The Problem of Sociology

David Lee, Howard Newby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134868803
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First Published in 1983. Designed for first-year graduates, this book provides an introduction to key themes and research in sociology. Written by two lecturers and based on the long experience of teaching the subject, 'The Problem of Sociology' serves as an antidote to the conventional 'institutional' approach to sociology and avoids he artificial fragmentation of major theories and concepts in common to so many introductory texts. From this text, the student is able to develop a clear understanding of what makes sociology a distinct and rigorous discipline; a discipline which has evolved historically through the analysis of certain fundamental issues, many of which continue to have a contemporary relevance. And while introducing the student to classical theory, the authors also show how these theories illuminate present social problems.

Part One:
The Problem of Sociology

1
Prologue: to the reader

The purpose of this book is to provide an up-to-date introduction to the study of sociology. It will no doubt help if we begin by describing what the discipline is about and by indicating the scope of the chapters to follow. The simplest way of doing so will be to explain the title of the book: why the problem of sociology?

First of all, of course, as with any academic discipline, it ought to be possible to describe the intellectual ‘problem’ which we are going to tackle. The problem of sociology in this sense is to investigate the many and varied kinds of happenings which are conveyed by the phrase ‘human society’. We shall find, however, that this statement is not nearly precise enough. Societies are not tangible ‘things’ which can be observed and classified like so many butterflies. In order to arrive at a more exact idea of what sociologists study, we must take a closer look at what we really have in mind whenever we talk about ‘human society’.

Even in quite ordinary situations people are aware of being, as they put it, under social pressure. Behind this everyday expression is the realization that our relationships with other people can have a curious effect on ourselves. The point has been put particularly well by two British sociologists who undertook a celebrated study of racial conflict in Birmingham over access to housing. They wrote of:

the feeling that individuals were often acting in contradiction of their own ideals and sometimes of their own interests. They adopted discriminatory policies reluctantly, regretfully and sometimes guiltily because they felt compelled to do so by circumstances beyond their control. Sometimes we felt that they acted as men possessed by some evil demon. (Rex and Moore 1967)

In this description Rex and Moore express what we take to be a common experience of people in many spheres of life: that one is part of a ‘system’ of forces that one is powerless to interpret or change.

Yet the ‘system’ itself does change, often with great suddenness, and still we can have that sense of being affected by something which appears to operate outside and independently of ourselves. During times of war, revolution and violent social upheaval the ‘thing’ seems quite out of control, carrying everyone along in unexpected and unpredictable directions. Here is Nadezdha Mandelstam’s vivid account of her feelings as Stalin’s purges gathered momentum in the USSR and she and her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, were taken into exile:

All of us were seized by the feeling that there was no turning back…all of us were in a state close to hypnotic trance. We had really been persuaded that we had entered a new era and that we really had no choice but to admit to historical inevitability. (Mandelstam 1975, p. 50)

Poor Nadezdha was brought to the point of doubting whether, in the last analysis, individuals are capable of maintaining any distance at all between themselves and society’s ‘endless pressure’ (Pryce 1979). She asks:

Can a man really be held accountable for his own actions? His behaviour, even his character is always in the merciless grip of the age, which squeezes out of him the drop of good or evil that it needs from him. (Mandelstam 1975, p. 108)

Of course, people can and do resist ‘the merciless grip of the age’. Even under the most extreme conditions of social control we can find examples of the autonomy of the individual asserting itself. S.Cohen and L.Taylor in their study of long-term imprisonment, Psychological Survival (1972), explore this aspect of social behaviour. So, too, does Hilde Bluhm (1948) in the analysis of an even more oppressive institution— the Nazi concentration camp. And she concludes:

The ego of the prisoners refused to accept the estrangement it was subjected to. It, therefore, turned the experience connected with the loss of its feelings into an object of its intellectual interests…. Those…who embarked on a study of the concentration camp proper, turned towards that very reality which had threatened to overpower them; and they rendered that reality into an object of their ‘creation’. This turn from a passive suffering to an active undertaking indicated that the ego was regaining control. (Bluhm 1948, pp. 9–10)

Thus even under conditions of extreme coercion the ‘system’ need not be totally determined, even though the costs of successful resistance may be very high. If it were, if people always acted in ant-like subservience to social discipline, social life would not be the puzzle which in fact it is.

We have said enough, we hope, to suggest that sociology does possess a distinctive ‘problem’, a subject matter. Nevertheless, it is not easy to describe it in everyday language. This is because ordinary language is rather vague and confusing in these matters and tends to hide not only the precise nature of the issues the sociologist wishes to examine, but also their importance. It encourages us to think of ‘society’ as if it really were separate from or at variance with the relationships existing between individual people. Providing all that we want is a handy descriptive term to cover the phrase ‘relationships between individual people’, terms like ‘society’ and ‘social’ will suffice. But exact study requires us to use words carefully. There is, of course, no such object as ‘society’ with an existence completely removed from individual human beings and certainly not one that could be seen or touched. There is only a set of forces ‘exerted by people over one another and over themselves’ (Elias 1970, p. 17) and it is with this fact and how it arises that sociology is concerned.

In place of everyday notions like ‘society’ and ‘social pressure’, therefore, the discipline has tried to put a more accurate and inevitably more complicated understanding of the experiences and happenings conveyed by such words. We shall be expanding upon the outcome of this attempt, and the questions which flow from it, in the course of the following chapters. We shall consider, for example, the fact that social relationships tend to possess a degree of consistency or stability over periods of time. Sociologists have tried to capture this fact through various metaphors; by talking of social ‘structure’, ‘form’, ‘system’, ‘pattern’ or ‘configuration’. Yet the ‘pattern’, we know, is quite capable of changing with varying degrees ofsuddenness; or even of breaking down altogether. What conditions make for cohesion and stability in social relationships and what, on the other hand, bring about disintegration? Then again, it is a familiar experience that at any given moment people vary in their willingness to accept the restraints which the established pattern imposes. Sociologists use the term deviance to denote ways of acting which are disapproved of by society at large. What produces deviance and its equally puzzling opposite, conformity? One consideration that clearly might be relevant arises out of the observation that in virtually every society individuals and groups come to differ markedly in their access to privilege, opportunity and authority over others. How do we account for this social differentiation as it is called? Is a degree of inequality a necessary and inevitable ingredient of ‘the life of people together’?

As soon as one does, in fact, examine the immense variety of human ways, customs and social conditions one cannot help but be struck by the fact that people are very dependent on group life, on their relationship with others. This dependence extends well beyond the level of material needs. In fact, organized economic activity presupposes, like other aspects of social life, a more profound dependence, namely, that our relations with others shape that sense of personal uniqueness which we call the individual ‘self’. In order to know very basic things about ‘ourselves’ we are dependent from childhood upon information supplied by other people. It is from others that we learn what sex we are, what words to use, what work to do, which gods to serve, who to love, who to hate— and so on. Sociologists have, therefore, repeatedly rejected the possibility of the totally isolated, non-social individual. If we wish to improve our understanding of human beings, they argue, we will not get very far by confining our attention to the properties of the individual mind as such. We must relate behaviour to its social setting.

Now, we had better make one thing clear. Sociologists recognize that there are some features of people’s behaviour that are largely dependent on the working of that mysterious entity ‘the individual mind’. Processes such as memory, thinking, emotion and so on are capacities of a biological organ, the brain. It is the job of another discipline, psychology, the ‘science of the mind’, to investigate them. Nothing written in this book should be construed as an attempt to encroach upon its territory. Even so, boundaries between academic disciplines are never rigid and there is undoubtedly a ‘grey area’ between psychology and sociology. Sooner or later in all investigations of human behaviour we come back to the fact that there is a whole class of effects produced by the interactions occurring between minds. Moreover, the interaction takes place not just between those alive now. The minds of the past, great and humble, leave their own legacy of ideas, techniques, customs and obligations. One way of giving the concept of ‘society’ a more exact shape, in fact, is to see it as the sum total of these interactions and of their consequence for personal life.

Sociology and the scientific ideal

There is, however, another way to talk of the ‘problem of sociology’. Like Bertolt Brecht, in the poem quoted in the epigraph, the sociologist who is faithful to the discipline is someone who ‘needs the truth’. But this demand for ‘the truth’ is both dangerous and difficult. We are setting out to study something— society— which itself contains and generates its own ‘truths’ about the world. So sociologists typically find themselves in the position of having to confront, examine and comment upon these generally held ‘truths’.

Socially generated ideas can, for now, be put into two rough-and-ready groups. First, there is what we might call ‘common sense’, which means everyday lore and homespun wisdom about the purpose, nature and vexations of the prevailing way of life. Second, there are more coherent ‘ideologies’, that is, systems of belief and philosophy which are recurrently introduced to justify some aspect of social life or action.

The trouble is that sociologists themselves are members of society. Sometimes, therefore, their questions and probings threaten powerful interests, disturb the elaborate balance of the status quo or simply upset lay people. Even worse, their own work can become contaminated. Either it suffers an overdose of taken-for-granted ‘common sense’, or it becomes permeated with the ideologies and assumptions of the apologists of the ‘system’—to say nothing of the possibilities of being swayed by those of its enemies. Clearly, we ought to have a clear and accurate set of criteria for distinguishing between rival claims to be telling the ‘truth’ about social life.

Alas, this is easier to ask for than to provide. The precise basis upon which one might distinguish between ‘true’ knowledge and false, even in the study of the natural world, has been the subject of controversy among philosophers for centuries. We do not intend to become involved in these unresolved debates here and the reader who is interested in the philosophical problems surrounding the social sciences should consult one of the many introductions available (for example, Ryan 1970; 1973; Lessnoff 1974; Keat and Urry 1975; Benton 1977). We prefer instead to proceed in a more ‘down-to-earth’ fashion by comparing the way in which we come to hold beliefs simply by participating in social life, with a style of thought that can be described as disciplined—and so might serve as a model for our efforts to study society.

As we see it, both ‘common sense’ and ideological beliefs suffer from certain limitations just because they originate simply from ordinary social activity. First, they tend to be self-centred. Their main purpose is to bolster the doings of particular individuals or groups as they endeavour to ‘get along’ in society (cf. Murphy 1972, p. 6). Second, therefore, the knowledge they offer tends to be incomplete. Frequently, it does not even provide a guide to the whole of the individual’s society but only that part of it which is of most immediate concern. As for other societies we remain for much of the time with only the most hazy and general notions. Moreover, though social life has always been full of change and novelty, our lay knowledge of society does not cope very well with the unfamiliar. Either our favourite beliefs degenerate into a puzzled but dogged resignation or, and here we come to a third limitation, they tend to promote various forms of intolerance. Ideas which have been used to justify costly commitments are abandoned only reluctantly. Ideologies themselves foster a dogmatic style of thought that insists on being right regardless. Even when they have ceased to be serviceable we tend to cling to them for such support as they can still offer.

We are not going to be so foolish as to claim that sociology can completely overcome these limitations. But can one do better with its help than without it? And if so, how? One answer would be to claim, as some indeed have, that sociology is a science: the ‘science of society’. The notion that there is, in fact, a unity of methods linking recognized natural sciences, like physics and chemistry, to social science is called ‘positivism’ and we shall be returning to it repeatedly in the following chapters. Nevertheless, we shall do well to consider now some of the reasons why we ourselves prefer to give positivism a miss.

The word ‘science’ covers a number of different possibilities. It usually conjures up what is best regarded as a particular technique of investigation, that is, experimental science. Even on practical grounds, it is very doubtful whether sociology could ever aim to be ‘scientific’ in this sense because it is both physically difficult and, of course, often morally wrong to carry out experiments on groups, particularly large groups, of people. Experiments are not wholly unknown in sociology and up to a point we can and do use variations found within or between actual societies as an approximation to the controlled conditions of an experiment. Let us merely say that formidable practical and logical objections remain.

But not even all of the natural sciences derive their findings from strict and literal adherence to experimental procedure. We may of course talk about ‘science’ in a wider sense: as the attempt to provide explanations based upon a rational appeal to impartial evidence. This option is more attractive. Most sociologists would accept that they are in the ‘explanation business’ in some way. Certainly there is no lack of theories from which such explanations might be culled, nor any lack of research studies which seem to be trying to verify one or more of these theories. But a word or two of caution is necessary before we rush to commend sociological analysis to the reader in these terms.

First as to the theories and ‘explanations’. In natural sciences these are usually thought of as being based upon the accumulation of bodies of laws linking given causes to given effects. The laws express general regularities in the natural world. In turn knowledge of them enables the investigator to make predictions about particular instances. Applied to the social context, however, the notion of general causal laws becomes very troublesome. Many of the instances which sociology studies are either unique or at least insufficiently numerous to justify assertions of law-like regularity. Furthermore, in studying physical forces and substances one does not have to worry about the awkward states which in humans we call ‘consciousness’ and ‘experience’. Chemicals in a test-tube are not capable of thought or feeling as far as we know and chemistry has been able to build up the laws of chemical combination without assuming that they are. From time to time it has been suggested that society and human behaviour are, in fact, governed in a similar way, by blind causal forces and deterministic laws. By and large, however, social ‘scientists’ have ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Figures
• Tables
• Preface
• Part One: The Problem of Sociology
• Part Two: Industrial Society As Regress—Tönnies and ‘Community’
• Part Three: Industrial Society As Progress—Evolutionary Accounts of Society
• Part Four: Industrial Society As Capitalist Society—Marx and Marxism
• Part Five: Industrial Society As Disenchantment—Weber and Rationalization
• Part Six: Industrial Society As Organic Solidarity—Durkheim, the Division of Labour and Moral Science
• Part Seven: Industrial Society As Structural Differentiation— Functionalism and Its Discontents
• Part Eight: Industrial Order and the Fragmentation of Self
• Bibliography