Varieties of Normative Inquiry: Moral Alternatives to Politicization in Sociology

This article evaluates four different ways of relating the normative side of sociology to its empirical side. Two such ways are in existence at present. The first is “dualism,” the idea that sociology provides purely scientific results to political or moral projects that are conducted on some independent normative basis. This position is commonly invoked in the idea of “value-free sociology.” The second is “monism,” the ideas that value-freedom is impossible and that sociology is inevitably value-driven, indeed perhaps that it should be openly so driven. This position is commonly invoked in the idea of “the unity of theory and practice.” These existing approaches are complemented by two that do not yet exist in practice. Both are explicitly normative in part. The first of these is a “canonical” approach, like that of the subdiscipline of political theory, in which normative inquiry within sociology would be formally recognized within the discipline and would be organized around a classical canon of normative works. The second would be a “legalist” approach, which would grow out of new genres of writing that aimed at the systematic normative evaluation of bodies of work or literatures, thus working inductively, in contrast to the canonical approach’s deductivism. The article evaluates these four positions according to four criteria: feasibility, coherence, trajectory, and open-mindedness. It concludes that the current positions (dualism and monism) are both embarrassingly weak: typically unconscious and sometimes naïve, in many cases driven by the unacknowledged – and hence uncritical - assumption that one's particular politics are in fact universally desirable. The discipline should try to create an explicit but rigorously argued normative subdiscipline, probably combining both the canonical and legalist positions.     

A Sociology of No‐Self: Applying Buddhist Social Theory to Symbolic Interaction

Although fraught with complexity, the self is a central phenomenon of discussion and analysis within sociology. This article contributes to this discourse by introducing the Buddhist ideas of anatta (no‐self) and prattyasamutpāda (interdependence) as analytic frameworks to deconstruct and rethink the self within sociology. We argue that the sociological self, most clearly articulated by symbolic interactionism, is premised on a self‐other dualism. This dualism leads to a conceptualization of the self as constantly threatened and anxious. Using these Buddhist concepts we propose an alternative interpretive schema, a sociology of no‐self, for analyzing social interaction and understanding the roots of social angst.     

PRAGMATISM AND GRIEVING: INCORPORATING MEAD AND DEWEY TO UNDERSTAND THE GRIEVING OF PEOPLE WITH MENTAL RETARDATION

Although the philosophy of pragmatism influenced American sociology, specifically that of symbolic interactionism, its use as a tool for explanation of everyday life has been underutilized throughout sociology. In this article, pragmatism, specifically the ideas of George Herbert Mead and John Dewey provide a framework for the understanding of grieving, specifically as it relates to people with mental retardation. Both Mead and Dewey's use and inclusion of physics into their philosophies proved paramount in their assertions regarding Cartesian or ontological dualism. They then demonstrated through the inclusion of quantum physics how to avoid positivism, thereby creating the necessary link of science with human perception and human action. Mead's use of the Theory of Relativity, as well as Sociality; and Dewey's incorporation of the Uncertainty Principle, and addressing the sum of possibilities, provides a context where the grieving process of people with mental retardation will be much more pronounced. People with mental retardation, by definition, through their neural networks have an inability to perceive existence in a manner that is functionally the same as the rest of the population. Their abilities influence how people with mental retardation relate to themselves or environment, thereby creating either fewer realities or systems from which to interact, or creating ones that are functionally dissimilar from the typical population, hence the label “mental retardation;” therefore, the loss of someone or something creates a greater hole or emptiness for people with mental retardation than the rest of society.     

A Sociological Alternative to the Psychiatric Conceptualization of Mental Suffering

Uncovering both the structural causes and experiences of suffering is a central sociological endeavor. Sociologists study many different kinds of suffering; after all, strife is experienced both physically and emotionally, because of internal factors such as illness, due to external factors such as trauma, and as a result of economic, political or natural environments. In this paper, I address one form of suffering: mental suffering. In particular, I describe the medicalization of mental suffering in biological psychiatry, which focuses on the genetic factors of illness and equates mental suffering with mental illness. The psychiatric concept of mental illness highlights the continuing, crucial role for sociology in both understanding the experience and identifying the structural roots of suffering. Since the dominant conceptualization of mental suffering is as a medical concept, it is vital for sociology to offer alternative explanations and contribute to a multidimensional analysis. The roots of mental suffering are much more than biological; social comparison, social inequality, and other social stressors are equally important etiological considerations. Therefore, a true understanding of mental suffering requires multiple perspectives, and sociological constructs guard against a total medicalization of mental suffering.     

The Emergence of Environmental Sociology: Contributions of Riley E. Dunlap and William R. Catton, Jr.

Human beings have a dualistic relationship with the environment, being subject to physical and biological limits and yet being unique in the capacity for culture and symbolic communication. Sociology reflects this context and adds another dualism, drawing heavily from the concepts and perspectives of biological ecology, but reacting almost violently against "reductionism" of any sort, specifically including social Darwinism and environmental determinism. During much of the twentieth century, the predominant trend within sociology was for scholars to downplay or even ignore the importance of the environment, particularly in the United States. This trend was ultimately counterbalanced by sociological responses to the environmental movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s and by the efforts of selected sociologists-particulady Riley Dunlap and William Catton-who helped bring together the field of "environmental sociology." Given the finite nature of many natural resources and the ways in which human activities depend upon and affect the environment, the field of environmental sociology is likely to be an increasingly important one in the years to come.     

MYTHIC FACTS AND PARK'S PRAGMATISM:

Robert Park's proposals for the study of human and urban ecology were grounded in pragmatism, but critics of his perspective from the late 1930s through the 1940s totally missed his use of pragmatism and thereby defined four lines of deficiency: dualism (between the biotic and cultural), neglect of the sociocultural, biological determinism, and problems of measurement. These criticisms became reified as fact, out of which came Hawley's 1950 pivotal text that redirected human ecological study. Developments since then have largely been reactions against the so-called neo-orthodox approach, but in the process, the criticisms of Park have become intertextually sedimented into what we call "mythic fact' and what rhetoricians refer to as constitutive rhetoric. We document the lines of criticism and their consequences in ecological study, and then show how they were inaccurately grounded by neglecting Park's pragmatist perspective. Our analysis contributes specifically to the further understanding of predecessor-selection processes and suggests a political sociology of knowledge that challenges the cumulative theory growth model.     

Introduction to the special issue: Sociology and feminist scholarship

Feminist writers in the seventies angrily criticized the work of male academicians, arguing that what scholarship presented as the norm was in fact white male experience. That critique generated a body of interdisciplinary theory and scholarship. This introduction examines what feminist sociologists mean when they talk about feminist theory—how they use the interdisciplinary theories, and how they apply a feminist methodological stance to generate feminist theory within sociology. It provides a context for understanding the articles that follow in this special issue as examples of feminist research in sociology and as statements of some of the current issues and as problems of concern to feminists in sociology. She is interested in gender, culture, religion and feminist theory. She wroteCharisma and Community: A Study of Religious Commitment within the Catholic Charismatic Renewal and is currently studying witchcraft traditions and the communities that support them.     

Critical race theory speaks to the sociology of mental health: mental health problems produced by racial stratification

The sociology of mental health focuses on the epidemiology, etiology, correlates, and consequences of mental health (i.e., psychiatric disorder and symptoms, psychological distress, and subjective well-being) in an attempt to describe and explain how social structure influences an individual's psychological health. Critical race theory describes and explains iterative ways in which race is socially constructed across micro- and macro-levels, and how it determines life chances implicating the mundane and extraordinary in the continuance of racial stratification (i.e., racism). This paper invoked critical race theory to inform the sociology of mental health's approach to studying race and mental health by conceptualizing five hypothetical mental health problems that could exist because of racial stratification. These problems were: (1) nihilistic tendencies, (2) anti-self issues, (3) suppressed anger expression, (4) delusional denial tendencies, and (5) extreme racial paranoia. Mental health problems such as these and undocumented others can only be recognized given awareness of the social and personal implications of racial stratification.     

Imputing Beliefs: a Controversy in the Sociology of Knowledge1

The problem of imputation - how to ascribe ideas and beliefs to groups, or to individuals on the basis of their group membership - has occasionally occupied the attention of those working in the sociology of knowledge. This article offers a critical discussion of this debate. It is argued that the various proposed solutions - idealist, empiricist, and structuralist - do not adequately tackle the problem since each assumes a deterministic model of sociological explanation, and adheres to a dualism of actor versus structure. We suggest that a theory of group formation informed by a social action perspective may offer some pointers towards taking such issues beyond self-sustaining debate between sociological idealism and objectivism.     

Varela and Contemporary Psychoanalysis,an Epistemological Gesture: From Representations to Co-emergence

This paper intends to articulate common epistemological elements between Francisco Varela’s and Contemporary psychoanalytic relational-intersubjective theories. These shared elements could be described as a common epistemological gesture, the overcome of a reductionist and dualist paradigm, instead giving away to a paradigm of complexity. In both perspectives, a phenomenological and close to experience philosophical reflection is incorporated, which can account the human experience as an irreducible and valid source of knowledge. In Varela’s theory, the notion of embodiment permit to conceive the mind as natural endowment of the body. In Contemporary psychoanalytic theories, nature of human experience is conceive as intrisically social, proposing a “two person” psychology and the intersubjective model. Finally, in line with both currents and in a preliminary way, I propose the notion of co-emergency, seeking to overcome different forms of dualisms like internal/external, subject/world, I/Other, etc. From a clinical perspective, co-emergency can be conceived a s the coupling of two subjectivities, as a particular experiential mode of being with others, intending to overcome dualism regarding transference and represented mental states.     

Embodiment, experience and theory: in defence of the sociological tradition

This paper examines whether the theoretical analyses and ambitions of sociologists of the body are increasingly making obstructive and irrelevant the subject boundaries and methodological conventions associated with their parent discipline. Concerns about the utility of the discipline have been expressed by a number of body studies emanating from within and outside of sociology. These imply that it is necessary to reject the dominant problematic of sociology and utilise non disciplinary resources if we are to understand issues surrounding the ‘lived experience’ of embodiment. In opposing this rejection of sociology, if not the use of other intellectual resources, I argue that the discipline contains much valuable theorising about experience which has yet to be developed by body theorists. Many of sociology's central concepts, indeed, evoke dimensions of human experience that remain highly pertinent to an understanding of the individual and societal significance of the body in the contemporary era. In order to illustrate this argument, I focus on the writings of Durkheim and Simmel. Their work is rarely central to writings on the body, but provides good examples of the diversity of theoretical approaches within sociology that remain relevant to body theorists. Specifically, I want to use it to develop the outlines of a theory of embodiment as a medium for the constitution of society which has at its centre a concern with human experience. I conclude by reassessing the strategic options sociologists of the body confront in developing their analyses.     

Emergenz und Reduktion

The micro-macro-link is a common problem in nearly every scientific field. In contemporary philosophy of mind a new concept of emergence has been developed which could also be useful for sociology. After a brief overview of the debate in the field of philosophy of mind, three different answers to the micro-macro problem are being distinguished and then transferred to sociology: an eliminative (e.g. R. Collins), a reductionist (e.g. rational choice theories) and a non-reductive answer based on the concept of emergence (e.g. Emile Durkheim, and, partly, N. Luhmann). Using the argument of “multiple realization” the article argues for a “conceptual dualism”.     

Academic odyssey: The training of an African sociologist

This article describes my experience of graduate training in sociology at an elite American university. As an African, I faced cultural and intellectual pressures to adopt white middle class cultural norms and a Eurocentric worldview. The article critiques American sociology, including symbolic interactionism, the sociology of the Third World and the study of race and ethnic relations. I describe my personal encounter with American racism and the process that led me to conduct research on black immigrants. I argue that my exposure to American sociology and experience of American society transformed me into a black marginal sociologist, specializing in teaching and research on the African-American experience in the New World. His forthcoming book,Becoming Black American, is being published by AMS Press.     

Dreams of Pure Sociology

Unlike older sciences such as physics and biology, sociology has never had a revolution. Modern sociology is still classical—largely psychological, teleological, and individualistic—and even less scientific than classical sociology. But pure sociology is different: It predicts and explains the behavior of social life with its location and direction in social space—its geometry. Here I illustrate pure sociology with formulations about the behavior of ideas, including a theory of scienticity that predicts and explains the degree to which an idea is likely to be scientific (testable, general, simple, valid, and original). For example: Scienticity is a curvilinear function of social distance from the subject. This formulation explains numerous facts about the history and practice of science, such as why some sciences evolved earlier and faster than others and why so much sociology is so unscientific. Because scientific theory is the most scientific science, the theory of scienticity also implies a theory of theory and a methodology for the development of theory.     

The use of theory in applied sociology: The case of community mental health

Despite the rapid growth of applied sociology as a recognized subdiscipline in American sociology, very little attention has been focused on the use of traditional theory in applied settings. The author traces consensual and conflictual approaches to the concept of community in the applied literature of the community mental health movement and relates them to political economic phases of the movement. The analysis suggests that varying forms of consensual theory dominated the early years of the movement, that conflict theory emerged during the middle years, and that consensual theory again reasserted its dominance in the late years of the movement. It is concluded that applied theory is importantly limited and directed by the political and economic interests that influence the environment in which that theory is produced and employed. Sylvia kenig is a medical sociologist who directs her own consulting firm, which specializes in evaluation of nonprofit health and welfare agencies.     

Revitalizing sociology: urban life and mental illness between history and the present

This paper proposes a re‐thinking of the relationship between sociology and the biological sciences. Tracing lines of connection between the history of sociology and the contemporary landscape of biology, the paper argues for a reconfiguration of this relationship beyond popular rhetorics of ‘biologization' or ‘medicalization'. At the heart of the paper is a claim that, today, there are some potent new frames for re‐imagining the traffic between sociological and biological research – even for ‘revitalizing’ the sociological enterprise as such. The paper threads this argument through one empirical case: the relationship between urban life and mental illness. In its first section, it shows how this relationship enlivened both early psychiatric epidemiology, and some forms of the new discipline of sociology; it then traces the historical division of these sciences, as the sociological investment in psychiatric questions waned, and ‘the social' become marginalized within an increasingly ‘biological' psychiatry. In its third section, however, the paper shows how this relationship has lately been revivified, but now by a nuanced epigenetic and neurobiological attention to the links between mental health and urban life. What role can sociology play here? In its final section, the paper shows how this older sociology, with its lively interest in the psychiatric and neurobiological vicissitudes of urban social life, can be our guide in helping to identify intersections between sociological and biological attention. With a new century now underway, the paper concludes by suggesting that the relationship between urban life and mental illness may prove a core testing‐ground for a ‘revitalized' sociology.     

Beyond the Structure/Agency Dualism: An Evaluation of Giddens’Theory of Structuration*

In this paper an evaluation of Giddens’theory of structuration is focused on two related issues: first, the degree to which Giddens provides a theory of action which transcends the structure/agency dualism and, second, whether such a transcendence is possible. In the first instance, it is demonstrated that Giddens exaggerates the powers of agents at the expense of structural constraints. Second, it is argued that transcendence of structure/agency dualism and the specification of a definitive ontology of action is not possible and that the merit of structuration theory lies in its use as a sensitizing device for empirical research.     

A feminist critique of rational-choice theories: Implications for sociology

I consider the relationship between two currents affecting sociology, rational-choice theory and interdisciplinary feminist theory. In particular, I consider how the feminist critique of the separative model of self applies to one version of rational-choice theory, neoclassical economics. In discussing this I identify four assumptions of neoclassical economics: selfishness; interpersonal utility comparisons are impossible; tastes are exogenous and unchanging; and individuals are rational. I argue that each of these harmonizes best with a view of separate rather than connected selves, and that this imbalance distorts theories, particularly those that claim to understand women’s experience. These distorting assumptions are less prevalent in sociology than in economics, but some of them are implicit in some versions of sociological rational-choice and exchange theories. I conclude by using research on marital power to illustrate how removing distorting assumptions and bringing questions about separation/connection to center stage can help illuminate sociological research. Her forthcoming book,Comparable Worth: Theories and Evidence (New York: Aldine deGruyter), discusses this controversial policy issue from a perspective that draws upon sociology, economics, and feminist theory.     

For a postcolonial sociology

Postcolonial theory has enjoyed wide influence in the humanities but it has left sociology comparatively unscathed. Does this mean that postcolonial theory is not relevant to sociology? Focusing upon social theory and historical sociology in particular, this article considers if and how postcolonial theory in the humanities might be imported into North American sociology. It argues that postcolonial theory offers a substantial critique of sociology because it alerts us to sociology’s tendency to analytically bifurcate social relations. The article also suggests that a postcolonial sociology can overcome these problems by incorporating relational social theories to give new accounts of modernity. Rather than simply studying non-Western postcolonial societies or only examining colonialism, this approach insists upon the interactional constitution of social units, processes, and practices across space. To illustrate, the article draws upon relational theories (actor-network theory and field theory) to offer postcolonial accounts of two conventional research areas in historical sociology: the industrial revolution in England and the French Revolution.     

Functionalism and the survey: the relation of theory and method*

Many writers hold that research method is necessarily determined by theory, and it is common to suggest the relationship between functionalism and survey method in post-war US sociology as an example of this. This paper questions the extent to which that method and that theory were in reality meaningfully associated, and argues against the position that theory and method are in general invariably connected in the way suggested.