Is 1980s Sociology in the Doldrums?

Recent feelings of malaise about the condition of sociology confuse the institutional level of the profession's material support with sociology's intellectual content. The "crisis" has been largely the result of a very rapid increase in the number of sociologists in the late 1960s and the 1970s, which has not only caused career problems but has brought increased specialization and mutual metatheoretical recriminations among contending specialties. Both the touting of new quantitative methodologies and the antipositivism of opposing camps tend to operate as ideologies for particular specialties and to obscure the substantive advances that are possible. A number of areas in which creative work is likely to go on in the next 10 years are sketched: historical change; emotion versus cognition; the micro-macro connection; an integrated theory of organizations, networks, and markets; and sex and gender.