Showing papers in "Theory and Society in 1988"

The social construction of an alcohol problem

Abstract: Social problems have careers that ebb and flow independent of the "objective" incidence of the behaviors thought to constitute them. This is nowhere more amply illustrated than in the history of alcohol issues. I offer here a description of the rise and impact of Mothers Against Drunk Drivers the latest in a long line of social movements that have contended over the definition of alcohol problems and an interpretation of why this movement managed to make drinking-driving into a major public problem in the conservative ethos of the 1980s.

Bringing society into the body

Abstract: Drawing on Marx and Engels's critique of Feuerbach, as does Turner, we can come to some new directions for sociology to pursue. Marx and Engels argue that Feuerbach's contribution lies in reasserting the importance of the material world (in contrast to the neo-Hegelian idealism that prevailed in German thought at that time). Feuerbach's vision of nature is ahistorical. Marx and Engels argued that nature does not confront human actors as a constant, but is transformed through human activity. Nature (including human nature) is mediated by historical circumtances. When I view a California “landscape,” I see trees, brush, grass, and so forth. These are indeed organic but the particular type of vegetation, the state of its growth and development, its specific ecology, the atmosphere and climate of the region, the contours of the landscape and other features all have been strongly modifed by human activity. In that sense, they are not “just” nature but historically socialized nature. Particular historically socialized environments, in turn, affect the creatures who inhabit and transform such environments.

Studying development since the sixties

Abstract: have more profound effects than in the study of development. The sixties saw dominant theoretical approaches to the analysis of development successfully challenged by dependency and world-system approaches, frameworks drawing on Marxist class analysis and on the work of Third World Scholars. By the mid-seventies, after a decade of sharp conflicts, the shifting content of citations and publications in major journals suggested that these new approaches had reached at least co-equal status with the traditional approaches. The field appeared divided theoretically with little promise of dialogue between contending approaches. In fact, what had happened was more complex. Gradually in the course of the conflict, a body of studies had grown up that combined the comparative historical method with certain of the insights of dependency and world-system thinking and even recovered some of the hypotheses of the modernization approach in altered form. We have labeled this work "the new comparative political economy."

Constitutionalism, warfare, and political change in early modern Europe

Abstract: Barrington Moore Jr.'s classic work, Social Origins,1 is doubtless one of the most important works of social science in the last twenty-five years. It delivered a serious blow to unilinear models of social change, reintroduced moral vision into the social sciences, and inspired a generation of historically grounded, macrohistorical studies no mean feat for a single volume. Though it has been criticized for minor historical problems, found to have overlooked important variables, and excoriated on metatheoretical grounds, a fully developed, comparative study that provides an alternative to Moore's emphasis on the commercialization of agriculture has not been put forth.2 In this article, I shall attempt just that, although, as we shall see, my findings are generally compatible with those of Moore.

The state and the making of the working-class - france and the united-states, 1880-1914

Abstract: Site of the modern world's first democratic revolution, the United States has become the world's great conservative power. Already by 1914, the United States had fallen behind most economically advanced European countries in the development of public welfare programs; and later advances have left the American welfare state still "a flawed and fragmented creation ... notorious among Western democracies for the narrow and niggardly protections it provided."3 The slow and limited development of the American welfare state has reflected the weakness of radical political movements in the United States. In most European countries, public welfare programs were established at the behest of labor movements joining socialist and communist political parties with radical labor unions. Only the United States has a conservative labor union movement opposed to radical social change; and the United States alone has never had a strong socialist party.4

The concept of justice in sociology

Abstract: Sociology has implicitly identified itself with a desert-based conception of distributive justice in various ways: the functionalist claim that societies naturally allocate resources according to contribution, the nearly universal belief that modernization involves the displacement of ascriptive with achievement norms, and the social psychological doctrine that we are innately drawn to equity. This misconception about the nature of distributive justice, and about the dominant mode of distribution in capitalist society, has blinded the discipline to deep tensions that constitute major themes in contemporary political discourse: the tension between market, meritocratic, and need-based principles of distribution. Moreover, sociology has absorbed a theory of justice that is open to severe challenge. Uncontroversially, need will play a significant role in any viable contemporary scheme of distribution. Perhaps controversially, the market represents a value difficult to ignore. We may indeed have a need to see achievement rewarded, our own and others. But we also want to spend our money as we choose and a meritocracy sets rules of allocation that restrict this freedom. We all have tastes and preferences that leave the deserving under-rewarded. There are other difficulties in the meritocratic ideal. As Rawls argues, our ability to achieve depends considerably on the luck of the genetic and social draw and hence rewarding people for talents they in no way deserve is of questionable moral force. Second, a fundamental tenet of liberal thought is that each individual should be free to choose his or her own conception of the good and hence there should be no official or collective sanctioning of any particular good. But to reward merit as a matter of public policy is to choose some values over others e.g. the Chicago Symphony Orchestra over Michael Jackson. An officially endorsed hierarchy of values is a threat to the moral autonomy of individuals cherished by liberalism. Michael Sandel, (London: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Sandel effectively describes the importance of government moral neutrality in liberalism. A third problem with the ideal of meritocracy is that decisions about the value of individuals and activities to society involve nearly impossible technical difficulties. The controversies stirred up by comparable worth suggest the intractability of these debates as well as their vulnerability to interest-driven parochialism. The unreflective absorption of the meritocratic ideal of distributive justice has had unfortunate consequences for sociology. A moral debate of central importance to contemporary political culture has been obscured and an ideal of doubtful appeal has been implicitly endorsed. Whether this is a parochial projection of the academic way of life, or an expression of a social-engineering impulse, a reappraisal is in order. Sociology's research agenda, as well as its ideological character, requires a reexamination of the concept of justice.

An “uppity generation” and the revitalization of macroscopic sociology

Abstract: The questioner was Perry Anderson, and the query was directed at me, Theda Skocpol, as the two of us sat together on a wintry day in 1978, eating lunch at Grendel's Den, down Boylston street from Harvard Square. I had just finished the manuscript for States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China.' Anderson and I knew one another by reputation, but this was our first personal discussion. I had described the arguments and the historical scope of my new book to him, and he had then asked me about my background. Where had I come from; and what was my education? Anderson was himself the author of a recently published two-volume masterpiece, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State, a study that analyzed European civilization and European states over two thousand years of history.2

Will sociology ever be a normal science

Abstract: According to Kuhn, normal science is a quiet and felicitous state of affairs where the (supposedly unique and unitarian) scientific community corresponding to a discipline believes faithfully in a unique paradigm. If this is true, sociology has never known and will probably never know this blessed state. Durkheim's sociology strongly influenced as it was by Comte's views had already little to do with Weber's, in spite of all the efforts undertaken by sociologists to discover a common inspiration in the works of the founding fathers. That sociologists have repeatedly tried to overcome this diversity detrimental to their status, using either an integration strategy (stressing the convergence between founding fathers or between paradigms) or a secession strategy (this paradigm, this founding father is the good one), is understandable. Why this lasting effort toward unity remained always mere wishful thinking is the question that I would like to raise here and deal with in a very sketchy fashion. My hunch is that there are good reasons for this multiplicity of paradigms, that it derives simply from the force des choses, and that there are also good reasons to forget the existence of this multiplicity.

States and urban revolutions

Abstract: The structural perspective applied here highlights the features that led to the successful, anti-modern, and backward-looking religious revolution in Iran and the failure of a democratic socialist, worker-oriented movement in Poland. I argue that one can best understand the outcome of modern revolutions by focusing on the state and its relations to the society. By contrasting two countries and two revolutions, I have tried to show that variables such as the structure of the state, the patterns of state-church conflicts, the shifting church-class alliances, and the impact of geopolitics on these domestic factors are essential in explaining why one revolution succeeded while the other failed. The comparative argument can be summarized in the following way. In terms of state structure, the one-man rule in Iran strengthened the absolutist power of the Shah, but weakened the organizational capacity of the various state agencies to deal with political crises. The state bureaucracy and military disintegrated when the leadership lost its authority. In Poland, the existence of powerful and potentially autonomous organizations within the state apparatus made the counterrevolution possible. The party bureaucracy functioned despite chaos at the top and bottom of the hierarchy; and the Polish generals used the united military to seize power by declaring martial laws. The dialectical relation between state and society is equally important to understanding the different revolutionary outcomes. The Iranian state intensified its attacks on the Shiite clergy in the 1970s, emasculating the power of this non-state elite. When popular discontent broke out, the Shiite clerics became the revolutionary vanguard, mobilizing the support of all urban classes and leading the final assault on the monarchy. On the other hand, after a period of repression, the Polish regime made peace with the Roman Catholic church in order to appease the overwhelming Catholic population and to gain legitimacy. Because of the moderation of the state's religious policy, the church played a mediating rather than revolutionary role in the state-class conflict of 1980–81. While the clergy in Iran allied with the urban classes, the Polish church first supported the creation of Solidarity and then broke this alliance; the neutrality of the church thus reduced drastically the capacity of Solidarity to negotiate with the party-state. In these two cases, the participation of the clergy or the withdrawal of its support to urban classes means class capacity or incapacity to fight the regime. In addition, the international contexts had a great impact on the Iranian and Polish conflicts. The Polish state was constrained by its satellite position within the Soviet military empire, and the Polish Catholic church by the Vatican bureaucracy. The Soviet threat of invasion forced the party to choose military repression and convinced the religious elite to adopt a cautious attitude. In contrast, the Iranian state was relatively independent from the United States. The U.S. administration had no policy of military intervention in the Gulf region, and because it was devoid of any constraint, Iran's clergy followed the revolutionary call by a charismatic leader.

Labor organization and class alliance: Industries, communities, and the Knights of Labor

Abstract: The analysis reported here helps to clarify the dual role played by craft organization in labor movement development. In the United States, as in France, community rather than industry was the more promising ground on which to build an inclusive working-class organization. Craft organization in the community always helped mobilize less-skilled workers, and the effect was strongest during the period when the labor movement was growing most rapidly. In contrast, craft organizations within a local industry may have impeded less-skilled workers' organization during the Knights' early years. Only later, when the Knights found themselves on the defensive - attacked by employers, the press, and the craft unions affiliated with the rival American Federation of Labor - did craft locals provide unambiguous support for the organizational efforts of less-skilled workers in their own industries.

Adorno on sport

Abstract: As Adorno once observed, "...if one were to summarize the most important trends of present-day culture, one could hardly find a more pregnant category than that of sports." Yet it is this very category of mass culture that Adorno has been severely criticized for either ignoring altogether, or treating in an offhand, cavalier manner. In particular, Adorno has been reproached for glossing over the emancipatory potential of the popular sports and leisure pursuits of mass culture,2 and for producing hyper-critical doctrines of the body and of modern sport based on Fascist political paradigms.3 Even more sympathetic critics of Adorno have charged that the only limits to reification he recognized were located at the level of the human subject, and that he never considered "... whether perhaps there are also limits to the reification of the cultural commodities themselves,"4 to include presumably sport and leisure.

For a sociological philosophy

Abstract: Sociology, then, should prove to be relevant to a host of issues within the traditional purview of philosophy: Epistemology and philosophy of science, of course; the issue of solipsism and other minds (as Habermas has already seen, invoking Mead); ontological issues of the mind/body relation, of person/self/identity (on which there is a wealth of untapped materials, from Goffman, Mead, and in the lineage of Durkheim and Mauss now being rediscovered); Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins, and Steven Lukes, editors, (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Norbert Wiley, “The Sacred Self: Durkheim's Anomaly,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, New York, 1986. and more deeply the questions of materialism/idealism, realism and anti-realism. All questions in the philosophy of ethics, ranging from conceptual analysis to critical and constructive ethics, make sense realistically only if handled with a sociological understanding of where moral ideals and feelings emerge from. The extent of possible success of sociological explanations is a crucial point for any discussion of determinism and indeterminism, and relatedly for the notion of will, free or otherwise. (Obviously the sociology of the self is implicated in the free-will issue as well.) The micro/ macro issue is a wonderful ground on which to consider questions of universals and particulars, of the different orders of causality, of reification and reductionism. Though it may seem presumptious to say so, sociology has implications right across the board in philosophy, even in its stronghold of metaphysics: space and time, existence and non-existence, the Ideal and the immediacy of lived experience are all parts of our current sociological controversies. As yet we have not been very bold in bringing such implications of sociology to attention. But there is recent work such as that of Preston David Preston, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). on the sociology of Zen practice, which is relevant to a philosophy of ontology at its deepest levels. Furthermore, I feel optimistic about sociology's capacity to contribute to these issues philosophically, that is to say within the problem-space of philosophy itself. Tools like Goffmanian frame analysis, with a nested and grounded relation among levels, should cast light even on tricky issues such as infinities and logical indeterminacies, ontological foundations and unfoundedness. After all, if reality is socially constructed, why shouldn't our professional understanding of society reveal something central about the universe? Sal Restivo (personal communication) suggests that this Une of argument can go even farther: “You [Collins] seem to fall into the same sort of trap that people like Rorty fall into. Everything you say spells the end of philosophy, but somehow philosophy gets saved in the end. Once Durkheim enters the picture, what's left of ‘ultimate questions’? Doesn't the of religion reveal that philosophy's concern with ‘ultimate questions’ (like religion's) is a strategy and a sham - and that it is sociology and anthropology ultimately that realistically address ‘ultimate questions’? It seems to me that sociologizing philosophy FEARLESSLY destroys philosophy. So in this view sociologizing philosophy can't lead to a ‘philosophy’ of sociology, but only a sociology of sociology. ‘Philosophy without mirrors’ (Rorty) is sociology/ anthropology; ‘philosophy with a hammer’ (Nietzsche) is sociology/ anthropology. In a very real sense, sociologizing philosophy is like trying to sociologize religion - either sociology has to dilute its explanatory power, or philosophy/religion has to evaporate as an intellectual strategy. The death of philosophy is another step in the Death of God process.” For a more extensive argument, see Sal Restivo, “The End of Epistemology,” 1 (1984), Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy N.Y. As of now, these implications remain only potential. But to buttress my claim for the relevance of sociology in just one area, epistemology and the reflexive issues that arise within it, let me close with a brief reflection on what the sociology of science implies about the nature of philosophy itself. We can hardly expect that sociology will give a final and definitive answer to philosophy's problems. I say that, not because of any pessimism about our intellectual tools, but because of the very nature of intellectual communities. Intellectuals make careers by gaining fame for their original contributions; there must be problems to solve if there is to be something to contribute. This of course is true of all areas of science and scholarship. But whereas the empirical disciplines can go on to create new specialties and research areas, philosophers do not have the same way out of the professional problem posed by a field's own past success. Philosophy has handled this problem in a deeper way. For philosophers have taken as their turf precisely those problems that are themselves inherently deep and, in some sense, intractable. Philosophers have traditionally been concerned with the understanding of knowledge itself, with the most fundamental categories of existence and experience, with the bases of value. These are the boundary problems of all the other fields of intellectual inquiry, and of human life itself. They are intractable, not because significant things cannot be said about them, but because they are located at the open edges of everything; they reveal themselves full of reflexivities, which constantly reemerge at a new level whenever a conceptual solution is proposed, much as in Godel's incompleteness theorem - and in the most highly transformed level of Goffmanian frames. It is for this reason that the history of philosophy is full of complaints that previous philosophers have come to no agreement, along with new beginnings that attempt to finish its business at last. There is a striking repetitiveness to these claims: we hear them from Descartes, and again from Kant, from the Logical Positivists, from Wittgenstein, in their different ways; there is more than an echo of this intellectual strategy in today's extremists, such as Rorty and Derrida, who again are abolishing philosophy. But philosophy has not been abolished; each previous claim to bring the uselessly warring sects of the past into a final resolution has failed to stifle philosophy's perennial inquiries. Just as strikingly, each such effort at ending philosophy has given rise to a period of renewed philosophical creativity. I think this is not an accident. It is because the structure of the intellectual field in general (across the disciplines, not only philosophy) is being restructured at a particular historical time that figures like Descartes, Kant, and others appear; the crisis of intellectual restructuring is what gives them the intellectual capital (and the creative energy) to reconceptualize the fundamental boundary problems in a new way. In this sense, philosophy is indeed “foundational”; it concerns itself with the ultimate questions, the borderlines of all inquiry and all of life. But there is another sense of “foundational,” the claim that philosophy is the discipline necessary for putting all other knowledge upon a secure foundation. This is certainly not true in a practical and historical sense; the other disciplines have gone ahead quite well without guidance from philosophy. Kant's claim to provide a secure foundation for the physical sciences against Hume's scepticism was really a rhetorical ploy, a way of building up the importance of what philosophy is doing; it really made no difference to the growth of science in Hume's day, or in Kant's, just what the philosophers said about the foundations of their knowledge. The same is true for all such claims about the significance of foundational issues. But this is not to dismiss the importance of what philosophers are doing. Theirs is the great intellectual adventure into the edges of things. The rest of the disciplines, the rest of what we consider to be knowledge, nestled in a pragmatic acceptance of whatever seems to work for us as intellectual practitioners, do not rest upon philosophy. The structural relation among intellectual fields is more the other way around, as far as the dynamics of intellectual change are concerned. But philosophy has nevertheless positioned itself in the intellectual space where the deepest explorations are launched. This will continue to be so, even as sociology adds its own impetus to the philosophical project.

From social scientific functionalism to open functional logic

Abstract: The times when social scientific writing was largely dominated by some pattern of functional reasoning are over. Its most prominent representative, Parsonsian sociology, came under attack in the sixties and early seventies1 and subsequently lost its overwhelming influence. A few years later the so-called "crisis of Marxism" eroded the Marxist functionalist approach, most notably expounded by the Althusserian school. And in the sphere of methodology, Anthony Giddens observed in 1977 that with regard to functionalism "the battlefield is largely empty."2 Nowadays methodological individualism, game theory, or, as in Marxism, discourse theory seem to have filled the place once held by functionalist system theory and "structuralist" Marxism. Even systems theorist Niklas Luhmann asserts in his recent work that functional explanation is nothing more than the "inquiry" into and "elimination" of functional equivalents.3

Inside contracting at the Sargent Hardware Company: A case study of a factory in transition at the turn of the century

Abstract: Four major points emerge from the events at the Sargent factory. First, the image of inside contracting as a system pitting owners against contractors is simplistic and incomplete. Rank and file workers constituted an important third force and were involved in a complex set of changing relationships with each group and within their own group. Shifts of power in this three-way straggle led to the organizational transition away from inside contracting.

Peasant movements and communal property during the French Revolution

Abstract: The rural history of the French Revolution is a history of movement. Drawn into a revolutionary process, peasants blocked some reform strategies and formulated others, protected and redefined custom, resisted and created. Among the most original activists of the period were the "sharers" (partageux) who advocated the partition of communal property. Their program was not a "dying wail," but an overture; rural rebels of the twentieth century continue to strive for rights that they were the first to define and enforce.1

Future of the sixties generation and social theory

Abstract: The sixties leave a sense of troubling incompleteness and shortcoming alongside that of proud achievement. But if the time has remained difficult to capture, it is also possible that it is not over. The decade itself was perhaps only the beginning of a time of vast change that is not yet fulfilled. Our generation, after all, has only lived into its middle years.... Why conclude that life's most powerful moments are already behind us? If the sixties are not over, it is up to the sixties generation to continue trying to heal our wounds, find our truth, and apply our ideals with a new maturity to our nation's future.'

Distorted transmission A case study in the diffusion of social "scientific" research

Abstract: ...a fairly evolved discourse, instead of being relayed by additional work which perfects it (either with criticism or amplification) rendering it more difficult and even finer, nowadays undergoes a process of amplification from the bottom up. Little by little, from the book to the review, to the newspaper article, and from the newspaper article to television, we come to summarise a work, or a problem, in terms of slogans. This passage of the philosophical question into the realm of the slogan... is not the responsibility of any one person in particular.... In the past there were two different circuits. Even if it could not avoid all the pitfalls, the institutional circuit, which had its drawbacks it was closed, dogmatic, academic nevertheless managed to sustain less heavy losses. The tendency to entropy was less, while nowadays entropy sets in at an alarming rate.... I have seen this entropy accelerate in a detestable way for philosophical thought. But it should be remembered that this means added responsibility for people who write.'

Big money in American politics

Abstract: The importance of campaign finance in understanding power in America is largely ignored or downplayed by grand theorists in political science and political sociology. For pluralists, heavy money is at best one "resource" among many, not a basic starting point. For the new "state-centric" theorists campaign finance figures hardly at all even though they sometimes talk about a nineteenth-century system of "courts and parties." Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers's Right Turn gives due weight to the role of major contributors. Indeed, this wellwritten and sharply argued book brings together a wide range of information to support the claim that campaign finance and related resources are not only crucial in the electoral process, but also in shaping public policies. In addition, it raises difficult questions for theories that place their strongest emphasis on public opinion or electoral realignments in explaining the changing fortunes and thrusts of the two major parties.

Modernity's myth of facts: Emile Durkheim and the politics of knowledge

Abstract: Any campaign to alter conventional patterns of political education presupposes an account of its subject. This is so in a twofold sense because each such initiative entails a characterization of the knowledge whose cause it promotes as well as a representation of the agents who are to be constituted by it. It is, accordingly, specification of the desired relationship between subject as content and subject as vehicle that informs the practice whose purpose is to tranform the abstractions of theory into the effective habits of acting agents.

Fundamental rights and the supportive state

Abstract: Poverty amidst affluence, chronic unemployment, political apathy and cynicism, crime and corruption, sexism, racism, and a moral climate of widespread hedonism these are evils familiar to all of us. The above is the first sentence in my recent book, Toward a Just Social Order.' In that book I use theoretical ideas from sociology and ethical philosophy to locate and defend those institutional arrangements appropriate to a just social order. My book is an exploration in social theory. More specifically, it is a work in normative sociology.2