Search

This paper examines one aspect of early twentieth century debates over the meaning of scientific methodology and epistemology within the social sciences: the tendency of sociologists to invoke 'laboratory' as a multivalent concept and in reference to diverse institutions and sites of exploration. The aspiration to designate or create laboratories as spaces of sociological knowledge production was broadly unifying in early American sociology (1890-1930), even though there was no general agreement about what 'laboratory' meant, nor any explicit acknowledgment of that lack of consensus. The persistence of laboratory talk in sociology over decades reflects the power of 'laboratory' as a productively ambiguous, legitimizing ideal for sociologists aspiring to make their discipline rigorously scientific. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates three conflicting reconstructions of the historical relationship between personality and social psychology and addresses questions they raise regarding the subdisciplinary status of personality in the 1920s and the way in which the field gradually emerged as a separate area of psychology. Contesting claims that Floyd Allport first connected social psychology to a separate “branch” of personality psychology in the 1920s, I argue that he drew upon earlier work of psychologists and sociologists who treated personality as a central topic of social psychology. I compare Floyd Allport's views with those of Gordon Allport, who endeavored to establish personality as a separate subdiscipline. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on a symposium on the history of behavioral and social sciences arranged by the Program Committee of the International Society for the Behavioral and Social Sciences. Remarks on the issues addressed by the symposium panelists; Focus of the symposium on the growth of scholarship in the behavioral and social science field; Role of intellectual history in behavioral and social sciences.

This critical narrative history examines the development of sociology in the United States during what has come to be labeled as the Progressive Era, roughly the years from the 1890s to World War I. Despite the label, this era was defined as much by social problems associated with industrialization, urbanization, and immigration as by the growth of its cities and the wealth of its capitalists. We explore the roots of American sociology in the transition of protestant theology from Calvinism to its reformation in the social gospel, the simultaneous development of settlement houses, and the 'creation' of sociology as the science of reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By the middle of the 1970s, a Max Weber revival commenced in American sociology. Almost 75 percent of the articles on Weber in the American Journal of Sociology published in the past six decades appeared in the 1970s and 1980s. The Weber revival in American sociology is a phenomenon observed in leading literature. New translations and publications are frequently indicated reasons for the renewed interest in Weber. Without dismissing this factor, it is not an entirely satisfactory explanation. This article accounts for the Weber revival in a new way. Taking the American Journal of Sociology as a case study, I argue that the Weber revival was a case of circulating knowledge. Certain historically set issues led to a reorientation of Weber, which meant that knowledge about Weber was moved, extended, and transformed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In successive editions of the Handbook of Social Psychology (Lindzey, 1954), the focus of the history of the field shifted from the substantive ideas of nineteenth-century thinkers to the successful emergence of a psychological experimental social psychology in the twentieth. Countering this whiggish account, the dominant themes in the present issue involve attempts to portray two parallel paradigm shifts: from a “social” to an “asocial” social psychology, and from a broad-ranging theoretical-philosophical subject to a narrow experimental (psychological) science—changes initiated by Floyd Allport. But such a formulation may be called into question as another version of retrospective history—with inverted, anti-Whig valuations. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]