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

XXXII Sarny Friedman
‘schools’ within the disciplines themselves, and examines certain trends aspiring
to ‘greater integration than that achieved by spontaneous intra- or interdisciplinary
co-ordination’ (often to criticize them), he refers, at least by implication,
to well-known theoretical efforts, such, for instance, as that of T. Parsons,
echoes of which will be found in other chapters3.
Section I, in which the various social sciences are considered, opens with Paul
Lazarsfeld’s chapter on sociology. What, then, is sociology, placed as it is in the
forefront of the social sciences? One tradition, firmly rooted in history, by which
its pre-eminence has been proclaimed ever since Saint Simon and Quktelet,
claims it to be the queen of the social sciences. It is, however, rather poign-
ant to find the Quktelet Professor of Sociology at Columbia University writing
with a true scientist’s humility that sociology is a residual science, created
either to supplement other studies of man undertaken through the ages by
political philosophy and the philosophy of history, or to explain phenomena left
aside by certain other sciences, such as economics, as they developed. Sociology,
then as a somewhat feeble joke has it, is defined as the science practiced by
sociologists; its subject-matter is constantly changing and its r61e is to ‘fill
in the blank spots in an intellectual map’. It is worth bearing in mind, none-
theless, that there is a sociological mode of thought, characterized by a way
of raising problems and a methodology torn between the ‘synthetic’ concern
to embrace society as a whole, and the more strictly ‘scientific’ concern to de-
fine sociology’s own particular field. It is this theme of a particular mode of
thought, or more exactly the main avenues open to it, that the author pursues.
He stresses, first and foremost, the considerable contribution made by the
technique of survey analysis to sociology and to the systematization of the
concepts it employs. Developed originally to meet the need to contribute to the
understanding of urgent social problems, in which quantitative treatment was
not, however, excluded (as can be seen from Le Play’s study of budgets), survey
techniques were greatly in vogue in the United States around 1930, growing
meanwhile in refinement. After the war, the codification of the concepts in use
gave rise to the language of variables, or rather of variates having certain nu-
merical properties, to whose development the author himself made a promi-
nent contribution. The idiom is similar to ordinary language, for, ‘just as we
distinguish words and sentences, [in empirical social research] we have variates
and the propositions into which they are combined‘, accounting for both process
and context, that is to say, the structures which represent, for the author, ‘the
influence exerted by broad context variations on the patterns of individual
behaviour’. This variate language naturally leads on to qualitative analysis, as
also to cross-cultural research, the formation of typologies (dealt with in other
chapters of this work) and the macrosociology discussed by Paul Lazarsfeld.
The latter had already been occupying the attention of European sociologists
since the 19th century and the study of major problems (socialism in the USSR,
democracy in Germany, etc.), also came to the fore in the United States after
the war, but it is nowadays more closely circumscribed in time and space, and
makes broader use of factual data. Survey analysis has had an influence in this