SOME SOCIOLOGICAL CONCEPTS AND METHODS FOR PSYCHIATRISTS
1
Garfinkel, H. (1956). Some sociological concepts and methods for
psychiatrists. Psychiatric Research Reports, 6, 181-198.
Note
This document has been digitized by Ben Hinton (ben@benhinton.com)
from the original referenced above. Although this is a digital document in which
page numbers are less relevant, the point at which each page in the original
document ends is indicated in square brackets. e.g. [END PAGE X]
As this document was prepared in great haste (as I read it for the first time) it
has at least two deficiencies which belong to me and not to Garfinkel:

The layout falls somewhere between APA and the
layout/referencing system of the original document hosted here
by Christophe.Lejeune@ulg.ac.be
http://www.squash.ulg.ac.be/ethnomethodology/Garfinkel_1956
_Concepts_and_methods_bw.pdf

There may remain accidental mistakes I have missed correcting
from the OCR process.
SOME SOCIOLOGICAL CONCEPTS AND METHODS FOR PSYCHIATRISTS
2
Some Sociological Concepts and Methods for Psychiatrists
Harold Garfinkel PhD*
I. The Subject Matter of Sociology
(a) Social Organization
Sociologists typically talk about "an organization" as if they meant what the
average person does when he refers to General Motors as "an organization," i.e. a
concrete, specific structure found in the world along with "chairs" and "tables."
But if you interpret the sociologist's favorite term as common sense indicates,
you will be misled. Closer inspection reveals that the term "an organization " is
an abbreviation of the full term "an organization of social actions." The term
"organization" does not itself designate a palpable phenomenon. It refers instead
to a related set of ideas that a sociologist invokes to aid him in collecting his
thoughts about the ways in which patterns of social actions are related. His
statements about social organization describe the territory within which the
actions occur; the number of persons who occupy that territory; the
characteristics of these persons, like age, sex, biographies, occupation, annual
income, and character structure. He tells how these persons are socially related
to each other, for he talks of husbands and wives, of bridge partners, of cops and
robbers. He describes their activities, and the ways they achieve social access to
each other. And like a grand theme either explicitly announced or implicitly
assumed, he describes the rules that specify for the actor the use of the area, the
numbers of persons who should be in it, the nature of activity, purpose, and
feeling allowed, the approved [END PAGE 181] and disapproved means of
entrance and exit from affiliative relationships with the persons there.
*
Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Sociology, University of California at Los Angeles, Calif.
SOME SOCIOLOGICAL CONCEPTS AND METHODS FOR PSYCHIATRISTS
3
A number of ideas, then, make up the general concept of "an organization". These
are the ideas of territory, of an actor, of numbers, of action, of timing, of rules, of
access, and of social relationships.
All sociological theories are alike in invoking these ideas. But one
particular theory may give them a different specific content, and may combine
them differently from another theory. For example, one theory may specify the
idea of territory as a geometrical layout, and specifically disregard many other
features that a sociologist with different interests would like to stress. The idea
of territory may be represented in one theory as real estate; another may cast it
as a political jurisdiction.
These ideas implicate each other. Thus, a sociologist in deciding what to
let them mean in effect decides how he will conceive the patterns of activities to
be related. Therefore, because one particular theory may specify these ideas
differently from another, theories that differ from one another conceive different
meanings of "an organization of activities." Obviously, this means theories that
are different, serve different uses. The idea of an organization, therefore, is itself
an interpretive technique in sociological inquiry.
Consider some examples.
Alex Bavelas (1951) of Massachusetts Institute of Technology conceives
"an organization of activities" as a communication network. He pays particular
attention to the rules that govern who can communicate with whom, and is
interested in the speed and efficiency with which groups of five persons who can
communicate only over prescribed paths can achieve solutions to tasks that are
set for the five persons acting in concert. The persons in the network are
narrowly and specifically conceived as task solvers, message writers, and
SOME SOCIOLOGICAL CONCEPTS AND METHODS FOR PSYCHIATRISTS
4
message transmitters. More complicated imputations, such as a psychotherapist
might use for example, are deliberately disregarded.
Because Bavelas describes "communicative paths" mathematically, his
"organization" is immensely useful if the investigator is interested in relating
certain geometrical properties of interaction to the efficiency with which a set of
persons acting in concert can achieve a particular task, or to the distribution
among the network's personnel of feelings of group affiliation and rejection. Its
particular usefulness comes from the conceptions of paths of communication and
positions in these paths which are models of clarity.
But while Bavelas' "organization" is useful for some questions, it is not
useful for others. For example, if you are interested in why people behave as they
do under the pressure of rules, then you may not want to assume that the rules
are fixed as Bavelas does. In this case Bavelas' "organization" is of less use than is
the so-called "paradigm of social interaction" of Talcott Parsons (1951).
Parsons' "organization" places particular stress on the person's perceived
situation as a set of mutually anticipated , expected, recollected events. The [END
PAGE 182] "rules" that govern their interaction are characterized as particular
types of uniformities of these expected and recollected events that the
interacting parties treat as maxims of conduct, and that they teach each other,
hold each other to respect, and use in controlling each other's actions.
In contrast to Bavelas' actor, Parsons' actor can not be conceived except
by specifying his situation which includes other people. The two actor and
situation, are, so to speak, dialectical counterparts of each other. Thus, what one
person expects of another as reward or punishment for his own actions consists,
from the point of view of the partner, of the partners' expectations of the actor's
SOME SOCIOLOGICAL CONCEPTS AND METHODS FOR PSYCHIATRISTS
5
course of action. A person is a chauffeur thereby, not only on the basis of the
service he expects to render the rider, but on the basis of the treatment that he
gets in return.
Parsons conception of "an organization of activities" is particularly
useful for thinking about the phenomena of socialization, deviance, and social
control. But Parsons' "organization" in its turn is clumsy if the investigator
wishes to study the volume of interaction between large groups of persons
located at various distances from each other, like the number of messages that
are exchanged between a set of towns and cities.
Stuart Dodd (1950) however has developed "organizations" that
are specifically designed to handle such phenomena. Dodd's actors contrast with
those of both Bavelas and Parsons. For one thing, Dodd's actors are
interchangeable with each other. They send messages that are addressed to no
person in particular, only to "someone" who is a member of another aggregate.
These messages have no meaning; Dodd disregards this feature in his conception
of a message. Dodd's actors are engaged in furiously communicating with each
other, but the specific content and purposes of the transmission is for his
purposes disregarded.
We can conclude from these remarks that the sociologist may be
useful to the psychiatrist for at least one kind of special competence: the
sociologist is a wholesaler in theories of social organization. He has a large
number of them on his shelves. Among them the psychiatrist is hound to find
many to fit his particular needs.
The sociologist's competence with theories of social organization
can furnish psychiatrists a second service. The second service comes from the
SOME SOCIOLOGICAL CONCEPTS AND METHODS FOR PSYCHIATRISTS
6
sociologist's preference for studying the actions of persons in their
organizational settings. Such actions include the troubles that persons are heir
to. Sociologists typically look to the features of organized social life, as such, in
their attempts to account for who has what kinds of troubles, with what
frequencies, with access to what remedies. One might say that the sociologist is
interested in the impersonal factors that make for the individual person's
troubles.
Further, psychiatrists in studying persons in trouble are inclined
typically to stress personal biographical factors and the individual's own
capacities [END PAGE 183] for managing his own states. The sociologist has
available various theories of social organization to tell how biographical factors
and the characteristic ways that persons manage their own psychological states
are themselves dependent upon the organizational features of the group without
respect, necessarily, for the characteristics of the particular individuals involved.
This view is frequently a difficult one for psychiatrists to accept.
Nevertheless, strange as the view is, students of bureaucratic organization have
become startlingly adept at identifying trouble spots in a group when these
students know only such things as how access to information, advancement,
money, and sponsorship are distributed and controlled in the bureaucracy, or
how the succession of leadership is provided for, or the rate of size increase of
the group, while knowing very little about the psychiatric biographies of the
persons involved nor much about the personalities of the members.
(b) Social Reality
SOME SOCIOLOGICAL CONCEPTS AND METHODS FOR PSYCHIATRISTS
7
By the study of "social reality," a term sometimes used equivalently with
the term "culture," a sociologist means the study of how situations of practical
everyday life are socially organized and, as such, are perceived, known, and
treated by persons as uniform sequences of actual and potential events which
the person assumes that other members of his group know in the same way that
he does, and that others, as does he, take for granted. As Alfred Schutz (1955)
states it:
"(Social reality) ... consists of the objects and occurrences within the
socio-cultural world experienced by the common sense thinking of "men living
their daily lives among their fellow men, connected with them in manifold
relations of interaction. It is the world of cultural objects and social institutions
into which we all are born, and within which we have to find our bearings, and
with which we have to come to terms."
The sociologist is concerned in a variety of ways with making a problem
of the feature of persons' "worlds" that they "merely take for granted." A brief
comparison of the way sociologists attack this phenomenon with the
psychiatrists' interests in the same phenomenon again shows some ways that
sociological concepts may be of interest to psychiatrists:
a. It is an abiding concern in psychoanalytic investigation to clarify the
structure of unconscious activities. The complementary interest on the
sociologist's part consists of his equally abiding concern with clarifying the social
structuring of highly routinized interpersonal situations. Sociologists refer to this
area as the "institutionalized" character of activities and its objects.
In pursuing this program, sociologists have developed distinctive
terminologies and methods, frequently to the exasperation of others. One such
SOME SOCIOLOGICAL CONCEPTS AND METHODS FOR PSYCHIATRISTS
8
distinctive and crucial concept is "common culture." The term figures
prominently [END PAGE 184] in sociologists' inquiries and psychiatrists'
complaints. There is no easy remedy. The phenomena that the sociologist
intends by the term "common culture" is translatable into common sense terms
only at the risk of losing the crucial insight that sociologists and their
anthropological colleagues have in the last century literally discovered, at
considerable cost in effort and reputations. Sociologically speaking, "common
culture" refers to socially sanctioned round1 of inference and action that people
use in everyday life, and which they assume that other members of the group use
in the same way.†
Such socially-sanctioned-facts-of-life-that-any-bona-fide-member-ofthe-group-knows depict, among other things: distributions of income, motives of
persons, the distributions among persons in the community of honor,
competence, responsibility, goodwill, the presence of good and evil purposes behind the apparent workings of things, the actual and potential disorder, misery,
poverty, illness, unemployment, trouble in the society as well as the effective
remedies, the chances and the reasons that particular persona will be victims,
and so on.
In order to describe the existence and characteristics of these socially
sanctioned grounds of inference and action, sociologists have devised such
techniques as questionnaires, polling interviews, content analysis, item sorts,
†
The phenomenon was pointed to by one of American sociology's heroes, W. I. Thomas,
when he stressed the importance for an understanding of a person's behavior of considering that
person's "definition of the situation." Thomas laid down the interpretive rule in a famous
apothegm, "If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences."
SOME SOCIOLOGICAL CONCEPTS AND METHODS FOR PSYCHIATRISTS
9
rules of scale construction, and the like. These devices permit him to survey
"common culture" on a mass scale. Such surveys are obtained at the inevitable
sacrifice of the exquisite variables that are so apparent in extended
conversations with particular persons. But the loss of the minutiae of "common
culture" does not sacrifice reality. It is the case instead that a knowledge of fine
structure is traded for a knowledge of first order effects that hold over large
sectors of the society. Such devices have the further virtue of treating in credible
and reproducible fashion such otherwise elusive characteristics of "common
culture" as its standardization, the extent of common subscription, its
transmissibility, and intra-and inter-personal consistency. Finally, their use has
permitted the treatment of these features in a highly rationalized and frequently
useable quantitative manner.
b. Just as psychiatrists and socioiQ8ists have complementary interests in
"unconscious activities," so also do they have complementary interests in "reality
oriented" actions. May I refer to them alternately as "rational actions”?
Sociologists have described the wide variety of meanings of rational activities
found in organizational settings: in studies of industrial, govern- mental, military,
business, and educational bureaucracies, of problem solving [END PAGE 185] in
groups, of acculturation and cultural marginality, of the situations of upwardly
mobile persons, of the criteria of occupational selection and advancement, of the
characteristics of Western law, and of various types of leadership.
Sometimes these descriptions refer to characteristics of the person's
actions; sometimes they refer to organizational features of the group. As
examples of the person's activities, sociologists have documented the presence of
the extent of the person's concern for the comparability of a present situation
SOME SOCIOLOGICAL CONCEPTS AND METHODS FOR PSYCHIATRISTS
10
with those he has known in the past; the economic use of his resources; the
degree of error a person will tolerate between an expected outcome and an
actual outcome; the extent to which a person engages in conceptualization,
analysis, and programming of the conditions for electing alternative courses of
action prior to undertaking the action; the nature of a person's concern for the
temporal scheduling of a line of action; the fact that a person realizes that he can
exercise choice in a situation as well as the situations in which in fact he
exercises choice; the empirical adequacy of the means he employs in his pursuit
of goals, and many others.
The sociologist has described, as well, features of the group as such that
correspond to these rational characteristics of the individual person's actions.
These have been documented as features of bureaucratic organization: of market
control structures; of budgeting and accounting practices; of systems of law; of
church organization; of types and uses of authority; of inter- and intraorganizational communications procedures.
Not only can sociological inquiries furnish the psychiatrist an elaborated
terminology for distinguishing the various phenomena of individual behavior
and social structure that the term "rational actions" is used to handle, but
sociologists have been concerned to describe the conditions of organized social
life under which such phenomena occur. One of these conditions is continually
documented in sociological writings: routine as a necessary condition of rational
actions.
The relationship between routine and rationality is an incongruous one if
it is viewed either according to everyday common sense or according to most
philosophical teachings. But sociological inquiry accepts almost as a truism that
SOME SOCIOLOGICAL CONCEPTS AND METHODS FOR PSYCHIATRISTS
11
the ability of a person to act "rationally,"-i.e. the ability of a person in conducting
everyday affairs to calculate, to project alternative plans of action, to select
before the actual fall of events the conditions under which he will follow one
plan or another, to give priority in a selection of means to their technical efficacy
depends upon the fact that the person who is going to "act rationally" or
"realistically" must be able literally to take for granted, to take and trust, vast
array of features of the social order. In order to treat rationally one-tenth of his
situation that, like an iceberg, appears above the water, he must be able to treat
the nine-tenths that lies below as an unquestioned, and even more interestingly
as an unquestionable, [END PAGE 186] background of matters that are
demonstrably relevant to his calculations but which appear without being
noticed.‡
The sociologist talks about these trusted, taken for granted, background
features of the person's situation, i.e., the routine aspects of the situation that
permit "rational actions," as "mores, and "folkways."
Psychiatrists commonly consider these habitual, traditionalized, socially
sanctioned practices in their diagnoses. Because these sanctioned practices vary
a great deal as one goes from one ethnic group, for example, to another, a
knowledge of them aids in discriminating "bizarre practices" that are features of
psychopathology from those that are normal to the patient’s ingroup
‡
In a famous discussion of the normative background of activities, the French sociologist, Emile
Durkheim, made much of the point that the validity and understandability of the stated terms of a
contract depended upon its unstated terms that the contracting parties took for granted as
binding upon their actions. "The Division of Labor," translated by George Simpson, The Free
Press, Glencoe, Illinois, 1947.
SOME SOCIOLOGICAL CONCEPTS AND METHODS FOR PSYCHIATRISTS
12
But a further use of these “mores” is suggested here. For sociologists the
“mores” depict the ways in which routine is a condition for the appearance of
“rational actions,” or in psychiatric jargon, for the operativeness of the "reality
principle." The mores may be used to show how the stability of social routines is
a condition which enables persons to recognize each other’s actions, beliefs,
aspirations, feelings, and the like as reasonable, normal, legitimate,
understandable, and realistic.
II. The kind of work that sociologists engage in when attacking a problem
(a) Interpretive Rules
Because sociologists subject to scientific contemplation those matters
whose value and relevance we are inclined in everyday affairs to take for
granted, sociologists have in their theories, which are interpretive rules for
ordering their impressions and observations, devices for appreciating the
incongruous character of everyday life. Several devices of interpretation are
available to sociologists to aid them to scan a familiar world in upside-downfashion. I want to mention one: the conception of the "homeostatic"
characteristics of group interaction.
There are many ways of conceiving the logically necessary connections
between actual observations. A prominent one for sociologists conceives their
related character under the scheme of a "homeostatic system." Such a scheme of
interpretation calls to our attention the features of self-regulation, selfmodification, and self-maintenance. The writings of Talcott Parsons (1951) have
SOME SOCIOLOGICAL CONCEPTS AND METHODS FOR PSYCHIATRISTS
13
been explicitly concerned with the tasks of conceiving homeostatic relationships
realistically with respect to the phenomena of human conduct. [END PAGE 187]
Parsons' task in theorizing is this: How to conceive the necessary
relationships between the patterns of social interaction while providing first for
the perspective of the participant , and, second, while retaining a respect for the
phenomena of "social reality." Parsons undertook the problem by investigating
the relationships between personality systems and social systems. In a recent
essay, "The Superego and the Theory of Social Systems,' Parsons elected the
solution of revising the content of the superego to include the internalization of
all culture.
As a consequence of this decision, a new accent is placed upon the
behavioral details that the psychoanalysts have documented as the mechanisms
of ego defense. The effect of Parsons' formulation is to treat the mechanisms of
defense as an open list of "devices" whereby a sensible shape of the world is
continually accomplished by the actor, with the features of the group providing
the conditions for, as well as the limitations upon, the ways of handling personal
strains, past, present, and prospective. By not assuming the fact of social order,
but asking in the first instance how it is constituted and maintained [which
Parsons refers to in a concern for the mechanisms of social deviation and social
control), Parsons does not start with the defense mechanisms, but instead seeks
to discover them. Programmatically, his procedure is to consider a viable group
and to ask for the features that contribute to its viability. The scheme provides
psychiatrists a way of thinking about the social consequences of the defense
mechanisms.
SOME SOCIOLOGICAL CONCEPTS AND METHODS FOR PSYCHIATRISTS
14
(b) Conceptual Play
In preparing a question for sociological treatment, sociologists make use
of several techniques that can properly be referred to as techniques of
conceptual play. By conceptual play is meant that the investigator undertakes the
solution to a problem by altering imaginatively the features of the problematic
situation and then following through the consequences of this alteration without
suspending a respect for the basic rules of his discipline.
Many techniques of conceptual play arc solutions to the enduring
problem of establishing comparability in the data. The sociologist seeks methods
for describing human experiences instances of a class of recurrent and typical
events.
With increasing frequency, this problem is being solved through the use
of control groups, comparative statistics, sampling procedures, randomizing
techniques, and the like. Immense importance for the credible use of schemes of
inference resides in them, for they permit the investigator to state his findings as
generalizations which carry along with them rational estimates of their
erroneous character that are related to the procedures of the inquiry and
thereby to the reproducibility of the claimed findings. Sociologists are indeed
increasingly occupied with "counting and measuring." Psychiatrists, [END PAGE
188] generally, find such behavior on the sociologist's part offensive. But unless
psychiatrists appreciate the sociologist's concern for counting and measuring in
the light of the tasks of comparison that both sociologists and psychiatrists must
necessarily and unavoidably address, psychiatrists will make foolish complaints,
and, worse, will overlook a most useful resource that their sociological
colleagues can furnish.
SOME SOCIOLOGICAL CONCEPTS AND METHODS FOR PSYCHIATRISTS
15
But statistical techniques of conceptual play do not differ in principle
from one discipline to another. By comparison, there are several techniques to
facilitate the task of comparison that are particular to sociology.
The mental experiment: Frequently referred to as the "mental experiment"
is a device more accurately called the method of "free variation." The method is
exemplified in the following excerpt from Karl Mannheim's essay, "The
Sociological Problems of Generations (Mannheim, 1952):
''The best way to appreciate which features of social life result from the
existence of generations is to make the experiment of imagining what the social
life of man would be like if one generation lived on forever and none followed to
replace it. In contrast to such a Utopian imaginary society, our own has the
following characteristics:
a. New participants in the cultural process are emerging. (while)
b. Former participants in that process are continually disappearing.
c. Members of any one generation can participate only in a temporally
limited section of the historical process.
d. It is therefore necessary continually to transmit the accumulated
cultural heritage.
e. The transition from generation to generation is a continuous process.
Although it may put me in trouble with my fellow sociologists to say so,
the principle of the method can be seen in any of the better varieties of
science fiction that elaborate the consequences of an imagined change of
some fundamental feature of the social order, while the imaginer retains a
respect for sociological fact. The procedure produces an "objectively
possible" sociological state of affairs that can be used as a standard for
SOME SOCIOLOGICAL CONCEPTS AND METHODS FOR PSYCHIATRISTS
16
comparison with a known state of affairs in order to evoke properties that
are otherwise unseen or difficult to grasp.
The method becomes of interest to psychiatrists because one need not
begin with a vision of a person or a social setting constructed merely out of
imagination. Instead, one may begin with a situation that is known in a vastly
comprehensive manner and retain the entirety of its actual detail. The trick
consists of prefacing the entire description with the theoretical fiat, ."Let it be
that..." That is to say, everything is retained as it was known before, let us say the
details of a case history, but with the important change of meaning that
accompanies the fact that its empirical accuracy is suspended, "officially
disregarded." The material is addressed by changing the aspect of "It is so..." to
"Let it be that it is so..." [END PAGE 189]
When applied to psychiatric work , the method calls to the
psychotherapist’s attention those respects in which the patient is explicitly
assumed to be comparable to all other patients defined as a class by the things
that the particular patient has done and said. The technique has the effect of
multiplying the amount of organized behavioral detail that may be used for
comparison by substituting for the procedurally sterile concept of the "actual
patient" a set of alternative ways of appreciating the typical character of the
particular patient 's behavior.
The natural metaphor: A useful form of the method of free variation is
found in a technique that is known around the Department of Sociology at the
University of Chicago where it was developed as the use of "natural metaphors."
SOME SOCIOLOGICAL CONCEPTS AND METHODS FOR PSYCHIATRISTS
17
By this is meant that there are formal similarities in the situations of persons
located at different places in the social order. These structurally repeated
situations, though they may be known to the participants by different names, are
organizationally identical. The participant's ways of describing their own
situations may be used as the metaphor or model for appreciating the formally
identical features in the situations of others.
For example, what the showman calls "singing," the Jewish waiter calls
"staging," the psychologist calls "directed activity." All three terms refer to the
actions that a person engages in who seeks some advantage from another, and
who must capture it within the limited opportunities of the immediate
interaction by not only accomplishing a task but by communicating to the other
person that a task is being accomplished.
Irving Goffman of the Laboratory for Socioenvironmental Studies
of the National Institute of Mental Health has made most extensive and
convincing use of the technique. In one paper (Goffman, 1952) he drew upon the
confidence game for the concept, "cooling the mark out." Among professional
confidence men provision must be made as part of the play to reconcile the
victim (the "mark") to the loss that he has suffered, and to accomplish this in
such a way that the victim does not interfere with the continued operations of
the game. Giving his paper the subtitle, "Some Aspects of Adaptation to Failure,"
Goffman writes:
"An expectation may finally prove false even though it has been possible
to sustain it for a long time and even though the operator acted in good faith. (As
a routine feature of the society's operations) a large number of persons may as a
normal course be involuntarily deprived of a position or a commitment or an
SOME SOCIOLOGICAL CONCEPTS AND METHODS FOR PSYCHIATRISTS
18
involvement and made in return something that is considered a lesser thing to
be. Such loss may be taken as a reflection on the loser and is of interest because
to the extent that the loss requires the severance of a commitment, severe
humiliation is involved . Disappointment of a reasonable expectation as well as
the disappointment of a misguided one creates a need for consolation. Cooling
the mark out is a theme in a very basic social story." [END PAGE 190]
Goffman then describes several situations of social life in which it
becomes necessary on important and repeated occasions to console the victim,
to "cool the mark out." He asks three questions: How can they be made to accept
the great injury and to carry on without interfering with the continued
operations of the system? How to deal with those who refuse consolation? And
what arrangements are made by operators and victims to avoid entirely the
distasteful and upsetting business of consolation?
The cogency of Goffman's particular application of this method for
sociologists and psychiatrists alike need not be elaborated. Both have routine
professional dealings with the risks and consequences of failing and failure.
The praxeological rule of the sociological attitude: Goffman is concerned with
failing and failure as matters of technical interest. He treats these matters in
much the same way as does the confidence man, from whom he borrows the
image of failure. In treating failure as a matter of technical interest, Goffman is
honoring a rule that is definitive of the sociological attitude. By demonstrating
this rule and giving some applications, another technique of conceptual play can
be seen.
Although the rule is used by sociologists, it is without a name. For
convenience, I shall call it the praxeological rule.
SOME SOCIOLOGICAL CONCEPTS AND METHODS FOR PSYCHIATRISTS
19
As the program of praxeology was recently described it consists of the
search for similarities of successful methods in many different domains of
activity. Praxeology seeks to formulate statements of method, and to extend their
generality, seeking as wide a domain of applicability as possible. The theory of
games and scientific methodology are instances of praxeological disciplines.
Insofar as a praxeological rule may be said to constitute a definitive
feature of the sociological attitude, the following is being referred to. Accounts by
sociologists of the conditions under which a phenomenon occurs may be mapped
point for point into the terms of strategies that persons follow whereby,
knowingly or not, they achieve the pay-off represented in the value of the
variable under study. The praxeological rule states that any and all properties
whatsoever of a social system that a sociologist might elect to study and account
for are to be treated as technical values which the personnel of the system
achieve by their actual modes of play.
When it is the determinants of a given rate of output in an industrial
plant that is of concern, the applicability of the rule is fairly familiar. Even
common sense does not boggle over it. But the same rule holds for the ways
persons are distributed by class or income or voting preferences. It holds for the
simple or intricate character of the division of labor; for the differential risks by
class of various mental illnesses; for the stability of suicide rates; and for the way
symptoms cluster into discriminable clinical entities.
Several applications of the rule that are particularly relevant to the
interests of psychiatrists can be illustratively cited. [END PAGE 191]
1. Merton's (1949) theory of anomie and social structure may be
stated "praxeologically" as follows: If you wish to multiply the
SOME SOCIOLOGICAL CONCEPTS AND METHODS FOR PSYCHIATRISTS
20
frequency in a society of frustration, psychosocial isolation,
delinquency, alienation, compulsive conformity, and dissent then
socialize the society's members so that there is uniform respect for
ultimately valued goals while you routinely and differentially
deprive the members of the legitimate means for achieving them.
2. The relationship that Levy (1952) finds between the disparity in
the loci of power and responsibility and the stability of a social
system can be stated in the following way: To multiply the
instability of a set of activities, deprive persons of the means for
controlling the conditions of an outcome while holding them to
account as causal agents of the outcome.
3. Myrdal's (1944) formulation of the "cyclical" effect in the
maintenance of anti-Negro discrimination would run: To conserve
resistance to an attempt to alter a feature of the social order,
reinforce the expectancy for any particular person that others
respect this feature, and have the person treat the beliefs that he
imputes to others as features of the social order so that he will
respect the moral character of limited tests of opinion.
4. Lindesmith's (1947) theory of the determinants of drug addicition
would be stated as follows: To increase the rate of drug addiction,
teach persons receiving the drug which symptoms of distress are
due to the withdrawal of the drug.
The use of the praxeological rule has the virtue of drawing attention away
from the search for impersonal "causal laws" of human action, framed in terms of
the determinants of an effect, in favor of stating the operations that an
SOME SOCIOLOGICAL CONCEPTS AND METHODS FOR PSYCHIATRISTS
21
investigator conceives the actors to be performing upon a system of
relationships to produce the state the sociologist is interested in.
III. "Understanding" as a Technique For Studying Human Affairs
I want to conclude with some remarks on "understanding" as it is used by
sociologists as a method for studying human affairs. As a method for solving
problems of sociological inquiry, "understanding" has several distinct meanings
(Shutz, 1955). I shall comment only one of these meanings: the documentary
method.
I cite this method, not because it is the sociologist's to sell to psychiatrists,
but because it is a method shared by both and is even inexorably binding upon
the investigative efforts of both. Further, it is the method not only of
psychiatrists and sociologists, but of the man in everyday life whose experiences
are their abiding objects of study. By citing the method, I hope to show that their
differences are not as great as the partisans would hope, though this does not
mean of course that they can therefore dwell in peace.
According to Karl Mannheim (1952) the documentary method involves
the [END PAGE 192] search for "... an identical, homologous pattern underlying a
vast variety of totally different realizations of meaning." It involves the treatment
of a sign's referrent as "the document of ... ," as "pointing to" an underlying
pattern. Not only is the underlying pattern derived from its individual
documentary evidences, but the individual documentary evidences are in their
turn interpreted on the basis of "what we know" about the underlying pattern.
This procedure, as Mannheim correctly stressed, is peculiar to the social
sciences. One kind of documentary procedure that particularly concerns
psychiatrists has been variously referred to as "sympathetic introspection,"
SOME SOCIOLOGICAL CONCEPTS AND METHODS FOR PSYCHIATRISTS
22
"method of insight," "intuitive feeling," "method of intuition," "interpretive
method," "clinical method," "empathic understanding," and so on. Attempts by
sociologists to identify something called "interpretive sociology" involve the
reference to this procedure as the basis for encountering and warranting its
findings.
Applications of documentary methods in sociological research are
widespread and perhaps ineradicable. Consider the variety of things that
sociologists know and describe in a documentary manner§
To begin with, there are the extensive descriptions of cultural
orientations, cultural themes, value orientations, value standards, styles of life,
life organizations, national character, all of which are realized as to their specific
characteristics through a method whereby evidences are used to "document" the
"underlying pattern."
Just as the documentary method is used when the psychiatrist treats the
patient's self-diagnosis as a symptom of his illness rather than as a correct
identification of his illness, the sociologist , no less than the psychiatrist, is
concerned with the "motivated character" of an actor's accounts of what is the
case with him and with others or with features of the society.
While sociologists have been reluctant to treat a Weltanschauung, or "the
spirit of an epoch," as a legitimate object for inquiry, they have warmed to the
descriptions of "group atmosphere," of the state of consensus, of "normal
functioning," and "normal operations," and of conditions of group viability and
equilibrium.
§
Much of the following discussion indebted to Mannheim’s (1952) essay, “On the interpretation
of Weltanschauung."
SOME SOCIOLOGICAL CONCEPTS AND METHODS FOR PSYCHIATRISTS
23
Still another application is found in those accounts which are warranted
by the criterion of comprehensive description as contrasted with a description
that is adequate to the logical requirements of a specific theoretical
representation of the situation under examination.
The method is exemplified again when the formal features of a situation
are used to epitomize the object under assessment. Just as one may say, "Isn't
that just like Harry," one may use some feature of a group to stand for the group
itself. [END PAGE 193]
It is the documentary method that is used when one finds evidences of the
other person's common sense, or evidences of his potentialities, but before
everything, the evidences of "what the other person has in mind."
The documentary method is a way of realizing the unity of a biography.
The work of historicizing past events, either for a particular person or for a
collectivity, consists of the application of the documentary method to the task of
selecting and ordering past occurences.
It is necessary to point out, too, that events in daily life are known
through their documentary meanings. Consider a commonplace example. When
coming upon a basket of apples, we treat it as a basket of apples, despite the fact
that a small fraction of the specifications of "a basket of apples" serve as the test
and document of the "basket of apples." By contrast, one would have to consider
the distrustful procedure whereby one would make "
𝑛(𝑛−1)
2
comparisons of the
apples in the basket" the sense of the "basket of apples."
What holds for our treatment of a basket of apples holds more generally.
The sociologist sees evidences that persons are forever attesting the normality of
the situations in which they participate. Whole orders of actions and personnel
SOME SOCIOLOGICAL CONCEPTS AND METHODS FOR PSYCHIATRISTS
24
are treated by the actor under the critically important aspect of "the sameness of
the scene," i.e. its comparability to situations known in the past, despite the
variability of behavioral appearances and the continual alterations of props and
scenery. The product of the actor's use of the documentary method is the
constancy of relationships between an actor and his changing scenes of activity.
Finally, the method can be cited as a prominent part of the work that
persons engage in whereby they maintain themselves and each other as the
same persons, i.e. as temporally homogeneous products. The sociologist is found
of citing as an important variable of social order the social judgements that the
member of a group employ whereby they retain their images of each other as the
same and valuable people. According to this conception, the self, as a
homogeneous product for other persons, is the outcome of continual and careful
management. It is in terms such as these that the sociologist is concerned with
conventionality and conformity, with status systems, with the paradoxical
relationship between individual choice and the standard products of concerted
action. All of these phenomena presuppose a set of actors who are conceived by
the sociologist to know the scene around them in a documentary manner, i.e. to
know the scenes around them in the ways that they furnish the actor
documentary evidence of types of persons, their motives, feelings, relationships,
worth, competence, and so on. The use of the documentary method is therefore
intimately related to the phenomenon of trust. Through the documentary
method, persons are enabled to treat such properties of a scene as invariants
despite continual alterations of actual appearances. [END PAGE 194]
All scientific disciplines have their great chronic problems to which the
methods of the particular discipline represent solutions. A prominent problem in
SOME SOCIOLOGICAL CONCEPTS AND METHODS FOR PSYCHIATRISTS
25
sociology and the social sciences generally is that of achieving a unified
conception of an object that has as its specific formal property that its present
character will have been decided by a future outcome. The documentary method
shows its uses not only as a unique instrument of the social sciences, but as the
only method so far capable of handling events having this peculiar time
structure. The documentary method consists essentially of the retrospectiveprospective reading of a present outcome so as to maintain the identicality of the
object through temporal and circumstantial alterations. Such method seems to
be an inextricable feature of situations in which the rules that govern
communicative exchanges create situations in which actions must be taken
despite the fact of incomplete information. Psychiatrists, sociologists, and
persons whose psychiatric and sociological judgements are governed by the
interests of everyday life are in this respect in identical situations, and have in
common a prevailing and identical method for coming to terms with them. It is
obvious that they should therefore have much to teach each other.
SOME SOCIOLOGICAL CONCEPTS AND METHODS FOR PSYCHIATRISTS
26
References
Bavelas, Alex. 1951. Communication patterns in task-oriented groups. The
Policy Sciences, edited by Daniel Lerner and Harold D. Lasswell. Stanford
University Press, Stanford, Calif.
Parsons, Talcott. 1951. The social system. The Free Press, Glencoe. Ill.
Dodd, Stuart. The interactance hypothesis, a gravity model fitting physical
masses and human groups. Am. Soc. Rev., April, 1950:245-256.
Schutz, Alfred . Concept and theory formation in the social sciences. J. of
Phil ., April 24, 1955:257-273.
Parsons, Talcott. 1953. The superego and the theory of social systems.
Working Papers in the Theory of Action. Talcott Parsons, Robert F. Bales,
and Edward Shils. The Free Press, Glencoe. Ill.
Mannheim, Karl. 1952. The problem of generations. In Essays on the
Sociology of Knowledge, translated and edited by Paul Kecskemeti, Oxford
University Press, N.Y.
Coffman, Irving. On cooling the mark out, some aspects of adaptation to
failure. Psychiat., November, 1952:451-463.
Hiz, Henry. Kotarbinski's praxeology., Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research, December , 1954:238-243.
SOME SOCIOLOGICAL CONCEPTS AND METHODS FOR PSYCHIATRISTS
27
Merton, Robert K . 1949. Social structure and anomic, Social Theory and
Social Structure. The Free Press, Glencoe, Ill.
Levy, Marion J. , JR. 1952. The structure of society, Princeton Univ . Press,
Princeton , N.J .
Myrdal, Gunnar. 1944. An American dilemma. Harper and Brothers, N.Y.
Lindesmith, Alfred, R. 1947. Opiate addition. Principia Press,
Bloomington, Ill.
Mannheim, Karl. 1952. On the interpretation of Weltanschauung . Essays
on the Sociology of Knowledge, translated and edited by Paul Kecskemeti, Oxford
University Press, N .Y.
[END PAGE 195]