Sociological concepts are clearly connected to students' interests and experiences by taking universal and popular elements of contemporary culture and rendering them sociologically relevant. This text devotes more space than others do to drawing connections between objectivity and subjectivity in research, presenting a more realistic, and therefore more exciting, account of how sociologists practise their craft. Some theories are rejected, while others are endorsed. The author team brings depth to issues of diversity and globalization using personal and research experiences.
This experienced author team shows students how sociology can help them know themselves and see what they can become. This text illustrates key points by drawing on recent movie hits, popular music, professional sports, the Internet, and other elements of popular culture that resonate deeply with students' own experiences. But suppose people are neither aware of any cherished values nor experience any threat? That is the experience of indifference, which, if it seems to involve all their values, becomes apathy.
Sup- pose, finally, they are unaware of any cherished values, but still are very much aware of a threat? That is the experience of uneasiness, of anxiety, which, if it is total enough, becomes a deadly unspecified malaise. Ours is a time of uneasiness and indifference—not yet formu- lated in such ways as to permit the work of reason and the play of sensibility. Instead of troubles—defined in terms of values and threats—there is often the misery of vague uneasiness; instead of explicit issues there is often merely the beat feeling that all is somehow not right.
Neither the values threatened nor whatever threatens them has been stated; in short, they have not been carried to the point of decision. Much less have they been formu- lated as problems of social science. In the 'thirties there was little doubt—except among certain deluded business circles that there was an economic issue which was also a pack of personal troubles.
The values threatened were plain to see and cherished by all; the structural contradic- tions that threatened them also seemed plain. Both were widely and deeply experienced. It was a political age.
But the values threatened in the era after World War Two are often neither widely acknowledged as values nor widely felt to be threatened. Much private uneasiness goes unformulated; much public malaise and many decisions of enormous structural relevance never become public issues. For those who accept such inherited values as reason and freedom, it is the uneasiness itself that is the trouble; it is the indifference itself that is the issue.
And it is this condition, of uneasiness and indifference, that is the signal feature of our period. All this is so striking that it is often interpreted by observers as a shift in the very kinds of problems that need now to be formu- lated. We are frequently told that the problems of our decade, or even the crises of our period, have shifted from the external realm of economics and now have to do with the quality of individual life—in fact with the question of whether there is soon going to be anything that can properly be called individual life.
Not child labor but comic books, not poverty but mass leisure, are at the center of concern. Many great public issues as well as many pri- vate troubles are described in terms of 'the psychiatric'—often, it seems, in a pathetic attempt to avoid the large issues and prob- lems of modern society. Often this statement seems to rest upon a provincial narrowing of interest to the Western societies, or even to the United States—thus ignoring two-thirds of mankind; often, too, it arbitrarily divorces the individual life from the larger institutions within which that life is enacted, and which on occasion bear upon it more grievously than do the intimate environments of childhood.
Problems of leisure, for example, cannot even be stated with- out considering problems of work. Family troubles over comic books cannot be formulated as problems without considering the plight of the contemporary family in its new relations with the newer institutions of the social structure. It is now the social scientist's foremost political and intellectual task—for here the two coincide—to make clear the elements of contemporary uneasiness and indifference.
It is the central de- mand made upon him by other cultural workmen—by physical scientists and artists, by the intellectual community in general.
It is because of this task and these demands, I believe, that the social sciences are becoming the common denominator of our cultural period, and the sociological imagination our most needed quality of mind. Nowadays, it is true, many intellectual fads are widely taken up before they are dropped for new ones in the course of a year or two. Such enthu- siasms may add spice to cultural play, but leave little or no intellectual trace.
During the modern era, physical and biological science has been the major common denominator of serious reflection and popular metaphysics in Western societies. That is one meaning of the idea of an intellectual common denominator: men can state their strongest convictions in its terms; other terms and other styles of reflection seem mere vehicles of escape and obscurity.
That a common denominator prevails does not of course mean that no other styles of thought or modes of sensibility exist. But it does mean thatjnore general intellectual interests tend to slide into this area, to be formulated there most sharply, and when so formulated, to be thought somehow to have reached, if not a solution, at least a profitable way of being carried along.
The sociological imagination is becoming, I believe, the major common denominator of our cultural life and its signal feature. This quality of mind is found in the social and psychological sciences, but it goes far beyond these studies as we now know them.
Its acquisition by individuals and by the cultural com- munity at large is slow and often fumbling; many social scientists are themselves quite unaware of it.
They do not seem to know that the use of this imagination is central to the best work that they might do, that by failing to develop and to use it they are failing to meet the cultural expectations that are coming to be demanded of them and that the classic traditions of their several disciplines make available to them. Yet in factual and moral concerns, in literary work and in political analysis, the qualities of this imagination are regularly demanded.
In a great variety of expressions, they have become central features of intellectual endeavor and cultural sensibility. Leading critics exemplify these qualities as do serious journal- ists—in fact the work of both is often judged in these terms. Popular categories of criticism—high, middle, and low-brow, for example—are now at least as much sociological as aesthetic.
By means of it, orientation to the present as history is sought. Although fashion is often revealed by attempts to use it, the sociological imagination is not merely a fashion. It is a quality of mind that seems most dramatically to promise an understanding of the intimate reali- ties of ourselves in connection with larger social realities.
It is not merely one quality of mind among the contemporary range of cultural sensibilities—it is the quality whose wider and more adroit use offers the promise that all such sensibilities—and in fact, human reason itself—will come to play a greater role in human affairs.
The cultural meaning of physical science—the major older common denominator—is becoming doubtful. As an intellectual style, physical science is coming to be thought by many as some- how inadequate. The adequacy of scientific styles of thought and feeling, imagination and sensibility, has of course from their beginnings been subject to religious doubt and theological con- troversy, but our scientific grandfathers and fathers beat down such religious doubts.
The current doubts are secular, humanistic —and often quite confused. Recent developments in physical science—with its technological climax in the H-bomb and the means of carrying it about the earth—have not been experi- enced as a solution to any problems widely known and deeply pondered by larger intellectual communities and cultural publics.
These developments have been correctly seen as a result of highly specialized inquiry, and improperly felt to be wonder- fully mysterious. They have raised more problems—both intel- lectual and moral—than they have solved, and the problems they have raised lie almost entirely in the area of social not physical affairs.
The obvious conquest of nature, the overcoming of scarcity, is felt by men of the overdeveloped societies to be virtually complete. The modern esteem for science has long been merely assumed, but now the technological ethos and the kind of engineer- ing imagination associated with science are more likely to be frightening and ambiguous than hopeful and progressive.
The felt need to reappraise physical science reflects the need for a new common denomi- nator. It is the human meaning and the social role of science, its military and commercial issue, its political significance that are undergoing confused re-appraisal. Scientific developments of weaponry may lead to the 'necessity' for world political rearrange- ments—but such 'necessity' is not felt to be solvable by physical science itself.
Much that has passed for 'science' is now felt to be dubious philosophy; much that is held to be 'real science' is often felt to provide only confused fragments of the realities among which men live. Men of science, it is widely felt, no longer try to picture reality as a whole or to present a true outline of human destiny. Moreover, 'science' seems to many less a creative ethos and a man- ner of orientation than a set of Science Machines, operated by technicians and controlled by economic and military men who neither embody nor understand science as ethos and orientation.
In the meantime, philosophers who speak in the name of science often transform it into 'scientism,' making out its experience to be identical with human experience, and claiming that only by its method can the problems of life be solved.
With all this, many cultural workmen have come to feel that 'science' is a false and pretentious Messiah, or at the very least a highly ambiguous element in modern civilization. But there are, in C. Snow's phrase, 'two cultures': the sci- entific and the humanistic. Whether as history or drama, as biography, poetry or fiction, the essence of the humanistic culture has been literature.
Yet it is now frequently suggested that serious literature has in many ways become a minor art. It is also owing to the very quality of the history of our times and the kinds of need men of sensibility feel to grasp that quality.
What fiction, what journalism, what artistic endeavor can compete with the historical reality and political facts of our time? What dramatic vision of hell can compete with the events of twentieth-century war?
What moral denunciations can measure up to the moral insensibility of men in the agonies of primary accumulation? It is social and historical reality that men want to know, and often they do not find contemporary literature an ade- quate means for knowing it. They yearn for facts, they search for their meanings, they want 'a big picture' in which they can be- lieve and within which they can come to understand themselves.
They want orienting values too, and suitable ways of feeling and styles of emotion and vocabularies of motive. And they do not readily find these in the literature of today. It does not matter whether or not these qualities are to be found there; what matters is that men do not often find them there. In the past, literary men as critics and historians made notes on England and on journeys to America. They tried to charac- terize societies as wholes, and to discern their moral meanings.
Were Tocqueville or Taine alive today, would they not be sociologists? Asking this question about Taine, a reviewer in The Times London suggests: Taine always saw man primarily as a social animal and society as a collection of groups: he could observe minutely, was a tireless field worker and possessed a quality..
He was too interested in the present to be a good historian, too much of a theorist to try his hand as a novelist, and he thought of literature too much as documents in the culture of an age or country to achieve first-class status as a critic. His work on English literature is less about English literature than a commentary on the morality of English society and a vehicle for his positivism.
He is a social theorist before all else. In the absence of an adequate social science, critics and novelists, dramatists and poets have been the major, and often the only, formulators of private troubles and even of public issues. Art does express such feelings and often focuses them—at its best with dra- matic sharpness—but still not with the intellectual clarity required for their understanding or relief today. Art does not and cannot formulate these feelings as problems containing the troubles and issues men must now confront if they are to overcome their un- easiness and indifference and the intractable miseries to which these lead.
The artist, indeed, does not often try to do this. More- over, the serious artist is himself in much trouble, and could well do with some intellectual and cultural aid from a social science made sprightly by the sociological imagination.
I want to specify the kinds of effort that lie behind the development of the sociologi- cal imagination; to indicate its implications for political as well as for cultural life; and perhaps to suggest something of what is re- quired to possess it. In these ways, I want to make clear the nature and the uses of the social sciences today, and to give a limited account of their contemporary condition in the United States.
I do not feel any need to kidnap the prestige or to make the meaning even less precise by using it as a philo- sophical metaphor. Perhaps 'the human disciplines' would do. THE PROMISE 19 At any given moment, of course, 'social science' consists of what duly recognized social scientists dre doing—but all of them are by no means doing the same thing, in fact not even the same sort of thing.
Social science is also what social scientists of the past have done—but different students choose to construct and to recall different traditions in their discipline. When I speak of 'the promise of social science,' I hope it is clear that I mean the promise as I see it. Just now, among social scientists, there is widespread uneasi- ness, both intellectual and moral, about the direction their chosen studies seem to be taking.
This uneasiness, as well as the unfor- tunate tendencies that contribute to it, are, I suppose, part of a general malaise of contemporary intellectual life. Yet perhaps Qie uneasiness is more acute among social scientists, if only because of the larger promise that has guided much earlier work in their fields, the nature of the subjects with which they deal, and the urgent need for significant work today.
Not everyone shares this uneasiness, but the fact that many do not is itself a cause for further uneasiness among those who But never mind. The term matters less than the idea, which I hope wul become clear in the course of this book.
In England, for example, sociology as an academic discipline is still somewhat marginal, yet in much English journalism, fiction, and above all history, the sociological imagination is very well developed indeed.
The case is similar for France: both the confusion and the audacity of French reflection since World War Two rest upon its feeling for the sociological features of man's fate in our time, yet these trends are carried by men of letters rather than by profes- sional sociologists. It is, quite frankly, my hope to increase this uneasiness, to define some of its sources, to help transform it into a specific urge to realize the promise of social science, to clear the ground for new beginnings: in short, to indicate some of the tasks at hand and the means available for doing the work that must now be done.
Of late the conception of social science I hold has not been ascendant. My conception stands opposed to social science as a set of bureaucratic techniques which inhibit social inquiry by 'methodological' pretensions, which congest such work by obscur- antist conceptions, or which trivialize it by concern with minor problems unconnected with publicly revelant issues. These inhi- bitions, obscurities, and trivialities have created a crisis in the social studies today without suggesting, in the least, a way out of that crisis.
Some expend great energy upon refinements of methods and techniques of investigation; others think the scholarly ways of the intellectual craftsmen are being abandoned and ought now to be rehabilitated. Some go about their work in accordance with a rigid set of mechanical procedures; others seek to develop, to invite, and to use the sociological imagination. Some—being ad- dicts of the high formalism of 'theory'—associate and disassociate concepts in what seems to others a curious manner; these others urge the elaboration of terms only when it is clear that it en- larges the scope of sensibility and furthers the reach of reasoning.
Some narrowly study only small-scale milieux, in the hope of Tbuilding up' to conceptions of larger structures; others examine social structures in which they try 'to locate' many smaller milieux. Some, neglecting comparative studies altogether, study only one small community in one society at a time; others in a fully comparative way work directly on the national social struc- tures of the world.
Some confine their exact research to very short-run sequences of human affairs; others are concerned with issues which are only apparent in long historical perspective.
THE PROMISE 21 Some specialize their work according to academic departments; others, drawing upon all departments, specialize according to topic or problem, regardless of where these lie academically. Some confront the variety of history, biography, society; others do not. Such contrasts, and many others of similar kind, are not neces- sarily true alternatives, although in the heat of statesman-like controversy or the lazy safety of specialization they are often taken to be.
At this point I merely state them in inchoate form; I shall return to them toward the end of this book. I am hopeful of course that all my own biases will show, for I think judgments should be explicit.
But I am also trying, regardless of my own judgments, to state the cultural and political meanings of social science. My biases are of course no more or no less biases than those I am going to examine. Let those who do not care for mine use their rejections of them to make their own as explicit and as acknowledged as I am going to try to make minel Then the moral problems of social study—the problem of social science as a public issue—will be recognized, and discussion will become pos- sible.
Then there will be greater self-awareness all around—which is of coure a pre-condition for objectivity in the enterprise of social science as a whole. In brief, I believe that what may be called classic social analy- sis is a definable and usable set of traditions; that its essential feature is the concern with historical social structures; and that its problems are of direct relevance to urgent public issues and insistent human troubles. I also believe that there are now great obstacles in the way of this tradition's continuing—both within the social sciences and in their academic and political settings— but that nevertheless the qualities of mind that constitute it are becoming a common denominator of our general cultural life and that, however vaguely and in however a confusing variety of disguises, they are coming to be felt as a need.
Many practitioners of social science, especially in America, seem to me curiously reluctant to take up the challenge that now confronts them. Many in fact abdicate the intellectual and the political tasks of social analysis; others no doubt are simply not up to the role for which they are nevertheless being cast. Yet despite this reluctance, intellectual as well as public attention is now so obviously upon the social worlds which they presumably study that it must be agreed that they are uniquely confronted with an opportunity.
In this oppor- tunity there is revealed the intellectual promise of the social sciences, the cultural uses of the sociological imagination, and the political meaning of studies of man and society. Whatever may be true in such disciplines as political science and economics, history and an- thropology, it is evident that in the United States today what is known as sociology has become the center of reflection about social science.
To interpret this variety as A Tradition is in itself audacious. Yet perhaps it will be generally agreed that what is now recognized as sociological work has tended to move in one or more of three general direc- tions, each of which is subject to distortion, to being run into the ground. Tendency I: Toward a theory of history. For example, in the hands of Comte, as in those of Marx, Spencer, and Weber, soci- ology is an encyclopedic endeavor, concerned with the whole of man's social life.
It is at once historical and systematic—histori- cal, because it deals with and uses the materials of the past; systematic, because it does so in order to discern 'the stages' of the course of history and the regularities of social life.
The works of Arnold Toyn- bee and of Oswald Spengler are well-known examples. It is, in short, concerned with a rather static and abstract view of the components of social structure on a quite high level of generality. Perhaps in reaction to the distortion of Tendency I, history can be altogether abandoned: the systematic theory of the nature of man and of society all too readily becomes an elaborate and arid formalism in which the splitting of Concepts and their end- less rearrangement becomes the central endeavor.
Among what I shall call Grand Theorists, conceptions have indeed become Concepts. The work of Talcott Parsons is the leading contempo- rary example in American sociology. Tendency III: Toward empirical studies of contemporary so- cial facts and problems. Although Comte and Spencer were main- stays of American social science until or thereabout, and German theoretical influence was heavy, the empirical survey became central in the United States at an early time.
In part this resulted from the prior academic establishment of econom- ics and political science. Given this, in so far as sociology is defined as a study of some special area of society, it readily be- comes a sort of odd job man among the social sciences, consist- ing of miscellaneous studies of academic leftovers.
Many course offerings in American sociology illustrate this; perhaps textbooks in the field of social disorganization reVeal it best. Lazarsfeld are present-day examples. These tendencies—to scatter one's attention and to cultivate method for its own sake—are fit companions, although they do not necessarily occur together. The peculiarities of sociology may be understood as distor- tions of one or more of its traditional tendencies. But its prom- ises may also be understood in terms of these tendencies.
In the United States today there has come about a sort of Hellenistic amalgamation, embodying various elements and aims from the sociologies of the several Western societies. But there is also an opportunity in our condition: the sociological tradition contains the best statements of the full promise of the social sciences as a whole, as well as some partial fulfill- ments of it.
The nuance and suggestion that students of soci- ology can find in their traditions are not to be briefly summarized, but any social scientist who takes them in hand will be richly rewarded. His mastery of them may readily be turned into new orientations for his own work in social science. I shall return to the promises of social science in chapters Seven through Ten , after an examination of some of its more habitual distortions chapters Two through Six. An element of a shared symbolic system which serves as a criterion or standard for selection among the alternatives of orientation which are intrinsically open in a situation may be called a value.
But from this motivational orientation aspect of the totality, of action it is, in view of the role of symbolic systems, necessary to distinguish a Value- orientation' aspect.
This aspect concerns, not the meaning of the ex- pected state of affairs to the actor in terms of his gratification-depriva- tion balance but the content of the selective standards themselves. The concept of value-orientations in this sense is thus the logical de- vice for formulating one central aspect of the articulation of cultural traditions into the action system.
It follows from the derivation of normative orientation and the role of values in action as stated above, that all values involve what may be called a social reference Ex- pectations then, in combination with the 'double contingency' of the process of interaction as it has been called, create a crucially impera- tive problem of order. Two aspects of this problem of order may in turn be distinguished, order in the symbolic systems which make com- munication possible, and order in the mutuality of motivational orien- tation to the normative aspect of expectations, the 'Hobbesian' prob- lem of order.
These standards are, in the terms used in the preceding chapter, patterns of value-orientation, and as such are a particularly crucial part of the cultural tradition of the social system. Grand Theory —the associating and dissociating of concepts—is well worth con- sidering. True, it has not had so important an effect as the methodological inhibition that is to be examined in the next chapter, for as a style of work its spread has been limited. The fact is that it is not readily understandable; the suspicion is that it may not be altogether intelligible.
This is, to be sure, a protec- tive advantage, but it is a disadvantage in so far as its pronunda- mentos are intended to influence the working habits of social sci- entists.
Not to make fun but to report factually, we have to admit that its productions have been received by social scientists in one or more of the following ways: To at least some of those who claim to understand it, and who like it, it is one of the greatest advances in the entire history of social science.
To many of those who claim to understand it, but who do not like it, it is a clumsy piece of irrelevant ponderosity. These are rare, if only because dislike and impatience prevent many from trying to puzzle it out. To those who do not claim to understand it, but who like it very much—and there are many of these—it is a wondrous maze, fascinating precisely because of its often splendid lack of intelli- gibility. Those who do not claim to understand it and who do not like it—if they retain the courage of their convictions—will feel that indeed the emperor has no clothes.
Of course there are also many who qualify their views, and many more who remain patiently neutral, waiting to see the pro- fessional outcome, if any. Now all this raises a sore point—intelligibility. That point, of course, goes beyond grand theory,2 but grand theorists are so deeply involved in it that I fear we really must ask: Is grand theory merely a confused verbiage or is there, after all, also some- thing there?
The answer, I think, is: Something is there, buried deep to be sure, but still something is being said. So the question becomes: After all the impediments to meaning are removed from grand theory and what is intelligible becomes available, what, then, is being said?
I have already indicated my choice of ex- ample. I want now to make clear that I am not here trying to judge the value of Parsons' work as a whole. If I refer to other writings of his, it is only in order to clarify, in an economical way, some point contained in this one volume. In translating the contents of The Social System into English, I do not pretend that my translation is excellent, but only that in the translation no explicit meaning is lost.
Each of the books in this series uses a sociological lens to provide current critical and analytical perspectives on significant social issues, patterns, and trends. The series consists of books that integrate the best ideas in One of the most important points of criticism raised some time ago against structural-functionalist sociology emphasized its Three types of change For the purpose of providing us Sociological Perspectives on Labor Markets.
Without these many perspectives it would not be possible to begin to understand in any meaningful way the complexities of society nor to produce the rich tapestry which is contemporary sociological analysis. In this light, the choice of Applications of sociology also appear to be spreading in multifaceted directions , and here the scopes seem unlimited. Their and other ideas for shifts in graduate education will be taken up by an exceptional panel of sociologists The concepts of health and illness are neither clear-cut nor objective facts but subjective experiences which are historically and culturally bound, and therefore need to be understood in context.
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