Stephen Crook

Change, Uncertainty and the Future of Sociology

[Extract] I am grateful for the opportunity to address themes that are central to the future of our discipline and association. That future appears clouded to many of us, especially the majority located in universities. There, our concerns are amplified by funding problems, shifts in student enrolment patterns towards ‘safe’ vocational courses, permanent revolution in organizational structures and the rest (I have been at James Cook University for three years and in each year the composition and structure of our Faculty have been different). Those matters richly deserve extended sociological attention, which I can’t give them here. But I do want to link them to other questions about the future of sociology. The theme of ‘sociology in crisis’ is as old as the discipline itself, but there are important differences between the challenges presently facing the discipline and the post-Parsonsian ‘crisis’ of US sociology in the 1960s. In that period, each side of the quarrels over ‘system vs conflict’, ‘structure vs action’ or ‘conservatism vs radicalism’ could share the comfortable assumption that their arguments mattered. It was important to settle the political, theoretical and methodological parameters of sociology because sociology mattered. The type of sociology that prevailed would influence the shape of society itself. We no longer enjoy that consolation. We may have come to terms with a post-Parsonsian pluralism, but we seem to face the more insidious threat of a leaching away of our salience. That point has a double sense. In the more obvious, the audiences for sociology among policy elites, publics and students appear to be shrinking. In the perhaps less obvious sense, the specifically ‘sociological’ character of what we do loses definition, shading into the concerns of various area studies.

Book Reviews : SOCIAL THEORY TODAY. Edited by Anthony Giddens and Jonathan Turner. Oxford, Polity Press in association with Basil Blackwell, 1988. 428 pp.

ditional idea of the work in its own right whilst mobilising post-structuralist theory leave themselves open for attack. However in his continued defence of empirical sociology in its functionalist formulation Frith is denying the possibilities which his journalism begins to canvas, in particular a reconstruction of the empirical as a part of the textual problematic in a way which subverts the metaphysical assumptions of empiricism whilst retaining a worth for empirical work.

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not always the assent, of scholars from a wide range of fields. In principle, at least, they are relevant to ’modernity versus postmodemity’ debates, to the claims of ’(new) realism’, ’rational choice’ analysis and ’structuration theory’, and to the analysis of specific and local cases of social change. Rather than attempt to summarise a very wide-ranging text this review will focus on its core argument.

Book Reviews : THEORIES OF SOCIAL CHANGE: A CRITICAL APPRAISAL Raymond Boudon, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1991, pp. 253, (paperback), £11.95 (UK)

Heller, Agnes (1984), Everyday Life, trans. by G.L. Campbell, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul. Heritage, John (1984), Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology, Cambridge, Polity Press. Garfinkel, Harold (1967), Studies in Ethnomethodology, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall. Giddens, Anthony (1984), The Constitution of Society, Cambridge, Polity Press. Giddens, Anthony (1987), Social Theory and Modern Sociology, Cambridge, Polity Press.

Book Reviews : Emancipation and Consciousness: Dogmatic and Dialectical Perspectives in the Early Marx Erica Sherover-Marcuse. Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1986. 211 pp.

’nation-state’. There are strong grounds for regarding the concept of the unitary society as highly problematic, both theoretically and empirically (Mann, 1986). One issue is that whereas capital typically operates within an international framework (enjoying the benefits of global financial systems), the working class typically assumes the character of a national class, immobilised within the dominant institutions ofcapital. In the present t

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him towards the end ofhis career. Pragmatism was attacked by reactionaries in the late 1920s at the University of Chicago. Internal politics combined with personal depression and stress to lead him to quit academia shortly before he died in April 1931. Joas’s biographical sketch serves to show social scientists that Mead was not merely the founder ofthe abstract orientation ofsymbolic interaction. He was an intensely practical man who put the individual at the centre of his attention, and a political activist who outlived the pragmatism of his day. Joas’s work is more an intellectual portrait than a biography. (We wait on Harold Orbach, for the latter.) So this book states the origins of Mead’s early philosophical writings and then presents two valuable essays on Mead’s philosophy of the mind and the origins ofsymbolic interactionism.