Reflexivity and alvin gouldner: The coming crisisin 1990

Abstract

My initial reading of The Coming Crisis occurred in my first year of graduate school (1971). One year earlier I had read Friedrich's, A Sociology of Sociology. I was particularly taken with the Friedrichs's volume because of its discussion of the prophetic strain in sociology. It seemed to me then, and still does, to be an important and attractive part of sociology. Gouldner's book, unlike Friedrichs's, seemed to raise a ruckus among faculty (perhaps this interpretation is exagger ated because it was my first year of graduate school when every intellectual disagreement is an important one) who had read it even among those who had not. The graduate students I knew were fascinated, appalled, and some applauded the book. Part of the effect of the Gouldner book was to place political discussions of the discipline in the forefront of graduate student consciousness. However, I remained unconvinced of the overall thesis of The Coming Crisis. I had com pleted a study of early American sociology {The Sociology of Knowledge in America, 1883-1915). My reading of early American sociology and particularly that of Albion Small's writing had suggested that at the turn of the century Amer