Approaches to the Study of Social Structure

Abstract

Contemporary Sociology 7(1) (January 1978):93—4. This book is the published version of papers presented at the plenary session of the American Sociological Association meetings in 1974. Nine distinguished theorists—— Parsons, Merton, Lipset, Lenski, Homans, Coser, Coleman, Bottomore, and Blau——present their approaches to the study of social structure, with three equally important theorists——Wallace, Goode, and Bierstedt——offering comments and criticisms. As Blau admits, certain approaches are not represented in this collection, particularly French structuralism, American ethnomethodology, symbolic interactionism, and German phenomenology. In the opening chapter, Blau makes a valiant effort to sort out themes and issues as well as types of theoretical approaches. His remarks are, as usual, insightful, but he sees far more coherence in this collection of essays than actually exists. While each essay has considerable merit, they are uneven in the degree to which they address the focal topic, social structure, and in the depth of their discussion. This is, of course, a general problem with “readers,” even those of original essays by some of sociology’s leading theorists. A book such as this reminds us, just in case we had become complacent, of how far sociology has yet to go in its theoretical development. One would imagine that even an immature discipline such as sociology would revealconsensusoverthedefinition ofacentralconceptlikesocialstructure. Most of the authors would agree that the concept of social structure denotes persistent regularities in patterns of social relationship. Beyond this vague generality, however, consensus is hard to find. Merton, inhiseloquentandstimulatingessay, arguesthatthisisalltothegood,for sociology will be a multiple paradigm discipline——a fact that will assure lively debate and intellectual flexibility. Yet this argument is, I feel, too supportive of the current status quo in sociological theorizing which, on the whole, ignores issues such as concept formation and logical rigor. It can too easily be used to support theoryasanenterprisewhereunarticulated assumptions, vague concepts, unformulated propositions, and loose discursive viewpoints are seen as “good” things. Rather than summarize each author’s contribution, I will examine some of the important issues raised by their essays. The first issue is: What is social structure? Several types of answers are presented. One states that social structureispatternsofsocialrelations among differentiated units. This is the “social system” definition advocated by Merton, Parsons, Lipset, and Blau. Another point of emphasis is on social structure as the “underlying dimension” in social relations. A number of authors, particularly Homans, Goode, and Bottomore, discuss notions of “deep structure,” although each takes a somewhat different tack. Bottomore moves from Levi-Straussian notions of universal deep structures of the mind to unique, historically bounded substructures inherent in economic