A full explanation of the development of sociology between 1900 and 1955 is, of course, beyond both the scope and the intention of this article. In my opinion, such an explanation would have to consider, at the very least, the influence of the Great War, of the Red Scare and Bolshevik Revolution, and of the concentration of industrial power between 1905 and 1925. Here, however, I have limited myself to a discussion of the impact of “professionalization” on the intellectual content and institutional practice of industrial sociology. From this point of view several observations may be made. First, industrial research that retained the holistic approach and political involvement of the older sociology did not receive the same kind of attention as before, even if it was conducted within Sociology Departments. For example, throughout the 1920s and well into the 1930s, the Russell Sage Foundation sponsored the “Industrial Relations Series” — studies of industrial conflict. These studies were the institutional and conceptual successors of the Pittsburgh Survey. Unlike the Pittsburgh Survey, however, they did not receive much attention. Mary Van Kleeck, the Director of Industrial Studies at the Russell Sage Foundation, conducted a study of the struggle between miners and owners in the Colorado area in 1934 entitled Miners and Management. In this work she advanced the quite astonishing idea that “scientific management” might imply the abolition of private property in the means of production and the creation of a planned national economy. Her study, however, received little recognition from sociologists, for it was not conducted by someone trained in a Sociology Department, nor did it refer to the conceptual concerns of any of the important research departments of that time. Another example, that of Bernhard Stern, is perhaps even stronger, for it shows that even professional training might not suffice for making one's work professionally relevant. In this case, a sociologist trained in the 1920s at Columbia under Ogburn, who taught as a professional sociologist, did not produce research in professional industrial sociology, although he studied such industrial subjects as “The Frustration of Technology,” “Science and War Production,” and “Freedom of Research in American Science.” Because his work was politically partisan it was not taken up by industrial sociologists; instead, it appeared in the radicaljournal Science and Society.
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Sep 1, 2013
Huan Yun Wang + 1
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