The<i>British Journal of Sociology</i>in the 1990s: disintegration and disarray?¹

摘要

Lacking any coherent definition of the field and blessed by a democratic attitude, our ark accepts animals, plants, rocks, bicycles, junked cars – you name it – which, in turn, makes it harder and harder to turn anything away. (Davis 1994: 189) When I announced to a colleague that I had been tasked with surveying the British Journal of Sociology in the 1990s, he grunted ‘rather you than me’. It was with huge trepidation that I approached a decade that I had been led to believe represented a discipline in crisis. That apprehension was compounded enormously by the impossible task of having to select two articles that represented ‘the best’ of the BJS in that decade.2 A crescendo of complaints about sociology in the 1990s sustained the truism that the sociological enterprise was at that time in a severe state of disintegration and disarray. Horowitz stated this boldly: sociology had fallen into a ‘dismal abyss’ (Horowitz in Good 1994). Whilst some sociologists disagreed with this diagnosis, a significant number believed that there were serious problems with both the intellectual coherence and professional organization of the discipline. Some of the loudest complaints came from those defending paradigms that had long held the discipline captive, but were now under attack. Predictably, sociologists were divided over what divided sociology. It is worth reprising some of these complaints here. The first, and most fundamental, complaint was that sociology had failed as a science. This was because it had failed both to predict and explain a host of critical socio-historic shifts: the ‘radicalization’ of the affluent middle class in major Western industrial societies in the late 60s and early 70s; the economic rise and modernization of Japan and other East Asian countries; the resurgence of religion in the USA and Iran in the late 1970s; and the collapse of communism as idea and practice (Berger 1992: 16–18; Hollander 1992). For Berger, this particular failure rendered sociology ‘obsolete’ and left it in a state of ‘cognitive anomie’. Sociology had also failed as a science because it had not made any theoretical ‘progress’. Rule attributes this to dissensus on the classics, its predilection for arcane reflexivity (he complains about Haraway here), and a slide into relativism (Rule 1994: 248–56). We fail, he argues, to deal with stuff that ‘matters’ or ‘that we need to know’, described elsewhere as a ‘terror of substance and worship of theory’ (Davis 1994: 196). We prefer, instead, to articulate ourselves in unfathomable jargon making our insights too obscure for consumption beyond the academy, and thus compound our own irrelevance (Molotch 1994: 229). A second complaint was that sociology suffered from parochialism. There are two aspects to this charge. First, sociology's blindness to the historical shifts in the social order(s) described above was due to a parochial ethnocentrism conditioning sociology's dominant paradigms (modernization, secularization and dependency theories); its methodologies (specifically the dominance of quantitative methods); and the ideological orientation of the discipline (Marxist) (Berger 1992; Hollander 1992). Second, disciplinary parochialism was an effect of sociology's bullheadedness and its consequent inability to embrace the insights of other disciplines. As Molotch notes, ‘our goal often becomes not to solve the problem, but rather to prove that only sociology can solve the problem’ (Molotch 1994: 225). Third, sociology was afflicted by a flourishing of self-sufficient specializations – demography, criminology and the family (amongst others) – which contributed to a disintegration of its core intellectual identity. Many of those working in these sub-fields consorted primarily with other disciplines working in the same field, and failed to draw on the classical sociological heritage for sustenance. The result was ‘a discipline in name only, whose members have fewer common ancestors than they did twenty