Abstract
Written as a short history of American sociology from the late nineteenth century to today, Stephen Turner takes up three interrelated themes: the tensions between sociology as social advocacy and as a social science until the 1920s; the stranglehold of professional elite sociology and the irrelevance of much of the research and publications undertaken under its hegemonic control; and the contemporary fragmentation of the discipline consequent upon the rise of women’s studies, queer studies, Latino sociology, and so forth. Alongside and in addition, he charts the post-war boom in recruitment to sociology and its near-death experience in the 1970s and its slow recovery as a result of the growth of gender studies in sociology. There are perhaps two other narratives taking place, both of which are more implicit and distinctively pessimistic. The first concerns the changing nature of the university in American society with the rise of massive open online courses (MOOCs), which he believes – correctly in my view – will reduce professors in the majority of state-funded universities to the status of high-school teachers, while leaving research professors in elite universities with status, salaries, and security. The second narrative is somewhat hidden but perhaps the most important and one that answers the question: why write the history of sociology (or any other academic discipline for that matter) at all? Bluntly, what is the point? There are any number of answers one could give but perhaps the most satisfactory for sociologists is that the history of American sociology is also the history of modern America from migration and the creation of the modern city (Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles), the golden years of post-war prosperity and consumerism, and the more uncertain present of rapidly changing technology, educational values, austerity and American decline as a global power. The unanswered question is whether sociology as a recognizable discipline can also make a successful transition in order to remain relevant to radically different circumstances. Will it find new ways to balance advocacy and science, moral concern and professional neutrality? While Turner attempts to remain positive and optimistic about, for example, the growing influence of women on sociology, I suspect he believes that successful renewal is unlikely. Let us examine these issues in more detail.
Early American sociology arose among and was spawned by a large array of social reform movements, of which the Women’s Christian Temperance Union founded in 1874 was probably the most powerful. The key causes addressed by these diverse charitable organizations were tax reform, public ownership of major utilities, health and sanitation, co-operativism, housing, education, and the 8-hour working day. The academic wing of these reform movements was small, but the reformers began to claim a presence in the universities by the 1880s and there slowly emerged a range of associations to cater to the demand for actual research on social problems. These included the American Social Science Association and the American Economic Association in 1885 with its subgroup of Christian Sociology. The American Sociological Society was founded in 1905. These associations struggled, often unsuccessfully, with the tensions between scientific and objective analysis of social issues and reform advocacy. There was nevertheless considerable overlap between advocacy and science, partly because the Boards of public universities contained members who were leading citizens and private universities had donors who were often sympathetic to reform. While some university presidents wanted to draw a clear separation between “investigation and agitation,” others attempted to embrace advocacy. In this respect, the history of “Christian Sociology” is instructive. It was frequently opposed because “Christian Sociology” was often an alternative for “Christian socialism.” In this development, sociology was simply the scientific application of Christian morality, and hence, its ethical contents came from Christian theology than from science. In addition, universities that were under the watchful eye of rich benefactors did not take kindly to sociology professors, under the umbrella of Christian socialism, agitating in support of workers taking strike action or against corruption in the ranks of business leaders.
Sociology became more successful through alternative routes such as the collection of labor statistics and the research findings of rural sociology. Yet another institutional route can be illustrated by the career of George Herron, a social gospel preacher and founder of an Institute for Christian Sociology. He later founded the Rand School of Social Science, which served as the educational institution of the American Socialist Society. In these early days, however, sociology never strayed far from the settlement houses and the work of the Charity Organization Society simply because for most sociology graduates holding an academic position normally went with serving on the boards of such reform organizations – at least until the American Sociological Association (ASA) began to professionalize its members in the 1930s. It was at Columbia University that a genuinely professional solution to the science-advocacy conundrum was developed by Karl Pearson, an admirer of Auguste Comte whose positive sociology required the elimination of religious presuppositions from science. Pearson gave Comtean sociology a workable methodology by turning all policy questions of social reform into statistical questions. Early sociologists such as Franklin Giddings, F. Stuart Chapin, W.F. Ogburn, and Howard Odum developed usable “sociological knowledge” consisting in “testable correlational hypotheses about relations between measurable variables, variables that the sociologist defined. This was to become the core of the methodological side of ‘mainstream sociology’” (p. 21).
We can say that the period from the 1880s to the 1930s was a success story in which sociology evolved from a side-show in movements for social reform to an accepted discipline in major universities such as Columbia and Chicago, but there was, in Turner’s reading of these academic trends, at least one important blind spot, namely, the question of race. As an academic discipline, sociology offered women opportunities for promotion in academic institutions that were otherwise exclusively dominated by men. The first sociology professor at Stanford was Mary Roberts Smith who had completed her PhD on the Almshouse Women of San Francisco (1895). In the 1920s, the proportion of women in sociology increased especially as Bryn Mawr began to award PhDs in sociology. Many academic women found employment in teaching social work courses, partly because social and sociology had not become professionally differentiated. While sociology departments were responding to these gender issues, Turner shows that race remained a problem in both reform and in academic institutions. The Progressive Party, which included figures such as Jane Addams, was persuaded by Theodore Roosevelt “to omit any references to improving the condition of Blacks, on the grounds that this would cost the party politically” (p. 24) and academic discussion of Blacks was equally difficult. In the dispute between W.E. DuBois and Walter Willcox over whether the high rate of crime among Blacks was the consequence of discrimination and prejudice in Southern racial practices, Willcox rejected this claim by presenting statistical evidence from the North showing that crime rates among Blacks remained high. Turner concludes this section of his book by observing that “this is a topic that American sociology has shown a continual inability to discuss” (p. 24).
This difficulty – how to discuss the place of Blacks in liberal democratic America where equality for all is inscribed in the “rags to riches” myth – was to re-appear in the criticisms leveled at Daniel Patrick Moynihan in response to his report The Negro Family in 1965. Moynihan, as an official for the Labor Department in the Johnson administration, developed a report that recommended strengthening the family as a measure to reduce many of the social and economic problems associated with being Black. As Turner notes, this idea was not especially new. Charles Ellwood (1915) had developed the idea of the importance of family stability in his successful prewar textbook Social Problems. Moynihan in his 1965 report had recommended that improving the employment of Black males would help family stability. When the report was leaked, Moynihan was accused of blaming the victim and as attacking Black culture. James Coleman’s (1966) Equality of Educational Opportunity in showing that family variables determined educational achievement for both White and Black students was also criticized by those who claimed that racism explained everything. One consequence of these controversies was that academic activists came to argue that personal experience was essential in understanding victimization whether as a Black, a woman, or a member of any marginalized and stigmatized group. The notion of racism was now accompanied by sexism and ageism. In my own area of research, I would add the issues surrounding Islamophobia which can only be fully understood by those who have direct experience. The result of these developments which are in turn related to the advocacy tradition in sociology was that economics rather than sociology became the preferred discipline for policy analysis. Perhaps, more importantly, “sociologists were less assertive about their role as honest brokers, and acceded to many of the criticisms of the claims of objectivity that were central to this role” (p. 51). Somewhat cynically he observes that sociologists could escape these problems be professional re-definition and “demography became a safe label” (p. 51).
Despite a range of institutional and professional dilemmas, sociology was not seriously affected by these difficulties until the 1980s when the number of bachelor degrees awarded in sociology fell from a high point of 35,915 in the early 1970s to around 14,000 in the mid-1980s. With the decline in enrollments, there was also an erosion of the familiar and recognizable core of sociology. While the elite departments remained relatively immune from the enrollment crisis, weaker institutions had to cater to student interests by making sociology more popular. One consequence was the fact that sociology had to compete with women’s studies, cultural studies, film studies, dance studies, and more recently, body studies.
As sociology departments competed for dwindling student enrollments by becoming more popular and fashionable, courses proliferated and became increasingly voluntary rather than compulsory. The ASA was able to co-opt the new developments by creating “Sections,” which continue to proliferate. These were in fact mini-sociological associations. This development further stimulated the process by which elected offices were opened to members who were not drawn from the top-20 departments. The core was further weakened by the critical assault of symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology which created their own associations, forms of discipleship, charismatic leaders, and annual conferences. Traditional areas were attacked by various Young Turks. The sociology of crime was gradually undermined by deviancy theory with its alternative vocabulary of delinquent drift.
Chapter 6 is the most controversial chapter in a volume that produces plenty of productive controversy. One consequence of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” over difficult political issues such as race and educational attainment was that “[s]ociologists over this period became monolithically Left-liberals in political orientation” and anthropology and sociology became “ideologically monochromatic disciplines” (p. 67). One further consequence was that appointments became entangled with affirmative and diversity issues. He offers various examples from Black sociology and from Women’s Studies resulting in what he refers to as the “feminization of sociology.” In 1968 in San Francisco, a group of women in response to a negative reaction to a proposal from Cynthia Epstein left the ASA conference and met in the nearby Glide Church. This event led to the founding of the Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS) which supports basic demands regarding jobs and membership of ASA committees. In 1972 at the New Orleans’s conference, SWS demanded a ballroom for its own activities. SWS set new standards for sociology departments in which women had to represent 40% of the faculty, and the growth of gender studies was defended as a new Kuhnian paradigm. For Turner, despite the obvious, if partial, success of the SWS agenda, the real question is whether elite sociology of the eight dominant departments that ultimately control the profession will co-opt or crush the feminization of sociology. The SWS agenda in some way takes sociology back to its roots in terms of advocacy and activism. As the “silverbacks” (white, old, heterosexual males) retire and die off, will sociology as a whole be reformed by a new gender sensitivity and will feminism save sociology from declining enrollments? The growth in enrollments since 1990 is congruent with the rise of female participation in graduate schools and on the faculty following the discipline’s shift toward gender studies. Turner identifies two rather different forms of feminization. There is the demand for more women in sociology departments, and second, there is the idea that feminization could and should transform sociology by forcing it to reflect seriously on gender. Which will prevail? He addresses the issue of women’s representation in sociology through an examination of the elite hierarchy within the profession in Chapter 7 in terms of Robert Merton’s Matthew effect, namely, those who have shall get more.
It is widely recognized that success in the American system requires a career that begins with an education in one of the elite private universities, membership on the ASA Council, and a publication in one of the top journals – the American Sociological Review and the American Journal of Sociology. Promotions, recognition, and success are consequently controlled by the top five departments: Harvard, Chicago, Columbia, Wisconsin, and Berkeley. While there is some dispute about differences between reputation, visibility, and productivity, and while there is the view that some departments (such as Yale) are undervalued, the system is self-reproducing, because the hierarchy within the discipline has a substantial impact on the hiring of new faculty. How the elite understood sociology had significant repercussions. For example, by the end of the last century, “serious scholarship in the classics had vanished from elite sociology departments, and ‘theory’ was taught by non-theorists when it was taught at all, and taught with an eye to its usability”(p. 95).
Turner believes that this elite system has had a stultifying effect on the profession as a whole, but there is worse to come. The growing interest in MOOCs will reduce faculty teaching in low-status departments and universities to the level of high-school teachers. Some commentators have assumed that the elite departments will always be protected from erosion via MOOCs because their “ideas” will always be necessary and in demand (Abbott, 2002). Turner proposes an alternative consequence. MOOCs are a replacement for lecturing not teaching, and ultimately sociologists are not paid for “ideas.” At most, sociologists receive grant and foundation money for their research, but “this is not sufficient to support elite sociology departments” (p. 95).
In conclusion, American sociology has been dominated by an elite system that has resisted many of the changes taking place within sociology as a whole, including the feminization of the discipline. Sociology has survived the enrollments crisis of the late 1970s and has achieved a stable state. Whether the existing character of the discipline can survive MOOCs remains to be seen. The important negative outcomes are the death of theory, especially the classical sociological theory, and what Turner calls, following Irving Horowitz (1993), a “larger sociology” that is concerned with social issues in theoretical terms.
This is a small volume with large concerns and issues. Despite its diminutive size, it compares favorably with official histories such as Craig Calhoun’s (2007) edited Sociology in America. Turner leaves us with plenty to think about and even more to be concerned about. It may seem churlish to ask for more. However, Turner might have made the obvious point that in the absence of a thriving official tradition of theory in the ASA, American sociology has depended heavily on European social theory to fill the gap – Luc Boltanski, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Jurgen Habermas, and Niklas Luhmann. Robert Nisbet (1967) defined “the sociological tradition” as European and conservative. At the same time, he says little or nothing about the work of Talcott Parsons and the legacy of theoretical sociology in the cultural sociology of Jeffrey Alexander and his colleagues at Yale. Another strange absence is the lack of recognition of the migration of Jewish intellectuals from the 1930s onward that gave rise to the critical theory school, albeit briefly, in the United States, and the longer lasting legacy of the New York intellectuals and the New School. In retrospect, perhaps the most significant tradition of American social theory (to take a wider view beyond sociology) has been the pragmatism of William James and his followers, but Turner says nothing about this legacy. Finally, there is one further absence whose career may well confirm Turner’s criticisms that American sociology no longer has a larger vision, namely, Robert Bellah, whose contributions to historical and comparative sociology were an outstanding exception. Despite the gaps, American Sociology is informative, controversial, and rewarding.