sociology More intimately than any other discipline that investigates the patterns of huma n interaction, sociology is associated

with the advent of modernity, and this for several reasons. First, perhaps the only common denominator of the great number of schools of tho ught and research strategies that claim sociological provenance is their focus on soc iety. This focus may take one of two forms. Some sociologists have taken as their subject t hose structures and processes that can properly be conceived only as the attributes o f a totality (that is, shown not to be reducible to the traits of the individuals or a ssociations whose interlocking and mutually dependent actions form that totality). Others ha ve been concerned rather with the difference that is made to the condition and the condu ct of individuals and groups of individuals by virtue of the fact that they form part of such a totality, called society . But society, understood as the supraindividual, anonymou s, and not immediately visible site of powerful forces that shape individual fates and prompt or constrain individual actions, is a modern creation (distinct both from the polis , the site of articulated intentions, open debate, decision making and explicit legislation, a nd the household, the sphere of free exercise of individual will, both of which are roo ted in premodern history). Within society, actions tend to take the form of conditioned and determined (and thus more or less predictable) modes of conduct, shaped as they are by a constant pressure towards uniformity. But because society is the rule of nobody wi th no fixed address, the mechanisms underlying this conditioning, the source of pressu res towards uniformity, are far from evident. They are not represented in the awaren ess of the actors whose behaviour they shape. They must first be discovered in order to be grasped. Only once statistics had been developed did it become possible to set apart soci ety as an autonomous object of study, as an entity distinct from individual, motivated act ions, since statistics allowed for the uniform representation of a mass of actions, stripped of individuality. Second, another typically modern phenomenon is the constant tension between huma ns uprooted from their traditional and communal settings, transformed into individua ls and cast into the position of autonomous subjects of action, and society , experienced as a daily constraint upon, and ultimately the outer limit to, the action of individu

al will. The paradox is that the modern individual neither can be fully at home and at peace with society, nor can he or she exist (indeed, come into being as an individual) outs ide society. In consequence, the study of society and of the tension between its capacity bot h to constrain and to enable, has been prompted throughout modern history by two dive rse though connected interests, in principle contradictory to each other in their pr actical

The social science encyclopedia 1408 applications and consequences. On the one hand there is an interest in manipulat ing social conditions in such a way as to elicit more uniform behaviour of the kind desired by those in positions of power. The central question here is one of discipline, tha t is of coercing people to behave in certain ways even if they do not share, or even rej ect, the goals set by the designing and controlling agencies. On the other hand, there is an interest in understanding the mechanisms of social regulation so that, ideally, their ena bling capacity can be revealed, allowing people better to resist constraints and press ures towards uniformity. It goes without saying that these two interests are at cross-purposes. One aims to limit the very human freedom that the other is designed to promote. More precisely, th ere is a clash between the two kinds of freedom that the respective interests require, an d in the end they undermine each other. The pursuit of enhanced uniformity is conducted i n the name of improving human control over nature, that is, in the name of a collectiv e freedom to shape the world in conformity with a vision of human needs or human n ature. Yet the objective of controlling nature also inevitably entails the control of h uman nature (in practice, of human individuals), that is, of imposing patterns of conduct wh ich would not necessarily be followed if matters were left to take what we call their natu ral course. The inherent ambivalence of the modern human condition, situated in a society th at simultaneously constrains and enables, was reflected in the self-definition of s ociology as the scientific study of society and of the aspects of human life that derive fro m living in society . Much sociological work has been inspired by a variety of controlling age ncies, which sought precise and efficient instruments for eliciting disciplined and man ageable behaviour. Above all, the modern state had to install and sustain law and order th rough the rational design of an institutional network that would constrain individual life. Theoretical models of society constructed by sociology more often than not prese nted a view from the top, from, as it were, the control room. Society was perceived as an object of social engineering, while social problems were depicted as in the first place p roblems of administration, to be met by legal rules and the redeployment of resources. O n the

other hand, sociology responded willy-nilly to the resentment felt against the o ppression entailed in social engineering, for it inevitably exposed the artificial, arbitr ary, manmade and contrived character of social institutions, which the powers that be claimed were objectively necessary or rational. That is why throughout its history socio logy has attracted criticism from both sides of the political divide. Power-holders will go on accusing sociologists of relativizing the kind of order they are sworn to promot e and defend, and so of undermining their hold over their subjects, and inciting what they see as unrest and subversion. People defending their way of life or their ideals agains t what they experience as oppressive, stifling constraints imposed by resourceful powers are likely to object that sociology serves as a counsellor to their adversaries. The intensity of these charges will in each case reflect not so much the state of sociology as the stat e of social conflict in which, by virtue of the very nature of its work, it is inescapably e nmeshed. Understandably, both sets of adversaries would like to delegitimize the validity of sociological knowledge and to deny its scientific authority. Such assaults make sociologists acutely sensitive about their scientific status. They prompt ever r enewed, yet forever inconclusive attempts to convince both academic opinion and the lay publ ic that the knowledge produced by sociologists, as a result of the application of sociol ogical

Entries 1409 methods, is superior to unaided and freely formed popular opinions, and that it can even claim truth values equivalent to those imputed to the findings of science. The boundaries of sociological discourse The term sociology has been in use since the second quarter of the nineteenth ce ntury, mostly through the influential work of August Comte, who not only coined the nam e for a not-yet-practised area of study but also claimed for the future science the st atus of a generalized and generalizing knowledge of the laws governing the progressive yet orderly development of human society (in his terms, the laws of social dynamics and social statics) knowledge that would be obtained by deploying universally applicab le scientific methods of observation and experiment. When attempts to establish soc iology as a superior source of comment on human experience (as scientific knowledge in general is superior to folk beliefs), and particularly to introduce it as a separate aca demic discipline into a field of study already occupied by subjects that had become es tablished and recognized at an earlier stage, were undertaken in Europe and the USA at the turn of the century, the pioneer sociologists chose to spell out the genuine or putative differences between the subject-matters or approaches of sociology and its older and establi shed competitors. These pioneer sociologists wished to define and fence off an area o f reality that none of the established disciplines had explored, and/or a type of knowledg e that no discipline had hitherto provided. Emile Durkheim, retrospectively acclaimed as one of the founding fathers of soci ology as an academic discipline, followed the French positivist tradition and postulat ed the existence of specifically social facts, which had been left out (and by their ve ry nature could not but be neglected) by other types of human studies, and particularly by psychology, the most obvious competitor for the job of explaining the observed regularities in human conduct. Durkheim postulated the objective status of such social facts, that is their irreducibility in principle to the data of individual, subj ective experience. (By objectivity he meant the assumed independence of social facts fr om the self-consciousness of human actors, and also their power to coerce the conduct o f individuals and to bring them into line should they veer from socially accepted standards.) This necessarily implied that such facts should be treated in the wa

y all respected sciences study their areas of reality: objectively, from the point of view of an external observer, without reference to subjectively experienced states of mind d the motives of the actors.

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At the same time, another founding father of academic sociology, Max Weber, insp ired by the German Geisteswissenschaften and Kulturlehre traditions, attempted to set the new discipline apart by following what was virtually the opposite strategy. Sociolog y was to be distinguished by its approach and interpretative stance, rather than by claim ing that a separate set of facts constituted an exclusive domain for its study. For Max Weber , sociology was distinguished by its attempt to understand human conduct (always a meaningful purposive phenomenon, unlike the behaviour of inanimate bodies that can be explained, but not understood) in terms of the meanings that actors invest in their actions. Unlike the natural-scientific explanation of events with reference to e xternal

The social science encyclopedia 1410 causes, sociological understanding was to be an inside job. What set apart prope rly sociological explanations was that they operated at the level of meaning . To under stand social action one had to postulate the meanings that made sense of the observed conduct. The differences between the disciplines collectively designated as social scienc es (of which sociology is one, alongside psychology, anthropology, political science an d various others) were, however, originally determined by the kinds of questions t hey posed about humans, regarded as social beings, that is, as entities whose conduc t is regular, by and large predictable, and also potentially (given the availability of adequate resources) controllable, and who are for these reasons potential objects of stud y in the sense defined by the strategies of modern science. These questions were in turn dictated by the often practical and policy-oriented interests of the modern state and oth er agencies. Only later were the originally contingent differences reinforced through the pro gressive departmentalization of academic research and teaching, and it was then argued th at each dealt with an allegedly distinct and autonomous aspect of human reality. The core of the discourse of sociology has been relatively well defined by a dis tinctive written tradition, but it has been, and remains, notoriously frayed at the edges , despite the fact that for most of its history it struggled to set itself apart from related academic enterprises, and thus to demarcate the area over which it exercised exclusive so vereignty. The frontiers of sociology are porous, letting in materials formed within other interpretive traditions and other discourses. It is also far from clear (let alone universall y agreed) what sort of propositions belong to sociology proper, and from which sites such proposi tions can be formulated if they are to be accepted as being sociologically relevant. L ittle wonder that there are few, if any, themes, topics, questions or practical intere sts that may be classified as unambiguously and exclusively sociological without their assign ment being contested by other discourses within the humanities or social sciences. Mo reover, as commentators on human experience, sociologists share their subject-matter wit h countless others, not only members of other social scientific communities but al so with novelists, poets, journalists, politicians, religious thinkers and the educated public in

general. There is another reason that sociology has been unable to make the transition fr om the status of a discourse to what Michel Foucault terms a discursive formation. It i s characterized by what Anthony Giddens (1976) describes as a double hermeneutics . The object of sociological commentary is always an already experienced experienc e, filled with meaning, interpreted and narrated even while it is still (for a soci ologist) raw material. Unlike the objects dealt with by the natural sciences, which are not a s a rule part of the daily practice and experience of non-specialists, the objects of the soci ologists hermeneutical efforts are the products of a competent, wide-ranging and incessan t though largely unreflective hermeneutical activity on the part of the lay members of society. Apart from the fact that the data of sociology are in this way secondary or seco nd level, the interpretative operations of the sociologist do not differ in kind from the lay hermeneutic practices that are already embedded in the objects of its study that a re, indeed, responsible for the constitution of these objects. It is not immediately apparent and must therefore be proven that professional sociological interpretations are

Entries 1411 necessarily superior, more credible, trustworthy and otherwise privileged than t he primary, lay meanings that they are intended to improve upon or to replace. Henc e again in striking contrast to the practices of most natural sciences, but in com mon with the experience of many human sciences the clarification of its relationship to com mon sense (that is, lay sense, beliefs that have been denied the status of professio nal knowledge) and intensive methodological self-reflection constitute an integral, and inordinately prominent, aspect of sociological work. The most common strategy of sociologists is to denigrate popularly held opinion, and to cast doubt upon the introspective capacity of actors. However profound the ot her differences between them may be, most schools of thought in sociology agree that the actors hold at best a hazy, at worst a mistaken, image of the true motives and r easons for their conduct, and that they cannot reliably represent the social forces that af fect their lives, for they reason from within the confines of their own, always partial and fragmentary, life experiences. On that view, common sense is incoherent and inte rnally contradictory, vulnerable to distorting influences, and always in need of correc tion. Being mere opinions, popular interpretations should be treated as objects of research and not as a source of true knowledge. This strategy of denigrating common sense is supplem ented by the effort to elaborate methods of data collection and an interpretive method ology that might claim the authority of established scientific procedures, so assuring a de gree of reliability of sociological knowledge to which mere opinions, which are not form ed in a similarly methodical fashion, cannot aspire. The formative interests of sociology The projects of research and teaching that were collected under the name of socio logy in the USA were stimulated by concerns about the turbulence that was caused by r apid industrialization and the massive immigration in the urban areas of the American MidWest in the early twentieth century. These concerns were shared initially by pol iticians, social reformers and religious preachers (the first academic sociologists being drawn from their ranks). The constantly changing social world seemed to be poorly inte grated, the direction of change unconstrained by shared traditions or by self-regulating

communal mechanisms. Consequently the options were apparently wide open, offerin g a perhaps dangerous freedom for social experiment. The social setting, and therefo re also human conduct, seemed to be flexible and pliable available for rational design and for social engineering. In this context, the emerging science of society regarded itse lf as first and foremost an instrument of policy for local governments and social work ers. The policies to be designed with social-scientific inspiration and assistance were i ntended to deal with deviation , abnormality and pathology . In short, they aimed to resolve social problems. Society was seen, indeed, as first and foremost a collection of problems, and the science of society was accordingly asked to deliver a theoretical guide to practical problem solving. A similar practical bias also characterized continental European sociology when, like its North American counterpart, it began to be assimilated into the universities at the end of the nineteenth century. However, the Europeans did not concentrate on problem

The social science encyclopedia 1412 solving. Rather, the emerging social science was intended to enable rational hum an beings to play a conscious part in the large movements of history, movements tha t were believed to exhibit a direction and logic, if one that had yet to be revealed. S ociology would therefore enable people to feel more at home in an unfamiliar world, more in control of their own actions and collectively and obliquely of the conditions under which they were obliged to act. In other words sociology, it was hoped, would di scover the historical tendency of modern society, and modify it. In the place of a spon taneous, elemental, poorly understood process, it would set an orderly, monitored develop ment. It was also widely assumed from the start that not all modern transformations were unambiguously beneficial and desirable. Sociology therefore had to alert the pub lic, at all levels but in particular at the level of the law-makers, to the dangers hidden i n uncontrolled social processes, and it had to propose ways of preventing such und esirable processes from materializing, or to propose ways of repairing the damage. The founders of the new discipline and their successors, whose ideas were later to be absorbed into its canon, agreed on this understanding of the calling of sociolog y, even if they differed in their interpretation of the crucial features and guiding factor s of the historical trends that they all wished to grasp. Comte (1798 1857) identified the moving force of history in the progress of scientific knowledge and, more generally, in the positive spirit . Herbert Spencer (1820 1903) envisaged the passage of modern society from the conflict-ridden military stage to a peaceful industrial stage, where a mu ltitude of products became available for distribution. He foresaw a continuous progress towards the increasing complexity of society, paired with the growing autonomy and differentiation of individuals. Karl Marx (1818 83) expected the progressive contr ol over nature to result eventually in the complete emancipation of society from the con straints of necessity arising from want a redemption from misery and strife, which would put a n end to the alienation of products from their producers and to the transformation of those products into capital deployed to enslave and further expropriate the producers, eventually putting to an end all exploitation. Ferdinand Tnnies (1855 1936) conceiv ed of a historical succession whereby the original Gemeinschaft the natural togethern ess of communities held together by mutual sympathy, solidarity and co-operation would be

replaced in modern times by Gesellschaft a web of partial, purposeful, impersonal and contractual bonds. Emile Durkheim (1855 1917) focused his analysis of historical t rends upon the progressive division of labour and thus the growing complexity of the s ocial whole. He proposed a model of society integrated first by the mechanical solidarit y of similar segments and later by the organic solidarity of functionally differentiate d yet complementary classes and professional groups. Max Weber (1864 1920) represented modernity mainly in terms of an ubiquitous rationalization of all spheres of soc ial life, thought and culture, and the increasing role played by action grounded in the ca lculation of means and ends at the expense of the non-rational or irrational, custom-bound or affective forms of conduct. George Simmel (1859 1918) emphasized the passage from qualitative and differentiated to quantitative and uniform relations, and underl ined the new and growing role played by universalizing and disembedded forces, best exemp lified by the institution of money and by abstract, categorical thought. The appearance of sociology coincided in continental Europe with a wave of optim ism in the creative, life-improving potential and the universal destiny of European

Entries 1413 civilization, which was identified in the public mind with civilization as such. That faith drew inspiration and apparent confirmation from the rapid and unresisted global expansion of European rule and influence. The profusely demonstrated practical superiority of the European way of life seemed to offer the budding social scien ce an uncontroversial model of social development in general, and a standard by which to measure other societies and to anticipate their future development. Then, as lat er, sociology was in tune with the general intellectual mood of the time, sharing th e widespread belief in progress, the expectation of constant improvement, the conv iction that all present or future problems could be solved through the advance of scien ce and technical know-how, if the political will existed, and the expectation that rati onally organized, humane societies would come to dominate the world. Sociology aimed to be a part of this progressive change, through reflecting upon the course history had taken and was likely to take in the future, and thereby supplying the standards by which p ractical measures might be evaluated. The identification of unsolved and potentially dang erous problems, and criticisms of misguided or ineffective ways of handling social pro blems, was seen as an integral constituent of the task of sociology. At the time of the establishment of continental sociology, Britain was the centr e of a worldwide empire. The principle of indirect rule in the colonies presupposed tha t the conquered populations were enclosed and by and large self-reproducing totalities societies in their own right. Evidently different from metropolitan societies, y et viable and retaining their own distinctive traits, they put on the agenda the task of t he comparative study of societies a task undertaken by what came to be known as social anthropology . Until the middle of the twentieth century, social anthropology domi nated social science in Britain, thereby delaying the establishment of academic sociol ogy. The emergence of sociology in Britain coincided with the dismantling of the empire a nd the concomitant concern with the study of Britain itself. The circumstance that soci ology entered public debate in Britain at a time of retreat and retrenchment, rather t han at a time of expansion and optimism, as had been the case in continental Europe and the US A, was to have consequences for the status and public reception of sociology in Britain for a long time to come.

The changing profile of sociology Attempts are often made, misleadingly, to reduce the variegated and open sociolo gical discourse to a succession of clearly demarcated periods, each distinguished by t he dominance, or at least prevalence, of a single paradigm a coherent and circumscrib ed body of interrelated concepts. Yet one can hardly think of sociology as a discur sive formation with boundaries, let along as characterized by the practice of normal s cience in Thomas Kuhn s sense, focused upon a shared paradigm. Always part and parcel of the intellectual life of its time and place, the shifts in the interests of sociolog ical discourse and in the tasks that sociology sets itself reflect more than anything else gene ral cultural changes. By common consent, the second part of the twentieth century has brought the most radical of all shifts to which modern culture has been exposed since its incepti on. The

The social science encyclopedia 1414 most seminal, and the most important of its intellectual consequences, was the c ollapse of the hierarchy of values that had hitherto underpinned modern culture. A new scep ticism became established, that put in question all modern certainties, above all the c onviction that the western type of society represents the form of civilization that will e ventually achieve universal dominion, and that (notwithstanding temporary slow-downs and occasional set-backs) a continuous progress towards a more rational and accident -proof society has already been assured. Closely connected with this crisis of confiden ce has been the retreat of the powers from the project of global domination, as well as the gradual yet relentless fall from grace of the ideal of an all-regulating, ubiqui tous, obsessively legislating state engaged upon great enterprises of social engineeri ng. The most momentous consequence for the shape and status of sociology was the disappearance of the vantage point from which most of the orthodox sociological work had been done: that of the cockpit, or control room, of an administrative centre willing and resourceful enough to treat society as an object that could be closely monit ored and managed, once social processes had been analysed into a series of definable and in principle resolvable problems. To be sure, much of the work done in sociology departments retains the impress of the past of the discipline, when it was susta ined by demands emanating from expanding warfare and welfare bureaucracies. None the les s the overall trend is away from the old ways and towards new cognitive perspectives. Th ere can be no doubt that the nature and tasks of sociological work are now understoo d in a very different way from that taken for granted in the first half of the twentiet h century. To sum up, the focus of sociological interests is shifting from structure to age ncy, from society understood primarily as a set of external constraints that restrict the field of choices available to the members of society, and to a large extent determine the ir behaviour, to social settings that are understood primarily as pools of enabling resources from which the actors draw in order to pursue their own goals. Society is concei ved of less as a self-perpetuating pattern of social positions and functions, more as a n ongoing process, which in its course puts together and dismantles (always temporary) net works of dependency and stages for action. Though the category of society is not likely t o vanish

from sociological discourse, its meaning is undergoing fateful changes. Increasi ngly, the category is used in the sense of sociation (actors entering into or abandoning relationships) or yet more symptomatically in the sense of sociality (meaning the very capacity of actors to sociate). This is arguably the crucial shift: other n ew traits or new emphases that will be listed below, and which set contemporary sociological discourse apart from the received tradition of modern sociology, may be represen ted as its manifestations or consequences. Where once sociology was concerned above all with stability, self-reproduction a nd repetitiveness, and with the ways and means of securing these (the central preoc cupation of the once dominant systems theory of Talcott Parsons and equally of the opponent s of his structural functionalism), attention is moving towards the study of innovati on. It is understood that every action is to an extent a creative act, though it always ta kes account of extant, already meaningful patterns. The emphasis is also shifting away from the search for laws and regularities. These were conceived of as preceding the actio n, affecting its course while themselves remaining unaffected. Actions are no longe r portrayed as determined but rather as contingent, each a unique creation and the refore not

Entries 1415 truly predictable. Doubt is also cast upon the predictive value of statistics. I t is accepted that the most frequent or numerous phenomena will not necessarily represent the trends of the future. In consequence, there seem to be no clearcut criteria by which to anticipate the consequences of events, their impact and durability, and thus to judge their significance. This in turn leads to the erosion of once central, privileged obje cts or areas of sociological study. Since sociologists no longer evoke basic conflicts , main lin ks or steering processes , it is not obvious why certain topics, actors or events ought t o be given priority by the sociologist. The attention of sociologists is accordingly shifting from the control room (fro m issues like the impact of the state, class domination, etc.) to mundane, elementary int eractions, to the grassroots level of social reality, to what actors do to one another and to themselves in the context of face-to-face interaction. Largely under the influence of Alfre d Schtz s argument that the world within reach supplies the archetype for the actors model of all other universes of meaning (Schtz 1982), it is assumed that the essential skills an d knowledge reflectively or unreflectively deployed by the actors in their daily l ife are ultimately responsible for what is perceived in retrospect to be a global, imper sonal trend, or the persistence of objective structures. Once actors were conceived of as knowledgeable and in principle prone to selfmon itoring, the prime task of sociological investigation became the reconstruction of their knowledge. This dramatically alters the role assigned to common sense in sociological discourse. Initially conceived of as alternative, poorly informed a nd essentially false interpretation of social reality (to be criticized, corrected or supplanted) it now becomes the major resource for sociological interpretation. To an unprece dented degree, sociology now assumes a hermeneutical stance. It emphasizes that social realities are intrinsically meaningful (endowed with meaning by the actors who produce the m), and that in consequence to understand those realities one must reconstruct the a ctors meanings. This does not necessarily mean that the sociologist strives to achieve empathy: to discover what is going on in the minds of the actors, to bring to light their conscious motives and explicit goals. Sociologists still tend to deny that the actors are necessarily the best judges of sociological interpretations. But the hermeneutical approach

does mean that explanations or interpretations of social realities must treat the actors a s meaningdriven and meaning-creating, rather than as being pushed and pulled by impersonal, objectively describable forces and constraints. Another intimately related trend is the switch in interest from external coercio n and constraint to the actor s self-construction and self-definition. Actions are meani ngful, actors are knowledgeable, reflecting constantly upon their own identity and moti ves. One might say that if human beings were seen by orthodox sociology as driven primari ly by necessity and as the target of social forces, they tend to be construed now, mor e often than not, as identity-driven and motivated, choosing subjects. The most general trend is to move down the levels of social organization in sear ch of the genuine levers of social actions. Contemporary sociologists accordingly pay particular attention to community at the expense of society (which in modern socio logy was assumed to be, for all practical purposes, identical with the nation-state). For a long time, sociologists believed that community was a relic of pre-modern times, boun d to disappear in the course of modernization. It is now being restored to a central position in

The social science encyclopedia 1416 sociological analysis, and is regarded as and thus of social reality itself. Communities are ion, which is sustained and recreated by the actions of ce of whatever commonality and sharing is to be the point of reference in the process whereby ruct their identities (and so, reciprocally, sustain the ultimate source of actors meanings,

considered to be the bearers of tradit their members; to be the ultimate sour found in the actors meanings; and to be the actors define themselves and const the community). Unlike society , which is

identified with the nation-state, communities have no objective boundaries (that is, boundaries guarded by coercive powers). They are fluid, and the strength of the grip in which they hold their members may vary too (that grip being none other than the intensity of the actors emotional identification with what they conceive as, or i magine to be, community). Sociologists say that communities are imagined. As conceived in contemporary sociology, community is postulated the postulate becoming reality where actions ar e undertaken as if it was a reality. There is therefore a constant interplay betwe en actors and their communities, neither being assigned priority in sociological analysis. Alternative sociologies The perspectival shift in contemporary sociology the new self-awareness that admit s the community-, culture-, time-bound nature of any sociological discourse and bo dy of knowledge is simultaneously responsible for, and a response to, the emergence of alternative sociologies that promote different interpretations of shared social realities. These insist that a plurality of interpretations is inevitable, given the differ ence between the experiential vantage points from which interpretive efforts are launched. To be sure, earlier social theorists sometimes argued that there was an intimate affinity be tween position-related experience and the style and content of sociological knowledge. Most notably, this is true of the Marxist thesis that there is an unbridgeable opposi tion between the bourgeois and proletarian view of society. The novelty consists, first, in an extension of the perspectival principle from two opposing classes to a multitude of categories distinguished by ethnic, gender, or cultural characteristics, and the overt acceptance of the interested nature of each perspective (for each serves the nee ds of a group whose collective experience it claims to articulate, and each is necessary for the integration of the group and the sustenance of group tradition). Moreover, the a

lternative sociologies abandon the claim to objectivity and to exclusive truth, openly admi tting the relativity of any interpretation. However strong the mutual interest (both appro ving and critical) that various alternative sociologies show in the assertions of others, little progress has been made so far towards a genuine synthesis of interpretive standp oints. Given their strategies and their understanding of the nature of sociological wor k, it is legitimate to doubt whether such a synthesis is a realistic objective. More like ly the coexistence of alternative perspectival sociologies will be a lasting (nay const itutive) condition of sociology. Arguably the most prolific and influential among alternative sociologies has bee n born of the new awareness of the specificity of gender-related experience, inspired b y the feminist movement of the second half of the twentieth century. Feminist sociolog y, like

Entries 1417 other alternative sociologies, assumes that all knowledge is socially situated. In other words, it is related in both its subject-matter and its interpretive angle to an experience unique to a specific group or category, distinguished by the content of its life concerns. Mainstream sociology, on this view, has been situated in the essentially male co ntext of the relations of ruling (Smith 1987) in the world of paid labour, politics and forma l organizations. Emerging in this context, and serving it, the mainstream, male so ciology produces rulership texts that masquerade as objective knowledge. They construct an d impose general identities and classifications, and deploy abstract, impersonal a nd anonymous categories that denigrate or exclude from the realm of the significant all real, personal life experience. The assumed objectivity of such knowledge, feminist sociologists aver, is a mere pretence; its allegedly non-partisan viewpoint can be seriously asserted only in so far as male domination itself has been exempted fr om the discourse, while providing its tacit premise. Once that premise is questioned, i t becomes clear that mainstream sociology is but one of the many potential situated sociol ogies one that focuses on a selected part of the social , excluding other parts. In parti cular it leaves out and fails to account for the social world as it is experienced and lived by women. For this reason, a sociology by women and for women needs to be developed to supplement the extant male sociology, and simultaneously to expose its limited s cope, its situatedness, and its unwarranted bid for monopoly, reflecting as it does at the level of theory the practice of male domination. On this view, the part of the social on which the new female sociology must be constructed is the sphere of daily domestic life, childcare, service-oriented ac tivities, in which women s roles are cast and moulded. But female sociology is not set apart on ly by concentrating on a specific, often underplayed area of experience. The different experience of women must also be processed in a new way, steering clear of the m ale inclination to abstract, depersonalize and categorize. Such a sociology should a im to return to the real and the concrete. Women are immersed in the practical context of the everyday/everynight world, the world of the actual and specific, which they neve r leave (at least in their gender-specific capacity). This kind of experience, marginali zed and declared out of court by the dominant sociological discourse, must be granted so

cial significance so that women s lives can be brought back from the margins to which t hey have been exiled to the centre of social life and of the knowledge of the social . The feminist-inspired alternative sociology takes gender as the key differentiator of social situatedness and situated experience. It considers gender to be the const itutive factor of the most consequential social division and social conflict, as well as the basis of the critical dimension of social domination and oppression that is, of patriarchal rule. Other alternative sociologies select their key differentiator differently most oft en from class, ethnic or racial attributes but on the whole they share the assumption that all knowledge of the social is position bound, situated and interested, and treat wi th reserve any claims of unencumbered objectivity, suspecting that behind such claims must lurk a bid for domination, and an apology for oppression.

The social science encyclopedia 1418 Areas of sociological study Sociology is a widely ramifying discipline, subdivided into numerous fields of specialized study, often united quite loosely by little more than shared hermene utic strategies and an ambition to correct common beliefs. The demarcation of these f ields follows quite closely the institutionalized, functional divisions in organized s ociety, answering the effective or assumed demand of the established areas of management . Thus specialized bodies of knowledge have accumulated that focus on deviance and corrective or punitive policies, politics and political institutions, army and w ar, race and ethnicity, marriage and the family, education, the cultural media, information technologies, religion and religious institutions, industry and work, urban livi ng and its problems, health and medicine. Not all specific research interests, however, can be referred unambiguously to administrative demands. The endemic ambivalence of sociology, which can be trace d back to the ambivalent response of the early sociologists to the rationalization project of modernity, manifests itself in the persistence of areas of study that have no di rect administrative application, and are even potentially disruptive from the manager ial point of view. To be sure, the distinction between the potentially stabilizing and des tabilizing, overt or latent intentions and effects of sociological knowledge cuts across the thematic divisions, none of the specialized fields being entirely free from ambivalence. Still, certain areas of sociological thought address themselves more explicitly than ot hers to individuals resisting managerial manipulation and attempting to assert control o ver their own lives. Relevant areas of study include social inequality (whether based on c lass, gender or race), identity-formation, interaction in daily life, intimacy and depersonalization, etc. In contrast to management-oriented areas of study, there is a pronounced tendency to cross-fertilize, to borrow insights, to dismantle boundar ies between different areas of expertise. This is in keeping with the overall strate gic aim of restoring the wholeness of life and personality, which are fragmented and separa ted by institutionalized divisions. Major theoretical influences in contemporary sociology The formative, classic ideas of Marx, Weber, Durkheim or Simmel continue to cons titute the backbone of sociological discourse, providing the reference point for selfid

entification over the wide range of schools and styles between which sociological practice is divided. The classic works are frequently revisited, reread and rein terpreted in the light of changing experiences, interests and priorities. Given the spread of interpretations imposed upon the variety of original classical insights, revival s of classic sources may serve the integration of sociological work or sustain the division b etween different schools of thought. Talcott Parsons s social action and system theory, w hich under the name of structural functionalism dominated the sociological scene in the 1950s and 1960s, was constructed as a (highly idiosyncratic) interpretation of t he classic

Entries 1419 sociological tradition. So was the opposition to Parsons by C.Wright Mills, Ralf Dahrendorf, David Lockwood, John Rex and others which prepared the ground for the eventual replacement of the Parsonian version of sociology by providing new insi ghts into the classical foundations of the discipline. The most seminal of departures that led in the course of the 1970s to widespread criticism and rejection of what Anthony Giddens termed the orthodox consensus was the phenomenological revolution. Initiated by Berger and Luckmann (1966), the revolution was sustained by a spate of radical reformulations of the subject-mat ter and proper strategy of sociological work. The posthumously published work of Alfred Schtz served as the main theoretical inspiration and authority. It prepared the way fo r the influence of the continental philosophies of Husserl and Heidegger, and their hermeneutical applications in the writings of Paul Ricoeur and Hans Gadamer. The effect of the exposure to phenomenology was to shift interest from external, extra-subj ective structural constraints to the interpretation of the subjective experience of act ors; and from the determination to arbitrate between objective truth and prejudiced opinion to the effort to reveal the conditions of knowledge rooted in communally transmitted tradition s. Harold Garfinkel s ethnomethodology (that treated the social as the accomplishment o f knowledgeable actors, in the course of their everyday work) added further impetu s to the reorientation of sociology away from objective systems and structures and towards social agency , self-reflexive, intentional action and its unanticipated consequenc es, a move most emphatically expressed in the work of Anthony Giddens. There has been a greater openness of sociology to developments and fashions in other disciplines, and more generally in other areas of culture. Apart from phenomenology and hermeneut ics, powerful influences have been Adorno and Horkheimer s critical theory, Wittgenstei n s philosophy, Lvi-Strauss s and Barthes s semiotics, Foucault s philosophy of knowledge, Braudel s historiography, Lacan s psychoanalysis and Derrida s deconstruction to name but the most obvious instances. Two other developments should also be noted. First, North American sociology los t the dominant position that it had gained in the years following the Second World War. It has been in retreat at home, due to the diminishing resources of its sponsoring bureaucracies, while its empirical methodology, once the source of its greatest strength and appeal, has found less application in European sociology due to its changed concerns and strategies. Second, there has been a growing interchange between national sociologies, sociological discourse acquiring increasingly a transnational chara

cter. Examples are the worldwide impact of Jrgen Habermas s (1979) communication theory , Niklas Luhmann s revised system theory , Ulrich Beck s (1992) Risikogesellschaft, Frederik Earth s analysis of ethnic boundaries, or Pierre Bour dieu s (1985) notions of cultural capital and habitus . The post-modern controversy Through the works of Charles Jencks, Jean-Franois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Gian ni Vattimo, Alberto Melucci, Michel Maffesoli and other writers, the twin issues of the reassessment of the current trends of modern society and of the aim and function of

The social science encyclopedia 1420 sociological work have moved to the centre of sociologists concerns, expressed in what came to be called the post-modern debate . The nub of the debate concerns the thesis that the modern project has ground to a halt or exhausted itself, being displaced by post-modernity a non-systemic condition of multiple realities, of change without direction, with no prospect of being contr olled. Doubts are voiced as to whether the present condition is so distinctive and nove l as to warrant the description postmodern. Habermas (1979) and Giddens (1993), for inst ance, insist that the features described as postmodern are traits of a late or mature modernity, and that the modernist project is still far from exhausted. Others, however, arg ue that the demise of utopias, of the trust in progress and in historical direction, as well as the collapse of projects to impose universal and uniform cultural standards and stru ctural patterns, testify to a decisive break. Both sides in the debate invoke the concept of the society of risk , originally introduced by Ulrich Beck (1992) and now very generally accepted. One view is th at the modern forces of science and technology have further reinforced their central po sition, since only techno-science can locate, articulate and deal with the new, global r isks. The contrary view is that present-day society is shaped by its responses to the new risks created mostly by past responses to risks previously revealed a process that feeds postmodern fragmentation. With respect to the microsocial level, some maintain that the notorious fluidity of individual identity, the instability of personal relationships, signal the fulfi lment of the long modern development towards individual freedom. The alternative view is that the current human condition is marked above all, in characteristic post-modern fashi on, by the difficulty of holding on to already acquired identities. Finally, another hotly contested issue is the connection between the condition c alled post-modern and the affluence of certain highly developed consumer societies. Doub ts are accordingly raised as to the global significance of the post-modern conditio n. The views adopted as to what are the appropriate strategies for sociology in the new circumstances are closely related to the stands taken in the debate between mode rnists

and post-modernists. Those who argue that contemporary society is increasingly postmodern maintain that sociology ought to take stock of the multiplicity of cu ltures, traditions and forms of life, and thus concentrate its efforts on facilitating c ommunication and understanding between distinct realities rather than continue the search for a unique and universally binding truth, in defiance of communally grounded and traditionbound local, lay knowledge. Those who hold this view are ready to accept that sociolog y is essentially an attempt to replicate, somewhat more systematically, the interpret ive activity in which all members of society are engaged, in the daily activities of sociation. Not everyone, however, is prepared to abandon the modernist ambition of social s cience to provide privileged knowledge, which is bound to expose the frailty of lay bel iefs and eventually to replace them with scientifically grounded, objective truth, and wh ich aspires to co-operate in political and legislative efforts to establish rational structures that will make possible and promote the replacement of lay enterprises with rational, scientific projects. Zygmunt Bauman University of Leeds

Entries 1421 References Berger, P. and Luckmann, T. (1966) The Social Construction of Reality, New York. Giddens, A. (1976) New Rules of Sociological Method: A Positive Critique of Interpretive Sociology, London. Schtz, A. (1982) Life Forms and Meaning Structure, London. Smith, D.E. (1987) The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology , Bos ton, MA. Further reading Bauman, Z. (1991) Intimations of Postmodernity, London. Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, New York. Bourdieu, P. (1985) Languages as Symbolic Power, Oxford. Coser, L.A. and Rosenberg, B. (1985) Sociological Theory: Selected Readings. Fay, B. (1975) Social Theory and Political Practice, London. Giddens, A. (1993) Sociology, Cambridge, UK. Habermas, J. (1979) Communication and the Evolution of Society, Oxford. Heritage, J. (1984) Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology, Oxford. Mestrovic, S.G. (1991) The Coming Fin de Sicle, London. Turner, B.S. (1990) Theories of Postmodernity, New York. Whistler, S. and Lasch, S. (1987) Max Weber: Rationality and Modernity, London.