Systematic sociological theory represents the highly selective accumulation of those small parts of earlier theory which have thus far survived the tests of empirical research. But the history of theory includes also the far greater mass of conceptions which fell into bits when confronted with empirical tests. It includes also false starts, the archaic doctrines and fruitless errors of the past.
The early history of sociology as represented, e.g., in the speculations of Comte and Spencer, a Hobhouse or a Ratzenhofer is very far from cumulative. The conceptions of each seldom build upon the work of those who have gone before. They are typically laid out as alternative or competing conceptions rather than consolidated and extended into a cumulative product. Consequently little of what these early forerunners wrote remains pertinent to Sociology today. Their works testify to the large merits of talented men, but they do not often provide guidelines to the current analysis of sociological problems.
Theories of middle range like many words which are bandied about, the worlds theory threatens to become emptied of meaning. The term Sociological Theory refers to the logically inter connected conceptions which are limited and modest in scope, rather than all embracing and grandiose. Merton attempts to focus attention on what might be called theories of middle range. Theories intermediate to the minor working hypothesis evolved in abundance during the day to day routines of research; and the all-inclusive speculations comprising a master-conception scheme from which it is hoped to derive very large numbers of empirically observed uniformities of social behaviour.
Contemporary social scientists live at a time in which some of the physical science have achieved comparatively great precisions of theory and achievement, a great aggregate of instruments and tools, and an abundance of technological by-products. Looking about them, many social scientists take this as the standard for self appraisal. They too, want to count bad, afflicted with despair at not having the rugged physique of their big brothers, they begin to ask “is a science of society possibly?”
To answer the above question one has to remember the destructive prehistory of each, between 20th century physics and 20th century sociology stand billions of man hours of sustained, disciplined, and cumulative research. Perhaps sociology is not yet ready for its Einstein because it has not yet found its Kepler. As Whitehead has observed, “it is characteristic of a science in its early stages to be both ambitiously profound in its aims and trivial in its handling of details.”
Complete sociological systems today, as in their day complete systems of medical theory or of chemical theory, must give way to less imposing and better grounded theories of the middle range. one major task today is, therefore, to develop special theories applicable to limited ranges of data e.g., theories of class dynamics, of conflicting group pressures, of the follow of power and the exercise of inter-personal influence rather than seek at once the “integrated” conceptual structure adequate to derive all these and other theories. The sociological theorist, exclusively committed to the explorations of high abstraction, runs the risk that, as with modern décor, the furniture of his mind will be sparse, bare and uncomfortable.
One must admit that a large part of what is now called sociological theory consists of general orientation toward date, suggesting types of variables which need somehow to be taken into account rather than clear, verifiable statements of relationships between specified variables. We have many concepts but few confirmed theories many points of view, but few theories; many approaches but few arrivals.
Sociological theory must advance these advance these interconnected planes, through special theories adequate to limited ranges of social date and through the evolution of a more general conceptual scheme adequate to consolidate groups of special theories.
Codification of Sociological Theory
Through theoretical codification, the desperate empirical generalizations in sociological must be revamped, collated and consolidated. Codification is the orderly arrangement of systematized fruitful experience with procedure of inquiry and with the substantive findings which result from the use of these procedures.
Merton uses analytical paradigms for presenting codified materials. The use of formal paradigms have great propaedentic value. For qualitative analysis in sociology they have closely related functions:
1. Paradigms have a national functions. They provide a compact, parsimonious arrangement of the central concepts and their interrelations as these are utilized for description and analysis.
2. The explicit statement of analytic paradigms lessens the likelihood of inadvertently importing hidden assumptions and concepts since such new assumption and concept must be either logically derivable from the previous terms of the paradigm or explicitly incorporated in it. it thus supplies a pragmatic and logical guide for the avoidance of adhoc hypothesis.
3. Paradigms advance the cumulation of theoretical interpretation.
4. Paradigms by their very arrangement, suggest the systematic cross-tabulation of presumably significant concepts and may thus sensitive the analyst to types of empirical and theoretical problems which might otherwise be over looked.
5. Paradigms made for the codification of methods of qualitative analysis of manner approximately the logical, if not the empirical, rigor of quantitative analysis.
Nevertheless, equipped with his paradigm the sociologist may shut his eyes to strategic data not expressly called for in the paradigm. He may turn the paradigm from a sociological field glass into a sociological blinker. Misuse results from absolutising the paradigm rather than using it tentatively, as a point of departure.
References
Jayapalan, N. (2014). Sociological Theories. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers & Distributors (P) LTD. (pp. 10-13)
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