The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
October 2002
The Sociology of Knowledge: Retrospect and
Prospect
Annual Review of Sociology
Volume 9 (1983), 287-310.
Index
The Sociology of Knowledge in the
From Explanation to Understanding
Toward an Understanding of Objective Culture
Before World War the intellectual climate of
American sociology was congenial to the growth of a sociology of knowledge
akin to
* History and Sociology of Science,
287
Surveys of work in the sociology of knowledge
have a formulaic character. Invariably
they begin by lamenting the relative neglect of the field by American
sociologists, continue with programmatic definitions of its mandate, and
conclude with optimistic forecasts of its future growth.
In this essay I adhere to the
conventions of the genre, for they are dictated by historical evidence.
That is, there is no coherent,
self-conscious research tradition in the sociology of knowledge as such.
Much of the literature in the field is
best described as philosophical anthropology - perhaps propaedeutic to
analysis of ideas in their social context but hardly equivalent to such
analysis. In part, this state of
affairs has resulted from the lack of professional consensus on a charter
mandate for this subdiscipline - essential to the realization of a research
program. Then, too, for the past four
decades the intellectual climate of American sociology has been unfavorable
for the sociology of knowledge; I return to this problem shortly.
The substantive boundaries of the sociology of
knowledge may be set either narrowly or broadly, either restricted to
specialized knowledge or extended to cover the commonplace beliefs that inform
everyday life. By the latter
definition, the field’s theoretical model is comprehensive, delimiting the
fundamental processes linking social structure, thought, and action; Durkheim
and Mannheim stand as historical patrons of this comprehensive form of the
sociology of knowledge, although they did not endorse it consistently, their
explanatory expectations varying with the sorts of societies they analyzed and
at different stages of their careers (Lukes 1973:
435-49; Douglas
1975; xi- xviii;
Simonds 1978: 6). Such contemporary
sociologists of knowledge as Berger and Luckmann insist that the field must
treat ordinary and esoteric culture alike if it is to address issues of
general sociological significance (1967: 12-14).
Nonetheless, my essay surveys the sociology of
knowledge in its narrow form, the analysis of esoteric knowledge; thus, it is
prescriptive as well as descriptive. I
survey research treating what
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scientific theories are underdetermined
by facts” (Hesse 1978: 1) and that collective agreement on the significance of
evidence is achieved through various types of negotiation (e.g. see Bloor
1981). Such a delimitation of the
sociology of knowledge serves a programmatic purpose: the definition of a
potentially viable research area that has been unjustifiably neglected.
Its neglect seems odd when viewed in
the light of the history of social science over the past century and a half,
for, as Clifford Geertz recently observed, during this period social science
has benefitted from virtually every theoretical and methodological scholarly
innovation, with the notable exception of one major trend in recent
scholarship - the effort to interpret “symbolic action,” to explain symbols
that serve as vehicles for conceptions (1973: 208).
Certainly the sociology of religion
has long been an established specialty in American sociology, and the
sociology of science has flourished recently; but research in both fields
would surely benefit from consideration of the similarities - and
dissimilarities - that obtain among different types of objective culture.
My essay is divided into three sections.
In the first I identify the
impediments to the development of a research tradition in the sociology of
knowledge, impediments based in the character of post-1945 American sociology.
In the second I discuss recent
theoretical formulations of the sociology of knowledge; though articulated by
practitioners of several disciplines - philosophy, literary criticism, the
social sciences, the history of art, the history of science, and intellectual
history - they display remarkable agreement. Finally,
in the third section I describe research illustrating the diversity of
approaches to the sociology of knowledge, emphasizing work that realizes the
programmatic injunctions expounded in the second section.
The Sociology of Knowledge in the
Because many of the founding fathers of American
sociology were trained abroad, the sociology of knowledge here has both an
indigenous and a European ancestry. From
the end of the 19th through the first three decades of the 20th centuries,
American social thinkers took for granted the basic assumptions of a sociology
of knowledge, as many scholars have observed.
Whatever their differences, the thinkers of this period agreed that
the social world had to be understood in historical terms, not in terms of
timeless laws; if laws of social behavior could be determined, they were laws
of evolutionary development. Such
diverse thinkers as J. Dewey, G. H. Mead, C. H. Cooley, L. F. Ward, A. Small,
W. I. Thomas, E. Fans, and Robert Park were not all unilinear evolutionists,
but they all charted the course of past and anticipated human history as the
progressive triumph of reason over instinct in the guidance of behavior;
increasing rationality derived from human adaptive capacity and was
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the product of interaction between conscious
purposes and material constraints. Different
styles of thought prevailed during - and were appropriate to - different
stages of evolution, and in any given society the various social strata
displayed different outlooks (e.g. Berger 1966; Fuhrman 1980: 212-29; Lewis &
Smith 1980: 100-1, 131; Merton 1967a: 562; White 1976).
From the late 1930s through the 1950s
sociologists set themselves tasks very different from those of their
predecessors, rejecting the intellectual tradition appropriate to the
sociology of knowledge (e.g. Kuklick 1973). Certainly
the older sociological approach survived in the still-thriving interactionist
school, but it was upheld only by a minority within the discipline; and
because it was wrenched from its evolutionist matrix it was transformed from a
macro- to a micro-sociological theory (for a survey, see Fisher & Strauss
1978). How had mainstream sociology
changed? Even before the 1930s
sociologists were turning away from analysis cast in historical terms, even
denying the value of historical information about their subjects on the
grounds that knowledge of “previous values and ideals could distort an
objective view of the present” (Karl 1969: 380; and see Barnes 1921).
They sought to establish timeless
sociological laws, transhistorical and transcultural.
Because the sociologists of the 1930s
were repudiating historicism in all its forms, they were unprepared to accept
No less important to their antirelativism was
the methodological stance sociologists adopted in the 1930s.
Determined to make their field truly
“scientific,” led by such propagandists as G. Lundberg and W. F. Ogburn, they
embraced the ideal of general “scientific method,” equally applicable to all
forms of scholarship, which to them entailed both methodological individualism
and collaborative research. Scientific
sociology so defined was institutionalized after World War II at
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range” problems.
Finally, the notion of a general scientific method was premised on a
distinction - central to the philosophy of science in the 1930s - between the
context of discovery and the context of justification.
According to this formulation,
sociological analysis can explain scientists’ choices of research problems,
which are conditioned by sociohistorical factors, but is irrelevant to
judgment of research results, which are evaluated by universal criteria.
Nowadays this distinction is
considered specious, for the same cultural factors inform problem selection
and the cognitive content of science. Sociology
was expected to gain prestige by becoming more scientific, and, indeed,
through analogous reforms the natural sciences won increased respect in the
mid-19th century [although one should note that many types of scientific
research cannot be bureaucratically organized (see e.g. Lundberg 1942; Morrell
1972; Mulkay 1979: 1-26; Ogburn 1930; Shils 1970: 794; R. S. Turner 1982)].
Scientific sociology could not be reconciled
with
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Given the reward structure of sociology, it is
not surprising that sociologists of knowledge have practiced externalist
analysis, for they thus defined their problems in the terms of more
conventional (and more prestigious) sociological specialties.
Hence, we may know little about the
social meaning of “objective” culture, but we can analyze its production just
as we do any form of complex organizational behavior (e.g. Reskin 1977; Swatez
1970); we can assimilate our understanding of the patterns of transmission of
knowledge to general theories of communication (e.g. Crane 1972; Kadushin
1976); we can suspend judgment about the relationship between the allocation
of prestige among cultural producers and the quality of their work,
transmuting this question into the problem of determination of the formal
mechanisms by which rewards are distributed (e.g. P. Clark, 1979; Cole et al
1977; Useem 1976), thus steering a neutral course between the irreconcilable
conclusions of students of social stratification that high status is either
fully deserved or virtually arbitrary; and we can translate analyses of the
prestige structure of the scientific community into the terms of those
sociologists who have attempted to relate social stratification patterns to
the course of the life cycle (Zuckerman & Merton 1973).
How would sociology have to change so as to
encourage research on the meaning of culture?
As has already been suggested, what is required is the reconciliation
of sociology with history. This
platitude has long been a staple of textbook wisdom (e.g. Berger 1963: 20,
1681), but there is evidence that the long-awaited reconciliation is now under
way, especially in the study of the family, education, and social
stratification. In these fields,
sociologists and historians are profiting from one another’s work, not merely
developing their specialties on parallel courses within the traditional
disciplinary division of labor. Of
course, in part this disciplinary cooperation represents the triumph of
sociological methodology in certain types of historical inquiry, belying
earlier sociological objections that historical data could not be analyzed
rigorously. But this interdisciplinary
exchange also reflects sociologists’ appreciation of the virtues of the
interpretive analysis traditional to history (e.g. see Aminzade & Hodson 1982;
Aronson 1969: 295-99; Collins 1979; Elder 1974: 1-24; Hareven 1976; Katz 1975:
44-175; Pleck 1976). Why are
sociologists now receptive to historical approaches?
Since the mid-1960s the discipline has
endured a crisis of identity, occasioned by discontent with the previously
dominant paradigm - positivist methodology coupled with functionalist theory,
which together were incapable of explaining social change (e.g. see Friedrichs
1970: 21). Sociolgists’ concern to
comprehend change entails attention to history.
The rejection of positivism has taken
such extreme forms as the recently formulated ethnomethodological model of
behavior, which permits an absolute idealism through which, to quote Gellner
(1975: 441), “the objective world evaporates, asymptotically approaches zero.”
(For a survey, see Frank 1979.)
Hence, sociology should be receptive
to the theoretical perspective to which I now turn.
From Explanation to Understanding
Social scientists have frequently debated the
merits of patterning their fields after the stereotyped model of the natural
sciences partially described above. Both
scientistic social scientists and their opponents typically grant the accuracy
of this model, although the former have concluded that scientific social
science cannot deal with problems of subjective meaning, while the latter
argue that the social sciences must treat such problems because natural and
social phenomena are qualitatively different.
All assume, however, that natural scientific explanations are
monistic, uncompromisingly materialistic, and reductionistic.
But many (if not all) philosophers of
science have rejected the positivistic characterization of science.
Above, I alluded to current
philosophic trends, and below I describe historical and sociological research
that supports philosophic generalizations. I
emphasize here, however, that philosophers of science no longer see their task
as constructing an ideal scientific method, freed of all historical and
personal idiosyncracies, the use of which in any sort of research will yield
“brute data” - data that are “available without any personal discernment or
interpretation on the part of the observer” (Taylor 1973: 56; see also
Bernstein 1976: 5-6; and for a somewhat different narrative of recent
philosophical trends see Laudan 1981). Philosophers
of science whose theories are informed by knowledge of actual (as opposed to
ideal) research behavior agree that in both the social and natural sciences
agreement on evidence is not reached by appeal to the timeless and universal
standards of true scientific method but is contingent on contextual factors of
various sorts (e.g. Bloor, 1983; Finocchiaro 1977; Toulmin 1977).
Indeed, it is difficult to see how
social scientists could reject interpretive analysis of symbolic meaning on
the grounds that it cannot be reconciled with positivist scientific method,
for social scientists have enthusiastically embraced an argument that
discredits such a model of science. That
is, despite Kuhn’s assertion in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
(1962) that his description of scientific behavior does not apply to the
social sciences, social scientists have cast the histories of their
disciplines in the form Kuhn outlined for the natural sciences.
Paradoxically, they have sustained
their claim to be truly “scientific” on the grounds that natural scientific
development is occasionally discontinuous, marked by irrational “paradigm
shifts” (e.g. Boissevain 1974; Bronfenbrenner 1971;
The positivist tradition has left another legacy
to contemporary social science, a legacy more significant for our purposes
than the positivist notion of
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scientific method.
This is the assumption that true
science is necessarily reductionist, which excludes interpretive analysis of
meaning from scientific activity. We
rank the sciences in a hierarchy deriving from Comte’s developmental scheme:
Moving from decreasing generality to increasing complexity, the sciences
evolve in a specific order - mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry,
biology, sociology - each science depending on its predecessor for its
positive content. Hence, each science
gains in specificity by further elaboration of its problems in the terms of
the antecedent sciences (e.g. Dolby 1979: 174-85).
If we require social science to
realize this research program however, we cannot justify research in the
sociology of knowledge. If we
assimilate the sociology of knowledge to a reductionist program of scientific
inquiry, we reduce ideas to epiphenomena of material factors; if ideas merely
reflect the social order, and play no role as determinants of social action,
the scholar should abandon the study of ideas and turn directly to analysis of
material conditions (e.g. H. White 1980: 327).
Unless we accept the dualist assumption that human behavior is the
product of the interaction between subjective perceptions and material
factors, the sociology of knowledge is a trivial enterprise.
Thus, because social scientists have so often
appealed to the standards of the natural sciences to justify their activities,
it is important to observe that much reputable science has been based on
dualist assumptions. As Merz noted in
his classic survey of 19th century science, “none of the great men to whom we
are indebted for the real extension of our knowledge of biological phenomena”
accepted the view that “[v]italism and animism were at an end; there only
remained mechanism and materialism” (1965: 399).
That is, such scientific giants as R.
Virchow, X. Bichat, J. Liebig, C. Bernard, and M. Foster agreed that the
characteristics of living matter could not be understood by reducing them to
their physical and chemical elements; either the material components of
organisms were animated by some extrinsic, inexplicable vital force, or life
was an emergent property of the organization of matter - an idea
introduced into biology by H. Spencer (Merz 1965: 368-464; and see Bynum
1981). Vitalist commitments explain
certain apparent inconsistencies in scientific argument.
For example, W. Bateson promoted
Mendelism, yet rejected the chromosome theory because it represented
materialistic reductionism; Bateson insisted that the organism must be
analyzed holistically (e.g. Coleman 1970).
What has been the fate of vitalism in the 20th
century? In the life sciences it is
still legitimate to argue against physicochemical reductionism on the grounds
that the character of an organism is determined by the organization of its
constituent parts, rather than the sum thereof.
The existence of some autonomous,
spiritual life force is not debated openly, but one need not interpret this as
evidence of the unqualified triumph of materialism.
Rather, the problem of determining the
possibilities and limitations of reductionism become nonsen-
294
sical through philosophic fiat: The positivist
My description of the differences between
mechanists and vitalists should disillusion social scientists who imagine that
all scientific inquiry proceeds in identical fashion.
Further, I have described debates
within the natural sciences because analogous disputes have raged within the
social sciences. The mechanist
position corresponds to the positivist social scientific model already
outlined, entailing methodological individualism, the reduction of the
behavior of all groups to the sum of their constituents.
Employing the terms current among
philosophers of social science, one would identify the object of positivist
social science as explanation rather than understanding.
In positivist social science,
subjective elements in social action are ignored because they are irrelevant
to the quest for general behavioral laws; hence, scholarly attention is
restricted “to the material surface of phenomena, to only such evidence as can
be perceived directly and without mediation, which can be measured,
quantified, and hence assimiliated to entirely formal and timeless categories
of ‘explanation’ (Simonds 1978: 196).
The alternative tradition of social inquiry is
directed toward understanding of social behavior.
This tradition, exemplified and
extended by
Purged of its Germanic metaphysics, can this
social scientific program be
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translated into terms acceptable to contemporary
Anglo Saxon theorists? The rejection
of methodological individualism does not require us to believe in any such
mystical entity as a group mind, affecting but not affected by individuals - a
statement with which
The proper method is said to be that of tracing
out the line of the so-called hermeneutic circle, by placing the text to be
interpreted within a field of assumptions and conventions to which it
contributes and from which it derives its distinctively meaningful character.
Finally, the goal of the method is
said to be that of “making sense” of the text by exhibiting the coherence
between what the agent is doing and the meaning the situation had for him
(Skinner 1975:210).
The contextualist program is unexceptionable.
Indeed, its leading proponents - Q. Skinner, J. Dunn, J. G. A. Pocock -
acknowledge not only the indebtedness to one another and their joint
obligation to R. G. Collingwood but also that there is nothing “particularly
dramatic or original” in their argument (Skinner 1974: 283).
These are the essential components of
their scheme:
Purposive social actors are bound by habits of
thought and behavior reflecting their societies’ traditions, but they
manipulate the elements of these traditions; we can understand actors’
purposes only in the contexts of their particular historical circumstances,
and thus the disagreements of those acting at cross purposes are as important
to a recovery of their intentions as are their common assumptions (e.g.
Skinner 1969). Not only can the
contextualist program be reconciled with the method of hermeneutics, the
conception of the actor it entails can be equated with the evolutionism of
theorists such as
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Agents act purposively in adaptation to their
circumstances, but they are constrained by ecological factors [both cultural
and natural (Toulmin 1981)]. Evolutionist
explanations (which the historian of early 20th century social thought is
bound to recognize), permit accounting for consciousness without recourse to
dualist models, for consciousness can be regarded as an adaptive mechanism
built into the organism. Furthermore,
the gradual process by which cultural patterns are transformed is explicable
in evolutionary terms. In response to
experience, actors modify particular features of their behavior; they must
then modify their use of apparently stable elements in their conceptual
schemes in order to reconcile them with these adaptive innovations (see Bloor
1983, who relies heavily on the work of Mary Hesse).
What methodological difficulties are posed by
the contextualist program? First is
the difficulty of delimiting the context within which culture is to be
analyzed. Second, the criteria of
plausibility for an interpretive account are problematic.
Third, the hermeneutic method may be
inseparable from a world view that many find objectionable.
First, the relationships between specialized
communities of culture producers and outsiders vary, whether these outsiders
are a limited group of consumers or the society as a whole, and no formulae
exist to determine the context of highly specialized knowledge.
It is a simple matter to determine the
context of Hobbes’s political thought: Its restricted context - the community
of political theorists - may be defined to comprise those who joined in debate
over the nature of political obligation; that its general context was society
as a whole is evidenced by the practical issues theorists were addressing -
i.e. the problems of the nature of political authority and of the citizen’s
duties to the state (Skinner 1972). Yet
an inward-looking community may produce esoteric culture explicable only in
its own eccentric terms, and contextualist analysis will reveal only the
meaning such work has for the community (e.g. see Pocock 1969).
We cannot assume, however, that
culture has this eccentric character either on the basis of its content or
because the community that produces it is corporately organized - permitting
but not necessarily resulting in self-regulation according to peculiar norms
(e.g. Kuklick 1980). Even so esoteric
a field as quantum physics can be seen as the embodiment of a world view held
by many outside the scientific community (Forman 1971).
Furthermore, as Becker has
persuasively argued in his analysis of the differences between artists and
craftsmen, the producers of culture may also consciously alter their
relationships with their audiences (1978).
This methodological obstacle to the practice of contextualism may be
more apparent than real, however. Sustained
research on any given topic should suggest appropriate boundaries for the
communities of culture producers and audiences.
By what criteria do we judge the adequacy of an
interpretive account? To quote Taylor,
a leading proponent of contextualist analysis,
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A successful interpretation is one which makes
clear the meaning originally present in a confused, fragmentary, cloudy form.
But how does one know that this
interpretation is correct? Presumably
because it makes sense of the original text: what is strange, mystifying,
puzzling, contradictory is no longer so, is accounted for.
The interpretation appeals throughout
to our understanding of the “language” of expression, which understanding
allows us to see that this expression is puzzling, that it is in contradiction
to that other, etc., and that these difficulties are cleared up when the
meaning is expressed in a new way (Taylor 1971:
5).
Such analysis cannot be expressed in
quantitative terms. The relative
importance of various factors cannot be weighted; one can only decide whether
a factor contributed to the creation of a situation by asking whether its
omission from an account would render the interpretation implausible (e.g.
Pocock 1969: 191). One can only advise
would-be practitioners of contextualist analysis that exhaustive research may
permit them to provide the “thick description” Geertz recommends: delimitation
of “a stratified hierarchy of meaningful structures in terms of which… [a
society’s repertoire of habitual acts] are produced, perceived, and
interpreted,” and without which any behavior is meaningless (1973:7).
A “thick description” evidently relies
on considerable ethnographic or historical evidence, which is presented for
scholarly inspection. But our judgment
of the interpretation of such evidence ultimately rests on our belief in the
reliability of investigators rather than their methods, for
their conclusions do not rest on procedures that meet the standard of
reproducibility expected of science.
We thus come to the most problematic aspect of
hermeneutic analysis - the undemocratic character of its methodology.
This characteristic is ironic in view
of the objectives of the line of theorists from
298
assumption that individuals possessed
complementary, not equal, native gifts, and therefore must be joined in
hierarchical, not egalitarian social relationships (e.g. Manuel 1956).
Certainly, organicist notions can be
bent to different political purposes. They
serve liberal ends if used to support the claim that the state is obliged to
serve the needs of all of its citizens, conservative ends if employed to
defend the subordination of individuals’ purposes to societal goals (e.g.
Clarke, 1978 : 24, 42, 58, 146-53). Nevertheless,
organicist arguments rest on an investigative method with unambiguously
conservative political implications.
In contrast to the methodology of hermeneutic
analysis, that of positivist social science is that supposedly employed by the
natural sciences. It ought to be
thoroughly impersonal, permitting scholars and research to be judged by
universalistic criteria. Research
conclusions should be accepted only if they can be reproduced by any competent
investigator, who can analyze published data using specified procedures.
And meritocratic standards determine
individuals’ places in the professional status hierarchy.
Furthermore, the reductionist program
linked to positivist methodology makes the individual, not the group, the
basic unit of social analysis and thus virtually dictates a relatively
democratic model of society as the sum of its individual parts.
Contextualist analysis illuminates the
political significance of positivist social science for its advocates.
Historically, middle-class opponents
of aristocratic privilege have demanded that scientific conclusions be based
on data accessible to everyone, while the elite have argued that their
dominance is legitimate because they possess special intuitive powers of
understanding (e.g. Jacyna 1980; Shapin 1979).
Indeed, from the 19th century on in both Britain and the United States
a tradition of middle-class cultural criticism has been directed toward
reforming society according to the perfect democratic standards of the
scientific community, a tradition exemplified in Merton’s formulation of the
“scientific ethos” based on the norms of “universalism,” “disinterestedness,”
“communism,” and “organized skepticism;” significantly, Merton defined this
ethos in 1942, when powerful fascist regimes threatened the survival of more
democratic societies (Hollinger 1983).
Sociologists of knowledge must attempt both
explanation and understanding of their material.
For though we may observe
long-persistent patterns of behavior, explicable through quasi-laws of
explanation appropriate to a particular epoch, we must understand that
conscious calculations affect individuals’ conduct, not the least because they
figure in disjunctive social changes (e.g. Taylor 1971:
32—51).
Knowledge claims based on positivist
and hermeneutical methods can be faulted.
Standards of “rationality” in scientific judgment are not peculiar to
science but depend on general cultural standards, and scientific results are
frequently accepted for particularistic reasons (see e.g. Barnes & Dolby 1970;
Latour & Woolgar 1979). Hermeneutical
interpretations
299
may sometimes be persuasive only if we accept
their producers’ pretensions to possess special visionary abilities.
Paradoxically, however, our objections
to positivism also oblige us to recognize that endorsement of the obvious
scholarly virtues embodied in the “scientific ethos” cannot be entirely
irrelevant to behavior. Contextualist
analysis is necessary to understanding of the sociohistorical locus of ideas,
but its practitioners can adhere to rigorous standards, even though these
standards may be more akin to those of conventional historical scholarship
than to those of scientific research.
Toward an Understanding
of Objective Culture
The distinction between the contexts of
discovery and justification may be philosophically indefensible, but it
suggests two broad analytical approaches that sociologists of knowledge must
employ simultaneously in order to explain and understand culture.
In practical terms this means: first,
that we must define the social structural properties of communities of
knowledge producers and consumers - types of work organization, patterns of
patronage, and audience characteristics; and second that we must interpret the
meaning culture has for its producers and consumers.
Students of culture have usually
focussed on either the first or second of these goals.
I now illustrate the range of
approaches possible to the sociology of knowledge by describing a variety of
studies, not all by sociologists.
In the first part of this essay I described
sociological studies treating the social-structural aspects of culture
production, ignoring the content of the culture.
Research exemplifying this genre
reduces behavior to functions of a limited number of factors, and its
character can be conveyed with only a few further illustrations.
If, for example, degrees of formal
religiosity are associated with differences in birth order and gender,
religious participation must somehow reflect family socialization practices
(e.g. Nelson 1981). If class
differences are correlated with attendance at various types of artistic
events, culture is but one type of consumer good, its purchase a means to
reaffirm status (e.g. DiMaggio & Useem 1978).
If religious denominational affiliations are associated with
educational, occupational, and financial characteristics, variations in
behavior linked to denominational membership must be functions of class, not
realizations of distinct religious values (for citations to the voluminous
literature on this topic, see Stryker 1981: 212).
The careers of culture producers can
also be explained without reference to the cognitive aspects of their work.
Cultural diversity or uniformity, and
the prestige accorded different types of work, can be treated as functions of
the organization of financial patronage, its centralization or lack thereof
(e.g. P. Clark 1979; Gaston 1978). Even
cultural innovation may be explained as the product of simple careerism,
300
the desire to create opportunities for personal
advancement where none previously existed (a subordinate theme in the analysis
of Becker 1978; the crux of the argument in Ben-David & Collins 1966).
The organizational structure and cognitive
content of culture are interdependent, however, and much can be learned about
the content of cultural enterprises from analysis focused on their
organizational features. The
well-known relationship between the organizational and doctrinal
characteristics of groups classified along the sect-church continuum requires
no elaboration here; types of political parties can be similarly described
(e.g. Duverger 1954). The
organization of scientific work is inextricable from its content: Advances in
mathematics depend on unpredictable inspiration, and work groups in
mathematics are the smallest of any scientific field; on the other hand, the
nature of much research in experimental physics, and the high capital
investment in technology required to solve many of its problems, are linked to
the growth of enormous, hierarchically organized work groups, many of the
members of which perform routinized tasks (e.g. Hagstrom 1976).
Although the patrons of elite forms of
musical and visual arts are similar, the institutional loci of these arts
impede musical innovation and encourage innovation in the visual arts: Because
concerts are highly organized, expensive activities, symphony orchestras
cannot risk performing avante-garde music; in contrast, museums build their
collections piecemeal, and art objects are admired individually, so museums
can randomize the risks they take in purchasing novel works (Zolberg 1980).
Changes in the organization of cultural
production affect the content of culture. For
example, the limewood sculptors of Renaissance Germany belonged originally to
guilds including other types of craftsmen and were prevented by guild
regulations from exercising certain skills; their sculpture was highly
conventional. When the sculptors
achieved monopolistic control of sculpture production, the trend toward
development of individual artistic styles accelerated (Baxandall 1980:
111-27). Because the French
Impressionists’ social network was restricted to artists, art dealers, and art
critics, they focussed on innovative painting techniques, rejecting the
earlier artistic objective of conveying moral imperatives through narrative
painting. In contrast, their Russian
contemporaries, the Critical Realists, adhered to the aesthetic standard the
Impressionists repudiated and belonged to the occupationally diverse social
network of the politically committed Russian intelligentsia (Greenfeld 1981).
The changed organization of American
science after World War I, effected by the emergence of foundations as patrons
of research, led to the creation of a new role in the scientific community.
The “science manager,” a foundation
employee, appraised scientific trends and allocated funds according to a
hierarchy of research priorities, exaggerating such trends as the transfer of
models and techniques from the physical to the biological sciences and
encouraging the
301
growth of new disciplines (Kohler 1979).
The American publishing industry has
recently been reorganized. Once-independent
small firms, concerned to reconcile artistic and commercial values, have
become conglomerate subsidiaries. Consequently,
publishers’ lists are dominated by books with mass market appeal - nonfiction
works and popular novels suitable for sale to movie companies [which may share
conglomerate ties (Whiteside 1981)].
Worthy though the study of the relationship
between the organizational structure of and substantive content of culture may
be, it tells us nothing about the meaning of culture to its producers and
consumers. Can we understand how
culture reflects world views and affects perceptions merely from examination
of texts? In his classic Art and
Illusion, E. H. Gombrich demonstrates how our perceptions may be
conditioned, showing, for example, how Dürer’ s misrepresentation of the
rhinoceros, based on secondhand evidence and published in
1515, influenced
future representations of the beast for almost two centuries, even those drawn
from life (1961: 8 1-82). Such
analysis depends only on study of pictures, but it aids our understanding of
the way knowledge is acquired and sustained. Or,
it may be argued that the sociohistorical conditions that engender cultural
forms are so fundamental to the traditions of our civilization that we
understand them from our own experience. Inspecting
representations of the female nude in Western Art from the Middle Ages to the
present, J. Berger has argued that the consumer of such art is implicitly male
and that women are depicted so as to reinforce male notions that they are
fundamentally passive and seductive. Because
this view of women has been - and, alas, remains - so characteristic of our
culture, we can accept his interpretation of the social meaning of art on the
basis of everyday knowledge (1972: 45-64). Scholarship
of this sort supplements rather than supplants contextualist analysis,
however, for psychological propensities and sustained traditions are modified
by peculiar historical circumstances.
If texts are analyzed closely and seen against
the backgrounds of the traditions they sustain or overturn, little additional
sociohistorical evidence may be required to determine their sociological
significance. For example, from the
19th through the 20th centuries, the medical model of the body changed in
tandem with the changing doctor-patient relationship in American medicine.
Initially, disease was conceptualized
and the results of treatment interpreted in a fashion that made the
doctor-patient relationship relatively egalitarian; medical theories and
practice changed as doctors achieved superior professional status (
302
aesthetic standards promoted by government
patrons from the mid-18th century, artists intended their narrative pictures
to inspire behavior (T. J. Clark 1973: 78-99; Fried 1975).
If we analyze the avant-garde culture
of fin-de-siècle
One way to express the partisan character of
culture in the absence of exhaustive information about the characteristics of
society as a whole is to establish elective affinities between the world view
embodied in cultural constructs and the social interests of groups that
endorse them. For example, we can see
that in
A thorough analysis of the production and
reception of culture must treat both the organization of culture production
and the subjective meaning of culture. None
of the studies so far described in this section does this.
I now discuss four contextualist
exemplars, chosen because they deal with different
303
types of culture and illustrate different types
of contextualist analysis: Radway’s interpretation of the appeal of “romance”
fiction in the United States today (1984); MacKenzie’s study of the
development of statistics in Britain between 1865 and 1930 (1981); Fleck’s
description of the gradual emergence of the modern concept of syphilis from
the 15th to the 20th centuries (1979); and Baxandall’s study of the 15th
century Italian painting (1972).
Although some of its elements are as old as the
novel itself, the contemporary romance is a commodity manufactured by
commercial publishers. Standard market
research techniques determine the preferences of readers who constitute the
established market for romances: women between 20 and 40 who have had little,
if any, higher education; manuscripts are tailored to suit readers’
preferences, and books are distributed in supermarkets and drugstores where
their buyers routinely shop. Thus,
Radway’s investigation of the publishing industry confirms Whiteside’s
description [given above (1981)]. In
order to determine the cultural significance of the romance, however, she also
analyzed the books’ content and interviewed a network of romance readers.
The conventional romance portrays an
intense emotional relationship, leading to marriage, involving a successful
man, the embodiment of traditional masculinity, whose steely exterior masks a
capacity for nurturance and devotion, and a woman whose innocence and
dependence embody traditional femininity. Textual
analysis alone suggest that romance readers are persuaded to accept the
limitations of their lives and the inevitability of patriarchial domination.
Yet systematic analysis shows readers’
responses to the novels to be various. Certainly
some accept the glorification of conventional marriage by glamorous fictional
characters. For others, however,
reading romances is an act of protest against their lot.
Romances are utopian literature,
revealing the inadequacies of their readers’ lives; the act of reading such
books is one of protest against socially prescribed self-denial, an escape
from the unremitting demands of husbands and children (Radway 1984).
During the late 19th through the early 20th
century, statistics in Britain developed within a nested set of contexts: the
statistics community itself, affiliated directly or indirectly with academic
institutions and divided into identifiable groups or “schools”; the larger
academic community, within which the statisticians competed for jurisdiction
over a piece of intellectual terrain - the explanation of biological heredity;
and the general social context, within which alternative research programs
suited the objectives of different segments of the middle and upper classes.
Within each of these defined
populations, opinion was divided on a single issue - that practicability of
eugenic reform. The followers of
Pearson and Yule conducted an esoteric debate about the fundamental premises
of statistical techniques: Should they assume that every variable had a
bivariate normal distribution, as Pearson contended?
Their debate had practical
significance. Statistical findings
supported policy recom-
304
mendations - eugenic or any other - only if
population characteristics could be inferred from samples.
The biometricians who followed Pearson
used statistics to explain heredity in orthodox Darwinian fashion, in
opposition to the Mendelian geneticists, and their different explanations
corresponded to the middle-class model of social change in opposition to the
aristocratic model, as described above (Coleman 1970).
If evolution were unpredictable, as
the Mendelians contended, it could not be controlled by human intervention, as
the eugenicists expected. Why was
eugenics a quintessentially middle-class reform movement?
Implementation of its program would
allow the elevation of the new class of university-trained “brain workers” to
the positions of social managers, who would make society as a whole more
“efficient” through the application of value-neutral technical “expertise.”
Statistical techniques such as
Pearson’s correlation coefficient could be used to demonstrate the legitimacy
of their claims to power, for statistical evidence proved that ability was
transmitted biologically and that it was differentially distributed among
social classes. The existing pattern
of social stratification was thus for the most part justifiable, a natural
order, but aristocrats’ eminence was undeserved.
A just society was a meritocratic one,
governed by the biologically superior middle class (MacKenzie 1981).
The contextual explanation of the development of
the modern concept of syphilis is less detailed than the above examples, for
it deals with a centuries-long process. Yet
this process must be treated as a whole, for the Renaissance conception of
venereal disease as a “carnal scourge” manifested in “bad blood” was finally
translated into the Wasserman blood test, which distinguished one type of
venereal disease from all others. Popular
notions thus informed the research of scientific communities, which Fleck
terms “thought collectives” - groups defined both by theoretical orientations
and by commitment to the employment of specific instruments and techniques.
The “thought collective” is a diffuse
concept, for it comprehends groups ranging from a few individuals, who will
behave differently with one another than they would working with other
individuals, to organized scientific disciplines.
But by analyzing scientific thought in holistic terms, Fleck is able to
integrate the diverse factors that figure in scientific judgment: “tacit
knowledge” - procedural skills that can be learned only from personal contact
with a successful scientist, rather than from impersonal formulae; specialized
scientific as well as commonsensical standards that determine which scientific
problems will be selected and which solutions will be accepted; and the
“active” and “passive” elements in scientific discovery.
His distinction between the “active”
and “passive” components of research is especially valuable, for it qualifies
the relativism that characterizes much sociology of scientific knowledge, to
the discomfort of many (e.g. Horton 1979). Scientists
confront the phenomena they investigate in a culturally mediated fashion; the
solutions they achieve represent the interaction
305
between cultural factors and natural
regularities (Fleck 1979; and for an exhaustive survey of the history of
science literature susceptible to reanalysis in contextuahist terms, see
Shapin 1982).
Michael Baxandall’s analysis of Renaissance
Italian painting is contextualist explanation of the highest order.
Paintings were relatively standardized
commodities, produced in hierarchically organized workshops.
Contractual agreements between artists
and their merchant patrons specified the paintings’ content, and the patrons’
commercial identity and religious beliefs affected every aspect of painting.
Paintings were vehicles for
conspicuous consumption; patrons displayed their wealth by commissioning
elaborate compositions, lavish use of expensive pigments, and work
predominantly executed by masters rather than assistants.
The message of the paintings cannot be
understood fully without knowledge of the patrons’ commercial values and
skills: Narratively significant elements in the paintings were indicated by
then-expensive pigments, gold and ultramarine; and the commercial classes of
Renaissance Italy possessed the perceptual skills to recognize the
three-dimensional relationships conventionally portrayed in the paintings, as
we do not, for these skills were routine to their commercial life, standard
means of gauging volumes of goods with geometric techniques.
The attitudes of figures in the
paintings conveyed emotional significance through then-conventional body
language. And the religious significance of the paintings was obvious to those
who had detailed knowledge of the life of Christ, knew precisely what moment
in the narrative was being portrayed, and understood the religious emotion
this moment should evoke (Baxandall 1972).
Evidently, different cultural forms and
different historical periods cannot be analyzed contextually in identical
fashion. It is relatively simple to
provide a contextualist explanation for political thought, for its
relationship to current events is fairly straightforward.
Networks of producers of other sorts of culture - science, religion,
art forms - may be delimited, although the intensity of their interactions
with one another will vary. Extrapolating
from the content of these forms of objective culture to the larger society is
problematic, however, and the degree to which culture serves particular social
interests and mirrors commonsense notions will have to be determined for every
case. Sociohistorical circumstances
determine the degree to which cultural forms can be assumed to have
collectively appreciated meanings. The
producers of scientific culture necessarily agree on the meaning of their work
to a considerable extent, for their activity represents a search for
agreement. Nevertheless, the degree to
which art production represents a collective enterprise similar to science
varies with historical circumstances (e.g. Kuhn 1977).
In a relatively homogeneous culture,
such as that of Renaissance Italy, we may assume that the public’s
appreciation of art’s meaning is relatively homogeneous.
But the contemporary experience of
religion and various art forms is highly privatized.
306
Sociologists might despair of the practicability
of contextuahist analysis, given all of the above qualifications of
possibilities of generalization. They
should be consoled, however, by reflection on the accumulated results of the
positivist program in the sociology of knowledge.
What conclusions have we reached from
repeated efforts to test general propositions?
Is Protestantism associated with worldly achievement?
Do scientists adhere to universalist
norms? Our results are inconclusive;
they must be, because such questions make no sense unless they are posed
within particular sociohistorical contexts. In
paradoxical contrast, historical research is cumulative.
A study such as MacKenzie’s could not
have been written unless historians and sociologists had devoted considerable
attention to various elements that figure in his account - the development of
evolutionary theories, middle-class reform movements, and British social
stratification patterns. Persuasive
contextualist explanation is difficult, requiring extensive documentation that
a single scholar is rarely capable of providing; but its very difficulty makes
it a task worth attempting.
I would like to thank Mark B. Adams, Richard P.
Gillespie, and Robert Alun Jones for their help in the preparation of this
essay.
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