The Origins of Sociology as a Discipline

Abstract

My general argument in this presentation will be that the origin of sociology as a discipline was a bad thing, in that it led us systematically away from the study of humans acting in society. Obviously this means that I think the subject matter of sociology is important and interesting. I will argue that the internal prestige system of sociology as a discipline, however, diverts us from studying the people involved in a social system, and leads us to study instead abstractions of people, people who are culturally shaped by our sociological mental operation into the sorts of things that fit better with our prestige system. So the basic argument is that the higher prestige of a piece of sociological work, the less people in it are sweaty, laughing, ugly or pretty, dull at parties, or have warts on their noses. Field work is the lowest status in methodology, because surprising humans keep popping out and bewildering us by doing things we do not understand; much better to have people answering closed ended questions so that they fall neatly into cross classifications to be analyzed by loglinear methods. Similarly, the highest prestige theory for many years, that of Talcott Parsons, started off with its people and their actions reduced to a cross-classification of five pattern variables (or perhaps different numbers at different times). No room for laughter or embarassing burps in the middle of a lecture here. If we range theories from the prolix fashion of Herbert Blumer who knows how people will define the situation and consequently what they will do to the lean and spare rational actors models that allow us to use maximization mathematical methods to specify at least one feature of the behavior exactly (e.g. what the net