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Timelines History of Sociology American Sociological Association TIMELINES HISTORY OF SOCIOLOGY AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION April 2007 E-Newsletter No.8 Message from the Chair Eleanor Townsley, Mount Holyoke College Doing History of Sociology Please join me too in thanking the exceptional candi- dates who have agreed to stand for office in the section The methods, problems and focus of the history this year. of sociology were taken up in a Didactic Seminar organ- ized by Ed Tiryakian at the Montreal meetings last Au- For Chair-elect: gust. Here, we reproduce contributions from Uta Gerhardt, Ida Harper Simpson, Jennifer Platt, and • Charles Camic, Northwestern University Charles Tilly, and encourage responses. Together, these fascinating papers not only raise large questions about • Terry Clark, University of Chicago the history of sociology but also provide insight and practical suggestions for doing history of sociology. For Council, 2 seats of 3-year terms: First is Ida Harper Simpson’s reflective analy- sis of creating a history of the Southern Sociological • Ira Cohen, Rutgers University Society. It is an elegant account of the relationship be- • Marcel Fournier, University of Montreal tween the sociological logic of composing a history and • Richard Swedberg, Cornell University the materials available from formal and informal archi- • Joyce Williams, Texas Women's University val records of this important sociological institution. Second, Uta Gerhardt’s ruminations about ar- chival work on Parsons’ biography describes what we In this issue might understand of Parsons’ life and work by analyzing the historical record about the process of his academic writing over time, and by looking at unpublished mate- Fifty Years of the Southern Socio- 2 rial, memoranda and correspondence. Third, Jennifer Platt offers a set of considera- logical Society tions for comparative macro-sociological work in the history of sociology, emphasizing the importance of description and comparison, reviewing types of data Section Officers 5 sources and their use, and providing an invaluable ap- pendix of archival sources in the United States and Europe. Intellectual Biography of 6 Finally, in a paper which serves as an analytical Talcott Parsons introduction to the collection, Charles Tilly draws paral- lels between different approaches to doing history of sociology and different approaches to doing historical Mission Statement 7 sociology more generally. He distinguishes what he calls epochal syntheses, retrospective ethnography and criti- cal comparison, narrating a history of how sociologists have used different perspectives over time. Didactic Seminar on 8 Enjoy. Methodologies All the very best, Eleanor Historical Methodology 11 Fifty Years of the Southern Sociological Society: Change and Continuity in a Professional Society. Methodological Perspectives on Studying the History of the Southern Sociological Society* Ida Harper Simpson Duke University * Invited paper given at the 105th annual meeting of the American Sociological Asso- ciation, Montreal, Canada, August 12, 2006, as a didactic seminar for the History of Sociology Section The Southern Sociological Society was founded in 1935. to being a professional society. I wanted to describe In anticipation of its fiftieth year, the Executive Com- how the change occurred mittee appointed a Golden Anniversary Committee to Methodological Issue make plans for the occasion. Lee M. Brooks and Alvin L. Bertrand’s History of the Southern Sociological Soci- The first and perhaps the most important methodological ety (1962) had been commissioned for the Society’s perspective for my research was defining the research twenty-fifth anniversary, and the Committee recom- problem. I saw my history as “a study of the processes mended a fiftieth-year history. I accepted an invitation that transformed a scholarly society into a professional to write this second history. I decided against simply association” (Simpson 1988, vii). How might I discern extending Brooks and Bertrand’s earlier work by adding changes and their significance by drawing chiefly on happenings from 1960 to 1985 (the next twenty-five archives? I realized quickly that I needed to view years) in favor of writing a new fifty-year history of the change and conditions fostering it within the context of Society. Preparatory to deciding what kind of history I the social environment of SSS. Relevant dimensions would write, I visited the Society’s Archives at the Uni- included the South, whose problems many sociologists versity of Kentucky to find out what kinds of informa- of the South sought to address through research; the tion it housed. There were personal accounts, mainly by development of sociology as a subject of study and re- the presidents; the secretary-treasurers’ reports; commit- search in the nation and in Southern colleges and univer- tee reports; copies of annual programs; and newsletters. sities; and the resources on which the Society drew, in- The documents spanned the Society’s life from its cluding the population of potential members. founding onward, though the information was far from Therefore, my second methodological concern was to complete for all years. The annual programs were the find sources of information about the development of most continuous documents. sociology in the nation and in the South. Among the most useful sources were studies of the growth of soci- I had long been impressed by Everett C. Hughes’ (1952) ology in colleges and universities in the United States, concern that the American Sociological Society (later especially L.L.Bernard’s works (1909,1918); American renamed the American Sociological Association) should Journal of Sociology’s annual lists of PhD’s by institu- be wary of shifting from a disciplinary to an occupa- tion, title and author; “news and notes;” and committee tional form of organization. (An occupational organiza- reports of the American Sociological Society; Howard tion is oriented toward its market position and the ca- W. Odum’s, American Sociology (1951); and in the reers of its members.) South (Bernard 1918, 1937; Odum1938) and a few in- terviews I conducted with old, middle-aged, and young After I perused archival information and reflected on my SSS members. Odum’s American Sociology is a fifty- observations of the Southern Sociological Society, I felt year descriptive history (as seen by Odum) of all of the that the available information would enable me to write first half-century’s ASS presidents and their presiden- a history guided by Hughes’ observation. Accordingly, cies. The primary sources, mentioned above, give pri- the thesis for my history was that the Southern Socio- mary information, consistently collected and reported logical Society evolved from being a community of over long periods of time. scholars interested in studying the problems of the South (Continued on page 3) 2 (Continued from page 2) The second annual meeting, held in Birmingham, was at Organizations change through long-term evolutionary the Tutwiler hotel. The Local Arrangement’s Commit- processes and through deliberate revolutionary actions. tee, which included Monroe N. Work of Tuskegee Insti- These are markedly different kinds of changes. Unlike tute, was able to get conference rooms for racially inte- revolutionary change, which visibly alters an organiza- grated meetings, but the management was unyielding tion, evolutionary change occurs largely unnoticed to with respect to a racially integrated banquet. The Soci- become visible only over relatively long periods of time. ety took swift action and struck the banquet from its SSS had experienced revolutionary as well as evolution- annual program, effective with the 1937 meetings. No ary (i.e., processual) change. Thus, my third major con- banquet reappeared until twenty-four years later. SSS cern was to assure myself that appropriate data to study was a leader in the South in including African Ameri- the two kinds of change could be had. cans and women in its governance. Charles S. Johnson of Fisk University was an early president (1945) as was The data to discern evolutionary change needed to be Katherine Jocher of the University of North Caroline in uniformly and consistently recorded over time in order 1943-44.) Other revolutionary actions lacked the strong that they might be standardized and quantified as appro- consensus that led to the swift decision not to have a priate. Standardized data enable a researcher to make banquet unless all members were able to participate. repeated observations over long time periods, with con- These were more testy to study. fidence that the same underlying object is being de- scribed at successive times. Luckily, the SSS Archives Understanding the events leading up to the changes and had fairly complete yearly series of annual programs; locating data to identify their coalescing into new organ- secretary-treasurers’ reports on membership, attendance izational directions required serious study. I was helped of meetings, business meetings, and finances; and com- by relating events in the SSS to those in ASS, in re- mittee reports, including those on elections, nomina- gional sociological associations, and in sister social sci- tions, publications, and some historical events whose ence associations in the South. Where might I locate data might be quantified. I used these sources to infer information on such incidents and views about them? evolutionary changes, including trends in membership, During the first quarter century of SSS, before the cus- its employment, and its
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