Originally published in 1962 by The Bedminster Press.
Published 2002 by Transaction Publishers
Published 2017 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2001037865
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Zetterberg, Hans Lennart, 1927-
Social theory and social practice / Hans L. Zetterberg ; with a new introduction by the author.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-7658-0906-0 (paper: alk. paper)
1. SociologyMethodology. 2. SociologyPhilosophy
3. Knowledge, Sociology of. I. Title.
HM511 .Z48 2001
301.01dc21
2001037865
ISBN 13: 978-0-7658-0906-3 (pbk)
Four Methods and Their Common Categories
The scholarly enterprise rests on four methods. First and foremost is the scientific method: the accepted rules for the development and formalization of academic knowledge. Second, there is publishing and librarianship, i.e. methods of the orderly distribution and storage of this knowledge in scholarly journals, books, and databases. Third, there is pedagogy, or methods to teach this knowledge in a series of lessons, explorations, audiovisual aids, exercises, and tests. Here belongs the task to popularize science for the general public. Fourth, there is practice, which are the methods to apply the academic knowledge to concrete problems. This book deals with the latter. It attempts to specify a methodology for the use of social science in coping with problems in a society. This is a neglected area of serious investigation and teaching. Many social scientists living in democracies naively believe that their science is put to work by popularizing its contents. They hope the public might be aroused so that politicians will take notice and begin to use this knowledge. Social Theory and Social Practice deals with something more akin to the practice in medicine and engineering: straightforward applications of academic knowledge thorough professional consultations. The book was first published in 1962 and sums up experiences from a time when I, a young assistant and associate professor at Columbia University, took my first steps as a sociological consultant in New York City.
In line with Aristotle, who superbly tried all four methods of the scholarly enterprise, we can claim that success comes when all four methods have one aspect in common: a kategoriai. A basic categorical scheme allows a scientist to ask the most profound questions, a librarian to efficiently organize research findings, a teacher to cover an entire field without the bias of omission, and a practitioner to be relevant and effectively search for a solution.
The categories used in this book and sketched on pages 68-69 and 71 in the chapter The Vocabulary of Sociology are the following:
A categorical scheme like this one encourages social scientists to formulate weighty problems. Consider institutional realms and their values (in bold type in the table). If you have a list of them in front of your eyes you can ask some very serious research questions, for example, Machiavellis classic research and consulting problem: when must politics ignore the dictates of religion to be successful? Or, Max Webers classic query: does the Protestant ethic help or hinder the development of rational capitalism? Machiavelli, to be sure, worked without any formal categories. But Weber developed his Wertsphren and Lebens-ordnungenfrom which the categorical scheme in this book is partly adaptedparallel to his empirical work.
A categorical scheme also guides the overseer of databases and libraries in the social sciences in the layout of a basic catalogue. The immense multiplication of research findings and interpretations make such a systematic catalogue essential. It is no longer sufficient in science to order knowledge alphabetically as in an old-fashioned encyclopedia.
A categorical scheme tells a teacher of social science what must be included in a curriculum. In looking at our scheme, he or she sees immediately that religion and art and ethics must never be overlooked in teaching the anatomy of a society. The scheme reveals mercilessly the foolishness in saying all is politics or everything is economy.
The categorical scheme tells practitioners of social science where in society a problem is located so that they do not use the laws of economics to solve, say, a problem of ethics. We cannot use the laws of economics to calculate a welfare measure to the totally senile or to the hopelessly handicapped. We support them out of ethical rather than economic considerations. Nor should practitioners try to use ethics to solve hitches in the workings of the price system. In a market economy there is no just or righteous price, only prices that customers are willing to pay.
Rushing to Resolve A Problem Outside of the Realm
Fallacies made by searching all remedies for a societal problem outside its societal realm are common. The Great Depression of the 1930s provides a telling example.
In the United States of the 1930s there was no lack of nourishment in the soil, no lack of machines in the factories, and no lack of agricultural labor, factory workers, or engineers. But starvation and poverty and general misery spread because important parts of the economic system had collapsed. Mr. Sociology of that time, Robert S. Lynd, the professor who was known inside and outside the universities for his studies of Middletown, looked for a solution. In a book called Knowledge for What? Lynd wrote: For it is the intractability of the human factor, and not our technologies, that has spoiled the American dream; and the social sciences deal with that factor (p. 4). The social sciences had not done their job. They had simply accepted the assumptions about society prevalent in the American capitalist system. This over-ready acceptance of the main assumptions of the going system has been a source of confusion and embarrassment to the social sciences as that system has become highly unmanageable since the World War, and particularly since 1929 (p. 3).
Lynds advice was to abandon the economic theory of the invisible hand and develop a theory of social and political planning. There is no way in which our culture can grow in continued servicability to its people without a large and pervasive extension of planning and control to many areas now left to casual individual initiative (p. 209).
Many agreed, and a new research tradition emerged at Columbia, Lynds university. We received celebrated dissertations on Roosevelts great piece of social engineering, the Tennessee Valley Authority,
