Stinchcombe, Arthur - Disintegrated Disciplines and the Future of Sociology

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Disintegrated Disciplines and the Future of SociologyAuthor(s): Arthur L. StinchcombeSource: Sociological Forum, Vol. 9, No. 2, Special Issue: What's Wrong with Sociology? (Jun.,1994), pp. 279-291Published by: Springer

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Sociological Forum, Vol. 9, No. 2, 1994

Disintegrated Disciplines and the Future ofSociology

Arthur L. Stinchcombel

INTRODUCTION

The basic argumentof this essay is that disintegrateddisciplineswithmany differentand incompatible tandards or what is good worktendto beprecarious n academic ettings.Geography, peechor rhetoric, rganizationalbehavioror management tudies,comparative iterature, ine arts,communi-cation studies,urbanstudies, evolutionarybiology, history,philosophy,andsociology seem to me to have similarproblems n justifying heircontinuedexistence. (A justification or partsof this list of comparablecases, and of

contrastingcases in the argumentbelow, may be extractedfrom Whitley,1984:90-94, 130-148, 155, 158, 168-208.) What is good in them does notdepend on the disciplines' orporate xistence;what is bad in themdiscreditsthe disciplines.

What is essential to a discipline s that it can tell who a leading uni-versity should hire - lesser universities an follow by imitating hem at alower level.Disintegrateddisciplines an sometimessolve the problemsposedby theirbeing brokenup into more or less separablesubpartsby havingastrong orderingof the subparts, o that although they do not agree at the

bottom they can agree at the top. In mathematics his seems to be achievedby the fact that mathematical alent is stronglyordered, so that the greatgeniusesthat fill great departments an do everythinghattheir inferiorscando, and more besides.In economicsand physicsthis seems to be achievedby the dominanceof theorists, speciallymathematicalheorists,over empiri-cal economics and "applied"physics(astronomy, eophysics,physicalchem-

1Department of Sociology, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60208.

279

0884-8971/94/0600-0279$07.00/0 C 1994 Plenum Publishing Corporation







280 Stinchcombe

istry, biophysics, etc.), and then the application of the mathematical talent

principle among theorists to pick the elite that leading universities should

hire.Chemistry seems to solve the disintegration by the division of the

world into "pure substances" (elements and compounds). The convenient

outcome of identifying such pure substances is that facts about a given pure

substance from one chemist can be used by another chemist if they need

a substance with those characteristics. The metric of chemical ability, find-

ing out the most things about the reactions of the most substances, allows

one to determine the academic chemistry elite in a moderately reliable way

that will be recognized across subparts. Perhaps history has a system much

like chemistry in this respect: although a history department hiring a Ren-aissance scholar may not know much about Venice in the 13th century,

they know what good work on 13th-century Venice would look like.

The second crucial thing that a discipline has to be able to do is to

agree on how to teach elementary courses. This involves being able to es-

tablish in the minds of the university community that the elementary course

in (say) chemistry leads to recognizable advanced courses that are also in

chemistry, and will help people to learn the material in those advanced

courses. For example, elementary language courses are obviously connected

to the literature written in that language (especially the poetry where trans-lation does not really work as a substitute) and to the grammar and pho-

netics of that language, so a literary discipline that is split between linguists

and literary historians at the top may be defensible at the bottom. Since

many Americans or French are excluded from being able to teach the ele-

mentary courses in any language but their own, the discipline of literary

analysis of a given literary tradition can defend its turf at the elementary

level even if it has a disintegrated elite.

I argue in this essay is that sociology has a dim future first because

it is unlikely to develop much consensus on who best represents the soci-ologists' sociologist to be hired in elite departments. Second, it has a dim

future because it is unlikely to be able to argue with one voice about what

is "elementary," and how what is elementary is connected to what is first

class, and so unlikely to be able to defend its freshman and sophomore

courses with solid arguments. This will be true even if some leading soci-

ologists will be recognized as clearly elite by many (never all) people from

other disciplines, as for example Pierre Bourdieu or James S. Coleman

would be. And it will still be true even if some sociologists teach elementary

courses that are very popular with students,and some others teach courses

that will be required as elementary by professional schools.







Disintegrated Disciplines and the Future 281

PARTIALLY ORDERED STRATIFICATION SYSTEMS

AND THEIR TROUBLES

Our argument in this section will be that since disintegrated disciplines

have partially ordered stratification systems, any particular department can-

not convince deans that it is elite enough to be suitable for an elite univer-

sity. We can illustrate what we mean by a partially ordered stratification

system by considering three criteria that are central in the stratification of

professors: seniority, personal research performance, and the reputation of

the university. All three of these strongly affect wages and working condi-

tions. But in the nature of the case, the correlation between seniority and

personal research performance is near zero; as one generation succeeds an-other, the average quality does not go down. As a group powerful senior

professors are equal to - half better and half worse than - the people

they judge. This is one of the many sources of "error" in judgment in re-

cruiting people to leading departments. Personal performance is correlated

with prestige of department, but elite departments are by no means homo-

geneous and some of the best people are in obscure places. And that means

that (especially but not exclusively in disintegrated disciplines) many of the

senior professors at leading departments "have not fulfilled their promise,"

and so are mismatched with their high position on criteria of seniority andprestigious department because of recent poor performance on the third

criterion.

The slang of the stratification system reflects this partially ordered

character of the system as a whole. For example, the senior professors in

leading universities who have "not done anything since . . . " are commonly

called "deadwood." Those too distinguished for their age are "too big for

their breeches." One who stays in a less prestigious department than his

or her fame warrants likes to be "a big frog in a small pond." A distin-

guished older researcher in a leading department is "a 600 pound gorilla,"or a "silverback." That two out of the four of these phrases describing

senior distinguished professors assume the professor is male may show that

slang discourse is more accurate than formal discourse.

The salience of the dimensions varies across the structural elements

of the stratification system. For example, it would be outrageous to provide

that only those who had published an annual average of two articles in

refereed journals since their Ph.D. could vote on promotions (because one

did not want high-seniority "deadwood" to have too much influence). But

it is perfectly proper to have senior and junior scholars have equal accessto the journals by blind refereeing. So the seniority rather than the merit







282 Stinchcombe

principle is more salient in voting rights on promotions, merit rather thanseniority on acceptance in the journals.

The salience of seniority, research, and department prestige also var-ies across individuals. There is always someone on the promotion and ten-ure committee who cannot see why we should promote anyone ahead ofschedule; always someone on a recruitment committee who does not seewhy we bother with candidates from departments not in the top five; alwayssomeone who will introduce into foundation policy a provision that peopleunder 40 will be preferred for grants and scholarships (though the behaviorgenerally does not agree with the reversed seniority principle, except whenthat principle is absolutely restrictive, partly because the foundation advi-sory committee are likely to be senior, therefore less convinced that seniorpeople's research is less valuable).

I have introduced the notion of partial ordering with an example thatapplies to all disciplines, in order not to confuse the introduction of theconcept with empirical assertions about why disciplines like speech orrhetoric, organizational behavior or management science, or sociology tendto get into trouble with deans and other allocators of academic resources.

My argument here is that a main reason what I have called disintegrateddisciplines have political trouble in universities is that their disciplinarystratification system has more than the average number of additional cri-

teria besides seniority, distinction, and prestige of department. I hope I havealready given reason to believe that political troubles arise through differentsaliency of the standard stratification principles of all disciplines. Now wewant to extend that suggestion to disciplines that have partial orderings byother criteria than these three, especially multiple standards for judgingresearch.

When salience of these other criteria varies between situations, be-tween people, and between institutions such as grant-giving agencies anduniversities, deans do not know whom to hire in order to be sure that they

remain in, or move up relative to, elite institutions. When they ask for peerreview in disintegrated disciplines with partially ordered stratification sys-tems, they get conflicting opinions. Young scholars in all disciplines whoget more grants than they can manage because their topic is "hot" never-theless cannot get past recruitment committees dominated by senior peoplewho are not working in "hot" areas because there is no standard set ofcriteria for excellence. But this effect is intensified when in addition a suf-ficiently large random sample in the discipline will apply different standardsin evaluating the research.

In more integrated disciplines with more standard criteria for excel-lence, areas that get a lot of grant money because they are important toproduction in the chemical industry (for example) can be discounted on








an agreed basis. Senior people writing evaluations or staffing promotioncommittees can apply more standard measures of originality and funda-

mental character of the research, and can agree not to count industrialusefulness as a criterion.

Since deans are risk averse in hiring or promoting people, when dis-

ciplines disagree within themselves on the criteria for excellence, the re-cruitment process becomes more random. This in turn implies that theaverage distinguished department in a disintegrated discipline (by the na-ture of the regression effects of random error) will have more "deadwood."Distinguished departments will on the average have more senior professorswho retrospectively look like hiring and promotion errors in disintegrated

disciplines. Those few people who, by accident, had nothing damaging intheir personnel file were not actually any better than those who had sometrace of a reason for a negative dean's decision.

In sociology there are different valuations of research, training, pres-tige of departments, and so on. Those who study interaction qualitativelyand those who study populations of individuals quantitatively, or "radicals"who think class and race conflict are a good thing (provided the right side

wins) and "liberals" who think they are a bad thing (provided the poweris properly pluralistically divided), or those who think social processes in alaboratory are much like those in real life and those who think one has to

"get the beauty of it hot" from the field, or those who think sociologicalknowledge should be equally applicable to the 18th centuly as to the mid-20th century and those who think "prediction is the test of science," allwill evaluate training programs and research prestige of departments dif-ferently. All of these differences in values to be applied to the judgmentof work mean that one cannot easily agree on who is elite and what de-partment really has it together in training graduate students. Since ideolo-gies are more powerful in determining people's views of the future thanof the past, even when people agree at a given time that (say) Columbia

University has the most distinguished department in the sociology of sci-ence, they may well disagree about whether the type of training one getsthere will prepare students for where the sociology of science is going.

PARTIAL ORDERING BY INTERESTINGNESS

In addition, the wide variety of substantive subject matter in disinte-grated disciplines, and the strong boundaries around substantive specialties,

means that people cannot get interested in each other's work. The best-established generalizations about the late-marriage pattern of westernEurope in early modern times and its breakdown in the industrial revolu-







284 Stinchcombe

tion among proletarian wage earners, especially in the cities, are "not in-teresting" to someone interested in teenage pregnancy in American central

cities in the 20th century, because they are in different subdisciplines. Eventhe study of 20th-century prison life and prisoners' culture - which is ofcourse disproportionately constituted by the fathers of some of these chil-dren - is not conceived of as relevant because it is in a different "section"of the American Sociological Association. Unfortunately, one shows one isa reputable family sociologist by agreeing to be ignorant of facts that comefrom the 18th century or from criminology.

Of course, that is partly because without consensus on methods, onehas to be an expert on the 18th century in France and Britain, or on prisons,in order to judge whether the facts are good enough to use to judge a

hypothesis about the mechanism of teenage pregnancy in modern centralcities. A biochemist interested in the mechanism of lead poisoning cantransfer knowledge from inorganic chemistry or physical chemistry (abouthow lead behaves) in a way impossible in the contact between historicalsociology or criminology and family sociology.

But the upshot of all this is that "boring" is actually a word heard inthe discourse of evaluation of sociologists. Judgments of "boring" very oftenhave to do not with the quality of the explanation of the facts or the solidityof the facts themselves, but instead with whether the facts are interesting

in themselves. In management science an editor-referee's report on a papercan actually say unashamedly that they reject a paper because they wouldlike the paper to have "more punch" (it happened to me). And a bookreview editor can unashamedly say he or she is asking one to review becausehe or she "wants to get interesting reviews" and not because one is an experton the matter at hand (it happened to me, and I agreed to do the review).

But varying valuations of what facts are "interesting" produces vari-ations in what work is considered excellent, so sciences with wide variations

in criteria of interest have wide variations in evaluations of the importance

of work. Variations among scholars, research granting agencies, and de-partments in the salience of interestingness as a criterion, and about what

facts are interesting if interestingness is salient, mean that it is very difficult

to get agreement on whether a candidate is elite in any moderately het-erogeneous department. And homogeneous departments are hardly everconsidered distinguished. It is difficult to get agreement that, say, Harvardhas an elite sociology department if there happens to be no one there whostudies facts one happens to think interesting.

Much of the variation in interestingness of facts in sociology has todo with their moral value. Because much of sociology is interested in con-temporary facts about things the government and the economy do not have

under control, about "social problems" (if they were under control political








scientists or economists would study them), a disproportionate share of thefacts we study are matters of ideological import, especially facts about what

conservative institutions are to be blamed for.Race and gender differences in earnings are, for example, of aboutthe same size as differences between workers in their late 20s and early30s and those in their late 50s and early 60s. The seniority difference inthe society as a whole is much smaller than the difference between pro-fessors and assistant professors in academic life, so academic life would bea good place to study the question of age discrimination. Most people inthe society have no particular moral or ideological objection to senioritydiscrimination, but find racial and gender discrimination morally objection-able. One result is that we have almost no studies of how much of theextra reward for older people is discrimination, not explainable by the mer-its of the aged, but very many about how much of the gender and racedifference is discrimination.

But more important for our problem here, it would be very difficultto appoint a person who did a brilliant job of statistically sorting out theseniority effect (into discrimination vs. merit) if the leading competitor haddone a moderately good job on sorting out the gender or racial difference.The facts the former had found and explained would be of very little moralor ideological interest, and so would be boring.

Thus, adding multiple criteria for the epistemnologicalvalue of socio-logical academic work, and further multiple criteria for the ideological andmoral value of the facts explained at an equal level of epistemological ex-cellence, to the standard three of seniority, research, and departmentalprestige, create problems because they make the judgment task difficult.But I argue that they create trouble as well because the salience of thosecriteria varies among judges, among departments, among institutional are-nas. That means that those who get lots of grants are not necessarily highlyevaluated by people who read their papers; that people on a recruitment

committee who have never written about any country but the United Statescan complain that sinologists only write about China; that someone whoanalyzes historical data qualitatively can be considered a substitute for afieldworker who just left by some department members but not by others.Those who think that class conflict is tending to get more peaceful cannotpass muster with those who wish it were not.

This variation in salience of interestingness then means that sociolo-gists cannot reliably sort out who is elite for deans of leading universities,and that one can always get negative opinions from the discipline about

the standing of an elite department. A dean at Yale may, then, not knowwhether or not he or she has a distinguished sociology department (or de-partment of organizational behavior in the business school) and get con-







286 Stinchcombe

flicting advice on what to do about it if it is not. The dean in James G.March and Pierre J. Romelaer's study could not tell whether the popularity

of the speech program with 20 faculty and 117 courses was due to its dis-tinction (March and Romelaer, 1976/1979: 254-258) or to its lack of dis-tinction, so abolished it to create another nondescript department ofcommunication. The analysis here would suggest that if one went back toMarch and Romelaer's university now, the department of communicationmight well be in the same situation as the abolished speech departmentbecause it was equally disintegrated. And one will go back to Yale to ob-serve the standing of organization behavior and sociology in another coupleof decades with trepidation.

Similarly, what constitutes the elite of geography, comparative litera-ture, history, urban studies, or evolutionary biology is also problematic, andso whether one has an elite department is problematic. We would expectthat such departments would tend to disappear first from elite universities,and then by imitation from universities on their way up.

I believe that the solid political standing of history in all elite schoolsdisproves the generality of this prediction, because history is fragmentedstrongly by place and period, and to some degree by variations in ideologyand in the salience of morally significant facts. I am not sure why the pre-diction does not follow. It may be that across subdisciplines historians re-

fuse to take the fact that they are not "interested in" other people's factsvery seriously, and so refuse to give negative evaluations to people fromother subdisciplines. The fight then may end up being over whether a uni-versity will have the subject of medieval China in its history department,rather than whether it will have a histoiy department. Or it may be thatbecause undergraduate history is regularlyconceived to cover larger periodsand areas than the specialty of the professor who teaches it, historians regu-larly show "interest" in other periods and places, and expect to have tohave a quasi-expert knowledge of the things they teach, as well as expert

knowledge of the things they do research on.

WHEN ELEMENTARY IS JUST DUMB

The link between elementary teaching and scholarship or research isdifferent in different disciplines. The link is generally more precarious inthe humanities than in the sciences. In the sciences one can teach elemen-tary students the boring mechanisms (e.g., valences and electron sharing)whose

excitinginteractions with each

other (e.g., in catalysis) one does re-search on five or six years later. In the humanities (except for elementarylanguages) one wants to take students' artistic taste, metaphysics, or politi-








cal ideology where they are and introduce complexity of mind into them,using the interests already there to make even elementary courses exciting.

In elementary languages one has to deal with the fact that anythingone can read or write in the first year leaves one functioning at an intel-

lectual level a standard deviation or more below the average native speakerof the language; hardly anything one can read or write in the new language

is of interest to a college student. But with this exception, advanced schol-

arship in the humanities is a further complexification of mind on questionsof taste, metaphysics, or ideology, of the same general kind as one is trying

to teach at the elementary level.

A central teaching problem in the humanities is that some students

are not far enough advanced to see why, say, the Taming of the Shrew ismorally unacceptable in the modern world - so not advanced enough to

find it an interesting question for discussion in a freshman seminar how a

humane and sensible person like Shakespeare could write such stuff in his

time and place. It is often hard for a senior humanities scholar to imaginehow few facts about the world and its history and literature are of interestto 19-year-olds.

The social sciences are in the anomalous circumstance of teaching un-

dergraduates as if their job was the humanities' job of complexification of

students' oversimplified tastes, philosophies, and ideologies -and doing theirresearch as if it were the search for simplified explanatory mechanisms ratherthan further complexification of mind. Thus in their research sociologists mayroutinely run across a humanitiesjudgment of the paragraphat the beginningwhere the main argument is stated: "How can you imagine the world to be

so simple?" But then in teaching they have to berate students for thinking

racism in Mississippi in 1850 was essentially the same as in New York City

in 1994, just as historians have to worryabout how to relate Jefferson's racism

to modem students' and professors' sensibilities (Wood, 1993).

In sociology one cannot get away with the physical science strategyof teaching dull elementary mechanisms. One cannot teach sophomores themechanisms by which some people are valued less highly than other people,and promise them, as chemists promise, that they will get to the inequalitybetween men and women in the second year in graduate school when theyare ready to understand complexities. So one is reduced to trying to catchthe interest he or she hopes they might have in comparable worth, so that

they can have their minds expanded by the possibility that comparableworth legislation and supportive union practice in Sweden may perhaps

have functioned to keep women out of better jobs, because then womencould not offer to do them cheaper. It is not clear why sociologists whoseresearch is trying to simplify stratification processes to mechanisms that







288 Stinchcombe

can be tested by research should be also the ones to introduce complexityinto the budding feminist ideology of sophomores.

Political science has some of the same problems with this as sociology,but since the advanced undergraduate curriculum is still about the sametopic area as the introductory courses, the complexification of mind can go

on for a considerable time; the elementary treatment is mostly just a less

complex form of what one studies in a senior honors seminar. Economists,on the other hand, take the high road of physics, teaching the elementary

mechanisms without calculus, then with calculus, then with systems of si-multaneous equations (linear and then differential). They save the com-plexification of mind for the dissertation, when it turns out that one really

has to understand the details of the system of airline regulation before one

can build a model of the impact of changing regulation on prices, costs,and services delivered by airlines. Economics only comes apart at the gradu-ate level, rather than right there at the beginning of elementary instructionon the mechanisms as sociology does. Economists agree on the mechanisms,though not on how they apply to the world. Sociologists agree on neither.

Part of the problem in sociology elementary instruction is that sincesociologists do not agree about what their science consists of, they do notagree about what would be important to educate people about in the in-

troductory course even if the students were headed for advanced training.

I, for example, used to teach a short unit of elementary statistics in intro-ductory sociology, because I figured that in more advanced courses the stu-

dents would have to read quantitative papers in sociology. This wassomewhat utopian even at Johns Hopkins, but my point here is that a largeshare of my colleagues would not agree that quantitative research was what

sort of reading they should do in advanced courses anyway, even if they

werebeing preparedfor graduateschooL John Hopkins students did not knowthis was not elementary sociology (nor did the dean) because sociology was

new there, and statistics was not difficult compared with what these students

(disproportionately premeds) had to learni in elementaiy chemistry. Mostof my sociological readers will find nmymisjudgnmentidiculous, and of those

roughly half will wish that it were not. That half will wish that statistics

really were elementary sociology, but the division illustrates our difficultyin defining the elementary course in terms of our scholarly practice.

The partially ordered nature of our stratification system that preventsus from being confident about who is the elite of sociology also adds tothe troubles that come from having a humanities teaching mission for ascientific field: we would be incapable of defining what the basic and ele-

mentary mechanisms and research operations of our field were even if we

had a science-like undergraduate mission. One measure of our trouble in

defining what undergraduate instruction should be about is the great ten-








dency for exams in the elementary courses - even in the special field com-ponent of the Graduate Record Examinations - to be a vocabulary test

about sociological jargon. If the best we have to teach undergraduates ishow sociologists use words, we should just give it up.

THE PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATION AS ANINEFFECTIVE TRADE UNION

I have been talking as if deans got to decide freely whether to abolishsociology, geography, or comparative literature, and that the disciplinewould end up not having anything much to say about it. But the relativeeffectiveness or ineffectiveness of disciplines as trade unions - preservingtheir positions and their place in the academic firmament - has to beexplained. I believe disintegrated disciplines are less effective as trade un-ions. We are not surprised that the chemists' association can undertake tocertify undergraduate chemistry programs and generally make it stick, whileone can hardly imagine what would be certified in sociology, or where thepower to impose certification of sociology on a college or university ad-ministration would come from.

It is impossible for sociology to dictate to colleges that want sociology

what it is they need to have. But this incapacity extends to dictating whetherthey should want it. One can imagine Washington University in St. Louisremaining reputable, and San Diego State retaining its assigned place in thehierarchy of California public universities, both without sociology. Onewould be extremely loath to offer the hypothesis that Yale failed to abolishits sociology department because it did not want to lose status, but muchless reluctant to hypothesize that their lack of enthusiasm for organizationalbehavior in the business school was due to their failure to turn it from avariety of sociology into a variety of economlics with a nmathematical lite.

But in all that speculation, it would nevei- occur even to conflict-ori-ented sociologists that we miglht fight the university adilinistration, use ourtrade union power at a national and local level, and win. One might choosesuch an approach to a fight over a medical school, or over a chemistrydepartment, but not over speech, or evolutionary biology, or sociology.

I would argue that some part of this ineffectiveness of sociology as atrade union is due to the disintegration of sociology as a discipline. Theargument in favor of sociology at San Diego State, for example, used asevidence that many of the scholars there had got large grants for their

research, and some people no doubt thought that was a good argument.But some probably thought that it was a veiy doubtful argument until theyknew where the grants came from and for what kind of research. And when







290 Stinchcombe

the argument that undergraduates need sociology turns out to mean that

they should have had at least one radical professor in their lives, some of

us will be persuaded, and some of us will havea jaudiced view of our trade

union. Thus even if there were powers concentrated in our trade union

that could and would intimidate our bargaining partners, it is difficult to

call on sociological solidarity when it is difficult to say what it consists of-

what it is solidarity about.

WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

My own belief is that this disintegrated state of sociology represents

the optimum state of affairs, both for the advance of knowledge and for theexpansion of mind of undergraduates. We do not have basic mechanisms

even if we want them for our elementary course, nor basic and universal

methods so that we can attach an appropriate laboratoiy experience to that

elementary course. So it is better that I try teachinig basic statistics, and

someone else exposes them to Street Cornere ociety (Whyte, 1961; actually

I have done that, too), and someone else sends them home to pretend they

are a boarder so as to teach them to uncover the assumptions on which

everyday life is predicated (Garfinkel [1964/1967]; I have not done that).

Similarly, I think it better to have disagreement about who is elite insociology rather than to develop a single dimension of research contribu-

tion. It is in the nature of sociology at this time that in my father's house

there are many mansions. This makes it hard to write to the Fellows of

Harvard College or the relevant committee at Columbia about whether

someone is really elite. It has happened to me that I have been asked to

evaluate a candidate, and could not answer because I did not know the

work of any one on the comparison list. This obviously meant that someone

considered the candidate to be distinguished on some criterion that I might

be expected to know something about, but also considered them to be dis-tinguished on a criterion that I did not in fact know anything about, on

which the others on the list were presumed to be elite.

I presume that the same thing would happen less often in economics

or physics, because those near the top do pretty much the same sort of

thing, and less often also in chemistry or Ihistoiy,because only those would

be asked for an evaluation who would know the comparison group, because

the evaluator, the candidate, and the conmpetitorswould be in a well-de-

fined subdiscipline.

Butit seems to me that an attempt to impose unified criteria near

the top of sociology would have worse effects than in economics, physics,

or chemistry because it would not reflect the fact that the advance of knowl-








edge goes on with many different methods, many different theories, andwith many different relations to ideological, granting agency, and theoreti-

cal objectives.So nothing is to be done except to suffer from the fact that deans

are not going to like us, and from the fact that inside our departments wewill fight with each other about how to determine the merit of researchand what our curriculum ought to be about. And if we want to find otherswho are as bad off as we are, we should look to comparative literature,geography, speech, and organization behavior for groups, compared towhich we are relatively well off.

REFERENCES

Garrinkel, Harold,1967 "Studies of the routine grounds of

everyday activities." (1964') In HaroldGarfinkel (ed.), Studies in Ethno-methodology: 35-75. Englewood Cli'fsNJ: Prentice-Hall. (Originally publish-ed in Social Problems 11(3): 225-250.)

March, James and Pierre J. Romelaer1979 "Positions and presence in the drift of

decisions." (1976) In James G. Marchand Johan P. Olsen (eds.), Ambiguityand Choice in Organizations: 251-276.Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.

Whitley, Rtichard

1984 The Inteliccetual and Social Organiza-tion of the Sciences. Oxford: Claren-don Press.

Whyte, William Foote1961 Street Corner Society. Chicago: Uni-

verisity of Chiicalgo Press.

Wood, Gordon S.

1993 "Jeffcrson at home [elsewhere labeled

"Jefferson within limits"]." New YorkReview, 40(9) (May 13):6-9.

Original publication date.

Documents

Stinchcombe, Arthur - Disintegrated Disciplines and the Future of Sociology