The Legitimation and Institutionalization of Metatheorizing in Sociology

Abstract

As is pointed out in all of these review essays, my major objective in writing Metatheorizing in Sociology was to help legitimize and institutionalize metatheoretical work in sociology. That book, as well as its primary objectives, should be seen in the context of the time period (1985-1991) in which it was conceived and written. The first contextual factor to consider is that, while there had always been a great deal of metatheoretical work in sociology, it was ill-defined and not clearly differentiated from strictly theoretical work. (In my view, theory deals with the social world, while metatheorizing deals with theory, i.e., it takes theory as its subject matter. However, it is the case that theorizing and metatheorizing often are, and should be, combined in the same work.) For many years, I had been doing both theoretical work (e.g., my efforts to apply the theory of rationalization to the professions [Ritzer 1975a], medicine [Ritzer and Walczak 1988] and the fast-food restaurant [Ritzer 1983, n.d.]) and metatheoretical work (e.g., my monographs on paradigms [Ritzer 1975b] and the need for an integrated sociological paradigm [Ritzer 1981]). As a result, I had a clear sense in my own mind of the differences, as well as of the relationships, between the two types of endeavors that I wanted to communicate to the sociological community. The second contextual factor was that, while metatheorizing was ill-defined, it was simultaneously being subjected to a series of well-known, withering attacks by Collins (1986), Skocpol (1985), and Turner (1985). This, in combination with the first factor, seemed to me to be the worst of all possible worlds. Here was a type of sociology that was both ill-defined and under attack. Given metatheorizing's lack of specificity, how did its critics know what they were attacking? For their part, how could metatheorists defend what they were doing