1995 - The Cultural and Social Incorporation of Sociological Knowledge (w. Alan Wolfe)

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The Cultural and Social Incorporation of Sociological KnowledgeAuthor(s): Robert K. Merton and Alan WolfeSource: The American Sociologist, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Fall, 1995), pp. 15-39Published by: Springer

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The Cultural and Social

Incorporation

of

Sociological

Knowledge

Robert K.

Merton

and

Alan Wolfe

Any

evaluation of

sociology

as a

discipline

ought

to

focus

not

only

on

the

way

sociology

is

produced,

but also

on

how

it

is

consumed.

In

this

article,

we

examine

the

degree

to

which

sociological

concepts

have been

incorporated

into

the

vernacular of

American

society,

the

impact

of

sociological

techniques

and

methods

on

politics

and

society,

and

the

relationship

between

sociology

and

public policy.

While

sociologists

often

point

to

the

problems

caused

by

a

certain

alienation from

the

general

culture?for

example

the notion

that

sociology

is

written in

an

obtuse

language

that the

public

cannot

compre

hend?we

point

to

the

problems

that

develop

when

sociology

is

too

readily

incorporated

into American culture and

society.

The

danger

is

that

the

more

popular

sociology

is,

the less

likely

it

will

be

to

maintain

the

sharp

intellectual

edge

that

made

its

incorporation

possible

in

the

first

place.

Introduction

One of the

least understood

stages

in the

development

of

a

science is

the

process

by

which

scientific

findings,

concepts,

and

ways

of

thinking

take

leave

from the scientists

who

originate

them

and

enter

the

general

culture and

the

larger

society.

This

process,

which

occurs

in

any

science,

is

of

particular

con

cern

to

sociologists.

The

terms

and

concepts

of

sociology through

a

process

that

has

been

described

as

cultural

incorporation

can

become

diffused

throughout

everyday language?often,

in

the

process,

losing

their

origins

in

the

academic

discipline

that

gave

them

birth.

Moreover,

sociological

knowledge

and

tech

nique

can

be

subject

to

the

parallel

process

of

social

incorporation,

the

direct

or

indirect

(and

unwitting)

reliance

on

the

findings

and

methods

of

sociology

by

social

institutions and

aspects

of the

social

structure,

both

macro

and

micro.

Robert

K.

Merton

is

University

Professor

Emeritus

at

Columbia

University

and

Foundation

Scholar of

the

Russell

Sage

Foundation.

Merton

and

Wolfe

15







If the social

and

cultural

incorporation

of

a

science is

part

of what

that

sci

ence

is,

then

any

effort

to

assess

the

state

of

sociology

as

a

science

should deal

with

the

way

sociology

has been received

in American

culture. One

of the

most

interesting aspects

of this

subject

is

that

the

findings

of

science,

which

are

presumably universal, are incorporated into cultures that, by definition, are

particular;

since,

in

studying

scientific

incorporation,

we

must

limit

ourselves

to

a

particular

culture,

we

have

limited ourselves

to

our

own.

As

sociologists

evalu

ate

their

discipline,

most

of

them will

quite

properly

focus?to

borrow

terms

from

a

sister

discipline?on

the

supply

side

of

the

equation:

how

new

knowl

edge

is

produced.

Our

concern

here

is

with the

demand side: how

social knowl

edge

is consumed. The

sociology

of

knowledge

is

often

better

appreciated

than

the

knowledge

of

sociology.

We

want

to

chart

some

of the

ways

in

which

work

that

originates

as

academic

sociology

becomes

part

of the culture

and

society

that academic

sociologists

themselves

study.

In

so

doing,

we

may

well

discover

that the

incorporation

of

sociology

into the culture and

society

is more of a

mixed

blessing

than

many

sociologists might

prefer.

The

Language

of

Sociology

One

place

to

begin

is

with the

use

of

sociological

words.

Every sociologist

knows Weber's

highly

technical

term

charisma has become

a

favorite

journal

istic

expression

for

those

covering

politics

(as

well

as

sports

and

popular

mu

sic);

how

many

of

us

also

know

that CHARISMA is

also the

name

of

a

software

program?or

the

name

of

a

woman's

clothing

store

in

Brooklyn?

(Another

store

which

closed,

this

one

in

Manhattan,

was

called

Gemeinschaft

[Wrong

1990:24]).

It is

common

to

find the

term

thick

description

in

many

areas

of

inquiry

besides

philosophy

and

anthropology, especially literary

criticism;

but

it

is

also the

name

of

an

experimental

theater

company

in

San

Francisco. A

popular

book

on

self

help

movements

was

called

Fm

Dysfunctional/You're

Dysfunctional,

even

though

it

contorted

to

some

degree

the

proper sociological

meaning

of

dysfunction,

while

a

journalist

can

write

an

article titled "We Have

Met

the

Anomie and

He

Is Us."

Clearly

one

way

in

which

we

can

begin

to

get

a

grasp

on

the

degree

to

which

sociological

terms

are

incorporated

into

the

vernacular

is

by

examining

their

use

in

the

popular

media.

The

mere

fact that

terms

used

by

sociologists

are

also used

by

journalists

does

not

establish

direction;

terms

move

from the

general

culture back

to

sociology

just

as

they

move

from

sociology

to

the

general

culture.

Still,

there

is

something

to

be

gained

by

examining

which

sociological

expressions

are

prevalent

in

popular

usage

and which

are

not.

One

way

to

approach

this

problem

is

to

explore,

using

on-line

data

bases

such

as

Nexis/Lexis,

the

frequency

of

citation

for

common

sociological

expressions

and

terms.

This

is,

of

course,

a

rough

measure,

since

Nexis/Lexis,

however

helpful

a

tool for

journalists

and

lawyers,

is

not

a

precise

measuring

instrument

that

can

be

relied

on

by

sociologists.

Nevertheless,

the

availability of such information does make possible some rough estimates of the

degree

to

which

sociological

concepts

appear

in the

mass

media.

16

The American

Sociologist/Fall

1995







Table

1

presents

the

frequency

of selected

sociological

(and

related

social

science)

terms

as

cited

in

major

newspapers

in

the

United States

between

Janu

ary

1991

and

June

1993.1

A

number of observations

can

be

made from

this

information.

For

one

thing,

it

appears

that the

frequency

with

which

sociologi

cal terms enter the general culture does not correlate with the frequency with

which

they

are

used

by

sociologists.

While the

Parsonian

paradigm

has

had

enormous

impact

within

the

field,

Parsons's less

jargonistic

concepts,

such

as

sick

role,

do

not

register

in

the

general

culture.

Max Weber

gave

contemporary

America

a

way

of

discussing

charisma

and

(as

did

Alfred

Adler)

lifestyle,

but

Americans

are

spectacularly

uninterested

in

formal

rationality.

Success

in

entering

the

general

culture is

usually

associated with

those

terms

that

touch

on

what

has

been called the

"triumph

of

the

therapeutic"

(Rieff

1966).

The

popularity

of the

term

dysfunctional,

in

a

social

sense,

is

one ex

ample;

as we

shall

see

below,

the

use

of

this

term

has

skyrocketed

in

the

past

few

years.

Peer

group,

subculture,

and

lifestyle

fit this

general

characterization,

for

they

refer

to

the worlds of

everyday

life

with others. Yet

although sociologi

cal

terms

which

are

close

to

psychology

are

more

likely

to

be

popular

in

the

general

culture,

it

would

not

be

correct

to

conclude

that

microsociological

concepts

are

more

frequently

cited

than

macro

ones.

There

is

nothing

especially

complex

about

the

ideas of

Mead

and

Cooley,

yet

neither

generalized

other

nor

looking

glass

self

are

widely

cited.

Terms

associated

with

Garfinkel

and

ethnomethodology

are

rarely

cited

at

all.

Even

more

surprising, considering

the

novelistic

quality

of

his

writings,

many

of

Erving

Goffman's

most

important

concepts?such

as

total

institution,

impression management,

or

interaction

ritual?are

not

common

in

the

general

culture.

There

are,

in

addition,

some

obvious

political

aspects

to

the

way

sociology

enters

the

general

culture.

Wrong

(1990)

has

argued

that

sociology

enters

the

general

culture

as

a

debunker of

popular

beliefs,

and

this

is

clearly

confirmed

by

our

investigation.

Terms

which

emphasize

less

than

positive aspects

of

American

life tend

to

be

among

the

most

frequently

cited

in

the

popular

press,

such

as

alienation,

deviance, anomie,

although,

itmust

be

pointed

out,

upward

mobil

ity

is

far

more

in

use

in

the

general

culture than

downward

mobility.

(The

exception

to

this

point

may

well be

words that

have

a

Marxist

origin,

such

as

false consciousness and labor aristocracy, which are closer to the bottom of

the

list.)

Journalists

do

not,

in

general,

look

to

sociology

to

accentuate

the

positive

aspects

of

American

society;

sociology

is

more

likely

to

be

incorporated

into

the

general

culture

when Americans

perceive

that culture

as

problematic

or

flawed.

A

political

element

enters

into

our

discussion

as

an

additional

form;

sociologi

cal

expressions,

like

the

realities

to

which

they point,

are

hotly

contested.

Gans

(1990)

has

argued

that

sociologists

should

not

use

the

term

underclass

because

it carries

the

implication

of

blaming

those

to

whom

it

is

applied

for their

con

dition.

Whether

or

not

sociologists

use

the

term,2

however,

journalists

clearly

do, for the term was one of themost widely cited of all sociological expressions,

as

is

the

term

culture

of

poverty,

which

is

also

disliked for

its

political

implica

Merton

and Wolfe

17







TABLE

1

Frequency

of

Selected

Sociological

Terms

in the

Popular

Press

Very

Strongly Incorporated

Terms

_Cover

50OO

citations)

Lifestyle

Role Model

Standard

of

Living

Dysfunctional

106607

27054

19852

6260

Strongly

Incorporated

Terms

(1000^5000

citations)

Underclass

Demographic (y)

Peer

Group

Subculture

Division of Labor

Altruism

White

Collar

Crime

Upward

mobility

Self-fulfilling

rophecy

Conspicuous consumption

Socialization

3831

3433

2763

2303

2192

2179

2104

1417

1395

1254

1199

Moderately

Incorporated

Terms

Youth culture

Belief

System

Meritocracy

Gender role

Life

course

Counter

culture

Folkways

Social

mobility

903

767

649

586

582

517

488

Lifecycle

Glass

ceiling

Double

bind

Status

Symbol

Achieved

Status

Anomie

Class

consciousness

Reverse discrimination

White collar crime

Ethnocentrism

Downward

mobility

Leisure

class

Other-directed

Culture

of

poverty

Mass

societv

Reference

group

Primary

group

Inner-directed

Social

stratification

359

346

331

325

268

263

257

231

224

218

215

192

169

161

159

150

133

123

114

105

Weakly

Incorporated

Terms

(10^

citations)

Meritocracy

Unanticipated

consequences

Civil

religion

False

consciousness

End

of

ideology

Upward mobility

Lumpenproletariat

Collective behavior

Authoritatian

ersonality

Intermediate

roup

Cultural

lag

Gemeinschaft

Relative

deprivation

Collective Conscience

Hidden

currinculum

Civilizing

process

Postindustrial

ociety

Sick role

Gessellschaft

Cooptation

Generalized other

Thick

description

Sexual division

of

labor

Unanticipated

consequences

Labor

aristocracy

Unanticipated

consequences

85

61

60

56

51

48

38

34

29

29

27

25

21

21

19

17

16

12

10

?;

Xnfi

o^tatedTerins

; <0-9 itations)

Gift

relationship

Anomie

Definition of the situation

Authoritarian

personality

Role distance

Structuration

Ascribed

status

Interaction itual

Total institution

Impression

management

Symbolic

interaction

Legitimation

crisis

Looking glass

self

Structural-functionalism

Organic solidarity

Habitus

Working

class authoritarianism

Formal rationality

Abstracted

empiricism

Cooling-out

process

Instrumental

ationality

Indexical

expression

Mechanical

solidarity

Moral

entrepreneurs

NOTE:

Although

all

these

terms

are

used

by

sociologists,

our

method does

not

allow

us

to

observe

whether

they

were

cited

in

a

sociological

context.

Source:

Lexis/Nexis,

January

1,

1991

to

June

30,

1993.

18

The

American

Sociologist/Fall

1995







tion. On

the

other

hand,

the

popularity

of

a

term

such

as

gender

role,

which

is

more

jargonistic

than

"sex,"

indicates

that

those who

write

in

the

mass

media

have

clearly

paid

attention to

the feminist

revolution

in America. The

rise

and

fall

of

sociological

terms in

the

general

culture

is

evidently

related

to

the

rise

and fall of social movements and ideologies.

Different

terms

are

incorporated

in

different

ways.

Some

can

be

described

as

"niche"

terms;

they

achieve

a

respectable

but

not

spectacularly

high

visibility

in

the

general

culture

and

tend

to

stay

there.

(Mass

society,

social

stratification,

and end

of ideology

are

examples).

Moreover these

terms

achieve

widespread

use

among

specialists

in

a

particular

field,

even

if

they

do

not

become

part

of

the

common

discourse

outside

that

field;

writers

on

religion

nearly

always

use

Robert

Bellah's

term

civil

religion,

even

if

writers

on

politics

may

not

be familiar

with

the

expression.

Some

terms

which

are

put

forward

with

the

apparent

expectation

that

they

will enter the general culture because they are catchy and have general appeal

nevertheless

do

not.

Cooling-out

process

is

one

such

term

that

was

widely

used

by

sociologists;

moreover,

it

applies

to

a

real

phenomenon

with

wide

popular

applicability.

Nonetheless,

the term

has

rarely appeared

in

the

mass

media.

Other

such

terms

would

include

working-class

authoritarianism

and

moral

entrepre

neurs,

both of which

one

might expect

to

be

widely

cited,

given

their

relevance

to

newsworthy

events,

but

are

not.

In

general,

the

past

few

years

have

apparently

not

seen

any

decrease

in

the

extent

to

which

sociological

terms

have

been

incorporated

into the

general

culture.

Although

the recent

availability

of

on-line

technology

makes it

impos

sible to search backwards in time for any length of time, we were able to

account

for

changes

in

the

incorporation

of

sociological

terms

since

1986

by

examining

selected

newspapers.3

We found

evidence

that

many

sociological

terms

that

enter

the

language

with some

frequency

either

maintained

or

increased in

usage

during

the

period

when

data

are

available

to

examine

this

trend

(see

Table

2).

This

seems

especially

true

of

terms

that

can

be used

in the context

of

self

help

or

group process,

such

as

dysfunctional

or

role

model,

both of

which

entered

the

general

culture

with

increased

frequency

during

this

period.

Less

rapidly,

but

still

notably,

other

terms?such

as

anomie

or

norm?also

increased

in

usage.

There appears to be something like a natural history of the

incorporation

of

sociological

terms.

It

clearly

takes

some

time

before

any

sociological

expression

enters

the

general

culture;

relatively

recent

terms?habitus,

dependency,

legiti

mation

crisis?will

have

to

rattle

about

in

the

academy

for

some

time

before,

if

ever,

they

enter

the

general

culture.

Other

terms

which

continue

to

have their

uses

among

sociologists,

such

as

relative

deprivation,

never

seem

to

enter

the

general

culture.

At

the

same

time,

far

older

terms,

such

as

conspicuous

con

sumption,

civil

religion

ox

folkways,

are

unlikely

to

be

displaced

for

some

time;

once

a

term

enters

the

culture,

it tends

to

stay,

even

well

beyond

its

frequent

use

among

professional sociologists,

even

if,

as

Table

2

shows,

such

terms

reach

a steady-state. However, not all terms which achieve a certain popularity will

remain

in

the culture

forever.

White-collar

crime

and

modernization

are

terms

Merton

and

Wolfe

19







Term

TABLE

2

Incorporation

of

Sociological

Terms

Four

American

Newspapers*

1985-1996

1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992

Anomie

Charisma

Dysfunctional

Norm

Peer

group

Role model

Self-fulfilling

Prophecy

Underclass

Conspicuous

Consumption

Subculture

Folkways

Ethnocentrism

White-Collar

crime

Relative

Deprivation

Civil

religion

25

371

14

1554

72

650

73

151

58

116

41

17

165

1

6

38

409

18

1484

71

845

87

207

68

141

60

8

113

0

8

39

451

44

1538

82

906

82

242

78

164

57

9

150

1

4

48

613

64

1749

59

1099

97

359

71

206

57

11

145

3

12

40

396

163

1978

76

1375

82

336

109

234

56

23

209

2

8

46

490

242

2129

86

1536

99

360

106

211

58

24

184

0

7

31

476

410

2025

72

1393

85

274

77

252

65

25

116

1

3

56

490

550

1879

78

1648

93

341

94

250

41

18

102

1

7

*New

York

Times,

Washington

Post,

Los

Angeles

Times,

Chicago

Sun-Times.

less likely to be cited now than they were a decade ago, even though the

phenomena

to

which

they

refer

may

be

as

ubiquitous

as ever.

Finally,

it is

worth

comparing

the

incorporation

of

sociological

terms

with

the

way

in

which

the

terms

of other

disciplines

are

incorporated

into

American

culture. The

most

obvious

point

of

comparison

is

economics,

for,

like

sociology,

this

is

a

social

science

that deals

with

matters

close

to

the

way

people

lead

their

everyday

lives.

Economists,

unlike

sociologists,

are

fairly

self-conscious

about

the

unity

of

their

discipline;

their work tends

to

group

itself

into

recognizable

schools

with

fairly

common

patterns

of citation

(Crane

and

Small

1992).

Al

though

economics

is

a

far

more

technical

discipline

than

sociology,

it too

has

a

rhetorical dimension (McCloskey 1985). Furthermore, no matter how abstract

economic

theory

can

be,

it

is

taken

to

have

more

direct

policy

implications

than

20

The American

Sociologist/Fall

1995







sociology;

there

is

no

Council

of

Sociological

Advisors

in

Washington.

For all these

reasons,

it

might

be

thought

that

economics,

of all the social

science

disciplines,

would

be

fairly

well

incorporated

into

the

general

culture of

American

life.

Indeed

it

is,

as

Table

3

shows,

but

there

is

no

evidence that

economic terms have been incorporated into general usage farmore than socio

logical

terms;

if

anything,

the

two

disciplines

seem

rather

parallel.4

Both

disci

plines

have

provided

terms

that

are

widely

used;

if

lifestyle

leads

the list in

sociology,5

supply

and demand

leads the list

in economics.

Both

disciplines

also

have

analogous

terms

with

a

particular

niche

in

the

general

culture;

elasticity

of

demand

is

cited

in

the

general

culture

at

roughly

the

same

rate

as

social

strati

fication.

As is the

case

with

sociological

terms

such

as

conspicuous

consump

tion,

much older

terms?the law

of

diminishing

returns,

the

invisible

hand?

are more

frequently

cited than

the

new

and innovative

terms

that

grab

the

attention

of

professional

economists,

such

as

satisficing

or

indifference

curve.

As

McCloskey's analysis

suggests,

terms that have

metaphorical

resonance,

such

as

crowding

out

or

wage

drift,

are more

likely

to

enter

the

general

culture

than

those

that sound

more

jargonistic. Newspapers

have their

business

sections,

which,

of

course,

use

terminology

from

economics,

but

they

also

have

their

lifestyle

sections,

which

use

terminology

from

sociology.

Moreover,

just

as

certain

sociological

terms

that

one

might

have

expected

to

enter

the

general

culture did

not,

the

same

is

true

for

some

economic

terms.

Marginal

utility

is

a

concept

that lies

at

the heart of

modern

economics;

it is

cited

no more

often than

unanticipated

consequences.

Terms

as common as

invisible

hand

or

the law

of diminishing

returns

were

cited far less

frequently

than the

concept

of

self-fulfilling

prophecy.

A

large

number of

terms

used

by

economists

in

their

professional life?price

inelasticity

and

marginal

propen

sity

to

save?were not

widely

incorporated

into the

vernacular,

perhaps

be

cause

of their technical character. The

gap

between

the

discipline

of economics

and

the

way

economic

terms

are

used

in

the

popular

media

is

actually

rather

wide.

Journalists

simply

do

not

talk

about the Coase

theorem,

let alone

non

Chicago

School

terms

such

as

backward-bending supply

curves

and

preference

schedules.

To

summarize,

it

seems

that

sociology

does

enter

into the

culture in

which

the science is practiced, if the incorporation of terms from the discipline into

general

usage

can

be

used

as

one measure

of such influence.

This,

as we

have

said,

is

true

of

any

science,

including

some

of

the natural

sciences;

Darwinian

conceptions

of evolution and

survival have been used

and

misused

to account

for

a

wide

variety

of

seemingly

non-natural

phenomena.

However,

sociology

faces

a

particularly

heightened

form of

what

might

be called "the

paradox

of

success."

Sociologists

know

that their field

is

more

likely

to

gain

public

recog

nition

if

the

field

develops

a

reputation

as

useful,

and

entry

into

the

vernacular

is

often

taken

at

least

as a

sign

of relevance.

Faced with

a

choice

between

a

general

culture

that is

impervious

to

the

concepts

of

sociology,

and

one

that

is

willing to adopt sociological terms as part of its language, there would seem to

be

advantages

to

the latter.

Merton and Wolfe

21







TABLE

3

Frequency

of

Selected

Economic Terms

Y?ry.&f3&te^

^<

^

Supply

and demand

126902

Balance

of

payments

21396

-Steeply

Incorporate

Price

system

1465

Comparative

advantage

1312

??^Wl

f?in?BSii^li

Supply

side

economics

946

Trade

regime

935

Invisible hand

823

Externality

739

Crowding

out

691

Stagflation

630

Excess Demand

538

Disequilibrium

399

Law of

diminishing

returns

227

Fiscal

drag

220

Effective

demand

182

Welfare

economics

119

Random

walk

117

Elasticity

of

demand

108

Surplus

value

104

^

N-

Weaklytneorporafe?

Veranar

Marginal utility 62

Countervailing

power

60

Allocative

efficiency

50

Cost

push

inflation

48

Wage

drift

36

Clearing

the

market

33

Revealed

preferences

25

Shadow

prices

23

Demand

pull

inflation

17

Disutility

17

Liquidity

preference

14

Price

inelasticity

10

Rational expectations theory 10

Mniii|jM

Satisficing

Indifference

curve

Fiscal

illusion

Marginal propensity

to

save

Backward

bending supply

curve

Preference

schedule

Average

propensity

to

consume

Age-earnings profile

Coase

theorem

Source:

Lexis/Nexis,

January

1,

1991

to

June

30,

1993.

22

The

American

Sociologist/Fall

1995







Yet there

are

disadvantages

as

well.

As

has been

noted,

"many

sociological

words become

modish,

boringly

reiterated with

successive

diminution of

mean

ing."

(Merton

1982:101).

As

terms

in the vernacular take

on a

life of their

own,

their

meaning

can

wander

far from

any

original sociological

purpose

associated

with the development of such terms. One result is to denude important socio

logical

concepts

of

their

precision

and scientific value?the

inevitable

conse

quence

of

widespread popularity.

This,

in

turn,

runs

the

risk

of

undermining

public

support

for the

discipline

in

direct

relationship

to

the

discipline's public

usefulness.

For

it

is

possible

that the

vagueness

and

imprecision

of

an

incorpo

rated

term

can

be

associated

with

the

discipline

that

gave

the

term

life,

even

if

it

was

the

culture,

and

not

the

discipline,

that

altered the

terms

meaning.

Any

number

of

sociological

terms

can

be used

to

illustrate

the

paradox

of

success.

There

are

few other

sociological

expressions

that

have

been

stripped

of

their

precise

conceptual

meaning

more

than

charisma,

which

is

now

routinely

applied

to

people

who

appear

in the

public

consciousness with

any

frequency

at

all,

irrespective

of what

qualities

bring

them

to

public

attention.

(Cars,

and

other

machines,

also,

we

are

being

told,

possess

this

quality.)

But

charisma

is

not

alone

in

this

regard.

Role model has

surely

come

to

rival

charisma

in its

wanderings

from

original

meaning,

as

professional

basketball

players

insist

on

television

that

they

are

not

one.6

Max

Weber's

Lebensstil

signified

fairly

pre

cisely

some

of the cultural attributes associated

with social

class,

and

even

when

it

was

transformed

into

lifestyle

in

the

early

1970s,

it

retained,

as

Robert Erwin

suggests,

"rich

possibilities,

a

broad

view

of human

development

and the life

course,

an

order

that fulfilled

rather

than

constricted."

"Unfortunately,"

he

con

tinues,

"journalists,

salesmen,

and

pop

psychologists

trivialized

it

even more

rapidly

than usual"

(Erwin

1994:

109).

Indeed,

a

glance

through

the

most

fre

quently

incorporated

terms

we

list

in

Table

1

suggests

that

most

of

them,

in

achieving

their

popularity,

have lost much

or

all of

their

original meaning

and

often

acquired

new

meaning.

Sociology

has

often

been mocked

for

its

jargon

(Darden

1992).

In

this

con

text,

we

point

by

contrast

to

the

opposite,

but

in

many

ways

more

serious,

problem:

the risk of

coining

terms

for

concepts

that,

far

from

jargonistic,

reso

nate

nicely

with

the

larger

culture. Yet if

this

problem

differs

from

the

problem

of jargon, it has similar consequences. Public distrust of social science increases

when

people

believe

that

it

is

introducing

new

words

or

complex

formulations

for

commonplace

knowledge.

The

public

comes

to

ask

why

social science is

needed

at

all,

since

it

and the

general

culture

share the

same

language

and

presumably,

therefore,

the

same

knowledge.

The

incorporation

of

sociological

terms

into

the

general

culture

becomes

a

mixed

blessing.

When the

cycle

is

completed?when

sociologists

have coined

terms

to

express

new

concepts

or

new

observations of social

reality,

only

to

have these

transformed

into

popular

but

misleading

expressions, they

may

gain

the satisfaction of

seeing

their

new

concepts

in

lights;

but

they

lose the

pleasure

that

comes

from

having

introduced

away of seeing the social reality that the culture, inward looking as it is, cannot

see.

Merton

and Wolfe

23







Sociological

Techniques

It is

not

just

through sociological

terminology

that

the

discipline

is

incorpo

rated

into

larger

realities.

The

techniques

of

obtaining

social

knowledge

or so

cial information have also reached out beyond the discipline of sociology; more

over,

they

have

been

incorporated

not

only

into the

culture but into

the

larger

society

as

well.

Americans

find

themselves surrounded

by

surveys,

polls,

demo

graphic

analyses,

focus

groups,

and

even,

on

occasion,

ethnographic

methods.

All

of them have

been

widely

and often

indiscriminately

used

to

explain

what

kind of

a

society

we

are

and

how

we

have

changed.

The

history

of

sociology

has been

as

much

a

search after

appropriate

methods

as

it

has

been

a

search

for

appropriate

concepts

and

findings.

The

development

of

sociology

and the

use

of

techniques

such

as

the

social

survey?used generally

to

uncover

social

conditions in

specific

urban

areas?are

closely

linked;

be

tween

1896

and 1921 in the United

Kingdom,

there were fewer than ten

surveys

conducted

annually,

but from

the

1920s

until the Great

Depression,

the

number

increased

to

more

than

forty.

In

the

United

States,

the

"golden age"

of the social

survey

was

the

years

before and after World War

I

(Bulmer, Bales,

and

Sklar

1991:

18, 29).

In

short,

both countries

experienced

an

increased

use

of

this

technique.

By

the

year

1933, however,

when Recent

Social

Trends

was

pub

lished?until

that

time

the

most

comprehensive

effort

ever

undertaken

in

the

United States

to

apply

social

knowledge

to

contemporary

conditions?no

men

tion of these

earlier local

surveys

was

made

(Bulmer

1991:

290).

Elites wanted

information about

national,

not

local, conditions;

and academic

sociologists

them

selves turned

away,

for

a

time,

from the social

survey

as

insufficiently

scientific.

Public

opinion

polling

became the

technique

of

choice

in

the

vacuum

created

by

the

decline

of

the social

survey.

As Converse

(1987)

stresses,

survey

research,

especially

the election

polls

taken

by

the

Survey

Research

Center

of the

Univer

sity

of

Michigan,

took

its

name

from the social

survey;

but

its

inspiration

came

from

professional

social

scientists

who understood

the

need for

knowledge

about

public

attitudes

on

the

part

of

governmental

and

commercial elites.

It

is

survey

research

that,

more

than

any

other

sociological

technique,

has been

incorpo

rated

into the

organizations

and

institutions

of American

life. The

election

sur

veys of the University of Michigan's Survey Research Center and the General

Social

Survey

of

the National

Opinion

Research

Center

at

the

University

of

Chicago

are

the

best

known,

but

they

have

been

supplemented by

a

wide

variety

of

others.

Nor

are

regular

surveys

confined

to

sociology:

the

Survey

of Consumer

Confidence,

begun

systematically

in

1954,

has

increased

in

frequency

from

three

times

a

year

in

the

1950s,

to

quarterly

in

the

1970s,

to

monthly

at

the

present

time?constituting

one

of the

most

durable records

we

have of

people's

atti

tudes

and behavior

(Curtin

1982).

There is

probably

no

better

example

of the

process

by

which

a

sociological

technique

has

become

an

important

part

of the

way

American

society

functions than this

regularly reported

survey;

its

conclu

sions are not only used to measure consumer confidence, they are also among

the

official

"economic

indicators"

of

impending

states

of the

economy.

24

The American

Sociologist/Fall

1995







Survey

research

techniques

were

incorporated

into

American

society

after

they

first

expanded

in

usage

within

the

social sciences.

The

results of

surveys

are

cited

in

more

and

more

articles

appearing

in

social science

publications.

Since

our

concern

in

this

paper

is

with the demand for

sociological

knowledge

and not the supply, it is not the number of surveys undertaken by social scien

tists alone that

is

of

interest,

but

rather the

frequency

with

which

they

are

used

by

others.

Data

from the National

Opinion

Research

Center

are

helpful

in

this

regard,

since

they

track

the

number

of articles

and

reports

that make

use

of

NORC

surveys.

Although

averages

can

be

distorting

when

annual

preferences

differ

dramatically,

Figure

1

demonstrates

an

increase in such

citations since

the

1940s,

from

an

average

of

about

twenty

in

the

1940s

and

1950s

to

an

average

of

over one

hundred

in the

1980s.

Much of this

use

was

in

sociology

itself,

citations

of

survey

findings

in

sociological

journals

being

the

most

prevalent

form

in

which

the GSS

was

used. Yet the

survey

has also

been

used

by

news

magazines,

specialized

newsletters,

U.S.

government

agencies,

and in

the

report

ing

of social

indicators

(Smith

1992:

4-19).

The

expansion

of

such

methods and

techniques

within

the

social sciences has

been

accompanied

by

a

similar

expansion

outside

them,

as

institutions and

or

ganizations

in

the

larger

society,

especially

the

mass

media,

also

come

to

rely

on

them.

When

the

mass

media

reported

social

science

findings,

they

invariably

cited

opinion

surveys;

about

half of all

social

science

studies

reported

in

the

media,

according

to

one

1982

study,

were

of

public

opinion

data,

a

figure

that

rises

to

81

percent

when

specific

techniques

are

mentioned

by

the

news

media

(Singer

1988:

413).

This

overlap

between

the

academic

world

of

public opinion

research

and

the

mass

media

is

hardly surprising;

key

individuals such

as

Frank

Stanton,

first the research director and

then

the

longtime

president

of

CBS,

moved back

and

forth

between

these worlds

and

regularly

drew

on

the

insights

and methods of

academic

sociologists

such

as

Paul

Lazarsfeld.

However,

there

are,

of

course,

major

differences

between

how

academics

report

the

findings

of

surveys

and the

way

journalists

discuss

polls;

in

particular,

the latter

tend

not to

be

interested

in

methodological

fine

points.

Perhaps

for

that

reason,

over

the

course

of

the

1980s

a

significant

change

took

place

in the

reporting

of

public opinion

information: rather than

relying

on

academic

sources

or those of professional polling organizations, the news media began to carry

out

their

own

surveys.

The

first

in-house

polling operation

among

networks

came

at

CBS in

1967, due,

in

large part,

to

Stanton's

efforts. The

major

break

through

came as

late

as

1975,

when CBS

and

the

New

York

Times

entered

into

a

joint

venture

to

sample

public

opinion

repeatedly

(Mann

and

Orren

1992:

2).

Since

that

time,

the

use

of

polls

and

other

ways

of

measuring

public

opinion

has

grown;

indeed,

the

period

between

1975

and the

present

can

be

compared

to

the

period

in

the

1920s

and the

1930s

when the social

survey,

which

had

been in

existence

for

some

time,

suddenly

became

popular.

No

one

knows

exactly

how

many

polls

are

taken

routinely

in

the

United

States,

but there

are

some educated guesses. Singer (1988: 413) cites a study suggesting that over 200

million

copies

of

newspapers

with

poll

results reached readers

in

a

one-month

Merton

and

Wolfe

25







0\

G\

I

ON

O

00

to

P

?o

10

o

m

^

;

26

The

American

Sociologist/Fall

1995







period

in

1980.

Ladd

and Benson

estimate

that

some

6,900

questions

were

asked

of

the

American

people

in the

1960s,

37,000

in

the

1970s,

and

89,000

in

the

1980s

(Ladd

1992:

20).

Ladd

and

Benson's

estimates

of

the

use

of

polls by major

media

organizations,

reprinted

in Table

4,

demonstrates the

increase in

the

use

of this sociological technique with respect to politics and elections. The wide

spread

and

effective

use

of

polling

as

well

as

the

widespread

and

frequent

misuse

of focus

groups

suggest

that

sociology's

single

greatest

impact

on

the

society

is in

the

realm

of

technique

rather

than in

the realm of

terminology,

substantive

ideas,

or

other

empirical

findings.

Polls

and

surveys

are

not

used

simply

for

electoral

purposes,

of

course,

but

it

has been

their

longtime

and

increasing

validation

by

actual

voting

outcomes

that

has

accorded

the

technique

generalized

legitimacy

(Crespi

1988).

The

one

dra

matic

polling

error

in the

presidential

election

of

1948

that

forecast the defeat

of

Harry

Truman?an

error

consequentially

analyzed

by

Mosteller

et

al.

(1949)?

led

to

only

a

temporary

lapse

of confidence in

polling

among

those

newspaper

editors

who

served

as

strategic

gatekeepers

in the

use

of

polls

(Merton

and

Hatt

1949).

Since

then,

polls

and

surveys

have

come

to

collect information

on

just

about

every

aspect

of

American

life.

In

1992,

the

New York Times

reported

on

polls

dealing

with American

attitudes toward

abortion,

AIDS,

Asian-Americans,

birth

defects,

capital

punishment,

crime,

daylight

savings

time,

drug

abuse,

education,

firearms,

gambling,

homelessness,

housing,

hunting,

immigration,

labor,

medicine,

parks,

police,

religion,

sex

crimes, taxation,

transit,

urban

areas,

waste,

and

women.

So

extensive

has

polling

become

that

we

may

witness

a

phenom

enon

in

the realm

of

sociological technique

similar

to

the

paradox

of

success

with

respect

to

sociological

terms.

Early

in

the

use

of

surveys,

it

was

assumed

that

they

would

enable the

scientist

to

measure

what

people

think.

More than

the

founders

of

public

opinion

research

evidently

anticipated,

the

widespread

use

of

polls

has

led

to

an

increasing

rate

of

nonresponse,

thus

reflecting

a

feedback

effect from

the

culture

to

the

technique

(Smith

1989;

Steech

1989). So,

as

well,

do

at

least

some

of

the

findings

from efforts

to

poll

the

public

about

polling;

some

Americans,

while

trusting

polls

in

general,

do

not

believe

that

samples

can

accurately

represent

the entire

American

population

(Roper

1986).

Feedback

effects

from

the

society

to

social

science

are

also

a

part

of this

story. Inundated with polls and skeptical about their scientific character, some

individuals

come

to

feel

that

polling

is

itself

problematic.

Recent

criticisms

of

polling,

which

argue

that

polls

are

used

by

elites

to

manipulate public

opinion

rather

than

to

represent

it,

contribute

to

this

sense

(Ginsberg

1986;

Herbst

1993).

As

this

public unhappiness

with

polling

takes

place,

it

is

just

a

short

step

for

the

distrust

to

reach

the

social

sciences

which

first

developed

survey

tech

niques.

Sociologists

themselves

are

divided about

whether

their field has suf

fered

a

crisis

of

legitimacy

(Hargens

1990;

Horowitz

1993),

but

the

general

prestige

of

sociologists

in

the

popular

culture

seems

to

have

decreased;

as

Darden

(1992)

discovered,

the

portrayal

of

sociologists

in

popular

literature

is

anything

but positive.

The

use

of "focus

groups"

on

the

grand

scale

(Leo

Bogart

[personal

commu

Merton and Wolfe 27







TABLE 4

Mean

Number

of Media

Polls Conducted

Annually

196&-89

Year Newspapers TV Stations Major Media

Organizations*

1968 1.7

0

0

1972 .0

0.3

.4

1976

.1

2.2

.4

1980

.2

5.6

6.4

1984

.9

6.2

6.6

1988

.6

6.1

2.4

1989.2

7.1

0.1

*ABC

News,

CBS

News,

Wall Street

Journal,

etc.

Source: Everett Carll

Ladd and

John

Benson,

"The Growth of News Polls

in

American

Politics,"

in

Thomas

E. Mann and

Gary

R.

Orren,

eds.,

Media Polls

in

American

Politics

(Washington: Brookings

Institution, 1992),

23.

nication],

the dean

of

marketing

and

advertising

research,

estimates that

some

$250

million

are now

expended

annually

in

the

use

of this research

procedure)

illustrates

the

mixed

fate

sociological

techniques

can

have

as

they

are

incorpo

rated

in

social institutions

and

practices.

During

World War

II and

afterward,

sociologists developed

the

technique

of the "focused interview"

to

obtain

more

detailed

qualitative

data

about

the character and

sources

of individual

opinions,

attitudes,

beliefs, sentiments,

and activities

than could be obtained from the

use

of

questionnaires

and

highly

structured

interviews.

Such

data led

to

new

hypoth

eses

which could then be

put

to

empirical

test

by

quantitative

research

(Merton

and

Kendall

1946;

Merton, Fiske,

and Kendall

[1956]

1990).

Some

years

later,

social

research

in the

marketplace

took

up

a

version of this

technique

which

came

to

be

known

as

the "focus

group"

(Krueger

1988;

Morgan

1988).

Increas

ingly,

plausible

guesses

and

hypotheses

derived from

focus

group

data have

been taken

as

conclusive

findings

and

as

partial

bases

for

practical

and

policy

decisions. New products are marketed based on the basis of focus-group re

search alone. Politicians

of

every

stripe,

from

local election

precincts

to

the

White

House,

draw

upon

focus

groups

to

tailor their

messages

to

the

unsampled

electorate.

It

is

even

reported

that the

1988

Moscow

summit

between Ronald

Reagan

and Mikhail Gorbachev

was

partly

designed,

on

the American

side,

on

the

basis

of

focus-group

data

(Stewart

and Shamdasani

1990:

124-126).

The

story

does

not

end

there.

In the

first

stage

of

the

incorporation

process

we are

examining,

the

focussed

group

interview

(which

emerged

in

the

aca

demic domain

as

a

qualitative

source

of

hypotheses

for

more

systematic

and

quantitative inquiry)

was

transformed

by

marketers

and

political pundits

into

focus groups that were taken to provide a sufficient basis for discovering what

was

on

the minds of

Americans.

(On

the

continuities

and differences between

28

The American

Sociologist/Fall

1995







the

focused interview

and

the

focus

group,

see

Bogart

1984:

82.)

Decades

later,

the academic

source

of the

focused

group

interview

was

"obliterated

by

in

corporation"7

into

the

society,

economy,

and

polity.

By

the

mid-1980s,

it

became

possible

for

sociologists

to

describe

focus

groups

as

"a

relatively

new

research

tool (Morgan and Spanish 1984: 253) and to have them think about its applica

tions

to

their

own

work.

Thus,

fifty-two

sociologists

attended

a

workshop

on

the

use

of focus

groups

in

social

research

that

was

held

at

the

1992

meeting

of the

American

Sociological

Association

(Billson

1993).

Rarely

has

a

technique

gone

from

sociology

to

the

society

and

back

again

quite

as

rapidly

as

this

one.

Polls

and

focus

groups

are

not

the

only

sociological

techniques,

of

course,

that have been

widely

incorporated

into

American

society

and,

as a

consequence,

feed

back into

the

way

sociology

is carried

out.

Demographic

analysis,

for

one,

has

become

part

of

the

way

Americans think about

themselves.

The

census,

although

not

a

research

tool

wholly

developed by

sociologists,

is

the

clearest

example;

once viewed as a

way

of

collecting

information that would tell us how

we

have

changed,

it is

now

part

of the

definition of

the

changes

that various

groups

hope

to

see.

Given the

ways

in

which

financial

benefits

are

distributed

by

federal

legislation

according

to

population?or

the

ways

in which

Supreme

Court

decisions

have

interpreted

what

it

means

to

be

represented

by

legisla

tors?the

stake

in

the

information

collected

by

the

census

has

become

enor

mous.

The

fact

that

social

scientists

can

speak

of

a

"politics

of

numbers"

indi

cates

that

numbers

can

also have

an

impact

on

those

who

collect

them

(Alonso

and

Starr

1986).

Yet

even

if

there

were

no

political

stakes

involved

in

determining

basic

social facts

about how

we

live,

American

fascinations with

lifestyle

and

culture

have

led

to

a

proliferation

of

stories

based

upon

systematic

statistical

informa

tion.

Intelligent

journalists

know

the

importance

of

turning

to

magazines

such

as

American

Demographics

for

materials

on

the

baby-boom

generation,

down

ward

mobility,

and

other

inherently

sociological

topics.

Technical

reports

deal

ing

with

the

size and

shape

of

the

American

population

have

become

factors

in

the

way

we

think

about

and relate

to

immigration,

AIDS,

intergenerational

wealth

transfers,

the

conversion of

defense

installations

to

civilian

uses,

or

public

and

private

education.

Important sociological

work?William

Julius

Wilson's

(1980,

1987) studies of inner city job loss and residential concentration, Sarah McLenahan's

work

on

the

effects

of

single-parent

families

(McLenahan

and

Garfinkel

1986;

McLenahan

1991),

and

Douglas

Massey's

studies of

segregation

are

conspicuous

examples

(Massey

and

Dent?n

1993)?are

widely

discussed

in

worlds

outside

academic

sociology,

especially

intellectually

oriented

magazines.

The

paradox

of

successful

incorporation

is

less

evident

with

respect

to

demographic

analysis

than

it is

with

respect

to

surveys

and

polling.

The

subtle

ties of

statistical

interpretation

tend

to

be

beyond

the

reach

of

most

people,

including

journalists,

few of

whom

are

sufficiently

well

trained

to

understand

academic debates

over

appropriate

methodology.

As

important

as

demographi

cally based work may be for policymakers, by not reaching the general public,

such

work

tends

not

to

suffer

feedback effects from

the

general

culture.

Ironi

Merton and

Wolfe

29







cally,

the

very

failure

of

demographic

analysis

to

be

incorporated

into

the

larger

society

to

the

same

extent

as

survey

research

and

polling

gives

demographic

work

greater

credibility

among

social

scientists

themselves,

and

thereby

increases

its

potential

influence

over

the

society.

It

is

possible

that

public

interest

maga

zines will feature such work?The Atlantic contained a cover story dealing

extensively

with

McLenahan's

findings

(Whitehead

1993)?but

even

this level

of

exposure

to

the

general

culture does

not

appear

to

shape

the

work

of

the social

scientists

who

develop

the

findings.

There

is

an

obvious

reason

why quantitative techniques

and

findings

are

in

corporated

into American

institutions,

since

they

offer

numbers

that

establish

trends and

suggest

conclusions about

frequency

and social

distributions. How

ever,

one

should also

not

overlook the

incorporation

of

qualitative

sociology

into

American

society

as

well.

One difference

between

the

two

forms

of

incor

poration

is

obvious:

quantitative

studies

are

generally

used

in

work

published

in

technical

journals,

while

qualitative

techniques

are

usually

published

in

book

form

(Wolfe

1990).8

Articles reach

the

public;

journalists

or

social

scientists

interested in

writing

for

a

popular

audience

report

on

the

scientific

findings

of

such

articles,

acting

as

brokers

in

the

process.

Yet

books,

even

those

published

by

university

presses,

are,

under certain

circumstances,

reviewed

in

newspapers

and

magazines

and discussed

on

radio

and television

(Coser,

Kadushin,

and

Powell

1982).

Beyond

the fact that

incorporation

of

quantitative

and

qualitative

research

may

be

different,

sociologists

have

become

more

professionalized.

As

rewards

and prestige are attached to those who win the respect of their peers for their

technical

competence, writing

for the

general

public

counts

for less

among

one's

peers.

(This

has

to

some

degree

always

been

true;

[Wrong

1993:

193]

points

out

that

many

of the

most

widely

cited

books

written

by

sociologists

in

the

1950s

and

1960s

were

written

by

scholars who

were

somewhat

marginal

to

the

discipline.)

Under

these

conditions,

the

best

way

to

have one's

work

reach

into the

general

culture is

to

have

it

discussed

among

policy

elites

first,

either

in book form

or

by

direct

interventions into

public policy

such

as

the

Coleman

Report

(see

the

next

section

of this

article).

It

may

also

be

that

American

society

is

less

receptive

to

sociological

findings.

The

general

impression

is

that

the

coverage

of ideas in the

popular

media

at

the

present

time

concentrates

on

the

popular reporting

of

science

on

the other hand

or on

issues

such

as

political

correctness

and

multiculturalism

on

the

other,

which

are

usually

identified with

the humanities.

Sociologists

will

be

recognized

if

they

have

something

important

to

say,

but

they rarely

become

academic celebrities.

Between

them,

these

two

trends

suggest

that,

with

the

exception

of

books

such

as

Habits

of

the

Heart,

sociological

ideas

are

not

likely

to enter

the

general

culture

through

direct

in

corporation.

The

incorporation

of

sociological

techniques

into

American

society

runs

fewer

risks for practicing sociologists than the incorporation of sociological language

into the

culture. To

be

sure,

the

widespread popularity

and

consequent

abuses

30

The American

Sociologist/Fall

1995







of

method

associated

with media and interest

polling

as

well

as

focus

groups

could

make

for

the

delegitimation

of all

sociological

research.

Non-response

rates

will affect

what

sociologists

measure,

with

consequences

for

the science

of

society

that

cannot

be

positive.

Yet

sociologists

retain

a

far

greater

control

over their technique than they do over their vocabulary. The world of research

technique

remains bifurcated

into

one

segment

in

which

peer

review and

pro

fessional

standards

are

taken

seriously,

and another

in

which commercial

or

political

pressures

lead

to

shortcuts.

So

long

as

sociologists

insist

on

high

stan

dards

for

their

techniques,

their

findings

are more

likely

to

survive,

even

if

public

confidence

in

polls

or

social

knowledge

in

general

is shaken

for

a

time.

Sociology

and Social

Policy

Sociologists

have

usually

been of mixed minds about the

possible

incorpora

tion of their

findings

and methods into the

larger

culture and

society.

Nowhere

is

this ambivalence

clearer than with

respect

to

issues

of

public

policy.

For

some

social

scientists,

the value-free research and

techniques

that

rely

on

statistics and

the

apparatus

of hard

science

define their

professional

obligations.

Others

be

lieve

that the

knowledge

they

accumulate

can

help

elites

make

policies

that

are

more

rational and

in

accord with the latest

findings

about human

behavior.

It is

an

austere

sociologist

who

can

resist

an

invitation to

discuss with

policymakers

his

or

her

findings

with

respect

to

crime,

alcoholism,

divorce,

poverty,

ethnicity,

immigration,

or

health-related

behavior.

Yet

when

sociologists

do involve

themselves

directly

in

public policy,

many

will wonder

who invited them

to

do

so

and

why.

In

1954,

for

example,

the

Supreme

Court

received

a

brief

signed

by

thirty-five

social

scientists,

headed

by

Kenneth Clark

and

including sociologists

Paul Lazarsfeld

and Arnold

Rose,

which

addressed the social

consequences

of school

segregation (Kluger

1976:

557).

In

response,

Mr.

Justice

Jackson's

chief

clerk,

E.

Barrett

Prettyman,

wrote

a

memo

warning:

"if the

country

feels that

a

bunch of

liberals

in

Washington

have

finally

foisted off

their

social views

on

the

public,

it will

not

only

tolerate

but aid

circumvention of the

decision,"

in

Brown

v.

Board

of

Education,

"and

James

Reston

would

write

a

column

saying

that

the decision

'read[s]

more

like

an

expert paper

on

sociology than

a

Supreme Court opinion'

"

(Kluger 1976: 691,

711).

Yet

Brown

anticipated

the

future,

for within fifteen

years

of its

holding,

expert

notions

developed

by

sociologists

would

become

major

documents

in

disputes

over

public policy

in

America. The

growing

relationship

of

sociology

to

social

policy

in

the

1960s

was

generally

related

to

the

welfare

state

(Gouldner

1970).

The

more

government

became involved

outside

purely

economic

activi

ties

(such

as

the

regulation

of business

or

tariffs),

the

more

it

called

on

sociolo

gists

as

well

as

economists

for

opinion

and

advice

(Lazarsfeld,

Sewall,

and

Wilensky

1967).

One

example

of the

close

interrelationship

between

social

policy

and

sociol

ogy involved the war on poverty. The writings of social scientists Lloyd Ohlin

and Richard Cloward?described

by

one

writer

as

representing

"the

marriage

of

Merton

and

Wolfe

31







two

great

traditions

in

American

sociology"

(Lemann

1991:

120)9?argued

that

higher

rates

of

delinquency

were

in

part

the

product

of blocked

opportunities.

Social

scientists

at

the National

Institute of

Mental

Health

and

the

Ford

Founda

tion

brought

their

ideas

to

the

Kennedy

Administration

through

David

Hackett,

who had been named director of the President's Committee on

Juvenile

Delin

quency.

Before

long

their notions

were

shaping

public policy, especially

the

notion

of "maximum

feasible

participation

of the

poor"?which

became

a

key

phrase

in

the

War

on

Poverty

(Lemann

1991:

120-129).

It

is

a

sign

of

sociology's

impact

on

social

policy

that

when

this

phrase

later

came

under

heavy

criticism,

one

of the

leading

critics

was

also

a

sociologist

and

political

scientist:

Daniel

Patrick

Moynihan

(1967).

Furthermore,

Moynihan,

in

turn,

added his

name

to

any

serious discussion of

race

and

poverty

(see

Rainwater

1967),

just

as

few

serious discussions of

education

took

place

without

reference

to

the Coleman

Report

(Coleman

1966).

Yet

were

the

1960s

the

heyday

of

sociology's

influence

over

social

policy?

After

all,

if

sociology's

fate

is tied

to

the

fate of

the

welfare

state,

the

latter

seemed

to

reach

its

limits

in the

1980s.

Moreover

sociology

itself,

according

to

some

critics,

became

so

intertwined with

one

particular

version

of social

policy?

a

leftist

one?that

it

became irrelevant

when

the

political

tenor

of the United

States

began

to

shift.

For

Irving

Louis

Horowitz,

sociology's

effects

on

social

policy

are

the

obverse

of its

relationship

to

political

ideology.

Horowitz

argues

that

at

the

very

time

when

sociology

has

become

captured

by

left-wing

critics

of American

life,

it

has also

lost its relevance

to

policy: "Sociology

has

seen

the

departure

of

urbanologists,

social

planners, demographers, criminologists, pe

nologists,

hospital

administrators,

international

development

specialists?in

short,

the entire

range

of scholars for whom

social

science is

linked

to

public

policy"

(Horowitz

1993:

13).

Thus

the

"decomposition"

of

sociology

does

not

mean

that

social

science

is

falling apart; according

to

Horowitz,

social science

is

flourish

ing,

but

it

does

so

with

new

organizational

and

disciplinary

designations

far

removed

from the

American

Sociological

Association.

We

should,

ifHorowitz

is

correct,

expect

to

find that the

impact

of

academic

sociology

on

public policy

decreased

since

the

1960s.

There

were

certainly

signs

that this

was

the

case

in the

early

1980s.

Upon

assuming

office,

the

Reagan

administration made clear its determination to cut support for social research;

governmental

agencies

that had funded

sociological

projects,

including

the

Cen

ter

for

Metropolitan

Problems of the

National

Institute

of Mental

Health,

were

abolished;

cutbacks

were

so severe

that the

social

science

professional

associa

tions

joined

together

in

protest

and

the National Endowment for

the

Humanities,

according

to

its

critics,

became

increasingly

ideological

in

its

funding

choices.

(Similar

efforts

were

undertaken

by

the Thatcher

government

in Great

Britain.)

Moreover with the

election

of

Republican

majorities

in

Congress

in

1994,

efforts

are

underway

at

this

writing

to

reduce

or

eliminate

the social and

behavioral

sciences from

the

National Science Foundation.

In one particularly striking example of hostility to social science, the govern

ment

made

quite

clear

its

view that research

into

sexual behavior

being

carried

32

The American

Sociologist/Fall

1995







TABLE

5

Professional

Appointments

to

Presidential Commissions

1973-1984

Field

#

of

Appointments

Law

17

Economics

13

Medicine

11

Political

Science 6

Sociology

6

Engineering/Technology

6

Physics

6

Education

5

Business

Administration

5

Social Work 4

History

4

Psychology/Psychiatry

3

Ethics/Theology

2

Journalism 1

Nursing

1

Environmental Studies

1

Nutrition 1

Chemistry

1

Other

3

Source:

Calculated

from

Stephen

D.

Zink,

Guide

to

the

Presidential

Advisory

Commissions,

1973-1984

(Alexandria,

VA:

Chadwyck-Healy,

1987).

out

by

Edward Laumann of

the

University

of

Chicago?research

that

used net

work

analysis

to

focus

on

the

ways

AIDS

spread

throughout

at-risk

populations?

was

not

to

be

funded,

on

the

grounds

that

the

Reagan

administration

considered

research

dealing

with

sexuality

illegitimate;

private

foundations

eventually

funded

the work (Laumann et al. 1994). Moreover, private foundations, such as Ford

and

Rockefeller, grew

unhappy

with

academic research

during

this

period,

shift

ing

their

own

efforts

more

in the

direction

of

direct

political

intervention

into

society.

There

seems

little

doubt

that

a

combination of

less

money,

a

changed

ideological

coloration

to

the

country,

and

a

public

suspicion

of

experimentation

in

social

policy

combined

to

limit

rather

drastically

the

effect that

sociology

could

have

on

public

policy.

Still,

this

story

of

declining

sociological

incorporation

into

public

policy

is

not

complete.

Another

way

to

assess

the

impact

of

the

social

sciences

in

the

larger

culture

is

to

look

at

the

role of

presidential

commissions

(Komarovsky

1975).

These bodies are called into being when the president feels that there is amatter

of

some

urgency

that

requires

expert,

and

usually nonpartisan,

advice.

Since the

Merton

and

Wolfe

33







Komarovsky

volume

was

published,

seventy-four

such

commissions

issued

re

ports.

Their

subjects

were

often

esoteric,

but

they

have

included

concerns

at

the

heart of

sociological inquiry,

such

as

population,

privacy,

biom?dical

ethics,

unemployment,

mental

health,

the

status

of

women,

immigration,

social

secu

rity, alcoholism, housing, and crime. In all, 1,505 individuals served on these

seventy-four

commissions. Of

this

group,

ninety-six

were

identified

as

profes

sors,

six

of whom

were

sociologists.10

Compared

to

other

disciplines,

sociolo

gists

were

not

bypassed

during

this

period.

There

were

seventeen

law

professors

and thirteen

professors

of economics

represented

on

these

commissions,

as

Table

5

indicates.

Still,

sociology

was as

fully represented

as

political

science,

engi

neering

and

technology,

and

physics,

and

better-represented

than

history

and

psychology.

If

these

commissions

are

any

indication,

sociology's

impact

on so

cial

policy

did

not

grow

during

the

1970s

and

1980s,

but neither

did

it

disap

pear.

As

the

subjects

studied

by

sociologists

continue to

overlap

with

areas of

public

concern,

sociologists

will continue

to

be

involved in

public policy

matters.

Take,

for

example, theory

and data

dealing

with divorce

or

paternal

contact

with

children

after

divorce

(Cherlin

1988;

Furstenberg

and

Cherlin

1991)

This

re

search

is,

at

the

moment,

relevant

to

discussions of

welfare

reform;

if

families

were

to

remain

more

intact,

or

if

fathers

would

assume more

responsibility

for

their children after

divorce,

the burden

on

government

would be lessened.

The

same

is

true

of

criminology,

immigration,

income

distribution?or

any

of the

other

topics

studied

by

sociologists

that

have

both

scientific interest and

impli

cations

for

public policy.

Direct involvement

in

public policy

does

pose

risks for

sociologists

that

barely

existed

during

the

Reagan-Bush

years,

when

sociological

advice

tended

to

be

ignored.

Those risks

are

well known and

barely

need

repeating

here;

policy

makers

want

fast

answers

under

high-pressure

conditions,

and

they

usually ig

nore

the

cautions

and ambivalences of real-world data. Our

point

is

to

empha

size

one

additional risk that flows

from

the

way

sociology

is

incorporated

into

American

culture?the

risk

of

disappointment.

If

sociologists

sell their

ideas

to

policy-makers

too

enthusiastically, they

over-promise

on

what

they

can

deliver.

The

American

public,

already

skeptical

of

government,

may

transfer its

skepti

cism to social science if social science is seen as too close an ally to government.

In this

way,

the

incorporation

of

sociology

into American

society through

influ

ence

over

public

policy

could

come

to

replicate

the

implications

of the

incor

poration

of

terms

and

technique. Already

convinced

that

sociological

terms

are

trite,

and

that social

science

techniques

are

flawed,

the

consequences

for

soci

ology

would be serious

if

Americans

came to

also

believe

that

sociological

ideas

about

public policy

are

inherently

unworkable

or

counter-productive.

Conclusion

Terms, concepts, techniques, and findings of sociology have been widely and

variously incorporated

into

the

culture and institutions of American

society.

Our

34

The American

Sociologist/Fall

1995







time

seems

particularly

receptive

to

sociological

ways

of

knowing.

At the

height

of

sociology's

postwar

popularity,

Richard Rovere

noted that

"Those

of

us

who

have been

educated

in

the twentieth

century

habitually

think

in

sociological

terms,

whether

or

not

we

have had

any

training

in

sociology."

This

is,

if

any

thing, even more true in the 1990s. At this time Americans are exceptionally

sociological?preoccupied,

as

they

are,

with

questions

of

ethnicity,

group

loy

alty,

immigration,

and

lifestyles.

We

continue

to

live in

a

sociological

culture,

one

important

reason

why

sociology

prospered

in

the

United States.

Sociology,

moreover,

has

been

influenced

by

the

general

culture

and

society.

The

women's

movement has

had

a

major

impact

on

the

field;

the number

of

women

sociolo

gists

has

increased

(Roos

and

Jones

1993),

and

the influence

of feminist

ideas

can

be

felt

in

nearly

every

area

of academic

sociology.

As

American

society

itself

seemed

to

lose

its

consensual

nature,

so

did

the

field,

as

sociology split

off into

a

number

of

sub-fields?disunited,

to

be

sure,

but

hardly

in

the "doldrums"

either

(Collins

1986).

Among

sociologists,

one

finds

considerable discussion

of

the

question

whether

sociology

has lost its

integrity

and

viability,

partly

as a

result of the

processes

of

incorporation

discussed

throughout

this article. For those

who feel that

it

has,

the

1950s

and

1960s

constituted

a

"golden

age"

for

sociology,

a

period

that

saw

rapid

increases in the number

of

doctorates

in

sociology,

the

expansion

of

fac

ulties,

and

increasing

membership

in

the

American

Sociological

Association

(Turner

and Turner

1990:

133-141).

In

more

recent

years,

according

to

these

critics,

we

now

see

declining

enrollments in

sociology,

a

drop-off

in

the skills

of

those

entering

the

field,

and

a

loss

of

membership

in

the

American

Sociological

Asso

ciation

(D'Antonio

1992).

For

some,

the decline

in

quantitative

skills

means

that

there

no

longer

exists

a

quality-control

mechanism

to

weed

out

students

who

simply

were

not

that

good

(Blalock 1989).

Others

argue

that

"sociology

has

become

a

series

of demands for

correct

politics

rather

than

a

set

of studies

of

social

culture"

(Horowitz

1993:

17).

Sociologists,

it has

been

noted,

failed

to

predict

the

most

important

social

developments

of

the

century,

such

as

the

rise

of

fundamentalism

or

the

collapse

of

communism

(Berger

1992).

The

academic

fragmentation

of the

contemporary

university

has

left

sociology

"a

discipline

in

name

only,

whose

members

have

fewer

common

ancestors

than

they

did

twenty

years ago, few common concepts, less to talk about and less language to talk

about

it

with"

(Becker

and Rau

1992:

71).

These

criticisms do

not,

in

general,

argue

that

the

problems

facing

sociology

are

due

to

its

inability

to

be

incorpo

rated into

the

culture and the

society.

On

the

contrary,

from

the

point

of view

of

many

of

these

critics,

American

society

and

sociology,

in

a

sense,

deserve

each

other,

since both

have

lost standards and

a

commitment

to

excellence.

The

"decomposition"

of

sociology

is

one

direct result of

too

extensive

a

process

of

incorporation.

The

case

that

sociology

has

lost its

scholarly integrity

is

open

to

dispute,

although

ideology

has

come

to

be

widespread

(Wolfe

1992).

However,

it is

not

necessary to take a position on the question of whether sociology has lost its

quality

in

order

to

consider the

benefits

and

drawbacks of cultural and social

Merton and Wolfe

35







incorporation.

That

sociology

will

be

incorporated

into the

general

culture is

an

inevitable

consequence

of

a

social science

that

is

part

of

the culture it studies.

From

this

point

of

view,

the

incorporation

of

sociology

into the

general

culture

and

society

reflects

the desire of Americans

to

know

more

about

themselves,

and this puts those who would presume to understand American society in an

awkward

position.

One

way

that

some

sociologists

deal

with the

awkwardness

is

to retreat

from

the

general

culture,

to

concentrate

on

their

own

discipline

and

its

findings

irrespective

of the interest that the culture

shows

in

such

findings.

A

contrasting

objective

is

to

transform

sociology

directly

into

a

policy

science,

seeking,

in

a

sense,

its

full

incorporation

into the

society.

Still others

try

to

balance

these

two

imperatives,

shifting

back

and forth

depending

on

circum

stances.

It

is

not

our

intention

to

argue

for

or

against

any

of these

responses,

but

rather

to

emphasize

that

all of

them have their

roots

in

the

problem

of social

and

cultural

incorporation.

Critics of

sociology

variously

maintain that it has become

exceptionally

eso

teric,

either

by

making

a

fetish of

technique,

language,

political ideology

or

epistemological

foundations. Such

critics

assume

that the

more

esoteric

a

disci

pline

becomes,

the

less

the

public

will

be

interested in its

findings.

Our

analysis

points

to

a

different

problem

that

leads

to

alienation of

the

public.

A

large

risk

we

face

as a

discipline

is that

those whose

behavior

we

study

will

take what

we

say

about them

more

seriously

than

we

take

ourselves.

It is

not

the

decline of

sociology

that

ought

to

preoccupy

us so

much

as

balancing

the

interest

of

the

public

in

what

we

do with

our

vocational commitment

to

the furtherance of

social

knowledge.

Acknowledgments

The authors wish

to

thank Patrick Bova of the

National

Opinion

Research

Corporation

for

making

available

the information contained in

Figure

1. We also wish

to

acknowledge

the

moral and editorial

support

provided

by

Jonathan

Imber.

Notes

1. To obtain

this

information

we

consulted

the

most

common

sociological

dictionaries and

a

recent

encyclo

pedia:

David

Jary

and

Julia

Jary,

The

Harper

Collins

Dictionary

of

Sociology;

George

A.

Theodorson

and

Achilles G. Theodorson, A Modern Dictionary of Sociology; G. Duncan Mitchell, A New Dictionary of the

Social

Sciences;

Michael

Mann,

The International

Encyclopedia of

Sociology;

Raymond

Boudon and

Fran?ois

Bourricaud,

A

Critical

Dictionary

of

Sociology;

and

Edgar

F.

and Maria

A.

Borgotta,

Encyclopedia of

Sociology.

Some of the

terms

contained

in

these

sources?bureaucracy,

class,

status,

race,

ethnicity,

insti

tution,

urbanization?are

so common

that little could be

gained

by

including

them without modifications

Cethnocentrism"

instead

of

"ethnicity,"

"class consciousness

"

instead

of

"class,"

"status

symbol"

rather

than

"status").

On the

other

hand,

we

did include

terms

such

as

"altruism,"

"lifestyle," "hegemony,"

and

"alienation." We

eventually

examined the

frequency

of

205

sociological

terms

of which

we

report

on

p.

92.

2.

Although

the

term

"underclass"

can

be traced back

to

Gunnar

Myrdal,

its

more

contemporary

use was

largely

introduced

by

William

Julius

Wilson. In

response

to

criticism,

Wilson indicated his

willingness

to

use

other

terms,

such

as

"ghetto

poor."

3.

Our

procedure

was

to

search

through

Lexis/Nexis

for

specific

terms

in

specific

years

cited

in

specific

newspapers.

4. We followed a similar method here of consulting Donald Rutherford's Dictionary of Economics, culling

from it

41

terms,

which

are

listed in Table

3.

36

The American

Sociologist/Fall

1995







5.

Although

the

term

lifestyle

was

later

(and,

it

seems,

independently)

introduced

in

a

distinctly

psychological

sense

by

Alfred

Adler,

we

have

the

impression

that its

current

usage

is

primarily

in

the

sociological

sense

introduced

by

Max

Weber.

6.

For

an

analysis

of how

the

term

and

concept

"role

model"

developed,

see

Zuckerman

(1988).

7.

As

a

process

in

the cultural

transmission

of

knowledge,

"obliteration

by

incorporation"

or

in

the

ultimate

brevity

of the

acronym,

OBI,

stands for obliteration of the

source(s)

of

ideas,

formulations, methods,

or

findings by incorporation in current canonical knowledge. On which see Merton 1968, pp. 27-29, 35-38

and in

more

specific

detail

Merton

[1965]

1993,

pp.

311-312.

8. There

exists

a

fine

journal

called

Qualitative

Sociology.

9.

Lemann

is

referring

to

the

Chicago

School

emphasis

on

ethnography

and the Columbia

University emphasis

on

middle

range

theory.

10.

Alice Rossi

(National

Commission

on

the Observation of

International

Women's

year

[1975]);

Charles Willie

(President's

Commission

on

Mental Heath

[1977]);

Elise

Boulding

(President's

Commission

on World Hun

ger

[1978]);

Cora Marrett

(President's

Commission

on

the Accident

at

Three

Mile Island

[1979]);

Ren?e

Fox

(President's

Commission

for

the

Study

of Ethical Problems

in

Medicine and Biom?dical and

Behavioral

Research

[1979]);

and

Daniel Bell

(President's

Commission for

a

National

Agenda

for the

Eighties

[1979]).

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Documents

1995 - The Cultural and Social Incorporation of Sociological Knowledge (w. Alan Wolfe)