Arthur Brittan - Meanings and Situations

The way in which some practitioners approach their subject-matter may force the cynic into thinking that sociologists spend a great proportion of their creative lives in coining neologisms in order to legitimate their continuous employment as sociologists. This is not an attack on sociological millenarianism as such. Criticisms of this sort usually derive either from humanists who are shocked by the sociologists rape of language, or from natural scientists who believe that science is something that goes on in laboratories. It is not surprising, therefore, that sociologists over-react by an almost obsessive sensitivity to the need for conceptual clarity on one hand, and an irrational ritualistic emulation of appropriate methodological procedures of the natural sciences on the other hand. This leads, inevitably, to a concern with conceptual purity, and eventually to the hope that sociology will eventually aspire to the condition of economics, just as all art is supposed to aspire to the condition of music.

In Britain, this aspiration is illustrated by the way in which sociologists seem unwilling to formulate conceptual schemes without some sort of deference to linguistic philosophy. There is always a metaphorical linguistic philosopher looking over the theorists shoulder before he summons up enough enthusiasm to commit himself to any level of abstraction. The key word is clarity, at least, this is the internalized injunction and ideal. But this lucidity is never achieved, except perhaps in the work of such diverse theorists as Homans and Merton. Also, the traditional British involvement in grass-root empiricism usually means that theory is regarded with an excessive degree of suspicion, particularly when this theory has its origins in dubious continental philosophies or turgid American dogma.

What Glaser and Strauss call the rhetoric of verification is, I think, still the unofficial orthodoxy of the British sociological establishment, in spite of the inroads that other viewpoints have made among younger sociologists. It is still true to say that British sociology has not produced a substantive theoretical perspective of its own. It borrows ideas and concepts from everybody else but for various reasons, particularly those relating to the peculiar status that sociology enjoys