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Sociological Theory and Sociological Practice Author(s): Thomas Kurtz Source: Acta Sociologica, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Sep., 2007), pp. 283-294 Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20460003 Accessed: 05-06-2015 22:04 UTC

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ACTA SOCIOLOGICA 2007

Sociological Theory and Sociological Practice

Thomas Kurtz Osnabruick University, Germany

abstract: This article is concerned with the question of the relevance of the results of sociological research external to the discipline – or, in other words, with the form of dealing with sociological knowledge in the environment of the scientific system.

When it comes to application, compared to other disciplines sociology has an unusual problem: Unlike jurisprudence or economics, which focus primarily on one specific social function system, sociology is characterized by a strictly external observation perspective and produces extemal descriptions of what the disciplines of the individual function systems have already put forward as self-descriptions. Based on these reflections, this article asks about the consequences for sociological theory and practice and sees one possible answer in viewing sociology as a form of advisory sociology.

keywords: advisory sociology * outside description * profession* sociological knowledge * sociological practice * systems theory

I. Introduction Sociology is frequently confronted with widespread lamentations of irrelevance not just by the public but also within the discipline itself, asking: 'What is the point of sociology today?'" Furthermore, there is talk of a crisis due to the lack of relevance of the results of sociological research external to the discipline. However, in contrast to these problems, the more recent results of knowledge application research emphasize, as its most important empirical finding, the proof that the factual application of social sciences and in particular of sociological knowledge has been drastically underestimated (Beck and Bont, 1989). While in its beginnings the practical success rate of the social sciences was viewed sceptically (Stehr, 1992), since the 1960s a continual diffusion of the knowledge of the social sciences into the most diverse social areas, organizations and Lebenswelten ('life-worlds') can be observed. Indeed, one can even speak of an increasing social scientification of the most diverse spheres of life in society. This can be seen especially in the political sphere when the reference to social scientific reasoning is either used as a basis for political decision-making or referred to as a basis for legitimizing political decisions in the areas of education, law and economy. Every political party has its own scientific court reporter delivering appropriate results and presenting them in the mass media as much-needed.

Two reasons in particular can be put forward explaining the immense spread of social scien tific ideas, which can certainly be viewed as a success story of the social sciences: First, the broad

ening of the social scientific study programmes since the 1970s and the resulting increasing presence of social scientifically educated practitioners in practice areas outside of universities; and second, the absorption of social scientific knowledge by the mass media, which, in its constant search for new information, first found what it was looking for in the natural sciences

Acta Sociologica * September 2007 * Vol 50(3): 283-294 * DOI: 10.1177/0001699307080933 Copyright C) 2007 Nordic Sociological Association * Published by SAGE (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)

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Acta Sociologica 50(3)

and then in the humanities and social sciences. In connection with these developments, the social sciences have become a part not only of the specialized knowledge of specific occu pations, but also of the individual cultural capital of a broad middle class.2 Hence, it would not be misguided to speak of a daily social scientification of everyday life. The extent to which the diffusion of the social sciences has led to a rationalization of social and individual problem processing or whether social scientific knowledge is only used strikingly and metaphorically is another question – one need merely think of the use of the term 'knowledge society' in the

media-informed public to illustrate this. Thus, although the social sciences are certainly present in public discourse (Lazarsfeld et al.,

1967), it is possible to ascertain a certain deficit in identifying them (Wingens, 1997).3 There is a demand for and in a sense also use of the social sciences in occupational practice, but even when they are used the initial form of the knowledge as produced in the social sciences can no longer be identified, and in application research one can search for the lost sociology (see Kroner and Wolff, 1984). And this search, or rather the proof of the effect of this knowledge, becomes all the more difficult with decreasing transparency of the paths or detours that this knowledge has taken over its journey through the mass media and the public. The difficulty in making social scientific products visible can already be explained by the simple fact that the social sciences, in contrast to the natural sciences, do not deliver hard facts or discoveries, but rather primarily provide interpretations (Felt, 2000). And in the broad public, these interpretations are often reduced to specific terms, pictures or metaphors.

In the following, I limit myself to concentrating on the area in which one is most likely to find sociological knowledge rather than attempting to identify all the places where one might detect sociology. This area is the application of sociological knowledge to concrete cases in the occupational action of sociologically educated practitioners. However, before doing this, let me make a brief comment on social scientific application research.

II. Knowledge and action Although social scientists were taken into service in the USA in the course of the psychologi cal warfare even before and during the Second World War, in particular by politicians and the military, the systematic research into the application contexts of social scientific knowledge first began in the post-war period. However, for a long time, this period was dominated by a naive, almost completely uncritical transfer mentality, led by the idea of a causal-technological knowledge transfer from science to the pragmatic action field of occupations, as paradigmat ically formulated in the phrase 'knowledge informs action'. Scientific knowledge was auto

matically attested superiority over practical action knowledge, and the relevance of sociology as a science for practical action attributed to its greater rationality. With the use of scientific knowledge, which in these concepts was principally interpreted deductively as a top-down relation (see Beck and BonfR, 1984), the so-called unscientific world of practice was to be brought up to the idealized rationality standard of science in order to function better.4

A turning-point is marked by Charles Lindblom's (1959) thesis of muddling through, with which the realization that the production of scientific knowledge follows different rules than its application in practice increasingly found acknowledgement. By the 1980s, the traditional transfer concepts had been replaced by more differentiated transformation models. These

models hold, in a somewhat oversimplified manner, that scientific knowledge generated through research, which is mediated – and if all works out well: also appropriated – in universities must be reshaped and recontextualized on its way into occupational practice. These transformation concepts thus reacted to the structural differences between scientific and practical action knowledge that had already been attested by phenomenology. Inspired by the concept of everyday life of the verstehende ('understanding') sociology of Alfred Schutz (1974;

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Kurtz: Sociological Theory and Sociological Practice

Schuizt and Luckmann, 1979), the idea of a rationality gap between science and practice was abandoned, as was the intention to steer practice with scientific theories in a causal-technical manner, as practice itself was interpreted as theory and knowledge laden. Schutz (1971) distin guishes between first-order and second-order constructs. First-order constructs imply action orientations of direct relevance in the form of everyday knowledge, which itself is a result of everyday situations of practice with pragmatic action relevance. In contrast, second-order constructs, which Schutz reserved only for science, observe problems external to science with a higher degree of generality and describe them with the help of a terminological framework. Social scientific reconstruction and interpretations of practice are in this sense always second order constructs and typifications, or, in other words: constructs of the constructs of practical action. In the transformation models of application research, this line of thought was continued and led to an interpretation of social scientific knowledge not as superior but rather as merely different (see, for this point, Nassehi, 2003: 310 ff.).

III. Self-description and outside description These application theoretical reflections generally address the social sciences. Beyond this, in the disciplinary context of society, sociology as a social science has a unique standing in research and education among the other social sciences. The fact that sociology lacks a clearly defined occupational practice external to science is always given as an explanation for this unique standing, but the main reason can be more precisely determined based on the differ entiation between self-description and outside description. As an editorial note explicating the meaning of description, let it at this point be said that description in this context refers to the textual fixation of observations. Although sociology can operate as the self-description and self-observation of society, of the scientific system and of itself as a discipline – and in this sense the reflections presented here are of course also self-descriptions of sociology – in all other cases sociology produces a description of its environment, which entails a distanced perspective of its object of observation as it is separated from that object by social system borders.

Sociology is thus distinctly different in the form of its perspective of observation from the disciplines of pedagogy, political science, jurisprudence and economics (Kurtz, 2000a). These social sciences are theories of reflections in the sense of self-description models as theories of the system in the system. Thus, they are themselves part of the communication processes of the respective function systems they observe, describe and characterize in the form of theories.

With reference to the regulation and orientation problems of the function systems, reflection theories are self-referentially connected to their objects. In accepting the key differentiation of their research object – for example law/injustice in the legal system – they at the same time incorporate themselves into these systems and offer a description that finds resonance in the communication of the system itself (see Luhmann and Schorr, 2000). In this process, they therefore identify themselves with the institutions and goals of the systems and, regarding plausibility and motivation, are located in a continuum with the observed system (Kieserling, 2004), so that the described finds itself well catered for in the description. This, however, does not mean that this self-description can get by without reference to science. Reflection theories also communicate their results in the form of scientific publications in science, but at the same time they are bound to their object in the sense that they do not merely engage in distanced research about their object but are simultaneously also engaged in researchfor their object.

In contrast, sociology – for which, for example, Theodor W. Adorno reclaimed the title 'The Party of Enlightenment (Aufklarung)' and Niklas Luhmann the title 'Science of the Second Glance' – takes a strictly external observation perspective and has produced descriptions of that which the reflection theories of the function systems have already presented as self-descriptions.

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Acta Sociologica 50(3)

Sociology itself cannot be primarily allocated to any one function system of society. It is, so to speak, the reflection theory of the whole of society. Thus, sociology describes a reality that has always already been described by other theories (Touraine, 1974; Bauman, 2000) without having committed itself in advance to a positive reference to the described system and its binary codes (key differentiations). The epistemic problems of the social environment are primarily processed by sociology under the aspect of truth, and by treating the system environment relation as a relation of difference it describes these systems and confronts them with these descriptions. Thus, in describing its environment, sociology as a science observes the differentiations of this environment with its own differentiation (true/false). As a result, it constructs for itself, on the basis of its own reality, an image of practice that is not necess arily congruent with the image that the respective practice has made of itself (Willke, 1993), or to put it more precisely, it forms an image that cannot possibly be congruent with the self image of the respective practice. Sociology is therefore not able to take up the perspective of a first-order world observer

(Luhmann, 1991) that knows what is right for the system under description – even if advocates of a critical sociology claim to do just that. Rather, sociology functions as a second-order form of observation, which observes observations and reveals blind spots of that which has been described, without being protected from its own forms of blindness. Hence, the differentia tion between self-description and outside description does not refer to a hierarchy between the disciplines: Sociology does not hold the position of the last observer described in Michael Power's Audit Society (1997), as sociology also finds its external observer, which judges its success, for instance politics informed by the mass media, which does not always want to acknowledge the usefulness of this discipline.

IV. Sociology as a profession? Viewing the field on the basis of the distinction between outside description and self description, it becomes questionable whether the foundation of a profession can be a realistic perspective for the development of sociology, as is repeatedly put up for discussion by certain areas of applied sociology in the framework of calls for a stronger practice orientation in study programmes. Indeed, this calls to mind the United States debate from over four decades ago, in which a quite different picture of the future of sociology was presented. For instance, it is clear from the works of Everett C. Hughes (1958), Talcott Parsons (1959) and William J. Goode (1960) that all three are in agreement that sociology should seek a profile more as a scientific discipline than as a practical profession. In this regard, Hughes (1958: 166 f.), for example, wrote: 'I think I can assume that we are all more interested in the advancement of sociologi cal knowledge than in the advancement of a profession of sociology.'5 And regardless of whether one focuses on the concept of profession of one of these authors

or on another concept of profession, it is difficult to imagine sociology as a science of action oriented towards a practical profession. Nonetheless, it is possible, both within the discipline as well as in the public domain, to observe an increased tendency to ascribe professions under the assumption that, fundamentally, any well-qualified occupational work can be profession alized (cf. Wilensky, 1964). In contrast to this term, which effectively no longer distinguishes between anything at all, one can use a more discriminating term – namely a social theoretical term – to determine professions, as can be found, for example, in the early sociological studies of law, religion and education of Niklas Luhmann and, building on these studies, in the sociology of profession of Rudolf Stichweh (see, for example, Stichweh, 1997). In this perspec tive, professions operate in the context of function systems in which the meaning of practical life problems of individual people – whether they be persons in need of comfort or cure for sickness, persons in conflict or needing education – make up the core of the communicative

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events. In these systems, the concern is not only with assuring communicative continuation within the system, but therefore also, under the requirement of helping, always with inter ventions in the lives of persons in the environment of society. And this is precisely why the communication in these systems can only be insufficiently made into a technique through media, leaving professional practitioners with the task of professionally assisting in the transformation of the problems from the negative to the positive – for example from sickness to health.

It can therefore be said that values which are specific to the professions at the same time mark the distinction of the respective function system to which the reflection theory of the system – its self-description – orients itself (cf. for more detail Kurtz, 2000b and 2005: 135 ff.). Thus the educational system of society distinguishes better accomplishments from worse ones, the teaching profession has the task of guiding the students to the positive side of the distinc tion, for which pedagogy as the reflection theory of the educational system supplies the appli cation-oriented theoretical tools. Even in other systems in which no occupational group dominating the field of practice has developed, such as in the economic system, theories of elaborated self-descriptions exist. For sociology, however, the situation is fundamentally different: Sociology dominates neither the theoretical nor the practical guidance of a function system. For this, it lacks above all its own personally bound and case-oriented practice.

Even if sociology – as is assumed here – cannot itself become a profession, this says nothing about its relevance for other professions. For Ralf Dahrendorf (1989), for instance, sociology is virtually the subsidiary subject par excellence, and for a long time the thesis was maintained that sociological knowledge was only able to enter into fields of practice external to universities over specific action sciences and professions (Lautmann and Meuser, 1986). If this were the case, we would have to ask ourselves why we bother at all to continue educating students majoring in sociology – and this in ever-increasing numbers. Although they are largely not visible on the labour market, as they rarely name sociology as their occupation, studies show that sociologically trained practitioners work in the most diverse social areas, such as education, social work, economy, politics/administration, health and media (Dammann and Zinn, 1997). Just as sociology can, as a science, produce descriptions of all areas of society, so too can trained sociologists apparently work successfully outside of science in the most diverse function areas – although as yet nothing has been said about what becomes of the sociological knowledge used in these areas. Does it maintain its distance or does it adapt itself to the respective requirements?

V. Sociological knowledge between truth and adequacy In order to answer this question we need to take another look at the application research: while the concepts of application as transformation are still based on the assumption of the possibility, in principle, of the translation of scientific knowledge into the practical action of occupations, systems-theoretical and constructivist analysis asserts a radical difference between scientific knowledge and action external to universities. According to these theories, the discussion of the relationship between science and practice systems is based on the false assumption that it is possible to generate a functionally determined relation between two systems. Such an attempt would be destined to fail, due to the fact that these self-referential systems can only

mutually orient themselves towards each other based on the logic of their own internal differ entiations, understandings of reality and different ways of processing the rationality specific to the system.6 The difference between the societal social system of science and the sociologi cal knowledge produced in this system and the field of practice external to the university appears, from this perspective, to be impossible to eliminate. Sociology, as a scientific theory of second-order observation, is not capable of finding causally adequate equivalents in the observed and described fields of practice, since the logic of observation is always the logic of

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Acta Sociologica 50(3)

the observing system and uses a choice of distinctions specific to the system. Viewed in this light, the results of sociological observations and descriptions, in reference to Heinz von Foerster (1981), can also be termed second-order reality. This theory-practice problem is, of course, also relevant on the level of organizations for the

reflection theories of function systems such as pedagogy, as self-description only means that the theory and that which has been described share the same function system context (see Kurtz, 2000a). The problem specific to sociological descriptions, however, is that they are also separated from their object by social system barriers. Hence, sociology cannot claim direct access to practice fields, as it is separated from the field of practice by several system barriers. Sociological knowledge, as a contribution to the field of practice, cannot give directions. It can at most be incorporated into the self-determining apparatus of the practical systems, although in this process it becomes an element of that system and thus no longer follows a scientific logic but rather the logic of the respective system. This is essentially a result of the fact that sociological knowledge must follow a different

logic in scientific practice and in practice areas external to science: While one can describe the production of sociological knowledge as the differentiated communication of truth, following the goal of explaining social structures, the sociological knowledge outside of science is not judged on the basis of the regulative idea of truth but rather in terms of the adequacy of the knowledge for making decisions relevant to the practice.7 And in this regard it is less a matter of whether the scientific meaning applies to practice than merely a matter of whether the benefits prove to be of value for the practice.8 A correct description of the respective practice by science is only of relevance to the practice insofar as it can transform these insights into the rationality specific to its own system. Otherwise, the capability of finding resonance remains restricted to the scientific system, for example, as a topic in the scientific discourse.

Scientific and practical perspectives remain as such in their respective systems. It is only through actors that they are brought, as points of contrast and similarity, into relation with each other (Kroner and Wolff, 1984). In this process, however, it is not the practical action itself which is made scientific, but rather the rationalization of this action as a retrospective and prospective form of reflection, or, in the words of Christoph Lau (1984): the structures of reasoning oriented towards decisions. Sociologically educated practitioners function here as translators of scientific and everyday language. This translation service occurs, however, in

what can be considered the environment of society – in the thoughts of persons – and the focus is then on the form in which sociological knowledge is fed back into the communication of the practical system. It is exactly at this point that the more recent application research faced the problem that it could not identify as such the sociological knowledge mediated in this way in its application beyond the theory-practice distinction. A sociological observation of the practical relevance of sociological knowledge is therefore faced in a certain sense with the problem of self-observation in external contexts. With regard to the differentiation between theory and practice, sociology as a science usually treats practice as the object that leads theory in its epistemic processes. By asking what the effects of sociological knowledge are in fields of practice external to science, it projects itself onto the other side of the distinction and then functions simultaneously as observer and as the object being observed. In any case, in contrast to the classical concepts of the application of sociological knowledge, one must ask whether, based on the internal logic of the observer perspective, it is at all possible to find sociology as sociology in the field of practice and, if found, whether the concern is truly with scientific knowledge itself or whether the key issue is more a type of know-how, understood as an adequate way of using this knowledge in order to act.

The immeasurably growing increase in knowledge in current society opens up a multitude of action possibilities (Stehr, 1994), which, however, have failed to make action any simpler.9 Owing to the huge diversity of action possibilities, knowledge is losing in stability/security –

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with the increase in knowledge, non-knowledge, as the other side of knowledge, also increas ing (Luhmann, 1992). At the same time, the adoption of specific knowledge to the question of

whether different knowledge would not have been more appropriate (Beck, 1992). And also for sociologists acting in practice areas external to the universities, the concern is not necess arily so much with having more knowledge as it is with non-knowledge, and the knowledge of this lack of knowledge is just as important for action as that which sociology act