Stinchcombe, Arthur - The Origins of Sociology as a Discipline

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The Origins of Sociology as a DisciplineAuthor(s): Arthur L. StinchcombeSource: Acta Sociologica, Vol. 27, No. 1 (1984), pp. 51-61Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.

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Acta Sociologica 1984 (27), 1:51-61

Commentary

The Origins of Sociology as a

Discipline*

Arthur L. Stinchcombe

Northwestern University, Illinois

Sociological prestige and the distance between natural humans

and humans as sociological objects

My general argument in this presentation will be that the origin of sociology as a

discipline was a bad thing, in that it led us systematically away from the study of

humans acting in society. Obviously this means that I think the subject matter of

sociology is important and interesting. I will argue that the internal prestige systemof sociology as a discipline, however, diverts us from studying the people involved

in a social system, and leads us to study instead abstractions of people, people who

are culturally shaped by our sociological mental operation into the sorts of thingsthat fit better with our prestige system.

So the basic argument is that the higher prestige of a piece of sociological work,the less people in it are sweaty, laughing, ugly or pretty, dull at parties, or have

warts on their noses. Field work is the lowest status in methodology, because

surprising humans keep popping out and bewildering us by doing things we do not

understand; much better to have people answering closed ended questions so that

they fall neatly into cross classifications to be analyzed by loglinear methods.

Similarly, the highest prestige theory for many years, that of Talcott Parsons,started off with its people and their actions reduced to a cross-classification of five

pattern variables (or perhaps different numbers at different times). No room for

laughter or embarassing burps in the middle of a lecture here.If we range theories from the prolix fashion of Herbert Blumer - who knows

how people will define the situation and consequently what they will do - to the

lean and spare rational actors models that allow us to use maximization mathematical

methods to specify at least one feature of the behavior exactly (e.g. what the net

*Prepared for the 'Polish American Conference on Qualitative and Quantitative

Approaches to Social Theory', planned for November 9-12, 1983, at the UniversityofChicago.At the presenttimeit appears hatPolishparticipationn the conferencehas beencancelled.

51







profit will be), it is the theories that are most divorced from blood, sweat, and

tears that have highest prestige. And if we admit that there are three elements tosociology as a discipline - method, theory, and substance - we find also that the

highest prestige books on substance are those that treat other books. The most

learned person in a Department of Sociology, the Reinhard Bendix or Hans Gerth

or Ed Shils, will be found, in general, to be the one who gets his or her facts from

the books rather than from the people.

The dynamics of disciplines

As a social structure, I take a discipline to be a social system with the followingfeatures:

1. It distributes prestige to cultural objects, such as scientific papers, by a set of

standards which are maintained by debate and consensus rather than by an authori-

tative administrative or legal order.

2. It penetrates the administrative systems in which scholars or other producersof culture work, especially universities, and shapes them so that money and powerare made dependent on the prestige derived from cultural production. That is, the

prestige of the objects produced is applied to the work and the worker which

produce them, and determines reward.

3. It lays claim to a jurisdiction of cultural production within which its standards,

formed in this consensual-debateway,

will be taken as authoritative.

My argument is that the dilemma any such social structure creates is that it has

to render the process of cultural production regular and limited, to oversimplifythe analysis of cultural objects, in order to be able to form the consensus on which

the operation of a discipline works. This means that in order for a discipline to

exist, the objects subject to the discipline, in our case the sociological papers, have

to be sharply limited in their cultural characteristics in order to be judged consen-

sually by the system. Cultural messiness would be illustrated by a loglinear analysisof a cross tabulation, with a list of nineteen answers at the bottom which didn't fit

the classification criteria. Such messiness undermines the refereeing system.We always have to forget, in our devotion to the best maximum likelihood

estimates of loglinear parameters, that the people who did not answer or who gaveunclassifiable answers are equal in the sight of God to those that got into our tables,that they are out there in nature in spite of our best efforts to construct analysesthat exclude them. At bitter points in methodological debates I have sometimes

defined sociology as a science consisting of generalizations about the 75 percentof the people who will answer a survey questionnaire. When cleaned up of the 25

percent who did not answer or the 5 percent whose occupations could not be

classified and given a prestige score, a fact is then in a position to be integrated

into, and evaluated for prestige in, our scientific status system.

Similarly, an action that might appear in full feather in a novel, such as Alyosha's

dismay at the fact that the saintly Father Zossima's body stunk after he died in

Dostoyevski's The Brothers Karamazou, has to be reduced to expressive ratherthan instrumental, particularistic rather than universalistic, and so on before we

know what to do with it in our structure of sociological theorizing (Parsons

52







1951:58-67), and before we know whether it is great social theory or merely great

description.A similar observation to my characterization of sociology as a discipline was

made about law as a profession in Andrew Abbott's paper in American Journal

of Sociology (Abbott 1981) a couple of years ago, that the high prestige lawyersare those that deal with objects such as corporations that are created by the law

itself, abstracted by the law from all the messy human interaction that actually getsthe things done that a corporation does, so that every aspect of the corporationas object is relevant to the cultural system of the law. In contrast, divorce is much

too close to messy human beings, who keep spilling out of legal categories into

rage, tears, passion, or love for the children, so the lawyers who deal with it have

low prestige within the legal profession (a more general theory with the same

implication is Ortner 1974, much of which is based on de Beauvoir 1953:24-27,

58-60, 239). I am arguing that we should expect the same dynamics in sociologyas in the law, because they are both 'disciplines' in the sense I have defined above:

they both give prestige to work and to workers by evaluating cultural productions

and, at least partially, control other rewards of the cultural workers on the basis

of that disciplinary prestige.Now it sounds as if I am objecting to the abstraction as a scientific procedure.

I do not intend to do that. Nor do I think that the fact that divorce is a matter of

rage, tears, passion, and love for children should keep us from abstracting certain

parts of it out, to deal with in the courts. What I am instead arguing is that the

socialprocess

in thediscipline

ofsociology

tends toprevent

us fromdevelopinga proper empirical groundwork for judging our abstractions. A successful abstrac-

tion is a great achievement. But if you abstract from the other 25 percent of the

population just because they do not answer survey questions, rather than because

it is scientifically justifiable to treat politics as consisting of the other 75 percent- if you quit thinking about the other 25 percent just because it makes you feel

uncomfortable and makes you realize that our cultural achievement rests in the

shifting sands - then this distorts the scientific value of the achievement. If 'expres-sive and particularistic' does not seem to you to catch the essence of Alyosha's

dismay at Father Zossima's body stinking, it demands a new achievement in

scientific abstraction - but if you exclude Alyosha's experience from sociology

because it is a description rather than theory, you miss the main test of whetheryour conceptual scheme is any good.

What we want, for example, is not a maximum likelihood estimate of the

relationship between alienation from politics and political behavior for the popu-lation who answer survey questions, but any old non-optimal kind of estimate that

takes into account that the people who refuse to answer survey questions are quitea lot more alienated than those who agree to answer (for example, see Stinchcombe,Jones & Sheatsley 1981:374-375). What we need in a conceptual system is not to

pare human action down to five pattern variables, but to pare it down to enoughso we can capture the social essence of Alyosha's dismay, and no farther.

The damage caused by disciplinary structures

Now let me specify some more specific features of the development of our under-

53







standing of society that seem to me to be undermined by these features of the

prestige system of the discipline of sociology. The first, and I believe the mostserious, is the underevaluation of learning in sociology, in particular, learning about

societies and social action. The two subdisciplines of sociology which would be

predicted to have the highest prestige according to the above analysis are meth-

odology, in the sense of the study of statistics and of abstractions such as a mobility

table, and theory, in either the sense of mathematical treatments of oversimplified

people or the sense of analyses of historically important books in the developmentof the discipline. The subdisciplines that we would expect to be lowest in prestigeare those in which people come to us in raw form, without having been culturally

processed, such as the substantive study of the family, or of criminals and crime,

or whatnot. But, after all, the purpose of the methodology and of the theory is to

understand social behavior like that of families of criminals. It seems to me thatthe result of making methods and theory into high prestige subdisciplines is that

they tend to close themselves off from sources of information that would tell them

that they are wrong.To take a very simple, but it seems to me telling, indicator of this, I believe that

one could not find the percentage of nonresponse in the original survey from which

the social mobility table came in any of Leo Goodman's articles analyzing such

tables - it seems to be quite possible to me that disciplined lower class Danes do

answer survey questions while English lower classes are more resistant and rebellious

to survey interviews, so that the whole set of ingeniously estimated differences

between the Danish and English mobility table are fictional (for example, Goodman

1969:34-37). The hint that this is a possibility does not appear in Goodman's

analysis of the table.

Similarly, descriptions of a bunch of real doctors being universalistic, achievement

oriented, collectively oriented, and the like, might have shown Talcott Parsons

that there was something more involved - taking the baby out by Cesarian section

so the obstetrician can get home for dinner, for example (in fact, if a woman's

labor starts during the day, she is more likely to be delivered by Cesarian section

than if it starts during the night, presumably because there are influences on doctors'

and hospitals' decision processes during the day that are more nearly absent duringthe night - one of these influences might be the obstetrician's hope to have an

evening free for non-collectivity orientedactivities - see Entwisle &

Doering(1981:86) for data on the determinants of Cesarian sections). Is the obstetrician

getting home in time for dinner universalistic achievement oriented?

The substantive field that seems to have the highest prestige, historical sociology,

seems to me to support the analysis of the source of our difficulties. Historical

sociology is defined mainly by its method, that it gets its facts from books. But at

least that way there is some method for errant facts to get into the discipline,without being too much culturally shaped before a sociologist gets to look at them.

I think my criticism of sociology as a discipline is supported by the fact - I believe

it to be a fact - that the most fundamental empirical criticisms of our main theories

have developed out of historical sociology. To a considerable extent, we find out

that our conceptual schemes are unsatisfactory when various facts about the Frenchand Russian revolutions do not fit in very well.

I believe that the reason facts get into sociology, in a sufficiently unrefined form

54







to modify theories, from history rather than quantitativeresearch is that the

historicalsociologistneed not actuallydeal with all the messy humansthat makeup his or her empiricalmaterial the tool of research or the historical ociologistis, in general, a secondarysource, a book aboutthe history n which the facts are

embedded.Thus, it is somewhatpre-shapedby the predelictionsof thatdisciplinewhichactuallydealswith the documents history but at least it is not pre-shapedby the predelictionsof sociologicaltheory.By beinga book reader,depending, n

turn,on bookswhichuse as their rawmaterial omewhatprocessedculturalobjects- the originaldocuments- the historical ociologistcan be a high prestigepersonin the discipline,withoutherebyhavinghis factstoo muchshapedbythe theoreticaland methodological purismsthat keep the rest of us from looking at unformed

unprocessed acts.

Why are generalizations forgotten?

Let me also mention a sub-varietyof the distortion-by-prestige rocessthat I havebeenanalyzingabove, the disappearance f previously stablishedknowledgewhennew methodologiesor theories become fashionable.I will sound a good deal likeSorokin at his most madly iconoclasticmoments, and I would rathernot, but Ibelieve it is an importantpoint so I will take the risk.

It is in the nature of path analysisthat the biggestcorrelationcoefficients n a

bodyof

empiricalmaterialwill

ordinarilygiverise to the

biggest pathcoefficients,because when you control a big correlationby a smallone, you still get a largerpartialrelationship or the big one. The mainexceptionto this is thatoccasionallyyou can control for a lot of small influencesand.wipeout a big one. Similarly, nalmost all cases, the metriccoefficientsin a regressionequation will be biggestrelative to variations n causal forces when the pathcoefficient s largest.The main

exception is when the variance of the causal variables tself varies a lot betweendifferent situations. And then, in turn, the big relations in loglinearanalysisarealmostalwaysthe same ones that have big metricregressioncoefficients,because

throughoutmost of its rangethe logisticcurve is prettynearlylinear. The main

exceptions are for variables which are badly 'skewed' in the sense of havinga

proportionnear 0 or 1. Whatthis means is that almost all our causal knowledgefrom the time we were using correlationcoefficients(or even eyeballingcross-

tabulations) s still ourcausalknowledge hroughouthe transitionso pathanalysis,to structuralequations with metric coefficients, to loglinear analysis.We don't

actuallyhave to recreatethe substantiveknowledge.We may get more exact orrobustresultswith the newmethods,butthe resultswill look prettymuchthesame,in the sense that the big variablescausing somethingwill be the same ones withall the methods.

Now whathappens n fact is thatthe loglinear iteraturehardlyever citesmetric

regressionor structuralequationliterature,and certainlydoes not convertcoef-ficients to be comparable; he metricregressionor structural quationliterature

does not cite the path analysis iterature,nor provideevidenceabout whetherthevariances of the variablesvarybetween the situationsthey analyzein such a wayas to undermine the old results. And, finally, the path analysisliterature must

55







rediscover anew what coefficients are big because they do not know anything less

pure methodologically than their own level.The consequence of methodological advance, then, is a prestige grading of facts

which does not have anything much to do with whether the facts are true or not.

The same social causes show up over an over again in our various methods, and

so the old facts were usually just as true as the new ones. But since one's professional

reputation depends on the prestige of the facts one uses, we have to reinvent

substantive sociology approximately every ten years, to keep up with most modern

methods, without actually discovering anything except that our old knowledge was

more robust than we might have feared.

Something like the same thing goes on with theories, as well. This was Sorokin's

forte, so I will just give one example. Clark Kerr many years ago wrote a fine

paper entitled 'The Balkanization of Labor Markets' (1954) in which he anticipated

approximately the level of complexity of the present Marxist literature on internal

labor markets, union-controlled craft markets, and the like. Kerr's own theory of

all this was rather empiricist and ad hoc, and certainly did not have the more or

less theological connection that has recently been built to a nineteenth century

German radical. Consequently, the Marxist literature on segmentation of labor

markets had to struggle through a stage of core-periphery dichotomy, first by

specifying internal labor markets within some kinds of firms, and then in a more

qualitative branch noticing professional societies' conspiracies to get a monopolycontrol over certain parts of the market for services, and so on. The facts had to

bepainfully redeveloped,

so as never toappear

in the moder literature unclothed

with nineteenth century radical legitimacy. The simple method of developing a

Marxist theory of labor markets by reading Kerr was impossible.A rather similar activity is going on now in economics, as they reinvent the

complexity of structural-functionalism by going around trying to find, for everyobserved institution, something that people might be optimizing to create that

institution. Because one has to have equations with differentials (usually of empiri-

cally undefined variables) that people are maximizing in order to be reputable in

the modern version of structural-functionalism in economics, one cannot as a

reputable economist merely read Merton and Parsons and Kingsley Davis - the

sociologists do not have any differentials and never mention Cobb-Douglas pro-

duction functions, so their ideas are not of nearly as high prestige. Gary Becker(1981), for example, could have the complexity of his mind increased greatlywithout violating any of his assumptions by reading an elementary treatment by

Kingsley Davis on the family (such as his treatment of jealousy in 1949:175-194).

This process of destroying our factual knowledge in order to use the most

prestigious facts possible may be analogous to Schumpeter's account of how econ-

omic development takes place under capitalism: what he called 'creative destruc-

tion'. In our case, however, I believe that it is not usually driven by the actual

competitive advantage of the new methods and new theories in establishing and

analyzing facts, but very often by the prestige dynamic due to the fact that sociologyis now a discipline.

56







How do facts get into sociology in spite of the discipline?

If the basic dynamicof the disciplineas a structure s to lead us away from thehumanreality n the directionof talmudicelaborationof theoryandmethod,whatare the compensating orces?While no one today wouldpublisha book as chockfull of humanbeings and human action as, say, Thomas and Znaniecki's PolishPeasant(1918), clearlythere is a lot of empiricalcommitment n sociology. If itdoesn'tcome fromsociology'sstructureas a discipline,wheredoes it come from?

I wouldarguethatthe sources of empiricalcommitmentare various.People getcommitted to empiricalrealities througha number of 'non-disciplinary'ources.Let me mentionbrieflyandelaborateon a few of these:(1) applied nterests,eitherof a 'practical' r of an 'ideological'sort, (2) general ntellectualism, 3) reflections

on one's own life, (4) sectariancommitments n sociology,and(5) teaching.WhatI will argue is that each of these is likely to producean impulse in individual

sociologistsor groupsof sociologistswhich makethempsychologically ommittedto explaining,reporting,or otherwisedealingwith rawfactsthat are not pre-shapedto ourdisciplinaryaste.These are the sortsof thingswhichserve for us the functionthat the flow of couples wantingdivorces, enough to pay a lawyerto get them,servesfor the legalprofession,to lead the profession o deal with the humanrealityratherthanonly its cleanedup version in corporate aw.

(1) 'Applied'interests:One can have eithernarrowlypracticalor broadly deo-

logical purposeswhichcommitone to understanding given empiricalreality.For

example, governmentswantto know(or havereason forpretending hattheywant

to know) what effect ethnic segregationhas on educationalattainment,and whateffects of variouspublic policies with respectto ethnic segregationwould be onthat attainment.They maywantthese facts in order to decide court casesbroughtbyethnicminorities, orexample.A sociologisthired o findout about suchmatters,or a sociologist with a consulting practice providingexpert testimony on such

questionsfor plaintiffsor defendants n suchcases, hasgood reason to understandthe humancomplexityof the scientificarea.Thathumancomplexity s likelyto getinto the courtroom,and not knowingabout it or not beingable to deal with it willcause the sociologist o lose esteem in the situation,thoughsuch trained ncapacitymaylead him to gainmethodologicalprestige n the discipline.Havingto deal withthe whole reality,ratherthan a cleaned up version of it, in an appliedsituation,

can lead to empirical ommitment.Similarly f one has an ideologicalconviction hat some affirmativepublic policy

would be necessary(e.g. that one must interfere with the boundaries betweenschool districts n order to effect adequate desegregation),one mightbe writingessays for The New YorkReview or some other more or less ideological journalabout how desegregationby court does not touch the essenceof the matter.

Either kind of interest can lead one to develop an empiricalcommitment.For

example, at MichiganState, social scientists learned a lot more about policeadministrativeproblems in Vietnam than they would otherwise have becomecommitted o in the 60's and 70's, andthe rest of us learneda lot more aboutwhatkind of governmentswere created in formerFrenchcolonies in Southeast Asia

than we wouldotherwise have had reason to know. Clearly,sociologists'commit-ment to explanationof revolutionaryactivitiesover the yearshave been sustained

57







by some combinationof CIA and Defense Departmentappliedinterests n con-

trollingrevolutions,and sociologists'own ideologicalcommitment o values thatare sometimesrepresentedmorebytherevolutionaryhanbythe conservative idein an internalwar.

The low prestigeof such activities s sufficientlycommunicatedby callingthem

'applied'or 'ideological'.(2) General intellectualism:A good manysociologistsarefolkswho like to read

books, whose eyes strayat the breakfast able to anything n sight thathas printon it. I supposethe reasonswhypeople interested n general ntellectualquestionsare quite often recruited nto sociology are fairlyobvious. But the generalintel-lectual culture, while faddish itself, is not committed to the same system for

determining he prestigeof facts or of theoriesas the sociologicalcommunity.The

generalintellectualcommunity implywillnot readTalcottParsonsor Leo Good-man. I supposethecentral ongrun determinant f what is of interest o thegeneralintellectualcommunity n the U.S. is whetherthe topic appears n TheNew York

Times,but I may be confusingan indicatorwith a cause. At any rate, one getsexposed to facts as reportedby novelistsbecause the novelistshave prestigeas

elegantwriters f one is in the generalintellectualcommunity.A sociologist ed toread novels in order to be an intellectual does eventuallyrealize that Alyosha's

dismayat the stink of FatherZossima'sbody is a social production,and that we

do not reallyunderstandt.

Similarly,all respectableU.S. intellectuals ecentlyhave hadto be interested nthe publicpolicy problemof how to make the Social Securityaccountsbalance,or what is really happening n El Salvador,or whether the black slaves in the

pre-CivilWar American South were really economicallybetter off than wagelaborers n the North at the same time, as alleged by some quantitative conomichistorians.The commitment o facts as reportedin books read by generalintel-

lectuals,then, is a sourcewhichpulls againstthe pull of sociologicalprestige.Of

course, a fact about the currentsituation in El Salvador s unlikelyto appear nAmericanJournal of Sociology until it is cleaned up and made into theory ormethod.But knowingaboutit does producea penumbraof a senseof socialrealityina largesegmentof thediscipline, hatkeepsthe disciplinary ynamic romhavingits full force.

The low prestigeof suchactivities s embeddedin callingthem 'journalism',r

callingthe person 'a Commentaryociologist'.(3) Manyof us, I suppose,came intosociologybecausewe had difficulties f one

sortor anothermanaging ocialrelations.I supposethat a lot of the troubleswereof the generalform that one's prestigeranking n the intellectual tatussystemof

secondaryschool was muchhigherthan one's rankin the social-classdominatedinformalsocial life of the school: this partlyexplainswhy we cannot get reallyinterested n anysocialprocess hatdoesn'thave to do withstratification.Our ownhiddeninjuriesof classsustainour interest n the realityof stratification. omeofthe most interestingrecentwork in organization heoryhas been aboutuniversity

organization especiallythat by Cohen, March,and Olsen (1972) on the garbage

canmodelof decision-making),which is surelypartof most of ourdailylives. Thedriftof manyof our bestminds nto the sociologyof sciencesuggests he samesort

of fascinationwith what shapes our own experiences. And one does not know

58







whether the high divorce rates alleged for family specialists in sociology is cause

or effect of the specialization, but it at least suggests that one's personal experiencesmight lead one to commitment to understanding an empirical area, even if that

area is of low prestige in the discipline.There does not seem to be a general pejorative for such activities, though I have

heard 'narcissistic' and 'self indulgent'.

(4) 'Sectarian' commitments: By sectarian commitments, I mean loyalty to such

social movements in sociology as symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology,

psychiatry, or occasionally historical sociology. The mechanism of commitment in

such sociological sects to empirical materials regardless of their degree of prepro-

cessing is somewhat obscure to me, but it seems to have to do with a passionateconcern with a sufficiently high level and prestigious methodological principle,

which contains in itself implications about the conduct of research that entail

incorporating undisciplined social facts. Although George Herbert Mead did no

field work, as far as I know, and Herbert Blumer published very little of his, their

abstract methodological arguments implied that one could not get at the essence

of social life without observing interactions, especially interactions in which the

people themselves define the purposes and meaning of the attached to the actions.

The average dissertation in the symbolic interactionism style takes longer to do

than average in other styles of sociology, because it has to be turned into a culturally

acceptable (theoretical or methodological) argument, without losing the flavor of

being about people interacting in natural settings. If the average survey research

dissertation goes through two revisions before it gets a degree, and two more

before it gets published, the published symbolic interactionist dissertation goes

through an extra two or three. This shows the author's difficulties in starting with

undisciplined facts and having to turn them in to disciplinary product, but it also

shows the power of the commitment. The marginal value of the commitment is

that people are willing to pay two revisions for it. There is no way to do a 'routine

science' dissertation in the symbolic interactionist tradition.

Similarly, there is not much way that one can have a commitment to the ordinary

psychiatric interview as a basic source of data without getting all sorts of messyfacts about sex and misery and delusion, facts that fit uneasily into received social

theory (what pattern variables describe sex? what kinds of sex do the non-respon-dents

have?).Erik Erikson can

perhapsturnsuch materials into readable theoretical

arguments, but even then there is a general tone of sloppiness and disciplinary

inappropriateness. We are likely to remember too much that Erikson says about

Martin Luther, or George Bernard Shaw, too little about the abstract names of the

seven or eight stages of personality development.The low prestige of such activities is sufficiently communicated by my own

pejorative, 'sectarian'.

(5) Teaching: Teaching undergraduates or Masters of Business Adminstration

students is a personal war over who gets to define what is interesting. Our MBA

students do not want a cleaned up social mobility table, but the inside dope on

how to get ahead. Insofar as they sometimes win this war, at least in the limited

environment of the classroom, they force the teacher to think about how peopleget ahead - thinking about how to get ahead undermines the commitment to

loglinear modeling of the table.

59







Similarly, our students are interested in marriage because they are going to make

one, or are going to decide against it. They rebel against classifications of varioustypes of extended kinship systems, and are inordinately interested in sex. An

occasional teacher will discover, in trying to turn topics of love and sex into a more

or less orderly lecture, that there is a lot of social interaction connected to sex that

we understand very little about. How do men (it is usually only men) deal with the

intimacy of masturbation when at sea on a submarine with very little privacy? How

do people cope when they find out they have married someone who wants a

different amount of sex than they do? Such topics confine you to the peripheral

journals of the discipline as a structure, but students can keep you worrying about

such subjects.The pejorative for the activity of talking about what students are intested in in

the classroom, and getting into the associated messy factual areas of ambition orsexual desire, is 'catering to the students', or occasionally, by an unpopular teacher

about a popular one, 'seductive'.

Conclusion

As a discipline, sociology as a social structure leads toward scholasticism. But

fortunately scholars are not allowed to construct monasteries, so there is a constant

stream of empirical pollutants that threaten the scholastic structure. The reason

we go to such effort and have some venom behind our pejoratives for those who

upset the cultural system of the discipline by letting in undisciplined facts is because

they are serious threats. There are enough general intellectuals, enough peoplewho deal with problems in their own lives through intellectualization, enough

people who take what they say about sex and ambition in the classroom seriouslyin their scholarly life, to supply the materials for a constant tension within the

sociological community. The thing that keeps our scholastic structure from being

perfect and eternal is that we keep having our attention called to social facts that

we cannot yet manage without it turning into 'high class journalism' or 'cateringto the students' interests'. This threatens discipline, yet it keeps it alive. The

disorganized flow of empirical social reality is the only thing that creates problemsdifficult enough to make it worthwhile to have a discipline trying to tame the flow

into theoreticallyand

methodologically unimpeachable sociology.

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