Book Review: Phillips, Beyond Sociology’s Tower of Babel

Bernard Phillips
Beyond Sociology’s Tower of Babel: Reconstructing the Scientific Method
Aldine de Gruyter, 2001, 245 pp.
$US 24.95 paper (0-202-30666-6), $US 49.95 cloth (0-202-30665-8)

What’s this, you say, another book on sociology’s failings? Has not everything there is to say on this dreary subject been said already? No, it turns out., Although his argument follows from critiques of the discipline set out by two important precursors – C. Wright Mills and Alvin W. Gouldner – Phillips brings some important new ideas to bear on how to correct some of sociology’s most disturbing shortcomings.

With Mills, Phillips holds that sociology has come to be oriented around a disconnected set of problems while suffering further fragmentation from a desultory array of facts related to particular milieux. These are the stuff of the discipline’s subfields, internal specialties, which with their nearly impervious walls, prevent routine generation of overarching abstract concepts that could help knit them together. Further, and again following Mills, such broad-ranging concepts enable us sociologists to “shuttle up and down language’s ladder of abstraction” thereby developing our capacity to integrate the scattered facts.

Understanding and confronting society’s many problems, a concern of both Mills and Gouldner, is according to the latter, significantly advanced when the social sciences give humankind special concepts to help it grapple with those problems. Anomie and alienation are two examples. Phillips fingers “bureaucratic science” as the villain here, the positivistic, predictive, mathematically-based approach, so dominant in our day, that valorizes minutiae and obscures the big picture by drawing attention away from the relevant abstract concepts as well as the sociohistorical context of the phenomenon under study. When abstract concepts are used in bureaucratic science, if used at all, their role tends to be superficial; a sort of paying of lip service to a few of the great ideas in the discipline without any real attempt to use them to illuminate findings in integrative fashion. Bureaucratic science perpetrates a specialized tower of Babel that confuses, if not impedes, by the clamor of its many arcane vocabularies development of an interactive scientific and cultural paradigm of broad scope.

Among Phillips’s principal contributions to this line of thought are his twin ideas of “web of sociological concepts” and “web of belief.” On page 24 he schematically presents 24 well-worn sociological concepts sufficiently abstract to do integrative duty of the sort just described. Although he makes no claims that this is an exhaustive list, they do run the micro-macro gamut, from individual through social interaction to culture and social structure. They are interrelated and have reciprocal effects. Moreover, a given concept or hypothesis should be seen as located within a web of belief, the smaller set of concepts pulled from the larger web of sociological concepts that bears on the concept or hypothesis being considered. All parts of the web of belief should be indirectly related to one another. This is decidedly not the approach of bureaucratic science, an approach that, in philosophy, lost credence years ago.

Phillips’s analytic scheme is more complicated than this, but what I have just presented is its essence. The scheme is set out in the first two chapters. Chapters 3 and 4 are concerned with illustrating the web approach to scientific method, accomplished by considering the invisible crisis of modern society. The invisible crisis refers to the accelerating gap between aspirations and fulfillment created by such forces as anomie, alienation, and relative deprivation, forces, or concepts (all are part of the web of concepts) well known to sociologists but not generally seen in the public media.

In the final section on the implications for sociology, chapter 5 examines how we can move with this reconstructed scientific method toward a reflexive sociology (the Gouldner legacy). There are also sections here on basic research, applied research, and teaching. In chapter 6 Phillips looks at the “external” implications of the new method for language and emotions. A short glossary follows, consisting mainly of definitions of concepts included the web of sociological concepts. Do we really need this feature? Perhaps, given the reputed narrowness of enthusiasts of the bureaucratic approach.

As well written and organized as this book is, it is still a complicated work, a quality to which this short review hardly does justice. Throughout the middle part, Phillips weaves an intricate mesh of concepts as he goes about illustrating the invisible crisis. And that is all to the good, for it shows what sociologists must do if they are to topple their tower of Babel and clarify their vocabulary for general social use and broader disciplinary integration. This is no easy task, in part because many sociologists appear to have neither the taste nor the intellect for managing at once so many abstract ideas. Nevertheless, at least some of us must take it on, as by writing review articles and conducting sociology-of-knowledge style analyses. We can also incorporate in reports of our research a section devoted to integrating the findings with the relevant web of belief.

Robert A. Stebbins
University of Calgary
stebbins@ucalgary.ca



		Canadian Journal of Sociology Online March - April 2002 Bernard Phillips Beyond Sociology’s Tower of Babel: Reconstructing the Scientific Method Aldine de Gruyter, 2001, 245 pp. $US 24.95 paper (0-202-30666-6), $US 49.95 cloth (0-202-30665-8) What’s this, you say, another book on sociology’s failings? Has not everything there is to say on this dreary subject been said already? No, it turns out., Although his argument follows from critiques of the discipline set out by two important precursors – C. Wright Mills and Alvin W. Gouldner – Phillips brings some important new ideas to bear on how to correct some of sociology’s most disturbing shortcomings. With Mills, Phillips holds that sociology has come to be oriented around a disconnected set of problems while suffering further fragmentation from a desultory array of facts related to particular milieux. These are the stuff of the discipline’s subfields, internal specialties, which with their nearly impervious walls, prevent routine generation of overarching abstract concepts that could help knit them together. Further, and again following Mills, such broad-ranging concepts enable us sociologists to “shuttle up and down language’s ladder of abstraction” thereby developing our capacity to integrate the scattered facts. Understanding and confronting society’s many problems, a concern of both Mills and Gouldner, is according to the latter, significantly advanced when the social sciences give humankind special concepts to help it grapple with those problems. Anomie and alienation are two examples. Phillips fingers “bureaucratic science” as the villain here, the positivistic, predictive, mathematically-based approach, so dominant in our day, that valorizes minutiae and obscures the big picture by drawing attention away from the relevant abstract concepts as well as the sociohistorical context of the phenomenon under study. When abstract concepts are used in bureaucratic science, if used at all, their role tends to be superficial; a sort of paying of lip service to a few of the great ideas in the discipline without any real attempt to use them to illuminate findings in integrative fashion. Bureaucratic science perpetrates a specialized tower of Babel that confuses, if not impedes, by the clamor of its many arcane vocabularies development of an interactive scientific and cultural paradigm of broad scope. Among Phillips’s principal contributions to this line of thought are his twin ideas of “web of sociological concepts” and “web of belief.” On page 24 he schematically presents 24 well-worn sociological concepts sufficiently abstract to do integrative duty of the sort just described. Although he makes no claims that this is an exhaustive list, they do run the micro-macro gamut, from individual through social interaction to culture and social structure. They are interrelated and have reciprocal effects. Moreover, a given concept or hypothesis should be seen as located within a web of belief, the smaller set of concepts pulled from the larger web of sociological concepts that bears on the concept or hypothesis being considered. All parts of the web of belief should be indirectly related to one another. This is decidedly not the approach of bureaucratic science, an approach that, in philosophy, lost credence years ago. Phillips’s analytic scheme is more complicated than this, but what I have just presented is its essence. The scheme is set out in the first two chapters. Chapters 3 and 4 are concerned with illustrating the web approach to scientific method, accomplished by considering the invisible crisis of modern society. The invisible crisis refers to the accelerating gap between aspirations and fulfillment created by such forces as anomie, alienation, and relative deprivation, forces, or concepts (all are part of the web of concepts) well known to sociologists but not generally seen in the public media. In the final section on the implications for sociology, chapter 5 examines how we can move with this reconstructed scientific method toward a reflexive sociology (the Gouldner legacy). There are also sections here on basic research, applied research, and teaching. In chapter 6 Phillips looks at the “external” implications of the new method for language and emotions. A short glossary follows, consisting mainly of definitions of concepts included the web of sociological concepts. Do we really need this feature? Perhaps, given the reputed narrowness of enthusiasts of the bureaucratic approach. As well written and organized as this book is, it is still a complicated work, a quality to which this short review hardly does justice. Throughout the middle part, Phillips weaves an intricate mesh of concepts as he goes about illustrating the invisible crisis. And that is all to the good, for it shows what sociologists must do if they are to topple their tower of Babel and clarify their vocabulary for general social use and broader disciplinary integration. This is no easy task, in part because many sociologists appear to have neither the taste nor the intellect for managing at once so many abstract ideas. Nevertheless, at least some of us must take it on, as by writing review articles and conducting sociology-of-knowledge style analyses. We can also incorporate in reports of our research a section devoted to integrating the findings with the relevant web of belief. Robert A. Stebbins University of Calgary stebbins@ucalgary.ca http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/cjscopy/reviews/babel.html March 2002 © CJS Online