Nouns and verbs

old and new strategies for sociology

Michael Rustin

pp. 31-53

in: Judith Burnett, Syd Jeffers, Graham Thomas (eds), New social connections, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

Abstract

Ever since Durkheim's (1895) famous adjuration to "treat social facts as things", sociology has been most comfortable with the work of identifying, classifying, and analysing the "thing-like" entities which it has defined as society and its components. The idea of 'social structure" attributed a thing-like solidity to the sociological object of study. The constant but sometimes unexpected concomitants or effects of 'structures' – their generation of unequal life-chances between classes, genders, or races, for example – gave sociology a significant explanatory power. Since structures could be empirically shown to have consequences for aggregates of individuals, as in the sequelae of social stratification, it was possible to hold to the idea that there were entities specific to sociology as a discipline, while also keeping at least one foot on the solid ground of methodological individualism.