A Century of Motion: Disciplinary Culture and Organizational Drift in American Sociology

This is the second essay of a three-part perspective series commemorating ASA’s centennial year.

by Bruce Keith, United States Military Academy

An underlying assumption of American sociology is the belief that the field is, first and foremost, a science. This assumption, embedded historically within the disciplinary culture and articulated presently as an integral component of the discipline’s mission, represents the patterns of thought, beliefs, and values drawn from shared experiences and common learning. As Frank Westie (1972) opined, the sociological discipline is encased in a culture of legitimation; new members begin with an interest in making the world a better place but learn quickly that professional success equates with scientific status. The resulting process of professional development replaces the goal of solving social problems with a quest for individual status.

Natural Law and Disciplinary Knowledge

Science is believed to represent disciplinary knowledge for which there exists substantial consensus (Cole 1992). While several distinct perspectives have been advanced on the nature of science, practitioners typically believe that they are uncovering laws of nature and do not give much, if any, thought to the notion that they are actually participating in socially constructed processes. Steven Brint (1994) has shown that the professions represent labor market enclaves that are defined and managed by credentialing mechanisms and are controlled by the societies that regulate them. Sometimes a profession constructs knowledge through application (e.g., law), while at other times the practical application of knowledge depends more on an understanding of the context in which knowledge is applied (e.g., medicine); in either situation, the construction and application of knowledge is regulated within definable boundaries of space and time.

I surmise that sociology is more akin to a profession than a science because I find no evidence that members of our discipline have discovered any law or principle that is applicable temporally across social contexts. For example, in the field of physics, Albert Einstein is credited for piecing together the universally applicable equation, E = mc², which states that the energy of a mass is equal to the product of that mass and the square of its velocity. Within sociology, more than a century of scholarship has yet to yield a similarly systematic expression of a single natural social law that is recognized commonly by practitioners in the field. Indeed, as Morten Ender and I (2004) have shown, little consensus exists on the basic concepts sociologists use in their presentation of the discipline; sociology’s claim as a science appears suspect in the absence of a core foundation of scientific knowledge.

Most members of our discipline could probably agree that sociologists study people and their interactions with social properties. As such, observed outcomes within a given context occur not because individuals adhere to the principles of a natural law but, rather, because the established social order provides them with differential opportunities for achievement. Once structural impediments are identified and altered, contextual displays of opportunity may be enhanced. Thus, shifts in organizational structures are time and space dependent; that is, they depend on history and context. Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Karl Marx variously sought to understand the interplay between agency and structure. More recently, Doug Massey et al.’s (2002) notable work on Mexican immigration patterns describes a cyclical pattern of human behavior that responds to shifts in the structure (i.e., laws, executive orders, border patrols) of the United States. The professional application of this knowledge seeks to modify the structure in ways that alleviate the problem by changing public policy. Patently, though, there is no scientific algorithm expressed in this study comparable to E = mc².

Practical Drift and Sociology

When our discipline is viewed as a science, the resultant knowledge ought to be both cumulative and generalizable across social contexts. Conversely, when conceived as a profession, sociological knowledge is problem-based and contextual; our problems are embedded within social and cultural contexts that, once altered, change forever the nature of the knowledge produced.

Within any field, disciplinary culture legitimates stratification patterns. When stratification undermines organizational cohesion, the resulting tension may produce a form of practical drift; the interrelated components of a system gravitate toward independence while the system operates as though the parts remain embedded within the whole. In the case of sociology, stratification based on a culture of science reinforces an organizational hierarchy that defines prospective leaders through a restrictive nomination process. The outcome may solve one problem (governance) while unintentionally creating another, possibly greater, problem (disciplinary dissonance). This situation is not unique to sociology; clinical psychologists and academic psychologists have struggled for decades with a similar stratification within their formal organizations.

The failure of the national and regional associations to remain integrated, as I discussed in the November 2005 issue of Footnotes (p. 5), contributes to disciplinary dissonance. In turn and over time, this dissonance impacts negatively upon all of the organizations within the discipline. As John Meyer and Brian Rowan (1977) suggest, drift becomes problematic because it creates a chasm between established procedures and actual practice that can produce unintended consequences. This drift toward internal differentiation is not so much the cause of the problem as it is an outcome, which emanates from a larger systemic problem embedded within the disciplinary culture. The problem of dissonance stems in part from the predominating view that sociology is a science, which appears to be an inaccurate perception. This misperception guides the discipline toward an overemphasis on the production of “scientific” research and the establishment of a governance structure drawn on a small number of faculty from “scientific” departments. Internal differentiation resulting from this self-image appears responsible for the presence of disciplinary dissonance, which permeates throughout the professional organization of the discipline.

References

Brint, Steven. 1994. In an Age of Experts: The Changing Role of Professionals in Politics and Public Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Cole, Stephen. 1992. Making Science: Between Nature and Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Keith, Bruce and Morten G. Ender. 2004. “The Sociological Core: Conceptual Patterns and Idiosyncrasies in the Structure and Content of Introductory Sociology Textbooks, 1940-1990.” Teaching Sociology 32:19–36.

Massey, Douglas S., Jorge Durand, and Nolan J. Malone. 2002. Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration in an Era of Economic Integration. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Meyer, John W. and Brian Rowan. 1977. “Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony.” American Journal of Sociology 83:340–363.