Читать книгу Concise Reader in Sociological Theory - Группа авторов - Страница 7

Sociological theory offers a rich conceptual tool‐kit with which to think about and analyze our contemporary society. As we reflect upon what it means to live and to understand others in today’s complex world, the insights of sociological theorists provide us with concepts that greatly illuminate the array of social and institutional processes, group dynamics, and cultural motivations that drive the patterns of persistence and change variously evident across local, national, and global contexts. Sociology is a comparatively young discipline. It owes its origins to the principles and values established by eighteenth‐century Enlightenment philosophers, namely the core assumptions that human reason is the source of knowledge, and though of different orders, the source of moral truth and of scientific truth; and that, by virtue of being endowed with human reason, all people are created equal and thus should be free to govern themselves in all matters, including political governance – thus motivating the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century in America (1776) and in France (1789) and leading to the decline of monarchies and the establishment instead of democratic societies.

It was the French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857) who coined the term sociology in 1839. He was influenced by the Enlightenment emphasis on scientific principles and believed that a science of the social world was necessary to discover and illuminate based on rigorous empirical observation how society works, that is to identify, as he saw it, a “social physics” parallel to the laws of physics and other natural sciences, and to advance social progress as a result of the data yielded from the scientific study of society. In his view, because sociology could and should study all aspects of social life, he argued that sociology would be the science of humanity, the science of society, and would outline “the most systematic theory of the human order” (Comte 1891/1973: 1). Harriet Martineau (1802–76), the English feminist and writer, commonly regarded as the first woman sociologist, translated Comte’s writings into English in 1855 (Hoecker‐Drysdale 1992). Additionally, in her own influential writing she emphasized both the breadth of topics that sociologists can/should study as well as the importance of studying them with rigor and objectivity. In her well‐known book How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838), morals and manners referencing the substantive, wide‐ranging content of sociology (and its encompassing of social class, religion, health, suicide, pop culture, crime, and the arts, among other topics), Martineau also argued that because social life is human‐centered it is different to the natural world. Unlike atoms, for example, humans have emotions. Hence, Martineau pointed to the need for sociologists as scientists to develop the empathy necessary to the observation and understanding of the human condition and to how it manifests in the course of their inquiry. She wrote:

The observer must have sympathy; and his sympathy must be untrammeled and unreserved. If a traveler be a geological inquirer he may have a heart as hard as the rocks he shivers, and yet succeed in his immediate objects … if he be a statistical investigator he may be as abstract as a column of figures, and yet learn what he wants to know: but an observer of morals and manners will be liable to deception at every turn, if he does not find his way to hearts and minds.

(Martineau 1838: 52)

As sociology became further established in the mid‐to‐late nineteenth century it did so amid major societal changes, propelled by industrial capitalism, factory production, the expansion of manufacturing and of railroads, increased urbanization, mass immigration of Irish, Italian, Swedish, German, Polish, and other European individuals and families to the US, the bolstering of democratic institutions and procedures (e.g. voting rights), nation‐building, and mass‐circulating newspapers. Living in a time swirling with change, sociology’s founders were thus well situated to observe and to recognize how large‐scale, macro societal forces take hold, interpenetrate, and structure institutional processes, community, and the organization of everyday life, as well as to ponder the relationship of the individual to society.

This Reader presents a selection of key excerpts from major writings in sociological theory, the classics from the foundations of the discipline to contemporary approaches. As with all disciplines, the classics are so defined not merely because they originated in a different time, but precisely because they contain the essential points or concepts that have endured through a long swath of time and have proven resilient in their explanatory relevance of the dynamic complexity of society even, or especially, amid its many ongoing patterns of change. Sociology, as a social science, is an empirical discipline; this means that sociologists are interested in and committed to knowing the truth about reality – how things actually are and why they are as they are, rather than how ideally they ought to be. Consequently, sociologists embrace scientific method as a way of studying the social world and accept the objective facticity of (properly gathered) data. Sociologists use both qualitative (e.g. ethnographic description, interview and blog transcripts, historical documents) and quantitative (e.g. surveys, census data) data‐gathering methods, and in using data they tend to lean either toward investigating the relationship between a number of macro‐level variables (e.g. education, crime, income inequality, gender) or focusing on how individuals in a particular micro‐context and small groups or communities carve meaning into and make sense of their lives. Regardless of the research method(s) chosen (a decision made based on the specific research question motivating the sociologist’s empirical study), sociologists do not and cannot let the resulting data stand on their own. Data always need to be interpreted. And this is why sociological theory is so important. Theory provides the ideas or concepts that sensitize sociologists about what to think about – what questions to ask about the social world and how it is structured and with what consequences – and theory is equally fundamental in helping sociologists make sense of what they find in their actual research, both of what they might have (empirically or theoretically) expected to find but also of the unexpected. As such, sociological theory is the vocabulary sociologists use to anchor and interpret empirical data about any aspect of society, and to drive the ongoing, back‐and‐forth conversation between theory and data. This, necessarily, given the dynamic nature of social life, is always an energetic and dynamic dialogue. Sociological theory does not exist for the sake of theory, but for the sake of sociological understanding and explanation of the multilayered empirical reality in any given sociohistorical context.

This Reader is organized into five sections. Each section includes excerpts from a core set of theorists, and I provide a short commentary or introduction prior to each specific theorist or to a cluster of theorists in the given section. The Reader begins with a lengthy first section with excerpts from sociology’s classical theorists: Karl Marx (chapter 1), Emile Durkheim (chapter 2), and Max Weber (chapter 3). These three dominant theorists largely comprise the foundational canon of sociology; their respective conceptual contributions have well withstood the test of time despite, from the hindsight of our contemporary experience, some notable silences in their writings with respect to, for example, sexuality and a limited discussion of the significance of gender and race.

The classical tradition was largely introduced to English‐speaking audiences by the towering American social theorist, Talcott Parsons. The excerpts in section II comprise an amalgam representing Parsons’s theorizing, generally referred to as structural functionalism, and different theoretical perspectives that it, in turn, gave rise to based on specific critiques of some of Parsons’s emphases. I briefly introduce Parsons’s ideas (in chapter 4) but because much of his writing is quite dense I do not include an excerpt from him but instead an excerpt from his student and renowned fellow‐theorist Robert K. Merton, exemplifying the structural functionalist perspective. Parsons was famously concerned with how values consensus translated into the social roles and social institutions functional to maintain social order. Countering this focus, conflict theory, exemplified by Ralf Dahrendorf, highlighted the normalcy and functionality of conflict (as opposed to consensus) in society. From a different context, critiquing Parsons’s focus on American society as the paradigm of modernization, neo‐Marxist dependency theorists including Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto highlighted the conflicting power interests between the West and Latin America, and within Latin American countries dependent on the US (chapter 5). Still other theorists pushed back against Parsons’s main focus on macro structures and what they saw as his diminishment of the individual (even though Parsons affirmed the relevance of the individual as a motivated social actor). With a micro focus on individuals and small groups (chapter 6), this line of critique was spearheaded by another student of Parsons, George Homans. Contrary to Parsons, he emphasized the core centrality of the individual and of individual interpersonal interaction or exchange as the foundational basis of all institutional and societal life. Homans’s student, Peter M. Blau, took a broader, more sociological view than Homans and elaborated on how power and status in particular interpersonal contexts are conveyed through, and result from, social exchange relations. Another theorist, James S. Coleman, adopted Parsons’s focus on shared societal values to focus on the functionality of trust to the accumulation of human and social capital in interpersonal and small group settings. Decades later, writing with a focus on a different set of questions – sexuality and gender in contemporary American society – Paula England elaborates on the relation between personal characteristics (skills/human capital, values) and social identity or social position to show the dynamic interaction between individuals’ personal characteristics and social position in accounting for variation in individual decision‐making outcomes.

Section III includes what are generally seen as the three most prominent micro‐level perspectives in sociological theory: (1) symbolic interactionism which, building on George H. Mead’s theorizing on the self and elaborated by Erving Goffman, focuses on the micro‐dynamics of face‐to‐face or interpersonal interaction (chapter 7); (2) phenomenology which establishes credibility for the relevance of the individual’s subjective experiences of the social world and for the individual’s intra‐subjective reality, a perspective outlined by Alfred Schutz and elaborated by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann in their widely influential book, The Social Construction of Reality (chapter 8); and (3) ethnomethodology which focuses on how individuals actually do the work of being members of a society in particular localized settings; its framing is indebted to Harold Garfinkel and subsequently further applied to gender issues by Sarah Fenstermaker and Candace West (chapter 9). It is important to note here, however, that though largely micro in their focus, each of these theories (and especially phenomenology) also variously point to the significance of macro structures, the dynamic interrelation of macro and micro social processes, and to the fact that the self is always necessarily in conversation with society, and is so at once both at a micro‐ and macro‐level.

Section IV returns us to the influence of European theorists on the development of sociology, especially as the discipline both emerged from the influence of Parsons in the late 1970s, and also attempted to take stock of the social changes of the post‐World War II era, an era that for all of its progress – increased affluence, the expansion of university education, the growth of the middle classes, and the expansion of mass media – did not eliminate social inequality. This section includes excerpts from theorists associated with the Frankfurt School (chapter 10), most notably Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno who wrote extensively and in a withering manner critiquing the strategic manipulation and manipulating effects of politics and consumer culture by economic interests. The Frankfurt School’s second generation, and undoubtedly the most renowned social theorist alive today, Jürgen Habermas, outlines a way forward from the contemporary debasement of reason, one that returns attention to the possibility of using reason to discuss societal problems and to craft solutions that serve the common good. This section also includes excerpts from the extensive work of Pierre Bourdieu (chapter 11) who has been highly impactful in getting sociologists to think differently and to conduct innovative research (e.g. Lareau 1987) about how social inequality is reproduced, especially through the informal cultures of school and in the ordinary everyday habits and tastes prevalent in family life. Michel Foucault is perhaps the most intellectually radical of all social theorists (chapter 12). His originality is especially seen in his construal of biopower and how he frames and analyzes the birth of sexuality and of other body‐controlling structures (clinics, prisons). Widely read beyond sociology, his analysis of the fluidity of sexuality and power underpins much of queer theory, elaborated for sociologists by Steven Seidman (chapter 12).

The fifth and final section continues the emancipatory spirit of the post‐1970s critique. This vibrant body of work includes (in chapter 13) selections from the early feminist theorist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the ground‐breaking focus by Arlie Hochschild on emotion work and its gendered structure, and leading contemporary feminist theorist Dorothy E. Smith articulating the necessity of standpoints that seek to understand from within the experiences of outsiders (e.g. women, members of minority racial and ethnic groups, LGBTQ+). Additionally, Patricia Hill Collins gives sustained attention to a Black women’s standpoint as well as the complex intersectionality of individuals’ identities and experiences, and to what this requires of scholars who seek to study intersectionality. Important here also is the construal and reassessment of hegemonic and nonhegemonic masculinities by R.W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt.

In a parallel vein, postcolonial theories (chapter 14) draw attention to the structured dehumanization of racial and ethnic outsiders, and to the enduring legacies of slavery and colonial domination on the delegitimation of postcolonial identities and cultures. The pioneering Black sociologist W.E. Burghardt Du Bois was the first to forcefully articulate the bifurcating effect of slavery on the consciousness and identity of enslaved people and its legacy on postslavery generations of Black people. Edward W. Said focuses on the West’s construal of the (inferior) Otherness of the Orient, while Frantz Fanon evocatively conveys the everyday reality and experience of being a Black man in a racist society. Stuart Hall underscores the plurality and diversity of postcolonial histories, cultures, and identities and offers an emancipatory vision of cultural identity as an ongoing project that can dynamically integrate past and present into a new authentic synthesis. Contemporary scholars also increasingly point to the colonial and Northern/Western biases in what is regarded as legitimate knowledge, including biases in sociological knowledge, as elaborated by Raewyn Connell and colleagues. Others, such as Alondra Nelson, draw out the somewhat unexpected progressive social consequences of DNA testing and the use of genetic data by universities engaged in initiatives to make reparations to the descendants of freed slaves.

The final chapter (chapter 15) features excerpts highlighting what is distinctive about global society, our contemporary moment of late modernity, characterized by an array of transnational actors and processes. Zygmunt Bauman highlights what he sees as the diminishing role of the nation state and of its protective function toward its citizens and their well‐being. Anthony Giddens discusses the disembeddedness of time and space and its consequences for individual selves and social processes. Ulrich Beck elaborates on the globalization of risk society and highlights its encompassing nature. Additionally, he and Edgar Grande highlight the variations in modernity and suggest the need for a cosmopolitanism that would more fully recognize the mutuality of all peoples and societies across the world. Focusing primarily on the post‐secular West, and the political and cultural divisions between moderate religious and secular impulses, Jürgen Habermas articulates how we might go about crafting more respectful and enriching discourses with those whose beliefs, ideas and experiences are different to ours.