Presidential Address: Two Methods in Search of a Substance

In tune with the overall theme of these meetings, this Presidential Address is an exercise in the uses of controversy. I am perturbed about present developments in American sociology which seem to foster the growth of both narrow, routine activities, and of sect-like, esoteric ruminations. While on the surface these two trends are dissimilar, together they are an expression of crisis and fatigue within the discipline and its theoretical underpinnings. I shall eschew statesmanlike weighing of the pros and cons of the issues to be considered and shall attempt instead to express bluntly certain of my misgivings and alarms about these recent trends in our common enterprise; let the chips fall where they may. Building on other students of science, Diane Crane (1972) has argued that scientific disciplines typically go through various stages of growth accompanied by a series of changes in the characteristics of scientific knowledge and of the scientific community involved in the study of the area. In stage one, important discoveries provide models for future work and attract new enthusiastic scientists. In the next stage, a few highly productive scientists recruit and train students, set priorities for research and maintain informal contacts with one another. All this leads to rapid growth in both membership and publications. But in later stages the seminal ideas become exhausted and the original theories no longer seem sufficient. At this point a gradual decline in both membership and publication sets in, and those who remain develop increasingly narrow, specialized, though often methodologically highly refined, interests. Unless fresh theoretical leads are produced at this point to inspire new growth, the field gradually declines. Such stages of growth and decline are, of course, not limited to the sciences. In other spheres of culture, religion and the arts for example, similar phenomena have been observed (cf. Thomas O'Dea, 1966; Max Weber 1963; Alfred Kroeber, 1957). One need only think of the creative effervescence in the communities of Christ's immediate disciples and their direct successors in contrast to quotidian routines and ritualized devotions of the later stages in what had now become the Church of Rome. Or consider the art of Byzantine icon painting where, after the early creative period, the same motives, even techniques, were endlessly repeated so that it takes a specialist to distinguish between paintings executed not just decades but even centuries apart. In religion and the arts, however, innovation is not a necessary condition for flowering and appeal, but in the sciences, when no innovation is forthcoming rigor mortis is not far away. The findings of Crane and others in the sociology of science typically refer not to a whole branch of knowledge but only to sub-fields within such branches. It would therefore be wrong to apply these findings to sociology as a whole, composed as it is of a wide variety of sub-areas each with its own pattern and rhythm of growth. Yet permit me nevertheless roughly, and per*Presidential Address delivered at the Annual Meeting of The American Sociological Association in San Francisco, August, 1975. 691