Sociology at the Crossroads

...In 1970 social harmony, that great good of functional doctrine, seems more illusory than at any other stage in Talcott Parsons' lifetime...

...Even during the 1930s, Parsons was more disturbed by the danger of disruptive social change than by the sufferings of the unemployed and the dispossessed...

...simply convert it to your own purposes...

...But the operators of the Welfare State have a vested interest in the identification of lagging responses to social problems and politically-rewarding public interventions...

...The nutriment of money and data flowing from public agencies increasingly feeds social scientists, whose prosperity and prestige alike depend more and more upon smooth relations with bureaucrats and their political masters...

...Some of the more controversial later pages of Gouldner's volume present evidence that here, as in so many other areas, East and West are converging...

...The problem for the social scientists extends beyond the meeting or evasion of these demands...

...What distinguishes Gouldner's manifesto from less systematic complaints is his capacity to work toward radical conclusions within the tradition of his subject...

...One of the virtues of his impressive performance, finally, is the possibility that it will serve as a model for radical economists and radical political scientists struggling with issues and temptations very like those currently afflicting their sociological brethren...

...More exactly, sociologists of functional analysis deny the Marxist claim that some things are more important than others????in particular, that events and changes occurring in the material base are of greater significance than the esthetic, religious, political, or ideological transformations in the social superstructure...

...Gouldner speculates that from the attacks, and the responses to them, may come a superior brand of sociology...

...As a result, functionalism is losing its cutting edge, becoming something like sociology in general...

...There is no need to jettison the social thought of the last two centuries...

...Indeed, he means to leave as his message, particularly to radical young colleagues, the proposition that functionalism and Marxism contain liberating as well as repressive elements...

...Parsons' students, the students of Parsons' students, and their students unto the third and fourth generation, are well launched in the world, each one eager to differentiate himself from his teachers and masters...

...Who would begrudge the sociologist his elegant apparatus if educational inquiry improved schools, drug research decreased addiction, or criminological investigation reduced current rates of recidivism...

...A second strain the doctrine labors under brings us back to the Welfare State and its benign relations with the social scientists...

...His description of how radicals can stand functionalism on its head, however, is somewhat sketchy...

...Social scientists are too often content with their success in dredging up new information and their ingenuity in manipulating it...

...The fact is that while the functionalists' theories argue all is well, or at least improving, their own observations rub their noses into class and generational conflict, not to mention such embarrassing failures of functional adjustment as the 300 years which have not yet sufficed to erase the disparity between the general treatment of blacks and the nation's official values of justice and equality...

...Conflict and violence have compelled him and his followers to take another look at Marxism...

...Social science benefits above all social scientists...

...It follows that a very large number of pages must be devoted to the major living figure of American sociology, Harvard's Talcott Parsons...

...Its addicts are always disposed to conclude that the adaptive mechanisms of education, religious training, and family life have appropriate social effects and prepare men and women to fill the public stations to which they are called...

...For all I know, the City may even have got something for its money...

...The trouble, as Gouldner sees it, is in the different objectives of the involved parties...

...Hospitals serve the convenience of doctors and nurses...

...So what else is new...

...The pure milk of their doctrine is the sort of automatic adjustment and inevitable return to social equilibrium that old-fashioned classical economists used to teach their students...

...There are occasions when the task of analyzing Parsons is too much even for Gouldner, and he sinks into the swamp of verbiage that has defeated legions of would-be readers of the master...

...I have thus far approvingly summarized Gouldner's message, but must conclude with a word or two on its limitations and applications...

...What the bureaucrats want, on the other hand, is analysis of the effectiveness of past programs and, still more urgently, guidance on approaches likely to be productive in the future...

...Whoever attacks establishment sociology must cope with Parsons and his work????extending over nearly four decades and comprising such monuments as The Structure of Social Action and The Social System...

...American functionalists are beginning to incorporate class and conflict into their ruminations and, for their part, Soviet and Eastern sociologists are cautiously beginning to avail themselves of the insights of the functionalists...

...Look closely at Marx and Parsons and you will find the stuff of radical sociology...

...In fact, I and other malcontents have said this sort of thing before...

...One reason for functionalism's present vulnerability is related to its exaggerated success...

...For functionalists class conflict, income inequality and maldistribution of power have at best shadowy lives...

...In form, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology is a tendentious history of 19th- and 20th-century sociology...

...Nevertheless, Gouldner has generally written vigorous and occasionally eloquent prose, convincing any reasonably attentive reader that he cares about sociology as an enterprise...

...Whatever the case, as Gould-ner makes plain in Tlie Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (Basic Books, 528 pp., $12.50), New York City's subsidies to the experts are only a striking illustration of a general phenomenon: the ever-tightening alliance between establishment social science and establishment politics...

...So it is that although Gouldner hunts the bogey of functionalism, he pointedly refrains from the kill...

...Writers &\\frjting SOCIOLOGY AT THE CROSSROADS BY ROBERT LEKACHMAN o n the very day I finished Alvin Gouldner's assault upon establishment sociology as the enemy of the people, the New York Times revealed that last year New York City spent $75 million on the services of miscellaneous consultants, including a clutch of sociologists...

...Functionalism tends to ignore such inconvenient questions as who defines the roles to be filled and who sketches the map of social reality that imposes large duties upon some and confers substantial privileges upon others...

...Parson's functionalism can be reduced, as Gouldner actually reduces it, to the triviality that in society everything influences everything else...

...Functionalism disallows the importance of conflict, insists that society molds man and not the reverse, and devotes the bulk of its attention and aptitude to a loving analysis of the devices employed by a society to process human materials into contented players of useful roles...

...Fortunately, functionalism is now under siege...

...Gouldner believes that a major flaw of the doctrine is its inclination to applaud as "useful" any social arrangements, of whatever origin and however enforced, existing at a given moment...

...l n a strict theoretical sense functionalists really have no business acting as agents of social change...

...Comte and Saint-Simon, and the classicists, Weber, Durkheim and Pareto, as a prelude to the object of his analytical interests: the confrontation between the two most important contemporary sociological schools, American functionalism and Marxist social analysis...

...Schools are run in the interest of teachers and administrators...

...There would be no particular reason to complain, though, if the social scientists occasionally alleviated a social problem...

...Happily, after a page or two he emerges into the limpid waters of English prose...

...Gouldner has his irritating turns of phrase: Locutions like "in fine," "domain assumptions," and the noun "resonance" or the verb "resonate" pop up on practically every page????or so it comes to seem...

...In short, functionalism is conservative...

...Gouldner uses the founders...

...The sociology Gouldner aims for, a truly revolutionary discipline, will distrust its clients, bite the hand that feeds it, free itself from elitist pretensions to a dispassionate ability to examine the motives of everybody else but its own, and turn sociologists into complete human beings...

...The bureaucrats and the politicians nag the social scientists to diagnose group pathologies and prescribe efficacious remedies...

...Gouldner is most convincing when he demolishes the sociology of optimism...

...I gather that the sequel to this volume will fill in the necessary details...