ISSN:
1573-7853
Quelle:
Springer Online Journal Archives 1860-2000
Thema:
Sociologie
Notizen:
Conclusion William Fielding Ogburn was located on and helped to create the “cutting edge” of developments in twentieth-century American sociology — particularly its increasing emphasis on statistics and objectivist methodology. His life, which spanned the period within which the changes he advocated were institutionalized, can be seen as having significance as a marker of a transition. From this perspective, studying well-chosen individual lives has the same heuristic value as studying particular historical events. They can, to quote Philip Abrams, “mark decisive conjunctions of action and structure;... moments of structuring at which human agency encounters social possibility and can be seen most clearly as simultaneously determined and determining.” Philip Abrams, Historical Sociology, 199. My analysis of Ogburn's advocacy of scientific sociology — one that differentiated science from both emotion and politics — reflected and reinforced his solutions to problematics in his personal life. His “response” to the separate spheres that defined gender relations in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, helped to construct a reflection of them in twentieth-century American sociology. It is in this way — through concrete social action within specific historical conditions — that personal life and gender shaped the intellectual and professional culture within which he lived and worked. Ogburn's life story suggests that action, particularly advocacy, is grounded, at least in part, in a personal agenda, but that personal agendas, just like any others, need to be understood sociologically. Ogburn's “problem” was not idiosyncratic. Indeed, it is because it was shaped by social conditions, rather than uniquely individual ones, that his solutions were more likely to be recognized, accepted, and institutionalized by his mostly male audiences. Tracing these connections within a concrete historical case, within a single biography, demonstrates how personal life is connected to action and, thus, needs to be included in any sociological theory of human agency. Ogburn's life coincided with a set of opportunities that made it possible for sociologists to gain a more prominent place in national affairs and to develop sociological knowledge in a particular direction. This development was, in turn, accompanied by the creation of a language and practice in which the scientific authority of sociology became associated with it being devoid of an appearance of politics and emotion. The emergence of this language and practice, and the beliefs on which they were based, however, cannot be explained solely by the circumstances that fostered them or the career opportunities that they made available. They reflect the practical actions of human agents within historically specific settings. But these agents must be recognized as gendered and the problematic of gendering must be incorporated into the history of American sociology. As Steinmetz has argued, the stories that we tell are important for what we do — and what we do not do — because they structure social consciousness and social action. George Steinmetz, “Chronicles and Narratives in German Working class formation,” paper presented at the 1989 meetings of the Social Science History Association. For a version of the history of sociology in Europe that has some similarity to the story told in this paper, see Wolf Lepenies, Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988), especially chapter 3. But Lepenies also does not make the connection between the history about which he is writing and gender relations, despite their relevance. As long as we write the history of American sociology as an ungendered narrative, we will not only misrepresent that history but we will also limit our capacity to understand and affect changes in it. Differentiation was (and is) a strategy more available to men than women and the norms and organization of professional life that embody that strategy need to be understood not as general but rather as gendered. There is a gender dimension to the history of American sociology to which more attention could usefully be given. Although the impact of political and professional interests has been widely recognized in this history, the impact of personal life in general and gender relations in particular have not been systematically incorporated into accounts of this process. Yet gender relations — and the meanings and actions that are shaped by them — are an important part of the story being told here and an important source of the energy that institutionalizing social change entails. Biography provides access to these personal and gendered dimensions of our professional history in ways that can more adequately acknowledge the complexities of the structuring process.
Materialart:
Digitale Medien
URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF00157324
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