The Idea of Social Structure

Papers in Honor of Robert K. Merton

Lewis A. Coser

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351481205
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

Written and compiled by friends and former students, The Idea of Social Structure honors Robert K. Merton, considered one of the premier sociologists of the twentieth century. Along with Talcott Parsons and Marion J. Levy, Merton was emphatic in his use of the term "social structure"—however different they were in defining and refining the term. The chapters in this volume address many of Merton's diverse sociological theories and, in turn, his theories' impact upon a very large sociological territory.

The volume includes major statements on the context of working with Merton by Lewis A. Coser, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Robert A. Nisbet, and Seymour Martin Lipset, as well as memorable statements covering Merton's interests in the sociology of knowledge and science, planning communities, medical education, relative deprivation, everyday life, political roles, and communication media. This is a powerful sourcebook for understanding the work of Merton and of his intellectual successors.

Nisbet called the decade of the 1930s among the most vital and creative periods in American history. It was certainly a period of intense struggle—political, military, and ideological. But the formation of modern sociology was without question one of the crowning achievements in the scientific evolution of the century. The volume is sharply focused on Merton's work and deeply appreciative of the nature of his contribution. It is a landmark effort in the study of sociology as history.

On the Shoulders of Merton

Toward a New View of the Sociology of Knowledge

Bernard Barber

IN this essay I should like to recommend the view that the sociology of knowledge—in regard to its theory, its research methods, and its data, all three—should be integrated into general or “mainstream” sociology. Such integration, a reciprocal process in which what is presently defined as the sociology of knowledge would have to conform to the standards of theory, method, and data of general sociology and in which general sociology would be improved and enriched by the contributions of the new sociology of knowledge, would obviously be beneficial to both. The sociology of knowledge, like all sociological specialties, can only flourish if it is an integral part of general sociology. The sociology of knowledge has languished for more than thirty years.

The isolation of what is presently viewed as the sociology of knowledge is not hard to see. Judging both from books and articles that call themselves works in the sociology of knowledge and from what graduate students in sociology who elect to take a course in this field expect to hear in lectures and read, the predominant present view of the sociology of knowledge is of a separate, “foreign,” philosophical, ideological, speculative, and nonresearch field of study.¹ I have been perhaps especially impressed with the unsatisfactoriness of the predominant view of the sociology of knowledge by my experience with beginning graduate students. For more than twenty years now, in teaching a course in this field every other year, I have had to confront, counter, and correct this predominant view. Graduate students in social stratification courses are different from one biennium to another: they seem to have heard of new theories, or new research methods, or new research studies. But sociology of knowledge students do not change.

Bernard Barber is Professor of Sociology at Barnard College, Columbia University.

It is not that previous efforts to counter the predominant present view of the sociology of knowledge do not exist—indeed, powerful and prestigious efforts. Twenty-five years ago Robert Merton, using numerous examples from the study of mass communications, pointed out that the research methods and standards of empirical data of the sociology of knowledge needed to be integrated with those of general sociology.² But in this instance Merton has not had the triumphant success he has had in several other sociological specialties. The old sociology of knowledge has gone its old way.

It is perhaps time again, then, to recommend a new view of the sociology of knowledge. That is my purpose here, and toward that end I shall, all too briefly, address five topics: the problem of philosophy; the problem of theory; the problem of the nature of the relationships among culture, social structure, and personality; the problem of the hierarchy of knowledge; and the problem of research methods and data. Finally, I want to say something about the future of the sociology of knowledge.

The Problem of Philosophy

The predominant, traditional view of the sociology of knowledge is preoccupied, to a degree that is no longer the case in other sociological specialties, by the philosophical problems of knowledge. Graduate student novices are more concerned with problems of the possibility, relativity, and validity of sociological knowledge than with the concepts, hypotheses, propositions, methods, and data that constitute it. In short, it is ontology and epistemology they wish to discuss, not sociology.

The new view of the sociology of knowledge recognizes, indeed insists upon, the importance of the philosophical problems of knowledge. But the philosophical problems of science and other forms of knowledge have been attended to by an ancient, highly developed, and necessarily separate discipline— philosophy. These problems cannot be confused or merged with sociological problems of knowledge. Of course, as the newer sociology of knowledge further insists, sociological and philosophical aspects of knowledge are interconnected— that is, affect one another—at certain important points. But through considerable and important ranges of analysis, they are independent and separate from one another. Each has its own technical methods of analysis, its own findings, its own need for disciplinary specialists and courses of instruction, its own subspecialties. The sociologist who has aspirations to contribute to the philosophy of sociology will have to master not only his own discipline but the relevant parts of the discipline of philosophy as well. Until the necessity of this double mastery is acknowledged and surmounted, we shall continue to have what we now have in the philosophy of sociology: a few small successes and many failures. No one, sociologist or philosopher, has yet produced a philosophy of sociology in the grand manner.

Recognizing the importance of philosophy, then, the newer view of the sociology of knowledge recommends a philosophical position of pragmatism (note the small “p”)³ which assumes and then takes for granted that the social world can be known, and can be known to a desired degree of objectivity, validity, and usability by scholars conforming to scientific standards and methods that have produced such knowledge about the physical and biological aspects of the world. Such a philosophical position is obviously a prerequisite to the sociological enterprise. The mature scholar or novice who cannot accept it is better cut out for philosophy itself than for sociology.

The Problem of Theory

In this section I should like to present a broad sketch of how the sociology of knowledge fits into general sociological theory and therefore why it should be integrated into that theory. For this purpose I shall describe very succinctly a theoretical model for social system analysis that helps to locate the nature and tasks of the sociology of knowledge as part of general sociology.

The sociology of knowledge is but one of many sociological specialties devoted to the analysis of action in social systems. As Figure 1 (below) may help to make clear, we assume that “action” or “interaction” is the basic stuff of sociological analysis, as “matter” is for physics and “life” for biology. Figure 1 shows that we further assume that the endless process of action or interaction is usefully conceived, not necessarily ontologically but only for purposes of scientific analysis, to be broken up into separate, boundary-maintaining, dynamic, and changeful systems. One type of system that is useful for sociological analysis is the one we label “society,” but the system assumption is useful also for those elements that are constituents of a society and for those that describe the interaction of two or more societies.

Figure 1. Diagram of Relations Among Action, Social System, and Society

Figure 1 also illustrates the assumption of this model that all action in social systems has three analytic aspects: social structure, culture, and personality. That is to say, there is no unit of action in any social system, societal or larger or smaller, in which all three of these aspects of its structure and functioning cannot be discerned. As Figure 1 shows, the basic unit of analysis for social structure is “role” and for culture is “idea.” Because of the paradigm differences among various schools of psychologists, who are the disciplinary experts with regard to personality, the basic unit of analysis for that aspect of action is left unspecified in this model. This merely signifies the lack of general theoretical commitment among sociologists to any one theory of personality. In practice, of course, sociologists doing research as social psychologists do make specific commitments in psychological theory. They are predominantly Freudians and Meadians, though there are a few Skinnerians among them.

All three aspects of action are conceived of as structured (or patterned, which is to be taken as a synonym for structured). That is to say, again for purposes of scientific analysis and not because of ontological assumptions, there are assumed to be discernible uniformities of regularity and recurrence in the process; these are defined as structures. It should be clear that structure and process are but two ways of conceiving the basic stuff of action.

Figure 1 also indicates that role and idea structures have to be analyzed as more or less “institutionalized,” that is, as supported by more or less moral consensus among those who are engaged in those structures. Institutionalization is very much a matter of degree, with some structures having very little such moral consensus attached to them, many having a moderate amount, and some having a great deal. In his discussion of folkways and mores, Sumner was talking about this important matter of institutionalization. It is essential to see that structure and institutionalization are different and independently variable aspects of action in social systems. It should also be carefully noted that although sociologists tend to use the term “institution” vaguely and to mean different things that should be kept separate, they do tend on the whole to use the term only to refer to social structures. According to our definition of institutionalization, idea structures are as much subject to analysis in these terms as are role structures. Language, ideologies, science, and the several other types of idea-systems are analyzable not only in terms of their cognitive or logical structures but as the foci of sentiments of moral consensus and dissensus among those who use them.

Finally, Figure 1 is intended to show that all three aspects of action— social structure, culture, and personality—are independent of one another to some extent, as well as being interdependent to some degree. That is to say, in some ways their essential types of structure, dynamics, and change are different from one another. These differences are matters for empirical research as well as theoretical analysis. Later in this essay, in discussing what I call “the hierarchy of knowledge,” I shall be giving an example of the different type of structuring which occurs in culture in comparison with social structure.

It is also an important assumption of the model presented in Figure 1 that social structure, culture, and personality are in principle all equally important aspects of action. Because we read from left to right in English and because I have listed social structure, culture, and personality in that order from left to right, there may be a tendency to infer that this order is an order of theoretical importance or weight. Not so at all. In this system model, we might have listed the three aspects in any order as far as their generalized importance as analytic structures or variables is concerned. In concrete cases of analysis, of course, any one may be more important than the others, but that is something to be established empirically and by controlled or natural experiment.⁴ The model of the social system illustrated in Figure 1 accepts none of the monofactorial theories—whether social structural, cultural, or personality— which are rife in the social sciences today.

It is now possible, using the condensed account we have given up to this point of a model for the analysis of action in social systems, to give some initial statements about the sociology of knowledge. It is clearly culture, or systems of structured ideas of various types, that is the central focus of concern of the sociology of knowledge, just as it is social structure that is central to other sociological specialties. But it is also clear that the sociology of knowledge will have to study the relationships between culture and social structure, and personality too, as well as sometimes limiting itself to analysis of the endogenous types of structure, process, and change within culture itself. Both of these kinds of study, of course, will be done best Γη reference to one another, since only with such reference can one establish what is endogenous and what is interrelationship. And it is clear that both kinds of study require the necessary expertise of the relevant knowledge of both culture and social structure. Sociologists of knowledge cannot be casual about social structure any more than social structuralists can be crude or rudimentary in their knowledge of culture. The stores of certified knowledge accumulated by disciplinary specialists in both areas are now too large to be ignored or treated lightly by any one specialist seeking to show connections between his own area and some other one. Difficulties of this kind seem to be one source of the controversy between certain historians of science, the “internalists,” who stress the endogenous problems of scientific idea-systems and ignore their social structural connections, and certain sociologists of science, derided as “externalists” by the historians, who are more competent in discerning these social structural connections than they are in understanding the subtle substance of the idea-systems in question.⁵

So much for knowledge, or culture, and social structure and their relationships in general. For some more detailed understanding of the place of the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copy Right Page
• Content Page
• Preface
• Robert K. Merton the Man and the Work
• On the Shoulders of Merton
• In The Spirit of Merton
• Index