Search

This article focuses on the sociology of sociology. Persons working in the sociology of sociology are allegedly groping for some model or means by which to understand and measure changes in dominant sociological perspectives. In addition to attending primarily to the making and maintaining of meanings, rather than the functional integration of institutions, one approach tends more toward field work or participant-observation as a research style. To view a social theory from its own perspective can allegedly be an interesting index of sociological self-consciousness. It seems that any thoroughing reality constructionist would analyze the shifts in the perspectives that dominate sociology in terms of the process of conversion. It should be made clear at the outset that a distinction is made between the moral careers of good and bad converts. The distinction comes from various sources within establishment sociology but is also accepted by some of the more pure converts. A bad convert is a person who has taken on the new sociology and defined it as pleasurable, yet has failed first to undergo the necessary personal and intellectual struggle with the old sociology. In addition, the morality of the moral career of the bad convert is somewhat questionable.

The article comments on the views of sociologists on optimism and pessimism in sociological analysis. The labels "optimistic" and "pessimistic" are often applied to works of sociological analysis. Sociologist Parson's alleged optimism is held to be related to the domain assumption that the existing social system is, at the least, viable, given some reforms, and that this is a happy circumstance. There is a kind of pessimism that is based on the assumption that whether an existing social system endures or is replaced by a new one, the collective condition of mankind will be no better and, from the standpoint of both liberal and radical sociologists, may become even worse. Sociology was born and developed in an era of optimism. The early American sociologists, grand theorists all of them, dealt explicitly with the concept of progress, and in doing so most of them reflected various kinds of optimism. The optimism that fertilized the soil out of which sociology grew also nourished in literature and theology visions of unending human progress.