社会学家作为说故事者

过去,一些重要的西方社会学者主张,社会学者最主要的任务乃在于挖掘与诠释社会互动现象所可能意涵的“未预期结果”。在结构功能论之思维传统的主导下,最具代表性的,莫过于默顿的说法,他认为,“未预期结果”是客观地存在于社会体系中的一种具潜在功能作用的社会事实,乃反映着那些有助于体系的调整与适应、但却未能为该体系之参与者所意图、且认识到的客观结果。在本文中,笔者则采取另类的观点,尝试表达如下的见解,其实,社会学家原本只不过是一个编织故事的艺匠而已。他大体上犹如都市中漫游的行走者,一直处于当下此刻,在一再分岔的街道上一边行走一边浏览着沿途的景观,也就是说,他选择个人特别亲近的、但具深邃文化－历史意涵的某种核心概念作为出发点,以不断分岔的方式来编织“社会”的图像。准此,韦伯所提出之理念型的研究策略,可以说是最为典型的例证。

Sociologist as a Story-Teller

In past, the task of sociologist has long been regarded as the excavator (and interpreter as well) of those unanticipated consequences deeply remained in conceal under the surface of a social interaction. Under the rubric of structural-functional doctrine, Merton takes a position to conceive society as an organism-like body enshrined with a holistic nature. It thus leads Merton to conceive unanticipated consequences as a handful of social facts with latent function which were objectively constellated within a social system. In effect, those objective unanticipated consequences are considered to be beneficial to the adjustment and adaptation of a system, but they are neither intended nor recognized by the participators. In this article, the author takes an alternative stand to argue that a sociologist may just only play a role of story-teller. Like a stroller in a city who takes all his purposes as well as possible opportunities in mind to choose where to go further at every forking street corner he (or she) is encountering. As a stroller, a person always presents himself (or herself) at a given moment of time in such a way that any single move in space actually tells us a “present” moment in time. That is to say, people are always in a phasic state in which a continuously forking-like displacement of “here/there” phase hybridizes the sense of “time”. Translating such a complex of notions implicit in the scenography of a stroller in a city into the enterprise of sociological knowledge construction, what a sociologist as a story-teller is expected to do means to select a particular conceptual scheme with salient cultural-historical significance as a point of departure to construct a frame of analysis in which finding a conceptual forking path is exerted all the way. Concomitantly Max Weber's ideal type as an analytical tool happens to tell such a same story.