Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

62 P. F. Lazarsfeld
ation of the industrial masses had to be coped with. The great figures of nine-
teenth century sociology aimed at providing answers to the problems created by
the disintegration of the pre-capitalistic pattern.
Whatever picture these authors paint, they all agree that sociology has not
developed around a positive subject matter but as a residual activity, filling in
the blank spots in an intellectual map. The metaphor is not an idle one because
it highlights a feature characteristic of contemporary sociology. Empty spaces
may either be filled or bridged, and indeed the task of the sociologist is often
viewed in two ways, both of which are properly applicable to his work. Some
sociologists look at society as a whole, and in doing so, look for the interrela-
tions between its major parts and institutions : the polity, the economy, spiritual
life, etc. Others are more interested in elements common to all these ‘subsystems’ :
‘choice behavior’, be it of the voter or the consumer, the role of the primary
group, whether in the formation of individual attitudes or in the stability of
large organizations, etc. Aron has remarked that sociology strives to encompass
the whole of society and yet have a specific subject matter parallel to the other
social sciences. The shifting balance of these two tendencies - he calls them
‘synthetic’ versus ‘scientific’ - characterizes the trends prevailing at a certain
time in various countries.
This being so, two procedures seemed inadvisable for the present chapter. A
review of empirical findings would result in an endless catalogue. For the remark
has been made that only hyphenated sociology exists : political, medical, legal,
familial, urban, etc. If concentrating on the major concepts rather than empiri-
cal findings, one would fare no better. Reference groups, roles, stratification,
socialization, etc. are important tools of analysis, but they certainly do not hang
together in a systematic way which would provide a ‘theory of society’.
Out of this unstable history and these diversified activities, one thing emerges:
there now exists a sociological mode of thought, a way of raising problems and
giving explanations that has coalesced into a discipline with new research
techniques and a promising quest for intellectual coherence. By its very nature,
this sociological orientation is not easily codified, though the direction in
which it moves at the moment may be caught. We can scrutinize the topics
which seem to occupy the profession at large, irrespective of specific pursuits.
Unavoidably the selection of these issues will depend upon the judgment of
the author. I have started with a section in which I try to allay a number of
misunderstandings between American sociologists and their colleagues in other
countries. Unfortunately, the multitude of empirical studies published in the
United States arouses little interest from scholars with more humanistic and
philosophical inclinations. This is unjustified if one looks at the methodological
ideas which grew out of a type of empirical social research which for the lack
of a better term I wil call survey research. In this section I shall trace the
history of these activities and the contributions they make to general sociological
thinking. Concrete examples were chosen not because of their particular con-
tent but as good illustrations for the basic conceptual points I am trying to
report.
In Section 11 I remain with empirical work but in a different phase of its