older sociology rather than doing the more serious work of integrating what is valuable into new and diverse intellectual approaches.

Heterodoxy need not mean fragmentation. It can mean productive arguments, empirical research examined from multiple theoretical perspectives, theoretical development informed by diverse empirical projects. There is no reason for ethnography, quantitative research, formal models of complex systems, and comparative historical analysis not to enrich each other. This is not just a matter of designing projects with multiple methods; it is a matter of reading and debating different kinds of work. Subfields need not be isolated islands but can bring different lines of work into the dialog, as cross-cutting intermediate associations advance a Tocquevillian version of solidarity.

One reason for optimism about sociology today is renewed engagement with the biggest issues in contemporary social life. Trying to understand social life in general demands analyzing both prospects for positive social transformation and for conflict and disintegration. It must include addressing challenges from inequality to climate change, experiences of despair to fragility of global systems. To advance this work, we can call for deeper scholarship, stronger interdisciplinary connections, and productive arguments across perspectives. Seeking an artificial consensus will not help sociology thrive.