Four rival lenses sociologists use, and the three questions they all chase
Spencer's favourite image treated society as a living body, with norms and institutions working like organs to keep the whole healthy. That organic analogy became the backbone of functionalism, one of four great traditions that Randall Collins identified in his 1994 survey. Each tradition offers a very different answer to why societies hold together.
Kenneth Allan drew a line in 2006 between sociological theory and social theory. The first offers abstract, testable propositions, leans on the scientific method and avoids value judgments. The second is closer to continental philosophy, commenting on and criticising modern society rather than explaining it. Robert Merton, writing in 1949, placed sociological theory in a middle ground between grand social laws and plain description, focusing on mechanisms with specific consequences for specific parts of society. Figures like Erving Goffman, Pierre Bourdieu and Claude Lévi-Strauss sit somewhere between the two camps.
Collins sorted theorists into four traditions. Functionalism, rooted in Durkheim and in anthropologists such as Malinowski, Mauss and Radcliffe-Brown, who added the word structural, asks what job each part performs. Conflict theory, traced to Marx and developed by Harriet Martineau, W. E. B. Du Bois and Jane Addams, explains society through unequal shares of resources and power. Symbolic interactionism, launched by George Herbert Mead and carried on by Herbert Blumer and Goffman, sees society as a shifting mosaic of meanings built in everyday encounters; Harold Garfinkel's ethnomethodology grew from it. Utilitarian or exchange theory, linked to George Homans, Richard Emerson and Peter Blau, assumes people pursue self-interest, though James March and Herbert Simon stressed that organisational settings limit rationality, and James Coleman revived the approach late in the twentieth century.
Raewyn Connell argued in 2007 that a fifth strand is often forgotten: social Darwinism, applying biological evolution to society, associated with Spencer, William Graham Sumner and Lester Ward. Traces of every tradition survive, and they overlap freely.
Beneath the variety lies broad agreement on the questions. Sociological theory asks what action is, what social order is, and what drives social change. It also wrestles with paired tensions, such as subjectivity against objectivity and synchrony against diachrony, and with how to connect micro, meso and macro levels of social life.
Source: Sociological theory
