The social world is more complex and heterogeneous than most parts of the natural world, with diverse causal processes, different tempos of change, and multiple influences on a given outcome of interest. If we want to understand, say, why American psychiatry came to have the institutions and prescriptions that it currently has (as Andrew Abbott wants to do in The System of Professions), we need to consider —
- actors at a range of levels (local people, state officials, educational institutions and associations …) who have an interest in the definition of mental-health practices, institutions, and regulations
- the legal and educational context that affects the interests and strategies of various practitioners differently
- the ways in which other professions connected to mental health and behavior (such as nursing or street-level policing) have influenced the development of the profession of psychiatry
… and many other factors and processes that do not yield to the impulse towards simple answers or single-dimensional hypotheses.
So the intellectual process of sociological inquiry and discovery is itself a complex and obscure one. The reader of a rich sociological analysis of a complex institution like Abbott’s treatment of the professions will quickly understand that this research project could not have been drafted out in detail in advance. Rather, the researcher was obliged to discover his or her own questions and insights as they dig more deeply into the specific institutional and practical realities of the profession. And this leads us to ask, what kinds of intellectual and imaginative capacities are invoked in this evolving analysis? To what extent does sociological theory contribute to a researcher’s ability to understand a new and complex social phenomenon? What is involved in applying a “sociological imagination” to a sociological topic?
David Stark’s Practicing Sociology: Tacit Knowledge for the Social Scientific Craft is a contribution to current thinking about methods of inquiry and uses of theory in sociological research. Stark is an organizational sociologist who has devoted a great deal of attention to “how organizations learn”.
The title is deliberately thought-provoking: is the process of investigating the social world a “craft”, or is it a set of precise methods that can be taught in PhD programs? The difference in perspective on this question is important: a craft involves something like “tacit knowledge”, whereas a precise set of methods sounds quite a lot like an algorithm of discovery. Stark’s view, and the view of many of the contributors to the volume, is that there are important aspects of the practice of sociology that are indeed “craft”-like. They are features of the active lives of academic sociologists that need to be learned through concrete practice in the discipline.
Stark’s introduction to the volume lays the ground for the contributions that follow. He argues that important parts of the research process within the social sciences are almost never addressed within graduate education. Three activities in particular are important: the researcher must “(1) come up with a compelling research topic …; (2) develop a publication strategy; and (3) learn how to improve a manuscript while navigating the process of peer review” (p. 1). And Stark suggests that these topics are both crucial to impactful sociological research, and at the same time, substantially under-developed when it comes time to assist young sociologists to make the transition from learners to researchers and creators of knowledge. Stark’s own comments focus on what are somewhat epiphenomenal aspects of the process of research — deciding who your audience is, choosing a title, making productive academic relationships in fields different from your own. Notably, however, Stark’s comments do not connect at all to the problems of deciding how to proceed empirically, how to define the research questions of interest in one’s project, how to decide about the theoretical or explanatory ideas that might be relevant to this topic. And yet these are in fact closest to the problem of conducting innovative, illuminating research on a difficult sociological topic.
The book consists of short commentaries in which a number of established scholars attempt to formulate their own answers to these three questions. And the contributions are excellent, written by highly creative and productive contributors to a range of fields of contemporary sociology.
The book is presented as a series of discussions of how a range of accomplished sociologists have sought to better understand the social world. But that’s not really what we get. Instead, in line with Stark’s emphasis on the “craft” of sociology, the contributors are mostly inclined to reflect on their own practices of writing and publication through an extended career. And this often comes down to mundane questions about choosing a potential publisher (book or journal article), how to respond most productively to feedback on a piece of work, how to decide when an article or book is “finished”, how to balance conference invitations and ongoing work within one’s own well defined research program, and similar pragmatic questions that arise for working academics. But we don’t get much insight into the creative intellectual work in which the sociologist engages. The contributors are themselves imaginative and innovative sociologists; but none of them really addresses the intellectual and imaginative processes involved in sociological research. Rather, we get pragmatic reflections about which kinds of publication venues are best for pursuing tenure at a research university, or how much time to spend on reviewers’ comments on a submitted manuscript.
We could ask whether the figure in the AI-generated image above conformed to any of Stark’s recommendations. And the answer seems to be almost universally “no”. Marx’s titles were unintuitive and unrevealing about the material in his manuscript; he gave virtually no thought to his “audience”; he had little interest in interdisciplinary discovery and collaboration; and Marx’s own published work was only a tiny fraction of his total corpus. He seems not to have thought at all about the pragmatic challenges raised by Stark. And similar comments seem in order for other founders”and early contributors to the scientific discipline of sociology — Tarde, Durkheim, Weber, Simmel, or Merton. Of course there is a bit of “selection bias” here, but these figures all turned out to have great impact within their intellectual worlds.
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