Abstract
Criticism of sociology from within the discipline has a respectable pedigree. It may indeed be intrinsic to the enterprise. More than forty years ago, C. Wright Mills famously diagnosed sociology as suffering from confusion, distortion, bureaucratisation, and shoddy craftsmanship.1 A decade or so later, Alvin Gouldner, no less famously, hailed a ‘coming crisis’ in sociology, arguing for a radical theoretical and political reflexivity appropriate to a historical moment — it was the end of the 1960s — when ‘new sentiments and old theories’ were out of kilter with each other.2 At roughly the same time Stanislav Andreski fired off a barrage of broadsides aimed at everything from the obscure language of sociological writing, to the methodological pretensions of sociological research, to ideology masquerading as theory.3
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Notes
C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959).
A. W. Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Westem Sociology (London: Heinemann, 1971) p. 7. See also A. W. Gouldner, For Sociology: Renewal and Critique in Sociology Today (London: Allen Lane, 1973).
S. Andreski, Social Sciences as Sorcery (London: André Deutsch, 1972).
There are very many examples I could cite here. I will stick to three: J. Mitchell and A. Oakley (eds), The Rights and Wrongs of Women (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976); D. E. Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1988); and L. Stanley and S. Wise, Breaking Out: Feminist Consciousness and Feminist Research (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983).
J. H. Goldthorpe, On Sociology: Numbers, Narratives and the Integration of Research and Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) p. 1.
For an overview of some of these critiques, see S. R. Quah and A. Sales, ‘Of Consensus, Tension and Sociology at the Dawn of the 21st Century’, in S. R. Quah and A. Sales (eds), The International Handbook of Sociology (London: Sage, 2000).
Other comments on the disconnection between general theory and empirical research include P. Bourdieu and L. J. D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992) pp. 174–6, 218–24; B. S. Turner, ‘Preface’ to B. S. Turner (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).
On what Peter Berger, in Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Introduction (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1966) p. 25, called sociology’s ‘barbaric dialect’, see S. Andreski, Social Sciences as Sorcery, pp. 59–88; H. S. Becker, Writing for Social Scientists (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); R. Jenkins, Pierre Bourdieu (London: Routledge, 1992) pp. 9–10, 162–72; C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, pp. 25–35, 217–22.
It isn’t only hard-nosed quantitative sociologists who recognise the need to strive for epistemological objectivity: Z. Bauman, Thinking Sociologically (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 5–6; P. L. Berger, Invitation to Sociology, pp. 27–9; S. Bruce, Sociology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) pp. 94–112.
B. S. Turner, ‘Preface’ to B. S. Turner (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, p. xiv. For a wider critique of ‘decorative sociology’, see B. S. Turner and C. Rojek, Society and Culture: Principles of Scarcity and Solidarity (London: Sage, 2001).
G. McLennan, ‘The New Positivity’, in J. Eldredge et al. (eds), For Sociology: Legacies and Prospects (Durham: Sociology Press, 2000);
D. Silverman, ‘Telling Convincing Stories: A Plea for Cautious Positivism in Case-Studies’, in B. Glassner and J. D. Moreno (eds), The Quantitative — Qualitative Distinction in the Social Sciences (The Hague: Kluwer, 1989).
M. Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, ed. E. A. Shils and H. A. Finch (New York: Free Press, 1949); and ‘Science as a Vocation’, in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1948).
For example: S. Harding (ed.), Feminism and Methodology: Social Science Issues (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), especially the chapters by Smith, Hartmann, MacKinnon and Hartsock. On ‘emancipatory research’ see the special issue of Disability, Handicap and Society, vol. 7 (1992) no. 4.
M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 2nd edn (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1976) p. 182.
For an example of the tortuous paths down which materialist determinism led, and the degree to which the real world had to be renounced, see L. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays (London: Verso, 1971) especially pp. 127–86.
Pro rational action theory, see J. H. Goldthorpe, On Sociology, pp. 94–136. Contra, see P. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990) pp. 46–51; and P. Bourdieu and L. J. D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, pp. 123–6.
A. Giddens, In Defence of Sociology: Essays, Interpretations and Rejoinders (Cambridge: Polity, 1996).
For example: G. Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society: An Investigation into the Changing Character of Contemporary Social Life (Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press, 1993); R. Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998).
On sociology as a worldview, see S. Restivo, The Sociological Worldview (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991).
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© 2002 Richard Jenkins
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Jenkins, R. (2002). Foundations of Sociology. In: Foundations of Sociology. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-87835-2_1
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