The Sociology of Sociology: Some Lines of Inquiry in the Study of the Discipline

SOCIOLOGISTS HAVE long been aware of the existence of relations between sociocultural variables and the development of types of scientific knowledge. Until relatively recently, the systematic study of the importance of these relations for knowledge in the social sciences has been more or less overlooked. To be sure, there was speculation about the impact of social and cultural factors upon the works of intellectuals in early studies by Veblen (1918), Mannheim (1936), and Weber (translated, 1949), and in later works by Lynd (1939), Znaniecki (1940), Wilson (1942), and Myrdal (1959). Sociologists, however, have appeared especially reluctant to test empirically the relevance of many hypotheses for the development of knowledge in sociology suggested in these works. Studies regarding the function of the social organization of the discipline, climates of opinion, and the social backgrounds and personal values of researchers have tended to be unfashionable. The assumption has been that improvements in research techniques and the rigors of the scientific method rule out significant influences by such factors (Curtis and Petras, 1970a). Some research, however, has begun to evolve in this area, and our purpose in this article is to examine the nature and types of works that have been done. No major American or European scholar has yet specialized in research in the sociology of sociology (but see Waller, 1932; Page, 1963, 1965; Horowitz, 1964, 1967a, 1968; Friedrichs, 1970; Gouldner, 1970; Reynolds and Reynolds, 1970; Tiryakian, 1970), and only occasionally are students introduced, in graduate courses, to some of the scattered findings which suggest that this area would prove a rich one for sociological inquiry. There have, as yet, been no large scale studies of sociology as a research or teaching enterprise. Such studies certainly would be of practical and scientific value in the rapidly developing sociologies of the professions, education, and science. This relative neglect to study the activity of sociologists is, in itself, an interesting problem that requires study from a sociology of sociology perspective. Some changes are taking place. Recently, the number of studies has increased, and further evidence of increasing interest in this area has been reflected in the publications of several symposia which focus on "sociological self-analysis." The essays collected in such works as Sociology on Trial (Vidich and Stein, 1963), Sociologists at Work: Essays on the Craft of Social Research (Hammond, 1964; see also Bates, 1967), Reflections on Community Studies (Vidich, Bensman, and Stein, 1965), Politics, Ethics and Social Research (Sjoberg, 1967), Sociological Inquiry (1969), and The Sociology of Sociology (Reynolds and Reynolds, 1970)