Contemporary Sociological Theory

Steven Loyal,Sinisa Malesevic

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781529735802
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Introducing you to the most important thinkers and schools of thought in contemporary sociological theory – from Parsons and Merton to the Frankfurt School to Foucault, Bourdieu, Giddens and Hochschild – this accessible textbook firmly locates key ideas in social, political and historical context. By doing so, it helps you to understand the development of central sociological concepts and how they can help us understand the contemporary world.

The book includes:

• Lively biographical sections so you can get to know each thinker
• Clear and easy-to-understand accounts of each theorist's arguments - and the most common criticisms
• Key concept boxes highlighting the most influential ideas

This comprehensive textbook brings the diverse field of contemporary sociological theory to life. Essential reading for all students of Sociology and Sociological Theory.

1 Parsons and Merton

Introduction

‘Structural functionalism’ is an academic label that has experienced a similar fate to that of ‘post-modernism’ or ‘social Darwinism'. Very few, if any, academics are comfortable with having these labels applied to characterise their approaches. However, while ‘social Darwinism’ and ‘post-modernism’ became ‘terms of abuse’ only after these perspectives lost their influence in the academic world, the label ‘structural functionalism’ was always contested by the scholars who were deemed to be the key representatives of that perspective – Talcott Parsons and Robert Merton. While this particular label certainly does not cover the wide range of their work, it does capture well what is distinct about this sociological paradigm which centres on the functional interdependency of systems and the role human beings play in the wider social networks. There is no doubt that Parsons and Merton developed distinct and, in some respects, very different sociological theories. Nevertheless, their approaches share the same epistemological foundations.

This chapter explores the key themes of structural functionalism. As in other chapters we start from biographies and the wider intellectual and historical contexts and then move on to the core ideas of Parsons’ and Merton's work. The last two sections provide a brief analysis of the recent developments and applications within this tradition or research and zoom in on the key criticisms of structural-functionalist approaches.

Life and Intellectual Context

Talcott Parsons

Parsons was born in 1902 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He grew up in an affluent and intellectual household. Both of his parents came from well-established patrician families that could trace their origins to colonisation from seventeenth-century England. His father was an ordained Congregationalist minister, who later became a professor of English and the President of Marietta College in Ohio. Parsons’ family were well disposed towards the Social Gospel movement, which applied Protestant teachings and Christian ethics to social issues ranging from poverty, crime and racial conflicts to economic inequality, lack of education, alcoholism and war. This religious movement was particularly influential among the clergy and its leadership who tended to be theologically liberal and socially progressive. It seems that young Talcott was influenced by his family's religious ethos.

Following in his father's footsteps, Talcott completed his undergraduate studies at Amherst, a private liberal arts college in Massachusetts, in 1924. At first, he intended to study medicine but changed his mind and pursued biology, sociology and philosophy. At Amherst, he soon became involved in various social activities and established himself as one of the student leaders. He was also a diligent student who early on showed a strong interest in multidisciplinary connections. As an undergraduate, Parsons was exposed to a variety of philosophical and social science traditions of analysis and had shown a marked sympathy for the theory of evolution. After graduation, he moved to the London School of Economics, where he spent a year studying under leading British scholars including L. T. Hobhouse, R. H. Tawney and B. Malinowski. He also befriended a number of fellow students who went on to become world-leading anthropologists, such as Raymond Firth, Meyer Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard.

European Influences

In some ways Parsons was enchanted by European intellectual life and decided to pursue his PhD studies in Germany, at the University of Heidelberg. He studied sociology and economics and had the opportunity to work with and attend lectures of leading German social thinkers including Karl Jaspers, Karl Mannheim, Alfred Weber and Emil Lederer. His PhD project was deeply influenced by Max Weber's work on the Protestant ethic and capitalism and he graduated in 1927 with the thesis entitled ‘“Capitalism” in Recent German Literature: Sombart and Weber'.

The encounter with Weber's work was a defining moment in Parsons’ academic development. In growing up in a religious environment Parsons was always convinced that culture and beliefs play a decisive role in the social world. Hence he found in Weber the conceptual and analytical tools for the study of long-term social change. He also decided to translate Weber's key works. In addition, he established a good working relationship with Weber's widow Marianne Weber.

Parsons started his academic career at Amherst, where he taught briefly from 1926 to 1927. After this he became an instructor at Harvard's economics department where he had the opportunity to work with Joseph Schumpeter and other eminent scholars. However, Parsons had little interest in economic issues and was eager to help establish a sociology department at Harvard. In 1930 Harvard established a sociology department led by the Russian émigré Pitirim Sorokin and which Parsons joined. However, Sorokin and Parsons never got along partly because Parsons preferred to be active in the numerous informal study groups at Harvard rather than activities organised by the sociology department.

Parsons was also very active in anti-Nazi campaigns. He visited Germany on a few occasions before the Second World War and warned the American public of the dangers that the Nazi movement represented. In 1944 he was promoted to a full professorship and also appointed the chairperson of the department. This was followed by the reorganisation and establishment of the new, multidisciplinary, Department of Social Relations, which aimed to integrate the work of sociologists, psychologists and anthropologists into a unified social science. The new department quickly attracted talented scholars including Allport, Kluckhohn, Stouffer, Murry and Homans among others, and also created a new generation of highly influential social scientists – from Harold Garfinkel, Marian Johnson, Norman Birnbaum, Robert Bellah and Renée Fox to Clifford Geertz, Robert Merton, Neil Smelser and Randall Collins. Parsons was at Harvard until his official retirement in 1973. He had a stroke during a trip to Munich, where he celebrated the 50th anniversary of his Heidelberg degree, and died in 1979.

Robert Merton

Merton was arguably the most influential student of Parsons. He was born in 1910 as Meyer Robert Schkolnick, a son of immigrant Russian Jews. Merton's parents were educated, but impoverished. His father, Aaron, owned a dairy-product shop that burned down and the family subsequently lost their main source of income. To survive [his father] Aaron became a carpenter's assistant and a truck driver. Merton's mother was a free-thinking socialist highly sympathetic to radical and anti-clerical ideas. The young Meyer attended South Philadelphia High School but acquired much of his vast knowledge from recurrent visits to nearby libraries and other cultural institutions. Since he lived in the slums of Philadelphia he was exposed early on to violence and was also involved with juvenile gangs and street fighting. As a teenager Meyer was also fascinated by magic and initially conceived of ‘Robert K. Merton’ as a stage pseudonym for his magic acts. Eventually his stage name became his real name, as he registered as Robert King Merton at Philadelphia's Temple University where he received a full scholarship to study sociology (between 1927 and 31).

Upon graduation at Temple Merton applied to continue his studies at Harvard and was accepted to work with Sorokin. At Harvard he also studied with Parsons, George Sarton and L. J. Henderson. As a graduate student Merton had already published a number of influential articles ranging from ‘Recent French Sociology’ to ‘Fluctuations in the Rate of Industrial Invention’ to (with Sorokin) ‘The Course of Arabian Intellectual Development, 700–1300 A.D.'. His first book, Science, Technology & Society in Seventeenth Century England, was published in 1938 and was one of the pioneering works in the sociology of science.

Merton's academic career started at Tulane University where he was appointed professor and chair in 1938. After three years he moved to Columbia University where he remained for over 40 years until his retirement, in 1979. In 1963 Merton was appointed Giddings Professor of Sociology, and the university later bestowed on him its highest academic rank, university professor, in 1974. During this period he also attained a degree of public visibility. His brainchild ‘focus group research’ was used on a mass scale by political associations, marketing agencies and other non-academic institutions, and he was soon recognised as the ‘father of the focus group'. Furthermore, he devoted a great deal of energy to making sociology institutionally recognisable and publicly visible. On becoming President of the American Sociological Association in 1957 he oversaw the unprecedented institutional growth of the discipline and its expanding impact on public policy in the United States. He was the first sociologist to win the US National Medal of Science in 1994. Robert Merton died in New York in 2003.

Historical, Social and Political Context

Although Parsons and Merton had already made their intellectual mark before the Second World War, their legacy is firmly linked with the post-war world. The end of the most devastating war ever fought on this planet generated a substantial degree of optimism throughout the world and this was also reflected in the social sciences.

The Rise of the Middle Class

In addition, the late 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s, were periods of intense economic development involving large-scale rebuilding projects in Europe and increased prosperity in the United States. The 1950s were characterised by sustained economic growth and the unparalleled rise of the middle classes. However, it should not be assumed that increased growth rates simply translated into society-wide affluence. Instead, the rise of the middle classes owed a great deal to the legacies of the Second World War. For one thing the development of the war industries stimulated greater spatial and social mobility as it fostered movement from impoverished regions to the ‘war-boom communities’ (Malešević, 2010: 261). As the US government had to invest heavily in mass-scale military production during the war it offered highly advantageous working conditions for people prepared to move and work in the military factories.

The well-documented case of the Willow Run community in Detroit shows how the government's financial incentives generated new social dynamics. Hence, what before the war was a very small farming community, became home to over 250,000 people who settled in Willow Run to work in the nearby bomber aircraft factory. During the war such new cities provided the opportunity for thousands of Americans to climb the social ladder and become middle class in a very short period of time (Carr and Stermer, 1952). Thus, the new war-related military and civilian industries were crucial in creating the conditions for greater social mobility. After the war, the military industries in part converted to the civilian sector and focused on producing cars, manufacturing goods and other industries which were vital in maintaining full employment.

For another thing, the degree of a society-wide sense of solidarity built during the war was important for preserving stable relationships between the unionised workers and their employers. The United States, in the 1950s, had strong trade unions that boasted huge memberships. The presence of powerful unions provided greater job security and periodic wage increases, both of which contributed towards a decrease in industrial action and wide support for the status quo. This economic prosperity, coupled with a substantial degree of cross-class accord, generated a degree of stability, moderation and conservatism.

Another important feature of this period in US history was the rise of consumerism. The economic growth together with new technological inventions and ever-increasing disposable income allowed ordinary Americans to purchase large houses in new suburbs, big cars and a variety of novel household appliances. The 1950s also witnessed the rise of targeted advertising and marketing and the availability of affordable bank loans, which further stimulated consumerist practices. This combination of cross-class consensus and rampant consumerism fostered the dominance of social conservatism in the United States. Hence it is no accident that structural functionalism emerged and intellectually prospered in this type of social environment focused on consensus. Parsons’ and Merton's key ideas reflected well the social realities of their world and also tapped into the widely shared aspirations of the United States in the1950s and early 1960s – the focus on social stability, a shared normative universe, the functionality of social mores and institutions, and generational social mobility.

Cold War Ideology

However, the United States was not just any economically prosperous society that operated with a high degree of social consensus. It was also a superpower involved in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Although the United States has already become an important geopolitical factor after the First World War, it was really victory in the Second World War that made both the United States and the Soviet Union global superpowers. As the Cold War (1947–91) unfolded it created a hostile environment between the capitalist liberal democracies and state socialist countries. This protracted ideological conflict intensified political conservatism on both sides. The rulers of Soviet-type societies dealt harshly with any form of dissent, often imprisoning or killing dissenters.

While the US liberal democratic political sys...