Showing papers in "The Sociological Review in 1978"

Towards a Sociology of Organisational Structure

Abstract: This article is coQcemed to describe and advocate a genuine sociology of organisational structure, to trace its major elements in the work of Weber and Marx and its re-emergence in some recent publications. Despite the plethora of writing and research on organisations, there exists relatively Uttie work of a truly sociological nature. The reasons for this are described. A sociological approach to organisations addresses the question of the relationship between the design of work and control within employing organisations and the nature of the society within which they occur. It maintains that organisational power and control must be seen in terms of the nature and priorities of the 'host* society rather than as consequences of particular forms of work process or technology. It insists on a critical consideration of the widely prevalent notions of 'eflSciency' and 'rationality' which conceptualise the hierarchic and inegalitarian nature of organisational structure and the distribution of rewards and deprivations associated with them, as inevitable and inexorable consequences of the application of the criterion of efficiency to the achievement of generally beneficial societal tasks. It considers the sectional advantages and functions of ostensibly neutral organisational elements such as mechanisation, automation, technology and science. And it focuses on the nature and functions of ideologies which buttress, disguise, or justify organisational inequalities and hierarchy. In short, it takes as the topic to be investigated exactly that which is assumed and glossed over by conventional organisational analysis: the relationship between internal organisational structures, processes and ideologies and the society within which they exist.

The voice of small business and the politics of survival

Abstract: SO began a newspaper article in May 1975 reporting on the demise of the latest organization formed to defend the interests of individuals 'who are self-employed, or in professional, creative or managerial occupations'. The Middle Class Association had been bom of a sense of injustice and a sense of powerlessness on the part of those who saw the political and economic strategies of successive governments doing little to prevent the erosion of their financial and social standing. At first it seemed to thrive, attractii^ not only a great deal of publicity but, more importantly, a good many members prepared to pay £$ each to join. By February 1975, only three mondis after it was founded the first interim report showed its membership to be drawn from all parts of the country and from more than two hundred different occupations. Mr. Gorst's claim that middle class individuals were being deprived of a fair return for their industry, enterprise and thrift, thus obviously struck a S3mipathetic note, and there is little doubt that had it not been for a reluctance to identify themselves so clearly with a class label many more would have joined. As it was, discontent about the name of the organizaticm led to a revision of the title. The Middle Class Association became the Voice of the Independent Centre and diough this may have helped overcome the reticence of some who agreed with the goals of the organization, it also signalled die beginning of a change in its character, for with the appearance of a new chairman and a new Steering Committee, it soon became a vehicle for the passionately anti-communist sentiments of an Irish millionaire, Mr. Martyn-Martin. There can be little doubt that he wanted to transform the association into a militant organization of the extreme right.^ John Gorst resigned from the Association, and

Class and Clientelistic Politics: The Case of Greece:

Abstract: This paper examines certain aspects of the relationship between class structure and clientelistic politics by focusing on a specific case: that of modern Greece. In particular, by looking at the way in which functionalist sociology and anthropology, on the one hand, and certain brands of Marxism, on the other, deal with the problem of political clientelism (mainly in the Greek context but also more generally), an attempt will be made (a) to formulate some general metatheoretical' guidelines on the manner in which such a relationship should be conceptualised; and (b) to give a brief sketch of the way in which the class-clientelism relationship has changed with the historical development of Greek capitalism.

Some Notes on Record Taking and Making in an Antenatal Clinic

Abstract: This research note is concerned with the filling in of case sheets in an antenatal clinic. As part of a study examining how single women reached outcomes of pregnancy,' I undertook a brief period of observation in the main antenatal clinic serving the area in which the study was conducted. Other material gathered in this study had made me aware of the importance which obstetricians and gynaecologists attached to information recorded on case sheets. Observations in the clinic allowed me to look not only at the way in which this information was interpreted and used, but also at the ways in which it was generated in the first place, and it is on the latter topic that this paper focuses. My concern here is with the records as constructions of the formal or informal processes of record-making during staff-patient interactions. The interest is then in 'rate producing' rather than 'behaviour producing' processes, to follow Kitsuse and Cicourel's distinction.^ Guiding the discussion will be a focus on 'the transaction^ character of the document producing context'^ and on the participants' interpretive procedures and definitions of the situation. As well as having relevance to substantive and theoretical themes in my own research into pregnancy, this concern with the organisational processes by which records, and from them rates, are produced, stemmed from a sense of a lack of empirical studies of record making. Programmatic statements of the 'constructionist' viewpoint, sudx as Zimmerman and Pollner's,

Love and Work

Abstract: There is a wide consensus that the rise of industrial capitalism in the West was accompanied by, or even accomplished through, a profound change in the concept of work. While the medieval ethos disdained mundane labour, considering it to be a badge of inferior status, and measured social worth by other criteria, the work of this world moved gradually to centre stage so that by the latter part of the eighteenth century, what a man could do had become the measure of what he was. The appearance of the 'spirit of capitalism', or the work ethic, has been examined by countless scholars of divers orientation and its significance for social organization has become an article of faith in much social scientific and historical writing. Leaving aside the issue of its causal import, there is hardly a source that would gainsay the centrality of labour to the modem era.' There is a second feature of industrial society that is about as widely recognized. Social critics of varied political perspectives have associated the rise of modem society with the gradual erosion of social cohesion. The lament for the solidarity and intimacy of the social bond thought to be characteristic of traditional society has been heard for at least two hundred years, variously described as alienation, anomie, bureaucratization, et cetera, and it has played a central role in modem social scientific thought. The implication has been that as man has tumed towards work he has renounced the more specifically social gratifications of pre-industrial society. Loneliness is the price modem man has paid for his historically unique effectiveness.̂ While it is widely believed that modernization has been associated with the work ethic and a concomitant decline in the quality and depth of social relations, the intimacy of the tie between these two features of modem society is not clearly stated. Nevertheless, an association is often implied. Generally, those thinkers who have pointed to the appearance of the individualistic achievement ethic in industrial society have also described a parallel erosion of social solidarity, and when social alienation is analyzed, its relation to the work ethic is implied. A wide range of theoretical writing and empirical

‘the Same—But Different’: The Allocation of Identity in Whalsay, Shetland:

Abstract: My friend's view suggests that the community of Whalsay is rather like a jigsaw puzzle, in which each piece stands in a given and determinate relation to every other, such that when one is missing or incorrectly placed the character of the whole is affected. The analogy may be extended further to suggest that just as the overall configuration of the jigsaw requires particular shapes of its components, so the community of Whalsay requires shape—in the form of identity—of its members to render the whole coherent and orderly. Each piece has its own dimensions, yet those dimensions only have meaning and purpose in terms of the complete puzzle. In this paper, I shall explore a little further the means by which the community of Whalsay manages this apparent dialectic of collective and individual identity.

CASH-TRANSACTIONS & HOUSEHOLD TASKS: Domestic behaviour in relation to industrial employment. *

Abstract: This paper is based on a 1976 study of working class families who live in an industrial and mining village in North Staffordshire. In the present discussion two groups of families will be compared. In the first group the women are mothers of pre-school or schoolage children and they work full-time in the home. The group consists of twelve people, seven women and five men, who were drawn from seven families. One couple was included because their case was unusual; the husband stayed home with their young child while the wife went out to work. The remaining four men in the group had the following occupations: factory worker in the pottery industry, factory maintenance worker, building worker and mining engineer. With the exception of the unusual couple, who were interviewed together, everyone was interviewed separately in their homes. The second group consists of fourteen people who were drawn from nine families in which both the husband and wife went out to work to support dependent children. All fourteen people worked outside the home on a full-time basis, with the exception of one woman who worked part-time. Everyone in the group was interviewed in their homes. Five couples were interviewed jointly and four women were interviewed without their husbands being present. Seven of the nine women in the group worked in factories, one in a clothing factory, three in a wire factory, and three in a pottery factory. One of the two remaining women worked in an ofl&ce, the other in a shop. Three of the five men in the group worked in the coal industry, two below ground, the other in an office. One of the remaining two men worked in a laboratory, the other worked as a self-employed painter and decorator.

Class Culture and the Persistence of an Elite: The Case of Army Officer Selection:

Abstract: The facts about the persistence of a social dite in positions of power in major British institutions have recently been published and pondered once again.* A series of studies has shown that a disproportionate share of top leadership positions are taken by products of a particular socialization process—education in the tiny public school sector rather than in the state sector which socializes the vast majority of the population. Despite public pronouncements by the major institutions that diey are seeking to recruit candidates from as wide an educational background as possible, and the claim that the emphasis is on leadership by the best qualified radier than leadership based on social superiority, there still seems, proportionally to be more room at the top for the public school educated than for the state school educated. In most institutions the evidence suggests that there has been a broadening of the social base of entrants to lower positions of leader^p, but little diange at the top. This may be due in part to a time lag—broadening of the base does not affect the top ai the pyramid imdl the new entrants have matured to an age and experience which entitles them to promotion. However, there is some evidence that broadening of the base can lead to retrenchment at the top perhaps as a kind of counterbalance and a guarantee of stability m the face of changes lower down—bishops and generals are two groups that seem to have been affected in this way, at least for a dme.^ Furthermore, there is a strong probability that, although shortage of candidates from a preferred background and breeding, and other pressures, may compel recruiters to broaden their intake, they still show a preference for candidates who have die traditional

Empiricist Explanatory Strategies: The Case of Causal Modelling

Abstract: Critiques of empiricism in sociology have become highly elaborated outside the perspective, yet have remained substantially ignored within it. What we have now is almost an industry of criticism, sponsored in recent years by the likes of Wright Mills, Popper, Cicourel, Kuhn, Wilier and Wilier, and embodied in the critical stances taken by a group of alternative perspectives, such as ethnomethodology, the Frankfurt School and Marxist struauralism.' At the same time, basically empiricist strategies are still being developed to meet particular substantive research problems. I am thinking of the various refinements to path analysis which aim to meet particular problems in the analysis of stratification and mobility.̂ More ironic is the example of the strategy within ethnomethodology which ignores its own critique and treats the 'regress problem' as resolvable on the basis of empirical evidence.' The reason for the failure of the critique in this sort of situation is not hard to locate. It is simply the inevitable estrangement of research practice and the philosophical reconstruction of its basis. Empirical researchers tend to see philosophical discussion as confining itself to logical preliminaries and of being no use to their distinctive problems. All research activity does, of course, involve the use of explanatory strategies, but these are thought to derive not from abstract principles but from the demands (rf the problem in hand. Methodologists, on the other hand, have a preference for reconstructed logic rather than this logic-in-use. They deal, if you like, with science as a body of propositions rather than the enterprise that generates them. Consequently there is this tendency to posit a limited number of universal models of knowledge and explanation. This automatically involves a degree of abstraction which is difficult to perceive in specific research practice, so much so that when particular research activities are criticized, 'it is often impossible for the specialized disciplines to recognize themselves with the naked eye.'̂ Consequently methodological criticism is often perceived as

Unemployment, Subemployment and Personal Characteristics: (B) Job Separation and Work Histories: The Alternative Approach

Abstract: I n my first article I noted the dominant role played by 'personal characteristics' in the explanation of unemployment in much of the previous literature on this problem. The failure to take into account the existence of recurrent imemployment was reflected in the concentration on individuals with long term uninterrupted periods out of work. Furthermore the precise nature of the individual attributes which could form elements of an explanation of unemployment were rarely specified. In practice they seemed to include variables such as skill level oi previous jobs whose status, as personal characteristics which workers bring to the labour market, is doubtful. The concept of subemployment was introduced because, whilst taking account of problems of recurrent unemployment, it specifically excludes the genuinely short term unemployed from consideration. It was found moreover that in the study samples, differences between subemployed men and their employed counterparts in terms of their relevant personal characteristics were not particularly large. In studies of long term imemployment attention is naturally focused on the problems faced by individuals with certain key attributes in acquiring a job once they are on the register. What this fails to recognise is that unemployment is the result of two interactions between an individual and the labour market, the inability to get a job and, preceding that in most areas, the loss of a job. Focusing on the subemployed alerts the researcher to the potential importance of this other aspect of labour market behaviour, job separations, in any causal analysis of unemployment. The first section of this paper looks at the types of job separations experienced by men in the samples and relates these to the occurrence of subemployment. This examination of the contribution which different types of job separation might make to an understanding of unemployment is further extended in the second

Interpersonal communication in pentecostal meetings

Abstract: The descriptive—and analytical literature on pentecost includes a number of accounts by peatEcostals: these consist for the most part of interpretations of history written within a fundamentalist perspective, by which phenomena are recorded as operations of the Holy Spirit, often in fulfilment of prophecy.' Standard works of a more scholarly nature include those by Wilson, Calley and Hollenwegcr: these are principally occupied with the history, theology and social ethics of pentecostals.^ Interactional studies within penitecosital assemblies include Wilson, and Walker and Atherton.\" Several sociological studies have been conducted of the functions of performance in glossolalia;* examinations of performances by pentecostals in their mother-tongues are, however, scarce: this paper is a contribution towards such literature/ The purpose of the study which this paper reports was to survey the schemes within which interpersonal relations are developed in Pentecostal assemblies. Particular attention is given below to the indirectness of interpersonal commimication and to taboos affectmg the expression of sympathy and appreciation. While the pentecostal movement legitimates its existence by reference to the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost as recorded in the Acts of the Aposdes,* the sociological identity of world pentecost today is a phenomenon dating back no further than to the beginning of this century. The latter-day 'outpouring' was first apparent in the United States in 1900 and was experienced there by T. B. Barratt, an English Methodist minister then on leave from his congregation in Sweden; it was through him that pentecost arrived in Britain in 1907, the great Welsh Revival of 1904-5 having opened the way for a movement that was theologically fundamentalist and operationally evangelistic and revivalist.

Women in the kibbutz movement

Abstract: M ost studies of and comments on the posidon of women in the kibbutz operate on the assumpdon that if equality between the sexes is possible, is should exist in the kibbutz (e.g. Rosner, Leon, Tiger and Shepher'). Two main reasons are given for this assumpdon; firsdy, that on its own admission, the kibbutz movement has abolished the economic base of capitalism, the source of the oppression of women in European society, and secondly, that the kibbutz movement is ideologically committed to equality between the sexes. Writers then proceed to examine the present-day posidon of women in the kibbutz and, observing a sexual division of labour and a 'resurgence' of family life, attribute these developments to the reasserdon of the biological predisposidons of women to perform certain types of task in society, usually concluding that a sexual division of labour of the type which has evolved in the kibbutz is a natural and inevitable aspect of human social organisadon. In this paper, I will consider the validity of such assumpdons and attempt analysis of their sources through discussion of the posidon of women in the kibbutz of today in historical terms, relating my own field material̂ to the more general development of the kibbutz movement.^

IDEOLOGICAL TRANSFORMATION OF DISCOURSE; or How the Sunday Times got Its message across*

Abstract: The paper demonstrates how linguistic theory can be used as a means of reliably grasping the ideological characteristics of discourse. Recent developments in linguistics have shown that many aspects of discourse are ideologically significant, and not only what is usually isolated as ‘content’. This is most easily seen in transformations of texts of the kinds that occur in paraphrase, rewriting, summary, translation and so on. The many syntactic transformations that occur are related in an organized way. The existence of ideologically distinct options in each syntactic transformation and in the overall structure of such changes makes the occurence of specific structures ideologically significant - and it means that a complete description of the structured set of syntactic transformations reveals the ideological determination of the transformation of the text. This is demonstrated with a detailed analysis of the way in which a journalist rewrote a letter from the British Leyland Personnel Department. The ideologies expressed in the letters are shown to be ones familiar in Industrial Relations Theory. A final section very briefly indicates the wider applications of the concept of ideological transformations of discourse in historical and sociological studies and in the study of the media.

How Many Sociologies

Abstract: A preoccupation with philosophical and historical self-reflection / \\ has characterised academic sociology since the mid-1960s.* This is, no doubt, the product of a complex nexus oi causes, among them being a shift in the relationships between social sciences and state planning in a number of flelds, and managerial strategies in capitalist firms, combined with a generalised and international upsurge in political radicalism among intellectual youth. Whereas sociology had previously defended its professional honour and sold its practical utility in terms of the claim to scientific status, the Viemam war, above all else, had by the late sixties bred a generation for whom 'science' and 'technology' were equivalent terms, and who had recovered the well established romantic critique of science as an oppressive and manipulative, anti-human instrumentality. It was widely recognised that, for instance, the complicity of the U.S. social scientific establishment in attempted genocide in Indo-China was not merely a matter of individual wrongheadedness, stupidity, corruption, or vfhuever. There had to be some cormection between the very content and method of the social sciences and their availability for service in the interests of U.S. Imperialism and managerial manipulation. Both directly and indirectly this political crisis surrounding sociological orthodoxy, and the idea oi a 'science oi society* led to (i) the revitalisation oi already established alternatives to the prevailing functionalist' orthodoxies and (2) the re-examination of the cognitive or 'scientific' status of a sociology which could no longer claim an orthodoxy or a consensus over any of its key terms or concepts, let alone doctrines. Some defenders of the established sociological orthodoxy tended to retain the equally or±odox epistemology a[ logical empiricism to proclaim their value-neutrality and objectivity, ^diilst others utilised Thomas Kuhn's notion of 'normal science' as a legitimation for the attempt to reimpose an orthodoxy fast disappearing. In the main, the sociological opposition made recourse to a variety of epistemologies from Schutz and Husserl to Winch and Wittgen-

Form, Ideology and ‘The Secret Agent’

Abstract: There is a sense in which Conrad's The Secret Agent is altogether too convenient a text to select for discussion in this kind of Monograph. For it is, self-evidently, a 'political' novel, and a materialist criticism should not give itself an easy ride by choosing as its object texts which 'spontaneously' conform to its method. Better, surely, to select an 'innocent' work a Beddoes verse-tragedy or medieval love-lyric than to risk the perils of methodological circularity, a mirror-image reciprocity between 'approach' and object. The Secret Agent may well seem too ideologically 'guilty' a fiction to strain the assumptions of an ideologically-oriented criticism; one may be merely repeating the evasion of the theological critic who works on nothing but Dante and Hopkins, or the semiotician for whom Joyce is the only true literature there is. Yet I am not in fact particularly concerned with the explicitly 'political' dimension of the novel, and certainly not with what might be termed a 'sociological' reading of it. Not that a 'sociology' of the novel can yield us nothing: it is textually relevant that a single historical incident is all the evidence there ever was to back up that vision of an anarchist-haunted London which The Secret Agent projects. The sociology ofanarchism can tell us much about the novel's perceptionscan lead us, for example, to ask why Michaelis should be categorised as an anarchist when he is clearly a Marxist, or how it comes about that the nihilist Professor and time-serving Ossipon can be subsumed under the same political heading. There is nothing in the least empiricist about such questions, but this article will not be concerned with them. For I have chosen The Secret Agent because it seems to me a peculiarly paradigmatic example of the complex relations within fiction between forms and ideologies, formal elements and ideological sub-ensembles, aesthetic devices and codified perceptions. That this is so because ofthe unusual 'foregrounding' of the ideological which the novel effects is doubtless true; but I would claim that what can be observed with peculiar visibility in this self-consciously tendentious text is merely a convenient index of what occurs in the self-structuration of every literary work. We need, then, to beware of the ease with which an 'ideological' text yields us insights for materialist criticism, at the same time as we need to insist that such a text can indeed provide a provisional model for such a materialist method. The specific form of The Secret Agent is composed of a complex amalgam of genres a compound of spy-thriller, Dickensian

Organisational unit size and individual attitudes: an empirical study *

Abstract: Caplow stated the early position on organisational size and its effects when he stated that we know just enough about the effects of size in organisational structure to 'perceive that size is an important element in determining the way any human organisation adapts to its environment and that the whole subject deserves closer study',* Somewhat earlier, the Acton Society Trust in a study of size and morale had emphasised the need for empirical studies to provide a much larger body of data than was currently available.̂ Treating organisational size as a unitary independent variable now seems a very over-simplified approach to the problem. The covariations of size widi bureaucratisation and functional specialisation will be dealt with in more detail later, but it is intuitively clear that an attempt should be made to identify the mediating variables between size and behaviour and to study the effects of these variables. It is for this reason that the present study has been confined to an examination of the effects on individual attitudes of variations in unit size within a single organisation. Relationships with immediate superiors, attitudes towards absenteeism, towards management and the trade unions, were all examined in order to facilitate comparisons with previous research findings. The rationale and findings of previous studies will be briefiy reviewed.

Consciousness and secondhand experience: wives and husbands in industrial action *

Abstract: Despite the recent expansion in literature on women, the serious sociological study of women is still comparatively new and much remains to be done. One such omission, which has so far been totidly neglected, is the consciousness of wives in relation to the mediated work experience of their husbands. The stress in women's literature has been either on women's own experience in the worlq>lace or on their experience of work in the house per se.^ As one might expect, this omission is not made good in other related areas of study. For instance recent contributions to the study of class consciousness have virtually ignored the particular position of women.' Similarly the sociological literature on industrial relations in general, and strikes in particular, totally fails to take adequate account of the attitudes of, and effects upon, the families of (male) workers who are involved.' From whichever standpoint, then—that of women's studies, of studies of dass consciousness or of industrial sociology— ît is dear that the mediation of men's work experience to their wives is an imderresearched area. Yet the fact that economic dependence on a working husband remains the typical situation oi women— f̂or at least a period of their lives (whether they work themselves during this time or not)*—^makes this an important area for investigation, for both political and theoretical reasons. Two traditional (and contradictory) assumptions—^that women are always a conservative force, or that they passivdy reflect the views of their menfolk—are both rejected here. Instead this artide' will attempt, by the use of one particular case study of an industrial dispute, to consider the complex ways in which husbands' experiences are mediated to their wives.

Art and Reality: Gangsters in Film and Society

Abstract: Introduction l In 1943 Humphrey Bogart was vlsItmg troops in North Africa. German radio publicised his visit by claiming that American morale was so bad that the wicked American gangster Bogart had been sent to Africa to entertain the troops. It was not only the Germans who saw things this way, for one day when he ran out of cigarettes, he walked up to some G Is in a jeep and bummed a cigarette from them. One man recognised him, and, as he lit the cigarette, leaned over to ask quietly, 'How are the boys doing?' It took Bogart a second to get it, then he said, 'Okay. They're fine.' 'Do you think Bugsy'll take the rap?' The G.1. asked. 'Yeah.' 'I thought so. And Lepke? Will he burn?' 'Sure he'll burn.' The soldier drove off and, needless to say, he had been in the rackets back home. 2 Louis 'Lepke' Buchalter did indeed burn; he was electrocuted in March of the following year. His capital offence ofmurder was only onc of a long list of criminal activities ranging from bootlegging through to labour racketeering. Benjamin 'Buggsy' Siegel was a colleague in the lattcr enterprise and they had rich pickings in Hollywoodland. They collaborated with the studio heads to keep out militant unions though in the end they squeezed too hard, and their men were imprisoned for extortion; they were replaced in the union by honest but oh-so-right wing Roy Brewer following the typical pattern oflabour racketeering. But in the meantime Siegal supplied the film colony with women, drugs and gambling and was also a good friend ofLongie Zwillman racketeer lover ofJean Harlow herself immortalised in The Public Enemy (1931) as the enigmatic blonde in the life of screen gangster James Cagney. Yet another good friend of Siegel was George Raft, Paul Muni's coin flipping sidekick in another of the early cycle of these films, Scaiface, (1932). Originally when still carrying the extra 'n' as George Ranft he had been third hand in a gambling club and though he became a star he never stopped running errands for the big men of crime. Is it any wonder that the soldier was confused? And there is more. Joe Schenck a founder of Metro Goldwyn Mayer was a good friend ofArnold Rothstein and helped him acquire a 'piece'

Neo‐durkheimian analyses of economic life and strife: from durkheim to the social contract

Abstract: “The task of the most advanced societies, is, then, a work of justice… Just as the ideal of lower societies was to create or maintain as intense a common life as possible, in which the individual was absorbed, so our ideal is to make social relations always more equitable… The harmony of functions and, accordingly, of existence, is at stake. Just as ancient peoples needed, above all, a common faith to live by, so we need justice…”

Suicide and the renewal of life

Abstract: For almost a century the major consideration in sociological research on suicide has been variations in suicide rates. ̂ Despite various conceptual and methodological 'refinements' sociologists have accepted Durkheim's assumption that a population's suicide rate provides a measurable index of the quality of its social relations and that it is through the comparative study of varying suicide rates that the search for the 'social causes' of suicide must be pursued.^ The reluctance of most sociologists to study suicide in any other way may be explained, to a certain extent, by the important part played by Suicide in the establishment of sociology as an independent academic discipline with its own clearly defined field of enquiry:

Radio astronomy revisited: a reassessment of the role of competition and conflict in the development of radio astronomy

Abstract: An examination of some of the previous case studies in the sociology l \\ of science' shows that they have produced a steadily accumulating number of apparently contradictory 'models' of scientific development. For example, a review by Edge and Mulkay^ of six such studies produces a list of fifteen factors^ which may or may not characterize the emergence of a scientific specialty. Each of the various models suggested by the case studies incorporates a imique combination of these factors. To a certain extent, some of the case studies seem to imply a monistic view of science, that is they assume that it is possible to discover a simple model of scientific development which can be applied to all innovations within the various sciences.\"* An alternative starting point (and the one selected here) is provided by the assumption that the sciences are pluralistic, that the various sciences develop in diverse ways, and that a sociological study should focus on the different forms of cognitive structure, the different types of social structure, and the various relations between, and changes to, these structures. If this assumption is correct, then it follows that the proliferation of models mentioned above may be inevitable so long as no attempt is made to integrate the particular group of scientists and scientific activities chosen for study into a broad theoretical framework capable of encompassing developments throughout the sciences. It was in the course of my attempt to interpret and explain a set of developments within cosmology^ in relation to an already existing abstract theoretical framework (that of Whitley*) that certain inadequacies in the description given by Edge and Mulkay^ of the growth of radio astronomy, and in the model of scientific development derived from it, became apparent. Their analysis suggests that controversy played little part in the development of this field,* and they are led to conclude that,