When surgeons step to the operating table, surgical tools of various shapes and sizes surround them. The modern scalpel, forceps, retractors, clamps, needles, probes, laser instruments, and so on result from a long tradition of tool-making innovation. Each tool solves a surgical problem.
The surgeon’s skill is also the product of very old traditions. Behind the surgeon are centuries of accumulated insight combined with the most recent advances in medical knowledge and education. Equally significant is the evolution of hospitals and licensing boards over the past two thousand years or more. Then there is the more recent funding of research facilities. Other social constructions important to medicine include the web of laws and regulations meant to protect against malpractice and the various insurance arrangements that pay for certified procedures. A division of labor between specialized doctors and nurses gives order to the work done. Tens of thousands of hours spent poring over books, listening to lectures, watching videos and live operations as well as practicing procedures have created these persons who tear at the patient’s flesh.
Traditions are not an invention of conservatives bent on turning the clock back to the Middle Ages. They are the very stuff that makes contemporary achievements possible. The reason moderns can see more truth than their predecessors is because moderns are dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants.
Without musical traditions, there would be no jazz, rock, salsa, hymns, or gospel songs. Ancient constitutions and bills of rights structure the democratic traditions out of which contemporary Western public life is woven. Someone invented the words used today. Others reshaped and redefined them and handed them down. Cotton shirts are possible only because different people discovered the qualities of the cotton plant, learned to make thread, figured out how to weave it into cloth. Cultures are living traditions. Without traditions humans would not and could not be human.
Traditionalism is another matter. Traditionalism enshrines past practices and ideas, condemning innovation and change. Yet traditions stay alive only so long as they are mixtures of both continuity and discontinuity with the past. Who would wish medicine to be what it was even fifty years ago? Yet today’s medicine grows out of the medical traditions of fifty (and 250) years ago. As a living practice, it benefits modern humans because it includes both the insights of the past and more recent developments. Remove from it everything developed and learned before the twentieth century, and it would collapse. Yet without the advances of the twentieth century, medicine would stand helpless against conditions that could kill hundreds of millions.
Furthermore, as disease and health matrices change, medicine must change. Doctors and researchers managed to put down measles and tuberculosis with herculean struggles, only to have AIDS appear. What makes change possible are the infinite small changes that have happened in the past, leading up to this or that particular innovation. In other words, innovation is possible because of an accumulating, living tradition. New challenges are what make innovation necessary.
Modernity has often been seen as an acid that dissolves all traditions. This image is not accurate. Modernity does destroy traditionalism (and evokes traditionalist movements of protest).1 It also has the tendency to turn into an ideology of modernism that views affairs as good simply because they are new or recent. Modernism is to modernity what traditionalism is to tradition. Often the ideology of modernism, taken up as a giant hoe to uproot traditionalism, cuts the very roots of the traditions that nourish modernity. The major threads of modernity as a continuing tradition include a number of disparate items. These include liberal democratic political thought, bourgeois individualism, ideologies of progress and enlightenment, values of technological innovation, and universal education.
Traditions are like the tools of the surgeon. People must learn how to use them and discover what they are good for. It is foolish to assume that one instrument will be equally adept at cataract replacement, heart surgery, amputation of a leg, and removal of a polyp from the lower intestines. Similarly, sociology is a living tradition of scientific thought and practice. It organizes explicit theories about social phenomena. For it to be useful, one must learn its practices and knowledge base. How effective is it for dissecting social systems and laying bare the processes of social give-and-take? The sociological tradition contains several streams of thought that differ from each other and that suggest widely variant perspectives on social worlds. These are sociological paradigms.
The year was 1947. Thomas Kuhn was spending the summer preparing lectures on seventeenth-century mechanics for the fall term at Harvard. To set the stage, he traced the subject to its source in Aristotle’s Physics. He puzzled over how such a brilliant mind could be so consistently wrong about the nature of the physical world. What suddenly struck Kuhn was that he was trying to pour Aristotle’s thought into the modern molds of atoms, molecules, and quantum mechanics. How would the physical world appear if one adopted Aristotle’s worldview? One of Aristotle’s key assumptions was that bodies seek the location where they belong according to their nature. Under this perspective, Aristotle’s conclusions that physical bodies have various sorts of spirits made eminent sense. Heavenly bodies rise in accordance with their airlike spirit, while earthly bodies have spirits that cause them to fall.
Matters are puzzling or sensible only within a given set of assumptions about the world. This insight set Kuhn on the path of what he came to call paradigms. Like other humans, scientists negotiate their everyday scientific life-world using a framework of presuppositions that they do not question most of the time. All scientists operate within a sort of intellectual gestalt that influences the perception and understanding of the object of study.
Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, created a sensation when published in 1962.2 He said that people have a distorted image of science. The impression of a gradual, incremental accumulation of certified scientific truth combined with the conception of science as a purely rational enterprise neglects the ways in which scientific inquiry actually happens.
Scientists work within a framework of presuppositions. At a given time in a particular scientific community, there is a dominant or paramount framework that guides scientific work and training. This is what Kuhn called a paradigm. Scientists get attached to their paradigms. Once they use a paradigm for some time, they have difficulty seeing their subject matter in any way other than as the paradigm allows them to see it. When new ideas or even inconvenient data appear, the proclivity is to reject them or explain them away rather than change the paradigm. When scholars change paradigms, it is a time of high drama and a lot of shouting. Scientific traditions do not just develop gradually. Instead, their history is one of scientific revolutions involving the spilling of buckets of intellectual blood.
Kuhn arranges the typical pattern of development of a particular scientific tradition into several stages. First, an area of knowledge is preparadigmatic. During this time, there is little agreement on what the subject matter is or on the sorts of methods to use. Disagreement exists over standards for evaluating attempts to discover and articulate knowledge. Various schools of thought exist, and they do not agree.
Following this is the emergence of a paradigm. This refers to “universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners.”3 A paradigm is a model or standard of scientific achievement in a given discipline. The history of science is a history of the careers of various paradigms. A paradigm guides research during a period of normal science. This is a time of widespread consensus among scientific practitioners on the basic core of their field. This basic core includes the field’s symbolic generalizations (such as laws), metaphysical commitments, values, and exemplars. Exemplars are classic examples within a particular science (perhaps some elegant experiment or piece of reasoning) that typify excellent science.
In physics, the preparadigmatic period was that existing before Isaac Newton. Newtonian mechanics became the first integrating paradigm for physics. After that, until Einstein, mechanics developed as a “mopping-up exercise,” filling in the details and gaps in Newton’s theories. Evolution is the contemporary integrating paradigm for most biologists. Virtually all current work in biology uses and integrates its findings as revisions and extensions of the notions of natural and kin selection.
Because of the consensus within a paradigm during normal science, scientists engage in “puzzle solving.” They fill in the cracks in the paradigm and apply it to new areas. They do not spend much time challenging the paradigm itself or examining its metaphysical commitments. Eventually, the puzzle solving leads to the discovery of discrepancies or anomalies. These are findings that are incompatible with the reigning paradigm.
When these discrepancies are important or frequent enough, the discipline enters a crisis period, which Kuhn calls the time of extraordinary science. Rival paradigms appear as alternatives to the dominant one. These new paradigms are not always accepted. The discrepancies may only be apparent ones, with the old paradigm eventually explaining them. Or the rival paradigm may not offer as good an explanation of other facets of the issue as the old one did. Or it may be unacceptable for other reasons. A scientific revolution occurs when the dominant paradigm is overturned and replaced by a rival. Kuhn speaks of shifting from one paradigm to another as a revolution because the change often appears to be rapid. It happens through the accumulation of younger scholars who accept the new paradigm in the face of resistance from older dominant scholars. As the older scholars pass from the scene, the new paradigm assumes control.
The process is not a neat, rational one in which logic and evidence decisively persuade all experts. Rival paradigms are very different ways of looking at much the same reality and data. Because their assumptions differ and their major concepts have different meanings, Kuhn believes that paradigms are incommensurable. This means that a scholar cannot fully translate his or her paradigm into another’s terms or compare the merits of both against some independent standard. Persuasion to accept a new paradigm is more than a matter of rational discourse and empirical proof. The shift from one dominant paradigm to another is a social and political event, involving the ousting of powerful advocates of the former paradigm. In other words, paradigm change is intellectual “gang warfare.” One way of looking at things prevails until a stronger, younger group of scientists gangs up on the older ones and defeats them.
Scientists convert from one paradigm to another in a way similar to people converting from one religious worldview to another. The shift in outlook is more like a dramatic switch in viewpoint than a gradual process of reasoning through to the truth. This process can be seen in the historic struggles of astronomy coming to accept a heliocentric view of the solar system. Or in the shift from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics. Or in the adoption of evolution by biology. Personal relationships, the prestige and commitment of scholars to the old paradigm, the politics of the community of scientists—all play a role in the switch. In short, the development of a scientific tradition is largely a sociological process. It depends on plausibility structures, commitments to the values of symbolic universes, and a socially enforced consensus about dominant paradigms.
Kuhn does not argue that the process of paradigm change is purely subjective and irrational (though some sociologists and philosophers of science do). Crisis in science happens because discrepancies between paradigms and the investigated reality do occur. Nature does not always fit people’s expectations and paradigm-structured perceptions. Scholars cannot always stuff reality into the categories of a given paradigm. Yet no one can ever know that reality except through the use of paradigms.
One implication is that facts may well fit several paradigms. This leaves unsettled the issues of which paradigm might be closer to the truth or which is a better model of reality. What finally settles the choice between rival paradigms at a given point in time is the plausibility structure of a discipline. It often enforces more agreement and certainty than the actual data and the paradigm warrant.
Kuhn’s scheme emerged from a comparative study of the history of several of the natural sciences. Because of their subject matters and the highly codified quality of their discourse, achieving consensus in a single paradigm marks the emergence of normal science in them. It is a different matter for the less codified sciences such as sociology with its more complex subject matter. That complexity is captured by a comment from Charles Beard: “After all, physics, complex as it may be, is relatively simple as compared to a subject which includes physicists and physics and everything else mankind has ever said and done on earth.”
Sociology is a relatively young science as compared with astronomy or physics. It still has several perspectives that seek to unify the field and show they can make sense of all the “facts.” Some of them create problems for a Christian sociology because they adopt assumptions that seem incompatible with faith. Examples of these assumptions include deterministic views of human behavior, materialistic assumptions about religious realities, relativistic views of knowledge and truth, and reductionist principles that efface the integrity of the human level of phenomena. Many of these assumptions derive from an alliance with the ideology of modernism and scientism. Nevertheless, one must consider every perspective on its own merits, spelling out its assumptions and stating its preferred methodology and data. Only then can one fairly evaluate the conversation of the various sociological schools of thought.
Christian thought must explore and appreciate the valid insights currently spread throughout the full variety of paradigm candidates active in sociology. Depending on one’s point of view, this multiplicity is either a cursed disease (“paradigmitis”) from which more infusions of science are essential as a cure, or it is a necessary feature of sciences that deal with a multifaceted reality—a reality that requires imaging the social world through multiple perspectives (“imaginization”4).
How many paradigm candidates are there in sociology? Depending on the analysis, there are five to a dozen perspectives vying for dominance in research and summaries of what sociology is about.5 Most textbooks boil this diversity down to three heavy-weight contenders as a simplified way of introducing nonprofessionals to sociological paradigms. This book uses a similar threefold division as a simple way of illustrating some of the diversity in sociological traditions. We freely acknowledge that the sociological tradition is much more complex.
Sociological paradigms include several interconnected elements. We suggest as important a paradigm’s philosophical roots, its exemplars and images of the subject matter, and its notions of human nature as well as the nature of society. Paradigms also include images of the nature of science and an account of preferred methodologies. Here, paradigms are taken to be collections of explicit theories that organize the formalized knowledge of a social science. One can often also identify typical sorts of ethical and political concerns that comport well with a specific paradigm. Because a paradigm is a web of interconnected ideas and evaluations, its relationship to Christian faith is never a simple matter. Consider the following paradigm traditions, which stress order, conflict, and diversity.6
Above all else, this tradition says, society is an organic, collective, cohesive reality. What impresses careful observers using this paradigm is the way in which patterns of regular social interaction and interdependent institutions serve underlying social needs.
The most important philosophical roots for this tradition lie in Plato’s Republic and Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. The classical exemplar is the famous French sociologist, Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), especially as represented by his books, Rules of the Sociological Method (1895) and Suicide (1897). Durkheim considered the subject matter of sociology to be “social facts.” Roughly speaking, social facts are large-scale social structures and institutions along with their effects in the consciousness and actions of human actors. Durkheim analyzed as social facts the division of labor, moral customs, the rates of suicide in differing social groups, education, and religious beliefs and practices. Social actors experience a social fact as external to them. At the same time, the social fact exercises a sort of authoritative, obligatory control over their thinking and acting.
Language is a good example of a social fact: it is both outside and inside individuals and precedes a person’s existence. If individuals are to communicate meaningfully with each other, they have no choice but to use the grammar and vocabulary of a language. Language is also representative of the primary forces that hold a society together. These are ideal (as opposed to material) forces; they include values, attitudes, and collectively shared worldviews. These forces are, as Alexis de Tocqueville put it, “habits of the heart.”
Human nature in this perspective is self-interested, individualistic, and competitive. Without checks on inner human passions and urges, a community would disintegrate into hostile, suspicious mobs of warring individuals. What most effectively limits and disciplines human wants is reason. Reason appears either consciously in a social contract in which people voluntarily give up some of their freedom for the control of government, or it works unconsciously through an “invisible hand” in social arrangements that punish people who do not seek the most rational ways to secure their interests.
In this tradition, inequality is natural. People are born with innate differences in gifts, motivation, and capabilities. This shows up in variations in social worth. Because humans are by nature inclined to disorder, strong social bonds are essential. The nature of society is that of interdependent institutions with a supportive set of norms and values that bind people into a cohesive whole. The most common metaphors for this vision of society are those of the living organism and the system. In either case, the images stress the unity of the social whole and the self-correcting functioning of the social organism when its parts properly interrelate. A stable but dynamic equilibrium is created when every part or element contributes to the survival and health of the whole.
This is not to say that the functioning of the social organism is purely automatic. Skilled knowledge and wisdom must be mobilized and used in key decision-making roles. For the sake of the health of a social organism, there must be specialization and division of labor. There must be identification of some positions and people as more important for the survival of the social totality than others. Hence, social inequality is natural, essential, and legitimate since it rewards those with greater social worth with higher power, prestige, and privileges. Such differences motivate the most qualified to take those social roles that are important for sustaining the society.
Social harmony comes from sharing norms and values. Social change is primarily a gradual, evolutionary process. In fact, forced social change represents a grave danger to the restraints on individuals that are essential to healthy and harmonious social organisms.
The practice of sociology in this paradigm is markedly similar to that of the natural sciences. Sociology is systematic, empirical, and quantitative. It seeks predictive power. Social facts are as objective as any other sort of scientific facts. Sensory-based knowledge and rigorous observation lead to quantitative measurements of variables and to the establishing of lawful relationships between them. The ideal is that of positive science: completely objective knowledge, neutral toward all values, concerned only with describing the facts and developing explanatory laws. The preferred methods are the interview questionnaire and the survey. In many ways, this has been and remains the dominant approach of North American sociology.
In this tradition, struggle, warfare, competition, battle, rivalry, and contest are emphasized as central aspects of the human experience. Inequality is not so much the result of natural differences as it is due to the exploitation and repression of one group by another. Look closely, adherents say, and it is clear that the most fundamental reality in society is conflict.
The philosophical roots of this tradition lie in the works of Polybius, Machiavelli, and Hegel. An important exemplar of this paradigm is Karl Marx (1818–1883). The subject matter, as in the order paradigm, is social facts. However, the focus is much more historical and comparative, looking for the dynamics of basic societal changes. Most adherents of this perspective see technology and economic forces as driving and structuring social reality. Material forces are at the center of history. Ideal forces such as law, worldviews, ideology, and shared values derive from and reflect material forces.
Human nature is seen positively, as innately good, creative, cooperative, and sociable. It is inherently perfectible yet distorted and alienated under the conditions of an exploitative, class-divided society. People are naturally rational. Through proper experience and education they can realize their inherent goodness and creativity. They do this primarily by engaging actively in productive physical activities. Effective labor in the material world masters the forces of nature and contributes to the collective welfare. Most people do not experience this sort of existence. Their work activities are boring, alienating, competitive, trivial, mindless, and undertaken only to “make a living.” Because of the conditions imposed by class conflict, work is not an expression of their gifts and freedom but a necessity for survival.
Society embodies structures of institutionalized inequality. The vast differences in wealth, power, and status deny the social nature of human beings. Powerful people exploit racism, sexism, ethnicity, and class differences to deny a fair or just distribution of the goods of this world. This is done so that a small elite group can have more. The result is a social order laden with conflict between groups with opposing interests. What this boils down to is that the rich control the key matters of societal life. The rich are able to exploit the poor because the poor must work at lousy wages in order simply to survive. This sets rich and poor against each other and often sets poor against poor in competition for the few jobs available.
The ongoing conflict over wealth and power drives a constant process of change. Any existing order contains the seeds of its own eventual destruction and the embryo of its successor. A class of revolutionaries is perpetually created in opposition to those in charge. The legitimacy of the status quo is constantly in question. The transition to a society favoring the good and creative nature of humanity comes through overthrowing the present order. Social harmony is only a facade that hides deep divisions between the haves and the have-nots.
In this perspective, science exists to change an alienating world into one that is more rational, just, and inclusive of all its members. Science as purely neutral and objective is an illusion. Science is always used in the service of some social group’s interests. The so-called objective sociology as practiced in the order paradigm is seen as a middle-class, capitalist sociology. It serves capitalist interests, providing a scientific legitimation for a repressive, irrational, alienating, hierarchical, and oppressive world. Marxist sociology would even claim that such sociology does nothing more than show rulers how they can continue to hang onto their control over the weaker classes.
The goal of good science in the conflict paradigm is not universal, abstract laws. What social science discovers are time-specific laws of the movement of history. They are historical laws because social laws change as societies change. The sociological laws of the localized, feudal, agrarian world of the Middle Ages differ from laws governing the capitalist, industrial, internationally connected world of today. The coming revolution and classless society will usher in new sociological laws. These will transform people and social interaction, releasing all the repressed creativity of human nature. Understanding these scientific laws of society removes the illusions and ideologies that hide the cruel reality of repression of the weak by the strong. An authentic social science aims at applied, value-oriented understandings of social phenomena in the service of banishing injustice, alienation, poverty, racism, and sexism. Its methods include those used by the older paradigm with the addition of methods more typically found in history.
The diversity, heterogeneity, and complexity of human social worlds impresses a third sociological paradigm. No single set of forces, groups, or social structures exists in any society; rather, there exists an astounding diversity. Neither order nor conflict is basic in social arrangements. What is fundamental is the human actor, capable of collectively creating many different social worlds and cultures with immense complexity.
The philosophical roots of this paradigm lie in the works of Kant and Nietzsche and in the philosophy of pragmatism. One influential exemplar is Max Weber (1864–1920) with his books, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) and Economy and Society (1922). George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) and Alfred Schutz (1899–1959) are other exemplars. The subject matter of sociology is social action—that is, human behavior structured and motivated by meanings. People interact in terms of meanings that they collectively give to their situations, to the roles they play, and to the symbols they use as they interact. This paradigm focuses its research on the ideas, emotions, values, and life-styles that motivate people to act.
The primary features of human nature in this paradigm are intentionality (goal orientation) and freedom. Human nature is socially constructed out of the patterned meanings and role relationships of the society into which a person is born. However, social conditions do not determine one’s behavior. Even as fully socialized adults, individuals remain purposeful creatures, able to distance themselves from their roles and enact those roles in new, creative ways. A person’s conduct is a reflection of his or her culture and of conscious, contemplated modifications to that culture. What people do is the result of their decisions, including decisions to conform to or change their cultural patterns.
The reciprocal orientation of individuals to each other is what the term society means. People do what they do in part because they can predict how others in society will respond to their behavior, and thus they act accordingly. Social norms teach individuals what to expect from other members of their social groups. The essence of society consists of collectively shared definitions and perceptions of the world. These definitions structure the interaction of teams of human actors carrying out roles embedded in institutions and organizations.
People, however, do not always share the same world of meanings. Society is heterogeneous and diverse. It incorporates different subcultures and interest groups, and this often causes trouble. Even members of the same social group disagree over which life-styles and customary behaviors to validate as legitimate. Pluralists do not assume that society is either structured by a value consensus and equilibrium (the order paradigm) or by a conflict of classes (the conflict paradigm). Society includes both clashing groups (not just classes) and pervasive, unifying subcultures.
This vision of society is profoundly ambivalent, seeing it as an ongoing antagonistic cooperation of groups. The heart of the struggle is over differing definitions of the world and differing life-styles and how to settle claims for power and prestige. In fact, society expresses the profound dualism of the sociability and self-assertion found in human nature itself.
Managing human life through the use of worlds of meaning is crucial to this paradigm. This makes its object of study very different from the objects of physical science. To speak of social facts as one might physical facts is highly misleading. In human cultural worlds, facts are not simply given. They are socially constructed through the meanings that people give to events. These meanings invariably are many and diverse.
Social science must consider the multiple realities of the social world. It not only must explain social action through laws (just as astrophysics explains the movement of the stars) but it must also understand social action by comprehending the meanings and purposes behind it. Hence, its method is interpretative in a way that is similar to the interpretative procedures of the humanities. It is not legitimate to group sociology with either the natural sciences or the humanities. It is a third sort of knowledge, sharing some features in common with the natural sciences and some with the humanities.
The pluralist paradigm begins with individuals and their consciousness. Its research aims at discovering how social actors interpret their world and, through interaction with others, construct stable social worlds. Pluralists often prefer qualitative research over quantitative. This is because they aim at getting inside the meanings and motivations of typical social actors. The paradigm requires that researchers be empathetic, able to see and feel experience as do members of the group they are studying. Preferred methods include participant observation and in-depth interviews, although not to the exclusion of surveys.
Sharing results with the actors investigated is crucial for assessing objectivity in this paradigm. Objective accounts describe the meaningful worlds of social actors well enough so that those actors agree it is a fair characterization. Such an account not only captures their everyday life-world but also reveals the explicit theories and symbolic universes they use to guide and give meaning to the ways they connect to the physical universe, other humans, and God.
Often scientific work in this tradition aims at enhancing the freedom of social actors by clarifying the meanings that structure their interaction. Much research in this tradition focuses on marginal and deviant groups. Most of it seeks to broaden tolerance levels in a pluralistic world and to enhance the participation of marginalized groups in the social constructions of the dominant cultural traditions of a nation. Many anthropologists work within this paradigm. Their research leads naturally into defending smaller tribes and cultural groups threatened by the spread of modernity and the rise of nationalism. In the face of strong pressures for uniformity and conformity to dominant national and world patterns, the pluralist tradition seeks to make room for alternative ways of life.
These three simple examples of sociological paradigms are part of three larger streams of sociopolitical thought. The order paradigm has many affinities with conservatism. It trusts the wisdom of the overall social system to correct itself if left alone. The conflict tradition resonates with radical and revolutionary thought. Its urge is to tear down contemporary sources of inequality and oppression. The pluralist paradigm is an expression of classic liberalism and its vision of reforming contemporary institutions to enhance individual freedoms and protect the weak.
Social science paradigms do not come in tidy packages. Theorists within these traditions actually vary widely in the political deductions drawn from their work. This is only a sketch of general tendencies that illustrate the web of interconnecting matters tied together in sociological reasoning. To be fair, we must say that there are many more paradigms. Further, specific theorists within each of these research traditions often put a particular spin on the paradigm that can result in surprising variations and extensions.
If there is to be conversation between sociology and Christian faith, it will happen only when the various sociological perspectives are taken seriously. Understanding sociology as a family of paradigms, none of which unifies the field, fosters a spirit of freedom and adventure. In looking at any piece of sociological work, one needs to ask:
1. To what general paradigm does this belong?
2. What are its assumptions about the nature of human nature? Are these spelled out or implied?
3. What is its view of the nature of society? What does it see as the relationship between the individual and society?
4. What is its view of the nature of science? What does it see as the goals and possibilities of science in sociology?
5. What methodologies does it prefer? What do these methodologies reveal about social worlds? What do they miss revealing about social worlds?
6. What value orientation stands behind this work? Does it imply or advocate a vision of the moral obligations of social actors? Does it offer some account of a better world than the one currently described?
These few questions, if answered carefully, will clarify the claims made by sociological work. First, one must hear what a paradigm says about a given social world. Only then can it be related to what Christian faith says about human beings and the social worlds they inhabit. When sociological traditions have been understood, then their usefulness in understanding contemporary peoples, cultures, and the social arrangements that structure life on this planet becomes obvious.
One final note: human vision is limited. One can see only what the eyes turn toward. Everything behind one’s head is out of sight. Even with twenty-twenty vision, the human eye can see only a part of the spectrum of light. What is actually seen depends on how close an object is and on what one is paying attention to.
Sociological paradigms are like detailed tourist maps and books, telling novices (and experienced travelers) where the best sights are. Some suggest looking at social worlds up close and personal, spending time with small groups and the tiniest details of interaction between two or three people. Work following this map is called microsociology. It dissects personal interaction and small-group dynamics. Others suggest that the best views of social reality are extensive panoramas, Grand Canyons of time and civilizations within which small groups and details are not even visible. Work along this line is known as macrosociology. The rise of capitalism, the sociology of agrarian civilizations, the analysis of the role of the state in social revolutions—these are the sorts of topics considered in macrosociology.
Our conviction is that these are not either-or directions. The sociological imagination needs the full range of paradigms in order to help people see the marvelous complexities that are present in human social experience. Sometimes one needs to know how great macrostructures and processes of global reach shape human life. At other times, one needs laws dealing with face-to-face interactions within particular organizational settings. It all depends on the goal and purpose of one’s research.
It is also true that a given paradigm, a given methodology, a given researcher, or a given period in the development of the discipline can lead to one-sided perspectives and conclusions. Sight and blindness are often Siamese twins in social science. The next chapter considers a case study in social research, an example of sight and blindness. It demonstrates the limitations of paradigms. It shows how the ideology of the symbolic universe of modernity can influence what is seen and not seen, even by one of the twentieth century’s acknowledged masters of social research.
1. Bruce B. Lawrence, Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt Against the Modern Age (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).
2. Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. enlarged (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
3. Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p. viii.
4. Gareth Morgan, Images of Organization (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1986), pp. 339–344.
5. George Ritzer, in Sociological Theory, 2nd ed. (New York: Knopf, 1988), recognizes at least fourteen. Other schemes with fewer include Don Martindale, The Nature and Types of Sociological Theory, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), and Jonathan H. Turner, The Structure of Sociological Theory, 4th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1986).
6. This section is indebted to William D. Perdue, Sociological Theory: Explanation, Paradigm, and Ideology (Palo Alto, CA: Mayfield Publishing, 1986).