sociology: Definition from Answers.com
Sociology as a discipline developed from theoretical writings of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. The predominant theories stem from the work of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Talcott Parsons, Robert Merton, and James Coleman. The influence of this rich theoretical foundation has manifested itself in major debates over the role of sociology as a science. European and American perspectives on sociology as a science differ, with the American perspective favoring sociology as a scientific discipline and emphasizing a more quantitative methodological approach than the European approach.
Key Concepts in Sociology
Several key concepts in sociology relate to its role in public health. Foremost is the emphasis on society rather than the individual. The individual is viewed as an actor within larger social processes. This distinguishes the field from psychology. The emphasis is on units of analysis at the collective level, such as the family, the group, the neighborhood, the city, the organization, the state, and the world. Of key importance is how the social fabric, or social structure, is maintained, and how social processes, such as conflict and resolution, relate to the maintenance and change of social structures. A sociologist studies processes that create, maintain, and sustain a social system, such as a health care system in a particular country. The scientific component of this study would be the concern with the processes regulating and shaping the health care system. Sociology assumes that social structure and social processes are very complex. Therefore its methodology is appropriately complex and often, particularly in American sociology, dominated by multivariate statistical methods of analysis. The advent of the computer in the second half of the twentieth century presented the field with the opportunity to work with very large bodies of data and complex variables.
Medical Sociology
Earlier social theorists, such as those noted above, did write on subjects of concern to medicine, health, and illness, but medical sociology, as a subdiscipline of sociology, developed in the post-World War II period. Early debates in medical sociology were concerned with the role of sociology as it relates to medicine: Should the field be critical and analytical, concerning itself with the sociology of medicine (i.e., examining how medicine works); or should it be largely applied, focusing on sociology as a handmaiden for medicine? Like many such formative debates, there could be no conclusive answer. However, the field has developed into two groups: those (largely within academic settings) which focus on the sociology of medicine; and those (primarily in schools of public health and governmental institutions) which focus on the application of sociology to medicine. Later debates related to whether the focus should be on health sociology or medical sociology. This debate has moved the field to a broader, more ecological, view of medicine and health.
Sociology in Public Health
Public health has been and remains a very applied field. It is also characterized by a population-based approach to health, and statistical methods are deemed the appropriate underlying method for the field. It is viewed as a science that seeks to intervene, control, and prevent large-scale processes that negatively affect the public's health. By these criteria, there is a strong logical fit of sociological principles and practices within public health. Nonetheless, sociology has not been the key social science discipline in public health. That position has gone to psychology, where the emphasis on individual behavior resonates more with a biomedical model. Despite this, many of the primary concerns of present-day public health, with large-scale variables such as social capital, social inequality, social status, and health care organization and financing, remain topics best suited to the sociological perspective and methodology. The emphasis in public health is thus shifting toward a sociological perspective.
Sociological Concepts in Public Health
Sociology in public health is reflected in the myriad of sociological concepts that pervade the practice of public health. More than any other social science, sociology has the discussion of socioeconomic status at its very core. Social-class variation within society is the key explanatory variable in sociology—for everything from variation in social structure to differential life experiences of health and illness. Indeed, there appears to be overwhelming evidence that Western industrialized societies that have little variation in social class experience have far better health outcomes than societies characterized by wide social-class dispersion. In short, inequalities in health are directly related to social and economic inequalities. Much of later-twentieth-century public health is devoted to the reduction of these inequalities.
Sociological Methods in Public Health
Methodological concerns are critical to sociological research. The great debate in sociology has been on the relative merits and role of quantitative versus qualitative approaches. Both approaches are widely used and play a critical role for public health. Sociology has long recognized that the social world comprises both an objective and a subjective reality. For example, the objective reality of having cancer is accompanied by the subjective reality of the experience of cancer by the patient, and the patient's family and friends. Both realities are relevant to the sociological approach. The subjective, qualitative approach is generally discussed in the theory and methods concerned with illness behavior, but qualitative approaches are equally applicable to the understanding of social policy, world systems, and areas of sociology where statistical measurement is difficult or less relevant.
Within public health, surveillance is seen as a key approach to describing the distribution and dynamics of disease. In sociological approaches to public health, the role of social and behavioral factors in health and illness is central. Survey methodology has occupied a central place in sociological research since the middle of the twentieth century. The concern has been with the collection, management, analysis, interpretation, and use of large quantities of data obtained by direct interview with respondents. Social surveys are characterized by large random samples, complicated questionnaires, and the use of multivariate statistics for analysis. By their very nature, most sociological variables are complex to measure and to analyze. For example, the assessment of socioeconomic status of an individual requires the accurate measurement of several variables that sit within a larger social context. Socioeconomic status (SES) is regarded as a product of several components, including income, residence, education, and occupation. Determining the relative weight of each of these components is a major analytical problem. Thus, when considering the role of socioeconomic status on health care outcomes, there is no easy answer to what mechanism actually works to determine the observed relationship between SES and health.
Sociology and Evaluation in Public Health
Because many sociological variables are at the socalled macro level, there is limited opportunity to intervene rapidly, directly, or simply. For example, the SES of a group is affected by complex components, such as education and occupation, that are part of the total life course of individuals within the group. Thus, to change the SES of a group would require significant redistribution of resources of the larger social structure. A significant period of time and concerted effort is needed to change such macro variables. This is, however, not dissimilar to many other challenges in public health, such as the long-term and time-consuming effort to change lifestyles and reduce behavioral risk factors related to chronic diseases.
The chief role of sociology in public health remains its evaluation of those macro components of society that affect public health at the population level. Such evaluations provide an understanding of why inequalities in health exist, and they help elaborate upon the mechanisms and processes that sustain these inequalities. This relates to the long-standing theoretical concern with social structure among sociologists. Further, sociology reveals the mechanisms for long-term changes that may lead to a reduction in health inequalities. The product of sociological thinking in public health is not immediate nor easily understood by those who seek quick and easy solutions to the suffering of humanity. Nonetheless, the long-term role of sociology in public health is to change and improve the public health.
(SEE ALSO: Community Health; Medical Sociology; Psychology, Health; Social Determinants; Social Health)
Bibliography
Cockerham, W. C. (2000). Medical Sociology, 8th edition. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Coleman, J. S. (1994). Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
Durkheim, E. (1982). The Rules of Sociological Method. New York: Free Press.
Marx, K. (1973). Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. New York: Vintage Books.
Merton, R. K. (1957). Social Theory and Social Structure. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
Parsons, T. (1951). The Social System. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
Weber, M. (1958). From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press.
— DAVID V. MCQUEEN
While the discipline of sociology had its roots in nineteenth-century Europe, it enjoyed its greatest success in the United States during the academic golden age of the mid-twentieth century. Making a science of society was a distinctly modern exercise. Not only did it depend on a modern concept of empirical, experimental science, but it also presupposed "society" as a new object of study. How was one to name, classify, and analyze the forms of human experience in the aggregate—that is, if one sought to discern an aggregate form beyond relations of kin and distinguished from the apparatus of formal government? A kind of age-old ethnography had long enabled observers to comment on the traits of different peoples, usually by remarking on the exotic look and habits of aliens. Also, the idea of large cultural units or civilizations, usually wedded to imperial domains or great religions, such as Christendom, had a long history. Far less developed was the concept of an order to human relations apart from family, state, ethnicity, or belief that might become the basis for a comparative anatomy of differing communities. Modern notions of "economy" and "society" emerged to name such an order, as European colonial expansion, political revolution, and industrialization stirred consciousness of great change and variation in the form human relations could take. From the Scottish Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century to the universities of Wilhelmine Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century, the terms of economy and society were conjoined and contrasted in various ways. In large part, sociology matured as the second term became clearly differentiated from the first. Surprisingly, it was in the United States, where individualism and the pursuit of wealth seemed to reign supreme, that sociology as a study of the collective, noneconomic forms of human life found its most secure home.
The First Sociologists
Although historians cite the beginning of modern social sciences in the work of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), the focus in his masterwork Leviathan (1651) on the formation and authority of the state denies him the title of the "first sociologist," which has been bestowed instead on the Scottish writer Adam Ferguson (1723–1816). Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) countered Hobbes in asserting that social sentiments—that is, desires to associate with others due to a dislike of solitude, sympathy with one's fellows and a desire for their esteem, or simple habit—were indeed as "natural" to individuals as their self-regarding appetites. Yet it was the French polymath Auguste Comte (1798–1857) who first used the term "sociology," in 1839 as part of his Course of Positive Philosophy and elaborated on its meaning in his System of Positive Polity (1851–1854).
Americans generally thought of "society" as the eighteenth-century Scottish writers had, recognizing social sentiments but still putting liberal ideas of individualism, progress, and market relations in the forefront. Comte's sociology was first adopted in the United States in 1854 by two writers venturing a principled defense of southern slavery, George Fitzhugh (1806–1881) in Sociology for the South and Henry Hughes (1829–1862) in Treatise on Sociology. Both of these authors contrasted slave society with "free society," for them virtually an oxymoron. Principles of individualism and equality, they wrote, eroded social organization as such. From Comte they borrowed the notion that "society" constituted a realm in itself, unified by sentiments concerned with the wellbeing of the whole and founded, like a family, on hierarchical norms in which superiors governed and cared for dependents incapable of self-rule. Just as Comte fell into obscurity for several decades after his death in 1857, the work of Fitzhugh and Hughes turned out to be a dead-end once the Civil War and the end of slavery made liberal principles all but universal in American society and culture.
American sociology was reborn in the 1880s under different circumstances and with different premises. When William Graham Sumner (1840–1910) began teaching the subject of sociology at Yale University, he relied on its individualistic British exponent Herbert Spencer (1820– 1903). In this view human evolution naturally led toward a modern world in which individuals were habituated to peaceful practices of exchange while the power of the state and coercive rule steadily declined. Hence, free will was rendered compatible with social order. This utopia of social order modeled on the ideal of a free market carried a decided moral meaning for Sumner, who insisted that self-sufficiency was the greatest obligation the individual bore toward society and that the plight of the pauper was the rightful consequence of dissipation. Sumner was challenged by a career civil servant, Lester Frank Ward (1841–1913), who brought Comtean principles back to the American scene by advocating an active state that nurtured the common welfare. According to Ward's 1883 book Dynamic Sociology, social evolution was to be guided by human intelligence rather than understood in naturalistic terms as a phenomenon impervious to will.
Beginnings of Academic Sociology
These early skirmishes over laissez-faire principles and social reform marked the prologue of institutionalized sociology in the United States. By the beginning of the twentieth century a new generation of intellectuals, coming of age amidst economic instability, industrial strife, and dramatic inequalities of wealth, was ready to combine a reforming spirit with the new repute of science in the emerging research universities. The American Social Science Association (ASSA), founded in 1865, represented an early effort to bring organized intelligence to bear on charitable activities concerned with social problems such as pauperism and crime. In 1885 a group of young American scholars, trained abroad in German universities and eager to see the state bring "social" values to bear on economic affairs, split off from the ASSA to establish the American Economic Association (AEA), the prototype for other specialized professional societies such as the American Political Science Association, founded in 1903. Sociology lagged behind. In 1893 the University of Chicago established the first American chair in sociology, awarded to the social gospel minister Albion Woodbury Small (1854–1926), and under Small's editorship the first issue of the American Journal of Sociology appeared in 1895. Ten years later, at the economists' professional meeting, Small and others founded their own organization, the American Sociological Society, later renamed the American Sociological Association (ASA).
Although these academic circles were composed almost entirely of men, women activists in settlement houses helped pioneer the disciplined study of urban and industrial affairs. The social surveys of immigrant neighborhoods conducted by Jane Addams (1860–1935) and her colleagues at Hull-House provided an early model of community research for the University of Chicago sociologists nearby. A few women devoted to studying social problems managed to forge a place in university life, such as Grace Abbott (1878–1939) and Sophonisba Breckin-ridge (1866–1948), also at the University of Chicago, though they were soon segregated from the male sociologists in a separate school of social work. Elsewhere, W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) made a distinctive contribution to the new styles of social research when his book The Philadelphia Negro (1899) demonstrated that "social" conditions, such as poverty and discrimination rather than inbred "racial" traits, accounted for regrettable features of crime and broken families among black slum dwellers.
The reformist mood of early academic social science was, however, quite modest and restrained. The middle-class reformers who entered the new academic social sciences typically recoiled from class struggle and wished instead to foster social peace by ameliorating conditions of deprivation, conflict, and misunderstanding. In any case conservative university administrators and trustees imposed strict limits on advocacy of social change. The prolabor activism of Ward's follower Edward A. Ross (1866–1951) led to Ross's forced resignation from Stanford University in 1900. Other early leaders in the field looked askance at social reform. Franklin Giddings (1855–1931), who assumed a chair in sociology at Columbia University two years after Small's appointment at Chicago, sought instead to frame truly "scientific" means of observation, data collection, and statistical measures for social facts. Nonetheless, Small regarded his Christian ideal of a harmonious society as thoroughly compatible with his aspirations for social science, and he persisted in seeing the discipline as an intimate partner to reformers in the field of social welfare. For years, many colleges in the United States used the term "sociology" for courses dealing with charities and corrections, thus carrying on the tradition of the ASSA.
Sociology Professionalized
A clearer differentiation of sociology from social welfare began in the 1910s and continued into the 1920s. The landmark study by W. I. Thomas (1863–1947) and Florian Znaniecki (1882–1958), The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918–1920), helped establish the characteristic disposition of Chicago's increasingly professionalized department: the study of change in the life of social groups, understood as a process of "social disorganization" (the loss of traditional norms) and "reorganization" (adaptation to modern life) experienced by recent immigrants from rural villages to the industrial city; a focus, informed by the philosophy of George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) and the "social psychology" of Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929), on the individual's subjective interpretation of social situations as it emerged in his or her interactions with others; and consequently a style of urban research founded on participant observation, designed both to achieve empathy with the viewpoints of social actors and to map the terrain on which they encountered others, that is, social structure understood as an ecology of social groups. This approach was codified by the new leaders of Chicago sociology in the 1920s, Robert E. Park (1864–1944) and Ernest Burgess (1886– 1966), commencing a vibrant body of research on city neighborhoods, ethnicity and racial groups, and youth gangs and other phenomena, such as the lives of con men and prostitutes, on the margins of polite society.
As the "Chicago school" matured, another touchstone of American sociology was in the works. The community study Middletown (1929) by Robert S. Lynd (1892–1970) and Helen Merrell Lynd (1896–1982) examined work, family, religion, leisure, and civic life in Muncie, Indiana, under the stress of industrial development, class divisions, and modern transportation and communications. Robert Lynd went on to head the new Social Science Research Council (SSRC), begun with Rockefeller backing in 1923 to fund empirical research and promote scientific development through professional seminars on methodology. Before long, an early sign of government interest in sociology appeared in the publication of Recent Social Trends (1932), the work of a committee impaneled by President Herbert Hoover in the fall of 1929 but funded largely by the Rockefeller Foundation and the SSRC. Tellingly, the President's Research Committee on Social Trends was cochaired by an economist, Wesley C. Mitchell (1874–1948), and a political scientist, Charles E. Merriam (1874–1953), representing the more established social science disciplines. But its research was conducted under the leadership of bona fide sociologists, William F. Ogburn (1886–1959), who earned a Ph.D. at Columbia University and then went to Chicago, and Howard W. Odum (1884–1954), another Columbia graduate, who brought academic sociology to the University of North Carolina. Despite its testimony to public interest in sociological research, however, the committee's report was criticized sharply by other sociologists, who considered its dry record of numerical trends in divorce, urbanization, and rates of technological invention unilluminating and uninspired.
By 1928, ninety-nine American colleges and universities had departments of sociology, five times as many as in 1910, and forty-eight others had departments defined as "economics and sociology." In the next decade, sociology achieved a stronger professional footing despite limited prospects for growth during the Great Depression. The membership of the ASA fell drastically, but those who remained were more strictly academic in orientation. As these scholars chafed under the domination of Chicago's inbred sociology department, they demanded that the organization better represent the profession as a whole. Yet the field lacked the kind of unity and coherence customarily claimed by self-conscious professions, and widespread disagreements flourished on what it meant to build a science of society, as the dispute over Recent Social Trends suggested. A vigorous cohort of Columbia-bred sociologists spread throughout the country and pursued the ideal of an "objective" science of society in terms bequeathed to them by Giddings. Their ideal was based not on Chicago's intimate observation of groups, their interactions and their sentiments, but rather on statistical generalizations about the attributes and preferences of individuals, a project that flourished in time with the help of new techniques drawn from opinion polling and market research. Other competitors for disciplinary leadership included the pugnacious Luther L. Bernard (1881–1951), the advocate of an updated Comtean social realism.
The real problem of sociology, compared to fields like economics and political science, lay in uncertainty over the definition of its essential subject matter. Since the 1890s, sociology had been defined alternatively as a kind of master discipline offering a comprehensive vision of society and incorporating all other specialties or as a "residual" field covering issues and problems not addressed elsewhere, such as crime and family. In hopes of escaping this quandary, some figures in the 1930s renewed the attempt to build sociological theory out of traditions of social philosophy. Giddings's successor at the helm of Columbia's department, Robert MacIver (1882–1979), moved in this direction. So did the young Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) at Harvard University. The fact that neither of these figures had any prior training in established sociology departments showed how much the discipline was still, during the 1930s, a work in progress.
Harvard had taught sociology in association with economic history and philanthropic "social ethics," moving to found its own department only in 1931 under the leadership of Pitirim Sorokin (1889–1968), a Russian émigré and author of the compendium Contemporary Sociological Theories (1928). In contrast to Sorokin's urge to classify the many variants of theory that composed the field, Parsons believed that a scientific discipline rightly had only one theory, a founding charter established by the synthesis of tendencies formerly at odds with each other. Parsons had been introduced to the social sciences by disciples of the dissenting economist Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929) and knew little of Chicago's or Columbia's sociological traditions. In his early masterwork, The Structure of Social Action (1937), Parsons portrayed a dawning convergence among exponents of English, French, German, and Italian social thought that overcame the customary divide between "positivist" or empiricist approaches to discovering objective social laws and "idealist" traditions that stressed the unpredictable force of human consciousness and will. But Parsons's synthesis also attempted to get beyond the social "realism" of a Comtean like Bernard and the "nominalist" position of the Giddings school, for whom society was merely a convenient term for an aggregate of individuals. Parsons sought to define "society" as something quite real, even if not a concrete entity in its own right. It was to be understood as an aspect of human experience that, strictly speaking, could be isolated only for the convenience of analysis, namely that element of human action that assured social order primarily by virtue of an integrated set of values held in common by a body of actors.
The Heyday of American Sociology
Parsons was important to the development of American sociology for a number of reasons. Having built his theoretical convergence largely on the work of Emile Durkheim (1858–1918), Max Weber (1864–1920), and Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Parsons played a crucial role in drawing grand traditions of European social thought into the American milieu. Parsons's synthetic disposition also led him to promote the realignment of sociology with cultural anthropology and social psychology, a tripartite arrangement realized in a new, interdisciplinary department of social relations begun at Harvard in 1946. The result was a clearer definition of sociology's subject matter, the social realm, than the discipline had ever had before. In Parsons's hands, sociology moved away from close associations with the older, dominant fields of economics and political science. Its special concern was those institutions, such as families, schools, churches, neighborhoods, small groups, organizations, and occupations. In these milieus of association and interaction, scholars could see the formation of personalities, roles, values, orientations, perceptions of reality, sentiments of solidarity, and the like. In this way was everyday behavior shaped and social unity fostered. And in these terms sociology defined the essential "structure" of a society, the patterns of behavior that gave it a unique order and disposition distinct from that of other societies, thus permitting a comparative anatomy of societies.
The immediate post–World War II decades marked the heyday of American sociology. Young scholars entering the academy in the 1940s and 1950s, often of immigrant, wartime émigré, and left-wing backgrounds, helped fuel the field's growth. At the same time, funding increased dramatically from private philanthropies. While Rockefeller funds had dominated in the 1920s and 1930s, now the Ford and Carnegie foundations made large contributions. By the 1960s, government sources offered support from the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, the Defense Department, and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. The field's infrastructure developed as large-scale survey-research centers at Columbia, Chicago, and Michigan, supported by grants and contracts, provided both jobs and masses of data.
Meanwhile, works such as Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma (1944), David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (1950), and William Whyte's The Organization Man (1956) garnered popular attention for sociology. Ideas cultivated by sociology along with cultural anthropology and social psychology regarding the "culture of poverty," "deviance" and opportunity structures, as well as schooling and race became part and parcel of public debate, policy formation, and presidential speeches in the era of desegregation and the war on poverty. Sociology became an ever more popular field for students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, attracting many of the young dissenters who populated campuses in the 1960s and 1970s. As American universities boomed in size, the ASA continued to grow. By 1972 its peak of 15,000 members represented a tenfold gain over its interwar membership. With this kind of growth, American sociology overshadowed developments in the European countries that were sources of the classics in modern social theory, and European thinkers concluded they had to come to terms with American standards in sociological theory as well as empirical methods.
Despite the common impression that Parsons's "structural-functional" theory of the 1950s represented the prevailing paradigm of postwar sociology, the discipline in fact was never so unified that it rested on a single coherent theoretical foundation. The landmark works in empirical sociology during the postwar period, many of them by the Austrian émigré Paul Lazarsfeld (1901–1976) of Columbia's Bureau of Applied Social Research and the students he trained there, rested on refinements of survey and statistical techniques, assisted by computerized data processing, with no special relation to the kind of abstract theory cultivated by Parsons. Also competing with Parsons's theory was the more modest, "middle-range" view of functional analysis promoted by his student Robert K. Merton (b. 1910), a method intended to discover how different parts of society, its institutions and organizations, worked together and influenced each other without presuming that they all meshed neatly in a harmonious whole. Furthermore, reputable theorists such as Lewis Coser (b. 1913) and Reinhard Bendix (1916–1991) challenged the priority Parsons gave to the problem of social order and his insistence that order required normative consensus.
Outside of functionalism per se, Herbert Blumer (1900–1987) codified the social psychology of the old Chicago school in the theoretical current called "symbolic interactionism," and practitioners of Chicago-style investigations of urban communities continued to produce some lively literature, such as Tally's Corner (1967) by Elliot Liebow (1925–1994). Other derivatives of interactionism flourished, such as the "dramaturgical" view of roles and rituals in everyday life developed by Erving Goffman (1922–1982) and the iconoclastic "labeling" theory of deviance by Howard S. Becker (b. 1928). More ambitious forays to mount full-bore challenges to Parsonsian and Mertonian functionalism, emerging from 1959 to 1966, included the critical sociology of C. Wright Mills (1916–1962), the historical sociology of Barrington Moore (b. 1913), and the individualistic "social exchange" theory of George Homans (1910–1989). Mills in particular criticized the division of sociology between what he regarded as vacuous "grand theory" (like Parsons's) and "abstracted empiricism" (like Lazarsfeld's work), insisting instead that sociologists must draw on a large canvas the social trends that mark "the salient characteristics of their time—and the problem of how history is being made within it" (Mills, p. 165). Similarly, though without Mills's radical intent, Daniel Bell (b. 1919) defined his own work as "sociography," an attempt to delineate the general form and dynamics of contemporary social life. His influential portrait of the present and the near future is The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973).
The Mainstream Assailed
Despite the robust appearance of American sociology, it soon encountered a social, political, and intellectual crisis spawned by protest movements in the 1960s and the accompanying revival of radicalism in academic life. Like all the social science and humanist disciplines, established sociology was criticized, mainly by young graduate students, for having provided an essentially conservative ideological rationale for the status quo. In particular, they charged, the functionalist focus on mechanisms of social order obscured the significance of conflict in social life; applauded conformity with social expectations instead of dissent, deviance, and disruption; suggested that the plight of the poor stemmed from their failure to adequately adapt to normative roles rather than from the exploitative and coercive structure of inequitable social relations; and masked the privilege and bias of sociologists themselves under a false ideal of "value-free" science. The most telling criticism aimed at postwar sociology was that the very disposition that gave sociology its own distinctive "social" province, apart from economics and political science, had denied it the ability to recognize the extent to which American society was governed by punitive inequalities in the distribution and uses of wealth and power.
The charge of entrenched conservatism, vigorously advanced by Alvin Gouldner (1920–1981) in The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (1970), misfired in some respects. Parsons, for one, was a liberal Democrat, and his work had emerged just when the rise of welfare states in western Europe (and more modestly in the United States in the New Deal and the Fair Deal) justified a theory that defined distinctly social needs apart from the imperatives of market economics. Indeed, American functionalism, in one form or another, found welcome abroad in Social-Democratic Sweden. Yet it was precisely the modern liberal (welfare-state) assumptions in postwar sociology combined with the anticommunist biases that governed all academic life during the Cold War era that gave social science its deep confidence in the progressive virtues of contemporary American life, including the view, characteristic of "modernization theory," that American society represented the future for all other, less-developed societies. Hence, it refrained from confronting the forms of inequality and injustice that had long shaped the development of the United States.
Consequently, the 1970s witnessed a flurry of studies dealing with the fault lines of American life. In work by William Julius Wilson (b. 1935) and other new black sociologists, racial cleavages were studied more in terms of political economy than in terms of cultural attitudes. In a revival of Marxism, the meaning of class was studied empirically by writers like Michael Burawoy (b. 1947) and theoretically by Erik Olin Wright (b. 1947), among others. Such concerns with race and class were wedded to issues of gender raised by the revival offeminism, yielding sensitive and highly partisan ethnographies, like the study of black women on welfare by Carol B. Stack (b. 1940), All Our Kin (1974), which rejected all "blame the victim" scenarios of poverty and family dysfunction.
The number of works on women's status from a feminist standpoint grew through the 1970s and 1980s and included studies of how gender distinctions between men and women are socially maintained, such as the widely read psychoanalytic account by Nancy Chodorow (b. 1944), The Reproduction of Mothering (1978). Although several women had earlier achieved distinction, such as Jessie Bernard (1903–1996), Mirra Komarovsky (1906–1999), Rose Laub Coser (1916–1994), Alice Rossi (b. 1922), and Renée Fox (b. 1928), men dominated sociology in its heyday. Beginning in the 1970s, the number of women practitioners increased dramatically, though sociology proved more reluctant than other social science disciplines, particularly anthropology, to revise its general theoretical concepts in the face of feminist criticism, some observers claimed. Paradoxically, the fact that sociology had long recognized a place for studies of women, namely in family dynamics, "ghettoized" such concerns and thus inhibited the understanding that gender inequities were bound up with all aspects of social life. The initiation of the journal Gender and Society in 1987 marked an attempt to enforce that broader view of the problem.
Sociology in Distress
At the same time, the fall of functionalism from its pedestal made it seem that sociology, lacking paradigmatic unity, was cast adrift in search of new moorings. Various signs pointed to disciplinary distress. Having enjoyed spectacular growth in the late 1960s, sociology suffered a substantial decline, starting shortly after 1970, in ASA membership and the number of degrees granted. Continued specialization also led many practitioners in the 1980s to lament the fragmentation of their field. The ASA recognized thirty-nine "sections" or research specialties, which included topical concerns as well as distinctive methodologies, ranging from traditional subfields, such as criminology and family, to newer matters, such as comparative and historical sociology, mathematical sociology, Asia and Asian America, aging and the life course, and more.
Highlighting the absence of theoretical consensus, several dynamic intellectual currents during the 1980s and 1990s moved in sharply divergent directions and implied a flight from the discipline's traditional concerns and assumptions. Sociobiology attacked the longstanding assumption that social environment shaped personality, behavior, and social relations more decisively than innate, hereditary traits did. The Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson made sociobiology's first coherent statement in 1975, and the study blossomed by the 1990s along with new studies aiming to isolate genetic sources of behavioral dispositions, such as aggression, sexual promiscuity, and the like. The rise of "rational choice" perspectives in sociology, adopting from economics the principles of methodological individualism, utility optimization, and game theory, reached a new height with the founding of the journal Rationality and Society in 1989 and the 1990 publication of Foundations of Social Theory by James S. Coleman (1926– 1995). Urging an understanding of most social processes as the consequences of actions by individuals seeking to maximize some interests of their own, rational choice renewed the old "nominalist" hostility to notions of society as a reality sui generis.
Meanwhile, another group of sociologists more critical of their society, their discipline, and the discipline's claims to scientific status embraced the disposition known as postmodernism. They emphasized the "social construction" (the historicized, subjective, and social character) of all categories used to grasp reality; regarded modern life as the staging ground for varied techniques of controlling and regimenting unruly people and behaviors; denied that the shape of social life could be understood as "centered" on any essential principles or fully integrated in an overarching whole; and insisted that social action and social change be understood as highly localized, incompletely organized or bounded, strained by contradictory impulses, and largely unpredictable. Such a skeptical view, though antagonistic to rational choice and sociobiology, seemed to share with them a common suspicion of "society" as an entity or structure in its own right. Indeed, "general social theory," which aims to understand societies as wholes and to integrate different dimensions of social life, such as economics, social institutions, politics, and culture, in one view, steadily lost appeal within the discipline.
Other signs also suggested that sociology had entered an era of danger if not disintegration. With the turn to the right in American politics around 1980 and the consequent decline in funding for sociological research geared to public policy and social services, sociologists felt under siege. Sociology departments were eliminated at a few universities. Even the department at Yale University, the home of Sumner and his disciples, was almost closed. Public reception of sociology by this point, strikingly different from the 1950s and 1960s, often appeared hostile. Newspapers were more likely to mock arcane jargon or to assail left-wing biases in ASA proceedings than to seek expert sociological comment on social problems.
Prospects At the End of the Twentieth Century
Nevertheless, graduate student enrollment in the field rebounded in the 1990s, and by the end of the decade, the number of graduate students studying sociology nearly equaled those studying economics. At the same time, while the perennial problems of sociological theory remained unresolved—how to understand the relation between individual and community, how to assess the significance in social action of objective "interests" and subjective "meanings," or whether the field ought to define itself as a scientific or moral discourse—American sociologists continued to generate and develop new techniques, methods, and theories, including sophisticated approaches to understanding social networks, processes of interaction, and dynamic change. Many of these were highly mathematized, others were more historical and ethnographic. However specialized and sophisticated the field had become, a number of sociologists still addressed a broadly educated audience in books concerning "social problems," such as work, immigration, racism, gender inequality, poverty, and homelessness.
By the end of the century, some elder statesmen, such as Neil J. Smelser (b. 1930), director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, greeted late developments of the field with equanimity. Laments over the fragmentation of sociology as a discipline, Smelser suggested, tended to exaggerate the field's unity and coherence at earlier points in its history. In any case, internal specialization, marking off distinct subfields of expertise, inevitably accompanies the growth of a discipline. Smelser pointed out how changes in human organization have challenged the traditional identification of "society" as a unit with the nation-state. New sensitivity was required to both "supranational" and "subnational" phenomena, such as "globalization," racial and ethnic identities, migrations, and community formation and dissolution. He recognized that these factors injected a new complexity to social experience and denied the existence of neatly bounded social units, but he also argued that they made the integrative capacity of general social theory more rather than less urgent if sociological understanding were to advance.
Generally, at the end of the twentieth century, sociologists tended to move away from overarching, architectonic notions of social structure, the metaphor of society as a kind of building, with many levels and rooms configured in a fixed pattern, among which people move and dwell. Instead, they favored more flexible models highlighting purposive action by individuals and groups, processes of interaction, the historical formation and ongoing transformation of social relations in a ceaseless flux, which can never be reduced to a simple story of progressive development. Yet, while these new emphases highlight the active, flexible, complex, and unfinished character of human social behavior, structures of inequality in wealth and power indeed seemed to be deeply entrenched features of the contemporary world. The question had become whether or not the new disposition can contribute to understanding these inequalities and can support efforts to change those forms in hopes of creating a better society, another longstanding aspiration of many modern social theorists.
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Sociology involves the study of how people relate to each other, as well as how the institutions of society affect behavior and attitudes. For most of the past hundred and fifty years, sociologists have focused mainly on social institutions and structures. It was only around the middle of the twentieth century that they turned their attention to the important roles that technologies (including food production and processing) play in society. Other disciplines (particularly anthropology) have a much longer history of research into food and culture.
Food and food habits have been only implicitly assumed in sociological literature until just recently. Food studies have been an integral part of both rural sociology and medical sociology. For rural sociologists, food has been central in studies of agricultural and technological change. Food has also been a main focus in the studies of farms, community living, social change, and consumer issues. In fact, rural sociologists began to study food production in the 1930s through research on the adoption and diffusion of innovations (new technologies).
For medical sociologists, food and nutrition are now recognized as an important factor in the study of health and wellness. Sociologists examine how our nutritional habits are based on cultural identity, gender, race and ethnicity, and social class. Although food is a fundamental concern for human life, sociologists are now just establishing a sociology of food by identifying how lifestyles, social class, gender, and ethnicity influence food selection and consumption. In fact, much of the market research that food companies conduct is in fact a form of sociological research (e.g., focus groups, surveys, and interviews).
The sociological study of food is important in understanding social change, the state, and consumer society. For example, positive social change has come about as a result of epidemiological and sociological studies of the importance of sanitation. Sociological studies based on food exportation, importation, and food agricultures have examined how states develop. In addition, research into the inequality of distribution and access to food comprises another way that sociologists can expose to explain class, race, and gender differences, as well as forms of political domination. Food is also important in explaining consumerism, cultural assimilation, modernization, and how beliefs and rituals change.
Sociologists have always been interested in social inequality and stratification (i.e., through analysis of gender, ethnic, and class differences.) For example, some foods are associated with women and some with men. Women eat less food overall, and they are usually light foods or foods that can be nibbled, such as salad or fish. Men tend to eat more food, and prefer foods associated with strength, such as red meat. Food habits also vary significantly with age. For example, soft or strained foods are appropriate for very young children who have no teeth, as well as for the elderly (for the same reason). As people age, they also become more concerned about the role of diet in their overall health.
Food also represents distinctive cultures; for example, pasta is associated with Italian culture, or curry with Indian culture. Cultures evolve to suit the local environment. For instance, spicy foods are more popular in the warmer climates. Class distinctions in foods abound. In the early 1900s in Great Britain, people in the upper classes ate more meat than those of the middle or lower classes. However, by the middle of the century, all people ate about the same amount of meat, as advances in food technology put meat in the range of everyone. Economically disadvantaged groups are sometimes forced to eat what is cheap, and these foods may not be as nutritious as higher-priced foods. Disadvantaged groups then are more vulnerable to health problems, such as heart disease or obesity.
It has been said that "We are what we eat." Food becomes part of our self-identity. From a very young age, an individual is socialized into his or her adult eating habits. A person eats what his family eats when he is young—these habits do not tend to change that much with age. In Western cultures, young children are taught that the insects they find are not to be eaten. In other cultures, however, young children are taught that certain insects are edible and they become part of the diet. Foods are part of the rituals we use to accept new members into our group, to celebrate milestones, and to express religious or political beliefs. For example, a new neighbor might be presented with a basket of food or a homemade pie as a welcome gift.
Celebrations, such as birthdays and anniversaries, usually involve some kind of cake or other sweet food. National holidays usually include foods associated with the country. For example, Americans celebrate Independence Day with backyard barbecues (including hamburgers and hot dogs, potato chips and watermelon). Thanksgiving is closely associated with turkey. Religious holidays also use symbolic foods, such as ham at Christmas for Christians. Some religions have specific taboos on food. For instance, Jewish people do not eat pork, while Hindus do not eat beef, and Seventh-Day Adventists do not eat meat at all. Many religions also endorse fasting as part of their rituals.
Sociologists have shown how the level of development within a country influences food habits and preferences. Industrialized countries consume and waste more food than developing countries. Americans may waste up to 25 percent of their food. Waste results from poor storage and processing, as well as from unused leftovers and spoiled foodstuffs that are never used. There is less consumer waste in developing countries. However, this practice is increasing as more countries adopt Western ideas and values concerning food.
Almost every culture has some form of food taboo. In fact, there is only one taboo that is universal, and that is the restriction on eating human flesh. This was not always the case, however. Early people, such as the South American Indians, would grind up the bones of their ancestors into a communal pot, to share their strength and wisdom with all tribal members. Some taboos restrict certain kinds of foods to certain meals. For example, Americans eat cereal for breakfast, but not for dinner. Food taboos may be based on cleanliness standards, but taboos may also be used to change entire food systems. Sometimes it is easier to restrict foods on religious beliefs, than to convince people rationally to change their eating habits. Emotions also play a major role in decisions about what people eat and why. Sociological research and theory are therefore important for understanding how to increase human health through better diet and nutrition.
Bibliography
Beardsworth, Alan, and Terresa Keil. Sociology On The Menu. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Gabaccia, Donna. We Are What We Eat. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998.
McIntosh, Alex, Sociologies of Food and Nutrition. New York: Plenum Press, 1996.
—Thomas Jefferson Hoban IV