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Foundations of Modern Sociology Series
Alex Inkcles, Editor
Social Change, Wilbert E. Moore

The Sociology of Economic Life, Neil ]. Smelser
Modem Organizations, Amitai Etzioni
The Family, 'William J. Goode
What Is Sociology? An Introduction to the Discipline and Profession, Alex Inkeles
Social Stratification: The Forms and Functions of Inequality, Melvin M. Tumin
Community Social Structure, Peter H. Rossi
Theory and Method in the Social Sciences, Paul F. Lazarsfeld
The Sociology of Groups, Theodore M. Mills
Political Society, William Kornhauser
Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives, Talcott Parsons
Deviance and Control, Albert K. Cohen
Foundations of Modern Sociology Series
AN INTRODUCTION
TO THE DISCIPLINE AND PROFESSION
Alex Inkeles, Harvard University
Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey

Prentice-Hall Foundations of Modern Sociology Series
Alex Inkeles, Editor
© Copyright 1964 by PRENTICE-HALL, INC., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.

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Errata for What Is Sociology?
by Alex Inkeles
Page 7 Line 19: express should be expresses.

Line 42: Unity should be unit.
Page 10 Line 19: seperate should be separate.
Line 33: equal foot should be equal footing.
Page 11 Line 9: is should be are.
Page 21 Footnote #6: Voter's should be People's.
Page 36 Line 30: on should be or.
Page 37 Line 22: Important should read unimportant.
Page 40 Line 19: have should be has.
Page 41 Line 11: Other should be Further.
Page 42 Line 32: follow should be follows.
Footnote 31: "a" should be before science.
Page 51 Line 41: influentials should be opinion-leaders.
Page 52 Six lines from bottom, last two sentences should be changed
to read: They are the men with a gyroscope inside. By
contrast, the "other-directed are individuals for whom
their contemporaries are the source of direction. ^ They
follow the crowd.
Page 54 Line 29: was should be before made.
Page 56 Lines 24-25: should be ".. .by applying to the designs on
pottery a scoring system originally used with the 'doodles'
of living persons. Again. . . "
Page 58 Line 13: to should be before reply.
Page 59 Line 23: 3 should be 23.
Line 35: stereopohic. should be stereopathic.
Page 66 Line 34: between should be among.
Page 67 Line 43: varies should be vary.
Page 71 Line 31: illusive should be elusive.
Page 76 First footnote following asterisk, insert aiter 1958 should
read: Since some respondents insisted that two values were
equally important, the answers for several countries total
more than 100%.
Page 84 Line 35: were should be was.
Page 107 Footnote 1 should read: Elbridge Sibley, The Education
of Sociologists in the United States (New York, Russell
Sage Foundation, 1963).
Page 110 Line 44: are should be is.
Page 113 Footnote 30: Madalia should be Medalia.
Page 114 Line 4: delete of.
Page 119 Last column, six lines from bottom, Mason should be
Nahum.
20779
acknowledg in cuts
» I wish to thank Nancy Boyden and Sharlee Segal for

help in various forms, including typing, which facilitated my work on this
book; Patricia Pajonas for dedicated and effective research and editorial
assistance; Joseph Berliner, Daniel Levinson, Howard Schuman, and Edward
Tiryakian for their critical reading of various chapters; and Alfred Goodyear
and Wilbur Mangas of Prentice-Hall, who resisted every temptation to press
for the manuscript before we were satisfied that it met standards appropriate
to this series.
Alex Inkeles
20779
To Robert S. Lynd, research pioneer,
ardent teacher, searching critic

contents
the subject matter of sociology, 1

one
Three Paths to a Definition
What the Founding Fathers Said What Reason Suggests
What Sociologists Do
the sociological perspective, 18

two
Sociology arid Related Disciplines
Disciplines, Boundaries, and Issues Toward a Definition
of Sociology: Social Order, Disorder, and Change
models of society in sociological analysis, 28

three
The Evolutionary Model The Organismic Model:
Structural-Functionalism Equilibrium vs. Conflict Models
The Physical Science Model Statistical
and Mathematical Models Models, Propositions, and Truth
Vll
conceptions of man in sociological analysis, 47
four
On the Nature of Man Types of Men
in Sociology Personality in Social Roles Personality
and Politics Personality and Social Structure
basic elements of social life, 62

five
The Minimum Requirements of Human Social Life
The Units of Social Organization
The Nature of Social Relationships
fundamental social processes, 78

six
Conformity, Variation, and Deviance
Stratification and Mobility
Social Change
modes of inquiry in sociology, 92

seven
Is a Science of Society Possible?
The Conflict of Meaning and Measurement
Conflict of Theory-Building and Empiricism
Sociology, Values, and Politics
sociology as a profession, 106

eight
Sociology as a Teaching Profession
Sociology as a Research Enterprise
Sociology and Social Criticism
Sociology and the Free Society
selected references, 118
index, 119
the subject matter
of sociology
one
Any attempt to set limits to a field of intellectual
endeavor is inherently futile. Whatever boundaries we set will inevitably omit
men whose work should be included. Yet when we stretch the boundaries to
bring these men and these works within the field, we inevitably incorporate
some we otherwise would have excluded. And what seems to us today firmly
entrenched as part of our little community, may yesterday have been an alien
enclave and tomorrow may have set itself outside our walls as an independent
discipline trying to define its own boundaries.
Yet no student can rightfully be expected to enter on a field of study
which is totally undefined and unbounded. If he must be responsible for
everything, he will master nothing. Indeed he will flee in panic, and properly
so. To define the limits of a field of inquiry may prove, in the long run, to
have been only a gesture, but for a start some delimitation, however tentative,
is indispensable. The danger is reallv not too great if we keep in mind that
any boundaries we establish are an aid to understanding. They should serve
as a loose cloak to delimit form, and not as a rigid suit of armor which is
endlessly constraining no matter how useful for fighting off those from other
disciplines making claims to the same territory.
1
Three Paths to a Definition
Three main paths are available for delineating the
subject matter of sociology. . .
1. The historical, whereby we seek through study of the classic sociologi-
cal writing to find the central traditional concerns and interests of sociology
as an intellectual discipline. In brief, we ask: “What did the founding fathers
say?” . .
2. The empirical, whereby we study current sociological work to discover
those subjects to which the discipline gives most attention. In other words,
we ask: “What are contemporary sociologists doing?”
3. The analytical, whereby we arbitrarily divide and delimit some larger
subject matter and allocate it among different disciplines. We ask, in effect:
“What does reason suggest?”
The historical approach has piety to commend it. It offers us the op¬
portunity to benefit from the wisdom of the past. It enables us to understand
issues which can be grasped only if we comprehend their background. Of
course, people may read the same history quite differently. In addition, the
historical method runs the risk of making our thinking rigid, since tradition
may be poorly suited to deal with emerging problems of the present and the
future.
The empirical method is least ambiguous; it mainly requires some form
of counting. Of course, what contemporary sociologists emphasize in their
work may be simply a passing fancy, having little connection with the impor¬
tant work of the past or little promise for the future. In the opinion of Pro¬
fessor Pitirim Sorokin, current sociological preoccupations are nothing but
“fads or foibles,” 1 and, in the view of C. Wright Mills, they indicate a decline
of “the sociological imagination.” 2
The analytical approach is the least troublesome. A few lines of defini¬
tion, a few more paragraphs of explanation, and we have it. This is a time-
honored path followed continuously since it was first marked out by Auguste
Comte, the father of sociology. But decrees dividing the realms of human
learning have none of the force of law. Scholars and scientists go where their
interests lead them; they study what they like when they wish; they are
natural poachers with little regard for property rights and “no trespassing”
signs. The arbitrary definition of fields of study, while often aesthetically
satisfying, is, therefore, generally a poor guide to what is really happening.
It presents a neat master plan, but for lack of effective zoning laws the factual
structure of research often bears little resemblance to it.
There is no need for us to prejudge the issue. Each perspective may
offer us something of value in understanding sociology. I have avoided impos¬
ing a “pre-packaged” definition of its subject matter, choosing instead to allow
a conception to emerge from a diverse set of relevant materials. Since the
method is inductive, it requires a bit of patience. Answers will not always be
forthcoming straightway. Yet I trust that those which emerge more gradually
will also fade away less rapidly. By this method of presentation, furthermore,
I hope not only to delineate the subject matter of the field but, in the course
of doing so, to communicate something of sociology’s history and an impres¬
sion of contemporary issues. Both are themes to which we will often return.
1 Pitirim A. Sorokin, Fads and Foibles in Modern Sociology and Related Sciences
(Chicago: Regnery, 1956).
2 C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1959).
2
the subject matter of sociology
It would not be entirely honest to say: “I let the facts speak for them¬
selves. ’ Facts may speak for themselves, hut they cannot select themselves.
I have, however, tried conscientiously to select the facts without prejudice,
allowing a wide variety of points of view to be represented. Needless to say,
included prominently among these points of view is my own. My objective
is to develop a broad and inclusive conception of sociology. This requires
searching for unifying themes and common bases of agreement. But I have
made no effort to disguise the great diversity of opinion which exists, nor to
deny the frequently deep disagreement which often divides the sociological
community.
What the Founding Fathers Said

Professor Sorokin’s standard work on Contemporary
Sociological Theories3 cites well over 1,000 men whose work is important
enough to mention in a review of the development of modern sociology.
The standard “history and interpretation” of the evolution of Social Thought
from Lore to Science 4 by Howard Becker and Harrv Elmer Barnes fills two
volumes of 1,178 long pages, apart from notes and appendices. In the face
of this massive array, who is to say which men define the sociological tradi¬
tion?
There are four men, however, whom everyone in sociology, regardless
of his special emphasis, bias, or bent, will probably accept as the central
figures in the development of modern sociology. They are: Auguste Comte,
Herbert Spencer, £mile Durkheim, and Max Weber. Together, they span the
whole of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, during which modern
sociology was formed. They represent the main national centers—France,
England, and Germany—in which sociology first flourished and in which
the modern tradition began. Each exerted a profound personal influence on
the conception of sociology as an intellectual discipline. It seems particularly
relevant, therefore, to explore their opinions about the proper subject matter
of sociology.
Auguste Comte (1798-1857), who gave sociology its name, devoted
more energv to expressing hopes for and to staking out the claims of sociology
than to defining its subject matter. He felt that social science in his time
stood in the same relation to its future as once astrology stood in regard to
the science of astronomv and as alchemy stood in relation to chemistry.
Only in the distant future, he argued, would the sub-division of the field
become practicable and desirable, and for his time he felt it “impossible . . .
to anticipate what the principle of distribution may be.” 5 We cannot get
from him, therefore, any list of topics or sub-fields of sociological interest.
Although Comte was reluctant to specify in detail the sub-fields of
sociology, he did propose and consistently treat sociology as divided into two
main parts, the social statics and social dynamics. These two concepts repre¬
sent a basic division in the subject matter of sociology which in many dif¬
ferent forms and guises appears throughout the history of the field and
persists today. In the first case the major institutions or institutional com¬
plexes of society—such as economy, family, or polity—are taken to be the
major units for sociological analysis, and sociology is conceived of as the
3 Pitirim A. Sorokin, Contemporary Sociological Theories (New York: Harper, 1928).

4 Howard Becker and Harry E. Barnes, Social Thought from Lore to Science, 2nd
ed. (Washington, D.C.: Harren Press, 1952).
5 Auguste Comte (H. Martineau, trans.), The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte
(New York: Blanchard, 1855), p. 442.
3
study of interrelations between such institutions. In the words of Comte:
“The Statical study of sociology consists in the investigation ^ of the laws
of action and reaction of the different parts of the social system. 6 The parts
of a society, he argued, cannot be understood separately, as if they had an
independent existence.” Instead, they must be seen “as in mutual relation . . .
forming a whole which compels us to treat them in combination. 1 He re¬
ferred to this principle of “universal social interconnection as the master-
thought” of his whole approach.8
The second major division of sociology which Comte proposed he called
social dynamics. If statics was to be the study of how the parts of societies
interrelate, dynamics was to focus on whole societies as the unit of analysis
and to show how they developed and changed through time. “We must
remember,” he said, “that the laws of social dynamics are most recognisable
when they relate to the largest societies.” 9 Comte rather believed that he
already had the problem solved. He was convinced that all societies moved
through certain fixed stages of development, and that they progressed toward
ever increasing perfection.10 This view will find few supporters today. Fewer
still would acknowledge that the stages identified by Comte are those through
which all societies in fact have passed or will pass. What is important for us
to remember, however, is that Comte felt the comparative study of societies
as wholes was a major subject for sociological analysis.
Herbert Spencer’s (1820-1903) three-volume Principles of Sociology,
published in 1877, was the first full-scale systematic study explicitly devoted
to an exposition of sociological analysis. He was much more precise than
Comte in specifying the topics or special fields for which he felt sociology
must take responsibilitv. Thus, in the first volume of the Principles he urged
that:
The Science of Sociology has to give an account of [how] successive

generations of units are produced, reared and fitted for co-operation. The
development of the family thus stands first in order. . . . Sociology has
next to describe and explain the rise and development of that political
organization which in several ways regulates affairs—which combines the
actions of individuals . . . and which restrains them in certain of the deal¬
ings with one another. . . . There has to be similarly described the evolu¬
tion of ecclesiastical structures and functions. . . . The system of restraints
whereby the minor actions of citizens are regulated, has also to be dealt
with. . . . The stages through which the industrial part passes . . . have to
be studied ... [as well as] the growth of those regulative structures which
the industrial part develops within itself. . . ,n
The subject matter of sociology as Spencer defined it contains quite

familiar elements. Here and there we must translate a term. For example,
when he speaks of the “system of restraints” he is obviously referring to the
subject which in modern sociology is called “social control.” Otherwise we
have no difficulty in relating the subject matter of sociology delineated by
contemporary sociologists to the outline given by Spencer. In the order given
e Ibid., p. 457.
* Ibid., p. 458.
8 Ibid., p. 461.
9 Ibid., p. 466.
10 We return to a fuller discussion of these evolutionary theories of social develop¬
ment in Chap. 3.
11 Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Sociology, 3rd ed. Vol. I (New York: D.
Appleton and Company, 1910), pp. 437-440.
4
in the quotation, the fields of sociology according to Spencer are: the family,
politics, religion, social control, and industry or work. In addition, Spencer
explicitly mentioned the sociological study of associations, communities, the
division of labor, social differentiation or stratification, the sociology of knowl¬
edge and of science, and the study of art and aesthetics. An unbiased exam¬
ination of the table of contents of Spencer’s Principles in the light of con¬
temporary work described in our next section suggests that the range of
subjects with which sociology deals has been remarkably stable for a long
period of time.
Spencer would by no means have agreed, however, that sociology was
limited to a list of institutions like the family or to processes such as social
control. He also stressed the obligation of sociology to deal with the interre¬
lations between the different elements of society, to give an account of how
the parts influence the whole and are in turn reacted upon, and in the
process may transform or be transformed. As examples of such “reciprocal
influences” he called attention to the effects of sexual norms on family life,
and the relations between political institutions and other forms of regulating
behavior such as religion and ceremonial activity. He also advised parallel
study of the organization of the priesthood and other hierarchies to reveal
“how changes of structure in it are connected with changes of structure in
them.” 12
Spencer added yet another responsibility for sociology—namely, to ac¬
cept the whole society as its unit for analysis. He maintained that the parts
of society, although discrete units, were not arranged haphazardly. The parts
bore some “constant relation” and this fact made of society as such a mean¬
ingful “entity,” a fit subject for scientific inquiry. On these grounds he held
that sociology must compare “societies of different kinds and societies in
different stages.” 13 To grasp the principles of sociology, he maintained, “we
have to deal with facts of structure and function displayed by societies in
general, dissociated, so far as may be, from special facts due to special circum¬
stances.” 14 Thus, the main division of sociological emphasis suggested by
Comte is clearly evident in Spencer’s thinking as well.
fimile Durkheim (1858-1917) did not set forth his conception of the
proper subject matter of sociology in as full detail as did Spencer. We can,
however, easily reconstruct his position from remarks he made in his Rules
of Sociological Method and his various other writings.15
Durkheim frequently referred to what he called the “special fields” of
sociology, and he clearly favored their widespread development. Sociology
could not become science, he said, “until it renounced its initial and overall
claim upon the totality of social reality [and distinguished] ever more among
parts, elements, and different aspects which could serve as subject matters
for specific problems.” In reviewing his own work and that of his associates
in France, he affirmed their joint “ambition to initiate for sociology what
Comte called the era of specialization.” 10 Durkheim clearly approved the
idea that sociology should concern itself with a wide range of institutions
and social processes. He said for example: “There are, in reality, as many
12 ibid., p. 439.
13 Ibid., p. 442.
ii Ibid., p. 37.
is A number of these have been gathered in Kurt H. Wolff (ed.), Emile Durkheim,
1858-1917: A Collection of Essays, with Translations and a Bibliography (Columbus:
Ohio State University Press, 1960), 463 pp.
ii Durkheim, “Sociology,” in Wolff (ed.), Emile Durkheim, p. 380.
5
/ branches of sociology, as many particular social sciences, as there are varieties
of social facts.” 17
Durkheim made his position unmistakably clear in the outline he
established for the early volumes of the first sociological journal, L Annee
Sociologique. He divided the journal into seven sections, with numerous sub¬
sections under each major heading. In a typical issue the major sections were:
General Sociology—including a sub-section on personality in the individual
and the collectivity; Sociology of Religion; Sociology of Law and Morals,
including sub-sections on political organization, social organization, and
marriage and the family; the Sociology of Crime; Economic Sociology, in¬
cluding sub-sections on the measurement of value and on occupational groups;
Demography, including a sub-section on urban and rural communities; and
one on the Sociology of Aesthetics. This outline, dating from 1896, could
easily be used for a contemporary general review of sociology.
Although taking a broad view of the institutions and social processes
which sociologists might study, Durkheim, like Comte and Spencer, also
emphasized the importance of analyzing the relationships among institutions
and between them and their setting. “One of the main contributions of
sociology,” he asserted, lies “in the awareness that there is a close kinship
among all these highly diverse [social] facts which have up to now been
studied ... in complete mutual independence.” Each social fact, he felt,
must be related “to a particular social milieu, to a definite tvpe of society.” 18
To do otherwise, he said, is to leave social facts—the facts of religion, law,
moral ideas, and economics—“suspended in the void.” To understand them
is impossible, he held, “unless they are seen in their relations to each other
and the collective milieu in the midst of which they develop and whose
expression they are.” 19
Durkheim, no less than Spencer, considered societies as such to be
important units of sociological analysis. He spoke of sociology as “the science
of societies,” 20 and repeatedly emphasized the importance of studying dif¬
ferent types of society comparatively. Thus, he said: “One cannot explain
a social fact of any complexity except bv following its complete development
through all social species. Comparative sociology is not a particular branch
of sociology; it is sociology itself.” 21
Max Weber (1864-1920) devoted the greater part of his observations
on sociology as a discipline to expounding the special method he advocated,
called the method of understanding (verstehen)22 and to discussing the
vicissitudes of maintaining objectivity and neutrality of value judgments in
social science. He did, however, offer a general definition of sociology which,
incidentally, he referred to as “this highly ambiguous word.” Sociologv,
according to Weber, “is a science which attempts the interpretive under-
17 Emile Durkheim, De La Methode dans Les Sciences (Paris: Alcan, 1902), p. 272.
18 Durkheim, “Prefaces to L’Annee Sociologique,” in Wolff (ed.), Emile Durkheim.
19 Durkheim, “Sociology,” in Wolff (ed.), Emile Durkheim.
20 Durkheim, “The Dualism of Human Nature and Its Social Conditions,” in Wolff
(ed.), Emile Durkheim, p. 326.
21 Emile Durkheim (G. Catlin, ed.; S. Solovay and J. Mueller, trans.), The Rules
of Sociological Method, 8th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938), p. 139.
22 Weber meant that sociologists must study social action by interpreting the
motivational processes of the actors in their situational, historic, or symbolic contexts. It
means, essentially, putting onself, in imagination, in the place of the other and, through
intuition, coming to understand his action.
6
standing of social action in order thereby to arrive at a causal explanation of
its course and effects.” 23
From our point of view, the crucial words in this definition are “social
action.” To that term Weber assigned a very broad meaning indeed, includ¬
ing “all human behavior when and in so far as the acting individual attaches
a subjective meaning to it.” 24 This might suggest that Weber regarded the
“social act” or the “social relationship" as the particular subject matter of
sociology. Weber did in fact propose an elaborate system for classifying
social acts and social relationships, but he did not studv them as such. He did
not develop his sociology as a body of descriptive statements about such acts
or the patterns of their relationship, nor did he offer any detailed explanations
for such patterns. Instead, he addressed himself mainly to the analysis of con¬
crete institutions. The subjects on which he wrote extensively include: re¬
ligion; various aspects of economic life, including money and the division
of labor; political parties and other forms of political organization and
authority; bureaucracy and other varieties of large-scale organization; class
and caste; the citv; and music.
Neither the definition of sociology offered by Weber, nor the list of
subjects on which he wrote, adequately express^ome of the most salient
features of his work. His recent intellectual biographer, Professor Reinhard
Bendix, says of Weber’s justly famous studies of religion: “his three main
themes were to examine the effect of religious ideas on economic activities,
to analyze the relation between social stratification and religious ideas, and
to ascertain and explain the distinguishing characteristics of Western civili-\
zation.” 25 The first of these two themes we will immediately recognize as
another instance of the conception of sociology as a discipline uniquely
concerned with interrelations between the parts or elements of society. And
the third theme, on the distinguishing characteristics of Western civiliza¬
tion, we must acknowledge to be another reference to that comparative
sociology which treats societies as its unit of analysis and inquires into those
factors which account for the similarities and differences between them as
they exist in different places and times.
Although they by no means expressed themselves in precisely the same

terms, the four founding fathers we consulted seem in basic agreement., about
the proper subject matter of sociology. First, all would allow, and in some
cases would urge, sociologists to study a wide range of institutions, from
rtip_farm 1 y tn fhp state These are to be analyzed in their own right, from
the distinctive perspective of sociology, a perspective we have not yet fully
defined. .Second, those who define the classical tradition seem agreed that a
unique subject matter for sociology is found in the interrelations among
different institutions. Third, they concur in the opinion that society—as_a
whnTF7^rTbe~taken as a distinctive unity of sociological analysis, with soci¬
ology assigned the task of explaining wherein and why societies are alike
or different. Finally, we must note among the classical writers in the field
some sentiment in favor of focusing sociology on social acts or social
23 Max Weber (A. Henderson and T. Parsons, trans.), Theory of Social and Eco¬
nomic Organization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 88.
24 Loc. cit.
25 Reinhard Bendix, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (New York: Doubleday,
1960), p. 265 ff.
7
relationships—regardless of their institutional setting.26 This view was most
clearly expressed by Weber, but was voiced by other writers in the classical
tradition as well.
What Sociologists Do
If we take '‘what sociologists do’ as our guide to
what sociology is about, there are three main sources we should examine:
(1) the textbooks in which sociologists attempt to sum up their field, (2)
the affiliations they choose when asked to identify themselves with one or
another branch of sociology, and (3) the research they undertake and the
reports they present at sociological meetings or publish in books and in
their scholarly journals. All three approaches perhaps tend to reflect mainly
what “average” or “typical” sociologists do. There are those who would say
that whatever the average sociologist is doing, he ought to be doing some¬
thing quite different. But let us for the moment withhold evaluation, to
learn what the average sociologist, for good or ill, is actually doing.
Sociological Textbooks27
All but a small portion of the nation’s sociologists
teach, and the great majority teach from textbooks. These books present a
basic conception of the field, and their use presumably reflects their accept¬
ance bv the profession. Between 1952 and 1958, 24 introductory textbooks
on sociology were published in the United States. The single most popular
text apparently was used by only about 15 per cent of the students enrolled
in introductory sociology courses, and only two others captured as much as
10 per cent or more of the audience. Considering this wide diffusion, it
becomes especially important in understanding the character of the field
to know whether these texts reveal substantial agreement on the subject
matter of sociology, or whether the diversity of point of view was as great
as so large a number of texts might suggest.
Professor Hornell Hart, who analyzed the content of these textbooks,
identified 12 themes which were dealt with within at least 20—that is, in
almost 85 per cent of those he examined. The 12 leaders were: scientific
method in sociology; personality in society; culture; human groups; popula¬
tion; caste and class; race; social change; economic institutions; family;
education; and religion. Certain social processes did not make the top of the
list largely because of the scoring scheme used. For example, if urban and
rural life had not been treated separately, it is obvious that “community life”
would have been cited by at least 20 out of 24 texts. Much the same mar'
be said of the topic “social problems.” In addition, a few obvious institutions
came very close to making the top of the list, such as government and
polities.
There seems substantial agreement on the dozen or so subjects which
should be included in any introduction to sociology. Such agreement does
not necessarily extend to the relative importance of different themes. On
this issue the disagreement among sociologists probably far exceeds that
which would probably be found in any of the natural sciences. Some of the
texts differ in emphasis and from the average to such a degree that they give
20 Social acts and social relationships are defined and discussed in some detail in
Chap. 5.
27 The bulk of the factual material presented in this description of the textbooks is
drawn from an unpublished study by Professor Hornell Hart, Director of the Project for
Comparative Analysis of Recent Introductory Sociologies, Florida Southern College.
8
a markedly different impression of what sociology is about. Thus, Professor
Arnold Green’s text 28 fails entirely to mention the following terms in either
table of contents or index: attitudes, organizations, association, social con¬
trol, crowds, public opinion, and social planning. Professor George Lund-
berg 29 assigns three times the average space to the topic “scientific method¬
ology” and more or less ignores the subject of social control. Professor Ronald
Freedman and his associates at the University of Michigan 30 allot almost
three times as much space as does the average text to the topic of human
ecology and community life, but almost totally neglect the themes of social
interaction and communication.
Despite these important differences, the facts indicate that sociology
has more of a common core than many people—including many sociologists—
had believed to be the case. Weighing all his evidence. Professor ffart con¬
cluded: “There appears to be a solid and fairlv definable core of sociological
subject matter which is dealt with to a greater or lesser extent bv almost
all the text books.” 31
Sociologists
Define Their “Field of Competence”
Not everyone will be too impressed by the evidence
of basic agreement on subject matter in introductory sociology textbooks.
Some would argue that the texts may cover the same themes only because
experience has taught that these are the subjects which students most want
to hear about. That might be said of race relations, but it can hardly be
said of a topic such as scientific methodology, which is also a standard theme
in texts. In any event, some will feel that neither the audience of beginning
students nor the authors who write textbooks for them are the best authority
for deciding what a field is about. They want to know how the profession
as a whole defines its subject matter. Fortunately this is relatively easy to
ascertain on the basis of studies conducted by the American Sociological
Association.32
In 1950, and then again in 1959, each member of the Sociological As¬
sociation was asked to list three sociological fields in which he felt qualified
to teach or to do research. Each sociologist was free to describe his com¬
petence in his own terms, so that the categories which emerged were not
predetermined. The individual responses were then sorted and grouped in 33
sets which seemed effectively to encompass all the fields mentioned. To a
striking degree, the topics cited by the profession as a whole coincide with
the 54 themes mentioned by one third or more of sociology textbooks.
There are, nevertheless, a few instances in which the lists do not com¬
pletely coincide. Thus, the textbooks may have sections on government,
politics, international relations, and war, but as a rule they do not sys-
28 Arnold Green, Sociology—An Analysis of Life in Modern Society, 2nd ed. (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1956).
29 George A. Lundberg, Clarence C. Schrag, and Otto N. Larsen, Sociology, rev. ed.
(New York: Harper, 1958).
30 Ronald Freeman, et al., Principles of Sociology: A Text with Readings, rev. ed.
(New York: Holt, 1956).
31 Hornell Hart, “Comparative Coverage on Agreed on Sociological Topics,” Third
Report for the Project for Comparative Analysis of Introductory Sociology Textbooks, 1959,
p. 10.
32 Matilda White Riley, “Membership in the American Sociological Association,
1950-1959,” American Sociological Review (1960), XXV:914-926. The membership
of the Association is more fully described in Chap. 8.
9
tematically discuss the sociology of knowledge, of history, and of law, which
were cited as fields of competence in the poll of the sociologists. Since each
of these fields was chosen by only 1 or 2 per cent of the sociologists, it
might be argued that the matter is not serious. Many sociologists, however,
will note with regret that contemporary textbooks do not give more atten¬
tion to subjects which have figured so importantly in the history of sociological
thought and research. Nevertheless, we may conclude that the profession as
a whole identifies much the same range of topics as being of sociological
interest as do the writers of textbooks.
In addition, these two sources agree quite closely in the relative emphasis
they assign to the different sub-fields. This may be assessed by the propor¬
tion of all sociologists who select any particular topic as an area for specializa¬
tion. At the top of the list are those subjects with which we have already
become familiar: culture, psychological aspects of social life, marriage and
the family, methodology, race and ethnic relations, and communication
and opinion are among the fields in which the largest numbers of sociolo¬
gists claim competence. The outstanding case of discrepancy involves “soci¬
ological theory” and “general sociology,” which are among the fields most
important to the profession but are not often treated as a separate topic in
texts for beginners.
One can, of course, cite numerous reasons why we would be well-advised
not to accept this approach as providing a definitive answer to what soci¬
ology is about. What sociologists are doing today may not reflect the tradi¬
tional and continuing central concerns of sociology as a discipline. As an
example we may cite the startlingly rapid growth of interest in the sociology
of medicine. Before World War II there were not more than a dozen or
so Americans working in the sociology of medicine; by 1960 there were
several hundred so engaged. Between 1950 and 1959 medical sociology
experienced a greater proportionate increase in adherents than any other
sociological sub-field, the number claiming competence in it rising seven¬
fold in that period. Inevitably a special section devoted to this subject was
formed within the American Sociological Association, thus placing it on an
equal foofi’^th some of the oldest of the more traditional sub-fields.
The increase in research on health and hospitals may perhaps be ex¬
plained by the fact that the Congress of the United States created a new
National Institute of Health, which was given a generous budget for research.
The sociological study of illness and medicine became both more feasible
and more attractive.
Not all the changes in sociological interest can be explained so easily.
Second only to medical sociology in its rate of growth between 1950 and
1959 was the field of stratification, which also increased sevenfold. In this
case it can hardly be claimed that a great outpouring of foundation or gov¬
ernment research funds accounts for the greater interest in the study of
social classes and social mobility. On the contrary, the increased importance
of this topic must be recognized as a spontaneous growth of interest in a
fundamental aspect of all societies which in the recent past had been un¬
fortunately neglected. Guardians of the classical tradition in sociology may
also take encouragement from the fact that among the other fields which
gained adherents at a rate far above the average were: the sociology of law,
religion, art, organization, and work.
On the whole, however, the relative attractiveness of different fields as
subjects for specialization remained remarkably stable in the decade from
1950 to 1960. Of the 16 most popular fields in 1950, all but one (rural
10
sociology) were among the top 16 nine years later. There were, in addition,
very few dramatic changes in rank order, the most spectacular being the
rise of social organization (including the study of social structure, institu¬
tions, leadership, and comparative institutional structure) from 16th place
to 4th place. Among the top 16, the average change in rank order, however,
was less than 2 places.
The Test of Elite Preference

It might be objected that the preferences and abili¬
ties of the rank and file of sociologists iJTifteresting, but should not be as¬
signed too much importance. To understand the central concerns of a
discipline, one should look more to the leaders, the elite which sets the
tone and determines by its influence the shape and direction of work which
the rest follow.
Just who are the elite is not always easy to determine, and even when
they have been identified they do not always make their position fully explicit.
Perhaps we may agree that one group clearly belonging to the elite are
those who play the leading role in shaping the program of the annual soci¬
ological meetings, and those who publish the materials appearing in leading
sociological journals. In 1957 the sociological meetings were devoted to a
broad review of the “Problems and Prospects of Sociology.” The survey
was designed to deal with all “the major branches of sociology.” With the
guidance of a Special Program Committee 33 some 30 sociological specialties
were selected and studied, and the results later were assembled in a widely
used book called Sociology Today.34
The now familiar topics all appear again: sociological theory, method¬
ology, the individual in society, the family, the community, ethnic and
race relations, and so on. There are a few important omissions, such as
historical and military sociology—which the editors explicitly state were
omitted only for lack of space. There are some signs of the rise to prominence
of new fields—such as “the sociology of mental illness.” On the whole,
however, the choice of topics follows the pattern we have already discussed.
The fact that the 1957 meetings of the American Sociological Society
were not unrepresentative of the interests of the most active sociologists can
be verified by examining the distribution, by subject, of the articles they
wrote for leading sociological journals. Although there are differences in
emphasis according to the special interests of the various journals, in those
devoted to general sociology, the familiar themes predominate. In the Ameri¬
can Sociological Review in 1959, for example, the leading topics were social
control and deviance, differentiation and stratification, scientific methodology,
and so on down the list of themes we have already encountered.35
The Fields of Sociological Concern

Textbooks for introductory sociology courses, the
rank-and-file membership of the American Sociological Association, and the
leaders of the profession, all seem in basic agreement about the topics which
33 The committee was headed by Professor Robert K. Merton of Columbia Univer¬

sity, who was President of the Association for that year, and on whose initiative the theme
for the year was selected.
34 Robert K. Merton, Leonard Broom, and Leonard S. Cottrell, Jr. (eds.), Sociology
Today: Problems and Prospects (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1959), 599 pp.
35 The distribution of articles in the Review was made on the basis of the scheme
presented in Table 1.
11
constitute the subject matter of sociology. We can, therefore, construct a
general outline of the fields of sociology on which almost everyone would
agree.
Table 1
A General Outline
of the Subject Matter of Sociology *
I. Sociological Analysis
Human Culture and Society
Sociological Perspective
Scientific Method in Social Science
II. Primary Units of Social Life

Social Acts and Social Relationships
The Individual Personality
Groups (including Ethnic and Class)
Communities: Urban and Rural
Associations and Organizations
Populations
Society
III. Basic Social Institutions

The Family and Kinship
Economic
Political and Legal
Religious
Educational and Scientific
Recreational and Welfare
Aesthetic and Expressive
IV. Fundamental Social Processes

Differentiation and Stratification
Cooperation, Accommodation, Assimilation
Social Conflict (including Revolution and War)
Communication (including Opinion Formation, Expression, and Change)
Socialization and Indoctrination
Social Evaluation (the Study of Values)
Social Control
Social Deviance (Crime, Suicide, etc.)
Social Integration
Social Change
* Some of the terms used in this chart are not self-explanatory. They are defined
and discussed more fully at later points in this book, especially in Chaps. 5 and 6.
It is doubtful if very many sociologists would challenge any item on

the list as not deserving its position. There are possibly one or two subjects
which a substantial number of sociologists would regard as major omissions,
but in most cases it could be shown that they are included in some other
category. This is not to say that the list is exhaustive, far from it. Sociology
has a tendency to break down into a seemingly endless list of specialties. Not
only is there a sociology of small groups, but in some departments separate
courses are given on “the two-man group.” There is not only a general soci¬
ology of organization, there is also a special sociology of the hospital. There
is a special and well-developed sociology of the stranger, and sociologists
have even written on sociology of the bicycle. But these may all be seen as
special cases and refinements of more general categories of sociological con-
12
cern, about the inclusion of which there is general agreement. We must keep
in mind, however, that the general agreement about the appropriateness of
these topics as subjects of sociological interest would not necessarily extend
to an evaluation of their relative importance, nor to judgments about how to
study them.
What Reason Suggests

We might reasonably argue that neither what the
founding fathers proposed, nor what sociologists today do is most appropriate
for determining the proper subject matter of sociology. It should perhaps
be decided by a process of logical analysis. Yet, as we will soon discover,
just what is the most “logical” ground for allocating responsibility for the
study of human affairs is far from self-evident.
Each of the social and humanistic branches of learning seems to have
its distinctive subject matter. Political science, for example, deals with the
ways in which soeietv allocates the right to use legitimate power. It analyzes
ideas about government and authority, and describes the actual distribution
of public power and responsibility and the institutions through which it is
exercised. Following this lead, our task becomes the simple one of finding
for sociology some special or distinctive subject matter, preferably some¬
thing concrete, specific, and easily identified, which is not claimed as the
central object of study of some other established discipline.
The most cursory glance at the easily identified major institutions, social
products, and processes reveals that there are indeed such unassigned or
unclaimed subjects. Politics and economics are spoken for, and so in large
measure are literature, language, education, and business. But there remain
the family, crime, social classes, ethnic and racial groups, the urban and the
rural community. No one of these major components of society has become
the distinctive object of study for a specialized branch of learning having
the status of an independent discipline comparable to politics or economics.
Instead, each of these subjects has become a focus for research and theory¬
building within sociology. In this way sociology has, to a degree, become the
gre^residuak-cafegop^-of-lhe sociaNseienees It has not one subject, but
many. Indeed, some might argue, thaf m this sense sociology has no distinc- ^
tiyejsubject matter. It is merely a congeries of disciplines united mainly by*
the fact that they deal with institutions and social processes which have
historically faited^to become sufficiently specialized and important to win
independent standing as intellectual disciplines.
At any time, of course, any one of these sub-fields may yet be established
as a separate discipline, providing the basis for departments in universities
and becoming recognized as an independent field by learned academies,
foundations, and the scholarly community as a whole. To some extent this
has already happened to the study of population and demography, to crimi¬
nology and penology, to industrial sociology, and to the study of the family.
If the long continuing process of differentiation and specialization in
scholarship were to go so far that all the sub-fields of sociology came to be
established as separate disciplines, would sociology then cease to exist as a
disciplineTmaWown right? We can properly say “no” only if We can point
to a distinctive subject matter which would remain for sociology. Happily we
can. Indeed, aided by the analysis in the preceding sections of this chapter,
we may propose several distinctive subject matters to which sociology could
still lay claim. They are, in decreasing order of size and complexity: societies,
institutions, and social relationships.
lationships.
V
13
Sociology as the Study of Society
Sociology need not be the study of any one part,
it may be the study of the whole—that is, sociology may be a special discipline
which takes society as its unit of analysis. Its purpose then would be to dis¬
cover how the institutions which make up a society are related to one another
in different social systems. The specialist in government may study types of
government, asking how the legislative, judicial, and administrative functions
are allocated, how the units which perform these functions are related to
one another, what consequences follow from centralizing administration
while leaving the legislative power diffuse. Just so, there may be a branch of
learning which concentrates on society as the unit of analysis. Such a study
of society would have at least two main divisions, one more concerned with
the internal differentiation of particular societies, the other treating all
societies as a population having certain identifiable external characteristics.
In the latter case, sociology would ask questions of the following type: Is
there any evidence that particular tvpes of society, say the great empires,
tend to endure for any specific period of time? Do societies go through
definite stages of development? Questions of this order once dominated soci¬
ological thought, especially in the form of the evolutionary theory of social
development.36 The discrediting of the evolutionary theories tended to dis¬
courage further efforts along this line.
Currently much more popular, and apparently successful, are those
studies of society which inquire mainly into its internal structure. Typical ques¬
tions asked in this tradition are: What are the internal problems which any
society must face? What are the most common components found in most
societies? How do societies typically allocate responsibility for various func¬
tions? What are the consequences of combining certain institutions—for ex¬
ample, how compatible is the industrial pattern of economic life with the
“extended” household type of family?
A great deal of what is often called historical and comparative sociolog}'
follows this pattern. In one of the classic series of studies undertaken bv
Max Weber, he posed this set of questions: Does not each religious ethic
contain implications for action in the real world, especially for man’s eco¬
nomic action? And in so far as this is true, would it not follow that the
communicants of certain religions would be more active or effective in eco¬
nomic life than those following different religious ethics? Weber pursued
these questions through an imposing series of studies of the influence of
religion on economic activity in China, India, and Protestant Europe, in
the last instance producing one of the best known and controversial studies
of all social science in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
We cite Weber as an example of the study of society because his interest
was not in religion as such, but rather in the effect which particular tvpes of
religious organization had on other aspects of social life, in particular, on
economic life.
Sociology
as the Study of Institutions
The idea that the distinctive unit of sociological
analysis is society, more specifically the relations between the elements which
compose it, is old and widely held. It can be argued, however, that institu-
36 This evolutionary theory is fully discussed in Chap. 3.
14
tions as such—the family, the church, the school, and the political party—
are a more distinctive subject matter for sociology, because society as a whole
is already the unit of analysis in the fields of history and anthropology. The
questions which would be dealt with bv a special discipline devoted to institu¬
tions are of this order: What features do all institutions have in common?
What are the dimensions on which they are distinguishable, and how do
these dimensions vary when one compares institutions that perform different
functions? Regardless of their function, do institutions come to share cer¬
tain other features by virtue of being alike in size, in degree of specialization,
in amount of autonomy, and so on?
Durkheim, as long ago as 1901, said that sociology “can be defined as
the science of institutions,” 37 but this form of sociological analysis has not
been intensively developed. The growing importance in the modern world
of one type of institution, the large-scale organization, has, however, led to
renewed interest in and research on the general properties of institutions.
Sociology
as the Study of Social Relationships
Just as societies are complex systems of institutions,
so institutions may be conceived of as complex systems of still simpler “social
relationships.” Tbe family, for example, is made up of many sets of rela¬
tionships—those between man and woman, parent and child, brother and
sister, grandparent and grandchild. Each of these may be studied as a particu¬
lar type of relationship. And in all relationships, we can pursue certain
common emphases, involving such attributes as the size of the group (dyad,
triad, etc.), or the quality of the relationship—as, for example, in the study
of dominance and submission.
On analytic grounds we may argue that such relationships form a dis¬
tinctive subject matter, and that just as the common and differentiating
properties of institutions can be studied in and of themselves, so one could
study social relationships in the same way. Going even further, we might
argue that such relationships are merely the “molecules” of social life, and
that there is still a smaller unit, the “social act,” the true “atom” of social
life, which could be the special subject matter of sociology.
We will discuss the meaning of these terms more fully in a later chapter.
For now we merely note that Max Weber took quite seriously the idea that
sociology might be mainly a study of social relationships and acts, and elabor¬
ated a set of categories for their description and analysis. Other leading
German sociologists shared this perspective. Leopold von Wiese argued at
length in favor of treating social relationships as the only truly distinctive
subject matter of sociology,38 and much of the sociological writing of Georg
Simmel39 was an application of this principle. Among contemporary soci¬
ologists, Talcott Parsons has expressed similar views.40 Systematic empirical
research focused on the social act and the social relationship has, however,
only recently been done on any substantial scale, mainly in the study of
small groups and in industrial research.
37 Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, p. lvi.
38 Leopold von Wiese (F. H. Mueller, ed. and ann.), Sociology (New York: Piest,
1941), and (adapted and amplified by Howard Becker), Systematic Sociology on the Basis
of the Beziehungslehre and Gebeldelehre of Leopold von Wiese (New York: Wiley, 1932),
772 pp..
39 Georg Simmel (Kurt H. Wolff, ed. and trans.). The Sociology of Georg Simmel
(Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1950).
40 Talcott Parsons, The Social System (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1951).

Proceeding on the principle that each discipline should have a distinc¬
tive subject matter, we found that series of institutions which failed to
become the subject of any established discipline have instead become
sub-fields of sociology. We have seen, as well, that even if institutions such as
the family were to become the subject matter of separately established dis¬
ciplines, still, societies, institutions, social relationships, and social processes
such as differentiation, co-operation, evalution, and competition would re¬
main as distinctive foci for sociological analysis. Of course, anthropology also
deals with all these subjects, and history also concerns itself with societies
and institutions. To discriminate precisely between any two fields, we must
consider not only their subject matter but their goals and methods. We
therefore leave further distinctions between sociology, history, and anthropol¬
ogy to our next chapter.
In this chapter, we explored three different paths leading to a delinea¬
tion of the subject matter of sociology, considering in turn: “What the
founding fathers said,” “what sociologists do,” and “what logic requires.
All three approaches indicate that sociology deals with a wide range of
institutions and social processes. Sociology’s claim to some of these poses no
particular problem. It is unthinkable that an institution so ubiquitous as the
family or a process so critical as social stratification should not be the object
of intensive and specialized study. Sociology may then be_seenj&_a_J2o]Jec-
tion of §ub-disciplines dealing with institutions and social processes not
claimed by more specialized disciplines.
Yet we must recognize that even when institutions such as the economic
and political are the subject of specialized and independent branches of
scholarship, they nevertheless continue to be objects of sociological investiga¬
tion. This is not mere redundancy nor scholarly imperialism. The aspect of
any institution or social process which links it to any other is its character as
J an interlocking “system” of action.41 We can, therefore, say that sociology

is the study of systems of social action and of their interrelations. Most
prominent among these systems of action we find, in increasing order of
size and complexity: single social acts, social relationships, organizations and
institutions, communities and societies.42
This was not immediately apparent to us from the study of textbooks,
because we could there tell only which institutions were discussed, and not
what aspect of them was emphasized. Looking back now at the subjects in
which sociologists feel themselves competent, we may recall that among
the most frequently cited specialties were “theory” and “general sociology.”
We did not earlier explore the meaning of those terms. If we had, we would
have discovered that by these choices many sociologists were expressing their
opinion that sociology is not merely a collection of sub-disciplines on all
realms of life, but rather is the study of those aspects of social life which are
si present in all social forms. This idea was, of course, often made explicit in
the sociological classics. One also inevitably encounters it if one seeks by
logical analysis to delineate a distinctive subject matter for sociology which
does not conflict with the claims of disciplines focused on particular institu¬
tions such as the political and the economic.
To understand sociology we obviously need to know something about
the subject matter. But even more fundamental in defining the character
of any discipline are the questions it asks about its subject matter and the
41 “Systems of action” are more fully discussed in Chap. 5.

42 These terms are defined and more fully discussed in Chap. 5.
16
ways in which it goes about answering them. Lists of subjects, such as have
been presented in Table 1 tell us what sociology deals with without quite
answering the question: “What is sociology all about?” We are, so far, in
the position of a student who is sent off to write a paper on human biology
as a branch of science and returns to report that it is the study of arms, legs,
heads, and the like; that it also deals with circulation, breathing, and
digestion; and that in addition it compares men and women. Such informa¬
tion is certainly something to go by, but it hardly defines the field.
We must yet discover what is the particular perspective in which soci¬
ology sees these subjects, how it approaches them, what methods of inquiry
it utilizes, and what order of conclusion it draws from its investigation. These
are the themes which will concern us in the chapters which follow. In them
it will become apparent that some of the differences in emphasis to which
we have so far only alluded in elucidating the subject matter of sociology
become quite important when decisions must be reached about the relative
emphasis to give various subjects and about the methods for investigating
them.
17
the sociological
perspective
two
In this chapter we address ourselves to two tasks:
to clarify the relation of sociology to the other disciplines which deal with
man in society, and to offer a more formal definition of sociology. Both
represent unfinished business carried over from the preceding chapter. Our
analysis of these issues, taken together, presents a conception of what is
distinctive in the
We earlier made quite explicit our position that the subject matter of
sociology could not in itself serve to define the field. We need not pause
long, therefore, to justify our attempt at a more formal definition of the
essential features of sociological analysis. The relation of sociology to other
disciplines is another matter. Intellectual disciplines are so complex and
diverse that any brief effort to characterize them must necessarily be full of
arbitrary and even distorted images. When we attempt to -discrimmate be¬
tween the branches of social study, the temptation is inevitably great to
exaggerate differences rather than to acknowledge similarities. Despite these
grave risks, we clearly must offer some map of the terrain to those who
wish to orient themselves in the complex realm of the social sciences. First,
and necessarily superficial, impressions may be altered as the novice becomes
better oriented and deepens his understanding of social science. And it is
important to recognize that the differences in the perspective and practice
of the several disciplines which treat man in society are often fundamental
and have endured for relatively long periods of time.
18
Sociology and Related Disciplines
Sociology is a behavioral science. It seeks to explain
contemporary or past human behavior as we experience it directly or en¬
counter it embodied in artifacts, monuments, laws, and books. But in this
sense history, economics, and even literary criticism are also behavioral sci-t...
ences. Some grasp of what is distinctive about the sociological approach to
these phenomena is necessarv to our understanding of what sociology is.
The learned community is no tight ship all neatly divided into separate
water-tight compartments of knowledge. Any effort to distinguish sociology
from other disciplines must be somewhat arbitrary and imprecise. As knowl¬
edge advances and trends of research change, currently adequate definitions
of the several social sciences will be rendered inaccurate. Viewing the problem
from a historical perspective, Professor Joseph J. Schwab, philosopher and
historian of science, reports that “A mode of inquiry discredited by one
scientist, dismissed at one time, discarded in one science, reappears and is
fruitful in other hands and other times, or in other sciences.” 1 Nevertheless,, t~
the branches of studv concerned with man and his work do reveal numerous
distinguishing features which, at the present time, fairly clearly mark off one
discipline from another. Among the critical questions we ask as a basis for
characterizing these disciplines is whether thev are multi-dimensional or
focus on only one aspect of social life, and if so which one; whether they are
directly concerned with the observation of behavior or concentrate on
data further removed from the realm of everyday action; whether they assign
a prime role to abstract theorv and generalization or emphasize description
of the immediate and the concrete; and whether they stress measurement and
mathematical manipulation of data or favor direct observation and a more
“clinical” or “empathetic” mode of understanding human action. Since the
same questions can equally well be put to all the disciplines, they do not jS)
suggest a natural order or presentation. I have, therefore, chosen to describe
firstThose which are least likely to be confused with sociology—namely, eco¬
nomics, political science, and history—and then those less easily distinguished
from sociology—namelv, psychology and anthropology.
Economics is sometimes called “the dismal science,” a fact in which
sociologists take some comfort whenever their discipline is dubbed “the pain¬
ful elaboration of the obvious.” Whatever comic relief this exchange of
insults may give, it does not suffice to distinguish between economics and
sociology as behavioral sciences.
Economics is the study of the production and distribution of goods and
services. As it developed in the Western World, largely under the influence
of the Classical School in England, economics has dealt almost exclusively
with the interrelations of purely economic variables: the relations of price
and supply, money flows, input-output ratios, and the like. Relatively little
attention has been paid to the individual’s actual economic behavior or
motivation, and only modest energy has gone into studying productive enter¬
prises as social organizations. This left great gaps in our knowledge of eco¬
nomic life. More important, it left the discipline inadequate to account for
the actual course of economic events. Recently economists have shown more
interest in motivation and in the institutional context of economic action.
Nevertheless, many important problems, highly relevant to economics, have
not yet become the object of concentrated economic research. Studies of
the role of values and preferences in affecting the supply of labor, the influence
Joseph J. Schwab, “What Do Scientists Do?”, Behavioral Science (1960), V:l.
19
the sociological perspective
exerted by prestige or custom on the price of goods, the origins and motiva¬
tions of entrepreneurs and managers, and the contribution of education to
productivity have been largely left to sociologists and psychologists. Only a
few hardy economists have ventured to deal with them.
The restriction of the economists’ horizon is certainly a source of weak¬
ness, but it has had its advantages in facilitating the development of eco¬
nomics as a highly focused, coherent discipline of considerable intellectual
accomplishment. Sociologists often envy the economists for the precision of
their terminology, the exactness of their measures, the ease with which they
can communicate with one another in a standard technical language, the
extent of their agreement about certain basic principles, and their ability to
translate the results of their theoretical work into practical suggestions having
major implications for public policy. On the other hand, the economists
record in predicting economic events is very imperfect indeed, presumably
because the}' fail to give due weight to factors such as individual motivation
and institutional resistance, which the sociologist feels well-qualified to study.
The parallels between the structure of economic and sociological think¬
ing are, nevertheless, many and striking. Most modern sociologists find the
economist’s wav of thinking more congenial than that of the historian or the
political theorist.2_ Economists think, as do sociologists, in terms of systems
and sub-systems; they stress the relations between parts, especially patterns
of dependence, dominance, exchange, and the like. Both are interested in
measurement, often precise, and in relationships between sets of variables.
Both are impressed with mathematical models as aids in analyzing data.3
Political science, or “government,” as it is taught in most American uni¬
versities, consists mainly of two elements: political theory and government
administration. Neither branch involves extensive contact with political be¬
havior. Courses in political theory usually examine ideas about government
from Plato through Machiavelli and Rousseau to Marx. Courses on adminis¬
tration generally describe the formal structure and functions of government
agencies, but less often deal in intimate detail with their actual operation.
Sociology is devoted to the study of all aspects of society, whereas
political science restricts itself mainly to the study of power as embodied in
formal organizations. Sociology stresses the interrelations between sets of
institutions including government, whereas political science tends to turn its
attention inward to the processes within government. Nevertheless, political
sociology long shared with political science many of the same interests and
a very similar style of work. Certain figures, important to sociologists but not
to political science, such as Max Weber or Robert Michels, played a more
important role in courses in political sociology. There were, in addition,
some differences in emphasis. In S. M. Lipset’s words: “Political science has
been concerned with public administration, or how to make governmental
organizations efficient; political sociology, on the other hand, has been inter¬
ested in bureaucracy, particularly in the specification of its inherent stresses
and strains.” 4 In spite of this, the content and emphasis in courses on politi¬
cal theory were much the same whether they were listed in the catalogue as
courses in government or in political sociology.
2 For example, see Talcott Parsons and Neil Smelser, Economy and Society: A Study
in the Integration of Economics and Social Theory (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1956).
3 See the discussion of mathematical models in sociology in Chap. 7.
4 S. Martin Lipset, “Political Sociology,” in Robert K. Merton, Leonard Broom, and
Leonard S. Cottrell, Jr. (eds.). Sociology Today: Problems and Prospects (New York: Basic
Books, 1959), p. 83. Italics in original.

In the last 30 years, however, sociologists interested in politics have
differentiated themselves from political scientists through an intensive pro¬
gram of research on political behaviorS' They vigorously investigated voting
behavior, popular attitudes and values about political issues, the membership
of radical political movements on both the left and right, voluntary organi¬
zations, and the process of decision-making within small communities and
inside large private and governmental bureaucracies.6 This gave political
sociology a new character which marks it clearly as a branch of behavioral
science. Some political scientists are also turning more actively to behavioral
studies of politics, notably the late V. O. Key at Harvard, Robert Dahl at Yale,
and Gabriel Almond at Stanford.7 In their work the distinction between a
sociological and a political analysis breaks down, and a new behavioral science
of political processes emerges.
History seeks to establish the sequence in which events occurred; it is
the arrangement of behavior in time. Sociologists are much more concerned
to show the relationships between events occurring more or less at the same
time. Historians, almost bv definition, restrict themselves to study of the past,
often the more distant the better. Sociologists show much more interest in
the contemporary scene or the recent past. Historians, with the notable
exception of those called “philosophers of history,’’ as a rule eschew the explo¬
ration of causes; they are content to establish how things actually happened.
Sociologists are much more likely to seek for the interrelations between events
and to propose causal sequences. The historian prides himself on the explicit¬
ness, the concreteness of detail which characterizes his discipline. The sociolo¬
gist is more likely to abstract from concrete reality, to categorize and general¬
ize, to be interested in what is true not only of a particular people’s history
but of the histories of many different peoples. From the historian’s perspec¬
tive, this sociological process of abstracting from the history of several coun¬
tries or periods is viewed as likely to distort the distinctive reality of some
one historical place or period.
Much, perhaps most, of man’s history has been written as the history
of kings and wars. The history of less glamorous or exciting events, the
changes through time in institutional forms such as landowning, or in social
relations such as those of men and women in the family, have less frequently
interested historians. Such relationships, however, lie at the center of the
sociologists’ concern.
5 For example, see S. Martin Lipset in Robert K. Merton, Leonard Broom, and
Leonard S. Cottrell, Jr. (eds.), Sociology Today, pp. 81-114; Alex Inkeles, “National Char¬
acter and Modern Political Systems,” in Francis Hsu (ed.), Psychological Anthropology
(Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey, 1961), pp. 172-208; Feliks Gross, “Political Sociology,” in
Joseph S. Roucek (ed.), Contemporary Sociology (New York: Philosophical Library, 1958),
pp. 201-223. Pecyo>els
,!Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet, The \toier!s Choice (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1944); Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld, Personal In¬
fluence (Glencoe, Ill., The Free Press, 1955); Hadley Cantril, The Politics of Despair
(New York: Basic Books, 1958); S. Martin Lipset, Martin A. Trow, and James S. Coleman,
Unison Democracy (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1956); Oliver Garceau, The Political
Life of the American Medical Association (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1941);
William Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1959);
Amitai Etzioni, A Comparative Analysis of Complex Organizations (Glencoe, Ill.: The
Free Press, 1961).
7 V. O. Key, Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York: Knopf, 1949);
Robert Dahl and C. E. Lindbloom, Politics, Economics, and Welfare: Planning and
Politico-economic Systems Resolved into Basic Social Processes (New York: Harper, 1953);
Gabriel Almond, The Appeals of Communism (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1954).
21
Despite these differences in emphasis, there are important bases for the
concordance of history and sociology. Some historians, among them some of
the greatest, such as Rostovtzev, G. G. Coulton, and Jacob Burkhardt,8 have
written social history—that is, history which deals with human relations,
social patterns, mores and customs, and important institutions other than
monarchy and army. And some of the most outstanding sociological analysis,
as in the work of Max Weber, has been applied to historical problems.
Sociologists acknowledge historical sociology as one of the standard special
fields of their discipline, and Sigmund Diamond, Robert Bellah, and Norman
Birnbaum may be pointed to as important contemporary practitioners.9
Psychology is often defined as the science of mind, or of mental proc¬
esses. Its studies encompass the capacities of the mind to receive sensations,
to give them meaning, and to respond to them. In other words, it deals with
mental processes such as perception, cognition, and learning. Modem psy¬
chologists also devote particular attention to feelings and emotions, to motives
as well as drives, and to their organization in what we call personality.
Psychology has deep roots in biology and physiology, and remains
closely tied to them. Much of the research by psychologists on visual and
aural perception has little relevance for social behavior. On the other hand,
studies of emotion, cognition, motivation, and the like, have an intimate
connection with the individual’s participation in social relationships. Students
of perception, learning, and other mental processes generally look for laws of
psychic functioning which transcend the differences between individuals and
even species. Those dealing with the emotions, feelings, and conative (striv¬
ing) behavior are more often concerned with the individual and the distinc¬
tive or unique organization of his personality. This is particularly true of
"clinical” psychologists.
For those psychologists more concerned with the psyche than with
physiology, the term “personality” serves as a central organizing concept in
much the same way as “society” and “social system” serve the sociologist.10
Psychology, in this perspective, seeks to explain behavior as it is organized
in an individual personality and determined by the combined influence of
his physiology, his psychic apparatus, and his unique personal experience.
By contrast, sociology' attempts to understand behavior as it is organized in a
society, and as it is determined by such factors as the number of people it
contains, their culture, their objective situation, their social organization.
Sociology and psychology draw closest in the special field of social
psychology. From the psychological point of view, social psychology is con¬
cerned with the ways in which personality and behavior are influenced by a
person’s social characteristics or his social setting. As an example, we may
cite Solomon Asch’s studies of conformity and perception. In these studies he
8 Mikhail I. Rostovtzev, The Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World
(Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1941); George C. Coulton, Medieval Panorama: The
English Scene from Conquest to Reformation (New York: Meridian Books, 1957); Jakob
Burckhardt (S. G. C. Middlemore, trans.), The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
Vol. I-II (New York: Harper, 1958).
9 Sigmund Diamond, The Reputation of the American Businessman (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1955); Robert Bellah, Tokugawa Religion: The Values of Pre-
Industrial Japan (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1957); Norman Bimbaum, “Social Struc¬
ture and the German University,” (Ph.D. Thesis, Harvard University, 1958); “Great
Britain: The Reactive Revolt,” in M. Kaplan (ed.), The Revolution in World Politics
(New York: Wiley, 1962). Also see George C. Homans, English Villagers of the Thirteenth
Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1941).
10 These concepts are defined and discussed in Chap. 5.
22
showed that people will report the length of a line as shorter or longer than
it actually is, contradicting the evidence of their senses, if a majority of the
other experimental subjects all connive at calling the line longer or shorter
than they know it to be. Thus, Asch showed how a psychic process—percep¬
tion—was influenced by a social situation—minority status—producing per¬
ceptual distortion.u
From a sociological perspective, social psychology includes any study
of social processes which systematically considers how the psychological
properties of every man, or the personality dispositions of particular men,
acting in a situation, influence the outcome of the social process. Thus,
Q
Janowitz and Marvick, in their study of voting, demonstrated with a repre¬
sentative national sample of Americans, that favoring an isolationist foreign
policy is more common not only among persons of limited education, but
also among those with an authoritarian personality structure.12 In this case,
a rate of social action—the proportion voting isolationist—was shown to vary
in response to the personalitv dispositions of the persons in the group.
The distinction between the sociological and the psychological perspec¬
tive in social psychologv often breaks down in the actual practice of research.
In studies of public opinion, of mob action such as riots or lynchings, of
mass movements in politics or religion, it is often difficult to see any difference
in the work of those who were sociologically trained as against those trained
in psychology. Indeed, many argue that social psychology should be recog¬
nized as a distinct field, much as biochemistry has been, and both the Uni¬
versity of Michigan and Columbia University have established separate pro¬
grams offering a degree in social psychology independent of the requirements
in the sociology and psychologv departments.
Anthropology, at least in the United States, is as diversified a subject as
sociology, incorporating archeology, physical anthropology, cultural history,
many branches of linguistics, and the study of all aspects of the life of primi¬
tive man everywhere. Like psychology, it has strong ties with the natural
sciences, and in the case of physical anthropology, a close link with biology.
It is as the science of culture that anthropology is most germane to
sociolog}'. Culture may be defined narrowly, to mean mainly the system of
symbols, including language and values, shared by a given people. In that
case we consider anthropology to have a distinct subject matter in the same
sense that we consider power and authority to be the subject matter of
political science and the production and distribution of goods the distinctive
subject matter of economics. But if culture is defined broadly to include all
the patterned ways of doing things, including not only shared values but
shared institutional arrangements, then anthropology becomes co-extensive
with sociology. In fact, in British universities, anthropology was well-estab¬
lished as the academic study of society long before sociology was accepted,
and in many American universities the two departments are combined.
Nevertheless, anthropology and sociology differ in that the former takes
prime responsibility for studying primitive or non-literate man, the latter for
studying more advanced civilizations. This basic fact exerts a pervasive in¬
fluence on the content and subject matter of the two disciplines. Anthropolo¬
gists tend to study societies in all their aspects, as wholes. In so far as they
11 Solomon Asch, Social Psychology (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1952),

pp. 450-501.
12 Morris Janowitz and D. Marvick, “Authoritarianism and Political Behavior,”
Public Opinion Quarterly (1953), XVII: 185-201.
23
specialize, it is usually in a given “culture area, such as Melanesia. Sociolo¬
gists more often study parts of a society, and generally specialize in some
institution such as the family, or a process, such as social mobility. Anthro¬
pologists traditionally live in the community they study, directly observing
behavior or recording customs as reported by their informants. Their method
of analysis is essentially qualitative and “clinical. Sociologists more often
rely on statistics and questionnaires; their analysis is more often formal and
quantitative. The natural milieu for the anthropologist is the small self-
contained group or community, whereas the sociologist is quite at ease in
studying large-scale and impersonal organizations and processes.
So long as there are distinctive indigenous peoples preserving their
unique cultures, anthropologists will not lack for a special subject matter.
Even if many of the people he studies move into the modern world, the
anthropologist may follow comfortably along so long as ‘ his people maintain
a distinctive community within the framework of the larger society. But as
its traditional subjects become fully acculturated, and are dispersed through¬
out the larger society and absorbed within it, anthropology will be less able
to survive as a distinctive discipline. It may become a branch of sociology
specializing in the study of values or the small community; or it may be
entirely absorbed, along with sociology, in a general science of society.
Disciplines, Boundaries, and Issues

Benjamin Kidd, writing about sociology in the 11th
edition of The Encyclopaedia Britannica, said: “From the 17th century for¬
ward it may be said, strictly speaking, that all leading contributions to the
general body of Western philosophy have been contributions to the science
of society (sociology).” He went on to point out that over the years the
following terms have been seriously proposed as substitutes for the word
“sociology”: politics, political science, social economy, social philosophy,
and social science.13 Under the circumstances, any novice in the field must
surely be forgiven if he expresses some bewilderment when faced with the
task of distinguishing one social science from another. Maintaining these
distinctions is made more difficult by the readiness of sociologists to accept'
f responsibility for any institution which is not already the subject of an estab¬
lished discipline. To the degree that these subjects are important and would
otherwise be neglected, sociologists deserve more to be praised than criticized.
The scholarly world has shown a remarkable capacity to exclude from serious
study enormous ranges of human activity, as if the common human nature
expressed in family life, in stratification, in crime, made these vulgar studies
unfit subjects for gentlemen scholars. For a new branch of study to win
recognition in the university and the learned academies has been only slightly
less difficult than for the camel to pass through that gate in Jerusalem known
as “the needle’s eye.”
This open quality of sociology, its ready acceptance of new topical
fields, stems from the sociologist’s general concern with systems of social
action and their interrelations.14 Inevitably this leads him to deal with all
aspects of man’s social life, whether or not the subject has already been
marked out as the special province or preserve of some other discipline.
There is no court to which we can turn for the adjudication of such
13 “Sociology,” Vol. XXV, Encyclopedia Britannica (1911), p. 322 ff.

14 Systems of social action are defined and discussed in Chap. 5.
24
territorial disputes. Of each intellectual discipline which takes a particular
subject in hand we may inquire: Does it ask challenging questions? Is there,
or can we devise, a method for exploring the questions it raises? Once applied,
will this method yield meaningful facts? Can these facts be grouped together
to formulate conclusions or generalizations which are contributions to knowl¬
edge? Do these conclusions now point the way to new questions which can
carry us still further forward in our effort to understand man and his works?
How, and how well, sociology meets these challenges we shall see in subse¬
quent chapters. In the next section we seek the answer to the first question:
What is the main issue to which sociology addresses itself?
Toward a Definition of Sociology:

Social Order, Disorder, and Change
If you were to insist that the basic problem to which
sociology addresses itself be described in a single phrase, we would reply: .
It seeks to explain the nature of social order and social disorder.
Sociolog}- shares with all other essentially scientific perspectives the
assumption that there is order in nature, and that it can be discovered,
described, and understood. Just as the laws of physics describe the underlying
order governing the relation of physical objects, astronomy the order of the
planetary system, geology the order underlying the history and present struc¬
ture of the earth, so sociology seeks to discover, describe, and explain the
order which characterizes the social life of man. ’, .
When we speak of “order” we mean that events occur in a more-or-less
regular sequence or pattern, so that we can make an empirically verifiable
statement about the relation of one event to another at given points in time
under specified conditions. Sociology deals with several such forms of order,
varying greatly in scale but each having substantially the same character.
The problem is perhaps most evident at the level of the largest unit \
with which sociology usually deals, the nation-state or other form of large-
scale society. Collectively, the members of a large society perform millions,
or even billions, of social acts in the course of a single day.15 Yet the outcome
is not bedlam, total confusion and chaos, but rather a reasonable approxima¬
tion of order. This order permits each individual to pursue his personal course
without too seriously interfering with the pursuit by others of their purposes
and goals. Indeed, this order generally assures that each can actually facilitate
to some degree the attainment by others of their goals. The prime object
of sociology is to explain how this comes about, how some reasonable
degree of coordination of so many diverse individual actions yields the
routine flow of social life. When we say that there is a social system, we refqr
to the coordination and integration of social acts which permit them to occur
in a way that produces order rather than chaos.
Since our emphasis on order may be so easily misunderstood, we hasten
to add early and emphatically that to delineate the nature of the social order
is not necessarily to approve or justify it. A totalitarian government also
develops a social order. A sociologist who studies it may explain the role
of the monolithic party in monopolizing political power. He may show how
the media of mass communication are used to mobilize public opinion and to
manufacture the appearance of consensus, or expose the role which secret-
police terror plays in permitting the elite to effect social control. In so doing,
15 See Chap. 5 for definitions and discussions of the terms social act and society.
25
he obviously is not justifying, excusing, nor indeed in any necessary way judg¬
ing the social order with which he deals. The sociologist may certainly be
stimulated by his own values to explore and to emphasize one rather than
another problem within such a system. In doing the job of analysis, he is
also giving those of us not familiar with the system a basis on which we can
form our own moral and political judgment. But such judgment should
not be confused with the separate task of describing the basic order by
which, for good or ill, a particular social system is kept in operation.
The sociologist’s concern with the problem of order should not lead
one to assume that he has no interest in or responsibility for studying mani¬
festations of disorder. No social system functions flawlessly, regardless of the
o perspective from which it is viewed. Certainly no social system is perfect

from the point of view of all its members. It is endemic in social life that
some norms will not be met, some values not fulfilled, some goals not attained.
Indeed, in any society, there may be some important realms in which the
majority violate the socially or legally defined standard, and often at great
cost of life. A trip along any of the highways of the United States during
the Labor Dav weekend will suffice to make the point. Almost all societies
know periods, often long ones, of riot, civil war, mob violence, terror, crime,
and general disorganization. Each of these manifestations is a departure
from some social order already established or, as in case of counter-revolution,
one seeking to establish itself. And even disorder is not necessarily chaos.
Within both individual and collective life there are “natural” forces
making for order and stability and other equally “natural” forces making for
disorder, conflict, and disruption. The balance between these forces may be
very different at different times. It is a matter of preference, of personal
inclination or philosophic orientation, whether you choose to see the world
as a place inherently in a state of disorder struggling to achieve some order,
or as normally in a condition of order but subject to constant disruption and
the threat of disorder. For myself, I am quite satisfied that it fits the existing
facts better, and is more conducive to effective analysis, to assume order as
man’s basic condition. To make this assumption is very far from passing on
the importance of studying man’s frequent and important plunges into a
state of relative disorder. 1 stress “relative,” because without some order,
even within conditions of seeming general disorder, man would cease to sur¬
vive. Some societies persistently failed to solve the problem of maintaining
order, and have dissolved, their members scattered, absorbed elsewhere, or
totally vanished. But always there has been another social system in which
order prevailed and social man survived.
A sociology which completely ignores the manifestations of disorder
in social life is clearly an incomplete and inadequate sociology. No less may
be said of one which denies the basic facts of social order and turns its back
on the mechanisms which insure it, concerning itself exclusively with the
problems of social disorganization. The conflict between those who hold
out for an “equilibrium theory” and those who urge us to adopt a “conflict
theory” of society is sterile,16 since a complete sociology must include both
the study of order and disorder, and also of orderly and disorderly change.
Arnold Feldman and Wilbert Moore urge on us the more dynamic, inclusive
conception of society as a “tension management system.”
“The ‘order’ characteristic of any social system thus consists of both
regularized patterns of action and institutions that control, ameliorate, or
16 These conceptions of society and their protagonists are discussed in Chap. 3.
26
canalize the conflict produced bv persistent strains. A society encompasses
conflict and its associated change as well as a social order that comprises n>
tension-preventing and tension-managing devices and systems.” 17
To delineate the social system by defining the underlying relationships
among a complex set of social acts is perhaps the prime responsibility of the
sociologist, but it is obviouslv onlv a beginning. Indeed, some sociologists
argue that it is less important than another task, that of accounting for the
persistence of social systems through time. The coordination, at a single
point in time, of thousands and even millions of individual acts in a more or
less stable system of social action is perhaps miraculous. Yet this short-term
order is only a minor wonder compared to the grand miracle represented by
the persistence of such systems of action over relativelv long periods of time.
Groups of animals, including dogs and elephants, can be trained to coordinate
their behavior in very complex patterns of action. Without their trainer,
however, these animals have no wav of passing on to subsequent generations
the tricks they have learned. The complex coordination of human action
which every social svstem represents is almost always carried forward through
time beyond the lives of anv single set of participants. Such continuitv is
also found in colonies of social insects, but in their case we know that instinct
insures the appropriate outcome. Since instinctive regulation of behavior is
not equally important in man, the continuity of the social order must be
explained by reference to other mechanisms.
Sociology, then, seeks to explain the continuity of social systems through
time. Yet continuitv must be recognized as relative. Its occurrence cannot
be taken as assured, but rather must be acknowledged to be problematic.
There is reason to believe that some unusually stable societies continued
unchanged in all essential respects, often down to the smallest detail, genera¬
tion after generation, for perhaps hundreds of years. Our impression of the
relativelv unchanging nature of these societies may be mainly an artifact of
the inadequacy of the historical record. In any event, most of the societies
which form part of the more recent history of man seem to have experienced
an almost continuous, often pervasive, and sometimes highly accelerated
process of change. Yet with change, as with continuity, the sociologist assumes
that the sequence of events is inherently orderly. The process of change is not
random, even though it mav at times seem chaotic, and is often beyond the
conscious control of individuals and of society as a whole. Sociology, there¬
fore, also describes change in social systems, and seeks to uncover the basic 4
processes bv which, under specified conditions, one state of the system leads
to another, including, potentiality the state of disorganization and dissolution.
In summary, then, we may say that sociology is the study of social order,
meaning thereby the underiving regularity of human social behavior. The
concept of order includes the efforts to attain it and departures from it.
Sociology seeks to define the units of human social action and to discover
the pattern in the relation of these units—that is, to learn how they are
organized as systems of action. Working with such systems of action, soci¬
ology attempts to explain their continuity through time, and to understand
how and why these units and their relations change or cease to exist.
17 Arnold Feldman and Wilbert Moore, “Industrialization and Industrialism: Con¬

vergence and Differentiation,” Transactions of the Fifth World Congress of Sociology
Vol. II (Louvain: International Sociological Association, 1962), p. 155.
27
in o d e I s
of society
in sociological
analysis
three
Each sociologist carries in his head one or more
“models” of society and man which greatly influence what he looks for, what
he sees, and what he does with his observations by way of fitting them, along
with other facts, into a larger scheme of explanation. In this respect the
sociologist is not different from any other scientist. Every scientist holds
some general conception of the realm in which he is working, some mental
picture of “how it is put together and how it works.” Such models are
indispensable to scientific work. It is not always possible to distinguish pre¬
cisely between a scientific model and a scientific theory, and the terms are
sometimes used interchangeably. A model may generate a host of theories,
but one theory may be so powerful'as to become, in effect, a general model.
In the following discussion we use model to refer to a rather general image
of the main outline of some major phenomenon, including certain leading
ideas about the nature of the units involved and the pattern of their rela¬
tions. A theory we take to be a heuristic device for organizing what we know,
or think we know, at any particular time about some more or less explicitly
posed question or issue. A theory would, therefore, be more limited and pre¬
cise than a model. A theory can ordinarily be proved wrong. In the case of a
model, it can usually only be judged incomplete, misleading, or unproductive.
The assumption that germs cause disease is a convenient illustration.
The germ theory of disease is basically a general model, whereas the explana-
28
tions of particular diseases in terms of this model may be taken as specific
theories derived from the general model. Holding to this model of the cause
of diseases is obviously very productive. It leads us to search for specific
organisms as the cause of particular diseases, and to follow especially relevant
techniques in that search. It also encourages efforts to control disease by
means of procedures which kill such organisms. But holding to this model
exclusively would obviously lead us astrav or otherwise block our progress
if we were trying to explain psychosomatic illness, dietary deficiencies, or
cases of chemical poisoning. Indispensable as our models are, therefore, we
pay a price for having them.
Under perfect conditions a model does not so shape our vision as to
prevent us from seeing important new facts and conditions. In the best of
all possible worlds, scholars would avoid too deep a personal identification
with any one model, and would freely abandon their picture of the world
as soon as a better one came along. In life, these ideals are seldom attained.
The models with which scientists operate often become rigid; they screen and
exclude from attention, or even lead to the denial of, important new facts
and ideas. A scientist will often become personally identified with a par¬
ticular model and resist efforts to replace it as if these were attempts to cut
off that part of himself which he holds most dear. Under such circumstances
the model no longer serves as a theorv tentatively held, but rather becomes
a fixed point of view, even a kind of scientific ideologv, which limits and
restricts the readiness to see things in a new light.1 The greatest of scientists
have encountered this rigidity, and some have shown it themselves.
The problem is particularly acute in sociology. Models of society and
man have much more obvious, immediate, and profound moral and political
implications than do most scientific conceptions. In addition, the social
scientist’s models are so important because very often that is all he has. The
great French philosopher and scientist, Poincare, once remarked that physi¬
cists have a subject matter, whereas sociologists engage almost exclusively
in discussions of method.2 In the natural sciences, disagreements are more
readily resolved because facts must be faced according to generally accepted
rules of procedure. In the social sciences, we have greater difficulty in agree¬
ing on the facts, and not much more agreement exists about how one should
go about evaluating them. The result is that social-science theories are more
immune to attack, and social-science models are able to lead an absolutely
charmed life. They long persist even when they give a misleading or inade¬
quate picture of society and man. At the same time, in a realm in which the
facts seem to provide such slippery footing, men are more easily led to hold
on to their models, as the only sure rock to which a man can anchor his
view of the world.
All sciences freely borrow and incorporate ideas from other fields. But
it seems distinctively true of sociology that the majority of the models of
society which have the widest currency have been taken over as analogies
from other fields. Yet not all the models of society and man prevalent in
sociology are made explicit and acknowledged by those who develop and
use them. Very seldom do sociologists distinguish between a literal model,
an image or conception, and a scientific theory. Not infrequently sociologists
1 Bernard Barber, “Resistance by Scientists to Scientific Discovery’’ (New York:

December, 1960). Paper presented before a joint annual meeting of the History of Science
Society and Section, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
2 Morris Cohen, Reason and Nature: An Essay on the Meaning of Scientific Method
(New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1931), p. 350.
29
models of society in sociological analysis
deny that they are in fact using the models attributed to them. When these
models are made explicit, as I have made them in this chapter and the next,
they inevitably emerge in a rather more bold, even stark, form which does
not do full justice to the subtlety with which some of their proponents use
them. Making allowances for this, we may, nevertheless, insist that most
sociologists are guided by models which are relatively consistent and form
a fairly clear cut orientation or even “ideology.” Some of the more important
models of society which underlie the work of leading sociologists, and occa¬
sionally of whole schools of sociology, are presented in the following sections
of this chapter. In some cases these models appear in pairs, as opposed or
polarized positions on some particular issue. It is largely in the choice of
sides, in the emphasis on one or another end of some dimension, that indi¬
viduals commit themselves to one or another kind of sociological work.
Without some familiarity with these models, it is difficult to place many
sociological studies in proper perspective. And since the models become
rallying grounds for competing schools of sociology, an understanding of
them is essential to identify the main intellectual currents in the field.
The Evolutionary Model

' " The thinking of early sociologists was dominated by
a conception of man and society seen progressing up definite steps of evolu¬
tion leading through ever greater complexity to some final stage of perfection.
The general evolutionary model of society is represented by a large number
of specific theories. Comte, for example, delineated three great stages through
which all societies must go—those of conquest, defense, and industry. For
each he enunciated a parallel step in the development of man’s thought,
which he conceived as progressing from the theological through the meta¬
physical to arrive ultimately at the perfection of Comte’s own Positive
Philosophy. While jSpencer’s scheme of evolution was much less grandiose,
he too took the position that sociology is “the study of evolution in its most
complex form.”3
The evolutionary model treated society as if there were an imminence
inherent in man’s social development which requires that each stage appear
in turn to play its role according to “natural law.” This conception under¬
standably tempted the promulgators of social philosophies to capture the
evolutionary theory and to use it in support of their political positions. The
American sociologist William Graham Sumner, for example, justified the
privileges of the advantaged classes over the disadvantaged on the grounds
that such differentiation was a law of nature in keeping with the principle
of the survival of the fittest. Sumner, who has been labeled a “Social Dar¬
winist,” used the idea of evolution, as had Spencer, to block efforts at reform
and social change, arguing that social evolution must follow its own course,
dictated by nature. “That is why,” he said, “it is the greatest folly of which a
man can be capable, to sit down with a slate and pencil to plan out a new
social world.”4
The evolutionary approach to societal development was also used to
support the arguments of the extreme left in politics. Marx and Engels were
greatly influenced by the work of the anthropologist L. H. Morgan, who
sought to prove that all societies went through fixed stages of development,
3 Herbert Spencer, The Study of Sociology (New York: D. Appleton, 1873), p. 350.
4 William Graham Sumner, “The Absurd Effort to Make the World Over,” in
A. G. Keller and M. R. Davis (eds.), Essays of William Graham Sumner (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1934), p. 106.
30
each succeeding the other, from savagery through barbarism to civilization.
Marx and Engels maintained that each stage of civilization, such as feudalism,
prepared the ground for the next. It contained within itself “the seeds of its
own destruction,” and would inevitably be succeeded by that stage next
“higher” on the scale of evolution. On this basis they argued that the “stage”
of capitalism had so far advanced the rationalization of production and its
concentration in large units as to make socialism and planning historically
necessary and inevitable. They also added the idea that each era resisted the
birth of the new, and concluded that the next step in social evolution could
be attained only by violent revolution.
Common to both Comte’s and Marx’ theories is the assumption that
each society does, indeed must, pass through a fixed and limited number
of stages in a given sequence. For that reason they are referred to as unilinear
theories of evolution. Such theories long dominated the sociological imagina¬
tion. In each generation the leading sociologist could be expected, each
in his turn, to come forward with a new scheme for classifying the stages of
social development. Since these later schemes were generally less sweeping
and less explicitly labeled, they should perhaps be called quasi-evolutionary
theories.
For Durkheim the most important dimension of society was the degree
of specialization within it, or as he called it, “the division of labor.” He
believed there was an historical trend, or evolution, from a low to a high
degree of specialization, and that important consequences followed from
this. Durkheim distinguished two main tvpes of society on the basis of how
far the division of labor had progressed. The first depended on what he
called “mechanical solidarity.” It was typified by the smaller community
in which the degree of specialization was limited, and people were held
together bv tight bonds through their immersion in strong primary institutions
such as the extended family and the local religion. The second type of society
was based on what he called “organic solidarity.” In this system relations
are less intimate and personal, and people are tied to one another mainly by
common interests, by contract, and by more abstract symbols. Durkheim
believed that this second type always evolved from and succeeded the first
as the degree of specialization, the divisions of labor, increased.5
Some years before Durkheim published The Division of Labor, a com¬
parable model, assuming the same direction of development, was presented
by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tomiies* who distinguished community-
like gemeinschaft and corporate (gesellschaft) types of society. The first
corresponded quite well to Durkheim’s mechanical solidarity, the second to
his organic type. Numerous others put forth similar ideas. The scheme most
recently to win attention was developed by the American anthropologist
Robert Redfield, who elaborated on the contrast between “folk” and “urban”
society.6 The regular rediscovery, restatement, and reiteration of the same
basic dichotomy of social types suggests that the distinction being made is
very fundamental. It also illustrates the difficulty sociology has in getting
beyond the stage of developing models of society, and moving on to the
point where it can convincingly put them to work in explaining major social
processes.
Cyclical theories are an important variant on the unilinear conceptions
3 Smile Durkheim (G. Simpson, trans.), The Division of Labor in Society (Glencoe,
Ill.: The Free Press, 1933).
6 Robert Redfield, “The Folk Society,” American Journal of Sociology (1947), Vol.
LII, No. 4.
31
of evolution. Such theories set out a certain number of stages or cycles which
any long-enduring culture may go through more than once, even repeatedly.
Pareto’s theory of the “circulation of elites ’ is essentially of this variety. ,
Among the more recent examples of this perspective is Professor Sorokin s
theory of social and cultural dynamics. He sees societies as passing through
three stages, each dominated by a system of truth. In the ideational phase
truth is revealed by the grace of God and is based on faith; sensate culture is
dominated by the testimony of our senses; and in idealistic culture there is a
synthesis of both, dominated by reason,8 Professor Sorokin places contempo¬
rary European and American culture in the last stages of the disintegration
of sensate culture, and argues that the only way out of our ‘ crisis is a new
synthesis of faith and sensation. “Such,” he says, “was the invariable course
of the the great crises of the past. Such is the way out of our own crisis. There
is no other possibility.” 9
The universal theory of evolution 10 grants that every society does not
necessarily go through the same fixed stages of development. It argues, rather,
that the culture of mankind, taken as a whole, has followed a definite line
of evolution. Principles of this type are found clearly enunciated in the work
of Spencer, as when he said that mankind had progressed from small groups
to large and from simple to compound and doubly compound, or, in more
general terms, from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous.11 The anthro¬
pologist Leslie White has been a leading exponent of this conception.12
Professor White held that technology, particularly the amount of energy
harnessed and the way in which it is used, determines the forms and content
of culture and society. The evolution of culture has not been even, he argued,
but proceeds in great spurts as new sources of energy are harnessed. Thus
the agricultural revolution on which the great civilizations of the Old World
were built was followed by a relatively long period of stagnation until the
Fuel Age was introduced in the New World about 1800. Although this
theory holds that there is a clear line of advance for the human species as a
whole, it does not argue that each society necessarily goes through all or most
of the stages of development. On the contrary, “ail share in the progress of
each” as a result of the diffusion of technological advances. Furthermore, with
each leap forward the rate of development is accelerated, in the sense that
population and energy per capita increase at an increasing rate. In one im¬
portant respect, however, White shares the orientation of the older evolu¬
tionists—he sees the whole development focusing on a single distant point
toward which we are “inexorably” moving. The future promises for all man¬
kind “higher levels of integration . . . greater concentrations of political
power and control ... a single political organization that will embrace the
entire planet and the whole human race.” 13
Similar ideas were greatly elaborated by William Ogburn, who stressed
the role of invention in social change, dealt with the acceleration in the rate
7 See also Chap. 5.

8 Pitirim A. Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics, one-volume ed. (Boston: Sargent,
1957).
9 Pitirim A. Sorokin, The Crisis of Our Age (New York: Dutton, 1941), p. 324.
10 I here follow the terminology suggested in Julian Steward, “Evolution and Proc¬
ess,’’ in A. Kroeber (ed.), Anthropology Today (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1953), PP. 313-326.
11 Herbert Spencer, Principles of Sociology, 3rd ed. Vol. I (New York: D. Appleton,
1910),p.471.
12 Leslie White, The Science of Culture (New York: Farrar, Strauss, 1949).
13 Ibid., pp. 338 ff.
32
of growth in material culture, and gave birth to the famous law of “culture
lag —which stated that changes in our non-material culture—i.e., in our
ideas and social arrangements—always lag behind changes in material culture
—i.e., in our technology and inventions.14
Still another type of evolutionary theory, which we may call the multi¬
linear,1-' has more recently emerged. Those who share this perspective attempt
to explain neither the straight-line evolution of each society, nor the progress
of mankind as a whole, but rather concentrate on much more limited se¬
quences of development. Thev might ask, for example: “In all cases in which
there has been a shift from hunting to agriculture in the economic realm,
has there also been a particular corresponding change in the family system?”
This type of question is interesting and important, but it does not bear much
resemblance to more “traditional” evolutionary thinking.
Recently some of the younger sociologists, particularly in the United
States, have become interested in the implications of the ever wider diffusion
of industrialism. In the tradition of White and Ogburn, they have closely
examined the culture and social structure of countries all over the world to
assess the extent to which the widspread adoption of industrial forms of
production encouraged the development of uniform institutions and social
patterns. Arnold Rose expressed a view, ever more widely held, when he said
in his introduction to The Institutions of Advanced Societies: “A world
culture affecting all advanced societies has been developing for the past
four centuries or so ... . The source and heart of this common culture lies
in world trade and industrialization and their immediate consequences in
urbanization, specialization, secularization, and the opening of possibilities
for social mobility, universal education, and improvement in the material
standard of living.” 1(i
This latest school of sociology does not really use an evolutionary model,
universal, orTnuItilinear, but rather holds a conception of society which as¬
sumes that changes in any part of the social system will have important con¬
sequences for other parts and for the system as a whole. That model, often
called the organismic, or structural-functional, will be discussed in the next
section.
A mass of evidence has been accumulated to show that societies dp not
pass through unilinear stages. In addition, the condition of the world during
the twentieth century has made it difficult to believe either that contemporary
society represents the highest stage of man’s development or that he will
inevitably move forward to develop still higher—i.e., superior—forms of
social life. Consequently the unilinear evolutionary model of social develop¬
ment has very little interest for most contemporary sociologists. The universal
theory of evolution also fails to capture their attention as an important
theme. They seem content to leave the continuing study of unilinear and
universal evolution to anthropologists. Much of what the multilinear theory
offers, they feel, they can better understand through the use of other models.
The evolutionary model of social development in all its aspects has, there¬
fore, largely been abandoned by sociologists.
14 William F. Ogburn, Social Change with Respect to Culture and Original Nature
(New York: Viking, 1950).
15 Julian Steward, “Evolution and Progress,” in A. Kroeber (ed.), Anthropology
Today, pp. 313-326.
16 Arnold Rose (ed.), The Institutions of Advanced Societies (Minneapolis: Uni¬
versity of Minnesota Press, 1958), p. 26. See also Alex Inkeles, “Industrial Man: The
Relation of Status to Experience, Perception and Value,” American Journal of Sociology
(1960), LXVT1-31.
33
With the rejection of the evolutionary view, some of the activities which
it stimulated have also been slighted. The evolutionary perspective required
a strong commitment to the study of history, especially man s early history.
That interest has largely died out in modern sociology. The effective applica¬
tion of an evolutionary scheme rested on developing typologies of society.
Contemporary sociologists generally look on this as rather an empty game
a kind of playing with boxes. One consequence of their neglect of history has
been that sociologists played only a minor role in shaping the study of new
forms of society, such as the totalitarian systems of Europe and the new
nations” emerging from tribal and colonial conditions in Asia and Africa.1'
The growing interest of younger sociologists in the consequences of industrial¬
ism and in the resultant forms of industrial society may, however, be the
path by which some types of work earlier fostered by the evolutionary perspec¬
tive may be restored to a place of importance in contemporary sociology.
The Organismic Model:

Structural-Functionalism
Analogies between society and living organisms are
as old as social thought. Plato spoke of the three different elements of society
as the thinking, or rational; the feeling, or spirited; and the appetitive parts,
each represented by a particular social class. The organic analogy was widely
prevalent in pre-Comteian thought, and it is not surprising that it appeared
very early in sociology’s history. The most important manifestation of this
pattern has been in the linked concepts of “structure” and “function,” which
already appear in Spencer, were used by Durkheim, and figured prominently
in the work of the great sociologically oriented British anthropologists, Mali¬
nowski and Radcliffe-Brown.18 Through these and other channels this per¬
spective came to have substantial influence in American sociology, particularly
among students and followers of Talcott Parsons, and it is now generally
known as the structural-functional school of sociology.
There are, of course, variations among structural-functionalists in em¬
phasis, and in the completeness of their devotion to an organismic analog}'
of society.19 The basic perspective of the structural-functional point of view
emerges in its prime emphasis on society, and on the interrelations of its
institutions, rather than on the individual or groups such as the family.
The main question to which it addresses itself is this: “How is social life
17 For important exceptions see: Barrington Moore, Jr., Soviet Politics: The Dilemma
of Power (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950); Raymond Bauer, Alex Inkeles,
and Clyde Kluckhohn, How the Soviet System Works (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1959); Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle
East (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1958); Monroe Berger, The Arab World Today
(London: Nicolson, 1962); Wilbert Moore and Arnold Feldman, Labor Commitment and
Social Change in Developing Areas (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1960);
Marion Levy, Family Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1949).
18 Herbert Spencer, Principles of Sociology; Emile Durkheim (J. W. Swain,
trans.), Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: Macmillan, 1926); Bronislaw
Malinowski, Crime and Custom in Savage Society (London: Trench and Trubner, 1926);
A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Structure and Function in Primitive Society (Glencoe, Ill.: The
Free Press, 1952).
19 For a general view of the structural-functional position the following sources are
indispensable: Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe, Ill.: The
Free Press, 1957); Kingsley Davis, Human Society (New York: Macmillan, 1949); Marion
Levy, The Structure of Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952); Talcott
Parsons, The Structure of Social Action (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1949), and The
Social System (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1951).
34
maintained and carried forward in time despite the complete turnover in
the membership of society with every new generation?” The basic answer
it gives is: “Social life persists because societies find means (structures)
whereby they fulfill the needs (functions) which are either pre-conditions
or consequences of organized social life.”
The evolutionary and functional views are not opposed to each other,
but their interests and emphases are different. The evolutionary perspec¬
tive is similar to Comte’s idea of “social dynamics,” whereas the structural-
functional approach is a contemporary relative of his “social statics.” The
evolutionist is concerned with the classification of societies according to an
established evolutionary scale. Time, stages of development, and change are,
therefore, central to his interest. The structural-functional approach involves
a more limited time perspective. It stops the motions of the system at a
fixed point in time, it order to understand how, at that moment, it works as a
system. When considering a particular institution, those guided by the
evolutionary perspective tty to understand how the evolutionary stage of the
society as a whole shapes the form of the institution. The structural-function¬
alists will emphasize more how the institution contributed to keeping the
society in operation. It is readily apparent that this approach could easily
lead the functionalist to neglect the process of change—a point to which we
will return shortly.
The objective of the adherents of the structural-functional view is to
delineate the conditions and demands of social life, and to trace the process
whereby a given society arranges to meet its needs. To choose an obvious
example, if a society is to continue, it must periodically find new members.
In all known societies the need is met by some form of family system. The
family is the institution which acts “for” society to ensure fulfillment of the
functions of sexual reproduction, of early care of the dependent infant, and
of his initial training in the ways of the society in which he will live.
The structural-functional analyst must also deal with the way in which
the different structures are co-ordinated and integrated to preserve the
unity of society as a complete system (or organism). This idea was already
quite clearly articulated by Comte when he said “sociology consists in the
investigation of the laws of action and reaction of the different parts of the
social system.” 20
The structural-functional point of view has undoubtedly contributed sig¬
nificantly to the development of sociological thought and research. Many
features of society which otherwise are puzzling and seem to have no reason
for existence become comprehensible when seen in relation to their “function”
(i.e., their contribution to the flow of social life). Thus, from a functionalist
point of view, rather violent, and even individually harrhful rites de passage
may be treated as useful training in the sort of publicly sanctioned bravery
and endurance which is required in a society which relies on hunting scarce
or dangerous game as its chief source of food. Or the romantic love complex
in our own society may be seen as serving the function of providing the
“push” required to free young people from the dependence encouraged by
our family system, thus getting them to accept the responsibilities of marriage.
This perspective has also made us sensitive to many functions important
to the continuance of social life which we otherwise neglect or to which we
assign insufficient importance. Durkheim and his associates did much to
clarify the significance of public ceremonials as a way of increasing social
20 Auguste Comte (H. Martineau, trans.), The Positive Philosophy of Auguste
Comte (New York: Blanchard, 1855), p. 457.
35
solidarity,21 and the studies by his disciple Marcel Mauss on The Gift 22 re¬
vealed in detail how seemingly unimportant elements of social life can in
fact serve important functions in preserving the bonds which tie one individ¬
ual and one group to another, thereby preserving the unity of society as a
whole.
Sensitivity to the interrelations of the component elements of a social
system has increased our understanding of social change. Our awareness that
changes in one part of society have important implications for other parts
of the system has broadened our perspective, enabling us better to understand
why so often innovations are so slowly adopted (we usually say resisted ),
and why changes introduced to effect one particular purpose so often have
consequences quite different from those initially intended and anticipated.
The structural-functional point of view has also been a great boon to
comparative studies, especially those involving primitive cultures and others
very strange or foreign to us. Many societies seem to have no government and
no economic institutions as we understand them. The functional emphasis
sensitizes us to search for the less obvious ways in which these societies ar¬
range to provide for the flow of goods and services or to control the legitimate
use of force. We are thus enabled to broaden our horizons concerning the
possibilities for variation in the forms of social life, and are, as well, made
aware of the practical limits to utopian schemes of social organization.
The dangers and difficulties inherent in this point of view are not
difficult to discern. The criticism most often cited is that the structural-
functional approach is teleological. Function seems only another word for
purpose, and it is often argued that a person can have purpose but that a
collectivity cannot. One can certainly sensibly reply that many groups act
so effectively in unison that it seems “as if” they were a single organism
possessed of only a single will or purpose. In addition, some of the leading
exponents of the structural-functional point of view use “function” only to
mean “as a consequence of,” thus avoiding the question of value ah purpose.
But even using function in this more limited sense does not avoid the
most serious complaint directed against the structural-functionalists, which
is that they often fail to specify for whom or what something is “functional.”
What is functional for the society may not be functional for the individual-
say slavery in ancient Greece or on the cotton-growing plantations of the
southern United States before 1840. The functionalist point of view easily
leads one to underemphasize the importance of the individual and his needs
relative to those of the group. The focus of a man’s research, and the prob¬
lems and materials he emphasizes, will obviously be different if he assumes
that society was brought into existence and acts mainly to serve the needs
of the individual rather than believing that societv is nature’s prime interest
and that the individual exists mainly to serve the needs of societv.
What is functional for one individual or group mav not be functional
for another. To say that we can resolve this ambiguity by choosing that al¬
ternative which is more functional for the society is not an adequate answer
unless we can get agreement on exactly what constitutes our “society” and
what is or is not functional for it. Unfortunately we cannot always agree on
who, or what, is meant by the term “the society.” The Greek slaves were
not considered members of ancient Greek society, although in some regions
they were the majority of the residents. Even if social scientists can agree on
21 Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life.
22 Marcel Mauss (I. Cunnison, trans.), The Gift (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press,
1954).
36
who are the members of a given society, they may find that the members
themselves do not agree on what is in society’s interest. And even if the
people agree, they may nevertheless be directing their society along the road
to ruin and dissolution, which is hardly functional from any point of view.
The structural-functional approach encourages a search for the function
of every existing structure. The imagination is generally not lacking to devise
such functions. Consequently, everything which exists in a society at any
given time is easily assumed to be there because it is “functional.” Presum¬
ably, if it were not there, some need of society would he left more or less
unfulfilled. This principle can obviously be used to justify opposition to
experimentation and social change, on the grounds that what exists, being
functional, cannot be removed without dire repercussions ensuing.
Despite these defects and dangers in the model, every sociologist to a
degree is something of a structural-functional analyst. There are very few
sociologists who would argue that there is no order or system in social life.
Not many would hold that society can properly be conceived only as a great
buzzing blooming confusion, or that the patterns which the sociologist pur¬
ports to see in social life are nothing more than illusions. It is doubtful that
any sociologist would deny that the continuation of social life requires that
certain functions, such as the socialization of children, the control of violence,
and the regulation of sex be performed by some social agency or propose
that it is'Tmportant to know which does the job and how. Nor would many
challenge the importance of studying the distinctive structures of society to
see what functions they perform.
Considering its potential universal appeal, it is interesting that the
structural-functional approach is the object of such regular and intense
criticism. In part this criticism rests on the difficulties cited above—such as
the tendency to invent functions for everything in sight. In part it rests on
the tendency of those who emphasize structural-functional analysis to act as
if they have the master key to sociology. Perhaps the greatest challenge to
this point of view, however, comes from those who prefer what they call a
“conflict model” of society. They place “conflict” in opposition to “equi¬
librium,” which, in their opinion, is the most important concept for those
sharing the structural-functional approach.
Equilibrium vs. Conflict Models

The equilibrium model of society is a special version
of the functionalist approach. Its critics claim that it deflects attention from
the facts of social tension and conflict, and therefore serves as a politically
conservative influence in sociological thinking. Conservatism is not a condi¬
tion inherent in the structural-functional perspective, which is quite well
able to handle most problems of change. Indeed, the theory explicitly states
that prolonged failure to meet certain functions will bring a dissolution of
society, that a change in structure will influence ability to perform function,
and that a change in one sub-structure will generally affect other sub-structures
in the same system. In the special case of the equilibrium model, however,
the problem of change does tend to drop out of sight in favor of concentra¬
tion on the “steady state” of the system. This defect is not an inescapable
characteristic of the equilibrium model, but in practice it tends to develop
rather consistently.
The equilibrium theory has been most fully elaborated by Talcott Par¬
sons and some of his students. The general model for this theory, one ex¬
plicitly acknowledged as such by its exponents, is the concept of homeostasis

as applied to human physiology by Walter B. Cannon in his widely read
book The Wisdom of the Body. Typical of Cannon’s mode of analysis is
his discussion of the processes which insure that the tissues are steadily
supplied with blood, thus serving to bring them nutriment and to carry off
waste. Cannon showed how, following any lesion, the body immediately
brings into play a series of mechanisms, such as contraction of the blood
vessels leading to the point of injury, a series of adjustments which insure
clotting, increased production of red blood cells, and the like. The body in
this way prevents blood loss from too drastically upsetting its balance, and
then gradually sets about restoring the system to its former equilibrium.-3
Following this model, Parsons and others have conceived of society as
also attempting by more or less automatic adjustments to redress the balance
of its equilibrium when it is upset by internal or external forces. To give an
example, let us assume that in some strata of society the family is weak and
children are often abandoned and generally not properly socialized. If the
values of the society stressed the importance of reasonable care and oppor¬
tunity for all young people, the situation would represent a source of strain
on the value system. If, in addition, the affected areas produced a dispropor¬
tionately large number of juvenile deliquents, a social nuisance would have
been created. Taken together these conditions would be elements of dis¬
equilibrium in the social system. The equilibrium model would suggest that
a society faced with this situation could be expected to take certain correc¬
tive measures. These might include intensified social work with the families
to strengthen them and to teach new ways of child-rearing, the development
of community centers to work with the youth, and investments in new
housing to eliminate blighted areas. With intelligent and timely effort on a
sufficient scale, the original source of “infection” would presumably be
brought under control. In time the affected group would, hopefully, be led
to adopt new habits in the care of children and in its relations to society.
The latter would, then, have had its equilibrium restored.
As a special case of structural-functional analysis, the equilibrium model
has some of the virtues of the former. But the analogy suggested by Cannon’s
studies does not bring anything important to what structural-functional
analysis already contained, and the newly added defects are fairly obvious.
There is no end of historical evidence that societies regularly fail to control
what happens to them; they change radically and very often simply die out.
Second, to apply the analogy of physiological homeostasis, we must know
just what is the optimal state of the system to which it should return when
disturbed. This may be clear with regard to human temperature, but it is not
nearly so obvious with regard to social climate. Third, we need to know
what brings the process about. In Cannon’s model the necessary adjustments
are clearly built into the cell structure, the organs, and the bodv chemistry
of the human organism, but we cannot, with equal preciseness, point out the
specific “guardians of equilibrium” in society.
Tire sharpest criticism of the equilibrium model is launched by those
who oppose to it what they call a conflict model of society. It is an illusion,
they say, to believe that society, especially modern society, is in some sort of
harmonious balance to the preservation of which everyone and everything is
devoted. The critics of the equilibrium theory argue that far from being in
a state of harmonious balance, most societies are usually experiencing con¬
flict, particularly a conflict of interests. In other words, they maintain that
23 Walter B. Cannon, The Wisdom of the Body (New York: Norton, 1932).
38
rather than consensus, the basic condition of social life is dissension, arising
through the competition for power and advantage between the different
groups. The dominant social process, therefore, is not the steady effort to
restore harmony or equilibrium, but the endless struggle between those with¬
out advantages, who wish to secure them, and those with privileges who
wish either to get more or to prevent others from taking what is available.
The equilibrium model, say the proponents of the conflict theory, consciously
or unwittingly, becomes a support for the status quo. Instead of being a lens
which sharpens our perspective and puts social reality in focus, it becomes a
pair of rose-colored glasses which distort reality, screening out the harsh
facts about conflict of purpose and interest in human affairs.
The conflict model of society has recently been most extensively and
vigorously advanced by Lewis Coser, Ralf Dahrendorf, and Johan Galtung,24
but it finds strong support in a number of other critiques of modern soci¬
ology, such as that by C. Wright Mills. There is certainly some justice in
their criticism. An analysis of current sociological writing will reveal much
less description of community and class conflict than the facts would warrant.
To say this is not to declare the conflict model more correct than the
equilibrium model. We are unfortunately not in a position to say which
model is more nearly “the right one.” Indeed, when the question is put in
such general form, it is probably unanswerable. Societies display both con¬
flict and tendencies toward consensus. Periods of relative stability may alter¬
nate with periods of intense conflict and rapid change. Different societies in
different times and places display more of one than the other. To say this
is to utter more than a platitude, yet this is a truth that does not carry us
very' far. What is most important for us to recognize at this point in our
inquiry into sociological analysis is that sociologists select and emphasize
different facts depending upon the model of society they favor.
The philosopher of science, Morris Cohen, has pointed out that social
science typically operates with sets of opposed generalizations, within which
both of the generalizations are to some extent true. He cites as an example
the idea that people are moved by a social instinct, and the opposed notion
that they are inherently individualistic and even anti-social. Some day we may
be able to give precise weight to each such factor, and then, in given situa¬
tions, to balance one against the other. In limited degree this is already
happening in contemporary sociology. Until we make further progress along
this line, we should be responsive to Cohen’s dictum that “science means
the rigorous weighing of all the evidence, including a full consideration of
all possible theories (which is the true antidote for bias or prejudice).” 25
The Physical Science Model

One of the oldest models of society is provided by the
physical world. Indeed before he coined the term sociology Comte referred to
the new field as “social physics.” The idea reappeared regularly in the course
of sociological development, and to this day has substantial influence on the
thinking of many sociologists. Even so consistently a partisan of the struc¬
tural-functional point of view as Talcott Parsons from time to time formulates
24 Lewis Coser, The Functions of Social Conflict (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press,
1956); Ralf Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1959); Johan Galtung, “Pacifism from a Sociological Point of View,”
Journal of Social Issues (1959), 3:67-84.
25 Cohen, Reason and Nature: An Essay on the Meaning of Scientific Method, p.
347.
39
a sociological principle obviously modeled after a typical law of physics. His
principle of inertia, for example, states: “A given process of [social] action will
continue unchanged in rate and direction unless impeded or deflected by
opposing motivational forces.” 26
Several sociologists, notably George Lundberg and Stuart Dodd,27 have
become deeply identified with the position that sociology must follow the
pattern of the natural sciences. Indeed they often take phenomena from the
physical world as explicit models for social events, and suggest that laws
applicable to the former can explain the latter. Contemporary social physics
has gone so far as to assert that the laws which explain the flight of a piece
of paper before the wind may also explain the movements of a man fleeing
from a mob. The intensity of the argument aroused by this idea is typical
of the profound gulf which separates those influenced by a physical model
of society and those who most vigorously challenge its adequacy. The gulf
widens when the principles of physics used are taken from the field of
mechanics.
The most obvious, and most often cited, explanation for the appeal of
the physical science model is that the success of physicists and chemists
have given their approach an aura of power and prestige so great that people
are inevitably attracted to it. Some sociologists do believe that physical
science has the magic key which unlocks all doors, even when there seems
little surface validity in the analogy between physical and social phenomena.
The precision of expression which characterizes physical science, with its
dimensions of space and time, its forces and vectors, greatly tempts those
who weary of the ambiguity of so many sociological terms, the vagueness of
the relations specified between variables, and the indefiniteness of the con¬
clusions reached.
We should be careful to distinguish between the general procedures of
science and particular theories of the physical and chemical sciences. Soci¬
ology clearly shares in and benefits from the general advances in scientific
method, to which the physical scientists have contributed so greatly. Useful
as the general principles of science may be, however, it does not follow that
particular physical science principles, such as those governing the attraction
of bodies in the law of gravitation, must be illuminating models for explain¬
ing social phenomena. The direct application of explanatory models drawn
from physics and chemistry has done very little to advance sociological
analysis. Sociological formulas couched in the language of physics are as a
rule quite empty, because we are unable to specify the units of such terms as
“rate of change” or “direction.” The development of formulas such as the
Parsons’ principle of inertia, therefore, tends to be little more than an exercise.
Even if we can give meaningful content to the concepts drawn from
physics, there is no reason to assume that the relations between the analogous
elements in the social realm will be the same as in the physical world. Indeed,
there is every reason to doubt that they will. Therefore, no particular benefit
is gained by the laborious process of translating sociological problems into
the language of physics or chemistry.
The difficulty of such translation can be well illustrated by the history
of efforts to explain “the observed movement of population in space.” This
certainly sounds like the sort of problem to which a physical model would
26 Talcott Parsons, Robert F. Bales, and Edward Shils, Working Papers in the
Theory of Action (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1953), p. 102.
27 See George Lundberg, Foundations of Sociology (New York: Macmillan, 1939);
and Stuart Dodd, Dimensions of Society (New York: Macmillan, 1942).
40
be relevant. George K. Zipf of Harvard, a philologist and leading exponent
of the social physics approach, sought to explain such movement by what
he called the “principle of least effort,7’ which he regarded as a natural law.
He gave this principle many applications, using it to explain some features
of language as well as the movement of population. According to the princi¬
ple of least effort, the number of people going from one city to another
should be a function of the distance separating them, since the effort required
to cover greater distances would presumably increase as did the distance.
His formula 28 was none too successful in describing the actual flow of popu¬
lation, at least so far as migration from one city to another was concerned.
analysis of the problem by Samuel Stouffer showed how we could
predict the observed population movements much better by introducing the
idea of “intervening opportunities.” Stouffer reasoned that the chance that
people moving from a given city would settle in some other distant city
should be influenced by the opportunities along the way which might initially
attract the migrant and then keep him from going on. Stouffer gave very
precise expression to this idea 29 and he and others firmly demonstrated the
factual superiority of their theory over that originally presented by Zipf. In
later studies Stouffer further modified the theory to take account of the
influence which other migrants competing for the same scarce opportunities
might have on the movement of people from one city to another.30 This
adjustment still further improved his ability to account for the facts of inter¬
city migration. In his last paper on the subject, published shortly before
his death, he urged those who would work on the problem in the future to
abandon the measurement of distance merely in terms of miles and to use
instead some more social measure such as transportation costs.
The precise details of this study are not important to us at this point.
What is relevant is the failure of a simple physical formula to account satis¬
factorily for a social phenomenon to which it seemed maximally applicable.
The principle of least effort involves no sociological concepts—it deals with
social phenomena entirely in terms of physical units—number of persons,
distance, and the like. And it fails adequately to account for the facts on
the migration of people from one city to another. Improved explanation
of such movement was possible only when Stouffer and others introduced
concepts such as “intervening opportunities,” “competing migrants,” and
“economic costs,” terms which have no exact analogue in the physical
world. The explanatory principle finally elaborated by Stouffer, therefore,
bears very little relation to the original developed by Zipf. Zipf’s theory did
lead him to select an interesting social problem, but his physical science
model kept him from developing a satisfactory explanation of it.
Doubts about the relevance for social science of models developed
initially to deal with physical and chemical phenomena should not be allowed
28 George K. Zipf, “The Px • P2/D Hypothesis on the Intercity Movement of Per¬
sons,” American Sociological Review (1946), XI: 677. The exact formulation was as fol¬
lows: “The number of persons that move between any two communities in the United
States whose respective populations are Pj and P2, and which are separated by the shortest
transportation distance, D, will be proportionate to the ratio Pj • P2/D subject to the
effect of modifying factors.”
29 Samuel Stouffer, “Intervening Opportunities: A Theory Relating Mobility and
Distance,” American Sociological Review (1940), VI:845-867.
30 Samuel Stouffer, “Intervening Opportunities and Competing Migrants,” Journal
of Regional Studies (1960), 11:1-26. His theory stated specifically that “the number of
people going ‘S’ distance from a point is directly proportional to the number of opportuni¬
ties on the perimeter of a circle within radius ‘S’ and inversely proportional to the number
of opportunities on or within that circle.”
41
to obscure the more general issue whether sociology is or can be a science.
When we show that one or another model from physics or chemistry fits
social facts very poorly, if at all, we do not thereby settle the question
whether there can be a science of social phenomena. The tendency to assume
we have settled the issue gains force from the fact that some of these who
most vigorously press for the use of natural science methods in sociology are
also these who slip most easily into using physical laws as models for soci¬
ological analysis. The two, however, are quite distinct. Concepts borrowed
from physics probably have the least relevance for sociology, and, in fact,
are usually a trap. The distinctive methods of physics and chemistry are
also unlikely to ever be important for social science. The physical sciences
can, however, offer the social sciences stimulation by suggesting some very
general explanatory approaches or models, providing they are not applied too
literallv. And the general procedures of science certainly have relevance for
sociology.31
Statistical and Mathematical Models

Most sociologists who use statistical methods of
analysis think of them as tools or techniques. Many, perhaps the majority,
would be somewhat surprised if you were to point out that in the mere
adoption of a particular statistical technique they are accepting a certain
mathematical model as an appropriate description of at least some aspect
of the social world. Sociologists tend to think of their techniques as “neutral”
and as not implicitly committing them to any particular view of the world.
In fact, no statistical technique can be intelligently applied unless certain
assumptions are made or conditions met. In meeting them, the sociologist
is accepting certain mathematical relations as a model, even if tentative, of
the social relations he is studying. Since the statistics used by sociologists
tend to follow the theory of probability, sociologists using it are in effect
adopting a probabilistic model of society.
After World War II the application of mathematical models to social
phenomena became an increasingly popular and explicit procedure. The
application of such models generally follows one of two paths. A research
worker observes that his results seem again and again to follow a given form.
He may then look around to discover if there is some mathematical model
which seems to fit this pattern, and, by direct test, will apply it to his data.
If it fits closely, he is likely to use the mathematical model as a basis for
predicting subsequent observations of the same phenomenon. The model
may also suggest to him types of data, or may even predict relationships,
with which he has not yet dealt.
Robert Bales’ study of interaction in small groups provides an example.32
In his small discussion groups Professor Bales recorded and counted each
action directed by and to any person. He then ranked each participant in
the group according to how many acts were directed toward him by others.
In some of his groups Bales observed that about 45 per cent of all the acts
that occurred were directed toward the man who ranked first. About 18
per cent of all acts were directed toward the man who stood second, and
about 6 per cent were directed toward the man who received least attention,
say in a 6-man group. Since this looked rather like the pattern one obtains
with harmonic curves, Professor Bales sought to apply this mathematical
31 This is a theme to which we will return when we discuss the possibility of science
of man in Chap. 7.
32 Other illustrations of Bales’ technique are given in Chap. 7.
42
model to the interaction in groups varying in size from 3 to 8 men. He
reached a striking conclusion that whatever the size of the group, up to 8
men, basically the same pattern was present. The man who received most
attention was the object of about 45 per cent of all action in the group; the
second was the object of about 18 per cent; and the rest divided the remainder
systematically according to the size of the group. The harmonic curve, it
developed, provided an approximate, although far from perfect, fit as a model
for the observed pattern.33
The procedure is not always so simple. The data available to a soci¬
ologist may not so clearly suggest the relevance of a particular kind of mathe¬
matics. Indeed, it is often necessary to construct new mathematical models
in order to deal with the pattern of relations present in a given realm.
The work of Herbert A. Simon, contained in his book Models of Man:
Social and Rational,34 represents one of the most successful and impressive
applications of mathematical models to social science problems. He has
suggested how set theory 35 may be useful in describing political power or
authority, how differential equations may be used to translate into mathe¬
matics the propositions developed by Professor George Homans to describe
interaction in small groups, and how a stochastic process36 model can serve
to describe a series of puzzling statistical regularities which are common to
the distribution of city sizes, incomes, word frequencies, and frequencies of
publication. This last problem suggested that the mathematics of stochastic
processes may prov ide a general model for describing widespread phenomena
of “social imitation.”
Like any other conception of the social world, mathematical models
affect the work of sociologists. They divert his attention to problems to which
mathematics seems most relevant, and away from those which do not lend
themselves to such treatment. Since it is usually difficult to transform or
“translate” actual observations into the terms used in the model, an interest
in mathematical models encourages either intensive preoccupation with
problems of measurement, or a happy game in which the analyst abandons
any pretense that his model is applicable to the real world, and simply
concerns himself with the “as if” world described by his model.
If we acknowledge that to work with statistical procedure is in fact to
adopt a mathematical model, in this case a probabilistic one, then we must
admit that mathematical models have already had a tremendous effect on
sociology. Indeed, they have transformed it. If we regard statistics as merely
a neutral technique, then we should conclude that so far the explicit use of
mathematical models in sociology has made only a very limited contribution.
In the future, of course, such models may well give very impressive results,
but only if we heed Professor Simon’s double caution:
First ... we do well to avoid a priori philosophical commitments to

models of particular kinds—whether they be probabilistic or deterministic,
continuous or discrete, analytic or set-theoretic. . . .
33 Robert F. Bales, Interaction Process Analysis (Cambridge: Addison-Wesley, 1951).
34 Herbert A. Simon, Models of Man: Social and Rational (New York: Wiley,
1957).
35 Set theory is a mathematics developed to deal with sets or classes of things rather
than numbers. In the social sciences it has been the basis of game theory, formulated to
calculate the “return” and “loss” involved in particular decisions.
36 In a general sense, a stochastic process connotes any statistical process. More
specifically, it is any statistical process involving sequences of events in which the proba¬
bility of an event depends on the preceding events. Language, learning, population move¬
ments, and chain reactions have all been studied with stochastic processes.
43
Second, we must not expect to find the models we need ready-made
in a mathematical textbook. If we are lucky, we shall not have to invent
new mathematics, but we are likely to have to assemble our model from
a variety of new materials. For this reason we should be wary of borrowing,
in any wholesale fashion, analogical models from the natural sciences.
Analogies there will undoubtedly be . . . but it will be safer to notice them
after we have developed our theories than to attempt to employ them as
a basis of theory construction.37
Professor Simon’s strictures may themselves be taken as a model of the

sound judgment one needs to exercise when choosing social science models.
Models, Propositions, and Truth

Even within sociology the models of society are
numerous and diverse. Naturally, the question arises: Which are correct,
which true, which false? The question cannot be answered. Indeed, the
question itself must be rejected. All are correct, in part. Each holds a piece
of the truth. No one is more nearly the absolute truth, because there is no
absolute truth. To ask which is truer is to fail to understand the proper
function of such models. They are devices for focusing our attention. They
point to problems; they suggest relevant data; they imply appropriate tech¬
niques by which the data may be collected and methods by which they may
be analyzed. A particular proposition or hypothesis may be true or false.
Sometimes, of course, a model is specific enough to constitute a precise
hypothesis. The unilinear theory of evolution was of that type. Most models,
however, provide more general perspectives. Such models can only be useful
or useless, stimulating or uninteresting, fruitful or sterile, but not true or false.
To say this may seem to be admitting that sociology is not, and never
can be, a science. That depends, of course, on one’s conception of science.
Many people have an image of science as much more orderly, precise, and
unified than it actually is. What any science knows is ordinarily summed
up in a set of theories which are only partially integrated and are sometimes
quite divorced one from the other. Alfred North Whitehead notes in Science
and the Modern World that Huyghen’s wave theory of light, although it
opened great vistas, failed to account for the shadows cast by obstructing
objects. This the corpuscular theory of light, favored bv Newton, did quite
well. Whitehead says of these competing theories that since they were formu¬
lated both have had their “periods of triumph.” 38
One might almost say that to the degree that a science has made rapid
progress, to that extent is it likely to entertain many theories which seek to
account for the torrent of new observations flowing in on it. Thus, Robert
Oppenheimer, one of our most distinguished physicists, characterized con¬
temporary atomic physicists as follows: “We have at this time the feeling
that we are wandering around in fog, somewhere near base camp number 1.”
He went on to say: “There is a place for many approaches to the [atomic]
system, none of which completely exhausts the subject. You need to think
of more than one approach, and you need to carry it out, in order to find
out everything that you can find out.” 39
Oppenheimer describes this as the “complementary approach” to the
37 Simon, Models of Man: Social and Rational, p. 97 ff.

38 Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmil¬
lan, 1925), p. 48.
39 Robert Oppenheimer, “Tradition and Discovery,” ACLS Newsletter (October
1959), 7.
44
study of atomic systems.40 The same attitude should prevail in the social
sciences. We must learn to live with diversity. We must be willing to give up
the security of one model for all, and accept the uncertainty of a world with
many competing models. And we do so not only because we are smugly
certain that “in the end they will all add up.” They may, but we had better
not count on it. More likely we will discover, as Oppenheimer tells us they
have discovered in physics, that having done one thing “you lose the value
of having done the other.” Each approach, he tells us, is a whole chapter, and
“these chapters are not serial or cumulative.”
Nor should we abandon our models altogether. To think we can is a
delusion. They will continue to influence our thinking, only without our
awareness, and, therefore, without our control. We must accept what Oppen¬
heimer calls certain “brute facts.” Every model, every perspective, exacts its
full price from those who use it. In Oppenheimer’s words: “In order for us
to understand anything, we have to fail to perceive a great deal that is there.
Knowledge is always purchased at the expense of what might have been seen
and learned and was not. . . . It is a condition of knowledge that somehow
or other we pick the clues which give us insight into what we are to find
out about the world.” 41
Sociologists’ models are such clues. They should, therefore, not be con¬
fused with the knowledge itself to which they hopefully will lead. But since
the world is endlessly diverse, there is room for many models, each a differ¬
ent potential clue to knowledge.
To urge that we hold to a system of open competition between different
models of man and society is not to suggest that it makes no difference which
one is chosen. Each model has its special time, its “period of triumph.”
What makes one model suddenly productive, capable of generating studies
which, one after another, excite us and spur on our research, is a complex
question we cannot go into. Models seem like mines. The rich veins are
quickly exhausted. Those who prefer to work in the old diggings still get
some ore out, but the yield is meager. Then someone makes a strike else¬
where. A new gold rush is on as everyone dashes to the fresh field. Yet there
are always the lone prospectors, following odd maps, poking around in seem¬
ingly unpromising country, one of whom may nevertheless make the next
great strike.
To have too many models may, of course, be as bad as being restricted
to only one. We then exchange a narrow prison cell for the soaring Tower
of Babel. It is not the uses of models, however, but their abuses which
should most concern us. Sociologists tend toward dogged intellectual loyalties,
favoring one or another approach to the exclusion of all others. The models
they prefer often become Procrustean beds from which they blithely hack
away all observations which do not fit, or racks on which the facts are tor¬
tuously stretched until they take the form the model says they should have.
We must be careful to distinguish between the selective focusing of
attention induced by following a particular model, and the distortion of facts
perceived under its influence. Selective perception is inevitable, and probably
desirable. Without it not only art, but science, could not exist. Distorted
perception, however, is a more serious matter. Darwin long ago warned that
false observations are a greater danger to scientific advance than false theories.
Social scientists tend to an alarming degree to merely derive or deduce alleged
40 In physics it has some special connotations which need not concern us.
41 Oppenheimer, “Tradition and Discovery,” p. 15.
45
facts directly from their models rather than to uncover the facts by more or
less independent observation. And since checking alleged social facts is a long,
laborious, and often unrewarding task, social scientists seldom produce the
sort of crucial experiment which really settles an issue. Cohen and Nagel
made the point very effectively when they said: “the physical sciences can
be more liberal because we are sure that foolish opinions will be readily
eliminated by the shock of facts. In the social field, however, no one can tell
what harm may come of foolish ideas before the foolishness is finally, if ever,
demonstrated.” 42
The solution, however, is not to discard our models. It lies in learning
to couch the propositions derived from them in terms which admit of their
being objectively tested by the general rules of the game established by science.
42 Morris Cohen and Ernest Nagel, An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method,
abr. ed. (London: Routledge, 1939), p. 239.
46
c o n c e p t i o ns
of in a n
in socioiu i leal
analysis
four
It is inevitable that each sociologist should have
some conception of the nature of man, and it is highly probable that it will
influence his approach to social research. Yet there is prevalent in sociology
a strong resistance to attempts to analyze social phenomena in a way that
takes explicit account of psychological factors in social life.
Those who take this position do so, of course, with the most authorita¬
tive of sanctions, since it was Durkheim’s explicit purpose, in the first great
modern work in sociology, to demonstrate that suicide rates could not be
explained by individual psychology. As he defined his task in Suicide, it was
“to determine the productive causes of suicide directly. . . . Disregarding the
individual as such, his motives and his ideas.” And, again, after reviewing
the psychological and other theories on suicide, he declared: “Wholly dif¬
ferent are the results we obtained when we forgot the individual and sought
the causes of the suicidal aptitude of each society in the nature of the societies
themselves . . . the social suicide-rate can be explained only sociologically.” 2
Durkheim was fighting to press back the waters of a veritable sea of
1 In developing this chapter 1 have drawn heavily upon my article “Personality and
Social Structure,” in Robert K. Merton, Leonard Broom, and Leonard S. Cottrell, Jr. (eds.),
Sociology Today (New York: Basic Books, 1959), pp. 249-276.
2 Emile Durkheim (J. A. Spiulding and G. Simpson, trans.), Suicide (Glencoe, Ill.:
The Free Press, 1951), pp. 151, 299.
47
psychologism in order to expose beneath the surface the solid ledge of societal
factors and to create an awareness of the explicit and distinctively social
attributes of situations which generated suicide. Considering the difficulty
he faced, it may be that the only course open to him was to insist on the
exclusive relevance of social factors.
Although Durkheim’s position was appropriate for his time, it is a lia¬
bility for contemporary sociology. It seems clear today that an adequate
sociological analysis of many problems is either impossible or severely limited
unless we make explicit use of psychological theory and data. Indeed, it may
be argued that very little sociological analysis is actually done without using
at least an implicit theory about the nature of human personality. In making
this theory explicit and bringing psychological data to bear systematically on
sociological problems, we cannot fail but improve the scope and adequacy
of sociological analysis.
The student of a social structure seeks to explain the implications for
social action of a particular set of institutional arrangements. In order to do
this, he must correctly estimate the meaning of those arrangements for, or
their effect on, the human personality. All institutional arrangements are
ultimately mediated through individual action. The consequences of any in¬
stitutional arrangement, therefore, depend, at least in part, upon its effect
on the human personality, broadly conceived. The personality system thus
becomes one of the main intervening variables in any estimate of the effects
of one aspect of social structure on another. Moreover, since social positions
are filled by individuals whose psychic properties may vary, it is likelv that
the quality of performance of social roles will vary greatly depending on the
personality needs and dispositions of those who fill the positions.
Discussions of human nature and society usually focus on themes
already discussed by the Greeks: What is the basic nature of man, is he good
or evil, socially responsible or a self-centered egotist? How much of what
we find in man is inborn, how much a product of his environment? What,
if any, are the universal qualities or components of the human personality?
How do the traits commonly found in men combine to form the distinctive
character we find only in certain men? In what places and under what con¬
ditions do these different types emerge and even predominate?
On the Nature of Man

Since sociologists take society as their main concern,
and, for the most part, leave the individual to psychology, one does not find
among them so wide a range of models of man as of society. While most
sociologists make their model of society explicit, their view of man is more
often only implicit. Nevertheless, that implicit conception exercises at least
as great an influence on their work.
Non-sociological Conceptions
The conception of man held by most sociologists is
best understood if we see the contrast between it and other images to which
it is often opposed. Among humanists, the most popular view of man stresses
his uniqueness, his diversity, the constant change in his mood and perspective,
as in Montaigne s remark that man is a marvelous, vain, fickle and unstable
subject, on whom it is hard to form any certain and uniform judgement.” 3
(Chicago: Regnery, 1959), p. 59.
48
conceptions of man in sociological analysis
By contrast, most sociologists stress the regularity of man’s behavior, the
repetition of certain socially relevant actions, and the resulting orderliness and
calculability of social life which follows from this. The sociologist thus calls
attention to man as a creature of social habit. If man were indeed as many
humanists depict him, so sociologists argue, we could have none of our
familiar institutions nor indeed any organized social life at all.
While psychoanalysis does not emphasize man’s ever changing, evanes¬
cent quality, it hardly would nominate the social impulse as the tendency
most regularly manifested in human behavior. Rather, it sees man as dom¬
inated by deep-seated biological drives, by voracious instinctual appetites,
which are constantly clamoring for satisfaction. This conception puts man
over against society. It considers him as only a weakly restrained animal whose
basic primitive nature may at any moment break through in socially disruptive
behavior. Freud summed up this view in a letter to Dr. Van Eeden as follows:
Psychoanalysis has concluded . . . that the primitive, savage, and

evil impulses of mankind have not vanished in any individual, but continue
their existence, although in repressed state—in the unconscious ... —
and that they wait for opportunities to display their activity.
It has furthermore taught us that our intellect is a feeble and de¬
pendent thing, a plaything and tool of our impulses and emotions; that
all of us are forced to behave cleverly or stupidly according as our attitudes
and inner resistances ordain.4
We may note still a third widespread conception of man, sometimes

called the Hobbesian view. In this scheme it is not instinctual sexual energy,
but social drives of a self-centered sort, which dominate man. He seeks to
secure for himself, or for his group, as much wealth, power, and prestige as
he possibly can, and cares for no man except as he may be either a necessary
condition for, or source of, those personal satisfactions which drive every man.
The picture of the world which emerges is one dominated by force and fraud,
in which every man is enemv to every other man. In this view onlv the
power of the state prevents the war of each against all and all against each.
These three conceptions hardly begin to cover the range of important
images of man contained in Western, let alone world, political philosophy,
but they will suffice for our purpose as representative views against which we
may set the elements of the most prevalent sociological conception of man.
The Over-socialized Conception of Man

In opposition to the picture of instinctual and irra¬
tional man, sociologists put their view of social man, a creature whose animal
instincts are tamed and transformed by the process of socialization.5 There
may, perhaps, have been feral children, raised by animals. But if we are to
trust the reports, they seemed more animal than human, and seldom sur¬
vived in civilization for more than a few years. Most sociologists hold that
man as we find him everywhere, even in the most primitive tribes, has had
his original, raw, animal nature overlaid by a long process of social learning.
This directs his biological drives along socially acceptable channels, and
indeed often transforms instinctual energies into social impulses of the highest
and most selfless sort.
4 Quoted in Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Vol. II (New
York: Basic Books, 1957), p. 368.
5 The concept of socialization is defined and discussed more fully in Chap. 5.
49
Sociologists seldom deny the irrational component in man s makeup.
Indeed, some sociologists, such as Pareto, have given the problem of the
irrational in man’s behavior the central place in their scheme of analysis. By
and large, however, sociologists do not feel that man’s irrationality is quite
the obstacle to social life many suppose it to be. They stress society’s capacity
to prevent its manifestation, or through sanctions to control its effects. They
emphasize man’s persistent and purposeful pursuit of the social and personal
goals which his culture and time define as appropriate. In this sense most
human action is “rational,” and in the sociological view, were it not so, men
could hardly survive in nature. Men could not for certain count on the
action of other men, and social life would be all but impossible. And since
men are mutually dependent on others for existence, human life itself would
disappear.
Opposed to the Hobbesian image of man as isolated, exaggeratedly
self-centered, and extremely individuated, sociologists more often see man
mainly in terms of his social drives. They emphasize his desire and need
for affiliation and companionship, this dependence on others for cooperation
and assistance, his interest in extending his personally limited resources and
power through group action. In the common sociological image, man values
others and seeks to relate himself to them. He is seen as committed to mutual
adaptation and adjustment to attain not only his individual and private ends
but also the communal and public goals which he has internalized and made
his own.
Certain elements, then, stand out in the sociological conception of man,
of which we may note three: Man’s “original nature” is seen largely in neutral
terms, as neither good nor bad. It is, rather, a potential for development, and
the extent to which the potential is realized depends on the time and society
into which a man is born and on his distinctive place in it. If it does not
quite treat him as a “tabula rasa,” modern sociology, nevertheless, regards
man as a flexible form which can be given all manner of content.
Socialization, the process of learning one’s culture while growing out
of infant and childhood dependency, leads to internalization of societv’s values
and goals. People come to want to do what from the point of society they
must do. Man is, therefore, seen, in his inner being, as mainly moral, by and
large accepting and fulfilling the demands society makes on him.
In his external life, in relations with his fellows, man is seen as social
man. Locked into a network of social relationships, dependent on others for
support and cooperation, eager to earn their good will and approbation, he
responds to external pressures which again push him to act mainly in accord
with the norms and standards characteristic of society in his time and
place.
These three elements, which make up the typical sociological image
of man, have been dubbed by Dennis Wrong as “the over-socialized concep¬
tion of man.” 6 If we trace the relation of this conception to theories in
Western political philosophy, we must acknowledge that it bears striking
resemblance to the image of man contained in the thinking of the Enlighten¬
ment, to the tradition of Locke and Rousseau, of Montesquieu and John
Stuart Mill. It has much less in common, indeed must generally be seen
as opposed to, the view of man proposed by .Machiavelli, Hobbes, Hume, and
Kant. It also is obviously a view more congruent with the structural-functional
6 Dennis Wrong, “The Oversocialized Conception of Man,” American Sociological

Review (1961), XXVL183-192.
50
approach, especially the equilibrium model, than with the conflict model of
society.
We are not seeking here to assess the correctness or adequacy of this
image, but only the consequences of holding it. Taking the view of human
nature which they do, sociologists must be expected to reject the idea that
differences between nations or cultures are in important degree caused by
innate differences in the people of different countries. They will much more
likely look to differences in level of material culture and in the forms of
economic, political, and social organization to explain the behavior of dif¬
ferent nations.
In the study of differences within any population, sociologists are likely
to be found ranged against those who explain crime, juvenile delinquency,
suicide, or the like, on the basis of innate differences in individuals or groups.
Instead, sociologists propose to explain these phenomena as products of social
arrangements which impinge with differential force on certain individuals
because of the distinctive position they occupy in the social structure.7
Because they thus minimize man’s inherent propensities to evil, the explana¬
tions they offer of starker phenomena such as mass murder, war, mob action,
inquisitions, concentration camps, and the like, tend to be weak and pale
alongside those offered by other disciplines such as psychology or history.
Finally, the sociologists’ conception of human nature leads them to
believe that to change man we must first change social conditions, rather
than the reverse. At the same time they are likely to be very dubious of
reforms which promise utopian conditions under which man will at last be
fully free and subject to no social restraints whatever. They rather take their
stand on a middle ground. While holding that man’s anti-social and self-
centered impulses can either be restrained or channeled to serve the public
good, they acknowledge that in the process man must inevitably suffer some
important restraints on the free and untrammeled expression of his impulses.
Despite these restraints, sociologists argue, on balance social life leaves man
infinitely more free for development and self-expression than he could be in
any conceivable unsocialized state of nature.
Types of Men in Sociology

In the past a great deal of sociological energy was in¬
vested in devising tvpologies of personality as a way of explaining the differ¬
ences in behavior characteristic of different societies and of important groups
within the same society. In The Polish Peasant, one of the landmarks of soci¬
ological research, W. I. Thomas and F. Znaniecki described the Bohemian,
the Philistine, and the Creative Man. Park and Stonequist gave us “the
marginal man,” William Whyte the “street corner boy,” Paul Lazarsfeld
the “influentials,” and Robert Merton the “cosmopolitans” and the “locals.” 8
The pattern seems so compelling that even the popularizers of sociology have
7 For a fuller exposition of this point see the discussion of sociological studies of
deviance and conformity in Chap. 6.
8 W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America,
Vol. I-IV (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1918); E. V. Stonequist, The Marginal
Man: A Study in Personality and Culture Conflict (New York: Scribner, 1937); William
F. Whyte, Street Corner Society, the Social Structure of an Italian Slum (Chicago: Uni¬
versity of Chicago Press, 1943); Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet,
The People’s Choice (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1944); Robert K. Merton,
“Patterns of Influence: Local and Cosmopolitan Influentials,” Social Theory and Social
Structure, rev. and enl. ed. (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1957), pp. 387-420.
51
followed suit, as Vance Packard did in calling his book on social stratification
The Status Seekers. Since the delineation of socio-psychological types seems
so pervasive and important in sociological analysis, we should understand it
more fully. Two illustrations will perhaps facilitate the process.
Vilfredo Pareto created one of the most distinctive and imposing sys¬
tems of sociology.9 One of the central elements in his system was the concept
of “residues,” by which he meant the rather elemental and enduring qualities
of social action. He regarded the residues as “constants” in human behavior.
A given residue might be characteristic of a particular society, institution, or
person. Pareto distinguished six main classes of residues, and he characterized
different societies, times, groups, and persons according to the residues which
were most characteristic of them. For example, he spoke of “foxes,” people
in whom “residues of combination” were strong. “Foxes” innovate, experi¬
ment, take risks. A speculator is typical of the “foxes.” By contrast, the “lions”
are more traditional, devoted to routine and fixed ways of doing things, and
lacking in imagination. In them the strong residue is that of “the persistence
of aggregates,” and they are typified by the rentier.
Pareto used this conception of social tvpes and their underlying char¬
acteristics to explain both social stability and social change. He held that
ideally a society should have leadership strong in the “residues of combina¬
tion,” and followers strong in the residues of “persistence of aggregates.” In
most historical cases, Pareto argued, the ruling classes are not flexible enough
to absorb into their ranks those of the lower classes displaying leadership
qualities. This leads to revolution, and replacement of the old elite with
new groups high in the residues of combination. Then the cycle resumes in
an endless “circulation of elites.” Pareto thus used the idea of social types,
each bearing different residues, as a basis for what we have defined as a cyclical
theory of social evolution.10
In The Lonely Crowd David Riesman presents a different set of social
types, one which has probably achieved wider currency than any sociological
typology ever attained.11 Riesman distinguished three main types, each of
which represents a different model of conformity, or of response to social
control.
The “tradition-directed” are those whose behavior is minutelv con¬
trolled from without by traditional cultural standards, by kinship ties, religion,
ceremonials, and the like. Their outstanding characteristic is conformity to
the external standards of behavior, the etiquette of their community. “Inner-
directed” people are responsive not to “strict and self-evident tradition,” but
rather to standards “implanted early in life by the elders and directed toward
generalized but nonetheless inescapably destined goals.” 12 By contrast, the
“other-directed,” the men with a gyroscope inside, are individuals for whom
their contemporaries are the source of direction.13 They follow the crowd.
Riesman called these “historic” types because he feels that each is most
characteristic of a given kind of society at a certain stage of development.
The tradition-directed man is typical in long settled, unchanging societies,
9 Vilfredo Pareto (T. Livingston, ed.), Mind, Self and Society, Vol. I-IV (New
York: Harconrt Brace & World, 1939). For commentary see George C. Homans and
Charles D. Curtis, An Introduction to Pareto: His Sociology (New York: Knopf, 1934).
10 See also the section on social change in Chap. 6.
11 David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd, abr. (New York: Doubleday, 1958); see
also S. Martin Lipset and Leo Lowenthal, Culture and Social Character (Glencoe Ill.:
The Free Press, 1961).
12 Riesman, The Lonely Crowd, p. 30.
13 Ibid., p. 31 ff.
52
where there is a fairly stable ratio of man-to-land, combined with great
potential for growth in the unused reserves of the society. In Western history
the Middle Ages may be regarded as a period high in tradition-direction.
According to Riesman, a change in the ratio of births to deaths often
brings about profound changes in such a traditional society. As the popula¬
tion expands, the death rate drops, agriculture improves and yields surpluses,
and a new character type comes forward to take advantage of new opportuni¬
ties. These are periods of rapid social mobility, of the accumulation of capital,
of invention and expansion. In such times the inner-directed man comes to
the fore. The Renaissance and the Reformation are periods in our history
which were ideally suited to the rise of the mner-directed man.
Further changes in society, according to the theory, bring further changes
in the dominant social type. Death rates follow birth rates downward; popu¬
lation becomes static or declines; agriculture is replaced by industry, and
industry in part by the service occupations; hours are short, materials and
leisure abundant. At such times men find that: “Increasingly, other people
are the problem, not the material environment.” 14 This is the period in
which the other-directed type rises to prominence. The United States after
World War II may serve as an example.
It is evident from the use Pareto and Riesman make of their typologies
that developing them was not just an amusing parlor game. They used the
character types in historical perspective to illumine major social processes of
adjustment and change. But it is also apparent from these illustrations that
the method provides a rather shaky basis on which to rest a structure of
sociological analysis. Almost every time we turn around, another sociologist
has come forward with a new set of social types. Whose character types shall
we then accept as authentic and socially important?
On closer examination the types defined by different authors seem often
to be the same old cast of characters decked out with new and catching titles,
even though the historic plot is basically unchanged and even the parts sound
fundamentally the same. Riesman’s tradition-directed man, for example,
seems very much like those whom Pareto characterized as strong in the
residues of “persistence of aggregates,” and we would not have to meet him
in the dark to confuse the inner-directed man with the fellow high on the
“aggregates of combination.” These types are also very similar to those de¬
scribed bv Thomas and Znaniecki, and Riesman himself acknowledges that
the inner-directed man is very much like Max Weber’s bearer of “the
Protestant ethic.” 15
There is an appropriate resolution of the difficulty. The inventors of
the social types might be asked to define more precisely exactly what are
the signs, the indicators, whereby we might know one type from another.
Unfortunately, we often discover on closer examination that the distinguish¬
ing characteristics of the types cannot be precisely stated. The other-directed,
for example, is supposed to be typically influenced by his contemporaries.
Yet it is obvious that both the tradition-directed and inner-directed must also
be somewhat influenced by contemporaries if they live successfully in society.
We, therefore, want to know how much each is influenced by his contempo¬
raries, and in which realms of life this influence is more important—in the
choice of one’s car, the books one reads, the wife one takes, the profession
one pursues?
Such questions lead to another issue—that of empirical substantiation.
i* Ibid., p. 34.
15 Ibid., p. 33.
53
Even if we can be sure that the separate qualities Pareto and Riesman
describe actually exist in real men, how do we know whether they in fact
combine in the way the authors imagine? And even if the separate qualities
do hold together in the way the sociologist imagines, how can we tell whether
these types are actually found in the social groups of which they are believed
to be typical? What evidence do we have, for example, that Riesman is correct
in his assertion that other-directed people seem to be emerging distinctively
in the upper-middle classes of our larger cities, and more prominently in New
York than in Boston?
To answer such questions we need reliable and valid measures of the
qualities which presumably characterize the various social types. With such
measures we could, at least in contemporary setting, directly test sub-groups,
or the total populations, of different nations selected as representative of
the various stages of development described bv Riesman. Analysis of the
results would indicate whether his hypotheses were correct, and would give
us some measure of the usefulness of his social types as a tool of sociological
analysis.
Until very recently the suggestion that we undertake such research
would have been utopian. We did not know how to devise the necessary-
tests, we had no means to apply them, and no way to test their value if the
results could have been obtained. Anyone was, therefore, quite safe in pro¬
posing yet another set of social types to explain both history and contempo¬
rary events.
The situation is today quite different. A long line of technological
advances has given sociologists and psychologists the ability to devise tests of
character, to apply them by sampling methods to large groups of people, and
through statistics to meaningfully analyze the results and relate them to
other aspects of social structure. Perhaps the most notable early effort of this
sort made by Gordon Allport and Phillip Vernon. They devised a test of
values to distinguish the 6 types of men suggested by the German social
psychologist E. Spranger, who delineated the theoretical, economic, social,
religious, and political types.16 Several people are at work seeking to devise
objective tests of the personality types described by David Riesman.17 It is
interesting that these empirical studies, although done by people sympathetic
to Riesman, seem to encounter some of the difficulties our theoretical analy¬
sis above anticipated. For example, a study of 2,500 9th- and lOth-grade stu¬
dents by the Rileys failed to locate the inner- and other-directed as pure types.
In most students both of these elements were found to be of more or less
equal strength.18
Perhaps the most outstanding instance of success among the efforts to
develop systematic empirical measures of a theoretically important personality
type is found in studies of the authoritarian personality. This concept was
developed by the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm on the basis of his psychiatric
16 Edward Spranger (P. J. W. Pigers, trans.), Types of Men: The Psychology and
Ethics of Personality, 5th ed. (Halle M. Niemeyer, 1928); Gordon Allport, P. Vernon, and
G. Lindzey, Manual: Study of Values—a Scale for Measuring the Dominant Interests in
Personality, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1960).
17 For example, see Robert Gutman and Dennis Wrong, “David Riesman’s Typology
of Character,” pp. 295-315; Elaine G. Sofer, “Inner-Direction, Other-Direction and
Autonomy,” pp. 316-348; and Matilda White Riley, John W. Riley, and Mary E. Moore,
“Adolescent Values and the Riesman Typology,” pp. 370-388, all in Lipset and Lowen-
thal (eds.), Culture and Social Character.
18 Riley, et al, in Lipset and Lowenthal (eds.), Culture and Social Character, pp
370-388.
54
practice and study of history. Later a group of clinical psychologists studied
the problem intensely in one of the most complex, thorough, and important
social science investigations of the mid-century.19 Their approach combined
careful study of documents, psychological testing, depth interviewing, and a
review of individual behavior. They established conclusively that there was
a syndrome of psychological traits which, in combination, they called “authori¬
tarianism.” Included in this syndrome were extreme conventionality; “anti-
intraceptivity,” meaning resistance to looking inside oneself to examine one’s
feelings, emotions, and impulses; a tendency to project onto others one’s
“bad” impulses, especially in regard to sex; and a feeling that authority is
absolute and one must be submissive to it. From a sociological point of view
one outcome of great importance was the development of a fairly simple
pencil-and-paper questionnaire, known as the F scale, which permits quick
and easy scoring of an individual’s authoritarian tendencies.
The F scale is representative of a newer form of psychological test
which is so easy to give and score that it can be economically and effectively
administered to large samples as part of a general public-opinion survey. As
a result of such developments we now can locate with considerable accuracy
the positions in the social structure in which one or another psychological
type is more frequently found. For example, in the national sample of the
American people in which the F scale was used, Janowitz and Marvick
found only 13 per cent of the well-educated members of the upper-middle
class scored high on authoritarianism. This quality was much more prevalent
in the lower class, being evident in some 30 per cent of the cases. But interest¬
ingly enough, the greatest concentration of persons high on authoritarianism
was among those who held white-collar jobs but had low incomes or little
education. In this group almost 40 per cent scored high. Janowitz and Marvick
concluded, therefore, that their empirical study gave support to the theory,
expounded in many contemporary analyses, that this group is particularly
susceptible to authoritarianism because of the frustrations its members ex¬
perience in their striving to achieve middle-class status.20
The development of simple pencil-and-paper tests of personality such
as the F scale opens the possibility that at last we can provide scientific
answers to one of the oldest and most troublesome questions in the study of
man: “Are there basic differences in the character or personality of the people
who make up the different nations of the world? The concept of national
character is not only old, but has long been under attack for its presumed
kinship with discredited theories about racial psychology. However eager
they may be to avoid seeming to be prejudiced, let alone being “racists,”
social scientists cannot avoid dealing systematically with the issue now that
it becomes practically possible to deal with it empirically.
There are grave technical difficulties facing those who would use psy¬
chological tests across national boundaries. But with sufficient inventiveness
and proper precautions they may sensibly be used. Optimism, or at least the
public expression of happiness, has been measured in a number of compara¬
tive polls of public opinion in the Western World. Invariably the French
19 T. W. Adorno, et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper, 1950),
see especially Chapter VII. See also Richard Christie and Marie Jahoda (eds.), Studies in
Scope and Method of ‘The Authoritarian Personality’ (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1954).
This book contains the contributions of six social scientists who criticize and comment upon
the methodological and theoretical aspects of The Authoritarian Personality, and consider
its impact and implications for studies in the field.
20 Morris Janowitz and D. Marvick, “Authoritarianism and Political Behavior,”
Public Opinion Quarterly (1953), XVIT185-201.
55
emerge as the particularly dour or pessimistic. As many as 40 per cent de¬
scribe themselves as “not very happy,” whereas in other countries of Europe
only about 10 per cent are quite so negative. By contrast, the people of the
United States score very high on these measures. For example, 43 per cent
of the Americans reported themselves “very happy,” compared to only 11
per cent of the French.21
The F scale has also been used cross-nationally with good results, at
least within the limits of continental Europe. Administered to school teachers
in 7 countries, the scale seemed to “work” much as it does in the United
States.22 There were clear differences in the average score of the several
national samples, and in the expected direction, with England and Sweden
showing significantly less authoritarianism than Germany. But the differences
between countries were not much greater than the differences within coun¬
tries when teachers were grouped by religious affiliation. Catholics generally
scored higher than Protestants, and both religious groups showed more
authoritarian tendencies than those claiming no religious affiliation.
Not only the nations of today but even the societies of the past may
prove to be accessible to the students of national character. David McClel¬
land applied the same type of measure used to rate individuals on their
“need for achievement” in order to score written materials from earlier
epochs in Ancient Greece, Spain in the Middle Ages, England in the period
before the Industrial Revolution, and the United States between 1800 and
1950. Indeed, even cultures which left no written record, such as pre-Inca
Peru, can be rated on “need for achievement” by applying a scoring system
originally used with the “doodles” of living persons to the designs on pottery.
Again these efforts are plagued by a host of technical difficulties, but the
relations McClelland found between changes in the economic activity of
societies and the average amount of achievement imagery in their literature
and pottery strongly suggests that such procedures for rating the psychological
properties of past eras may be quite feasible and reasonably reliable.23
We are only on the edge of a great field of exploration. Our early ex¬
perience indicates, as is almost always the case, that social reality is more
complex than our initial schemes suggest, and the key to social change more
elusive than we imagined. The pure qualities of personality dealt with by
theory—such as Pareto’s risk-taking and innovation or Riesman’s “respon¬
siveness to contemporaries”—are elusive, hard to measure, and difficult to
isolate in real situations. Often the composite ideal types cannot be found.
In reality the pure components of personal psychology may combine dif¬
ferently from the way the men who invented them imagined they would.
We are just beginning to learn where, in a population such as that of the
United States, the different psychological types are most frequently found.
Comparative studies simultaneously conducted in several countries are still
largely for the future. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that we are on the
verge of important advances in systematic studies of the socially defined
personality types prevalent at various times and in various social roles. How
far we can apply this approach to the past is uncertain. But on the basis of
21 These and other comparable results of cross-national opinion polls will be found
in Alex Inkeles, “Industrial Man,” American Journal of Sociology (1960), LXVI:1—31.
22 From an unpublished study by Daniel J. Levinson, Arthur S. Couch, and Stein
Rokan, based on material obtained by the Organization for Comparative Social Research.
23 David C. McClelland, The Achieving Society (Princeton: D. Von Nostrand,
1961), especially Chap. IV, “Achieving Societies in the Past.”
56
such studies in the future, we may come to a firmer and more substantial
knowledge of the role which the different types of personality play in social
change.
Personality in Social Roles

If pressed to do so, most sociologists will certainly
acknowledge that in principle sociological analysis must keep in mind the
nature of human personality, and will grant that personality factors theo¬
retically may play a substantial role in determining individual social behavior.
But they are also likely to be rather dubious that such factors possess any¬
thing like the influence exerted by more “objective” structural forces or the
individual’s social position as described in terms of occupation, education,
income, and the like. It is highly relevant to our purpose, therefore, to con¬
sider how more systematic use of psychological theory and personality data
have contributed to a deeper understanding of a problem of major sociologi¬
cal importance—namely, recruitment to occupational and other status-posi¬
tions and the quality of role performance.24
Sociologists have traditionally explained the fact that most people ful¬
fill their major social obligations by referring to the system of sanctions
imposed on those who fail to meet, and the rewards granted to those who
do meet, the expectations of society. Performance is thus seen as largely
dependent on factors “outside” the person. The only thing that need be
posited as “inside,” in this view, is the general desire to avoid punishment
and to gam rewards. Important as such “drives” may be, they do not seem
sufficient to explain the differences in the way people perform their assigned
social roles. While accepting the crucial importance of the objective factors
which determine social behavior, we must recognize that recruitment into
occupational and other status-positions, and the quality of performance in
the roles people are thus assigned, may, to an important degree, be influenced
by personal qualities in individuals. It may be assumed, further, that this
happens on a sufficiently large scale to be a crucial factor in determining the
functioning of any social system. To the degree that this is true, to predict
the functioning of a particular institution, of a small- or large-scale system,
we need to know not only the system of status-positions but also the dis¬
tribution of personality characteristics in the population at large and among
those playing important roles in the system.
It would not do justice to the facts to say that sociologists give no con¬
sideration to the commonly observed and often marked behavioral charac¬
teristics of the incumbents of certain occupations. They generally assume,
however, that these characteristics emerge as a response to the distinctive
situational—or as they say “structural”—pressures which one typically en¬
counters on the particular job. In other words, they assume “anybody”
would probably respond the same way, and that the personality types one
encounters in certain positions probably got that way as a result of the job.
This point of view is reflected in an influential article by Robert Merton, first
published in 1949, on the relation of personality and bureaucracy. With
great skill Merton shows how the values and pressures on the employees of
large-scale organizations induce them in the very process of conscientiously
fulfilling their duties to engage in that sort of exaggerated behavior we label
disparagingly as “bureaucratic.” As Merton puts it: “As a result of their day
24 These concepts—status-position and role—are defined and discussed in Chap. 5.
57
to day routines, people develop special preferences, antipathies, discrimina¬
tions and emphases.” 26 In other words, the bureaucratic personality is learned
on the job.
Although Merton emphasized almost exclusively how the job shapes
the person, he did, at the very end of his article, raise the question whether
or not organizations do not in fact select a particular personality type.-'’
As sociologists and psychologists turned, in the post-war period, to a
more systematic examination of this question, substantial evidence accumu¬
lated to show that people are indeed differentially attracted to occupations
on the basis of their personality characteristics. Perhaps the most substantial
evidence comes from a study of the occupational preference of a nation¬
wide sample of American college students who were asked to indicate their
choice of career and reply to a series of questions which made it possible to
score their values, personality, and social characteristics. 1 he study yielded
much evidence of very strong influence exerted by personality on the stu¬
dents’ career plans. For example, those who scored high on a test of faith
in people” were much more likely to prefer professions in which one gives
personal service. Thus, of those who planned to be social workers, 62 per
cent had high faith, whereas among those who planned to enter sales or
promotional work, only 22 per cent so responded. Those who were classified
as “detached” personalities chose professions involving little contact with
others—such as art, architecture, and natural science—twice as often as did
those who were classified as either “aggressive” or “compliant’ personalities.
With the passage of time in college, furthermore, more and more of the
students brought their occupational choice into line with their values by
changing to more appropriate occupations. Among one group of Cornell
undergraduates, for example, the co efficient of association between values
and career choice increased from .559 in 1950 to .711 in 1952.27
It is of the utmost relevance for the main point we are making in this
section to compare the relative influence on career choice exercised by per¬
sonality factors as against objective indices such as fathers’ occupation and
income. Although the research report did not directly compare the power
of these two influences, the data presented suggest that such structural factors
exert only equal and perhaps even weaker influence on career choice than
did the value and personality factors.
Whether arising from differential recruitment or developed on the
job, differences in modal personality tvpe in different occupations are relevant
to the sociologist only if they can be shown to affect individual role per¬
formance and, consequently, institutional functioning. Studies in which data
on personality and on role performance are simultaneously reported are
rare. The few available indicate that personality does have a marked influence
on role performance. In a study of nurses’ aides in a mental hospital, Gilbert
and Levinson obtained both a measure of personality and a measure of role
performance. The aspect of personality they studied was authoritarianism,
as measured by the famous F scale, and the evaluation of objective behavior
was based on the reports of the aides’ supervisors. Gilbert and Levinson
rated the aides as “custodial” or “humanistic” on the basis of their treat¬
ment of patients. Aides were considered “custodial” in behavior if they made
25 Robert K. Merton, “Bureaucratic Structure and Personality,” Social Theory and

Social Structure, p. 198.
26 Ibid., p. 205 if.
27 Morris Rosenberg, Occupations and Values (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1957),
P- 20 ff.
58
many threats to patients and placed prime emphasis on keeping the wards
quiet. They were scored as “humanistic” if they were more friendly and
respectful toward the patients and assumed the role of “social” therapist
for their wards. For the female aides in three Boston hospitals, the rank-order
correlation between custodialism in the treatment of patients and score on
authoritarianism in personality was .75, reflecting an extremely strong influ¬
ence of personality on behavior on the job.28
Several outstanding studies relate personality to school performance.
Stern, Stein, and Bloom obtained a series of performance measures for two
groups, each of 61 college students, who were rated high and low on stere-
opathy. The stereopathie personality, broadly similar to the authoritarian,
is one who accepts authority as absolute and is submissive to it, prefers de¬
personalized and “codified” relations with other people, inclines to rigid
orderliness and conformity, and usually inhibits or denies his psychic im¬
pulses.29 The importance of these traits is evident when we learn that the
emphasis at the college concerned, presumably at the University of Chicago,
was placed on “capacity for detachment, for delaying resolution or closure,
and for tolerating ambiguous relativities rather than demanding structural
absolutes.” 30 The college thus placed a premium on qualities which were
characteristic of nonstereopaths and relatively lacking in those personalities
high in stereopathy.
Striking differences emerged in the college performance of the two
personality types. At the end of the first year, 3 per cent of the stereopathie
students had withdrawn from the college, whereas only 1 per cent of the
nonstereopaths had done so.31 Intelligence made virtually no difference in
this performance. The complaints of the withdrawing stereopathie students
strongly suggested that their action resulted from a lack of congruence be¬
tween their personality and their consequent ambitions and hopes, on the
one hand, and the special requirements of the particular college they had
entered, on the other. They complained most about the seeming lack of
discipline, the refusal of instructors to give the “right” answers, and the
separation between course content and their immediate and practical voca¬
tional interests.32 This outcome was largely as had been predicted from an
examination of the distinctive qualities of education at the particular college
and the distinctive personality attributes of the stereopahic sudents.
It is clear from these studies that recruitment to status-positions and
subsequent role performance cannot safely be predicted solely on the basis
of the extrinsic features of a position and its place in the larger social struc¬
ture. The personalities of those occupying status-positions strongly influence
the quality of their performance. And since it seems likely that personalities
are not randomly recruited to social positions, the effects of the modal per¬
sonality patterns in any given group of job incumbents may strongly influ¬
ence the performance of the group as a whole. We see then that both social
structure and personality must be treated as important independent, but
interacting, variables influencing the flow of the social process.
28 Doris C. Gilbert and Daniel J. Levinson, “Role Performance, Ideology and Per¬
sonality in Mental Hospital Aides,” in Milton Greenblatt, et al. (eds.), The Patient and
the Mental Hospital (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1957), p. 206.
29 George C. Stern, Morris J. Stein, and Benjamin S. Bloom, Methods in Personality
Assessment (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1956), p. 189.
30 Ibid., p. 206.
31 Ibid., p. 210.
32 Ibid., p. 213.
59
Personality and Politics
Systematic studies which attempt to show how per¬
sonality influences recruitment to status-positions and later role performance
can be extended far beyond the limits of the more restricted study of occupa¬
tions. We are just beginning to grasp in a more systematic way how per¬
sonality factors influence the choice of political role and the style of political
action.33 For example, Henry Dicks, a British psychiatrist, was able to
demonstrate a strong relationship in German prisoners of war between their
personality dispositions and their orientation to Naziism. Those classified
politically as “fanatical, wholehearted Nazis,” when compared with politically
anti-Nazi German soldiers on the basis of psychiatric interviews, were judged
to show a marked taboo against tenderness, to be more sadistic, and to be
more likely to engage in “projection” as a psychic defense.34
The development of psychological measures which can be administered
in the form of questionnaires permits us to extend this type of analysis to
large samples and to a variety of political processes under more natural
conditions than those confronting Dr. Dicks. In their study of authoritarian¬
ism in the American population, for example, Janowitz and Marvick found
that authoritarianism was strongly related to whether or not people bothered
to vote. Of the non-voters, 40 per cent scored high on the personality measure
of authoritarianism (F scale), whereas among those who voted in the pre¬
ceding elections only 25 per cent were so classified.35 F scale scores were also
strongly related to the position people took on foreign policy. Among those
high on authoritarianism, 45 per cent favored a strongly isolationist position,
whereas among the low scorers only 22 per cent took an isolationist stand on
U.S. foreign policy.36 We should note a parallel between this study and one
on student values. The personality measure was as effective in predicting
voting behavior and foreign policy preferences as were the more objective
structural indices usually emphasized by sociologists, such as income and
education.
Personality and Social Structure

I have argued that sociological analysis—the attempt
to understand the structure and functioning of social 'systems—will often
require the use of a general theory of personality and knowledge of the
distinctive personality characteristics of participants in the svstem as a whole,
in major sub-systems, and in particular status-positions. To many, this may
suggest that I am proposing a “reduction” of sociological analysis to the
presumably more basic level of psychological analysis. I am by no means
implying or suggesting this course. What is at issue here is not the reduction
of one discipline to another but the articulation of the two for certain specific
purposes under certain specific conditions.
The two disciplines have quite different analytic foci. Sociology is the
study of the structure and functioning of social systems—that is, relatively
enduring systems of action, shared by groups of people, large or small. Psy-
33 For a fuller account of the problem, see Alex Inkeles, “National Character and
Modern Political Systems’’ in Francis Hsu (ed.), Psychological Anthropology (Homewood:
Dorsey, 1961), pp. 172-209.
34 Henry V. Dicks, “Personality Traits and the National Socialist Ideology,” Human
Relations (1950), III: 111-154.
35 Janowitz and Marvick, Public Opinion Ouarterly, XVII:200.
36 Ibid., p. 198.
60
chology is the study of structure and functioning of the personal system—
the system of action which characterizes an individual biological organism,
notably a human being. There are many areas of traditional sociological
research for which personality theory or knowledge of modal personality
patterns would seem to have little or no relevance—lor example, most demo¬
graphic research, a substantial part of urban sociology, and a great many
problems in measurement or social mapping, including the mapping of class
structures.37 But if we go beyond the mapping of a class structure to deal
with the behavior of members of different classes and the rates, say, of
stability in or mobility out of the particular classes, then psychological data
may assume great importance in the general model of analysis. This is not to
say, however, that the problem “reduces” itself to personal psychology. Ob¬
viously, in an occupational pyramid with relatively few jobs defined as very
desirable and many defined as less desirable, the amount of mobility out of
the lower classes is objectively given by the nature of the pyramid. If educa¬
tion of a given level or quality is a prerequisite to attaining certain occupa¬
tional levels and such education is generally not available in rural areas, the
rate of mobility for rural residents will be primarily determined bv these facts.
Within the framework of such structurally set limits, however, there
is a broad area in which personality forces have considered room to operate.
For lack of appropriate motivation, those who are otherwise eligible may not
use their opportunities for mobility to maximum advantage. Of those who
strive, some will have the capacity, some will not. Even a cursory glance at
the many recent studies stimulated by our national need to discover and
train inborn talent will reveal the serious miscalculations we have made in
assuming that onlv objective factors of “opportunity” are important in
determining mobility drives. If we are to go beyond the mere statistical
charting of mobility rates for different strata to more complex explanatory
schemes with predictive possibilities in new situations, we must be able to
deal with the personal component—the motivated actor in the social situa¬
tion. The mobility rate for the society is not thus reduced to a matter of
mere personal psychology. It remains a social, not a personal, datum.
The same is true of the other aspects of the individual’s social context
of action. But the actions of individuals in any situation are personal, how¬
ever much they reflect the determining influence of the social environment.
And that environment, in turn, can be reflected in individual action only to
the extent that it is mediated through the personal system or personality.
A full understanding of any social situation and its probable consequences,
therefore, assumes a knowledge not only of the main facts about the social
structure—the gathering of which is presumably the special province of soci¬
ological study—but also of the main facts about the personalities operating
in that structure. Thus, what is required is not a reduction of either mode
of analysis to the allegedly more fundamental level of the other, but rather
an integration or coordination of two basic sets of data in a larger explana¬
tory scheme.
37 Social stratification and social mobility are discussed more fully in Chap. 6.
61
basic elements
tit social life
five
To meet the challenge posed by the problems of
developing, sustaining, and elaborating their life in common, men universally
develop specialized activities. The first principle of social life is the division
of labor, the elaboration of differentiated actions designed to meet the
exigencies of daily living in social conditions. The differentiation and speciali¬
zation of human activities compels us to develop a set of terms which are
appropriately differentiated and sufficiently specialized to do justice to the
phenomena we are studying.
Sociologists are often criticized for their use of jargon, their apparent
predilection to develop new words while at the same time giving new
and often strange meanings to old and familiar terms. The charges are
often justified. Equally often they go beyond reason. Systematic discussion
is impossible if one does not work with more or less precisely defined terms.
Without a technical language, scientific communication becomes cumber¬
some and inefficient. Even in the humanities, the desire to be more precise
in analysis leads to the elaboration of technical terms, as anyone familiar
with the “new criticism” in literature will testify.
In point of fact, sociological terminology has been relatively stable, at
least as far as many of its core concepts are concerned. As early as 1900,
the index of the first major sociological journal, L’Annee Sociologique, con-
62
tained many of the terms which are standard in sociological usage today,
such as: urban concentration, sect, race, mores, exogamy, family disintegra¬
tion, social disaggregation, conformism, classes, caste, associations, and adapta¬
tion. It is not so much the terms but the disagreement about their definition,
the ambiguities of their meaning, and the lack of standardization in their
use which are the basic problems in sociology. In this respect sociology pre¬
sents a sharp contrast to the natural sciences. Nevertheless, most sociologists
agree about basic concepts.
However necessary they may be, the definitions of the technical terms
in any field are much iess interesting than the uses to which the terms are
put in analyzing subject matter. Being all too ready to accept this point, I
decided against presenting a set of basic sociological concepts and terms in
the cut-and-dried form of a glossary or list of definitions. I chose, instead, to
introduce these terms gradually in the course of unfolding an approach to
man in society, and delineating the problems of analysis which face the
sociologist who hopes to enrich our knowledge and deepen our understanding
of social processes.
By way of introduction I have briefly sketched the minimum require¬
ments, sometimes called the “prerequisites,” of human social existence. These
are the conditions which any social unit must meet if life is to be sustained
and continued through the generations. The ways in which these prerequisites
are satisfied represents what is distinctively social action as against that which
is human but indistinguishable from the behavior of other mammals. In
solving his basic problems of existence, man develops a series of patterns
of action considered the basic forms of social organization. These forms range
from the simplest customs, such as those governing greetings and departures,
through units of intermediate size, complexity, and completeness, such as
the community, and culminate in the self-sufficient society, the largest unit
for sociological analysis. Cutting across all such units, however, and the
common element in all, is the social relationship, which some sociologists
feel is the really unique subject matter of sociology. Without necessarily
accepting this opinion we may, nevertheless, acknowledge the importance of
this perspective. There follows, therefore, a brief discussion of efforts to
develop special terms to describe the aspects of any social relationship, as
well as some illustrations of efforts to use this approach in research.
The Minimum Requirements

of Human Social Life
It is the nature of man that he can and does elabor¬
ate many aspects of his life until they achieve a degree of subtlety and com¬
plexity beyond all imagining. This tendency is rare, indeed almost completely
absent, in the animal and insect world. Animals may have simple means to
communicate, as in signaling the presence of enemies or food, but they do
not have language which can be used to write elaborate folk tales, create
poetry, and fashion novels. Some animals and insects do intricate “dances”
but these are rigidly fixed by instinct, are generally invariant, and are highly
specific to such acts as mating. Neither animal nor insect develops a reper¬
toire of dances for all occasions, or simply for no occasion other than recrea¬
tion and pleasure. Birds may build complex nests and spiders weave marvel¬
lous webs, but no animals or birds elaborate the building of structures and
their decoration so far beyond their immediate need for shelter and for
preservation as does man in his architectural fancy.
Man’s propensity to elaborate the elements of human action easily ob-
basic elements of social life

scures the fact that underneath this overlay there is a hard core of basic
problems of existence which he must also face. These are not limited to the
physical survival of the isolated or independent organism. Because men al¬
ways live in groups, they face a set of fundamental problems of social life
no less important.
Any living group which endures for several generations has presumably
found some way to meet these demands, else it would not have endured so
long. If the solutions are relatively imperfect, the society may be functioning
poorlv, subject to much strain, and perhaps destined to break up if it does
not soon find better ones. If the society’s answer to the basic challenges of
social life are reasonably satisfactory, however, the system may keep going
for a long time. Since all “ongoing” social systems are presumably meeting
the minimum requirements for existence to some degree, it is easy to take
these requirements for granted, and to pass directly on to a discussion of major
institutions such as the family. This is unfortunate. The inescapable mini¬
mum requirements of social life exert so profound an influence that no
conception of society can be complete or even adequate unless it takes
account of the role which this set of underlying problems plays in organiz¬
ing and focusing all social action.
The question we face here is analogous to that posed in biology: ^WTrat
conditions must be met to sustain the life of an organism? The sociological
form of the question is: If social life is to persist, what conditions must be
met by society? The answer has been couched in various terms. One of the
best known of the recent attempts rests on the concept of “the functional
prerequisites of any social system.” Under this rubric, a group of Talcott
Parsons’ students proposed a list of some 10 conditions any society must meet,
ranging from such obvious needs as that for ^'common system of communica¬
tion to rather less self-evident requirements such as that for “the regulation
of affective expression.” 1
Although to do so may involve some simplification, we may conveniently
group the recurrent problems facing any society in three main sets, each
dealing with a different type of adaptation to the basic facts of life.
Adaptation to the external environment, physical and human, lies at
the center of the first set of requirements. For a group to survive, it must
have a technology adequate to provide some minimum of food, clothing,
and shelter appropriate to its size, geographical setting, climate, and the
like. In addition to meeting this short-run problem, the group must provide
for its long-run survival. This requires, above all, providing nurturing and
care for the very young who are unable either to support or to protect
themselves. Protection includes not only defense against nature and animal
but also against human predators, so organization for defensive and offensive
action against other human groups is included here.
Adaptation to man’s bio-social nature poses a second set of problems.
A society cannot endure if it fails to meet the individual human needs of its
members. In man these needs are not limited to food and clothing, but
include psychic and cultural requirements which are not evident in any¬
thing like the same degree in animals. Social scientists have not been able to
establish a list of highly specific individual needs which must be met by any
society, nor can we say with certainty which common needs are rooted in
man’s biological inheritance and which are products of his long history of
social living. There is general agreement, however, on the types of individual
1 David F. Aberle, et al., “The Functional Prerequisites of a Society,” Ethics (1950),
LX: 100-111.
64
need which should be considered. These include the more obvious tissue
needs for food and shelter, and the infinitely more complex need for sexual
expression. Closely related, but not so well understood on the biological
side, are needs for physical and psychic contact with other humans, for
exercise, and for relaxation or release of tension. Still further from any
specific physiological structure are expressive needs of the kinds usually
manifested in dance, art, and probably in magic and war. Other needs, such
as the need for status and self-respect, we cannot at all locate physiologically,
but they are so nearlv universal in social life that we must assume them to be
rooted in man’s basic bio-social human nature.
Without exception, everv society takes special note of, and makes ad¬
justments to, sex and age and biologieallv crucial events such as birth and
death. Most societies also take account of individual temperamental differ¬
ences, although less regularly and systematically. All provide special arrange¬
ments in the face of illness. Wherever there is social life, there is a distinc¬
tive pattern of leisure and recreation, some elaboration of crafts and art,
and some form of religion expressed in a special set of ideas or myths and
often in fairly elaborate ritual.
A number of plausible interpretations can be placed on these elabora¬
tions of human social life.2 Certainly one important force generating these
universal cultural forms is the need of the individual for certain satisfactions
which go beyond his minimal requirements for food, shelter, and clothing.
Such needs may be thought of as bio-social or psychic, and some adjustment
to them must be made by every society.
Adaptation to the condition of collective living presents a third set of
problems which every society must solve. Man could conceivably survive in
his physical setting without social life. The need to satisfy his bio-social or
psychic needs is probably what drives him to collective living. But finding
himself living in groups, he is immediately confronted by a particular set
of problems which go beyond the individual. Men living together must co¬
ordinate and integrate their actions to some degree to avoid chaos and
confusion. In the collective life of animals and insects, this coordination is
assured bv instinct. In human society it is almost entirely a product of social
invention. Man must elaborate rules and provide orderly procedures to
determine who occupies given sites, to coordinate movement, to control the
use of force and fraud, to regulate sexual behavior, to govern the conditions
of exchange, and so on through the whole gamut of human relations. In
the process of elaborating these rules, man creates the basic units of social
organization. The invention of social organization was even more important
than the invention of tools in setting man apart from the animal world.
The Units of Social Organization

Man is endlessly inventive. But his greatest inven¬
tion is non-invention, the skill of transmitting intact and unchanged from
one generation to the next the fundamental ways of doing things which he
learned from the generation which preceded him. Children are conceived
and reared, houses built, fish caught, and enemies killed in much the same
way by most of the members of any society; and these patterns are main¬
tained for relatively long periods of time. From the perspective of those in
2 Clyde Kluckhohn, “Universal Values and Anthropological Relativism,” Modern

Education and Human Values (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1952), pp. 87-
112, and “Universal Categories of Culture,” in A. L. Kroeber (ed.), Anthropology Today
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 507-523.
65
each new generation, and for the society as an enduring, historical entity,
this process of cultural transmission yields enormous economy. Thanks to it,
each generation need not rediscover, at great cost in time and subject to
great risk of failure, what those coming before have already learned. Not only
is knowledge thus conserved, but the basis for communal life, resting on
common information and understanding, is thus established. Since all those
in each generation receive more or less the same cultural heritage from the
preceding generation, they can more easily relate to one another and more
effectively coordinate their actions.
The grand total of all the objects, ideas, knowledge, ways of doing things,
habits, values, and attitudes which each generation in a society passes on to
the next is what the anthropologist often refers to as the culture of a group.
The transmission of culture is man’s substitute for the instincts whereby most
other living creatures are equipped with the means for coping with their
environment and relating to one another. Yet it is more flexible than instinct,
and can grow; that is, it can store new information, infinitely more rapidly
than the process of mutation and biological evolution can enrich the in¬
stinctual storehouse of any other species.
From Folkways to Institutions

Custom, or alternatively, folkways, are the terms
most commonlv applied to the specialized and standardized ways of doing
things common to those sharing a particular culture. The term can be
applied to as small a social act3 as a man’s lifting his hat and saying “hello’
on passing a woman he knows, or to as large and complex a set of events as
the speeches, ceremonies, parades, and fireworks which grace the celebration
of the Fourth of July in the United States. Custom, then, is any standardized
and more or less specialized set of actions which is routinely carried out
according to a generally accepted pattern in a given group. If the custom
is not only routinely followed, but is, in addition, surrounded by sentiments
or values such that failure to follow the expected pattern would produce
strong sanctions from one’s group, it is referred to as part of the mores. This
distinction between folkways and mores lay at the heart of the work of the
noted American sociologist William Graham Sumner.4
The association between customs is not random. Definite sets or com¬
plexes of customary ways of doing things, organized about a particular prob¬
lem, or designed to attain a given objective, can be readily identified in any
human community. Such a cluster of customary ways of doing things we
designate a role. Roles are generally recognized and defined by the participants
in a social system. They are, therefore, intimately tied to a set of expectations
about which acts go with which others, in what sequence and under which
conditions. Certain roles are open and can be assigned to anyone. A child
asked to go out and rake the leaves has been temporarily assigned a role.
He will be expected to follow a certain broadly defined sequence of acts,
including putting the rake back in the garage when he is through. Any other
child in the family might have been asked, and would have been expected to
proceed in the same way.
Other roles are more highly specialized and become specific to particular
individuals. When this degree of formalization exists, in particular when
we use a specific name, title, or similar designation for certain role incum-
3 The term social act is defined and discussed below in the section on social rela¬
tionships, p. 71.
4 William Graham Sumner, Folkways (Boston: Ginn, 1906), 692 pp.
66
I
bents, then a social position has been created. The term “status” is most
commonly applied to such positions, but since this use of the term is easily
confused with another, as in Vance Packard’s The Status Seekers, as mean¬
ing prestige or standing in the community, we will speak either of “positions”
or “status-positions.” Within our family system we obviously do not recognize
the status-position of “leaf-raker.” In the occupational realm, however, where
the degree of specialization is very much greater, we do recognize such
rather narrowly defined positions as “stoker” on a coal ship or “fireman” on
a train.
A status-position, then, is a socially recognized designation, a position
in social as against geographical space, to which individuals may be assigned
and which confers on the incumbent a set of rights and obligations. The
rights and obligations constitute the role which the incumbent is expected to
play. Positions may' varvlrTThe range and specificity of the roles they involve.
In my status-position as rider on a public bus, my chief right is to be trans¬
ported more or less directly to my destination. My obligations are largely
limited to paving my fare, and not causing any disturbance to the other
passengers. When I step into the position of husband or father, however, I
acquire a large and complex set of roles involving a series of quite diffuse
rights and obligations.
The paths of assignment to status-positions are generally distinguished
on grounds of whether the position is ascribed or achieved. Ascribed status-
positions are those to which individuals are more or less automatically as¬
signed on the basis of accidents of birth. Age and sex form the most obvious
bases for such ascription, and often color, caste, family line, and religion
determine the assignment. Achieved status-positions are those in which a per¬
son is placed because of some action or attainment on his part. In our
society political office and occupation or profession provide the most im¬
portant examples of achieved positions, but one can treat the status-position
of husband and wife in the same way. Certain achieved positions may be
open only to those with prior qualifications on the basis of ascription, and
many positions once open mainly to achievement are captured by a particu¬
lar group and converted into ascribed positions.
Just as social acts may be aggregated into customs, and sets of such
actions aggregated in roles, so a more complex structure of roles organized
around some central activity or social need may be aggregated into an institu¬
tion. E. B. Reuter, in his dictionary of sociological terms, proposes that we
mean by institution: “The organized system of practices and social roles
developed about a value or series of values,5 and the machinery evolved to
regulate the practices and administer the rules.” 6
Institutions lie at the center of sociological attention. They constitute
the main building blocks of society. The number of institutions and the
degree of their specialization varies from society to society. High civilizations
and modern large-scale industrial societies are characterized by the intensive
specialization of institutions organized around delimited problems of social
life, and by the extensive internal elaboration of sub-systems within the
larger institutions.
We must, therefore, think in terms of small-scale and large-scale institu¬
tions, and of complexes of institutions which form sub-systems within the
larger society. At least four major sets or complexes of important institutions
5 Values as a sociological term is defined and discussed below in this chapter, p. 74.
6 Edward B. Reuter, Handbook of Sociology (New York: Dryden, 1941), p. 113.
67
are recognized by most sociologists. It will be evident, however, that each
group could readily be broken up into several still categories.
First, are the political institutions, concerned with the exercise of power
and which have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Institutions involv¬
ing relations with other societies, including war, are also considered to fall into
the political category. Second, there are the economic institutions, concerned
with the production and distribution of goods and services. Expressive-
integrative institutions, including those dealing with the arts, drama, and
recreation, represent a third set. This group also includes institutions which
deal with ideas, and with the transmission of received values. We may,
therefore, include scientific, religious, philosophical, and educational organi¬
zations within this category. Kinship institutions, the fourth main category,
are principally focused around the problem of regulating sex and providing a
stable and secure framework for the care and rearing of the young.
Although it is helpful and to a degree accurate to think of institutions
as organized mainly around one central problem of social existence, it is mis¬
leading to assume that each institution’s contribution to social life is limited
to that main concern. Each major institutional complex participates in and
contributes in a number of ways to the life of the community. The family,
for example, may be, and often is, itself a productive enterprise, and it always
engages in the distribution of goods and services. Economic institutions not
only produce goods and services but must have an internal order which
involves the control of force and the exercise of legitimate authority. These
considerations have led sociologists to make a distinction between social
structures conceived of in either the analytic or the concrete sense. When
speaking of concrete structures, they refer to the institutions we are all fa¬
miliar with—families, courts, factories, and the like. By analytic structures
they mean the whole set of social ways, spread over many concrete institu¬
tions, whereby a society manages to effect the production and distribution
of goods, the control of force, and its other basic functional needs. For ex¬
ample, when we speak of “the structure of authority” in the analytic sense,
we mean the way in which authority is organized and exercised not only in
political affairs but also in the neighborhood, the church, the school, the
family, and even in informal groups. Analytic structures are, therefore, con¬
structs, products of the mind, abstracted from the concrete reality of a set
of specific institutions.
A set of institutions constitutes a social system, of which the institutions
may be thought of as sub-systems. The term “social system,” like many others
in sociology, is used to describe quite different levels of complexity. Thus,
it is not uncommon to speak of the social system of a unit as small as a
village or even a street-corner gang, and of those as large as a nation. Despite
the ambiguity this introduces, it is at the present stage of our development
a term without which we seem unable to manage.
Three elements are relevant to a definition of community. A community
exists (1) when a set of households is relatively concentrated in a delimited
geographical area; (2) their residents exhibit a substantial degree of integrated
social interaction; and (3) have a sense of common membership, of belonging
together, which is not based exclusively on ties of consanguinity. The ex¬
ample most commonly used, most familiar, and most directly accessible,
is that of the peasant village. In such a village the peasants and their families
usually live in fairly close proximity, and their common residence area is
clearly demarcated and known to them. Most of the villagers’ interaction is
with other residents of the same village. The inhabitants will commonly
68
consider themselves of the village, know its name, acknowledge their mem¬
bership in the community, and be defined by and treated by those from
other communities in accord with the standing of the village from which
they come.
The neighborhood is simply a more limited form of community, but
otherwise, it has the same characteristics. There is a physically distinctive
territory, the inhabitants interact with one another relatively often, and
they have a sense of belonging together. The neighborhood is usually the
smallest residential unit, other than the household, recognized by sociology.
1 he latter is not, customarily, spoken of as a community because it is pre¬
dominantly organized on the basis of kinship.
As the size of a group inhabiting a given territory increases, there is an
almost inevitable decrease in the probability of interaction between any two
individuals chosen at random. When interaction between the average mem¬
ber and any other decreases beyond a certain point, the appropriateness of
speaking of a community may be slight. In other words, physical proximity
does not in itself make a community. A census tract arbitrarily and me¬
chanically imposed on the map of a city does not bear any important relation
to the more natural communities which develop in the different sections of
a city. In what sense can the 10 million inhabitants of New York City be
considered members of “a” community? In reply we might say that direct
face-to-face interaction can be replaced to some degree by symbolic inter¬
action, including that fostered by the media of mass communication. And a
sense of common membership can be reinforced by external—i.e., legal or
political—inducements to think of oneself as part of a specified commu¬
nity.
Although physical proximity does not automatically yield a community,
can it exist at all in the absence of a common place of residence? This is
basically the issue raised when we ask whether certain dispersed peoples,
such as the Jews or the Armenians, constitute a “nation,” since they do not
inhabit a common territory. What we answer depends on our definition of
community. If by a community we mean a group inhabiting a common area
of residence, the answer is, by definition: “No.” If, however, we define com¬
munity mainly on the basis' of frequency of interaction, or the feeling of
common membership, the answer could be: “Yes.” Certainly the idea that
a community rests mainly on common feeling or belief is explicitly present
in the expressions “a community of like-minded men” and “the world-wide
community of scholars.” Neither of these “communities” shares a specific
and delimited area of residence.
The essence of community is a sense of common bond, the sharing of
an identity, membership in a group holding some things, physical or spiritual,
in common esteem, coupled with the acknowledgement of rights and obliga¬
tions with reference to all others so identified. We may designate several types
of community. A residence community (also called an ecological community)
is one in which the bond which unites the members is common habitation
of socially delineated physical space: a compound, neighborhood, town or
village, city, region, or state. The term moral or psychic community is applied
to those in which the sense of membership rests on a spiritual bond involving
values, origins or belief. Either type may be largely latent, having merely a
potential for common action, or active, with members interacting regularly
and intensely. The natural small community of permanent residents such as
a village, a town, or a neighborhood combines all these elements. It is an
ecological and moral community, characteristically having a large number

of realized interactions as well as a large number of latent bases for mobilizing
a sense of solidarity in common membership.
Society: National and Worldwide

There is a type of social system larger than the
institution and different from the community. Yet it is not automatically
present whenever there is a set of institutions, nor does it automatically
arise from every set of communities. It constitutes the largest unit with which
sociology is ordinarily concerned, and is designated a society.
In The Structure of Society Marion Levy proposed 4 criteria which
must be met by a group before it may be considered a society: The group
must be capable of existing longer than the life span of the individual; it
should recruit its new members at least in part by means of sexual reproduc¬
tion; it should be united in giving allegiance to a common complex “general
system of action”; and that system of action should be “self-sufficient.” ' The
last of these criteria merits a few words of further explanation. By “system
of action” we mean the total set of customs, values, and standard ways of
acting which are commonly manifested by a group having relatively enduring
mutual social relations. Systems of action may be relatively limited and
moderately simple. For example, the relations between the teachers and
pupils in a school represent the system of action specific to the school. We
consider a system of action “self-sufficient” only if the rules, customs, and
technology of a given group provide resources, knowledge, and legitimate
power which normally arise in the course of social life.
According to this definition, the ordinary township in the United
States, despite its high material culture and complex organization, would
not be considered a society. It does not have the power to organize its own
defense, and as a rule to deal with a murder it is obliged to rely on county
or state police, courts, jails, and the like. A monastery would not qualify,
even if its rules covered murder, because it makes no provision for sexual
recruitment of new members. But these are essentially technical reservations.
A simpler, although somewhat macabre, way to think about whether a group
qualifies as a society would be to imagine that all other communities in the
world except this one were suddenly to disappear. If there were a good chance
that the surviving community would go forward in substantially its present
form through subsequent generations, then it qualifies as a society. Most
primitive tribes, however small, and virtually all nation states clearlv meet
this requirement. If a community could not survive under such a severe test,
or could do so only by developing or elaborating many new institutional
arrangements, such as a system of law and justice for which it formerly
depended on a larger social system, then it does not qualify as a true society.
One can argue that the increased speed of travel, and the interlocking
nature of world economy and international politics have, in effect, made a
single, interacting community of all the people on earth. From this perspective
one would maintain that there is a worldwide social system. Participation in
this system is partly on an individual basis; partly on the basis of informal
groups, as in the relations between relatives dispersed in different countries;
and partly between more formally organized entities, such as companies doing
business internationally, or international welfare organizations such as the
Red Cross. The greatest portion of the interaction which characterizes
the global social system, however, is accounted for bv relations between the
7 Marion Levy, The Structure of Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1952),p. 113. 1
70
nation-states as units, or at least between individuals and groups acting as
representatives or agents of such national units. These activities include diplo¬
matic relations, the control of trade and movement, and war.
Whether the system of action in which the nations of the world partici¬
pate constitutes a true worldwide society, in the sense in which we use the
term, is certainly open to question. The issue hinges by our definition on the
existence of a shared, self-sufficient system of action. On this test the world
community seems seriously lacking. Very few values are shared by the ma¬
jority of the world’s people and fewer still are shared by their governments.
Accepted mechanisms for the peaceful settlement of disputes, an indispen¬
sable element in any society, are poorly developed at the international level.
The United Nations notwithstanding, there is no organized authority with
the power to compel the nation-states’ obedience to group decisions. We are
today probably further from having a truly global society than the world
knew under the hegemony of Rome or at the height of the power of the
Church in medieval Europe. Yet there is reason to feel that since World
War II we have come closer to developing a world society than was true
at any point in the past few centuries.
The Nature of Social Relationships

In exploring the basic elements of social organization,
we identified the institution, the community, and the society, each reflecting
a different degree of completeness as a system of social action. But pursuing
this line we neglected another set of distinctions which has an equally
long and honorable place in sociology. One major mode of sociological
analysis focuses mainly on the frequency and the qualities of social relation¬
ships. This approach can be applied to all the groups we have already dis¬
cussed. It cuts across institutions, households, neighborhoods, community,
and society.
The smallest unit to which sociological analysis is applied is “the social
act.” It has been written about at length by leading sociological thinkers
such as Max Weber and George Herbert Mead,8 but it remains an illusive
concept and something difficult to measure. Most theorists apparently have
in mind the smallest unit of directly visible action which has a reasonably
clear shared meaning for both the actor and others with whom he is in
contact. Tire instantaneous flick of the eyelid may serve as a simple example.
If I merely “blink” spontaneously, especially as a reflex, the act is physical,
but not social. But if I “wink,” meaning to communicate the idea—“I am
with you”—to someone I believe able to read the sign, then the movement of
my eyelid is “a social act.” If the other person responds by nodding or
smiling, and he intends thereby to communicate receipt of the signal from
me, then his nod is also “a social act.” Taken together this sequence repre¬
sents a simple social interaction. Social relationships may be conceived as
made up of sets and patterns of such interaction sequences.
These ideas obviously invite numerous complications. We may ask, for
example: Is an act social if I alone give it meaning? Is it social if it has no
particular meaning for me, but has meaning for others? What about “in¬
ternal” acts, which no one else can directly observe? Different, but equally
8 Max Weber (A. Henderson and Talcott Parsons, trans.), Theory of Economic and
Social Organization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), especially pp. 88-122;
George Herbert Head (C. W. Morris, ed.), Mind, Self and Society (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1934), and (C. W. Morris, ed.), The Philosophy of the Act (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1950).
71
difficult, is the task of setting limits to the beginning and end of any social
act. If I not only wink but also laugh and say, “Very funny,” should each
of these units be considered a social act, or only the entire sequence? It is
obvious that challenging difficulties face those who aspire to classify and
measure interaction in empirical research.
One can easily be tempted to see in the sociological concepts of “the
act” and “the relationship” an analogy with the atom and the molecule in
physics and with the cell and tissue in biology. These are the basic units of
which are built all the larger and more complex structures relevant to the
respective disciplines. It will be no surprise, therefore, that many leading
sociological theorists sought to develop a set of terms to distinguish different
types of relationship and to increase our understanding of them. Sociological
writing is replete with schemes for classifying social relationships, varying
greatly in complexity, sophistication, and thoroughness. Perhaps the most
honored is Charles Cooley’s distinction between primary and secondary
relationships.9 A primary relationship, according to Cooley, is one in which
intimate face-to-face association and cooperation predominate, as a result of
which individuals become fused into a common whole epitomized by stress
on “we” rather than “I.” Similar, and equally well-known distinctions, were
elaborated by Tonnies in Germany 10 and by Durkheim in France.11
Not only have these distinctions endured, but so have the difficulties
of using the concepts with any degree of precision. As Kingsley Davis has
pointed out, Cooley’s stress on “we” feeling cannot be taken as the distinctive
element in a primary group since this same feeling is to some degree necessary
for any enduring community. It must exist even in the great nations, in which
there clearly can be face-to-face contact between only a small proportion of
the members.12
The obvious difficulty is that concepts such as Cooley’s primary group
and Tonnies’ gemeinschaft assume the factual coherence of a set of discrete
aspects of relationships which may or may not combine in reality as the
sociologist thought they would. Such concepts, are, in other words, rather
global summaries; they refer to the hypothetical rather than to the empirically
demonstrated. One of the tasks of those following Cooley and Tonnies has,
therefore, been to designate more precisely what are the aspects of any re¬
lationship. The underlying justification for these efforts at conceptual clarifi¬
cation is, of course, the hope that more precise conceptual distinctions will
encourage more exact observation and measurement. The accumulation of
data based on direct observation would enable us more accurately to describe
the actual pattern of association between various dimensions of interaction
which is assumed to exist when we use concepts such as “the primary group.”
One distinction we obviously must make in describing any relationship
is that between quantitative and qualitative aspects. The quantitative ele¬
ments include, first and foremost, the number of people participating in the
system of action, their concentration or dispersion in geographical space,
the frequency with which they interact with one another, and the relative
duration of their association.
9 Charles H. Cooley, Human Nature and the Social Order (New York- Scribner
1902).
10 Ferdinand Tonnies (C. P. Loomis, trans.), Fundamental Concepts of Sociology
(New York: American Book, 1940).
11 fimile Durkheim (G. Simpson, trans.), The Division of Labor in Society (Glencoe,
Ill.: The Free Press, 1949). These terms are defined in Chap. 3.
12 Kingsley Davis, Human Society (New York: Macmillan, 1957), p. 303.
72
The qualitative aspects of the interaction are less easy to agree about.
Kingsley Davis distinguishes 5 characteristics which, when combined with
certain information concerning the quantitative aspect (which he calls “phys¬
ical conditions”) serve him as a basis for discriminating primary from sec¬
ondary relationships.13 He gives examples of these at the level of both the
dyad and the larger group. His scheme is given in Table 2.
13 Ibid., pp. 294-298.
Table 2
Primary
and Secondary Relationships *
Primary
Physical Social Sample Sample

Conditions Characteristics Relationships Groups
Spatial Identification Friend-friend Play group

proximity of ends
Husband-wife Family
Small Intrinsic valuation
number of the relation Parent-child Village or
neighborhood
Long Intrinsic valuation Teacher-pupil
duration of other person W ork-team
Inclusive knowledge
of other person
Feeling of freedom
and spontaneity
Operation of in¬
formal controls
Secondary
Physical Social Sample Sample

Conditions Characteristics Relationships Groups
Spatial Disparity of ends Clerk-customer Nation

distance
Extrinsic valuation Announcer- Clerical
Large of the relation listener
number Professional
Extrinsic valuation Performer- association
Short of other person spectator
duration Corporation
Specialized and Officer-
limited knowledge subordinate
of other person
Author-reader
Feeling of external
constraint
Operation of formal
controls
* Kingsley Davis, Human Society (New York: Macmillan, 1957), p. 306.

Professor Davis’ scheme is a variant on one more widely known, de¬
veloped by Talcott Parsons.14 He uses a set of 5 “pattern variables” to dis¬
tinguish the aspects of any social relationship. According to Parsons, each
time we act, and in each role in which we act, we are, in effect, emphasizing
one or another side of the 5 basic divisions. If a role is specific, our relation¬
ship is limited to one particular narrowly defined exchange; if it is diffuse,
our involvement will extend over a wide variety of problems or relationships.
We stress either affectivity (that is, feeling, emotion, and gratification), or
affective neutrality, which means we place more emphasis on instrumental or
moral considerations. We manifest particularism when we give special con¬
sideration to people because of their relationship to us, whereas if we evi¬
dence universalism, we treat more or less alike all who come before us in a
given status-position. If my treatment of you is mainly on the basis of what
you are in yourself, in contrast to what you do or have done, I stress quality
over performance. When my concern is mainly to advance the goals of the
group, I display a collectivity-orientation, whereas if I am most concerned
to advance my own interests through our relationship, I stress self-orientation.
Described in these terms, the relations of husband and wife, and indeed all
nuclear family relations, tend to be diffuse, affective, and particularistic, and
reflect stress on quality and collectivity-orientation. The relationship between
a clerk and a customer would be at the opposite pole on each dimension.
Precision in the delineation of concepts is a necessary, although not
sufficient, condition for exact empirical observation. After decades of talk
about the components of interaction within groups, it was only after World
War II that we began systematically to measure precisely the content of
group interaction. Among the most notable of these efforts is the work of
Professor Robert Bales in the Laboratory of Social Relations at Harvard.15
Professor Bales’ technique, called Interaction Process Analysis is sufficiently
advanced so that by study of a discussion group’s interaction “profile” one
can tell at a glance whether it is a dissatisfied group or one with high morale.
I have given an example of such profiles in Table 5, Chapter 7.
The Study of Values
Although the most dramatic advances in the direct

observation of interpersonal relations and the measurement of interaction
have been made in the laboratory, significant progress is also being made in
studying relationships in real life. These studies, however, more often deal
with values about human relations rather than with behavior directly observed.
The term “values” has almost as much importance in sociology as the
terms “institution” and “social system.” Individuals, groups, organizations,
societies, and cultures are all spoken of as “having,” “expressing,” and “pur¬
suing” values. Like many another sociological term, “values” carries a heavy
load indeed. In the many definitions of values proposed by sociologists and
anthropologists, the common element lies in the recognition of values as an
expression of the ultimate ends, goals, or purposes of social action. Values
deal not so much with what is, but with what ought to be; in other words,
they express moral imperatives. Thus, when Weber identified the importance
to Benjamin Franklin of sobriety, strict ethics in business relations, and the
avoidance of indulgence, he was describing Franklin’s values. Almost any
conceivable aspect of any relationship can be, and somewhere probably has
14 Talcott Parsons, The Social System (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1951).
15 See also Chaps. 3 and 7.
74
been, made an object of value. Honesty and duplicity, silence and loquacious¬
ness, stoicism and emotionality, restless activity and passive acceptance, all
have been deeply valued in different societies.
Much the same range of human qualities and aspects of relationships
are recognized in most societies, the main differences between cultures being
in the value they put on these qualities as important or minor, good or bad.
One values aggressiveness and deplores passivity, another the reverse. And a
third gives little attention to this dimension altogether, emphasizing instead
the virtue of sobriety over emotionality, which may be quite unimportant
in either of the other cultures.16
As was true in the study of interactions, it was only after World War 11
that social scientists went beyond merely defining and discussing values and
began actively to measure their nature and distribution. One of the most
complex and interesting of these efforts has been carried out by Florence
Kluekhohn. She began by defining certain basic “common human problems
for which all peoples, at all times must find some solution.” 17 All societies,
she maintained adopt some value position with regard to man’s relation to
other men, to nature, to time, and to activity. She argued that all cultures
had discovered pretty much the same range of positions or alternatives one
might take with regard to these life problems, but that different cultures
placed different value on the various alternatives.
To establish her point Dr. Kluekhohn studied 5 small communities,
each with an apparently distinctive way of life but all inhabiting the same area
in the American Southwest. The groups included a Mormon settlement, one
of ex-Texans, a village of Spanish-Amerieans, and both Zuni and Navaho
Indian reservations. To samples from each community she presented the
same set of basic human situations, and recorded the alternative solutions
they preferred. She found that the groups were indeed different, and “no
two of the cultures chose exactly the same pattern of preferences on any of
the (value) orientations.” 18
The two English-speaking groups were most alike, although differing
in important respects. They seemed to represent one pole, the Spanish-Ameri-
cans the other, with the Indian groups falling somewhere between. For ex¬
ample, the Texans were more individualistic rather than concerned with the
extended family group, were oriented to the future rather than to the past,
inclined to see man as over nature rather than as subjugated to it, and on the
activity dimension were predominantly interested in “doing.” By contrast,
the Spanish-Amerieans stressed lineality (the principle which sees the indi¬
vidual mainly in terms of his relation to an ordered succession of social
positions enduring through time); they were more oriented to the present
than to the future; they viewed man as subjugated to nature; and they
strongly preferred “being” over “doing.” 19
Public-opinion surveys, especially those more recently conducted on an
international scale, also permit us to speak more authoritatively about the
distribution of values in larger groups up to the size of nations. For example,
in 1958 adults in 11 countries were asked what they thought it most impor¬
tant to teach children. Some of the results are summarized in Table 3.
10 For one general reference see Charles Osgood, The Measurement of Meaning
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1957).
17 Florence Kluekhohn and Fred L. Strodtbeck, Variation in Value Orientation
(New York: Harper & Row, 1961), p. 10.
18 Ibid., p. 172.
19 Ibid., p. 170 ff.
75
Table 3
Values in Child-rearing,
in Percentages by Country and Socio-economic Status *
Country and Socio-economic Status

Child-rearing Values Upper Middle Lower
Australia
Ambition 5 3 8
Obedience to parents 13 17 23
Enjoyment 1
Trust in God 26 33 25
Decency; honesty 60 51 45
Don’t know 5 4 3
No. of respondents 94 313 367
Denmark
Ambition 11 13 9
Enjoyment 2 1 3
Don’t know 3 3 2
Japan
Ambition 20 24 22
Enjoyment 4 3 1
Trust in God 4 4 6
Don’t know 2 2 6
Netherlands
Ambition 8 4 3
Enjoyment 1 2 2
Don’t know 4 2 2
* Data provided by International Research Associates, from a release of March 13,

1958.
Alex Inkeles, “Industrial Man: The Relation of Status to Experience, Perception and
Value,” American Journal of Sociology (January 1960), 66:224.
In all of the countries, and at all economic levels, decency and honesty
were the most important values, generally chosen by about half of those
interviewed. This suggests that some values are equally important to all
people, and provides a basis for assuming the existence of a set of pan-human
values. But there are also great differences in the relative importance of other
values in the several countries. Ambition is clearly the second most important
values in all classes in Japan, whereas it is of very minor importance in Aus¬
tralia and the Netherlands. Correspondingly, “trust in God” is quite heavily
emphasized in Denmark and Australia, but to the Japanese it seems hardly
worth mentioning as a quality to inculcate in children.
76
The greatly improved techniques we have developed for the direct
observation and recording of human interaction, and the impressive strides
we are now able to make in studring values about interpersonal relations
held by groups as large as national populations, suggest that in coming de¬
cades those who view sociology as mainly the study of social relationships
may, through the quality of their research, win many new adherents to their
point of view.

fundamental
social
processes
six
If sociology went no further than to offer an elabo¬
rate set of concepts referring to community and society, status and role, pri¬
mary and secondary groups, folkways and custom, it would still contribute
to our thinking about man in society. It would also present an extremely static
conception, analogous to anatomy without physiology. The processes, the
flows and exchanges of action and reaction, with which sociology concerns
itself are numerous. Dealing with them is complicated by the fact that essen¬
tially the same process has often been designated by quite different labels,
each having widespread currency. We cannot, therefore, hope to be exhaustive
in this presentation. But a brief discussion of conformity and deviance,
stratification, and social change should serve to introduce the more important
social processes and to impart some sense of how sociology approaches them.
Our discussion of these 3 processes must serve to represent a much
larger set of processes which characterize all social systems, but which we
could take up fully only if this were an exhaustive treatise rather than a modest
introduction to sociology. Competition and cooperation, conflict and accom¬
modation, immigration and assimilation, integration and segregation, con¬
centration and dispersion, imitation and diffusion—these terms suggest the
range and complexity of the processes which we might discuss. The list is
large, but by no means endless. Sociological interests vary with the times.
Some processes once given a great deal of attention, such as imitation, no
78
longer capture the sociological imagination. Whatever the process, however,
its significance lies not in itself, but in its contribution to the flow of social
life.
Conformity, Variation, and Deviance

T he social order depends on the regular and adequate
fulfillment of the role obligations incurred by the incumbents of the major
status-positions in a social system. It follows that the most important process
in society is that which insures that people do indeed meet their role obliga¬
tions. The processes of conformity, variation, and deviance are, therefore,
among the most crucial with which sociology concerns itself. v
Most people assume, almost glibly, that they know the meaning of con¬
formity. It means doing what you are supposed to do, as exemplified by the
child who puts on his rubbers when his mother tells him to, the pupil who does
his homework assignment, the motorist who stops his car at the intersection
until the policeman signals that he may proceed, and the citizen who honestly
pays his taxes. In all these examples the status-position is clear-cut, the behavior
required explicit and limited, the rules unambiguous, and the power to en;
force conformity physically embodied and close at hand. Sociology starts here
with what we all know and accept; conformity to role obligations rests in
good part on sanctions: the power of others—individuals, groups, and the
L
community—to enforce their expectations by the use of reward and punish¬
ment.
The ultimate negative sanction is, of course, death. Negative sanctions
range through all forms of physical force down to mild restraint. They include,
as well, psychological punishments from the most degrading public humilia¬
tion, through ridicule, to mild forms of censure such as are implicit in many
nominally friendly jibes and critical jokes. Negative sanctions may be effected
not only in doing, but in not doing. In our psychological-minded era, every¬
one has become familiar with the idea of the “withholding of love’’ as a sanc¬
tion parents apply to control their children.
There is an obvious difficulty in reiving on sanctions to insure con¬
formity tcycrucial role obligations: Someone must alwaysTe around toobserve
what happens and to dispense rewards and punishment. Although we are all
to some extent ombrothers’ keepers, no society could manage even a small
part of its diverse tasks if conformity to role obligation rested solely on such
ubiquitous supervision. Motivation, the readiness and desire of the individual
to fulfill his_mle—obligations is. therefore, an indispensable underpinning
which supports the network of roles and insures th£-reasonahlyjariooth flow of
social activity without exr-pssivp social investment in supervision"by others.
Finally, neither sanctions nor motivation to perform can be successful where
the incumbent of status-position does not understand clearly what is required
of him.
When an individual has incorporated within himself knowledge and
appropriate skills necessary to the fulfillment of a role, and when he accepts
the value or appropriateness of the action, sociologists speak of his having
“internalized’’ the role and its psychological underpinnings. The term sociali-
zcrtrorTlrusecrffo^descffbe the process whereby individuals learn their culture,
both in its most general form and as it applies to particular roles. Although
it usually refers to the learning of children, the term socialization may be
used in exactly the same sense to describe adults learning what is required of
them in a new job or some other status-position which they are entering.
A complaint long directed against anthropologists, and sometimes made
79
fundamental social processes
with equal justice about sociologists, is that they too readily assume that the
members of society hold the same values and beliefs and share a common
pattern of action. In trying to develop a “model” of any society, the social
scientist almost inevitably gives us a simplified picture which gravely under¬
states the variety and diversity of attitude and behavior found in most socie¬
ties. Cultural norms and ways of doing things seldom involve rigid and
uniform requirements. They usually permit a fairly wide range in the way
things are done. We are expected to cross streets at the crossing, but people
cross them at all places and in all ways without, in most cases, very much
being made of the fact. Even with regard to the most fundamental issues of
life, most cultures do not hold a single unified set of beliefs. Rather, they
harbor both dominant and quite acceptable variant values.1 Most Americans
are either present or future oriented, but it is quite acceptable to look to and
value the past. Indeed, some social groups in some sections of the country,
notably New England and the South, rest their social distinction in part on
their preoccupation with the past.
Deviance, then, is not necessarily inherent in every departure from a
commonly accepted standard, nor in holding any minority view. This would
be statistical deviance, but not social deviance. Social deviance arises when
the departure from accepted norms involves action about which the com¬
munity feels strongly, so strongly as to adopt sanctions to prevent or other¬
wise control the deviant behavior. In other words, deviant behavior is not
merely oblique to dominant or “core” values, but is antithetical to them.
The point is clear-cut in the case of major crimes. But the issue can also
become clouded, and the designation “deviant” very ambiguous. Exceeding
the speed limit on the highway is against the law. Is it still deviance if almost
everyone does it? In Mississippi local citizens engaged in armed resistance
to United States marshals trying to carry out an order of a Federal Court
instructing them to effect the enrollment of a Negro in the University of
Mississippi. The local grand jury in Mississippi wished to send the marshals,
not the rioters, to jail. Obviously, what is deviant may be different from the
perspective of different groups participating in the same larger system of
action. Landlords owning property near crowded army camps may, for sub¬
standard housing, charge the dependents of mobilized soldiers much higher
rents than those commonly collected in their region. Are they merely follow¬
ing the accepted business practice in taking advantage of an opportunity for
profit, or is their action a deviation from moral norms?
In the United States the study of social deviance has been largely
limited to the study of certain social problems such as crime, juvenile de¬
linquency, prostitution, drug addiction, and the like, all of which are most
common among the lower classes, and in the more depressed and disadvan¬
taged segments of modern industrial society. In the development of such
studies a major role was played by the sociologists at the University of Chi¬
cago, whose home city provided a great natural laboratory for the pursuit of
such investigations. The guiding idea and connecting thread in these studies
was the conviction that such deviations from accepted social norms were not
a product of mental deficiency, of psychosis, or other forms of personal and
psychic aberration, but rather had social roots and were caused by social
conditions. Chief among these were the neglect and consequent deteriora-
1 Florence Kluckhohn and Fred L. Strodtbeck, Variations in Value Orientations

(New York: Harper & Row, 1961). The terms of dominant and variant values have been
proposed by Florence Kluckhohn. Her comparative study of values in the American South¬
west, described in Chap. 5, gives ample evidence for the point made here.
80
tion of certain parts of the city, which produced social disorganization and
in turn bred deviant behavior of all kinds.
One of the typical, and most important, of this series of investigations
was that by Clifford Shaw and his associates on juvenile delinquency.2 By
dividing the city into mile-square areas and recording for each the proportion
of delinquent boys, they were able to demonstrate dramatically that delin¬
quents came overwhelmingly from a small number of areas around the
central business district, or "Loop,” along the Chicago River, near the stock-
yards, and in the vicinity of the steel mills in South Chicago.3 In some of
these mile-square areas as many as one fourth of all the boys were entered
on the police blotter at least once in the course of a year, whereas in the
great majority of districts 1 per cent or less were so entered. The high delin¬
quency areas, although physically separated, were all areas of transition, being
invaded by industry and business, with declining populations living in con¬
ditions of physical deterioration and experiencing the culture conflict at¬
tendant on rapid change.
From these considerations Shaw and his associates drew a conclusion
about delinquency striking similar to that developed much earlier by Durk-
heim to explain suicide. They reasoned that under the conditions existing
in slum districts the community becomes disorganized, and its hold on its
members weakened to the point where individuals are not constrained to
follow the social norms. In their words: “If the community is disorganized
and weak in its control, it will be easy for institutions to disintegrate and
behavior will not be controlled by conventional standards.4 Furthermore,
they argued that under these conditions criminal patterns are so common,
and are transmitted so freely, that they become, in fact, the dominant culture
in high-delinquency areas. Young boys and girls growing up in these districts,
therefore, spontaneously come to learn and accept delinquent patterns as
the natural way of behaving.
The work of Shaw and his associates certainly presented a sharp soci¬
ological challenge to the then current ideas about delinquency as mainly a
product of mentally defective or inherently vicious boys who were somehow
nature’s accidents. But it has itself been since seriously challenged by sub¬
sequent work. Perhaps most important was the research of the Gluecks at
Harvard, who showed decisively that the transitional zone alone could not
explain delinquency since within those zones only some boys, generally a
minority, acted in a delinquent way.5
The Gluecks compared 500 persistent delinquents with 500 non-delin¬
quent boys living in the same district and of comparable age, intelligence,
and ethnic origin. Their findings supported Shaw’s conclusion that psycho¬
logical difficulties such as psychopathy or neuroticism could not explain
the differences between the two groups, nor could differences in physical
strength or the like. They did find, however, that the delinquent boys much
more often came from families which often moved, in which only one parent
was present, the father had bad work habits, alcoholism was prevalent, and
so on through a host of disadvantages. It was, therefore, clear that although
the delinquent culture existed throughout the district, it affected only those
2 Clifford Shaw, et al., Delinquency Areas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1929), 214 pp.
s Ibid., p. 203.
4 Ibid., p. 6.
5 Sheldon Glueck and Eleanor Glueck, Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency (Cam¬
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1935).
81
boys with certain prior family experiences which apparently predisposed
them to delinquency either by affecting their character or by leaving them
inadequately supervised, or both.
Quite a different challenge to the earlier thinking about delinquency is
posed by the recent work of Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin/’ Most
students of the problem assume that delinquent boys have rejected the
dominant middle-class values of society. Cloward and Ohlin believe that
lower-class delinquent boys have the same values as those in the middle
class, but finding legitimate paths for attaining those goals blocked, they
turn instead to illegitimate means. While the Shaw approach would suggest
urban renewal and the Gluecks’ family rehabilitation, the solution obviously
following from the Cloward and Ohlin theory is to provide lower-class boys
with more legitimate opportunities to attain middle-class goals. This idea is
reflected in the title of their book—Delinquency and Opportunity. It has
become the basis for a large-scale experimental program of action-research
in New York City designed to test the efficacy of this idea.
Although American sociology of the Chicago school made major con¬
tributions to our understanding of deviant behavior through its work on
problems such as delinquency, it nevertheless seemed to define deviance as
if it were exclusively a characteristic of the more disadvantaged classes of
society. Edwin H. Sutherland began a long overdue revolution in the Ameri¬
can study of deviant behavior in a pioneering paper on “White Collar
Criminality” which he published in 1940.7 He drew together a variety of
striking bits of evidence which indicated how widespread, indeed ubiquitous,
were violations of criminal law statutes on the part of “men of affairs, of
experience, of refinement and culture, of excellent reputation and standing.”
Among the crimes he discussed were embezzlement, fraud, bribery, misappli¬
cation of funds, false grading and weights, and violations of a number of
federal regulatory statutes such as the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Pure
Food and Drugs Law.
Sutherland rejected the argument that such cases referred merely to
standard sharp business practice. He argued that even though it is not ordi¬
narily called crime: “White collar crime is real crime . . . because it is in
violation of the criminal law (and belongs within the scope of criminology).
The crucial question ... is the criterion of violation of the criminal law.” 8
Not only on this technical ground, but also because white-collar crime is so
expensive to society and so deleterious in its effect on social trust and con¬
fidence, Sutherland urged that criminologists seriously study it as intensively
as they had been studying crimes such as assault, burglary and robbery,
larceny, and the sex offenses more prevalent in the lower classes.
The campaign so vigorously begun by Sutherland in 1940 mirrored a
more widespread dissatisfaction with the narrow definition of deviant be¬
havior prevalent in American sociology. The broader perspective which is
coming to replace it is reflected in the fact that the most popular and
prestigious introduction to the field of deviance available during the 1960’s
contained chapters not only on the usual themes of crime and prostitution,
6 Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin, Delinquency and Opportunity (Glencoe, Ill.:
The Free Press, 1961).
7 Edwin Sutherland, “White-collar Criminality,” American Sociological Review
(1940), V:l—12. See also Albert Cohen, et al. (eds.), The Sutherland Papers (Blooming¬
ton: Indiana University Press, 1956).
8 Sutherland, American Sociological Review (1940), V:5.
82
but also on the world of work, on traffic and transportation in the metropolis,
and on race and ethnic relations. Deviant political and religious behavior
still were not systematically dealt with, however, and as Robert Merton, the
book’s editor, acknowledged, we are still far from attaining a single, over¬
arching or comprehensive, theory of deviant behavior.9
Stratification and Mobility

There is no society known which does not make
some distinction between individuals by ranking them on some scale of
value.10 The most ubiquitous is that between men and women. But such
distinctions may rest on almost any basis, involving either ascribed or achieved
status. Even in the societies with the simplest technology, the good hunter
is distinguished from the poorer one and is generally accorded prestige or
higher standing in the community. The more complex the technology, the
greater the specialization, the more extensive the degree of social differentia¬
tion, the more bases are established for differential valuation.
Such prestige rankings are often referred to as status rankings. It is that
sense of the word that almost everyone has come to know of “The Status
Seekers.” Many radical religious and political philosophies treat all such
distinctions as invidious, and indeed evil. They urge the establishment of a
world in which these distinctions no longer exist, and instead all men are
valued as equal. Most sociologists are dubious of the possibility of creating
such a society, and the unhappy fate of most utopian communities makes
this skepticism warranted. There is good reason to assume that ranking
people is inherent in man, and that no society will ever be without it.
Differential valuation is unfortunately commonly confused with dif¬
ferential possessions, such as skill, power, or economic resources. Sociologists
insist on keeping these categories quite distinct. Exploring the actual relation
between differential possessions and differential prestige is one of the more
important and interesting tasks the sociologist can find. The interrelations
are by no means obvious or simple. Prestige may be used to win access to
economic advantage, and both power and money may be used to buy stand¬
ing in the community—or at least the outward evidences of respect and
prestige.
The individuals in any society may be placed on a scale or hierarchy
of value expressing the prestige or respect in which each person is held. Those
sharing more or less comparable standing will then form a prestige group,
or stratum. In some societies these arrangements are formal and explicit. They
may be religiously sanctioned, as in the Indian caste system, and even en¬
forced by law. Similarly, individuals may be placed on a scale of possessions,
separately for political power, land, and money. Those having similar shares
of power or wealth can be grouped and considered as forming a stratum, or
class, in the hierarchy of possessions.
When we speak of the stratification system in any society we refer to
the nature of its hierarchies of possessions and status, the bases for assign¬
ment to positions in these hierarchies, and to the relations between the two
hierarchies and among groups within each hierarchy. No problem in soci¬
ology has received more attention in the last 3 decades, and probably no
9 Robert K. Merton and Robert A. Nisbet (eds.), Contemporary Social Problems

(New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961).
10 See the section on values in the preceding chapter.
83
other has been the subject of more confusion. This attention stems in good
part not only from the basic importance of the issues but also from the
special role which the theory of stratification plays in the Marxist scheme.
The sociological attack on the problem of stratification seeks to answer
a series of questions. The first is: What is the structure of stratification in
any given society or group? The task here is mainly descriptive, a job of
social mapping. The sociologist tries to determine how many classes there are,
what their characteristics are in terms of income, occupation, and prestige,
how large each class is, where its members are located in physical and social
space, and so on.
The task of description proves more difficult than it might seem on first
glance, because it rests on decisions about a second issue: What_.sho.uld.be
the basis for measuring stratification? There are two main competing ap¬
proaches adopted in placing people in social strata. The “objective_measures
assign great weight to the amount of income, or to possessions, education, or
power a man has. The more “subjective,” or psychological, measures rely
more on the feelings a man has about which class he belongs in, or depend on
the opinion which others have about where they would place a given person
itrthe class hierarchy.
If more than one index of class position is to be allowed, this immedi¬
ately raises serious questions about a third issue: What are the interrelations
between the different measures? Accepting the principle of assignment on
the basis of multiple indicators forces us to inquire into the degree of associa¬
tion among the indicators. If the indicators agree, there is no great problem.
There clearly is a distinct class if those at the top in education, income,
power, and possession are all the same set of men. This was essentially the
condition Lloyd Warner found in his famous study of “Yankee City” during
the ’thirties.11
Warner and his associates placed every one living in an old industrial
port city of some 17,000 people in 1 of 6 classes on the basis of reputation
or social standing. They then studied other aspects of the life of each class,
and found these strongly associated with standing in the hierarchy of social
position. Of those classified as belonging to the upper-upper class, 84 per
cent were, by occupation, proprietors or professionals. The remainder were
in clerical or kindred occupations and none were tainted by connections with
wholesale and retail business or industrial labor.12 Ninety per cent of those
in the upper class who were “employable” had jobs, whereas in the lower-
lower class in that period of depression only 26 per cent were fully employed.13
In keeping with their occupational status, the upper-uppers enjoved the
highest incomes, with an average of $6,400 coming into each of their families
as contrasted with $882 per family in the lower-lower class.14 The upper-
upper families almost invariably lived in the best districts of town, and in
large and better quality homes. The median value of the real estate they
owned was more than $5,800, whereas among owners in the lower-lower
class it was $1,600.15 The advantages of the upper classes also extended into
the realm of political power. They held twice as many political posts as their
11 W. Lloyd Warner and Paul A. Lunt, The Social Life of a Modern Community
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941).
12 Ibid., p. 261.
13 Ibid., p. 424.
ii Ibid., p. 290.
is Ibid., p. 282.
84
proportion of the city population. More important, they were concentrated
in the relatively more powerful public offices. Although they did not have a
monopoly of political power, it could be said that “the upper classes, together
with the upper-middle class, dominate the high control offices” in Yankee
City.16
Since the leading stratum in Yankee City stood at the top on all the
relevant hierarchies, there is little reason to challenge the assertion that they
represented a distinctive social class. Indeed, we may acknowledge the exist¬
ence of social classes even when groups do not have a homogeneous set of
rankings so long as they are consistently placed in certain positions. In other
words, we may still speak of classes if those with the most power prove
consistently to be in the middle range of incomes yet consistently fall in the
low range of education. But what if the men of power include in their ranks
men of both high and low income, and some high and some low in educa¬
tion and in standing in the community? This condition has been demon¬
strated to exist in a number of American communities, and has been particu¬
larly well documented in an outstanding study of New Haven conducted by
Robert Dahl.17 Even in Yankee City, as we noted, the upper classes had to
share power with the middle classes. And the other classes were by no means
so consistently homogeneous as was the upper-upper. In the lower-middle
class, for example, all types of occupation were strongly represented, rang¬
ing from the professional and proprietary (14 per cent) to the semi-skilled
worker (27 per cent).18 About as many lived in large and medium-size houses
in good repair as lived in small houses in poor physical condition.19 In the
face of such diversity within one group, can we still sensibly speak of it as
a social class?
Our response depends on the answer to still a fourth question: What
are the relations between any set of men who share some common position
on one or more indicators of class? Some sociologist'Ta'tgue that a class is
constituted only when men have a common outlook, and in particular, only
when they regularly meet together, have social intercourse, or act together
to advance their common interest. It is largely in this latter sense that C. W.
Mills argued that the United States is governed by a “power-elite” of generals
and businessmen which makes all the really important decisions affecting our
lives.20
It is, of course, much easier to make such assertions than to prove them.
Although Mills presents some material concerning overlapping membership
in major corporations and government service, it remains unclear how much
of a monopoly of power these associations have, and how far they act in
concert or in competition with each other. On a number of these points
Mills has been challenged rather effectively by Daniel Bell, who argues the
case for a series of more or less independent and competing elites.21 Decisions
at the national level are harder to trace precisely than those at the local.
Floyd Hunter, who studied community leadership in Atlanta, reached the
conclusion that there was indeed a power elite of men who were in intimate
is Ibid., p. 372.
17 Robert Dahl, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1962).
18 Warner and Lunt, The Social Life of a Modern Community, p. 261.
19 Ibid., p. 245.
20 C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957).
21 Daniel Bell, “Is There a Ruling Class in America?”, The End of Ideology (Glen¬
coe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1960), pp. 43-67.
85
contact and represented a clique without whose initiative or approval no
important community action could be undertaken.-" But Hunter based his
investigation mainly on the reputation of the leaders rather than by directly
reviewing the history of a series of proposals or decisions. Studies which have
adopted this more systematic approach, such as Dahl s in New Haven, cast
serious doubt on Hunter’s assumption about the existence of a single, cohesive
power elite in the typical American city.
Elites, and indeed any other stratum, may be stable and even permanent,
or they may experience rapid and extensive turnover. A man moving from
one job to another, but at much the same level of prestige or income, is
engaged in horizontal mobility. This type arouses little interest among soci¬
ologists. Movement from one stratum to another up or down any one of
the possible stratification hierarchies is called vertical mobility. This type of
movement suggests a fifth question to which students of this field avidly
address themselves: What are the rates of social mobility?
Rates of social mbBiTily may be computed either within the life span
of a man or, as is more common, between generations of fathers and sons.
Sociologists long entertained the belief, without too systematically examin¬
ing the data, that certain societies, such as India, had highly closed systems
of stratification—that is, there was little upward mobility and almost all
sons ended up in precisely the same stratum their fathers had occupied. This
type of stratification is contrasted with relatively open-class systems, such as
that in the United States, which was long assumed to have a distinctively high
rate of upward mobility.
Recent investigations have taught us to be more cautious about accept¬
ing such traditional, essentially stereotyped images.23 A study of inter-genera¬
tional mobility in 18 countries shows that frequent movement by the sons
of manual workers into white-collar jobs is much more common and wide¬
spread than had been believed.24 In some underdeveloped countries, such as
Italy and Puerto Rico, only about 10 to 15 per cent of the sons of men who
worked with their hands attained white-collar positions. But in 9 of the 18
countries the rate was much higher, ranging between 24 and 31 per cent.
The United States did not have a distinctive rate, but rather shared its lead¬
ing position with several other countries. Even India, always held up as
the leading example of a society with a rigidly fixed caste system, reported a
mobility rate of 27 per cent, although this was limited to an urban sample
from industrial Poona. Perhaps even more striking was the evidence con¬
cerning the formerly neglected subject of downward mobility. In many
countries movement down into the manual class by sons of fathers with
white-collar positions is as common as is upward mobility. Indeed, in 3
countries, the Netherlands, Puerto Rico, and Great Britain, more than 40
per cent of the sons of white-collar fathers become manual, usually industrial,
workers.25
However elites may secure their position, whether bv inheritance, through
talent, or by force, many feel the most important question of all to be the
sixth: What is the influence of the class structure on the lives of the class
22 Floyd Hunter, Community Power Structure: A Study of Decision Makers (Chapel

Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953).
23 A pioneering role in challenging these ideas was played by S. Martin Lipset and
Reinhard Bendix, Social Mobility in Industrial Society (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1959).
24 S. M. Miller, “Comparative Social Mobility,” Current Sociology (1960), IX: 1-89.
25 Ibid., p. 34.
86
Table 4
The Relation of Democratic Government to Indices of Wealth,

Industrialization, Education and Urbanization *
Number in Percentage
Per-capita Percentage of School beyond in Metro¬
Income Males in Primary Grades politan
Countries in: (dollars) Agriculture (per 1,000 pop.) Areas
Europe
More democratic 695 21 44 38
Less democratic 308 41 22 23
Latin America
More democratic 171 52 13 26
Less democratic 119 67 8 15
* Adapted from S. Martin Lipset, Political Man (New York: Doubleday, 1960),
pp. 51-54.
members and on the rest of the social system? Contemporary sociologists,

in their very proper concern with the accurate measurement of class indicators
and their preoccupation with the interrelations among these indicators, have
seriously neglected the important questions about the social consequences
of different class structures which many earlier sociologists had placed at
the center of their interest. The problem of the relations between classes,
most strikingly illustrated in Marx’ theory of the ubiquitousness of class
struggle in all known societies, has been much neglected.
More recently these questions have begun to regain the attention they
deserve. For example, S. M. Lipset in his Political Man used information on
contemporary aspects of economic development to test an idea which we can
trace to Aristotle, that “a society divided between a large impoverished mass
and a small favored elite results either in oligarchy (dictatorial rule of the
small upper stratum) or in tyranny (popular based dictatorship).”26 Using
indices of wealth such as per-capita income, levels of industrialization, urbani¬
zation, and education, Lipset shows conclusively that where there is greater
wealth more widely shared, there the likelihood that democracy will develop
and prevail is greatest. (The basic facts are summarized in Table 4.) Consider¬
ing the relation of these facts to the class struggle, Lipset concludes:
Economic development, producing increased income, greater economic

security, and widespread higher education, largely determines the form of
the ‘class struggle,’ by permitting those in the lower strata to develop
longer time perspectives and more complex and gradualist views of politics.
A belief in secular reformist gradualism can be the ideology of only a rela¬
tively well-to-do lower class. . . . Among the eight . . . wealthiest nations
... all of whom had a per capita income of over $500 a year in 1949 . . .
the Communists [did not] secure more than 7 per cent of the vote. ... In
the eight European countries which were below the $500 per capita income
mark . . . the Communist Party . . . has had ... an over-all average of
more than 20 per cent . . . .27
26 S. Martin Lipset, Political Man (New York: Doubleday, 1960), pp. 51-54.
27 Ibid.., p. 61.
87
Class systems may influence other aspects of social structure, but they
may also be shaped by them. Here we reverse the order of influence and ask,
as our seventh question: What type of society is likely to produce what kind
of stratification system? One of the most interesting propositions, put forth
by Max Weber but not systematically tested since, was that in times of
economic stability the stratification system will most likely rest mainly on
considerations of prestige, but in times of rapid economic change stratifica¬
tion will more likely be based mainly on economic class factors. As Weber
put it: "Every technological repercussion and economic transformation
threatens stratification by status and pushes the class situation into the fore¬
ground.” 28
The sociologists’ attempt to answer these seven questions, even if success¬
ful, does not settle the moral and political issues raised by social stratifica¬
tion. The justice or injustice of different systems of stratification and the
possibility that men may someday form a society in which all are equal in
possessions and in value will continue to agitate men, to excite their con¬
science, and to engage them politically. But the knowledge which sociologists
have acquired and are now developing about systems of stratification in
society can certainly help to establish the discussion of these issues on a
firmer basis of fact.
Social Change
No aspect of social life is more challenging than the
process of change, yet there are few other problems about which contemporary
sociologists seem to have so little to say. Some critics attribute this to a
conservative bias among leading contemporary sociologists. This allegedly
leads them to stress the appropriateness of existing social arrangements,
rather than to face up to the contradictions in contemporary society and to
explore the prospects of changing it for the better. A more charitable interpre¬
tation would stress the shift of sociological interest from historical or long-
range to contemporary and short-range problems, and from the comparative
perspective to greater emphasis on the structure of the single society’ and
even smaller units.
It has become popular, indeed fashionable, to say that sociologists lack
a theory of social change. It would be more accurate to say that in the
study of change, sociologists suffer not from too little but from too much
theory. No other problem in social science has quite the same power to
generate global theories which attempt to explain all else in social life by
reference to one master key. The Marxian theory of history, which predicates
all change in social life on the prior changes in the relations of people to
the mode of production, is but one of a long list of examples. Sociologv has
largely turned its back on such global theories of change. Yet it is quite mis¬
leading to say that sociologists are not concerned with the problems of
change, nor that they are without theory to account for it. Sociologists have
abandoned the search for a single, all-encompassing theory of change. Instead,
they seek to deal with change more concretely, one might say more realisti¬
cally, as it manifests itself in different types of social organization under
various conditions. Several examples, ranging from the smallest to the largest
social units, may serve to illustrate the point.
In the study of attitudes and values, sociologists seek to discover the
forces which produce changes in these important and generally stable personal
28 Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills (trans. and eds.), From Max Weber: Essays
in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 194.
88
orientations and dispositions. In a well-known study of college girls at Ben¬
nington College in Vermont, Theodore Newcomb sought to explain why
some girls gave up their more conservative views under the influence of the
college’s “liberal" faculty, while others continued to adhere to the more
conservative values of their original home and community. The girls who
changed the most, Newcomb discovered, were those “characterized by inde¬
pendence from their parents, [a] sense of personal adequacy in social relations,
and modifiability of habits of achieving their goals.” 29
Working in a very different environment, W. F'. Cottrell asked what
happens to people’s values when the one industry on which they depend
for their livelihood, and indeed on which they based the very existence of
the entire community, is suddenly, totally, and apparently irretrievably lost
to them. In his article “Death bv Dieselization,” Professor Cottrell describes
the reactions of people living in a small community in the western desert,
which had been developed entirely around the technological needs of the
steam engine.30 Such engines required servicing stations at intervals of 200
miles. When the transcontinental railroads switched to the diesel, which
did not require attention at intermediate points across the desert, the entire
economic basis of existence of these engine-servicing towns was eliminated
in one sweep. Although the townsmen had earlier been deeply loyal to the
railroad, many now became very critical of the presumed heartlessness of big
business. Whereas they formerly made a great deal of the traditional Ameri¬
can value of autonomy, independence, and standing on one’s own feet, they
now began to hope for and request numerous forms of government aid.
Formerly they had sanctified the ideals of the private-property philosophy,
but one now heard numerous ideas expressed which, if not quite socialistic
in tone, at least seriously questioned the justice of allowing the pursuit of
profit and “blind” market mechanisms to determine the course of economic
events.
The study of change in institutions is well-represented by the work of
sociological students of the family, who have been concertedly seeking an
answer to the question: What changes occur in the family under the impact
or urbanization and economic modernizations? The attack on this problem
has been carried forward on a truly international basis, and a number of
tentative answers seem likely to endure the scrutiny of further testing. These
investigations reveal that throughout the world the process of modernization
has tended to strengthen the nuclear family as against the extended family;
to increase the degree of mutual sharing of responsibility between the
spouses, in contrast to the more traditional sharp differentiation of responsi¬
bility by sex; and to encourage the free choice of partner by the individual,
rather than by his parents or some other authority. At the same time, these
studies reveal that even under modern conditions there is much strength left
in the extended family, as reflected in patterns of residence and of mutual
help; that some forms of dominance, notably by the men, persist to a
surprising degree even in the most modern households; and that the choice
of marital partner is usually restricted to narrowly defined traditional groups
of “eligibles.” 31
29 Theodore Newcomb, Personality and Social Change (New York: Dryden, 1948),
p. 176.
w.
so F. Cottrell, “Death by Dieselization,” American Sociological Review (1951),
XVI: 358-365.
31 See, for example, the special issue on “Changes in the Family,” in International
Social Science Journal (Paris: UNESCO, 1962), XIV:411—580.
89
Contemporary sociologists have not neglected the study of change in
large-scale societies. Numerous attempts are currently in progress to trace
the changes which the worldwide process of industrialization is introducing
into traditional societies. Professors Wilbert Moore and Arnold Feldman
report that there is a common core of structural elements found in industrial
societies ranging from the more obvious features, such as a factory system of
production and increasing urbanization, through “common cognitive orienta¬
tions, such as the view of time and the uses of knowledge; [and] common
value orientation, such as achievement orientation.” 32 At the same time,
they caution that there is no evidence that as societies become more industrial
they become more alike in all respects, and point particularly to the fact
that industrialization occurs under, and seems compatible with, both demo¬
cratic and totalitarian political systems.
Despite the diversity in the units we have examined and the different
kinds of change they reflect, these illustrations point to a set of elements
and problems common to the study of social change. Probably the greatest
ambiguity results from failure to specify the unit of change—that is, whether
we speak of mankind and all world culture, of a particular society, one institu¬
tion, a set of relationships, or some individual. Second, we must specify the
elements we believe to be changing. For example, if we study change in a
person, do we refer to his attitudes and values, his behavior, as in voting, or
his social standing, as judged by his occupation? Third, it is necessary to
agree precisely about what will be objectively accepted as constituting
“change.” A great many discussions about social change bog down in un¬
resolved argument about whether certain changes, say in the rate of social
mobility, are “real changes” or merely “expressions in new form” of older,
well-documented characteristics.
A fourth set of problems arises from our efforts to measure the rate
and direction of change. Some rates are obvious but relatively unambiguous
—for example, the rate of growth in per-capita income. To measure the
rate at which a population is becoming “modern in spirit,” however, is in¬
finitely more difficult. Measuring the “direction” of change is no less trouble¬
some a task. The classical form which this question takes is: Is mankind pro¬
gressing or regressing? Perhaps less interesting, but more amenable to study,
are questions about the direction of change cast in less global and ambiguous
terms—for example: Are the members of societv becoming more or less inter¬
dependent? Are the populations of the several nations of the modern world
developing a more-or-less common, world-wide, industrial culture?
Important as these issues are, they are, perhaps, all subordinate to the
key question: What are the causes of social change? Sociologists are often
able to establish that two elements of social life vary simultaneously, but
they are much less often able to establish clear-cut sequences of events. They
are even less successful in proving that they have isolated the causal factor
in such sequences. The definitive establishment of causes is rendered difficult
by the multiplicity of factors which operate in most social situations. Further¬
more, sociologists are ordinarily not able to follow the example of the natural
sciences, by developing controlled experiments to isolate the effect of single
causes.33
32 Wilbert Moore and Arnold Feldman, “Industrialization and Industrialism: Con¬

vergence and Differentiation,” Transactions of the Fifth World Congress of Sociology
(Louvain: International Sociological Association, 1962), 11:165.
We return to this issue in the next chapter, where we discuss the controversy
about whether sociology is a science.
90
Sociologists may properly feel gratified that by improving the design of
their research, developing more exact and reliable forms of measurement,
and persistently clarifying their concepts, they are making some progress in
increasing our understanding of the process of social change. Instead of the
single, all-encompassing theory of change so notable a feature of classical
sociology, we now have numerous theories of change which take account of
the specific characteristics of different social units. We may have lost some
sweep, and, perhaps, grandeur, but we are well-compensated by increases in
the reliability and validity of the judgments we make.

modes a! inquiry
in sociology
seven
After settling for ourselves what sociology is about,
developing a satisfactory conception of man and society, and choosing a
problem to study, we still must make important decisions about how to go
about investigating the problem we have selected. Once again, persons new to
the field will find that the alternatives are numerous and that there is no
unanimity among sociologists in accepting some one mode of analyzing
social issues above all others. Instead, there is a continuing, and sometimes
intense, debate. This debate is not limited to the evaluation of techniques,
but rather deals with fundamental issues. Sociologists divide on the issue of
whether sociology is or even can be a science, whether its method should be
that of sympathetic understanding or the controlled experiment, whether it
is nobler to build theory or to get one’s hands dirty digging into the facts,
whether sociology should be politically engaged or value-free. The decisions
which sociologists make with regard to these issues have a profound effect
on the kind of sociological investigations they conduct. To grasp fully what
many sociologists are trying to do, and equally to understand the criticism
which is sometimes directed against their work, one must know why these
issues are important and what are some possible resolutions of the challenges
they pose to sociological inquiry.
92
Is a Science of Society Possible?
Perhaps the most fundamental question which di¬
vides sociologists, one which largely subsumes all the others, concerns the
status of sociology as science. There are really two questions here: Should
sociology try to be a science? If so, is it able to meet the standards of science
as we understand them today?
Sociology had its roots in social philosophy, which was most definitely
not a science by contemporary standards. But in the era which included the
formative years of sociology, the idea of science was ail powerful; it bestowed
the highest prestige on everything. Comte always spoke of sociology as science;
indeed he assigned it first place as the “queen of sciences.” The ideal of
science, thus established, has held sway ever since. As long ago as 1873,
Spencer was arguing the question “Is There a Social Science?” 1 against
attacks very similar to those we can read today in the magazine section of
Sunday’s New York Times.2
There has always been a minority of sociologists, however, who regard
sociology as essentially a humanistic branch of study, concerned with evalua¬
tion, criticism, and sympathetic understanding rather than with the usual
pursuits of science. Often they seem to regard sociology as more a branch of
history or politics than as a separate discipline. They are likely to point to
the fact that Weber classified sociology not with the natural sciences, but
with history and the social studies. Numerous contemporary sociologists hold
to some variant of this position. C. W. Mills, for example, urged that soci¬
ology strive to be a “craft” rather than a science. Control and prediction, he
said, are the concerns of a new bureaucratic type of sociologist who is depart¬
ing from the old ideal.3 Robert Bierstedt said in his 1960 Presidential Address
to the Eastern Sociological Society: “Sociology owns a proper place not only
among the sciences, but also among the arts that liberate the human mind.” 4
Those who wish sociology to be a humanistic discipline rather than a
science base their argument on more than mere preference. They maintain
that there are inherent limitations on the study of social phenomena which
preclude sociology’s attainment of true scientific status. They argue that the
most important events are unique, that social phenomena do not follow
“natural laws,” and that the application of scientific methods to social events
usually destroys the essential meaning of the events.
The Unique vs. the Recurrent

There cannot be a “science” of a single event. Science
deals with the laws which govern recurrent or multiple events. Yet the most
important events to which sociology should address itself, in the view of the
humanist-sociologist, are precisely the unique historical forces and acts which
have most shaped the course of human experience. Pitirim Sorokin force¬
fully expressed this idea when he said:
1 Herbert Spencer, The Study of Sociology (New York: D. Appleton, 1929),

pp. 22-42.
2 Russell Kirk, “Is Social Science Scientific?”, New York Times (June 25, 1961),
Sec. 6:11 ff; Robert K. Merton, “Now the Case for Sociology,” New York Times (July
16, 1961), Sec. 6:14; Russell Kirk, “The Battle of Sociology,” New York Times (July 23,
1961), Sec. 6:30; Letters, New York Times (August 6, 1961), Sec. 6:52.
Press, 1959), pp. 113-117.
4 Robert Bierstedt, “Sociology and Humane Learning,” American Sociological Review
(1960), XXV:3.
93
modes of inquiry in sociology
I, for one, cannot see how we can operationally define and study such
phenomena as the state; the nation; Taoism or Christianity; Classicism or
Romanticism in the fine arts; epic, comedy, or tragedy; love or hatred;
happiness or despair, or, as a matter of fact, any of the events of the whole
past history of mankind. These historical events in all their uniqueness (for
example, the murder of Julius Caesar) have already happened and cannot
be reproduced in any present or future operational setting.5
Although there is some merit to this argument, it does not settle the
issue. Science does not always treat repeated or recurrent events. The Ice Age
or the Jurassic Period in geology, the birth of the solar system in astronomy,
were unique events of momentous significance; but they are not thereby
beyond our powers of scientific study and explanation. Furthermore, reference
to the “uniqueness” of historical acts often obscures the fact that events
such as the murder of Caesar, however individually unique, are also concrete
historical manifestations of a larger class which may be numerous enough to
support scientific generalization. The world has known no small number of
dictators, and, of these, a not inconsiderable proportion have met violent ends.
There is every reason to argue, therefore, even with regard to the death of
dictators, that there may be sufficient examples of important historical events
to support scientific generalization.6 As Morris Cohen said: The fact that
social material is less repeatable than that of natural science, creates greater
difficulty in verifying social laws but it does not abrogate the common ideal
of all science.” 7
Of course, the sociologist who makes an historical generalization may
easily fall into the error of assuming that any particular instance follows the
form and detail of the general case. This happens often enough to be very
disturbing to those who are aware of the distinct, even unique, characteristics
of important historical events, and leads them to the often well-justified
complaint that contemporary sociologists lack a “sense of history.” Neverthe¬
less, those more interested in history often completely fail to understand the
nature of the process of scientific generalization. The effort to discover recur¬
rent aspects of the death of dictators, and to expose the relations between
such aspects, can be an end in itself. Such effort produces that special form
of knowledge which is typical of science. The statement of a statistical regu¬
larity is not an attack on the idea of uniqueness. In presenting statistical
generalizations we are not asserting that any particular selected case must be
like all others. And it is often forgotten that knowledge of the general can
greatly facilitate our understanding of the particular.
Even if we were to allow that the historically unique event is beyond
science, it would not follow that there could be no scientific sociology. If
sociology were to give up all claim to the analysis of the key events of history,
such as the murder of Caesar, it would still have as subject matter all the
myriad forms of social relationship which do recur and indeed have been
repeated daily through the ages. In the relations of nation to nation
and people to people in commerce and war, in procreation and kinship, in
authority and subordination, in teaching and learning, and in all other aspects
of social life, there is no end of recurrent social events which provide the
subject matter for a scientific sociology. Our difficulty lies, indeed, not in
(Chicago: Regnery, 1956), p. 50.
6 George W. F. Hailgarten, Why Dictators? (New York: Macmillan, 1954).
7 Morris Cohen, Reason and Nature: An Essay on the Meaning of Scientific Method
(New York: Macmillan, 1931), p. 345.
94
having so few recurrent acts to analyze but so many. When we consider our
resources and our past accomplishment, the magnitude of the task looms
exceedingly large.
The Possibility of Social Laws

lire prospect for a scientific sociology rests not only
on the argument that social events are recurrent but also on the belief that
they are regular or “lawful.” This assumption was long ago set down by
Durkheim as “the line” for all sociologists. Writing the preface to the first
issue of L’Annee Sociologique he said: “All doctrines . . . concern us, pro¬
vided they admit the postulate which is the condition of any sociology,
namely, that laws exist which reflection, carried out methodically, enables us
to discover.” 8
After some 70 years of trying, sociologists are no longer so sanguine
about the possibility that they can discover the laws of social phenomena.
Indeed, Morris Cohen makes the stark suggestion that there may not be any
social laws. Cohen acknowledges that social phenomena are determined, and
in that sense are like all other natural phenomena. But in the case of physical
laws, we have “relatively simple analytic functions containing a small number
of variables,” whereas in social phenomena we must deal with so large a
number of variables organized in such complex patterns of interrelationship,
as to seem “to a finite mind in limited time [not to] display any laws at all.” 9
The sociology books do, of course, contain references to numerous laws.
Durkheim’s law, that the suicide rate varies inversely with the degree of social
integration characteristic of anv group, is perhaps the best known. It is cer¬
tainly one of the more precise and best established. Even this law suffers from
a defect which is more painfully evident in the numerous social laws with
which the history of sociology is studded. Laws are inherently abstract. They
state what would be true if all other things remain equal. Although this often
happens in the physical world, it almost never does in the social. One sociolo¬
gist may prove, in one field of human action or with one population, that
people respond to their economic interests; yet another can establish that they
are influenced by their religion; whereas a third may show that education
shapes the response in question; and a fourth will soon demonstrate that age
plays a role, and so on at great length. Our failure to develop simple sociologi¬
cal laws may, therefore, be largely a reflection of the staggering complexity of
social phenomena.
As sociology has developed in the recent past, it has shown a marked
tendency to produce ever more complicated versions of what were initially
simple theories describing how “x varies with y.” Professor Robin Williams, in
his presidential address to the American Sociological Association in 1958,
pointed out that we no longer accept the classic and simple hypotheses we
once favored. He pointed out, for example, that we were once satisfied to
explain mutual personal attraction by the statement: “the greater the fre¬
quency of interaction between any two persons, the more likely it is that there
will be mutual attraction, all other things being the same.” 10 Our more
sophisticated contemporary researcher will now propose that: “Within an
interaction situation, friendship formation will be more likely to occur the
8 Kurt H. Wolff (ed.), Emile Durkheim, 1858-1917: A Collection of Essays, with

Translations and a Bibliography (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1960), p. 345.
9 Cohen, Reason and Nature, p. 356.
10 Robin Williams, “Continuity and Change in Sociological Study,” American Soci¬
ological Review (1958), XXIII:624.
95
longer the situation occurs, the more often it is repeated, the more intimate
it is, the less [the] competition that is involved, the more relaxed the atmos¬
phere, and the more need there is for mutual activity.” 11
What was once beautifully simple has now become devilishly complex.
If it is this staggering complexity of social phenomena which stands in the
way of sociological progress, the answer may lie in modern mathematical
modes of analysis and in the electronic computing machines which, unlike
the “finite mind” of man, are undaunted by unlimited complexity. Of course,
the machines can perform their unique function of rapidly processing large
amounts of extremely complex data only if we can succeed in measuring social
interaction in sufficient detail and with great precision. Unfortunately, with
a few exceptions, we are still far from being able to thus “operationalize” our
observation and recording of social phenomena. Nevertheless, some will take
encouragement from Professor Herbert Simon’s belief in the promise which
mathematics holds for mastering the complexity of social phenomena: “Math¬
ematics has become the dominant language of the natural sciences not be¬
cause it is quantitative—a common delusion—but primarily because it permits
clear and rigorous reasoning about phenomena too complex to be handled in
words. This advantage of mathematics over cruder languages should prove of
even greater significance in the social sciences, which deal with phenomena of
the greatest complexity, than it has in the natural sciences.” 12
The Conflict
of Meaning and Measurement
To the degree that social science requires ever greater
precision, objective measurement, mathematical expression, and machine
processing, it encounters with increasing vigor the charge that it distorts or
even becomes emptied of meaning. Weber held it to be the distinction of
social science that “we can accomplish something which is never attainable
in the natural sciences, namely the subjective understanding of the action
of the component individuals. The natural sciences . . . cannot do this. . . .
We do not ‘understand’ the behavior of cells, but can only observe the rele¬
vant functional relationships and generalize on the basis of these observa¬
tions.” 13 Sorokin expressed similar concern about the loss of meaning which
he feels results when the sociologist does not directly experience the social
situations he analyzes, which is very often the case with those whose penchant
is for the statistical manipulation of data. “Only through direct empathy,”
Sorokin argues, “. . . can one grasp the essential nature and difference be¬
tween a criminal gang and a fighting battalion; between a harmonious and
a broken family.” 14
No doubt statistical manipulation of depersonalized scores based on the
ratings of observers who are not involved participants in some group can
produce distortion or loss of meaning. The risks are no less great, however,
in the work of the involved participant, whose very involvement in a situation
weakens his ability to be an unbiased observer and analyst. We may put
Professor Sorokin’s assertion to a simple test, and one even more stringent
than that he proposed. The difference between a criminal gang and a fighting
11 Quoted in American Sociological Review, XXIII:624.

12 Herbert A. Simon, Models of Man: Social and Rational (New York: Wilev, 19571
p. 89. 1 '
13 Max Weber (A. Henderson and Talcott Parsons, trans.), Theory of Social and
Economic Organizations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 103.
14 Sorokin, Fads and Foibles, p. 160.
96
battalion is after all rather obvious. It would, however, require a very sensitive
instrument indeed to discriminate between two objectively similar discussion
groups, each including 5 Harvard undergraduates, each assembled at random
by the same recruiting method, and all discussing the same case study in
human relations. Yet by using recently developed techniques, a qualified
sociologist can now tell rather precisely, merely by glancing at a few statistics,
which of two groups was “happy” and well-integrated, which tense and dis¬
integrating. This can be done by using the records of group interaction scored
by the method of Interaction Process Analysis.15
In Professor Bales’ laboratory groups, 5 or 8 persons discuss a case in
human relations—for example, whether a school principal should fire an ex¬
tremely gifted teacher who has been flagrantly insubordinate. Since the
discussion room in Bales’ laboratory is faced by a two-way mirror, every
action by each group member can be scored by trained observers as falling
in 1 of 12 simple categories. When these scores are summed for all members
of the group at the end of the hour-long discussion, the group’s score on
each of the 12 categories describes the group’s “profile.” 16
Only a little experience with this method enables one to read fairly
accurately from a group’s profile what the spirit, temper, or morale of a given
group was. Table 5 presents the action profiles of 2 discussion groups, each
of 5 men. To simplify the presentation in this table, we have combined the
data to yield 4 major categories. The 2 group profiles were chosen to present
different degrees of group morale or cohesiveness. Morale in this case was
measured by the extent to which the members of the group were satisfied
with their participation, expressed positive feelings toward other group mem-
13 Also see Chap. 3.

16 Robert F. Bales, Interaction Process Analysis (Cambridge: Addison-Wesley,
1950), pp. 1-29.
Table 5
Action Profiles
of Two Discussion Groups *
Percentage
Action Category Group Morale
High Low
A B
Questioning
Asks for orientation, opinion, suggestion 4 10
Answering
Gives orientation, opinion, suggestion 57 56
Positive
Releases tension, shows solidarity or agreement 34 17
Negative
Expresses tension, antagonism, disagreement 5 17
Total 100 100
* Adapted from Robert F. Bales, “The Equilibrium Problem in Small Groups,” in

Talcott Parsons, Robert F. Bales, and Edward Shils, Working Papers in the Theory of
Action (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1953), p. 116.
97
bers, and wanted to work further with members of the same group. Group A
is a highly satisfied group, and B is a highly dissatisfied group.
We have no difficulty in identifying the groups simply by referring to
their action profiles. Positive actions of an integrative variety, such as express¬
ing agreement, are twice as common in the high-morale group (A) as in
the low-morale group (B). Negative actions, such as expressing antagonism or
disagreement, are three times as frequent in the low-morale as in the high-
morale group. In the high-morale group, positive expressions are related to
negative in the ratio 7:1, whereas in the low-morale group the ratio falls to
1:1. Notice also how much extra time Group B puts into asking questions,
which reflects its inability to come to a quick understanding about facts and
issues, and then to move on to the job of working out a solution to the human-
relations problem the group has undertaken to solve.
Of course, an assessment of the morale in these groups could also have
been made by a skilled participant observer trained to be sensitive to the
nuances of group feeling. People with such skill are rare, however, whereas
less talented people can learn to use the Bales technique for scoring inter¬
action and rating the morale of groups. The Bales technique, furthermore,
yields an objective factual record, so that the differences in interpretation
which follow from differences in what observers believe is happening in a
group are largely eliminated. The Bales technique also provides a permanent
record; it is not necessary to have been there to evaluate a group’s discussion.
Finally, the Bales technique enables us to compare one group with another
in an exact and precise way, which is often not possible when we simply
talk about groups, especially when several observers have each worked with
a different group and do not have a comon experience. It seems reasonable to
say that the Bales technique of Interaction Process Analysis answers Pro¬
fessor Sorokin’s challenge.
Conflict of Theory-Building
and Empiricism
In many fields the interplay between theory and
fact is rapid and intimate. Empirical work focuses on problems which theory
shows to be important. Theory incorporates new empirical findings, gives
them meaning by integrating them with other findings and existing theory,
and on this basis points the way to new empirical research. Sociology has
seldom enjoyed this happy condition. What it calls “theory” and “empirical
research” are largely separate specialties. Sociology is not in this respect
unique. In physics, for example, the theoretician generally does not do ex¬
perimental work, and the experimentalists often describe themselves as being
a breed quite different from the theoretical physicist. What is distinctive in
sociology is that its theory is to a remarkable degree developed independently
of any body of continuing research, and to an equal extent empirical research
in sociology often has only limited connections with the concerns of the
theorists.
The division is one of long standing. Weber called the two types “inter¬
pretive specialists” and “subject matter specialists.” In a more derogatory
spirit, C. W. Mills dubbed them the schools of “grand theory” and “ab¬
stracted empiricism,” selecting Talcott Parsons as his prime example of the
former and Paul Lazarsfeld as the epitome of the latter. These distinctions
in the style of sociological work are so pervasive, and the feelings about
them so strong, that one cannot effectively orient oneself in sociology without
some awareness of the issues raised.
98
In part the division must be understood historically. Since sociology
was an outgrowth of social philosophy, it tended to have a speculative and
evaluative rather than an empirical investigative emphasis. Comte had an
idea or scheme which he felt accounted for society and its development. The
idea was its own justification. Although he understood the importance of
testing his conceptions against the known facts, he really did not make a
substantial effort to do so. At about the same time, in the mid-nineteenth
century, there developed independently of the work of men like Comte and
Spencer, and even to a degree in opposition to it, a concern with discovering
the basic facts of social life. Thus, the first issue of the Journal of the Statisti¬
cal Society of London in 1838 noted “a growing distrust of mere hypothetical
theory and a priori assumption, and the appearance of a general conviction
that, in the business of social science, principles are valid for application only
inasmuch as they are legitimate induction from facts, accurately observed
and methodically classified.” 17
The indifference of the great schematizers to facts, and the hostility of
the early fact-gatherers to what they derisively called “mere figures of speech,”
provided competing models of sociological style for later generations. These
contrasting approaches to sociological work continue, to an unfortunate de¬
gree, to compete for the allegiance of young sociologists. Undoubtedly, per¬
sonal preference plays a major part in determining which role a young soci¬
ologist will take. Indeed, if the parts in this drama did not already exist,
they would probably be invented again. But the fact that the script is already
a standard feature of our experience makes it easy to take sides. Consequently,
before he is very far along in his career, each young sociologist has pretty
well committed himself to one of the competing positions.
In many ways the opposition of theory and empiricism is artificial and
unreal, at least so far as it is applied to the contemporary scene. The battles
are largely ideological, and often the most powerful thrusts are directed at
straw men. There is the sound of much ripping, but in the nature of the
case no real blood is drawn. The issues are greatly clarified if we avoid the
slogans of people in different camps and make more precise distinctions
about the types of work they actually do.
Robert Merton points out that under the heading of “theory” soci¬
ologists often lump one or more different types of work.18
1. Providing general orientation: Often the theorist is mainly concerned
with identifying and making a case for the importance of a certain dimension
or variable. He says in effect: “You ignore this order of fact at your peril.”
One example would be a social psychologist who argues that an investigation
studying suicide should measure not only the degree of social integration
of a group, but should also study the personality characteristics of its mem¬
bers. Another example would be the researcher studying small groups who
urges that one pay attention not only to the effect which is produced by the
rules governing group interaction but also that we consider the effect which
the mere size of a group has on social processes within it. In the field of
demography, it might be the man who stresses the importance of religion, or
some similar value orientation, as an influence on the birth rate. In the study
17 Nathan Glazer, “The Rise of Social Research in Europe,” in D. Lerner (ed.),

The Human Meaning of the Social Sciences (New York: Meridian, 1959), p. 50.
18 Robert K. Merton, “The Bearing of Sociological Theory on Empirical Research,”
Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1957), p. 86. In the
following pages I have not followed Professor Merton’s scheme exactly, but rather have
freely adapted it.
99
of social mobility, it could be the researcher who urges us not to forget the
contribution IQ makes to getting ahead in the world. Ordinarily, no soci¬
ologist has any particular quarrel with this type of theory-building so long as
the competition produced as people clamor for attention to their favorite
variable does not interfere with his ability to win a hearing for the variables
in which he personally is most interested.
2. Developing sociological concepts: Concepts are indispensable tools
of any scientific inquiry, although in themselves they do not suffice as a basis
for conducting research. Concepts specify the form and content of the vari¬
ables which one’s general sociological orientation defines as important. Thus,
Durkheim not only assigned importance to the degree of social integration of
a group, but he went on to define several types of integration, the best
known described by the concept anomie, or a state of normlessness. Talcott
Parsons does not limit himself to the idea that all behavior tends to be
patterned. He also presents a set of concepts such as his pattern variables19
which he finds necessary in order to do justice to the different aspects of the
way in which people relate to one another.
Although such concepts are indispensable to any science, it is unfortu¬
nate that so many sociological theorists stop at this point. The more empirical-
minded sociologist typically makes two complaints against this practice.
First, he points out that while the theorist may have defined the concept,
he frequently gives no precise indication of how one should go about trying
to find out whether the thing defined actually exists in the real world. A
second, and even more forceful, complaint is that the theorist frequently
fails to indicate what one can do with his concepts other than use them as
labels to replace the labels these same things already bear. As George Homans
put it: “Much modern sociological theory seems to me to possess every virtue
except that of explaining anything. Part of the trouble is that much of it
consists of a system of categories, or pigeon-holes, into which the theorist
fits different aspects of behavior.’’ 20
3. Formulating empirical generalizations: Following John Dewey, Mer¬
ton defines an empirical generalization as “an isolated proposition summariz¬
ing observed uniformities of relationships between two or more variables.” 21
As an example he cites Halbwachs’ finding that laborers spend more per
adult for food than do white-collar employees with the same size income. As
Merton notes, sociological writing abounds in such empirical findings.22
There are numerous new ones reported in every issue of the sociological
journals. They are the chief product of the typical empirical researcher.
At this point, those with a stronger affinity for theory again find fault
with the empiricist. We have endless facts, but they frequently contradict
one another. The results emerging from research vary greatly depending on
the conditions under which the study was conducted, the sample used, and
the like. More serious, the findings do not necessarily add up; they do not
give us cumulative knowledge and increasing power to predict or control.
Indeed, our research findings often fail to yield even the encouraging feeling
that we now better understand the phenomenon just studied. The dissatis¬
faction which many of the more theoretically oriented sociologists feel in
19 The pattern variables were listed and defined in Chap. 3.

20 George C. Homans, Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms (New York: Har-
court, Brace & World, 1961), p. 10.
21 Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, p. 25.
22 Ibid., p. 95.
100
the face of the mounting tide of unconnected empirical findings was tersely
expressed by Robert Lynd when he said: “Research without an actively
selective point of view becomes the ditty bag of an idiot, filled with bits of
pebbles, straws, feathers and other random hoardings.” 23
4. Elaborating scientific theory: What is wanted, of course, is not
discrete findings, but a scientific law, what Merton defines as “a statement of
inference derivable from a theory.” 24 As Merton and every other sociologist
is well aware, this type of sociological law is extremely rare. Our old friend
Durkheim again comes to the rescue. His statement that suicide varies with
the degree of integration of a social group is such a law. On the basis of it,
one can safely predict which groups will have a higher suicide rate among
those varying in religion, marital condition, sex, and level of education.
To explain why this law operates, we must understand a sequence of
steps which makes clear the underlying logic of a set of relationships. Merton
outlines them as follows:
1. Social cohesion provides psychic support to group members sub¬
jected to acute stresses and anxieties.
2. Suicide rates are functions of unrelieved anxieties and stresses to
which persons are subjected.
3. Catholics [and specified additional groups] have greater social co¬
hesion than Protestants.
4. Therefore, lower suicide rates should be anticipated among Catholics
than among Protestants.25
Our ideal is to be always to complete the cycle leading from the
development of such interrelated propositions to the generation of research
designed to test them, then on to the subsequent revision of the theory in the
light of the research findings, and then finally to the design of new re¬
search. In reality, as Merton notes, there are “marked discontinuities of em¬
pirical research, on the one hand, and systematic theorizing unsustained by
empirical test, on the other.” 26 It was not always thus, nor need it be so.
Most contemporary sociologists recognize that the writing of the past masters
such as Durkheim and Weber was dominated by theoretical interests even
when it was most empirical in practice. Both Suicide and The Protestant
Ethic are appropriate examples. We have, therefore, had to regain lost
ground in working toward a proper appreciation of the relation of theory to
research. It remains for the future generations of sociologists to attain in
practice what many in the present generation understand well only in princi¬
ple.
Sociology, Values, and Politics

The student of society is easily tempted to con¬
clude that his specialized knowledge qualifies him to be the doctor of society,
also its spiritual adviser, perhaps its planner, and even its director. Auguste
Comte had a vision of a new form of society which would be based on knowl¬
edge drawn from the newly created science of sociology. In effect a complete
moral transformation of mankind, he sketched in great detail a plan for a
new Religion of Humanity to be directly by a priesthood having special
23 Robert Lynd, Knowledge for What? (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1939), p. 183.
24 Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, p. 96.
25 Ibid., p. 97.
23 Ibid., p. 99.
101
scientific knowledge of man and nature. The chilling implications of such
“scientific” schemes for reforming mankind soon produced in many a deep-
seated resolve to keep sociology separate from politics.
Durkheim sought to make the distinction between sociology and social
doctrine as explicit as possible when he said, in The Rules of Sociological
Method: “Sociology . . . will be neither individualistic, Communistic, nor
socialistic. . . . On principle it will ignore these theories, in which it could
not recognize any scientific value, since they tend not to describe or interpret,
but to reform, social organization.” 27 Similar precautions have been urged
on the field bv most of its leading figures. Pareto warned against the danger
that the personal sentiments of the sociologist might lead him to report
not “what is” but “what ought to be” in order “to fit in with his religious,
moral, patriotic, humanitarian sentiments.” 28 Weber, in his turn, urged that
sociology remain “value-free.” 29
Although the aspiration toward a value-free or politically neutral soci¬
ology has been the dominant orientation among contemporary sociologists, a
number of leading men have seriously challenged this position. Robert Lynd,
co-author of the famous Middletown studies, made an impassioned plea for
a more engaged social science in his Stafford Little Lectures at Princeton in
1938, which he published under the title Knowledge for What? Lynd rejected
the ideal of a disinterested science, asserting that the social sciences were
and always had been mainly tools, “instruments for coping with areas of
strain and uncertainty in culture.” He therefore urged social scientists to
respond to the public need for policy guidance by coming out from behind
the “sheltering tradition of ‘scientific’ objectivity.” 30 Similar sentiments were
echoed by C. W. Mills in his Sociological Imagination (1959), in which he
bemoaned the loss of what he called sociology’s “reforming push.” Mills also
alleged that contemporary sociology had failed to come to the defense of
freedom and reason, both of which he considered gravely threatened in the
modern world.31 In pressing for this kind of social science, Lynd and Mills
are joined by the great Swedish economist, Gunnar Myrdal, who addressed
himself to this issue in brilliant article on “Social Theory and Social Policy.”
Here he said: “We need viewpoints, and thev presume valuations. A ‘dis¬
interested social science’ is from this viewpoint, pure nonsense. It never
existed, and it will never exist.” 32
Not one but several different issues are raised by the plea of Lynd,
Mills, and others for a more engaged sociology. At some points thev stand
on firm ground, at others they rest on shaky foundations. Rather than treat
the problem at a general level, therefore, we are well-advised to consider the
different dimensions separately.
We cannot contradict those who argue for a more engaged sociology
when they insist that social research, like all scientific research, has practical
consequences, and that these should be recognized. Neither can we success-
27 Emile Durkheim (G. Catlin, ed.; S. Solovay and J. Mueller, trans.), The Rules
of Sociological Method, 8th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938), p. 142.
28 From Vilfredo Pareto (T. Livingston, ed.), Mind, Self and Society (New York:
Harcourt, Brace & World, 1939), quoted in V. F. Calverton (ed.), The Making of
Society (New York: Modern Library, 1937), p. 545.
29 See Alvin Gouldner, “Anti-Minotaur: The Myth of a Value-Free Sociology,”
Social Problems (196 3), IX: 199-213.
30 Lynd, Knowledge for What? p. 114 ff., 120.
31 Mills, The Sociological Imagination, pp. 165-176.
32 Gunnar Myrdal, “The Relation Between Social Theory and Social Policy,”
British Journal of Sociology (1953), XXIII:242.

fully challenge their assertion that values guide research, either consciously
or unconsciously. Moreover, since unstated values are harder to identify and
control, we should agree that it is best that the researcher make his values
explicit. This is, of course, more easily said than done, since the values
guiding a piece of research are not always consciously known to the researcher.
More important, we must recognize that curiositv, the simple desire to know,
is also a value.
1 hose who criticize social research because it is primarily motivated by
intense moral or political values, and those who criticize it for not defending
or advancing any particular political or social value at all, are equally missing
what is for other sociologists the central point. For many sociologists the
prime consideration is the advancement of knowledge. There is no guarantee
that useful knowledge and understanding will more surely emerge from
politically engaged research than from that which purports to be neutral. The
crucial question is not what led a man to a problem, but what he does about
it. The loftiest motives may produce the most sterile research, and “idle”
curiosity the most challenging findings. The critical issue is whether the actual
conduct of the research and the presentation of evidence follow the rules
set down by scientific procedure, conceiving science in the broadest rather
than in narrower terms.
Myrdal is right when he says: “Chaos does not organize itself into any
cosmos. We need viewpoints.”33 But can it be that the only permissible
viewpoint is that of traditional liberal philosophy, the only important motiva¬
tion compassion for human suffering or the pursuit of reason? Does not the
scientist have a right to aloofness? We should not forget Professor Cohen’s
reminder that “the aloofness involved in the pursuit of pure science is the
condition of that liberality which makes man civilized.” 34
The activist not only argues that we should let our values guide our
research, but he also tells us what those values should be. First and foremost,
we must be critical of the status quo. Thus, Robert Lynd says it is “the role
of the social sciences to be troublesome, to disconcert the habitual arrange¬
ments by which we manage to live along, and to demonstrate the possibility
of change in more adequate directions.” 35
Any social-science investigation, merely bv laying bare the facts of
social existence, may bring the sociological investigator under attack for un¬
dermining cherished belief or for questioning established truth. Although
every sociologist must accept this risk, it seems going too far to insist that
his objective must be to incur it. Why should not his purpose equally be to
approve, to conserve, and to integrate? Either purpose, or neither, the choice
seems a matter of personal or political preference. In a civilized world a man
should be free to choose the position he finds congenial. As a politically active
person you may criticize him for his inactivity. But as a sociologist your
evaluation of him should rest on the quality and adequacy of his sociological
research. Tire universal standard of judgment for that purpose is the degree
to which he advances knowledge of man and society.
The activist will respond by saying that we make a serious mistake if
we oppose “good” sociological research and politically motivated research
because “good” research is that which finds solutions to the pressing practical
problems facing the world. The choice of almost any other kind of problem
is treated by those who incline to the activist view as either escape or timidity.
33 Loc. cit.
35 Lynd, Knowledge for What?, p. 181.
103
inodes of inquiry in sociology
Even if this diagnosis were correct, those who prefer to work on other prob¬
lems are still entitled to their choice. If the activists had their way, we might
ultimately be led to “directed” research in which some public authority
would choose the problems on which social scientists should, and indeed
must, work. Anyone with even the faintest knowledge of totalitarian countries
such as Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany knows that this means the initial
perversion and ultimately the complete destruction of social science. Even in
a democratic society, as Morris Cohen points out, “ To subordinate the pur¬
suit of truth to practical considerations is to leave us helpless against bigoted
partisans and fanatical propagandists who are more eager to make their
policies prevail than to inquire whether or not they are right.” 36
Even if we accept the demand that sociology’s first obligation is to help
solve social problems, it by no means follows that the surest way to such
solutions is to devote our attention exclusively to such matters. To do so
would be analogous to arguing that the spread of cancer is so serious that
one should not waste time studying the biochemistry of growth in the normal
cell. As Cohen again reminds us: “The social reformer, like the physician,
the engineer, and the scientific agriculturalist, can improve the human lot
only to the extent that he utilizes the labor of those who pursue science for
its own sake regardless of its practical applications.” 37
In the end, then, the issue comes down to that of the legitimacy of
pure science. Those who urge an engaged, critical, practical, problem-centered
sociology certainly have every right to their preference. More than that, it
may well be that in the social sciences, as against the natural, research
focused on practical problems will in the end prove more productive. Where
the activist goes wrong is in questioning the legitimacy of any other kind of
social science, especially the kind which aspires to meet the conditions of
pure science. The ideal of pure science, especially pure social science, may
in fact be unattainable. “The only answer,” again in the words of Morris
Cohen, “is that this is true also of the ideal of beauty, of holiness, and of
everything else that is ultimately worth while and humanly ennobling.” 38
Summary
Sociologists are often embarrassed and distressed by
their pervasive disagreements, thinking that this reflects poorly on the
maturity of their field. They fail to realize that debates concerning the way
in which inquiry should be conducted are endemic in science. In a remark¬
able paper called “What Do Scientists Do?” Joseph J. Schwab reported the
results of his review of some 4,000 scientific papers written by European and
American scientists over a span of almost 5 centuries.39 The research he
examined was mainly in biology, psychology, and the behavioral sciences;
and his purpose was to explore the debates among scientists about how their
inquires should be conducted.
Professor Schwab’s investigation led him to conclude that the issues
raised and the positions adopted in debates about the modes of scientific
enquiry were “remarkably constant from science to science and from epoch
to epoch.” 40 Moreover, he reached the rather surprising conclusion that the
choices scientists made between alternative modes of inquiry were not the

37 Ibid., pp. 349-350.
38 Ibid., p. 350.
39 Joseph J. Schwab, “What Do Scientists Do?”, Behavioral Science (1960), V:l— 27
49 Ibid., p. 1.
104
product of the “inexorables of logic or of history” but rather must be ac¬
counted for by personal preferences based on personality factors and the
“ephemerals of circumstance.” It does no good to look to Professor Schwab
for some reliable method of ascertaining, in the light of the history of science,
which is the best of most productive approach, since he concluded that
“there are many ways of achieving mastery of a subject of enquiry, no one
of them capable of undebatable superiority over the others; each of them
capable of illuminating the world of things in a way not precisely duplicated
by the others.” 41
Professor Schwab’s work suggests how wise we would be to resist the
temptation to squander our energies in squabbles over which is the true
or the best method of sociological inquiry. Recognizing that each method
has a contribution to make, we should adopt a more catholic and tolerant
attitude toward approaches different from those to which we personally
incline. The critical question is not so much what is a man’s ideology of
research but rather what is the extent of his contribution to knowledge. Un¬
derstandably, people become emotionally committed to their scientific posi¬
tions. Often they can no more accept the inevitable tentativeness of their
pet method or theory than they can face up to the fact of their own mortality.
We do well, therefore, to remember Pareto’s dispassionate analysis:
The logico-experimental sciences are made up of a sum of theories

that are like living creatures, in that they are born, live, and die, the young
replacing the old, the group alone enduring. As is the case with living
beings, the lifetimes of theories vary in length and not always are the long-
lived ones the ones that contribute most to the advancement of knowledge.
Faith and metaphysics aspire to an ultimate resting place. Science knows
that it can attain only provisory, transitory positions. Every theory fulfills
its function, and nothing more can be asked of it.42
41 Ibid., p. 23.
42 Calverton (ed.), The Making of Society, p. 539.
105
inodes of inquiry in sociology
sociology
as a profession
eight
Sociology is not only an intellectual discipline; it is
also a profession. When we consider any branch of learning as an intellectual
discipline, we have in mind the premises on which the men in the field rest
their work, the ideas and currents of thought which unite or separate them,
the characteristic styles of reasoning or argument which they use, the types
of data considered, the way in which they are collected, and the manner in
which they are treated. When we speak of a profession, we refer mainly to
such themes as the uses or applications of a body of knowledge—for example,
whether to teach or to heal; to the context in which the discipline is used,
whether in public or privately, with large groups or face to face with one
individual; to the way in which those concerned with a given realm make
their living; how they are related to their “client,” to one another, and to the
larger society; how much freedom and autonomy they enjoy; how well or
poorly organized they are, and the like. The nature and practice of a discipline
determine the kind of intellectual enterprise and profession it may become.
Sociology as a Teaching Profession

Teaching absorbs by far the largest part of the na¬
tion’s sociological energies. Approximately three fourths of those holding
the Ph.D. in sociology teach in university or college programs. Professional
schools, especially of education and social work, but increasingly those of
business, law, and medicine as well, also employ sociologists as teachers. Of
those sociologists with an academic connection, 1 in 7 is affiliated with a
professional school, a research institute within a university, or an other-than-
sociology teaching department.1
The development of sociology in American universities is distinguished
by the following facts: it came very late to the academic scene; its bearers
could neither point to a well-established and venerable intellectual tradition,
nor claim for themselves superior and distinguished personal social origins;
and it nevertheless grew at a phenomenal rate. These facts played an im¬
portant role both in shaping the reception sociology received in the Ameri¬
can academic community and the reaction of sociologists to that reception.
Growth of Sociology in America

All of the social studies had to struggle to win a
place for themselves in the traditional or classical program of the American
college and university. The task was probably easiest for history, which could
trace its origins to Herodotus and readily pass for a humane branch of
learning. Economics was less readily accepted, but the distinction of Adam
Smith and the importance of the subject to English and American societies
undergoing rapid economic development greatly smoothed the way. Soci¬
ology came along at the end of this chain of development. The first depart¬
ment of sociology was not established until 1893 at Chicago. The American
Sociological Association was formed by a rump group which broke away
from the parent Economic Association in 1905.2 Although Spencer’s evolu¬
tionary theory had had some vogue in the United States, very few people
had at the time heard of sociology and fewer still knew the meaning of this
strange new term only recently coined.
The newer Midwestern colleges and universities, state supported and
generally more democratic, welcomed the new discipline and it grew up along
with them. Yet sociology was by no means excluded in the East. Brown,
Columbia, Dartmouth, Pennsylvania, and Yale introduced sociology courses
prior to the founding of the Sociological Society, and Yale was host to Wil¬
liam Graham Sumner, one of the first of the great American sociologists.
There were, however, major pockets of resistance to this new and strange
discipline among the more conservative, private and elite eastern schools.
Harvard did not establish a department of sociology until Sorokin came to
the University in 1930. It is striking that as late as 1960, 5 of the nation’s 20
"leading” liberal arts colleges3 still did not offer any instruction in sociology.
Sociology’s late arrival on the academic scene was compensated for
neither by the social standing of its partisans nor the inherent status of its
subject matter. Very few representatives of the older and wealthier families
of the eastern seaboard took up sociology as they did the classics, literature,
or history. The early American sociologists were distinctively products of the
rural rather than the urban segment of the country. Almost without exception
the first two dozen presidents of the American Sociological Association were
of rural origin. So pervasive was this characteristic that C. W. Mills detects
in the work of American students of social pathology a typical rural prejudice
against the city, a tendency to see it as the source and natural home of vice,
1 Elbridge Sibley, data from unpublished study.

2 Roscoe C. Hinkle, Jr., and Gisela J. Hinkle, The Development of Modern Soci¬
ology (New York: Random House, 1954), p. 3 ff.
3 Liberal arts colleges are classified as leading if, among each 1,000 graduates, 15
or more won fellowships or earned the Ph.D.
107
sociology as a profession
crime, broken families and the like.4 The rural origins of the early sociologica
leaders frequently combined with a connection with the ministry. A sur¬
prisingly high proportion of the early sociologists were descended from minis¬
ters or were themselves trained in the ministry. The list includes such out¬
standing figures as Lester Ward, early disciple of Comte and often regarded
as the father of American sociology, Franklin Giddings, founder and long¬
time head of the Department of Sociology at Columbia, Albion Small,
founder and chairman of the great department at Chicago, and many others.
The early sociologists in Europe dealt mainly with theories of history
or drew on the lives of primitives to illustrate their ideas about evolution,
religion, and society. Although similar themes and sources figured prominently
in the work of Ward and Sumner, early American sociology gave a much
greater share of its attention to the pressing social problems which seemed to
spring up everywhere in the rapidly changing American society. This was
especially true at the University of Chicago, which for more than two
decades (1915-1940) was virtually unchallenged as the leading center of
sociological training in America. Chicago sociologists in the living laboratory
provided by the city studied the slum and ghetto, the prostitute and juvenile
delinquent, the professional criminal, jazz, and drug addiction.5
Despite the plain origins of its practitioners and the often raw quality
of its subject matter, or perhaps because of them, sociology grew rapidly,
indeed phenomenally. The hundred-odd members who had founded the
American Sociological Society in 1905 had increased almost sevenfold by the
time the United States entered World War I. After the war it experienced
another spurt of growth, more than doubling in size in the next 10 years.
Although the number of members decreased during the depression years,
the period after the Second World War saw the resumption of growth.
Indeed, the membership of the Sociological Association has been growing in
the postwar period at the exceptional rate of some 10 per cent a year, and
in 1960 included more than 6,000.
There is hardly a college or university where sociology is not taught
today. One study of a sample of 263 colleges revealed that they offered an
average of about 14 courses in sociology at each school.6 In 1958-1959 the
U. S. Office of Education reported that 641 universities and colleges (exclu¬
sive of schools of social work) awarded bachelors degrees in sociology to
almost 7,000 students graduating that year.7 The number of graduates
majoring in sociology is slightly larger than in political science and slightly
smaller than in psychology and economics. In the face of such growing inter¬
est and increasing acceptance, sociologists have come to feel about their
discipline much as Lavoisier did about chemistry when he said in 1805: “I
do not expect my ideas to be adopted all at once. . . . Those who have
4 C. Wright Mills, “The Professional Ideology of Social Pathologists,” American

Journal of Sociology (1943), XLIX:165-180.
5 Some contributions from the Chicago School of Sociologists are: Robert Park,
Edward W. Burgess, and R. D. McKenzie, The City (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1925); Nels Anderson, The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1923); Louis Wirth, The Ghetto (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1929); Harvey Zorbaugh, The Gold Coast and the Slum (Chicago: Uni¬
versity of Chicago Press, 1929); William I. Thomas, The Unadjusted Girl (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1931); Clifford Shaw, The Jack Roller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1930); Frederic Thrasher, The Gang (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1927).
6 Lawrence Podell, Martin Vogelfanger, and Roberta Rogers, “Sociology in Ameri¬
can Colleges,” American Sociological Review (1959), XXIV:95.
7 Earned Degrees, Conferred, Bachelors’ and Higher Degrees. United States Office
of Education (1958-1959), p. 179.
envisaged nature according to a certain point of view during much of their
career, rise only with difficulty to new ideas. It is the passage of time, there¬
fore, which must confirm or destroy the opinions I have presented. Meanwhile,
I observe with great satisfaction that the young people . . . are beginning
to study the science without prejudice. . . ,8
The Undergraduate Curriculum

How far the academic image of sociology as a dis¬
cipline is shaped by its course offerings is difficult to assess. Although it may
not be important to those who spend full time on research, the curriculum
certainly is one of the main concerns of the teaching sociologist.
I he fare offered in most sociology departments is much less diversified
than our initial survey of the field (Chap. 2) might indicate. A general in¬
troductory course in sociologv (and also in anthropology in the common joint
department) is ubiquitous. Beyond this the courses most commonly offered,
in order of frequency, are: marriage and the family, criminology, social prob¬
lems, social work, social “deviance,” social psychology, and social theory.
Together these 10 leading subjects account for approximately two thirds of
all the courses regularly offered to undergraduates in sociology.9 Since half
of these can be considered part of one complex focused on the theme of
personal and social adjustment, the degree of concentration is very great
indeed. There is hardly a sociology department, however small, which does
not offer one or more courses on this theme.
By contrast, many of the most important elements of social life, the
chief social institutions and problems to which the founders of sociology gave
a central place and which still loom so large in European sociology today,
are gravely neglected in the sociology curriculum available to many Ameri¬
can undergraduates. A course on social stratification, the sociology of religion,
or economic sociology is available in only 1 of 10 departments, and a course
on the sociology of politics in only 1 of 20.10
The teaching of sociology in American colleges therefore suffers from a
peculiar condition. Those subjects which are most important in the intel¬
lectual tradition of the field, most emphasized in graduate instruction, and
most often of interest to the instructors are seldom taught to undergraduates.
To illustrate: The complex of courses which includes social work, public
welfare, child welfare, and community organization ranks number 1 among
undergraduate courses listings, but in frequency of choice as a field of special
interest among sociologists it ranks fourteenth.11 At the other end of the
scale, we find that the field most often chosen as a specialty by sociologists,
namely social psychology, ranks only seventh in course listings, and the sec¬
ond most-chosen specialization, “social organization,” is in tenth place in
the number of course offerings. As the authors of one of the surveys of this
problem despairingly phrased their conclusion: “the further removed is the
subject matter from the discipline of sociology, as it is defined in the first
chapter in most introductory texts . . . the more courses [on it] are offered
by departments of sociology.” 12 Another put the matter more directly and
8 Quoted in Charles C. Cillispie, The Edge of Objectivity (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1960), p. 232.
9 Podell, Vogelfanger, and Rogers, American Sociological Review (1959), XXIV:92.
10 Ibid., p. 9.
11 Matilda White Riley, “Membership of the American Sociological Association,”
American Sociological Review (1960), XXV:925.
12 Podell, Vogelfanger, and Rogers, American Sociological Review (1959), XXIV:95.
109
succinctly when he said: “the college courses given in sociology do not reflect
the interests of those who teach them.” 13
Whatever the explanation, we cannot but be struck by the narrow
range of sociological theory and research to which so many students are
limited. No less peculiar is the situation of their instructors, who teach but
a small part of what their discipline has to offer, and who in their teaching
can neither carry forward the tradition of their discipline nor exercise the
special skills which they acquired in their own graduate training.
Although these are striking facts, they hardly tell the whole story about
sociology as a teaching profession. However narrow the limits of the courses
they may offer, sociologists, almost without exception, find teaching their
subject to be a richly rewarding experience. They give the student his first con¬
tact with a subject to which he has not previously been introduced in high
school. Through this encounter he gains his first systematic appreciation,
sometimes even his first awareness, of the structure of his society, of the
nature of man’s condition, and of the variety of solutions of human problems
which societies have tried or may yet attempt. To be able to bring this experi¬
ence to his students is sufficient to make most sociologists quite ready to
gladly teach.”
Sociology as a Research Enterprise

With few exceptions sociologists make their living
by teaching or research, or some combination of the two. Even those in
administration usually work in the context of a university, a government
agency, or a business corporation. The 1959 census of members of the Ameri¬
can Sociological Association showed 70 per cent affiliated with universities
and colleges, 5 per cent working for the federal government, 6 per cent
employed by business and industry, and the remainder mainly in state and
local organizations such as schools, hospitals, prisons, and the like.14 Among
those professions which it is reasonable to compare with sociology, this pattern
is probably most like that for economists. Historians, by contrast, are found
almost exclusively in teaching posts, whereas psychologists are found in
large numbers in private practice, which is rare among sociologists.15
Unfortunately, we cannot trace this pattern very far back to discover
its stability or variability. A census comparable to that for 1959 is available
only for 1950.16 Even over this short span, however, several trends emerge
which are probably of long-term significance.
Between 1950 and 1959 the proportion of sociologists with a university
or college affiliation decreased from 75 to 70 per cent of the total, while
those with a government or other types of affiliation increased from 22 to 26
per cent.17 While a shift of this magnitude hardly suggests a radical transfor¬
mation of the profession, it points to the increasing representation of those
engaged either in full-time research or in applications of sociology. This
trend is strengthened by the fact that of those in colleges and universities,
an increasing proportion are affiliated with professional schools. Such schools
increased their share of sociological employment from 8 to 11 per cent.18
13 Richard L. Simpson, “Expanding and Declining Fields in American Sociology,”
American Sociological Review (1961), XXVI :464.
14 Riley, American Sociological Review, XXV:921.
13 Molly Harrower, “Psychologists in Independent Practice,” in B. Webb (ed.),
The Profession of Psychology (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962), p. 130.
10 Riley, American Sociological Review, XXV:921.
17 Loc. cit.
18 Loc. cit.
110
1 he available facts may be used to argue that sociology is becoming less
exclusively an academic discipline or a pure science, and is more and more
developing a major component of applied work.
Investment in Social Research

It is difficult to get figures on the extent of the
nation’s investment in sociological research, and more difficult still to assess
those one does get. The available data describe expenditures for social science
taken as a whole, and it is not feasible to judge what part of the total is
accounted for by sociology alone. Even these figures are unfortunately limited
to expenditures more or less explicitly earmarked for research in some institu¬
tion s budget. We know, of course, that a great deal of social research is done
under conditions likely to escape notice in anyone’s research budget. Many
a professor whose entire salary is charged to teaching spends three or more
hours each day doing research in the library, the laboratory, or in the field.
An adequate accounting system would certainly assign a value to this time
and weigh it in the total. Despite such defects, the data available on expendi¬
tures for social-science research tell an interesting story.
Social-science research has become a large-scale affair. Dr. Harry Alpert,
formerly Social Science Director at the National Science Foundation, esti¬
mates that in 1959 the total American expenditure for such research, both
basic and applied, was $215 million.19 This is less than half the cost of one
atom-powered aircraft carrier and only a very small fraction of the total spent
for research in the natural, physical, and engineering sciences. Indeed, the
social sciences’ share of the research budget of the federal government de¬
creased from 24 per cent in 1937 to a mere 2 per cent in 1953. This did not
mean an absolute decline in funds for social science, but rather came about
because of the phenomenal increase in federal support of research in the
physical and natural sciences. Indeed, the sum of $215 million represents a
large increase in the absolute investment in social-science research. In this
field the federal government spent only $17 million in 1937, but by 1953
the figure had risen to $53 million.20
It is not the federal government but industrial and commercial organi¬
zations which are the largest single source of funds for social-science research.
In 1959 they accounted for $137 million, or almost 64 per cent of the total.21
Some of this money was spent on studies of public opinion. The greatest part
of it, however, went for “marketing research,” a term used for investigations
of the effects of advertising and of the preferences of consumers for one or
another product or brand. The results of these studies are usually accessible
only to the companies which pay for them. In any event, they would have
little interest for most sociologists. We must, therefore, recognize that the
largest outlay of moneys for social research contributes little or nothing to
the general advance of social science. It may, of course, be argued that it is
actually inappropriate even to include this type of expenditure with those
used to support scientific research.
The federal government stands second as a source of social-science
19 Harry Alpert, “The Growth of Social Research in the United States,” in D.

Lerner (ed.), The Human Meaning of the Social Sciences (New York: Meridian, 1959),
p. 74.
20 Milton Graham, Federal Utilization of Social Science Research: Exploration of
the Problem (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1954), mimeographed re¬
port, p. 46.
21 Alpert in D. Lerner (ed.), The Human Meaning of the Social Sciences, p. 75.
111
research funds. It provides one quarter of the money, spending the greater
part directly and allocating the remainder to other organizations. A special
study of social-science expenditure by the federal government was undertaken
in 1953 by Dr. Milton Graham of the Brookings Institution, and it revealed
some striking and distressing trends.22
Dr. Graham reported that the “research contract” had become the
chief means by which the government allocated funds to support the work
of non-profit research organizations such as universities. 1 he contract, as
against an unrestricted grant, usually calls for the performance of specifically
defined research and the delivery of some particular report or other result.
Most scientists feel that the contract system “indirectly but inevitably reduces
the [number of] exploratory investigations, particularly in directions which
are not in the spotlight at the moment.” 23
In 1952 only 6 per cent of the federal government funds for social
science went to support basic research, whereas 44 per cent was spent on
collecting general-purpose statistics such as census data, and ?0 per cent was
used for applied research.24 Thus, in the social sciences as in the physical,
we can see the operation of what Vannevar Bush, wartime Director of the
Office of Scientific Research and Development, called “the perverse law”
whereby “applied research invariably drives out pure.” 20 Dr. Graham also
pointed out that while virtually every department of the federal government
now conducts some social-science research, and almost every branch of Ameri¬
can life and every social problem receives some attention, almost all the
recent increases in federally supported social-science research could be ac¬
counted for by increased expenditures by the military agencies.
Of course, we must acknowledge that these patterns are subject to
change. Dr. Graham’s report was prepared in 1953. Since that time the
National Institutes of Mental Health, established by Congress, have sup¬
ported basic social-science research on a substantial scale. More important,
perhaps, is the fact that the National Science Foundation has established a
Division of Social Science. The significance of this move lies in the fact
that the NSF supports only basic research. As a result of action taken by
Congress, the Social Science Division was to have a budget of approximately
$7 million in 1962.26 Although this was only 3.3 per cent of the total NSF
budget27 it represented a marked increase in our national investment in basic
social-science research. It is important to notice, as well, that NSF funds are
allocated mainly in the form of small grants to individual scholars rather
than in large sums for institutional research.
Private foundations, including “giants,” such as the Ford Foundation,
provide some $15 million annually for social-science research, and from their
own resources universities and colleges provide an additional $5 million.28
Most of the money provided by the foundations, and a substantial part of that
furnished by government, is turned over to the universities. As a result, they
annually spend about $35 million for social-science research, which is about
16 per cent of the total national expenditure. It is in the university and
college that basic research is most likely to be carried on.
22 Graham, Federal Utilization.
23 Ibid., p. 49.
24 Ibid., p. 1.
25 Ibid., p. 38.
28 Ibid., p. 2.
27 National Science Foundation, Federal Funds for Science, Vol. X, Survey of Sci¬
ence Resources Series, NSF 61-62, p. 23.
28 Alpert in D. Lerner (ed.), The Human Meaning of the Social Sciences, p. 74.
112
We must then face the fact that only about one eighth of our national
expenditure for social research is of the unrestricted, free, or basic variety.
The overwhelming bulk of the money is devoted to collecting statistics or to
applied research. Anyone who understands the history of science must be
distressed to find that the proportion spent on basic research is so low, since
it is to it that we must look for those important discoveries and new insights
which form the foundation on which progress in applied work depends.
The Bureaucratic Milieu

and the Individual Scholar
The sociological profession is growing very rapidly.

In 1960 there were about 2,100 living holders of the Ph.D. in sociology.29
Over half had received their degrees in the preceding 10-year period. Since
new Ph.D.’s are graduating at a rate close to 200 per year, in another decade
the number will again have doubled. Some critics, for example, C. Wright
Mills, would have us believe that this growing corps of highly trained social
scientists is being marched, rank on rank, into the insatiable maw of vast
research bureaucracies in the government, especially the military establish¬
ment, and in advertising offices of business and industry. There these poor
young sociologists presumably toil as routinized and bureaucratized intellec¬
tual slaves, doing the bidding of masters who have no real interest in social
science or its future development. This outcome is a real possibility in the
modern world. But the available data fail to support those who claim that
the once free intellectual discipline of sociology has been subverted and re¬
duced to a condition of servitude and impotence.
Among the youngest holders of the Ph.D., those under 35, as among
the older groups over 55 years of age, approximately three fourths are em¬
ployed not by large formal research organizations but by colleges and uni¬
versities. A 1960 survey located only 170 sociologists in the federal govern¬
ment, and of these by far the largest group, numbering 63, was employed
in the health, education, and welfare services. There were only 16 in the
Department of Defense.30 Even in the academic world, only 2 per cent of
those in regular sociology departments are exclusively in research. Among
those not in regular departments, only about 1 in 5 are full-time researchers.31
These facts make it difficult to accept C. W. Mills’ description of social
science as having become bureaucratized, ready “to serve whatever ends its
bureaucratic clients have in view.”32 Nor can we quite accept his assertion that:
“The idea of a university as a circle of professorial peers, each with apprentices
and each practicing a craft, tends to be replaced by the idea of a university
as a set of research bureaucracies, each containing an elaborate division of
labor, and hence of intellectual technicians.” 33
While acknowledging the growth of large bureaucratic research organi¬
zations, we should realize that their activities do not basically change the
situation of the individual scholars who still make up the overwhelming
majority of the profession. Because some work on “projects” arising out of
“programs” of research, rely on professional interviewers and paid research
29 Sibley, unpublished study.

30 Nahum Z. Madalia and Ward S. Mason, “Position and Prospects of Sociologists
in Federal Employment,” American Sociological Review (1963), XXVIII:282.
31 Sibley, unpublished study.
Press, 1959), p. 101.
33 Ibid., p. 103.
113
assistants, run their data through IBM machines, and juggle their figures
on computers, it does not follow that others must do the same.
In any event, the critical fact is that most sociologists are and continue
to remain outside af the research bureaucracies. The libraries relied on by
the classical sociologists who worked as individual craftsmen are as open
and free now as they were when Durkheim and Weber wrote their books.
It is weak indeed to excuse the failure of one’s research to yield results by
charging that the other fellow uses bad methods. And many a sociologist
who works as an individual craftsman relies heavily on materials assembled b\
research bureacracies. There is no other way to collect statistics about a large
national population or a complicated economic or political system save by
developing such an organization. The critical issue is not whether we have
research bureaucracies, but what we do with their products. The young
sociologist today has the same freedom to do good work, and runs the same
risk of doing poor work, as did his predecessor before the era of large-scale
research bureaucracies.
Sociology and Social Criticism

Gunnar Myrdal, in a brilliant essay on “The Relation
Between Social Theory and Social Policy,” 34 argued that the social sciences
are important to a democracy because they encourage the open discussion
of important issues by appealing to the people’s rationality rather than to
superstition and narrowness. The sociologist can make this contribution,
however, only if his situation affords him reasonable freedom and security.
No doubt some societies and bureaucracies will be more tolerant than
others of those who “step out of line.” And there are, of course, ways in
which the social scientist can work for his ideas within any bureacracy.
Nevertheless, most of those employed in public and private agencies which
are organized as bureacracies and enforce discipline and loyalty to superiors,
will understandably be constrained from playing an independent role either
in opening up important issues or in leading people toward their resolution
through free public discussion.
Since the overwhelming majority of sociologists are not employed by
such special-interest bureaucracies but rather serve as free scholars in the
universities and colleges, we might conclude that the situational pressures
which might induce them to neglect their obligations to democracy are not
great. Ideally the university professor is, in Myrdal’s words, “free to pursue
the truth without anxiously seeking public acclaim or avoiding public
anathema.” 35 In practice, as Myrdal, Mills, and others have been quick to
point out, the conditions which underlie the professor’s independent status
may be either very imperfectly assured or lacking altogether.
Three conditions, characteristic of the era following World War II,
particularly limit the social scientist’s freedom to initiate public discussion of
the fundamental issues facing our society.
Professors have become much more deeply involved as advisers to, or
grantees of, the government, often moving back and forth between their
university town and the seats of power. In 1938 the National Resources
Committee complained that “academic men frequently do not know the
amount or character of highly interesting scholarly study and research going
34 Gunnar Myrdal, “The Relation Between Social Theory and Social Policy,”
British Journal of Sociology (1953), XXVIT210-242.
35 British Journal of Sociology, XXIII: 218.
114
on in government [and] governmental agencies do not utilize as fully as they
might the intellectual resources of the nation.” 36 The same complaint could
not be made today with equal justice. As professors develop more intimate
contact with government programs, their freedom to criticize those programs
becomes limited in various ways. In so far as they share in shaping policy, they
are of course not likely to be critics of their own handiwork. Even when they
have not participated directly in setting policy, they may be cautious in their
criticism so as not to lose their good standing against the day when they
may be called on. In so far as they relv on government contracts and grants
this, of course, introduces an additional restraint.
Not only have individual professors become more intimately involved
with government, but so have the universities as such. Some of the leading
universities, including those with a very large private endowment, are cur¬
rently receiving as much as 40 per cent of their total annual budget in the
form of grants from and contracts with the federal government. Even in those
cases in which a professor is immune to direct pressure, he may be influenced
by a desire not to embarrass or harm his university community. In considera¬
tion of its interests, he may either temper his remarks or avoid controversial
issues altogether. For its part, the university’s ability to honor its commitment
to the academic freedom of its professors may be pushed beyond the limits
of endurance in cases when the university’s dependence on public funds is
so disproportionately heavy.
By far the most important factors affecting the professor’s freedom of
expression are the nature of a country’s tradition of independence and
autonomy for its university, and the climate of opinion which pervades the
country at any given time. Many of the European universities enjoy a legally
privileged existence which follows custom and law going back to the Middle
Ages. Their support by the government is accepted as a traditional obligation
which gives public authorities no more right to meddle in the internal affairs
of the university than in those of the established church. In addition, the
rank and file in Europe often have little awareness of or interest in, and no
power to influence, the life of the university and its professors.
It is quite otherwise in the United States. Here the universities, espe¬
cially the land-grant colleges and the numerous state-supported institutions,
were founded to meet the popular demand for education or for practical
training in agriculture, the mechanical arts, and the professions. The demo¬
cratic tradition in America has obliged colleges and universities to adopt
relatively open admissions policies. Their financial dependence on state
legislatures, and the frequent public review of their budgets by these authori¬
ties, make them uncommonly sensitive to public opinion. Often they are
open to the influence of every current of public sentiment, however foolish,
which sweeps through the community.
The social sciences are particularly vulnerable because in the popular
mind—in which category many congressmen and senators are included—
the term “sociology” is often understood as being somehow connected with,
indeed even the same as, the term “socialism.” The problem is rendered all
the more acute because sociologists have been outstanding among the few
social scientists with the foresight and the courage to undertake systematic
study of the emerging societies of Communist countries such as Russia and
China. Often their reward for their pains as pioneering students of Commu¬
nist society was to be mistaken for Communists.
36 Quoted in Graham, Federal Utilization, p. 141.
115
Sociology and the Free Society
Late in life, Durkheim prepared a contribution on
sociology for the volume La Science Frangaise, assembled in connection with
the San Francisco Exposition of 1915, in which he wrote that sociology could
be conceived and develop only in a society which met two conditions:
First, traditionalism had to have lost its domain. Among a people who
consider their institutions everything they ought to be, nothing can incite
thought to apply itself to social matters. Second, a veritable faith in the
power of reason to dare to undertake the translation of the most complex
and unstable of unrealities into definite terms was necessary.37
France, said Durkheim, satisfied this double condition. I think we can

say that the United States also distinctively fulfilled these conditions. By
contrast, the Soviet regime was not long in power in Russia before most of
her sociologists were either driven out of the country or purged. Sociology is
defined in the Soviet Union as a bourgeois social science, engaged in only
by “lackeys” and “wage slaves” of capitalism who use it to counter the true
Marxist-Leninist social science. Sociology suffered a similar fate in Communist
China. Before the Communist takeover, there were more than 1,000 students
studying sociology under some 140 teachers in Chinese colleges and univer¬
sities. The new regime stamped out these activities completely, to replace
them by new courses on Marxism. Those sociologists who survive live under
a cloud because of their former profession. Dr. Sun Pen-wen, author of what
was the leading treatise on sociology before the new regime took over, sent
the following chilling response to an American sociologist who wrote request¬
ing a set of his works: “I have come to understand that all my books are
only good for burning and hence I have none to send you. I have also learned
that I formerly neglected to study the works of Karl Marx which I am now
doing many hours a day. Please don’t write again.” 38
American society has characteristically subjected itself to a constant
process of self-examination and critical reappraisal which has produced a
steady stream of proposals for change. Moreover, a surprisingly large number
of these has been adopted. As a result, the United States is viewed by most
peoples of the world as dynamic and progressive to a degree which they
hardly can imagine, and certainly do not expect to realize, for their own
countries. This readiness to change has provided an environment conducive
to the development of sociology. Americans may justly be proud of the
United States’ standing as the undisputed world leader in contemporary
sociology. This may be considered one of the important confirmations of its
outstanding tradition of freedom of thought and inquiry. But that which
confirms can also disconfirm. We must acknowledge the recurrent tendencies
in American life to subject to political attack those whose scientific investiga¬
tions are thought too dangerous or whose ideas are too disturbing.
To fulfill the function Myrdal assigns them as searchers for truth and
as leaders of the public discussion of basic social issues, sociologists must
have security of tenure and some reasonable immunity against political
persecution. In England, and probably France, both the tradition and the
37 Kurt H. Wolff (ed.), Fmile Durkheim (Columbus: Ohio State University Press,
1960), p. 383.
38 Albert R. O’Hara, “The Recent Developments of Sociology in China,’’ American
Sociological Review (1961), XXVT928.
116
institutional arrangements guaranteeing independence to the university pro¬
fessor are stronger than in the United States. Where institutional supports
are weak, the climate of opinion is all the more important. Dr. Myrdal has
said that the “most unfortunate and potentially enormously dangerous effect
of the cold war is that even academic discussion tends to be hampered by
anxious fore-thoughts and clamped in opportunist stereotypes.” 39 The United
States has not escaped these effects. The consequences of the atmosphere
of suspicion, of thought control, and of punitiveness which prevailed during
“the McCarthy era” cannot be realistically assessed by pointing to the small
number of professors actually dismissed, nor even by proving that they were
really subversives. Much more important is the effect on the free expression
of those who were not subversive and who were not dismissed.
Those effects are well-documented in Lazarsfeld and Thielen’s study,
completed in 1955, of almost 2,500 social-science teachers, including histo¬
rians, carefully chosen to represent all the colleges and universities in the
United States. Of those teaching in larger schools rated as of high quality,
70 per cent reported that they were familiar with at least one “incident”
involving an attack on a fellow faculty member for his views or associations.
In the smaller and less outstanding schools, 28 per cent of the teachers knew
of such incidents.40 It should not be surprising, therefore, that 40 per cent
of college teachers in the social sciences reported that they worried lest some
student inadvertently pass on a warped version of what they said,41 and 22
per cent admitted direct self-censorship of one kind or another.42 Under such
circumstances it is, of course, not only the professor who suffers but equally
the students and the community, which are denied the chance to hear a
frank expression of the views of men especially well-qualified to analyze our
society and its problems.
Sociology can thrive only under freedom. Indeed, the extent to which
sociologists may pursue their interests, fully publish their results, and freely
state their conclusions is one important index of the degree to which a nation
qualifies as a free and open society. A nation cannot have quality in sociology
by fiat. It can, if it chooses, write a kind of “contract” for that kind of soci¬
ology which guarantees, in advance, to produce results which affirm the
established order and confirm received doctrine. It may then get what it
orders, as it does in the Soviet Union, but it will not get good sociology. Only
a nation which provides the conditions for free inquiry may with reason
hope for the development of social-science knowledge which permits ever
deeper understanding of man in society.
39 British Journal of Sociology, XXIII:222.

40 Paul Lazarsfeld and Wagner Thielens, Jr., The Academic Mind (Glencoe, Ill.:
The Free Press, 1958), p. 164.
44 Ibid., p. 76.
42 Ibid., p. 78.
117
selected
references
The following material only suggests social systems and illustrate the use of
the extent of the literature in the field sociological tools are (to name a few):
available to anyone who wishes to read Kingsley Davis, Human Society (New
background material in the classics of York: Macmillan, 1949); George C. Ho¬
sociology, basic concepts and/or state¬ mans, The Human Group (New York:
ments of the contemporary field. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1950); Marion
Levy, The Structure of Society (Prince¬
Additional textbooks, useful for an ton: Princeton University Press, 1948);
over all glance and prominent in the dis¬ Robert M. Maelver, Society: Its Structure
cipline are: Leonard Broom and Philip and Changes (New York: Long and
Selznick, Sociology: A Text with Adapted Smith, 1931); Robert K. Merton, Social
Readings (Evanston: Row, Peterson, Theory and Social Structure, rev. ed.
1955) ; Arnold Green, Sociology—An (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1956);
Analysis of the Life of Modem Society, Talcott Parsons, Essays in Sociological
3rd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956); Theory: Pure and Applied (Glencoe, Ill.:
and William F. Ogbum and Meyer F. The Free Press, 1949); and Robin Wil¬
Nimkoff, Sociology, 3rd ed. (Boston: liams, American Society (New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 1958). Knopf, 1951).
General discussion and presentation of For three examples of a discussion of
current trends in the field and profession philosophy of science and social science
can be found in: S. Martin Lipset and see: Morris Cohen, Reason and Nature:
Neil Smelser (eds.), Sociology: The Prog¬ An Essay on the Meaning of Scientific
ress of a Decade (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Method (New York: Harcourt, Brace &
Prentice-Hall, 1961); Robert K. Merton, World, 1931); Morris Cohen and Ernest
Leonard Broom, and Leonard S. Cottrell, Nagel, An Introduction to Logic and the
Jr., Sociology Today: Problems and Pros¬ Scientific Method (New York: Harcourt,
pects (New York: Basic Books, 1959); Brace & World, 1936); and Ernest
Edward Shils, “The Calling of Sociology,” Nagel, Structure of Science (New York:
Epilogue to Talcott Parsons, et al. (eds.), Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961).
Theories of Society, two volumes (Glen¬ For illustrations of the use of mathe¬
coe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1961); and Hans matical models and stochastic processes
L. Zetterberg, Sociology in the United see: James S. Coleman, Mathematical
States: A Trend Report (Paris: UNESCO, Sociology (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Pren¬
1956) . tice-Hall, 1964); Anatol Rapaport, Fights,
Professional journals that offer state¬ Games and Debates (Ann Arbor: Uni¬
ments concerning the state of the field versity of Michigan Press, 1960); Herbert
and current empirical and theoretical A. Simon, Models of Man: Social and
studies are: American Journal of Sociol¬ Rational (New York: Wiley, 1957); John
ogy, American Sociological Review, British Von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern,
Journal of Sociology, Daedalus, and Hu¬ Theory of Games and Economic Behavior,
man Organization. The Journal of Con¬ 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University
flict Resolution, Journal of Intergroup Re¬ Press, 1947); and Harrison C. White,
lations, Journal of Social Issues, Social Anatomy of Kinship (Englewood Cliffs,
Forces, Social Problems, and Sociometry N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963).
are also useful. For the works of some of the classical
Contemporary works that present basic figures in sociology refer to the footnotes
concepts and approaches to analyses of and text.
Culture, 66 Hinkle, Roscoe, 107, 117
Curriculum, 109-110 Historians, 110
Curtis, Charles, 52 History, 15, 16, 19, 34, 51, 88;
Custom, 66 defined, 21; social, 22; and
sociologists, 2-7, 21, 34, 94
Hobbes, Thomas, 49, 50
Dahl, Robert, 21, 85, 86 Homans, George, 22, 43, 52, 100
Dahrendorf, Ralf, 39 Homeostasis, 37, 38
Darwin, Charles, 45 Hsu, Francis, 21, 60
Davis, Kingsley, 34, 72-74 Hunter, Floyd, 85, 86
index Democracy, 87
Demography, 6, 13
Huyghens, Christian, 44
Deviance, 6, 11, 80-82

Dewey, John, 100 Industrial sociology, 13, 15, 90
Diamond, Sigmund, 22 Industrialism, 33, 34, 90
Dicks, Henry, 60 Inkeles, Alex, 21, 33, 34, 56, 60,
Differentiation, 11, 14, 62 76
Aberle, David, 64
Diffusion, 32 Interaction Process Analysis (IPA),
“Abstracted empiricism,” 98
“Division of labor,” 5, 31, 62 74, 96, 98; action profile, ta¬
Adorno, T., 55
Dodd, Stuart, 40 ble, 97
Allport, Gordon, 54
Almond, Gabriel, 21 Durkheim, Emile, 3-6, 15, 31, 34, “Interpretive specialists,” 98
Alpert, Harry, 111 (see also Re¬ 35, 36, 38, 47, 72, 81, 95, 100- “Intervening opportunities,” 41
search, federal funds) 102, 114, 116 Institution, 67-68
American Sociological Association,
9, 11, 95, 107, 108, 110
Economics, 19, 20 Jahoda, Marie, 55
American Sociological Review, 11
Economic sociology, 6-7 (see also Janowitz, Morris, 23, 55, 60
American Sociological Society, 11,
107, 108 Curriculum)
Anderson, Nels, 108 Empirical generalization, 100
Empiricism vs. theory, 98-101 Kant, Emmanuel, 50
L’Annee Sociologique, 6, 62, 95
Engels, Friedrich, 30, 31 Katz, Elihu, 21
Anomie, 100
Equilibrium theory, 26, 37-38, 51 Kirk, Russell, 93
Anthropology, 14, 16, 19, 23-24
(see also Structural-function¬ Kinship, 68 (see also Family)
Aristotle, 87
alism) Key, V. O., 21
Asch, Solomon, 22, 23
Etzioni, Amitai, 21 Kidd. Benjamin, 24
Associations, 5
Evolution, 4, 14; cyclical, 31; as Kluckhohn, Clyde, 34, 65
model, 30-35; multilinear, 33; Kluckhohn, Florence, 75
unilinear, 31, 33, 44; uni¬ Kornhauser, William, 21
Bales, Robert F., 40, 42, 43, 74,
versal, 32, 33 Kroeber, A. L., 32, 33, 65
97, 98
Barber, Bernard, 29
Barnes, Harry Elmer, 3
Lavoisier, Antoine, 105
Bauer, Raymond, 34 Family, 5-6, 13 (see also Insti¬
Lazarsfeld, Paul, 21, 51, 98, 117
Becker, Howard, 3, 15 tution; Kinship)
Lerner, Daniel, 34
Bell, Daniel, 85 Feldman, Arnold, 26, 27, 34
Levinson, Daniel, 51, 58, 59
Bellah, Robert, 22 “Folk society,” 31
Levy, Marion, 34, 70
Bendix, Reinhard, 7, 10, 86 Folkways, 66
Lindbloom. C. E., 21
Berelson, Bernard, 21, 51 Franklin, Benjamin, 74
Lindzey, G., 54
Berger, Monroe, 34 Freedman, Ronald, 9
Lipset, S. Martin, 20, 21, 52, 54,
Bierstedt, Robert, 93 Freud, Sigmund, 48
86
Birnbaum, Norman, 22 Fromm, Erich, 54
Locke, John, 50
Bloom, Benjamin, 59 F scale, 55, 56, 58; and politics, 60
Lowenthal, Leo, 52, 54
Broom, Leonard, 93, 113 (see also Personality, authori¬
Lundberg, George, 9, 40
Bureaucracy: and personality, 57; tarian)
Lynd, Robert, 101, 102, 103
and sociological research, 93,
113
Burgess, Edward, 108 Galtung, Johan, 39 McCarthy Era, 117
Burkhardt, Jakob, 22 Garceau, Oliver, 21 Machiavelli, 20, 50
Bush, Vannevar, 112 Gaudet, Hazel, 21, 51 McClelland, David, 56
“Gemeinschaft,” 31, 72 McKenzie, R. D., 108
“Gesellschaft,” 31 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 34
Calverton, V. F., 102, 105 Gerth, Hans, 88 “Marketing research,” 111
Cannon, Walter B., 38 Giddings, Frank, 108 Marvick, D., 23, 55, 60
Cantril, Hadley, 21 Gilbert, Doris, 58, 59 Marx, Karl, 20, 30-31, 84, 87, 88,
Chicago School of Sociology, 80, Gillispie, Charles, 109 116
82, 108 Glazer, Nathan, 99 Mason, Ward, 113
Christie, Richard, 55 Glueck, Eleanor, 81-82 Mathematical models, 20, 42, 43,
Class (see Stratification) Gleuck, Sheldon, 81-82 96
Cloward, Richard, 82 Graham, Milton, 112 Mauss, Marcel, 36
Coleman, James, 21 “Grand theory,’* 98 Mead, George Herbert, 71
Communists, 115 Green, Arnold, 9 Measurement and methodology, 9,
Community, 5, 6, 16, 68-70 Greenblatt, Milton, 59 11, 29, 42-44, 54, 84, 93 (see
“Competing migrants,” 41 Gross, Feliks, 21 also Mathematical models;
Comte, Auguste, 2-6, 30-31, 35, Groups: small (see Bales, Robert Bales, Robert F.; Interaction
39, 93, 99, 101, 108 F., and Interaction Process Process Analysis)
Conflict theory, 25, 27, 37-38, 51 Analysis); primary, 72 “Mechanical solidarity,” 31
Cooley, Charles, 72 Medalia, Mason, 113
Coser, Lewis, 39 Merton, Robert K., 11, 20, 34, 47,
Cottrell, L. S., 11, 21, 47, 89 Hallgarten, G. W., 94 51, 57-58, 83, 93, 99, 100-101
Couch, Arthur S., 56 Harrower, Molly, 110 Michels, Robert, 20
Coulton, G. C., 22 Hart, Hornell, 8, 9 Middletown, 102
Criminology, 13 Herodotus, 107 Mill, John Stuart, 50
“Cultural lag,” 32 Hinkle, Gisela, 107, 117 Miller, S. M., 86
119
Riley, Matilda W., 9, 54, 109, 110 Sofer, Elaine, 54
Mills, C. Wright, 2, 39, 85, 88, 93,
Rogers, R., 108 Sorokin, Pitirim, 2, 3, 32, 48, 93,
98, 102, 107, 113, 1 14
Rokan, Stein, 56 96
Mobility (see Stratification)
Role performance, 57, 66 Spencer, Herbert, 3-6, 30, 32, 34,
Models of society, 28-46, 80 (see
also Evolution; Mathematical Rose, Arnold, 33 93, 99
Rosenberg, Morris, 58 Spranger, Edward, 54
models)
Rostovtzev, Mikhail, 22 Statistical models, 42 (see also
Montaigne, 48
Roucek, Joseph, 21 Mathematical models)
Moore, Barrington, 34
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 20, 50 Status-positions, 57, 59, 60, 67, 79
Moore, Mary, 54
Stein, Morris, 59
Moore, Wilbert, 26, 27, 34, 90
Stern, George, 59
Mores, 66
Motivation, 79 Steward, Julian, 32
Myrdal, Gunnar, 102, 103, 114, Sanctions, 79 Stochastic process, 43
Schwab, Joseph J., 19, 104, 105 Stonequist, E. V., 51
116, 117
Self-censorship, 116-117 Stouffer, Samuel, 41
Set theory, 43 Stratification, 5, 7, 10, 11, 83, 84;
Shaw, Clifford, 81, 82, 108 and caste, 86; and class, 55,
Shils, Edward, 40 83-86
Nagel, Ernest, 46
Sibley, Elbridge, 107, 113 Strodbeck, Fred, 75, 80
National Science Foundation, 111,
Simmel, Georg, 15 Structural-functionalism (see Or¬
112 Simon, Herbert A., 43, 44, 96 ganismic model)
National Institute of Health, 10
(see also Mathematical models) Structures: analytic and concrete,
National Institute of Mental
Health, 112 Simpson, Richard, 110 68
Small, Albion, 108 Suicide, 47, 48, 81, 95, 101
Needs, 56, 64-65
Smelser, Neil, 20 Sumner, William Graham, 30, 66
Neighborhood, 69
Newcomb, Theodore, 89 Social act, 7, 8, 15, 16, 71 107, 108
Newton, Sir Isaac, 44 Social action, 7, 63 Sutherland, Edwin, 82
Nisbet, Robert A., 83 Social change (see Conflict; Equi¬
librium theory; Evolution;
Needs; Industrialism; Struc¬
tural-functionalism) Technology, 32, 33
Ogburn, William, 32, 33
Social control, 5, 11 (see also Textbooks, 8-10
O’Hara, Albert, 116
Deviance; Sociology, as study Theory, 28, 98-101
Ohlin, Lloyd, 82
of order) Thielen, Wagner, 117
Oppenheimer, Robert, 44, 45
“Social dynamics,” 4, 35 Thomas, W. I., 51, 53, 108
“Organic solidarity,” 31
“Social facts,” 6, 7, 16 Thrasher, Frederic, 108
Organismic model: Structural-
Social laws, possibility, 95 Tonnies, Ferdinand, 31, 72
functionalism, 33-38, 50
Social psychology, 22, 23 (see also Types of man, 49-61
Osgood, Charles, 74
Personality)
“Oversocialized conception of
Social relationships, 7, 8, 13, 16,
man,” 49-50
71; primary and secondary,
72; table, 73 “Urban” society, 31
“Social statics,” 3, 35 “Universal social interconnection,”
Packard, Vance, 52, 67 Social system, 35-46, 68 4
Pareto, Vilfredo, 32, 50, 52, 53, Socialization, 49, 51, 59
54, 56, 102, 105 Society, 36, 70
Park, Robert, 51, 108 Sociologists: affiliations of, 9, 11,
Parsons, Talcott, 15, 20, 34, 40, 74 107; in bureaucracies, 93, 113- Values: in child-rearing, table,
Pattern variables, 74, 100 114; elite, 11; interests, 9, 10; 76; in college, 59, 89; defined,
Pen-Wen, Sun, 116 and resistance to change, 29- 74; and personality types, 58;
Penology, 13 30, 45; and socialism, 115 and politics, 60; in sociology,
“Persistence of aggregates,” 52 Sociology: of aesthetics, 6; and 101-102
Personality, 6, 22, 48, 57-59; au¬ anthropology, 23; approaches Value-orientations, 75
thoritarian, 23, 55, 56, 60 (see to a definition of, 2-3; of art, Vernon, P., 54
also F scales); and mobility, 10; of the bicycle, 12; com¬ Vogelfanger, M., 108, 109
61; and role performance, parative, 4, 6, 7; in communist
57-60 countries, 115-116; defined,
Physical science models, 39-42, 44 16, 19, 27; degrees in, i05,
Plato, 20, 34 113; and economics, 19-20 Ward, Lester, 108
Podell, Laurence, 108, 109 (see also Economics); his¬ Warner, Lloyd, 84
Poincare, J. H., 29 torical, 21-22, 52-53; of the Weber, Max, 3, 6-7, 13, 14, 15,
Political science, 13, 19, 20 hospital, 12; of law, 6, 10; 20, 22, 53, 71, 74, 88, 93, 96,
Political sociology, 6, 20, 21 of medicine, 10; of mental ill¬ 98, 101, 102, 114
“Power-elite,” 85 ness, 11; of organizations, 6, “White collar criminality,” 82
Prestige groups, 83 10, 11, 16 (see also Curricu¬ White, Leslie, 32, 33 (see also
Probability theory, 42 (see also lum); origins of, 5, 107-108; Evolution, universal)
Mathematical models) outline of, table, 12; and psy¬ Whitehead, Alfred North, 44
Psychoanalysis, 49 chology, 47, 51-61; of religion, Whyte, William F., 51
Psychology, 19, 22, 47, 48, 57, 5, 6, 14 (see also Curriculum); Wiese, Leopold von, 15
60-61 as science (see Chapter 7; of Williams, Robin, 95
Psychologists, in private practice, small groups, 12, 15, 42, 99 Wirth, Louis, 108
110 (see also Bales, Robert F., and Wrong, Dennis, 50
Interaction Process Analysis); Wolff, Kurt (see Durkheim,
of the stranger, 12; of stratifi¬
Emile, and Simmel, Georg)
Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., 34 cation, 5, 10 (see also Stratifica¬
Redfield, Robert, 31 tion); as study of institutions,
Research: federal funds, 111-112; 7, 13, 14, 16, 17; as study of
industrial and commercial order, 35-37; as study of social “Yankee City,” 84-85
funds, 11; independence of, relationships, 13, 15, 16-17; as
103-104, 114 study of societies, 5, 6, 13, 14,
Residues, 52-53 16; theory in, 11, 16, 28; Zipf, George K., 41
Reuter, Edward B., 67 “value-free,” 102;'of work, 10 Znaniecki, Florian, 51
Riesman, David, 52-56 (see also Industrial sociology) Zorbaugh, Harvey, 108
120
index
Date Due
CAT. NO. 2* 233
LIBRARY
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HM Inkeles, Alex
What is sociology?
vji O
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Trent
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NUNC COCNOSCO EX PARTE

Social Change, Wilbert E. Moore

Alex Inkeles, Harvard University

Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey

Alex Inkeles, Editor

© Copyright 1964 by PRENTICE-HALL, INC., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.

PRENTICE-HALL INTERNATIONAL, London

C-95241 (p), C-95242 (c)

Page 7 Line 19: express should be expresses.

» I wish to thank Nancy Boyden and Sharlee Segal for

ardent teacher, searching critic

the subject matter of sociology, 1

the sociological perspective, 18

models of society in sociological analysis, 28

basic elements of social life, 62

fundamental social processes, 78

modes of inquiry in sociology, 92

sociology as a profession, 106

selected references, 118

What the Founding Fathers Said

3 Pitirim A. Sorokin, Contemporary Sociological Theories (New York: Harper, 1928).

The Science of Sociology has to give an account of [how] successive

The subject matter of sociology as Spencer defined it contains quite

Although they by no means expressed themselves in precisely the same

The Test of Elite Preference

The Fields of Sociological Concern

33 The committee was headed by Professor Robert K. Merton of Columbia Univer¬

II. Primary Units of Social Life

III. Basic Social Institutions

IV. Fundamental Social Processes

It is doubtful if very many sociologists would challenge any item on

What Reason Suggests

36 This evolutionary theory is fully discussed in Chap. 3.

the subject matter of sociology

J an interlocking “system” of action.41 We can, therefore, say that sociology

41 “Systems of action” are more fully discussed in Chap. 5.

Joseph J. Schwab, “What Do Scientists Do?”, Behavioral Science (1960), V:l.

the sociological perspective

11 Solomon Asch, Social Psychology (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1952),

Disciplines, Boundaries, and Issues

13 “Sociology,” Vol. XXV, Encyclopedia Britannica (1911), p. 322 ff.

Toward a Definition of Sociology:

o perspective from which it is viewed. Certainly no social system is perfect

16 These conceptions of society and their protagonists are discussed in Chap. 3.

17 Arnold Feldman and Wilbert Moore, “Industrialization and Industrialism: Con¬

1 Bernard Barber, “Resistance by Scientists to Scientific Discovery’’ (New York:

The Evolutionary Model

7 See also Chap. 5.

The Organismic Model:

Equilibrium vs. Conflict Models

models of society in sociological analysis

The Physical Science Model

Statistical and Mathematical Models

First ... we do well to avoid a priori philosophical commitments to

Professor Simon’s strictures may themselves be taken as a model of the

Models, Propositions, and Truth

37 Simon, Models of Man: Social and Rational, p. 97 ff.

On the Nature of Man

Psychoanalysis has concluded . . . that the primitive, savage, and