Contemporary Social Psychology: Four Points of ViewAuthor(s): Karl L. AlexanderSource: Social Forces, Vol. 68, No. 1 (Sep., 1989), pp. 15-16Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2579215 .

Accessed: 16/06/2014 05:24

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Social Forces.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.41 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 05:24:53 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Contemporary Social Psychology: Four Points of View*

KARL L. ALEXANDER,, The Johns Hopkins University

The following four papers were presented at a plenary session on social psychology I had the pleasure of organizing for the 1988 annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society, held in Nashville, Tennessee, March 18. President Ida Harper Simpson's theme for this meeting was one of stocktaking, and the four panelists were ideal for such a charge. Alan Kerckhoff, Melvin Kohn, Morris Rosenberg and Sheldon Stryker, each is a distinguished scholar of long standing, and that alone would be ample qualification. But in addition, each is very active on the contemporary scene, engaged in research and by example helping to chart future di- rections.

Our session was titled "Reflections on the State of Social Psychol- ogy: Retrospect and Prospect," and it is in the charge to look both back- ward and forward that the composition of our panel takes on special sig- nificance. Here we have four scholars whose sense of perspective joins the wisdom that a reasonably long time frame can cultivate with lessons from today's labor in the trenches. Each is well positioned not only to look back, but also around, and being so situated ought to make their projections forward that much more acute.

I believe you will find the papers both thoughtful and thought- provoking. Of course, simply having four interesting statements in hand from scholars of distinction does not itself make a case for wide distribu- tion, but it seems to me the time is right for serious discussion of social psychology's future within sociology, and it is my hope that publication of these four papers will encourage others to take up the challenge. We are reminded in Stryker's paper of the institutional challenges to sustaining a healthy, distinctive sociological social psychology, and some indicators do indeed seem to suggest a specialty area "at risk"-declining membership in the ASA Social Psychology section, etc. And does Rosenberg's recount-

*Direct correspondence to the author, Department of Sociology, The Johns Hopkins Univer- sity, Baltimore, MD 21218. ?) The University of North Carolina Press Social Forces, Sept. 1989, 68(1):15-6

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.41 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 05:24:53 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

16 / Social Forces Volume 68:1, September 1989

ing of how paradigmatic blinders until quite recently impeded research on the self-concept foreshadow a similar fate for social psychology generally as the New Structuralism has its moment in the sun? I share Stryker's sense that it has become increasingly difficult to find a receptive audience for work that is "purely" social psychological. It is near obligatory that studies of the self-concept or other affective constructs be marketed as something else-either as social problems research or equity research or as social organization one step removed. Has social psychology really gone underground to this extent?

At the 1987 ASA meetings in New York I heard Al Kerckhoff offer remarks to the effect that social psychology wasn't dead, but simply being done in disguise. What Al had in mind was that social psychological in- sights and perspectives were being carried along routinely in a variety of enterprises that were not always recognized or read as "social psychol- ogy." An excellent example is my own favorite literature, status attainment studies, and Kerckhoff's paper in this collection suggests some exciting avenues for reinvigorating this highly stylized research tradition. Kerck- hoff's point struck me at the time as quite insightful and I have been carrying it around with me since then. I wonder whether such diffuseness is necessarily bad, or inevitable?

I also wonder whether the institutional and intellectual challenges alluded to by Stryker and Rosenberg threaten to drive the enterprise fur- ther underground, or are there countervailing forces around which those of a social-psychological bent might effectively rally? Kerckhoff, Kohn and Stryker apparently see the language of "social structure and personality" as potentially affording a comfortable collective identity, but beyond sur- face similarities in terminology there are important differences in the out- lines they sketch. I urge readers to search these out and to reflect on their implications in reading through these four papers. Kohn, in particular, is self-consciously aggressive in his insistence that a "quintessentially socio- logical approach" must move beyond "the immediately impinging inter- personal environment," that it must take social structure as its point of departure, and that it must engage its subject matter cross-nationally. Is he correct in all these respects? Are there legitimate sociological varieties of social psychology that could not accommodate comfortably to this vi- sion, or, for that matter, to its variants as reflected in Kerckhoff's and Stryker's papers? Rosenberg reminds us that one scholar's "focus" is an- other's "blinders." Is there a risk in coming back above ground, in rein- vigorating a distinctively sociological social psychology, that some impor- tant subterranean fellow-travelers will be sacrificed as a result?

This is a good time to be reflecting on such weighty matters. These four papers make good reading in themselves, but my hope is rather loftier. I see them as a vehicle for getting on the table a long overdue consideration of "whither social psychology." I commend them to you and look forward to seeing what sort of response they evoke.

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.41 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 05:24:53 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions