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Sociological Methods in the Study of History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

B. R. Wilson
B. R. Wilson
Affiliation:
All Souls College, Oxford
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Extract

SOCIOLOGY is a discipline that employs abstract concepts to express general propositions about social behaviour, relationships and processes. From its beginnings, sociology was as much concerned to interpret the past as to explain the present. The early sociologists were historicists and evolutionists who explained the past by imposing a pattern of order upon it, and who readily took the less developed contemporary societies of their own time as images of the remote past of their own societies. It is to those thinkers, Comte, Spencer and Marx, if not precisely to the issues that occupied them, that sociologists still turn in tracing their intellectual descent—not to the early social surveyors, Charles Booth or Frederic Le Play.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 21 , December 1971 , pp. 101 - 118
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1971

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References

1 Riesman, David, ‘Introduction’, in Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (New York, 1958), p. 3.Google Scholar

2 Sociology, albeit in courses under other titles, was taught at the University of Virginia from the late 1850s by George Frederick Holmes. A decade later sociology was being taught by that name in the University of Pennsylvania. In 1872, William Graham Sumner was appointed at Yale to the first post specifically designated as a Chair in Social Science. The history of the institutional development of sociology is treated by Morgan, Graham, Sociology in America: A Study of its Institutional Development until 1900 (Unpublished D.Phil, thesis. University of Oxford, 1966).Google Scholar

3 Report of the Committee on Student Accommodation, University of Leeds, 1962.

4 Durkheim, Emile, Suicide (London, 1952), a translation of Le Suicide (1st edn., 1897).Google Scholar

5 There is an extensive literature on content analysis. The following may be found useful: I. Pool, de Sola, Trends in Content Analysis (Urbana, Ill., 1959);Google ScholarBudd, R. W., Thorp, R. K. and Donohew, L., Content Analysis of Communications (New York, 1967);Google ScholarMitchell, R. E., ‘Use of Content Analysis for Explanatory Studies’, Public Opinion Quarterly, xxxi. 2 (1967), pp. 232–241; Bulletin du Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Phycho-techniques, xvi, 3 (juil.-sept., 1967), entire issue.Google Scholar

6 Merritt, Richard L., Symbols of American Community 1735–75 (New Haven, 1966) and, for a discussion of his method, idem, ‘Google ScholarThe Emergence of American Nationalism: A Quantitative Approach’, The American Quarterly, xvii (1965), pp. 319–35.Google Scholar

7 Elton, G. R., The Practice of History (London, 1969), p. 77.Google Scholar

8 For the argument that the historian does not ‘force’ nature, as natural scientists do, see Ibid., pp. 72–73.

9 On professionalization see, for example, Marshall, T. H., ‘The Recent History of Professionalization in relation to Social Structure and Social Policy’, Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, v. 13 (1939), pp. 325–40 (also reprinted in idem, Sociology at the Cross-Roads, London, 1963, pp. 150–71).CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Professionalization, ed. Vollmer, H. M. and Mills, D. (Englevvood Cliffs, N.J., 1966).Google Scholar

10 On the use of concepts in sociology, see Bendix, R. and Berger, Bennett, ‘Images of Society and the Problem of Concept Formation in Sociology’, in Symposium on Sociological Theory, ed. Gross, Llewellyn (Evanston, I11., 1959); pp. 92–128.Google Scholar For the use of the concepts referred to here, see, for example, Merton, Robert K., Social Structure and Social Theory (New York, 2nd edn., 1957), esp. chs. i, vii, viii, ix;Google ScholarEmmet, Dorothy, Function, Purpose and Powers (London, 1958);Google Scholaridem, Rules, Roles and Relations (London, 1966);Google ScholarRunciman, W.G., Relative Deprivation and Social Justice (London, 1966),Google Scholar esp. chs. i and ii. In general, see also Gould, Julius, ‘The Vocabulary of Sociology’, British Journal of Sociology, xiv. I (1963), pp. 29–40;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and A Dictionary of the Social Sciences, ed. Gould, J. and Kolb, W. L. (New York, 1964).Google Scholar

11 For analysis of this type, see Selznick, Phillip, ‘ Institutional Vulnerability in Mass Society’, American Journal of Sociology, lvi (1951), pp. 320–32;CrossRefGoogle Scholaridem, The Organizational Weapon (New York, 2nd edn., 1960);Google ScholarWilson, Bryan R., ‘Analytical Studies of Social Institutions’ in Society: Problems and Methods of Study, ed. Welford, A. T., et al. (London, 1962), pp. 99–111.Google Scholar

12 Ideal types were extensively employed by Max Weber. For their contemporary use, see Don Martindale, ‘Sociological Theory and the Ideal Type’ in Symposium on Sociological Theory, ed. Gross, pp. 57–91, and McKinney, John C., Constructive Typology and Sociological Theory (New York, 1966).Google Scholar

13 For fuller discussion of these issues, see Wilson, B. R., ‘An Analysis of Sect Development’ in Patterns of Sectarianism, ed. Wilson, B. R. (London, 1967), pp. 23–45;Google Scholar and, for a more theoretical discussion of ‘types’ of sect, Wilson, B. R.. ‘A Typology of Sects’, in Types, Dimensions et Mesure de la Religiosité (Actes de la X Conférence Internationale de Sociologie Religieuse, Rome, 1969), pp. 29–56.Google Scholar

14 Elton, The Practice of History, p. 129.