Sociological Theory From the Chicago Dominance to 1965Author(s): Lewis A. CoserReviewed work(s):Source: Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 2 (1976), pp. 145-160Published by: Annual ReviewsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2946090 .Accessed: 18/11/2011 14:24

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SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY *:10523

FROM THE CHICAGO DOMINANCE TO 1965

Lewis A. Coser Department of Sociology, State University of New York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, New York 11794

INTRODUCTION

Were I to take the title of this essay literally, it would take an amount of space that the editor would surely not condone. Much, though alas not all, sociological writing in the period under consideration involved some effort at theoretical analysis. Raw empiricism, though still being practiced, was clearly in retreat. Under the circum- stances I was forced to impose on myself a self-denying ordinance by discussing only those developments that aimed self-consciously to erect theoretical structures of general scope which hopefully would provide guidelines for large varieties of con- crete sociological investigations. This essay hence has nothing to say about, for example, the impressive developments of demographic theory or about the efflores- cence of theoretical thought in urban sociology, but limits itself to those theoretical trends that strike the observer as having general significance over and beyond any specialized field of inquiry within sociology.

This is not the place to indulge in yet another effort at explicating the relations between sociological theory and sociological research. I was impressed by the enor- mous amount of good sociological research that was produced during the period under consideration, even though I was sometimes quite saddened to discover how much research effort has failed to withstand the test of time. Most of the valuable research was informed by theoretical notions of one sort or another, and largely for that reason contributed to the cumulation of sociological knowledge. That none of this is discussed here stems from the limitations alluded to earlier and is definitely not meant to indicate any kind of preference for theory over research.

Since various varieties of functionalism took pride of place during most of the period covered here, a large part of this essay is devoted to their consideration. Social interactionism, exchange theory, conflict theory, and related developments are also discussed in some detail in the second part of this essay. There will inevitably be

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some complaints that I have failed to include this or that theoretical development judged particularly important by one or another of my readers. I can only reply that I have attempted in my choices to keep personal predilections in check so as to be able to depict what I believe to be the general consensus about the relative impor- tance of sociological theories that came to the fore in the period under review.

THE RISE AND HEGEMONY OF FUNCTIONALISM

The major part of this essay deals with the emergence of functionalism, or structur- al-functional theory, in American sociology. Largely following Merton (1968) and Stinchcombe (1968), functionalism will here be defined as a mode of analysis con- cerned with the interrelations between social phenomena in general and, more particularly, with the consequences of given items for the larger structure or struc- tures in which they are variously embedded. Functions are those observed conse- quences that make for adaptation or adjustment of given structures; dysfunctions are those observed consequences that lessen adaptation or adjustment. Functional analysis, moreover, focuses attention on the causal loop through which the conse- quences of given courses of action act back on the item under observation, bringing about, as the case may be, its persistence or modification.

Before the emergence of this orientation of theoretical inquiry is examined, a short sketch of the antecedent state of American sociological theory is in order.

Established in 1892, the University of Chicago department of sociology domi- nated general sociology and sociological theory until the 1930s. Albion Small, its long-time chairman and spiritus rector, also founded the American Journal of Sociol- ogy, which until the 1930s was the most important and path-setting scholarly journal in the field. Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, two other prestigious members of the Department, edited the earliest, highly influential textbook in sociology, An Introduction to the Science of Society (1921). W. I. Thomas, and somewhat later, Herbert Blumer, Everett Hughes, Louis Wirth, and W. F. Ogburn, joined these scholars and helped consolidate the intellectual and organizational preeminence of the Chicago department. Its close association with the department of philosophy's main luminary George Herbert Mead further enhanced its status in the sociological community (Coser 1971, Chap. 8, 9). Other departments, such as that of Columbia, initially chaired by Franklin Giddens, were not able seriously to challenge Chicago's preeminence during this period.

The end of the Chicago dominance may conveniently be dated in 1935 when the American Sociological Society, previously largely though not wholly dominated by the Chicago department or Chicago-trained scholars, decided in a minor coup d'etat to establish its own journal, The American Sociological Review, thus severing the long-time formal and informal links of the discipline to the Chicago department. Although Chicago has continued to this day to be among the most prestigious and influential centers of sociological research and training, it never again attained the dominant position it once enjoyed in American sociology.

Although the importance of Parson's The Structure of Social Action (1937) was not immediately recognized, it may be said in retrospect to constitute the other

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watershed in the development of sociology generally and sociological theory in particular. This work was a landmark in that it set a new course that was to dominate theoretical developments from the early 1940s until roughly the middle of the 1960s.

It would be too facile to say, as has often been asserted, that American sociology was liberated from an atheoretical empiricism during the Chicago period by Par- sons's daring synthesis of several major European sociological traditions. Many of the major Chicago figures had studied in Europe and were well acquainted with European sociological and philosophical thought. Several of them, Small and Park in particular, were familiar with, for example, the work of Georg Simmel, which they introduced to the American scholarly public. A simple glance at Park & Burgess's influential textbook readily shows that far from being parochial, they attempted to introduce their students to a great deal of European sociological thought. Nonetheless, the Chicago reception of European sociological contributions proceeded, so to speak, by bits and pieces. Chicago scholars made use of one or another aspect of European work, but they did not succeed in appropriating it in a systematic manner. This was precisely what the Harvard group, under the guid- ance of Parsons, managed to accomplish in the wake of the publication of The Structure of Social Action. This book widened the vistas of American sociologists, making them receptive to the rich heritage of the European sociological tradition. In this work Parsons attempted to develop a "voluntaristic theory of social action" by way of a creative synthesis of Durkheim, Weber, and Pareto (the work of the British economist Marshall was also considered in detail but somehow was later largely dropped from consideration).

Surveying the major assumptions and theoretical premises of utilitarianism, ideal- ism, and positivism, Parsons set out to analyze them critically and to indicate in what respects they might be useful in elaborating the new synthesis for which he was striving. Agreeing with the utilitarian view of individuals as purposive and goal-oriented actors, he rejected what he conceived to be the atomistic and overly rational orientation of utilitarian theory and its attendant incapacity to account for the emergence of a social order regulating the goal-oriented activities of individual actors. Positivism was attacked for its reductionism; its propensity to account for individual behavior in terms of physiological, psychochemical, genetic, or geograph- ical influences; and its consequent inability to account for the voluntaristic, choice- making, and goal-striving tendencies of social actors. Finally, the German idealistic tradition was praised for its emphasis on the influence of cultural determinants such as ideas or symbolic processes, while it was criticized for its inability to account for the complex interrelations between social structures and the world of ideas. Being wedded to an emanationist view of cultural determinism, Parsons argued, idealist theorizing could never account for tensions or descrepancies between the world of ideas and the world of social activity. If, as he contended, ideas and social structure were bound to each other through dynamic interplays and interchanges, a theory that saw social structure simply as an emanation of ideas was surely inadequate. Furthermore, if the character of each particular society was said to be determined by its ethos, it would be impossible to develop a generalizing theory of society to

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account for human actions across cultural diversities. This was precisely what Parsons attempted to do.

Parsons developed a series of abstract analytical concepts that were to be ordered in such a manner as to reflect central features of all human societies without having to account for the myriad of empirical phenomena that threatened to drown the researcher in a sea of particularities. He wished to highlight the salient and system- atic features of human action.

In The Structure of Social Actions these central features were constructed from the following basic building stones: (a) actors, capable of voluntary striving, em- phatically not behaving and reacting bodies; (b) goals that these actors were striving for; (c) choices between alternative means these actors were using in their pursuits; (d) situational constraints coming from both biological and environmental condi- tions, which set bounds to the selection of means and the accomplishment of ends; and (e) sets of norms and values that channel the actors' choices of both means and ends. In sum, human actors were seen as capable of making choices of courses of action, but these choices were constrained by biological and environmental condi- tions and, more importantly for Parsons, by the values and norms governing the social structures in which they were variously enmeshed.

This conceptual scheme, as The Structure of Social Action shows in instructive detail, was derived from the synthesis, among other things, of the Durkheimian emphasis on structural constraints and collective consciousness, the Weberian stress on the determining functioning of sets of ideas and values, and the Paretian notion of moving societal equilibria brought about through the interplay of actors possessed in varying degrees of a set of a fundamental "residues," or prepotent drives (at a later date Freud largely replaced Pareto in Parsons's theoretical edifice and the functionalist theories of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown became major building blocks of the Parsonian synthesis).

In the subsequent development of Parsons's theoretical scheme, interaction came to displace the emphasis on individual social action. In his second major work, The Social System (1951), the systematic interrelations between human actors and the relatively stable patterns built out of institutionalized expectations that constrain their actions assume pride of place over consideration of individual actions. While it may be true that this shift in perspective has involved a toning down of Parsons's earlier stress on the voluntary character of social action, he nevertheless continued to hold that a social system can only operate if its component actors are sufficiently motivated to act in terms of the requirements of that system.

In The Social System, Parsons's stress is on the central importance of institution- alized values and norms and on differentiated social roles corresponding to differen- tiated status positions. The building blocks of a social system, or of one of its subsystems, are motivated actors who play roles governed by the expectations of other actors involved with them in a web of social interaction. In a relatively stable system, the role partners of particular status incumbents serve to hold them in line through their expectations and their power to exercise negative or positive sanctions. The central values and norms of the system are upheld when properly socialized actors are motivated to live up to role requirements and when they are impelled to

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uphold and defend these institutionalized requirements in their interaction with other actors. The primacy of values and norms in Parsons's system makes it appro- priate to call this system "normative functionalism".

This main line of Parsons's system has had a strong impact on American sociol- ogy. I shall return toward the end of this section to the later development of Parson's thought.

Parsons's work is intimately associated with Harvard University, yet the Harvard sociology department, founded in 1930, was not originally influenced by Parsons, who was then still a young instructor in the department of economics. The founder and first chairman of the department was Pitirim Sorokin, a Russian emigre scholar who had taught at the University of Minnesota and was already well known as the author of Social Mobility (1927), a path-breaking contribution to the topic that laid the groundwork for all further investigations and Contemporary Sociological Theo- ries (1928), an encyclopedic and critical survey of the storehouse of European sociological learning. A few years later he published his greatest work, Social and Cultural Dynamics. (1941) This was a synthetic system in which the central stress was on the determining importance over the course of human history of varying systems of thought and values.

Parsons became an instructor in sociology at Harvard in 1931 and served in that rank until five years later. Sorokin was highly critical of his work from the begin- ning, and so it was that the two men never achieved a close intellectual relationship despite the fact that they shared a number of central ideas, most particularly concerning the importance of values in the determination of human conduct. Never- theless, the small elite group of uncommonly gifted students that gathered at Har- vard in the 1930s all seem to have been influenced, though to different degrees, by both Sorokin and Parsons. One other seminal influence on them needs to be briefly mentioned, that of the physiologist and Pareto specialist J. L. Henderson, whose famous seminar on Pareto was attended by many graduate students and members of the Harvard faculty in the early 1930s (cf Barber 1970).

The most prominent students in the pre-World War II Harvard department were George Homans, Robert K. Merton, Kingsley Davis, Wilbert Moore, and Robin Williams. All of them left an enduring mark on the subsequent development of sociological theory. Homans was greatly influenced by Henderson, and his first major work (written with Curtis in 1934) was an introduction to the work of Pareto. He subsequently turned to work in English social history that culminated in his English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century (1941). Though this book was highly praised by historians, it did not make much of an impact in American sociology. Such was not the case with his subsequent work; in The Human Group (1950), a theoretical reanalysis of a series of previous studies of such diverse subjects as work groups in factories, street gangs, the kinship system in primitive societies, and the structure of a declining New England community, Homans attempted to develop a theoretical scheme of interrelated propositions derived from observed regularities in the initial accounts of these studies. He then used an inductive strategy very much at variance with that of Parsons. However the book was at least partly rooted, like Parsons's own work, in the functionalist approaches of Durkheim and of the British

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anthropologists Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown. Homans's strategy set out to extract from the studies under investigation a number of propositions and to estab- lish the conditions under which such propositions would in fact hold. He showed, for example, that increased interaction between persons would increase their liking for one another, but qualified this statement by noting that this would only be the case if these persons did not hold significant authority over each other, that is, if they had roughly equal status positions. While The Human Group may still be said to be largely congruent with the emergent functionalist perspective, Homans's subsequent work, notably his Social Behavior, Its Elementary Forms (1961), aban- dons this perspective in favor of an exchange theory largely constructed from building blocks provided by the Skinnerian version of psychological behaviorism and classical utilitarian economic theory. This work will be discussed later.

Robert K. Merton, who was to become the only serious rival of Parsons as a central figure in the theoretical development of American sociology during this period, studied under both Parsons and Sorokin. He was clearly influenced by both, though Parsons's impact was more pronounced. His thought was marked by a variety of European thinkers to whom he is likely to have been introduced by both Sorokin and Parsons, especially through the lectures Parsons gave before publishing The Structure of Social Action. Merton's overall theoretical stance owes much to that book and, to a lesser extent, to Parsons's subsequent work. Merton's writings in the sociology of science were also influenced by Sorokin, with whom he col- laborated in parts of the latter's monumental Social and Cultural Dynamics. Still, long before Merton published his highly influential Social Theory and Social Struc- ture (1968), consisting mainly of previously published papers, it had become appar- ent that Sorokin's influence on Merton had become attenuated and, while holding a broadly functionalist perspective, as he refined the method of functional analysis his path began to diverge from that of Parsons. Largely rooting his thought in the same set of thinkers that Parsons had highlighted (though adding Karl Marx and Georg Simmel to Parsons's set of seminal Europeans), Merton rejected Parsons's attempt to develop a general all-encompassing theory and opted instead for an apparently more modest aim: the development of theoretical propositions of middle range, purporting to analyze a limited set of empirical phenomena (cf. Parsons 1949, Merton 1968). Merton argued that Parsons's enterprise was overambitious consider- ing the general status of sociological knowledge and theory. Sociology did not yet have its Kepler, let alone its Newton, and attempts to build a general theoretical system at this stage were, according to Merton, condemned to failure. Theories of the middle range, on the other hand, could elucidate limited sets of empirical phenomena and be susceptible to empirical testing. Yet, far from only putting forward a series of brilliant detailed studies in delimited areas, Merton had an overall theoretical vision. This perspective, as Stinchcombe (1975) has shown, fo- cuses on motivated actors whose consequential choices are largely, though never wholly, constrained by their differential location in the social structure. People, Merton argues in all of his work, are not free to act as they please, but have alternative modes of action. These, however, are patterned and institutionalized. Most of Merton's work aims to elucidate structural sources of variations in patterns

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of choice. His apparently disparate contributions, whether in the study of anomie or the sociology of science, whether in the analysis of the functions of political machines or of reference groups, are rooted in this overall perspective. While reject- ing the Parsonian attempt to build an all-encompassing general theory at this stage of sociology's development, Merton nevertheless taught his students the art of approaching a variety of substantively different theoretical problems under a unified theoretical angle of vision.

In addition, Merton endeavored to counteract the rigidy of previous functional theory by suggesting a number of paradigms and a protocol for functional analysis, which, among other things, stressed the need to consider dysfunctions as well as functions, questioned Malinowski's assumption that every social phenomenon nec- essarily had a social function, and attacked the conservative implication that any item was necessarily indispensable to the operation of a given social structure. By highlighting the twin notions of functional alternatives and dysfunctions, Merton did yeoman's work in banishing the Panglossian optimism that all was always the best in all possible (functional) worlds. On the contrary, he stressed that social actors are always faced by ambiguities, conflicting expectations, and dilemmas of choice; and societies, far from being rigidly unified wholes, contain in their structures ambiguities and incongruities of expectations that preclude the possibility of treating them as unambiguously unified wholes.

His closely argued distinctions between manifest and latent functions, i.e. those consequential activities that are present in the actor's mind and those that are not, and his distinction of individual purposes from functional effects helped remove some of the teleological implications that many critics had discerned in the writings of some of his predecessors and contemporaries.

Invidious comparisons on the respective impact of Parsons's and Merton's work on subsequent theorizing would be out of place in this essay, but it seems open to little doubt that Merton's theoretical stress on problems of the middle range has been more pronounced in its impact on empirical research than Parsonian grand theory.

Kingsley Davis graduated from Harvard in 1936, the same year as Merton did. Although Davis later rejected allegiance to functionalist analysis as a peculiar method (1959), and although his work in recent years is almost completely devoted to specialized demographic studies, he must surely be reckoned among the handful of figures who helped establish a functional style of analysis as the predominant theoretical mode in the 1940s and 1950s. His textbook Human Society (1949) endured for many years as the most thorough and systematic attempt to present an overall view of social structures and social functions from a largely Parsonian- Mertonian perspective. It was only superseded by H. M. Johnson's Sociology, (1969) a much less imaginative and considerably more rigid presentation of the major lines of Parsons's and Merton's thought. In addition, Davis presented a series of inter- related papers on the sociology of the family, the sociology of prostitution, and related areas in which functional analysis was exemplified in his characteristically lucid fashion; these essays, though no longer referred to as frequently as Merton's essays of the same period, serve as examples of functional theorizing at its best.

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Although evidently beholden to the teachings of Parsons, they do not follow him in his grand design but exemplify a Mertonian type of middle-range strategy.

Wilbert Moore, who graduated from Harvard in 1940, and Robin Williams, who graduated in 1943, are other major figures who helped establish functional analysis as the dominant perspective in that period. The former did this through a series of works in the sociology of industrial relations (1951) and the sociology of moderniza- tion and social change (1963):

The latter accomplished this end through his work in intergroup relations (1947) and his highly influential textbook American Society (1951), the first major attempt to analyze the whole of American society from a functionalist perspective, and his collaboration (with Stouffer et al) in The American Soldier (1949), a landmark in sociological research. Marion Levy, who graduated in 1951, authored a major book, The Structure ofSociety (1953), which attempted, very much along Parsonian lines, to present a grand synthesis of functionalism. His work on the Chinese family (1949) and on the theory of modernization (1966), though marginally differentiated from him, follows closely in the footsteps of his erstwhile teacher. In the 1950s a number of other products of Harvard, too numerous to mention here, continued the tradi- tion of their predecessors. By that time Parsons and his colleagues had succeeded in transforming the department of sociology into the department of social relations through the amalgamation of social and clinical psychology, social anthropology, and sociology. Parsons chaired that department for ten years. Though not all of his colleagues shared all aspects of Parsons's vision, he nevertheless dominated the department as a whole both organizationally and intellectually, and served as a major vehicle in spreading the message of Parsons's style of theorizing. In addition, Parsons's earlier students had now assumed leading positions in other universities, Merton at Columbia (where Davis also taught before going to Berkeley), Williams at Cornell, and Moore and Levy at Princeton. In addition, a number of other Harvard-trained sociologists continued to work in the general Harvard tradition, though most of them tended to diverge to a greater or lesser degree from Parsons's grand scheme of analysis as time went by. Merton's students at Columbia, Selznick (1949) and Gouldner (1955), for example, continued to work in a broadly Mertonian tradition. Others, like Goode (1963, 1973) and Gross (1958), while not graduating from departments in which functional analysis predominated, still patterned their work according to the mode of either Parsons or Merton. By around 1950 this mode had clearly become predominant in American sociological theory.

In the meantime, Parsons's own work developed in several new directions. In 1951 he collaborated with Shils in publishing Toward a General Theory of Action. The authors developed a set of concepts characterizing, so they claimed, all action systems. These they termed pattern variables, which were supposed to account not only for the variant normative priorities of social systems, but also for the dominant modes of orientation in personality systems and the patterns of values found in cultural systems. Essentially an elaboration and refinement of the Gemeinschaft- Gesellschaft dichotomy of Toennies, these pattern variables were presented as di- chotomous alternatives, for example between affectivity and affective neutrality,

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between universalism and particularism, between diffuseness and specificity, or between achievement and ascription.

Affectivity-affective neutrality refers to the amount of affect allowed to enter into an interactive situation. A modern physician, for example, could not perform his task were he to be affectively involved with his patient, whereas high affective involvement might be a condition of success for the primitive medicine man. Univer- salism-particularism pertains to the standards of evaluation of others in an interac- tive situation as individual specimens of general categories of persons (as in the procedures of modern bureaucracies), or as particular human beings (as in court- ship). Diffuseness and specificity refers to the nature of obligations in interactive situations, whether they should be narrowly defined (as in a modern labor contract) or be of a more diffuse nature, as in a marital relationship. Finally, the distinction between achievement and ascription rests on whether status incumbents are judged on their performance or on qualities judged independently of specific expected performance, as when a modern civil servant's activities are evaluated in terms of what he does, as opposed to a noble incumbent of a status in medieval times, who is judged in terms of who he is. These pairs of variables were then seen as focal points of individual decisions, normative demands, and value orientations. They were said to channel the actions of actors through the twin mechanisms of socialization and social control. Proponents of this theory claimed that these pairs of variables, being built into the personality system, ensured a desirable fit between individual actions and societal requirement.

Only two years after the publication of Toward a General Theory ofAction (1951), Parsons, again joined by Shils, and now also for the first time by his Harvard colleague Bales, published another book, Working Papers in the Theory of Action (1953), in which he presented yet another novel theoretical conceptualization. Building on ideas adumbrated in The Social System, as well as on the results of small-group research previously conducted by Bales, Parsons and his collaborators now suggested that all action systems were faced with four major problems if they were to survive and develop. They must secure sufficient resources from their environment and distribute these within the system. This is termed adaptation. They must mobilize resources for the attainment of system goals and establish priorities among these goals. This is called goal attainment. They must coordinate and adjust relations within the system and hence have mechanisms for integration. Finally, there must be ways of insuring that component actors are sufficiently motivated to play their parts (pattern maintenance), as well as mechanisms devoted to internal tension management. (The entire set of these functional requirements was called the A.G.I.L. scheme). Any item under sociological analysis, it was now suggested, would have to be assessed in terms of its functional contribution to the overall requirements of the system.

Space does not allow extended consideration of other aspects of Parsons's amaz- ingly fertile sociological imagination in works published in the 1960s. I shall limit myself to mentioning his concern with generalized media of exchange, such as money and power, within and between social systems (1963), as well as his explicit

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development of what had always been fairly strong idealistic underpinnings of his thought through the notion of an informational (or cybernetic) hierarchy of control (1970). Parsons now asserted that in the last analysis symbolic processes have primacy over social structural factors. Finally, I can only note that in the 1960s and early 1970s Parsons, who had once rejected Spencer's thought as entirely obsolete, now returned to a Spencerian evolutionary scheme in an attempt to counter those of his critics who had accused him of being unable to offer an explanation of social change. In his Societies. Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives (1966) Parsons now argued that a process of increasing differentiation marked the evolution of all human societies and of particular social systems over time.

Parsons's work became the target of a number of attacks in the 1950s and 1960s (Lockwood 1956, Mills 1959, Coser 1956, Dahrendorf 1958, Gouldner 1970). His critics complained of a built-in bias toward conformity, an absence of concern with social conflict, an inability to perceive the central place of material interests in human affairs, a persistent Panglossian optimism, and disproportionate concern with integration and consensus at the expense of concern with change and instabil- ity. This being an expository essay, these matters cannot be pursued here, but it must be noted that the eclipse of Parsonian thought in the last ten years or so may be due less to these persistent critical onslaughts, important as they were, than to a general shift in concern away from the macrosociological and structural features of Parsonian theory in particular and of structural-functional theory in general.

THE RESURGENCE OF MICROSOCIOLOGICAL AND CONFLICT THEORIES

Homans's shift of analytical attention from the system approach in The Human Group (1950) to a psychological exchange perspective, fully developed in his Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms (1961), was a first intimation of things to come. In the latter work, Homans mounted a full-scale attack on sociological system theories and asserted that a full explanation of human behavior would never become possible on the sociological level, but had to proceed from an accounting for the behavior of individual persons on the psychological plane. Borrowing largely from the partic- ular form of behaviorism developed by his Harvard colleague B. F. Skinner, as well as from utilitarianism and classical economics, Homans argued that self-interest was the universal motive that made the world go around and that men and women, just like Skinnerian pigeons, modified their behavior in terms of positive or negative reinforcement provided by their environment. Homans's social world now consisted of interacting individuals exchanging rewards and punishments. As distinct from the nineteenth-century image of economic man, Homans's incentives to action did not only consist of money or commodities, but also of approval, esteem, love, affection, and other nonmaterialistic or symbolic tokens. Homans's person was seen as a rational calculator of pleasures and pains, forever intent on maximizing returns and minimizing losses. Homans now tended to couch his arguments in terms of chains of deductive reasoning, starting with axioms such as "Men are more likely to perform an activity, the more valuable they perceive the reward of that activity

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to be," and to proceed from there through a series of derivations to explain why in concrete settings particular persons were motivated to adapt their behavior in terms of the incentives and disincentives present in a given social environment.

Homans was attacked as a reductionist by several of his critics, who attempted to show that his deductive schemes tended to be either tautological or ad hoc. They charged, in particular, that he was unable to explain such sociological variables as degree of literacy or level of industrialization with his reductionist scheme. His critics contended that by neglecting the symbol-using nature of the human animal, Homans was incapable of explaining the world of values and norms that largely determined the course of human actions. They further argued that he neglected those aspects of social structural attributes that could not be reduced to individual propensities.

Peter Blau, though clearly much influenced by Homans's work, proceeded in his Exchange and Power in Social Life (1964) to remedy some of the deficiencies of Homans's conceptualizations, and to reconcile them with the structural perspective that had previously dominated his own work and to which he was later to return (Blau 1975).

In the first part of his book Blau follows Homans's lead and develops an elemen- tary model purporting to account for "an exchange of activity, tangible or intangi- ble, and more or less rewarding and costly, between two persons," even though he is more sharply aware than Homans that purely rationalistic economic models of human transactions are inadequate whenever there is no accepted medium of ex- change 3uch as money. He acknowledged that wherever there is no standard mea- sure of value, the notion of exchange must lose much of its precise meaning and may be largely analogic. Blau argued that in addition to money, people find social approval, respect, and compliance with their wishes inherently desirable. Actors compete with one another in order to maximize these rewards and their competitive exchanges always proceed under the assumption that people who can bestow re- wards will receive rewards in their turn. While ideally norms of reciprocity prevail among exchange partners, in fact these norms are systematically infringed, creating imbalances and deprivations that always threaten the smooth operation of social systems. People being differentiated in terms of the resources they possess create power bases through which they may be able to exploit those deprived of such bases. In this part of the book, though following some of Homans's main leads, Blau tones down the latter's emphasis on balance and equilibrium and highlights sources of conflict and contention.

In the second part of his book Blau proceeds to modify considerably the rather bleak Hobbesian model of society that he presented in the first. Abandoning Ho- mans and returning to a macrosociological perspective, Blau shows that processes of institutionalization, value commitment, and normative regulation make it impos- sible to explain the workings of society in reductionist terms. While the first part of the book limited itself to elementary exchanges based on the maximization of advantage or the processes of interpersonal attraction and repulsion, the shared values of the functionalist reenter the scene in the second part and macrosociological issues replace concern with the minutiae of microsociological exchange processes.

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Almost like the return of the previously repressed, the symbolic nature of the human animal and its immersion in a universe of norms and values now come to the fore of analytical attention. It now turns out that human actors may well be moved by adherence to legitimating values, even though this may involve costs in self-interest and the maximization of advantages. Shared values, it turns out, control exchange relations, just like in Durkheim's structural explanation, where contracting individ- uals can proceed in their dealings only within a matrix of previously established norms.

It should be clear that in Blau's work there exists a tension between a theoretical commitment to the primacy of a micro-level exchange model and a concern with the structural explanation of human conduct on the macro-level. In symbolic interac- tionism the structural level of analysis is all but abandoned, and the scene is almost completely occupied by interacting individuals who modify their respective con- ducts regardless of differentiated position in the social structure, sociocultural cli- mates of values and norms, or institutional settings.

My account of symbolic interactionism will be brief, chiefly because this theoreti- cal scheme seems to be based largely on a systematization and elaboration of the intellectual heritage of Mead (and to a lesser extent Dewey and James), whose writings predate the period under consideration. Moreover, symbolic interactionism has, in the main, limited itself to analysis of interpersonal and social-psychological processes. Its major tenents, as formulated by its spiritus rector Herbert Blumer (1969) and his disciples, can be briefly summarized: Human beings act toward social objects mainly in terms of the meaning they attribute to these objects rather than to their intrinsic character. Such meanings are constructed and reconstructed in the process of social interaction. Shaped as they are by the actual or anticipated response of others, human actions cannot be accounted for by background characteristics, prepotent impulses, structural requirements, or external stimuli. Social reality, far from being stable, is the result of ongoing negotiations between mutually involved sets of actors. These actors are always engaged in fluid interpretative, evaluational, and definitional processes so that only strictly inductive procedures can help eluci- date their behavior. Any sociological theory that proceeds deductively or attempts to build nomothetic propositions is bound to founder on the rock of the inevitable particularities and the ever-changing character of human conduct. Hence symbolic interactionism is at bottom an antitheoretical sociological theory that refuses in principle to transcend the peculiar characteristics of social processes in the here and now. It rejects conceptual generalization and abstraction and allows concepts to perform at best a sensitizing function. Since the social world is constructed from interpretative processes arising in transactions between individuals, it is only amena- ble to careful description aided by sensitizing, as opposed to theoretically grounded, concepts. Only by inserting himself or herself imaginatively in the flux of social interchanges between actors by taking the role of others, can the sociological re- searcher make sense of data. Blumer and his co-thinker wish, in fact, to teach a lesson of humility to the sociological theorist, who is seen as incapable of construct- ing enduring, objective, theoretical structures, but who must, in their view, be attentive to the subjective interpretations, the definitions of the situations, and the

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emergent meanings that arise in human interaction and be content with that. Need- less to say, though functionalists have availed themselves of many particular insights provided by Mead and his successors in the elucidation of social-psychological processes, they have rejected, as a kind of scientific Luddism, the extreme idio- graphic and antitheoretical bias inherent in symbolic interactionism. They, as well as other critics, have asserted that this orientation prevents the understanding of social structures and their constraining characteristics or of patterns of human organization such as class hierarchies or power constellations.

It is precisely the analysis of these matters that stands at the forefront of attention of scholars who are said to belong to the "conflict school." I have advisedly used this cautious formulation since some sociologists, including myself, who are often said to belong to that school have rejected such labeling. More generally, it may be said that this "school" has a somewhat protean shape. The term is sometimes simply used as a code word for Marxism, but it also sometimes refers to sociologists who have made contributions to the sociological study of conflict and who have high- lighted the importance of conflict-ridden interaction in society, without, however, claiming that "conflict theory" presents an encompassing theoretical scheme like, say, Ptolemaic astronomy in relation to Copernican. Gluckman (1956) and Coser (1956, 1967) have maintained instead that there can be only one overall sociological theory even though it may consist of various conceptual schemes and sets of partial theories of the middle range considered important for understanding a particular social dimension.

I shall limit myself, therefore, to a fuller presentation of only one "conflict theory", that of Dahrendorf (1958, 1959), because his work does indeed attempt to lay the groundwork for an overall theoretical system sharply at variance with functionalism and with the other theories discussed in this paper. (I shall not consider American Marxist sociology here, since all major contributions in that vein -apart, of course, from the classics-were in fact published after 1965). A critical discussion of my own work can be found in Turner (1974).

Dahrendorf's point of departure is the assertion that all social organizations are in fact based on hierarchies of power in which the powerful are able through various means, among which coercion is central, to extract conformity to their expectations from the less powerful. Power and authority are conceived as scarce resources and the component actors of every society are said to be perpetually engaged in struggles over the distribution of these resources. At times their contentions may be latent or muted, but they are never absent from any social structure. Societies are always in a state of conflict and the interests of some human actors are always opposed to those of others. These interests are not primarily seen in economic terms, as in the Marxian scheme, but rather in terms of contentions over the distribution of power. Conflicts can never be eradicated since every particular solution to a conflict of power creates a new constellation of interests that must give rise to new conflicts. The inexorability of conflicts of interests has as its corollary in Dahrendorf's scheme the assertion that societies are always in flux and that social change is hence a ubiquitous feature of society. An attempt, as in Parsonian theory, to postulate equilibria in societal functioning is rejected. The details of Dahrendorf's work are

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concerned, by way of discussing a variety of intervening structural factors, with specifying conditions that help exacerbate or mute conflicting interactions. Throughout his work he holds firmly to his major contention that though conflicts may be channeled, institutionalized, and shorn of their more violent manifestations, they can never be eradicated from the human scene. Power and authority are, to use a terminology that he would reject, functional prerequisites of any social system and since they must necessarily invite contentions, social conflict, and social change they are, in Dahrendorf's view, the nodal points of any explanations of human affairs.

This is not the place to evaluate Dahrendorf's contributions, though it may be noted that his panconflict imperialism suffers from the same one-sidedness as Par- sons's panconsensus views. It may be asserted with some confidence, however, that his work, together with that of Marxian sociologists and the other so-called conflict theorists, has contributed to growing dissatisfaction with those versions of function- alist theory that clung to equilibrium models and assumed that societies are mainly held together by normative consensus. These authors have highlighted those societal processes where consensus, far from being spontaneously forthcoming, has been achieved through coercion, manipulation, or all those other means that are available to the powerful in their attempt to maintain their domination over the powerless.

Two major outgrowths of symbolic interactionism, the work of Goffman and of the so-called labeling school will not be discussed here. Although their initial formula- tions came during the period under consideration (Goffman 1959, Lemert 1951) they attained their full flowering only after 1965. For the same reasons, ethnome- thodology falls outside my given chronological frame of reference. I shall only remark here that what seems common to these approaches is sustained attention to the point of view of human actors and to their interactive strategies, and a rejection of structuralist or system perspectives. A consideration of theoretical developments in the last ten years, it seems to me, would note a rise of subjectivistic and microsoci- ological perspectives at the expense of concern with objective social structure, although at the end of that period one can already note (Blau 1975, Coser 1975) a resurgence of interest in structural explanations.

CONCLUSION

A balanced assessment of the theoretical trends discussed in this essay will become possible only after considerably more time has elapsed. We are still too closely involved with them to allow such an assessment. Just like young trees that have only begun to bear fruit, their ultimate worth will have to be judged by a generation that is able to evaluate the quality of their products. Some of them, no doubt, will turn out to have been barren, while others will have produced an abundant harvest.

Nevertheless, one conclusion can already be made with some confidence at this point in time. American sociology has come of age during the period under consider- ation. It is no longer mired in the swamp of ad hoc explanations or raw empiricism. No longer content with genuflections before closed theoretical systems, whether homegrown or imported from Europe, American sociology, largely under the im-

SOCIOLOGY FROM CHICAGO DOMINANCE TO 1965 159

pact of the theoretical thought discussed in these pages, is now equipped with a remarkable array of theoretical notions, including those developed in the last ten years, that should allow it in the future to contribute mightily to that major task its founder envisaged for it from the beginning: to provide a reasoned explanation of the social roots of the human predicament.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I wish to record my indebtedness to Mullins's Theories and Theory Groups in Contemporary American Sociology (1973) and to Turner's The Structure of Sociolog- ical Theory (1974). I have profited a great deal, and borrowed quite liberally, from both of these volumes in the present essay.

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