Sociology is no paradigmatic discipline. Whether it is a discipline at all is arguable. But it is a large and great field of academic teaching and of scholarship. One of sociology's main attractions is its boundless interest in social and cultural issues.
There have been several attempts at establishing a sociological paradigm. All have failed to win a broad consensus, and have been confined to being schools in competition, of varying longevity. The grandest attempt was, of course, that of Talcott Parsons, the nearest sociological equivalent to the Neoclassical Synthesis in economics launched by Paul Samuelson, with success. Why did not Parsons succeed? His “structural functionalism” did become academically predominant for a time, from the late 1940s to the early l960s, while having to coexist with sharp critics, think of conflict theory and of C. Wright Mills, and vigorous alternatives even on its American home turf, such as George Homans and Erving Goffman. The para-paradigmatic status of structural functionalism lasted less than two decades. Later attempts, for example by James Coleman and Pierre Bourdieu, reached a much more limited radius of influence.
The reasons for the failure of paradigmatic attempts in sociology should be a main task for the history of sociology to find out. The vastness of the societal field and the wide range of conceivable perspectives on it constitute a big stumbling block to disciplinary paradigmatization, but hardly an intrinsically insurmountable one. Pioneered by Anthony Downs and Gary Becker, neoclassical economics has, not without influence and effect, branched out from analyzing economic markets to the functioning of democracy, family behavior, youth gangs, and the strength of religious beliefs and practices. A comparative analysis of Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947) and Parsons’ The Social System (1951) is likely to give us some answers. One is implied in their very titles, to the explanatory-analytical focus of Samuelson corresponds the taxonomic drive to build a conceptual mansion in Parsons.
Parsons' sociological synthesis, developed in his most brilliant work, The Structure of Social Action (l937), was also at its origins too narrowly conceived, too marked by the conservative Harvard milieu of the l930s to win enduring acceptance. Parsons brought together Alfred Marshall, Vilfredo Pareto, Durkheim and Weber. A quite different sociological perspective would have been opened up by substituting Marx and Simmel for Marshall and Pareto.
The non-paradigmatic character of sociology means an enormous supply of choice and opportunities, not just of concrete topics but also, of theoretical frameworks, methods, and forms of presentation. This is a great advantage, but, like all advantages, it is something which also calls for a sense of responsibility. Without it, sociology is likely to be considered a spoilt, privileged enclave where anything goes, and thus a good candidate for university axing.
Without a paradigm, sociology is at least a common field, in which we all work unhindered by disciplinary property rights. Maintaining a common field means recognizing the equal right of others to use it, and a commitment to keep it clean and proper. The two are not without possible tension. The limit of tolerance and respect is the necessity to prevent the growth of weeds, of bad scholarship. This in turn requires a sense of intellectual rigour, and its opposites, independent of the kind of theoretical and frames and of methods deployed. While there is no definite solution to this tension, it is not unsolvable. This kind of evaluations is made by every multidisciplinary research council or foundation.
To maintain a common field you also need to recognize it, and not only by its boundaries to external enclosures. What is it that we have in common? There is no universally consensual core of sociology, but we need to reflect upon our possible commonality. Probably, what we will come up with is some only partly overlapping set of analytical perspectives. Personally, I think social action is a central part of that set. Social action, driven primarily by the (collective) formation of actors – their cultural socialization and sense of identity, not above all by (des)incentives – and by their location in social structures of opportunities and constraints, including of information. The social connectivity of actors also seems to me a central sociological interest, whether connectivity of networks, groups, organizations or social systems.
Those musings are not an editorial statement, they are given only as possible examples. The editorial point is, that we should think seriously about what a micro- and a macrosociologist, a modeling survey researcher and a qualitative observer sociologist might have in common. This should include an awareness of our genealogical tree of descent.
We may raise our aspirations higher than just maintaining the sociological commons in decent order. If mastering a paradigm of analysis is not a demand on a good sociologist, what is? Of, course, first of all you have to learn the craft of your chosen subfield, its literature, its theories, methods, and its sources and data gathering. But the open field of sociology offers you greater possibilities.
Sociology has so many vistas from which to look out into the wide world. It borders on politics, economics, law, demography, psychology, geography, history, philosophy. It is a sister of anthropology, and it has gates open to art, literature, music, architecture, and increasingly to medicine and ecology. The lack of paradigmatic closure is not only a scientific limitation, it is also freedom to intellectual travel and to new scholarly encounters. It may be argued, then, that a good sociologist is continuously acquiring a wide-ranging social knowledge, not only from her colleagues on the common, but also from the rich environment of sociology. A great variety of social experience is also a great asset to a sociologist, as we have seen in recent history, ranging in training and occupation from manual labour to natural science, from business to music, in cultures from Africa to Northern Europe, from China to USA, or from Russia to Latin America.
This openness to many different kinds of knowledge and of experience is a strength of sociology, which needs to be promoted in teaching and deployed in research. An ideal portrait of ourselves might be: a sociologist is someone who is interested in everything, who knows a lot, who can explain social action and social issues, and who is always open to argument.
The Issue
As usual, European Societies bears witness to the diversity of sociology. Clemente J. Navarro, of Universidad Pablo de Olavide in Sevilla, and Terry N. Clark, of the University of Chicago, analyze three different kinds of cultural orientation in European post-industrial cities. Jakob Skjøtt-Larsen, from Aalborg University, brings Bourdieu to the Danish city of Aalborg, finding political-moral boundaries as important as cultural ones. In Africa, Asia, and Latin America self-employment is regarded a major part of a dual labour market, informal and formal. Kaisa Karpinska, of Utrecht University, looks at it from another angle, that of Eastern European post-Communist transitology. Paul Marx, of Odense University looks at French labour market dualisation and explains the spread of fixed-term contracts. Together, the articles by Felix Bühlmann, Thomas David and André Mach, all at the University of Lausanne, and by Mikael Nygård, of Åbo Akademi in Vaasa, Finland, and Nicole Krüger, at Technische Universität Darmstadt, bridge both social ends of contemporary Europe. The former deals with the political and economic elites of one of Europe′s richest countries, Switzerland, and the latter with poverty and changing public policies about it.