And this was a distinction that was founded on the assumption of inherent difference between colonized and colonizer.
Its cultural roots go back as far as the contrast of Christian and pagan in mediaeval European culture that legitimated the crusades in Palestine and Prussia, and the fierce disputes that arose in Spain in the sixteenth century about the legitimacy of overseas conquest. It is not accidental that sociology as an organized knowledge project emerged at the high tide of European imperialism, both overseas and overland.
The doctrine of progress gave the liberal intellectuals who created the discipline a solution to the severe cultural dilemma they faced as beneficiaries of imperialism. It abstracted reports from all over the colonized world, and texts about other periods of history, in greater number than texts about modern Europe. Themes of industrialization, class struggle, or bureaucracy were very far from being dominant concerns.
In substance and in framing, sociology was global from the start. Though my sketch is being replaced by more comprehensive narratives, the intimate relationship between sociology and empire is abundantly proven by more recent historical research Steinmetz, STEINMETZ, George ed. This connection was the fundamental fact suppressed by the internalist narrative of the origins of sociology and the selection of Marx, Weber and Durkheim rather than, say, Spencer, Letourneau and Sumner.
The creation of a canon followed a turn towards the empirical study of the metropole itself, after the crisis of Comtean sociology in the early twentieth century. Sociology as a world-viewing intellectual project among the liberal bourgeoisie in Europe collapsed in the face of war, working-class struggle, nationalism and authoritarian rule. Sociology faced something of a legitimation crisis as it sought a home in the academic ecology of US universities after the Great War.
Re-interpreting it as a science of modernity, and emphasising its roots in Great Books of the Western World, helped to handle this problem. In truth, the Great Books had hardly any relation to the techniques of the Chicago School fieldworkers and the Columbia School quantifiers, which, since the s, were producing the bulk of North American sociology. Ironically, it was a conservative version of metropole-centred sociology that was exported to developing countries during the Cold War, when creating social sciences on the American model in the global South became a project for the US corporate foundations, the US universities and the American state.
The creation of a canon was not just the formulation of an idea. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, English-language version of Simmel. The collectively sustained fiction of the Founding Fathers could then be proudly presented to undergraduates, at the start of their studies literally in Chapter 1 of many Sociology textbooks , as the truth about the origins of their discipline.
A Short History of Sociological Thought. Basingstoke: Palgrave, This was widely agreed. The centrality of the classics. Social Theory Today.
Cambridge: Polity Press, , p. As well as being texts of unexampled brilliance, the classics serve a functional purpose for sociology. They allow - indeed invite - argument within a shared space; the centrality of the classics makes interpretation a key form of theoretical argument, as the classical texts become a battleground.
That was a relatively economical argument. Should sociologists forget their mothers and fathers? American Sociologist, v. Yet the history of religion might remind us that not only what the canon means, but what the canon itself is, can be a subject of fierce dispute. There have been debates about which of the Gospels are to be accepted as valid; whether the Apocrypha should form part of the Bible; and which of the hadiths are legitimately taken as words of the Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him.
In literature, the other great source of the contemporary idea of a canon, the sense in which a set of classics is necessarily a back-formation, not a history, is even clearer. Princeton: Princeton University Press, The African Renaissance challenge and sociological reclamations in the South. Current Sociology, v. It is consistent with this broader history that the canon of classical sociology has been subject to amendment.
The Sociology textbooks of the s were usually satisfied with Marx, Durkheim and Weber. That choice came under fire from feminist sociologists, who became a large constituency in US sociology during the s and s, and who observed that even the second team was entirely composed of blokes.
African-American sociologists at the same time observed that the canonical list was entirely White. We could also observe that it was entirely bourgeois, though the inclusion of Marx gave symbolic protection from socialist critique; during the student movement of the s and s, sociology even became the main academic vehicle for new-left radicalism.
Textbook writers and their publishers were sensitive to these changes in the market, so Sociology textbooks in time amended the membership list.
It is now common to see a nice picture of Jane Addams included in the chapter about classical sociology; alternatively, a picture of Harriet Martineau, heralded as the first sociologist woman a concept that would have surprised her. That did happen for the amendment made in response to African-American criticism.
Du Bois had certainly produced notable sociological books, and The Philadelphia Negro and The Souls of Black Folk have now been reprinted and anthologised. He did not stop writing social analysis when he became deeply involved with the anti-colonial movement in Africa, with peace campaigns, and eventually with the international communist movement.
That seems to me an important limit to his canonization. It highlights the way in which the textbook version of the foundation story has remained focussed on the global North. A more radical revision is suggested by nominating thinkers from outside the North Atlantic world as founders.
Ibn Khaldun turned this tradition towards social analysis, partly in response to the political problems of his own society, partly in a critique of over-rationalist strains in Islamic philosophy. Syed Farid Alatas , has emphasised the creative potential of this turn. Crucially, Alatas has shown how the Muqaddimah can provide a framework for understanding political and religious change in other times and places, and has offered concrete examples.
Can this process be extended? Indeed, should it be? Do we want to reconstitute the canon of classical sociology on a world, rather than a North-Atlantic, basis? Cambridge: Polity Press , I can understand how the book might be read that way, given the familiarity of canonical thinking in sociology, and the fact that the book begins with a critique of the European canon. Nevertheless my intention was not to identify a few decisive figures on whom traditions could be built.
It was to show the tremendous wealth of social analyses that were generated by social change and social struggle in the colonial and postcolonial world, and the diverse genres in which those ideas were expressed. The sources range from political pamphlets through religious sermons to economic policy statements to ethnographies. Southern Theory does nominate names, and discuss specific texts, in an attempt to show all this concretely, to provide proof of the main claim.
It is, rather, a narrative of the way in which one intellectual from a settler colony, carefully trained in Eurocentric social science, encountered people, texts, stories and problems from beyond the boundaries of that training.
Prophetically, one of the first postcolonial texts I ever read was C. New York: Vintage Books, []. The implication of this approach was that, rather than being only a narrow group of classic-standard theorists, there were many more out there of comparable insight and value.
And it is not hard to nominate more. Meeting at the edge of fear: theory on a world scale. Feminist Theory, v. The recent discussion of global plurality in sociology, sponsored by the International Sociological Association, has frequently taken the form of national narratives - see the valuable collections edited by Patel PATEL, Sujata ed.
Los Angeles: Sage, Facing an Unequal World. Taipei: Academia Sinica, Setting sail: the making of sociology in Australia, Journal of Sociology, v.
It provides extremely useful documentation, among other things demonstrating the different sequences of intellectual history in different world contexts. A local history can open up new themes that are little treated in Northern theory. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, But there are limits to a national or even regional narrative, when many social and intellectual developments in the world of imperialism and post-imperial globalization operate on a much larger scale.
There is a risk that the demonstration of plurality will fall back into the dubious project, all too familiar in the global North as well as in the South, of trying to define a unique national or regional style, ethos, spirit or philosophy For an example from the global North, see Levine LEVINE, Donald N. Visions of the Sociological Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, At the end of the day, re-working the canon, even de-colonizing the canon, and substituting a more diverse group of classics, is not a methodologically adequate way of relating to the history of social thought.
When researching the disciplinary history of sociology, we certainly need to study why a narrow canon and an unbelievable foundation story were invented and institutionalized. But we should not make the same mistake again. There are important forms of social thought that resist being formulated in canonical terms. Some of these movements have given rise to important texts, such as B. But such statements have force mainly because of the collective knowledge production behind them.
In recent years, the social sciences have been coming to terms with the fact that knowledge formation and circulation is global, and is structured both by the history of imperialism and the tremendous inequalities, as well as the technical possibilities, of the neoliberal world economy today.
Approaching Southern theory: explorations of gender in South African education. Gender and Education, v. The Earth is one but the world is not: criminological theory and its geopolitical divisions.
Theoretical Criminology, v. Decolonizing European Sociology: Transdisciplinary Approaches. Bielefeld: Transcript, Vermessene Disziplin: Zum konterhegemonialen Potential afrikanischer und lateinamerikanischer Soziologien. Bielefeld: Verlag, The tendency of this literature as a whole, I would argue, is anti-canonical. Knowledge societies, seen from the South: local learning and innovation challenges.
International Social Science Journal, n. Belgrade: IKSI, These conditions include privilege and funding for knowledge workers who can attach themselves to institutions and agendas of the metropole. The Idea of Latin America. Oxford: Blackwell, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books, Singing the Coast. Camberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, This is a highly disputed arena; it is not easy to define what indigenous knowledge is. African Philosophy: The Essential Readings.
New York: Paragon House, Atenas: Ohio University Press, The idea of indigenous knowledge does get mixed up with nationalist agendas and very dubious politics. Cape Town: Jacana, Yet there can be no question that colonized peoples in all parts of the world did have extensive knowledge of their worlds, and practices and technologies based on this knowledge. Paulin Hountondji and his colleagues documented this for West African societies in the very important book Endogenous Knowledge: Research Trails , which ranges across the iron industry, rainmaking, number systems, prediction, zoological nomenclature, pharmacology, mental disorder and more.
Even those societies which European colonizers and sociologists regarded as the most primitive of the primitive - the San and Khoikhoi in southern Africa, the Fuegian communities in the far south of America, and the Aborigines of Australia whose religion Durkheim insisted was the most elementary form, despite the fact that he never set foot in Australia - all had environmental, biological and social expert knowledge and sustainable technologies, not to mention complex religious cultures.
Endogenous knowledge in anthropological perspective: a plea for a conceptual shift. Odora ed. Indigenous Knowledge and the Integration of Knowledge Systems. Claremont: New Africa Books, , p. I would emphasise, however, that indigenous knowledge, which is far from static, also includes a large component of social knowledge. Here are records of social processes, concepts for social relations, ways of understanding social conflicts and techniques for resolving them, ideas about education.
This knowledge may make connections that are rare in Eurocentric sociology. The representation of social relations in Australian central-desert Aboriginal art, for instance, persistently connects people with the land, with particular places and specific routes across the country.
Our Land is Our Life. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, Indigenous knowledge resists being formulated in terms of a canon. Contributions to the sociology of knowledge from an African oral poetry. Several classics of organizational sociology covered in this book were explicitly or implicitly concerned with making sense of the rise of corporate industrial capitalism. During the period in which many of our theorists wrote, Western economies were in transition from agriculture to mass production manufacturing.
In the p. Within two generations, nearly half the labor force worked in manufacturing. New forms of work and social organization were arising and spreading, particularly Fordist mass production and the social forms that arose around it. The principles of mass production had spread beyond the factory to engulf research, education, medicine, warfare, and public administration.
In hindsight, it is clear that large corporations were en route to becoming the dominant social structures in society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By that point, the largest corporations controlled half of industry's assets, and almost half of these firms were under the control of professional managers.
The result was a new kind of social system. Organizational sociology took it from there. Espeland and Stevens describe how the evolution of statistics in its original sense in the p.
But in the past few decades many of the transitions that sociological classics addressed have been transcended. Figure It takes little imagination to project where the trend is headed: just since the start of the Bush administration in , over 3.
To give a recent example: in there were , mortgage brokers working in 50, firms in the United States. The p. And much the same can be said about states. States are now just one vendor among many competing for the custom of their corporate and other consumers. Examining the classics might help us theorize our contemporary transition away from a society of organizations. The social history of ideas gives useful clues, for example, the parallels between Marx and Darwin in their imageries of change are perhaps analogous to the widespread use of network imagery in contemporary natural and social science.
Many ideas from prior theorists lie fallow and then become revived due to their new applicability. Industrial districts and the continuing centrality of geography for economic activity, for instance, were largely ignored by American theorists between the time of Alfred Marshall and that of Piore and Sabel Organizations, in other words, need no longer be the predominant object of organizational research, as many of the processes of interest transcend particular organizations.
As described by Abbott in this volume , the old Chicago School also studied the organizing of human activities without focusing on formal p. Schumpeter unpacks the structures for entrepreneurial action inside and outside organizations Becker and Knudsen, in this volume. The chapters in this volume present a feast for reflection on the continuing relevance and sometimes irrelevance of past works.
Unlike the elimination of species that occurs in biotic evolution, the evolution of the canon allows for the recall, possibly in reinvigorated forms, of what were once classics, or had been published in some form.
It is at least possible that the classics of tomorrow may have had little fame or reputation when they first appeared. We have no idea whether there are hidden jewels out there, just waiting for some scholar to make claims about their importance for current or future thinking. It is easiest to suppose that some work of an eminent scholar that had little resonance in its time deserves contemporary currency.
When population ecology approaches to organizations flourished in the s, Amos Hawley's book , largely unknown to students of organizations without grounding in human ecology, became a foundational text. It is very unlikely that a work from the past by a long dead and rarely or never cited author could suddenly be trumpeted as a classic. Merton had previously read it in Harvard's Widener Library.
Fleck, a Polish microbiologist, had developed the idea of a thought collective and can be seen as taking a constructionist approach to science, long before the sociology of science took that turn. Fleck showed how the diagnosis of syphilis emerged from the welter of assumptions, classifications, and research of the community of microbiologists. This Handbook has largely focused on the classics and the canon for theoretical interpretations of important organizationally and sociologically substantive issues.
Of course, there are also classics for methodological and analytic forms as well. There are exemplars of quantitative methods and exemplars of analytic styles.
Durkheim's Suicide is known not largely because of its findings about rates of suicide, but for its enunciation of a sociological level of analysis not, apparently, p. Case studies of organizations have exemplars that can be called classic, as can comparative studies with a small number of cases. Although the study of organizations changes partly in response to changes in organizations as they respond to their societal and organizational context, the changes in what from the past is seen as foundational also responds to the chaotic and fractal processes within and between academic disciplines Abbott Thus, we return to classics and reinterpret them in the context of a transformed academic discourse.
Abbott , A. The Chaos of Disciplines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Find this resource:. Berle , A. The Modern Corporation and Private Property.
New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Burawoy , M. American Sociological Review , 4— Chandler , A. Cambridge, Mass. DiMaggio , P. American Sociological Review , — Drucker , P. Harper's Magazine , September: 21— The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Chicago: Free Press. Suicide: A Study in Sociology , trans.
Spaulding and G. Glencoe, Ill. Espeland , W. Annual Review of Sociology , — Evans , P. Journal of Public Economics , 49— Fleck , L. The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact , ed. Truen and R. Merton, with a foreword by T. Graff , G. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Guillory , J. Hawley , A. A Theory of Community Structure. New York: Ronald Press. Kellner , D. Stanford, Calif.
March , J. New York: Wiley. Marshall , A. Principles of Economics. London: Macmillan. Piore , M. New York: Basic. Scott , W. Stinchcombe , A. Zald , M. American Sociologist , 5— Organization Science , 4: — Gerald F. Davis is the Wilbur K. He has published widely in management, sociology, and finance. Richard Scott, and Mayer N. Mayer N.
He has published more than fifty articles and written or edited eighteen books. He has published on many topics, including sociology of social welfare, political sociology, social movements, and complex organizations. In , he edited with Gerald Davis, W. Richard Scott, and Doug McAdam a volume of essays on the relationship of social movement theory to organizational theory and research Cambridge University Press.
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