Sociology: A Very Short Introduction Part 2, Sociology: A Very Short Introduction Part 2 english novels online

Long-term, cultural pluralism brought about fundamental changes in the structure of social life and in its psychology. At the societal level, we see an increasing division between the public and the private world. People became increasingly free to do what they liked at home, at leisure, in private. At the same time, toleration was increasingly enforced by procedural rules in the public sphere. Many illustrations of this momentous change can be seen in how we use the term 'discrimination'. In the early nineteenth century it was quite normal for someone who held a powerful public office to use it to promote the interests of his family and friends. Patronage was the key to social advancement. Large landowners who controlled church appointments, for example, were expected to give rich parishes or posts on the staff of cathedrals to their kinsmen or to the sons of other wealthy patrons who could return the favour. Senior army officers and civil servants would appoint their relatives. We would now regard such a system as unfair. Nepotism is no longer a descriptive term; it is an accusation. More than that (and this offers another important insight into the modern world) we would regard such a system as inefficient.

Modern societies take the principles that underlie the industrialization of manufacture and apply them to the organization of people in other spheres. We suppose that any task is best done if we concentrate on the matter in hand and relegate all other considerations. We thus expect that soldiers will be promoted because they show aptitude for the task of soldiering and not because they are the younger sons of generals. We expect that clergy will be appointed because they show appropriate spirituality and not because their families have some 'pull' with the patron of the parish. Admission to higher education is by academic qualifications. Concentration on the task in hand requires us to be 'universalistic'. For example, we suppose that the most efficient and fairest way of allocating government housing is to establish criteria of need (such as number of children and state of present housing) and then allocate houses as they become vacant to those who 'need' them most. When, as was the case in Birmingham in the early ig6os, we discover that local councillors are denying council houses to immigrants, we accuse them of 'discrimination' and we create new sets of rules and procedures to force housing allocation to be put on a rational basis.

Of course, powerful groups do not readily bow to the demands for civil rights and in many arenas we see lengthy cat-and-mouse games. When the United States gave the vote to blacks, many southern states tried to preserve white supremacy by creating requirements of voters (such as literacy tests) that superficially looked fair, in that they applied to everyone, but were actually intended to curb black voting. When, despite this, blacks began to vote in large numbers, electoral districts were drawn up in ways that reduced the effectiveness of the black vote. By creating a large number of low-density white congressional districts and a small number of districts that encompassed very large numbers of blacks, one white vote could be made as influential as three or four black votes. The response of the federal government and the courts was to promote new laws that prevented each new evading tactic.

The progress of civil rights in modern societies has been uneven and halting. For all our legislative efforts on equal opportunities, it remains the case that many groups are systematically disadvantaged. While we have a good record of promoting individual legal and political rights, and of trying to prevent discrimination, we have done less to redress the considerable disparities of power and wealth that flow from social characteristics such as class, gender, and race. Strategies for redistributing wealth or creating real equality of opportunity by giving disadvantaged groups various sorts of 'head start' have usually been defeated by the counter-argument that they infringe the individual rights of those who cannot claim membership of the group that is intended to benefit from 'affirmative action'. None the less, observing that our societies retain certain forms of inequality should not blind us to the extent to which they have abandoned others. Modern societies regard as unjust and inefficient, and seek strenuously to outlaw, discriminatory practices that were entirely acceptable 200 years ago.

To recap, on the one hand, we have the public sphere becoming increasingly free of cultural norms (such as 'promote your cousins'). On the other hand, we have ever-greater freedom for people to exercise their personal preferences. Religious preferences and sexual orientation are now largely matters for individuals. The important point the sociologist would make about these changes, which separates the sociological explanation from that of the idealist philosopher, is that increasing personal freedom and liberty did not come about because any particular person or group thought liberty was a good idea. It was not the sloganeering of the French revolutionaries or black civil-rights activists that made the world as it is. Such social movements merely reinforced changes that were already underway as a necessary accommodation to the forces of modernization. Changes in the economic and political structure required changes in our basic attitudes to people. The division of public from private was a necessary accommodation to increasing social and cultural diversity in a context that assumes all people are at base equal.

That describes the structural response to social fragmentation. There was also a powerful change in the way we hold our beliefs and values. We saw it first in religion, but it spread. When the dominant religious cultures first fragmented, each fraction insisted that it and only it was right, but with increased diversity such conviction became difficult to maintain. The easiest way to do it is to have a theory which both asserts the superiority of one's own views and explains why other peoples have got it wrong. The British missionaries of the nineteenth century developed the notion that God revealed himself in forms appropriate to the social evolution of different races. To the aborigines and Africans he gave animism. To the more developed Arabs he gave Islam. To the southern Europeans he gave Catholicism. But to the northern Europeans (and especially the British) he revealed himself fully by giving them evangelical Protestantism. We can appreciate the rich functionality of this line of thought. It explained why other people were wrong without accusing them of malevolence. It asserted the primacy of British Protestantism. And it justified the civilizing mission of British imperialism. By 'bringing on' these supposedly backward races we would raise them to the point where they were ready for the true religion.

This is one example of the devices that people can use to sustain their own views in the face of alternatives. Another is to suppose that those who disagree with us are in thrall to some evil power. So American fundamentalists of the cold-war era supposed that liberal Christians were either in the pay or the power of Soviet Communism. All of these strategies work best when the dissenters are 'foreign', not our sort of people, which is why the cultural diversity that results from the internal fragmentation of society is so much more threatening than that which comes from outside. When it is our own people - our neighbours, friends, and relatives - who disagree with us, it is less easy to dismiss their views as being of no account. In that situation we are much more likely to change the status and the reach we accord our views. Of course, dogmatism is still common, but, especially as they are expressed in such public forums as the mass media, ideas and beliefs are often handled in a manner that, even if it is not consciously seen in these terms, is in practice relativistic. We handle our failure to agree by supposing that what works for you may not work for me, and vice versa. Values become personalized.

More will be said about relativism in the final chapter. Here I will summarize by saying that the rise of egalitarian individualism has consequences both for the organization of society (in essence increased freedom in private and increased constraint in public) and for the status we accord our ideas and values.

Anomie and social order.

This is a slightly contrived link, but I would like to return to the nature of social order and the causes of crime, and the topic of egalitarianism does feature in what follows. Consider India. Here we have a country with extremes of wealth and poverty. Yet, compared to the United States, there is little crime and comparatively little of the vices we associate with urban social malaise: alcoholism, drug addiction, and suicide.

The core of the explanation is simple and was given in the 1950s by Robert Merton, who took Durkheim's arguments about the link between individual stability and social order and added a radical twist. It is often supposed that the crucial tension in social life is between the individual and the society. Crime and other forms of malaise result from a society insufficiently imposing its values on the minds of its members. Anti-social behaviour results from a lack of socialization. Merton took the rather different view that a tendency to crime and deviance was actually endemic to the modern society.

Naturally, this summary simplifies, but Merton's case was that we can understand a society as two relatively autonomous spheres: culture and social structure. Culture tells us two sorts of things: what we should desire and how we should behave. Structure describes the allocation of power, wealth, and status. The social structures of traditional societies are hierarchical. Some people are rich and powerful; most are impotent and poor. The culture reflects that disparity. Different groups of people are taught to expect very different things from life and to behave in ways appropriate to their station. So what people expect and what they get are in balance. The poor expect to be poor. Hence they accept being poor. In medieval Europe and in Hindu India this profoundly discriminatory system was legitimated by a widely shared religion that promised great rewards in the next life to those who humbly accepted their position in this life. The meek Christian expects to inherit the earth in the next life so long as he does not try to steal it in this. The poor but pious Hindu will be rewarded with a better birth in his next reincarnation.

What puts conflict right at the heart of the modern social system is that culture and social structure are no longer in harmony. The culture is democratic: the goals of material success are offered equally to everyone. The American dream promises that anyone can become President of the United States or at least president of a major corporation. As Andrew Carnegie put it: 'Be a king in your dreams. Say to yourself "My place is at the top."' Merton goes further and suggests that the United States (and here it may differ in degree from many European societies) makes ambition patriotic.

But equality of aspiration is not matched by equality of opportunity. The rhetoric of meritocracy encourages everyone to want the same things, but the reality of a class structure means that many people are denied the chance to attain their goals legitimately. As the social structure does not permit them to remain equally committed to the socially approved goals and to the socially approved means, they must lose faith in one (or both) parts of the value system. Merton suggests that there are five basic ways for individuals to adapt to the tension between goals and means.

Merton's typology of modes of individual adaptation.

To the extent that a society is stable, then conformity will be the most common and widely diffused position. Most people are committed to the goals and to the rules that specify how one attains them. Innovators are committed to the end result but reject the procedural rules. The combination of the relentless emphasis on success and the uneven distribution of the means to achieve it allows many people to feel justified in finding new (and illegal) ways to get on. Denied a realistic chance to become president of General Motors, the young Italian instead aspires to become head of a Mafia family.

The third type of adaptation, ritualism, is interesting. The British socialhistory literature offers many studies of the almost obsessively 'respectable' lower-middle class, and the type is well explored in the early novels of George Orwell. Here we have those people who have no serious prospect of being successful in worldly terms (and indeed are suspicious of too much ambition: that is getting ideas above your station) but who are none the less terrified of falling back into the working class. Dress and language codes become an important device for drawing a clear line between the respectable and the rough. As Merton puts it: 'It is the perspective of the frightened employee, the zealously conformist bureaucrat in the teller's cage of the private banking enterprise or in the front office of the public works enterprise.'

The retreatist response is the least common. In this category fall some of the adaptive activities of 'psychotics, autists, pariahs, outcasts, vagrants, vagabonds, tramps, chronic drunkards and drug addicts'. These are people who have given up on goals and means, or, to use the Australian metaphor, 'gone walkabout'. Finally, Merton adds a fifth response. Rebellion describes the deliberately selective attitude to goals and means of those people who seek to replace the prevailing order by a new world in which merit, effort, and reward are brought into alignment.

As with many other classics of the sociological tradition, Merton's theory of anomie inspired a large body of research that confirmed some elements of the model but cast doubt on others. In particular, scholars have been critical of Merton's expectation that innovation will be most strongly associated with the working class. The idea that disillusionment with the unfairness of a class system will cause those most disadvantaged to seek to enrich themselves by robbery, burglary, theft, and mugging seems plausible, but why then do those who have every opportunity to do well honestly none the less want to do better dishonestly? Why do financiers fiddle their customers? Why do rich businessmen fiddle their taxes? Although Merton does discuss whitecollar crime, his view from the 195os now seem rather naive. As journalists have become less deferential to the rich and powerful, we have learnt a great deal about the workings of power Elites. If we consider just recent American presidencies, we have the scandal of Richard Nixon approving of his officials illegally weakening his opponents' election campaigns and then covering up the crimes; we have Ronald Reagan approving illegal arms sales to provide funds for illegal guerrilla armies in Nicaragua; and we have the very fishy financial dealings of people very close to Bill Clinton. I will avoid the minefield of trying to compare the social costs of the crimes of the rich and the crimes of the poor by saying, minimally, that few of us now share Merton's confidence that innovation is particularly strongly associated with the working class.

None the less, Merton has captured a vital point about modern societies. At the heart of any stable world is a shared belief that things are mostly as they should be. There need not be a dominant ideology that justifies social arrangements in detail and to which everyone enthusiastically subscribes, but there does need to be some sort of moral sense that most people get theirjust deserts. The Hindu notion of karma achieves that perfectly. Because it is built on the principle of repeated reincarnation, it can suppose that, however unfair things look right now, the bad people with good lives must have been good in a previous incarnation. More than that, they will suffer a worse rebirth in the next life as punishment for their acts in this round. Though Christianity is less good at explaining why bad things happen to good people, it offers a restorative mechanism in the notions of heaven and hell. But modern societies are largely secular and our desire for social justice has to be satisfied in this material world.

The egalitarian impulse, which, I have argued, is a central feature of the modern world, challenges the manifest inequalities of life. So long as meritocracy remains more of an aspiration than a reality, those who are encouraged to want a slice of the action but feel themselves denied a fair break will have little compunction about taking what they feel is due to them. The American journalist Studs Terkel once suggested that the motto of the city of Chicago should be 'Where's Mine?'. Two observations may save Merton's theory from the problem of middleclass innovation. First, we can note that experiences and reactions can become diffused and adopted by others outside the social location that most pressingly experiences the frustrations Merton identifies. It may well be that the working class first or most severely appreciates the inequitable nature of the world, but disregard for the law can become widespread. Secondly, we can go back to Durkheim's argument about the boundless nature of human desires (see pp. 20-1). Someone who has everything can still want more, and a culture that puts great stress on worldly success while promoting the rights of the individual over the fate of the community encourages everyone, irrespective of their objective position, to feel relatively deprived.

Postmodernity?

Although scholars differ in the weight they give to different causes in the above account of modernization, there is widespread agreement that industrial societies are fundamentally unlike the agrarian societies that preceded them. For most of the twentieth century, there was a further argument about which features of our world were a consequence of industrialization and which were a feature of the capitalist form of economy in which our industrialization had taken shape. The class structures, gender relations, patterns of religious observation, and crime rates of capitalist democracies were compared with those of the Communist bloc states. The complete collapse of Communism in the i98os ended those debates. The attempt to see which parts of our past were somehow 'essential' and which were accidental has now shifted to comparison between our past and the present development of Third World countries. It is, for example, now possible to understand better our own history when we see how the development of the nation state, representative politics, and industrialization proceed in the very different context of Singapore, Japan, Korea, and China. The existence of such comparators has certainly contributed to the decline of the confidence of Western sociologists of the i95os who believed that the history of the West provided a universal template for modernization.

There has also been an important shift in depictions of the West as many scholars (interestingly often philosophers and social theorists rather than sociologists) have argued that, though the above account of modernization is reasonably accurate for the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we have now moved into another epoch: the postmodern world. Although there are many strands to 'postmodernism' (an art style before it became a social theory), the basic idea is that individual freedom has combined with increased geographical mobility and better communication to create a world in which 'consumers' select elements of culture from a global cafeteria. Economies based on the production and distribution of things have been superseded by economies based on the production and distribution of ideas and images. Idiosyncratic preference, taste, and choice have extended to the degree that it makes little sense to talk of social formations such as class. An obvious illustration can be found in the matter of accents. Before the 1970s there was a clear association in such societies as the British and American between a certain accent and social prestige. Mass-media broadcasters spoke in the accents of the upper classes. It used to be possible to guess the political party of a politician by accent. British Tories spoke like members of the royal family; Labour politicians spoke in the regional tones of the working class. Such typing is now vastly more difficult. Well-educated middleclass children listen to 'gangsta rap' and other musical styles associated with the black poor of the inner cities and borrow vocabulary and accent, as well as borrowing dress and posture styles.

In politics, it is no longer possible to 'read off' people's preferences from their position in the class structure. Instead we find a variety of consciously created interest groups: radical student movements, environmental movements, animal rights campaigns, gay rights groups, and women's groups.

The nation state has become impotent. The globalization of trade and finance has radically reduced the ability of states to control their economies. Modern digital technologies of communication have radically reduced the ability of states to control their citizens. States are becoming increasingly subordinate to supra-national entities such as the European Union.

Even the certainties of birth, sex, and death have been blown away by transplant and reproductive innovations. Genetic engineering has given us the power fundamentally to alter the biological bases of identity. We have now cloned a sheep. We will soon clone people. In the postmodern world, nothing is solid. All is flux.

While there is something in such a description, it is grossly exaggerated. It is always useful to remind the intellectuals of London, Paris, and New York that much of the life in the provinces goes on little changed. Satellite TV might be a novel form of communication, but the soap operas we watch are little different from the novels of Dickens. Cheap international travel is now possible, but it takes as long to cross London now as it did when Sherlock Holmes solved the crimes of Victorian London. The heavy industries of the Ruhr and the Clyde have disappeared, but workers are still organized in trade unions and occupational class still affects people's attitudes, beliefs, and political behaviour. More significantly for the postmodern image of the autonomous consumer, the hard facts of people's lives, their health and longevity, remain heavily determined by class. To give just one example, at the start of the twentieth century working-class boys in London and Glasgow were on average 2.5 inches shorter than their middle-class counterparts. At the end of the century that is still the case. The popularity of divorce and remarriage has made the structure of the modern family more complex than that of its nineteenthcentury predecessor, but the family remains the primary unit of reproduction and socialization and, for most of us, it remains a source of great satisfaction and psychic stability. While technological and social innovations have threatened the family, they have also provided resources for retaining the old habits in new times. Cheap high-speed travel allows us to be further away from each other, but it also allows us to regroup frequently. As we see when states limit trade, set quotas on immigration, and haggle over which will play what part in the 'international community's' response to this or that political crisis, the announcement of the passing of the nation state is, to say the least, premature.

It may well be that the modern societies that have preoccupied sociology were so dependent for their character on industrial manufacturing that a shift to an economy based on technological expertise and exchange will bring about such far-reaching changes to society and culture that we will at the start of the twenty-first century be justified in claiming a new epoch. But at present such designation seems premature and masks the fact that many of the changes heralded as 'post-modern' are only extensions of the features of the modern world that fascinated Marx, Weber, and Durkheim.

Ironic consequences and social policy.

In order to avoid repetition, one very important consequence of the ironic nature of social action has been held over to this point. The key sociological proposition that much of our world is inadvertent and unintended is important, not just for understanding why things do not go as planned but also for understanding why things are as they are. This has serious policy implications, because, if we misunderstand the causes of what concerns us, we misdirect our efforts to change it.

The point can be illustrated by considering the conservative critique of modern sexual liberality. Those who bemoan the decline of the 'traditional' family often blame the proportion of children in day care, juvenile pregnancies, high divorce rates, and, by extension, urban crime and juvenile delinquency on individuals or social-movement organizations that have openly championed easily available contraception, sexual liberation, easier divorce, and alternatives to the nuclear family. Liberal writers from the 'permissive society' of the ig6os are quoted and their opinions are taken to have been effective. That is, the problems are the result of deliberate policies advocated by these bad people. Hence the solutions are to restrain the opportunities for liberals to promote their ideals and for conservatives to become equally vocal in arguing the merits of traditional values.

However, a sociological approach to increasing divorce rates would suggest that, far from being the deliberate outcome of consciously desired ends, they are the unintended consequences of a large number of developments, many of them supported by and enjoyed by the conservatives who bemoan the consequences. Clearly much of the stability of marriage came from its role in allocating property and determining inheritance. When the bulk of resources took the form of heritable private capital, then determining just who was a legitimate heir was a vital matter. When there was a clear division of status so that the male was the head of the household and there was a gender division of roles, then there were good reasons to subordinate personal fulfilment to the stability of the family unit. But industrialization reduced the economic importance of the household as a unit of production and reduced the importance of 'legitimacy' (and with it many of the constraints on sexual activity). The development of contraceptive technology broke the link between sexual fulfilment and reproduction. Increasing individual affluence (and, for those who did not personally prosper, the creation of a welfare state) made it much easier for people not to band together in small units pooling resources and made it easier for us to dissolve those units when we no longer liked them.

Crucial also was the gradual expansion of the notion of egalitarianism. There were many legislative and political battles to be fought before the fundamental idea that all people were much of a muchness was translated into a culture of equal rights for all, but gradually rights were extended from landowners, to rich men, to not so rich men, to all men, and then to women.

The decline in the economic and political functions of the family allowed space for the development of a new justification for the nuclear family: the production of emotional satisfaction. In the 19506 American sociologists such as Talcott Parsons argued that the primary role of the family was to provide warmth and comfort and companionship. The family was to be a place where one recharged one's batteries and indulged in the personal and discriminatory behaviour that was increasingly outlawed in the public sphere. At work we were supposed to be rational and disciplined, to be confined by our roles, and to treat people on the basis of universalistic criteria. But at home we could relax and be ourselves. We could be honest. Worse than that, we were expected to be honest and open, which called into question the hypocrisy that had allowed our forebears to engage in extramarital activity while swearing lifelong fidelity. Concentration on psychological fulfilment places enormous strain on the institution because it raises impossibly high expectations.

A further complication comes from improvements in health. One of the most remarkable achievements of modern industrial capitalism is the increase in life expectancy. What is involved in swearing to love and cherish 'until death do you part' has changed dramatically since i8oo or even igoo. At the start of the twentieth century only 8 per cent of the British population was over 6o years old; by the end, it was over 20 per cent. It may seem a little callous to express it in these terms, but divorce can be seen as the modern equivalent of premature death.

The specific causal connections are complex, but I hope the above is enough to assure us that the decline of the traditional nuclear family had very little to do with the writings of the enemies of the family. Rather than being a cause, it is far more likely that such propaganda was a symptom of the changes already in progress. Changes in the family cannot be separated from changes in the structure of the economy, the expansion of the idea of rights, and increasing affluence. And those are all things that in the main the conservatives who bemoan the death of the family would not wish to have been otherwise.

The policy implication is this. When we concentrate on the individual person choosing a particular course of action, we risk the mistake of supposing that those actions will have the intended consequences. By overlooking the amply-evidenced fact that much action goes astray and that the world turns out as it does not because anyone wants it like that, but because actions engaged in for one purpose have unanticipated consequences, we risk exaggerating our own powers to engineer change. Especially if we can find some group of people who did want that change, we can readily (but mistakenly) suppose it happened because they wanted it and it can be reversed by us wanting something different.

The most florid example of this mistake is the conspiracy theory. The understandable desire to understand the world has lead to a huge and persistent market for simple theories of powerful hidden agents. So the Second World War was not the outcome of a very large number of actions engaged in by a very large number of individuals, groups, and organizations with very different goals; it was caused by the Jews, or the Freemasons, or International Communism, or some other unitary actor. If no this-worldly agent of sufficient potency can be imagined, then one can always invoke aliens. Such conspiracy thinking is actually a misdirected partial understanding of social causation. It rightly supposes that there is more to life than meets the eye and reflects the sense of the powerless that there is an order that is not immediately observable to the untrained eye. But then it reverts to the idea that things occur because someone wanted them like that. It fails to understand unintended consequences and the supra-individual causes of action.

Chapter 5.

The Impostors.

The previous chapters have tried to give some idea of the themes of sociology and the distinctive flavour of the sociological vision of the world. In order to clarify further that vision, this chapter will look briefly at various impostors in the sociology camp and then attempt a summary description of the discipline.

Improvers and utopians.

There is an impression, widespread among our detractors and not unknown within the discipline, that sociology is (or should be) in the business of helping people. This is understandable but it is mistaken. It is understandable because many of the early contributors to the discipline were moved to their studies by a desire to alter the world. Karl Marx was primarily a revolutionary who wished to see unjust and oppressive capitalism replaced by a more humane economic and political structure. Such founders of the British tradition of empirical social research as Seebohm Rowntree and Charles Booth documented poverty because they hoped to shock governments into doing something about it. Sociology in Britain owed a great deal to the London School of Economics, and the close association of that institution with the Webbs (who founded the Fabian Society and were an influence on the early Labour Party) gave much of its work a clearly reformist tone. Some of the founding faculty of the University of Chicago's Sociology Department had been raised in Protestant clergy families, and, though far from being Marxists, they would have heartily agreed with Marx that the point of studying the world was to change it.

However, though the discipline owes much to reformers and many sociologists derive their research interests from moral and political engagement with the world, sociology must be distinguished from social reform. An academic discipline can function only if it is driven by its own concerns and not those of others. Even the most confident advocates of the scientific method recognize the constant interplay of explanation and observation. We need tentative theories before we can know what to observe or how to describe it. For sociologists to collaborate in accumulating a body of knowledge, they need to speak a common language. For example, the comparative class analysis mentioned in the previous chapter is possible only because scholars in different countries use the same models. Furthermore, debates (for example, over the relative merits of Marxist and Weberian views of class) can be rationally advanced only if both sides agree to deal in the same currency. For this reason, only those ideas that are necessary to the task in hand should be allowed to guide our work.

That is easier to say than to ensure. The core ideas of genetics and of Soviet communist philosophy are sufficiently different for us to see their mixing in the Lysenko example as detrimental and distorting intrusion. But the study of social life and the reform of society share concepts, measures, and theories and that makes it especially difficult to avoid contamination. None the less, that has to be our aim. Productive dialogue between sociologists is best served by them making every effort to distinguish between the values necessary to the discipline (such as honesty, clarity, and diligence) and extra-disciplinary concerns that should be laid to one side.

Those of us who teach sociology routinely see the difficulty our students have in distinguishing between a social and a sociological problem.

When asked to choose a topic for their research projects, students almost invariably focus on something bad about the world. They want to 'do something about' the homeless or alcoholism or domestic violence, and the flaccid verb 'to do' is a clear symptom of the confusion between explaining and rectifying.

One way of clarifying the difference is to describe a sociological case study of some feature of the social world that might be widely seen as unacceptable. David Sudnow examined 'plea bargaining' in a California court. Some 8o per cent of cases never come to trial because the defendant agrees to plead guilty, which saves the courts a lot of money. To encourage the defendant to 'cop a plea', some reduction in the charge is usually offered. The supposed perpetrator is given a choice between contesting the case and risking a certain level of punishment or accepting as certain a lower level of punishment.

The California legal code recognizes the notion of a lesser offence. If in committing crime A, a person must also commit crime B and B gets a shorter custodial sentence, then B is the lesser offence. For example, robbery necessarily includes petty theft in the sense that one cannot rob without also committing petty theft. The procedures of the court specify that one cannot charge a person with two or more crimes, one of which is necessarily included in the other. For example, a person cannot be charged with 'homicide' and with the necessarily included lesser offence of 'intent to commit a murder'. The rules also say that the judge cannot instruct a jury to consider, as alternative crimes of which to find the defendant guilty, offences that are not necessarily included in the charged crimes.

Sudnow explains the legal principles governing charges and lesser offences because he wants to make a contrast between the formal rules and what actually happens. For the District Attorney (prosecuting) and the Public Defender (hereafter DA and PD), the interest in charging is quite different from the concerns enshrined in the legal codes. Rather than being concerned with what crimes were actually committed and the procedural rules about inclusion, they are concerned to strike a bargain. In order to persuade the defendant to enter a guilty plea, they need to find a lesser offence that carries a sentence sufficiently lower to seem like a good deal but not so much lower that the DA will feel that the defendant has 'got away with it'.

What Sudnow discovered was that offences were routinely reduced to others that were neither necessarily included nor actually included in the particular commission of the major offence. For example, 'drunkenness' was often reduced to 'disturbing the peace', even if the peace had not actually been disturbed. 'Molesting a minor' was often reduced to 'loitering around a schoolyard', even when the offence had taken place nowhere near a schoolyard. Furthermore, reductions often defied the nature of the original charge. Burglary was often reduced to petty theft, even though petty theft is necessarily included in robbery and robbery is clearly distinguished in law from burglary. Were one to take the legal code seriously, such a reduction would be a nonsense, yet it was routinely used. Why the DA and PD colluded in this defiance of the law is obvious: producing the right outcome was much more important than following the letter of the law.

But how was this practical goal achieved? The answer is that, through lengthy experience, the PD and DA had come to develop knowledge of the typical manner in which offences of given classes are committed, the social characteristics of the persons who regularly commit them, the features of the settings in which they occur, the types of victims often involved, and the like. They had built up a notion of 'normal crimes' based on intensive knowledge of their areas. Over a history of plea bargaining the two sides had developed recipes for successful reductions. Typical 'assaults with a deadly weapon' were reduced to simple assault, 'molesting' to 'loitering around a schoolyard', and so on. Although the recipes were applied to individual defendants, the particularities of each case were of little concern provided the offence fitted into a typical box. It was the class of offence and the typical class of offender that were at issue and the charge sheets were written up in such a way as to guide everyone involved to the correct interpretation. So the harassed defence lawyer, who might typically have only a few minutes to review the case, could quickly see what was required and what would work.

It would be possible to read Sudnow's work as a report on a 'social' problem. The cut-price justice that the system offered could be construed as a major infringement of civil liberties: people are routinely pressed into pleading guilty to crimes that nobody thinks they committed. However, none of that is Sudnow's concern. What he wants to know is not whether the justice routinely doled out by the courts is good or bad, but what it is and how it happens. His point is not to highlight the thing that needs correcting, but to identify the thing that needs explaining. In so doing he offers a well-documented example of the common phenomenon of people developing shared ad hoc typifications that they use to order the raw material for their work in a way that allows them to 'get on with the job'.

A similar theme informed the research of a postgraduate student who was a contemporary of mine at the University of Stirling in the 1970s. She wanted to understand the practical organization of psychiatric nursing and for a number of months she worked 'undercover' in a major Scottish mental institution. She quickly discovered that patients were managed within two quite different frameworks. The consultants classified patients according to formal diagnostic schema and prescribed treatment appropriate to the diagnostic categories. But the nurses, who were responsible for the day-to-day management of the wards, had a much simpler system that reflected their working concerns. They labelled patients as 'wetters' and 'wanderers'. The primary problem with the former was their incontinence; with the latter it was their lack of orientation. The nurses knew that their classificatory system would offend the consultants and the family and friends of the patients, so those terms were used only in private talk between nurses and in the 'backstage areas' such as the tea-room, the canteen, and the nurses' home.

Like Dalton's work on the disjuncture between formal models of organization and the informal organization of the workplace, these examples could be seen as identifying problems, and no doubt particular interest groups will wish to complain about them. But that cannot be a central concern for the sociologist. In setting their agenda, sociologists must be driven by what is sociologically interesting, not what is socially problematic. Erving Goffman's influential work on roles was built on the study of mundane everyday actions, not on the exotic or the especially troublesome. Howard Becker's labelling theory of deviance was the result of what, at the time and from the standpoint of a social reformer, might have seemed like a curious choice of topic. Why study marijuana-smoking jazz musicians when there is serious crime to investigate?

Agendas external to the discipline are an unhelpful distraction. Had Goffman viewed the mental institutions that provided much of the material for Asylums with the perceptions of either the psychiatrists or their critics, he might not have seen the sociological gold dust. Goffman takes a wide variety of trivial and previously unremarked bits of behaviour (such as using crayons as lipstick) and shows that they share a common and important social function: they are devices that patients use to maintain a sense of self-identity in a setting that was designed, for therapeutic purposes, to undermine it. Goffman finds the new meaning in what he observes because he approaches the field as a sociologist. Instead of seeing boarding schools, asylums, monasteries, and army training camps as unrelated places that should be seen as respectively educational, therapeutic, religious, and military, Goffman perceives that they have common sociological features that he expresses through the notion of a 'total institution'. Because he was thinking sociologically, Goff man asked questions of his data that others with different agendas and interests would not have asked.

Partisanship.

The social sciences are particular vulnerable to betrayal of principle because a central premise - one of the strands of the charm bracelet - can, if misunderstood, provide a warrant for partisanship. When we recognize that reality is a human product, a social construction, we weaken the solid link between perception and objective reality and call into question the standing of our own accounts and explanations. We then go further and point out that how people see things owes a lot to their shared interests.

This is not a claim about honesty (though it can be closely related); it is about something more subtle than lying. What distinguishes ideology from dissembling is that ideologists believe. When conservative Christians in the United States claim (let us assume mistakenly) that the high level of teenage pregnancy is a result of atheists banning prayer from public schools, they are not lying. They are being influenced by their shared beliefs into seeing the world in a particular way. When entrepreneurs argue that the extension of labour rights will cost jobs, they are not dissembling. They are giving voice to views they sincerely hold, which happen to coincide with their material interests.

The natural temptation is to see our own views as accurate and the views of others as ideology, but sociology makes that difficult by identifying ideological influences in an ever-greater number of social groups. Two examples come particularly close to home. In the 195os it was common to distinguish professions from other kinds of work by noting that doctors and lawyers, for example, experienced lengthy periods of training in which they acquired expertise, were free from external regulation (only a doctor is able to judge if a colleague has been negligent), could restrict entry to the profession, and enjoyed high levels of reward. A firm line was drawn between the professions and other forms of skilled labour (such as craft engineering) that also tried to limit access and thus improve rewards. When the professions did this, it was justified because they served some higher social good (health and justice). When engineers did it, it was an unwarranted restraint on trade, and in many countries it was outlawed.

Sociological studies quickly punctured the inflated self-image of professionals by showing that, although their advantages were real enough, the justifications offered for them were largely self-serving rhetoric. The lengthy training periods often had more to do with excluding those of the wrong class, race, and gender than with the acquiring of necessary skills. Professional self-regulation had more to do with hiding bad practice from lay scrutiny than with the social good. Professionals seemed as greedy and acquisitive as any other group of workers.

The pretensions of science were also deflated by sociological research that showed that scientists were extremely reluctant to expose their theories to refutation, that the social influence of cliques had a major effect on how new ideas were received, and that there were often no observable differences between the conduct of orthodox and pseudo-science. Far from having a method that guaranteed authority for its results, science looked pretty much like other forms of work. In the first chapter I explained why I think this downgrading of science is grossly exaggerated, but it has become popular in Western social science.

If sociologists undermine the special status of the professions and the sciences, where does that leave their own work? Does it not follow that the profession of social science is itself pervaded by ideology? Even if the discipline has no special ideological interests, most of its practitioners would be influenced by the general racial, gender, and class interests of the white, male bourgeoisie.

One seductive resolution to this conundrum is to abandon all pretence to scientific neutrality. As conventional scholarship provides no way of arbitrating between competing visions, we should take sides on grounds derived from outside the discipline and opt for the fully committed partisan vision. Goals such as accuracy are then replaced by an interest in the consequences of ideas, what Marx called praxis. What matters is not whether an explanation of crime, for example, is coherent and well supported by the available evidence (because plausibility and status as evidence are themselves ideological products), but whether a theory will promote the interests of whatever social group one supports. One brattish criminologist, who had himself made little contribution to the subject, preposterously questioned the work of one of the doyens of American criminology by rhetorically asking what Edwin Sutherland had ever done to promote popular struggles!

Another defence for the scholar as partisan has become popular in the areas of ethnic studies and women's studies. The claim here is not that objectivity is impossible; it is that, even if it were possible, it would hinder the sociological enterprise. In order to explain we must understand. In order to understand we must experience. Only a black person can really understand what it means to be black. Only a woman can understand other women.

One good reason to be suspicious of this argument is that it is not offered even-handedly. We do not find sociologists arguing that only aristocrats can usefully study the aristocracy or that only fascists can study fascism. Such special pleading is offered only by people on their own behalf. Often it has the appearance of being a lazy way of asserting (rather than demonstrating) the superiority of their claims. Clearly, possessing some trait may be useful in understanding others with the same characteristic. I made that point in my general defence of sociology in the first chapter. However, there can be no room in honest scholarship for trump cards.

The idea that one has to belong in order to understand is often made further suspect by the way in which the group to which one should belong is defined. In drawing a line between insiders and outsiders, we have to impute to the group a patently exaggerated (if not downright false) set of common experiences and interests. Obviously, not all women or members of ethnic groups share the same experiences or hold the same values. Margaret Thatcher may have been Britain's first woman Prime Minister, but she was remarkably unsympathetic to what feminists defined as women's interests. Colin Powell was the most senior black person in the United States armed services in the early i99os, but he served under Ronald Reagan, the most conservative president of the twentieth century, and rarely associated himself with racial-minority causes. One response of the partisan intellectual is to expel such people from the honoured group: Thatcher was not really a woman and Powell was an 'Uncle Tom'. The other response is to substitute for the opinions of the real group what that group would have thought had its thinking not been distorted by ideology. The partisans of gender and race assert what their client group should have thought and then claim that as the vantage point from which the world should be viewed.

In defence of value neutrality.

At this point I would like to offer a defence of the ambition of objectivity. The partisans argue that objective social science is impossible because sociologists cannot transcend their own ideologically constrained world-views. If this point is not a statement of faith, it must be treated as a testable proposition. With only a little flippancy, I would note first that the partisans themselves refute their case: ideology blinds others, but they have managed to see above the mists. Unless the partisans can provide a plausible and testable explanation of why they are immune to a disease that infects everyone else, their intellectual good health offers a good reason to doubt the prevalence and severity of the ailment from which the rest of us are supposed to suffer.

A second response is to note that, even if the ideology problem is real in the abstract, it may not be relevant for a lot of sociological research. To continue with the sickness and health metaphor, the illness might not impair all functions equally. To take the example of my own work on loyalist paramilitaries, the facts that I am Scottish rather than Irish and have little personal sympathy for nationalism may bear on some aspects of my studies but have no effect at all on others. To return to the case mentioned in the first chapter, I do not see how any ideological interests would give me a particular slant on the question of how terrorists attain leadership positions.

The argument against objectivity supposes that contaminating bias will distort all one's work. My own experience suggests that many interesting and important questions in sociology simply do not carry the sort of moral, ethical, or political charge that would cause differences in observation and explanation to vary systematically with the social interests of those studying such questions.

Yet, even when they do, we still find sociologists taking up positions that do not appear to have a regular connection with their interests. I offer an example from the sociology of religion. Some sociologists believe that religion has declined markedly in the modern world; others believe that behind the apparent decline is an enduring and fairly constant religiosity. Many sociologists of religion are themselves religious people and have been drawn to the discipline in order better to understand their own faith. So we might expect that the personal values of these commentators would influence how they see the evidence. But the protagonists do not line up as we might expect. Among those who are persuaded by the evidence of secularization, we find two liberal atheists, a Lutheran who was an evangelical in his youth and is now in the mainstream, a former Methodist who is now an ordained Anglican, a conservative atheist who mourns the passing of moral orthodoxy, an official of a major US denomination, and a professor in a conservative Baptist college. Those who believe that modern societies are almost every bit as religious as pre-industrial ones show a similarly broad range of religious positions. Especially when I observe that some of these scholars have changed sides, and that many find quite plausible elements of the arguments presented by their opponents, I conclude that this field at least offers no support for the general claim that interests cannot be transcended. A similar case could be made from the field of political sociology. Again we have scholars studying aspects of the social world in which they are personally involved and again we find no easy match between competing explanations of voting behaviour, for example, and political preferences.

A further response to the partisans is to observe that the quality of a body of scholarship does not depend solely on the personal virtues of scholars. As I noted for natural science (see p. 4), the social organization of the enterprise is also relevant. Sociologists work in a competitive environment that allows the ready exchange of ideas and information. However blinkered I may be, there are others who are keen to prove me wrong. Objectivity does not depend on each of us being severally devoid of extra-disciplinary values; competition and collaboration neutralize the distorting effects of any one scholar's biases.

Finally, I would like to note that it is perfectly sensible to recognize that it is sometimes difficult to transcend one's own beliefs and values and still strive to overcome obstacles to objectivity. As the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz nicely put it, we know that it is impossible to create an entirely germ-free environment, but none the less most of us would rather have a heart operation in a modern operating theatre than in a sewer.

Relativism.

If one response to the problem of ideology is partisanship, another is relativism, which brings me back to the subject of postmodernism. If reality is unknowable, if no objective and accurate account of the social world is possible, then we can do no more than endlessly manufacture partial descriptions of what the world looks like from this or that standpoint. And none of those descriptions is superior to any other. Again what we see here is a complex interaction between aspects of the world as described by sociologists and the way in which some sociologists see their work. Relativism has become particularly popular among disciplines such as media studies and cultural studies that lie on the fringe of sociology, but, like cancer, it has fed secondaries throughout the body of the discipline. Like cancer, it needs to be eradicated if the discipline is to survive.

We can readily understand why relativism is popular in cultural studies. Whether Austen is a better writer than Blyton and Constable a better painter than Picasso is largely a matter of taste. In most societies, the social hierarchy produces a hierarchy of tastes; one particular class decides what is good and bad art. In the Britain of the 195os the expression 'I don't know much about art but I know what I like' was attributed by the smug to the ill-educated lower middle classes as a joke, a way of insulting their lack of expertise. In the 199os it became an expression of high democratic principle. Attempts to preserve a 'canon' of good culture were seen as Elitist folly. To suggest that Austen was a better writer than Blyton came to be seen as snobbery. In many Western democracies (the United States, in particular) attacks on cultural hierarchies took on a particularly bitter tone as they were attacked, not just for class, but also for gender and racial bias. High culture was dismissed as the work of 'dead white males'. While we might have some sympathy with such criticisms in art and literature, they raise the awkward question of just where one draws the line between what is legitimately a matter of personal preference and what is a matter of fact. Those of us who believe in rational thought and the possibility of social science would draw a vital distinction by saying that we can accord everyone the right to believe what they wish and yet still assert that some beliefs are wrong. I fully support the right of people to believe that the world is run by a conspiracy of international Jewish financiers or that the governments of the West are in regular contact with aliens, but I would insist that such beliefs are not well founded.

What the relativist does is expand the area of knowledge that should be seen as matters of personal. preference and hence of legitimate disagreement. The democracy of civil rights becomes a democracy of knowledge and that takes the form of supposing, not that everyone has an equal right of access to knowledge, but that what everyone believes is equally likely to be true.

The case against relativism.

Part of the appeal of relativism lies in its starkness. It is dramatic and clear, whereas the responses often seem mundane and unfocused. Fortunately, that does not stop them being good responses. They will not satisfy those who want simple and arresting formulas, but together they do form a comprehensive refutation of relativism.

One reply was briefly given in the discussion of the claim that class is no longer significant: research consistently shows otherwise. Now it is always possible to argue that this or that pattern of regularities is merely a product of the strategies used to find it. After all, the Zande chicken-poisoning witch doctor would assert that his theories of causation are amply supported by the evidence. But where large numbers of scholars from disparate backgrounds come to the same conclusions, it becomes less easy to suppose that their findings are some sort of collective delusion and more easy to suppose that they are actually making contact with some external realities. That our observations can be persuasive for scholars from a wide variety of cultures suggests that there is a real world out there, which is independent of our beliefs about it, and hence that we can at least aspire to making discoveries about that world that are more than just an expression of our beliefs and preferences.

The point about understanding across cultural and social boundaries is important. If postmodernists are right that no reading, no account, can have any greater validity than any other, then cross-cultural communication would be impossible. The whole notion of translation supposes that we can (at least in theory) distinguish between more and less correct translations. In any particular case, it may not be easy, but the fact (and it is a 'fact') that nation states negotiate treaties, that religious missionaries translate their sacred scriptures into foreign languages, and that, every day, millions of us successfully communicate across class, gender, racial, ethnic, and linguistic borders should be enough to persuade us that the relativist's pessimism is misplaced.

Translation is possible because, for all the anthropological variation, there is much that is common in human experience. One culture may have a strong preference for male offspring while another may treat baby boys and girls alike, but the joys and trials of parenthood are similar the world over. Cultures may differ in the way they like their beef. We used to value fat cattle, now we prefer lean meat. But it is precisely because cattle rearers the world over speak 'the same language' that they can compare the relative merits of lean over fat. For centuries the Masai of East Africa have raised cattle in the most hostile environments and one might suppose that they had little in common with the rich beef farmers of the north-east of Scotland, but the first pedigree herd of Simmental cattle in Africa was founded in 1990 as a result of a collaboration between the Masai and a farmer from Methlick, a small village in Banffshire. They were worlds apart, but they had a common love for cattle and could find a common language for common action.

The difficulty with this sort of rejoinder to relativism is that relativists can refuse to be impressed because they reject the rules of engagement. Like the partisan who dismisses every criticism as mere ideology, the relativist can assert that the very idea of subjecting the claims of relativism to empirical test is based on an approach to knowledge that relativism shows to be mistaken.

The best answer to such blanket refusal to come to terms is to ask if relativists act consistently on their avowed philosophical position. Clearly they do not. Postmodernists write books and lecture; they try to communicate their claims to others. They do so because they believe that they are right and others are wrong. If they took a full-strength dose of their own medicine, they would shut up shop. If no reading is superior to any other, then why destroy trees to announce that to the world? If it is not possible to distinguish truth from error, why do postmodernists argue with those who do not share their views?

Conclusion.

In this short essay it would have been impossible to describe sociology by comprehensively listing the impressive contributions to our understanding of the world that have been produced by the discipline's practitioners. I have tried to make some reference to the major figures and their most significant contributions: Marx and Weber on class; Weber on rationality; Durkheim on anomie; Gehlen on instincts; Merton on the structural causes of crime; Mead and Cooley on socialization; Michels on oligarchy; Parsons on the family; Becker on labelling; and Goffman on roles and total institutions. I have also tried to include enough references to specific sociological studies to give some idea of what sociologists do. However, the text has been designed to present, not a summary, but a sense of sociology.

If sociology is to be anything more than interesting (and not always that interesting) speculation, it has to be empirical. That is, its theories and explanations must be based on sound observations of the real world.

Hence my selection of great names has leant towards those who have combined theory with detailed empirical studies. If it is to be empirical, then sociology must model itself on the natural sciences.

However, in asserting that sociology must be a social science, we must also bear in mind the peculiar disadvantages and advantages that come from the discipline's odd subject matter: we study ourselves. The capacities of reasoning and interpreting that allow us to do more than merely act out our instincts or respond to our physical environment are what allow us to study anything. In turn this means that we cannot hope to treat social action as the symptoms of underlying regularities akin to the laws of the physical world. We have to recognize the socially constructed nature of reality and study those social constructions (of which sociology is itself a particular systematized and refined example). To the partisan and the relativist this is a conundrum to which we can respond only by abandoning study and either taking sides on ideological grounds (the partisan view) or taking all sides or none (the relativist position).

As I have argued, both of these forms of surrender are an unnecessarily pessimistic response. It is certainly not easy to understand the causes of crime or the decline of religion in the West, nor to explain political preferences and educational attainment. But so long as, in our everyday lives, we continue to believe we can work out which buses go to the town centre, which churches offer to hear confessions, which political parties come closest to our preferences, and when our children are lying to us, I see no reason why we should believe that a more systematic examination of such questions on a larger scale is impossible. At various places in the text I have drawn attention to the ways in which sociological explanations differ from common sense: sociology recognizes the socially constructed nature of reality; it identifies the hidden causes of action; it describes the unanticipated consequences of action. But I would also assert that common sense itself provides the best warrant for the possibility of social science. Some of us are better at it than others and we all make mistakes, but everyday, in hundreds of small ways, we attempt to observe, describe, understand, and explain our actions and the actions of others. If we can do it as amateurs, I see no reason why, with greater effort, we cannot do it professionally.