The Wonderful World of Sociology: Merton
Aside from cultural studies, the academic discipline with probably the poorest reputation is sociology, at least in Britain. A lot of this stems from the 60s and 70s when almost anyone could get a job in a British university teaching the subject if they could show they had a fleeting knowledge of some social science or another (most usually anthropology). The 60s were the boom years: new universities (Essex, York, Sussex, etc.) were being set up plus the old universities decided that they really needed a sociology department to keep up with the Jones'. The discipline was one of the main bastions of academic Marxism (a contrast to old Karl himself, he associated the term with conservatism) and a few satirical novels that centred around sociologists also helped to lower its public reputation, e.g. The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury or The Men's Room by Ann Oakley, both of which had BBC TV versions made. The Thatcherite reforms of the 80s targeted sociology in particular, and it didn't help that the discipline itself was pretty much breaking up into factional struggles about politics and theory.
A lot of the bad press for the discipline is justified in my view, but then I'm someone who tried to become a sociologist for a number of years before giving up so I'm more likely to think "I'm too good for it, it's a pile of pants" than "I was too shit for it, it were great it were". However, it's not all bad stuff (and at least it's not psychology that great store of overgeneralised nonsense, I'm overgeneralising of course...) and indeed part of its PR problem is that it's too successful. Back in the day, before he turned into a technocratic apologist for New Labour, Anthony Giddens elaborated on Winch's point about social science's dependency on "natural language" for its terms' meanings by pointing out that the traffic was two-way. Not only did social science draw its language and meaning from "the real world" but that the products of social science often fed back into society, what Giddens called the double hermeneutic (a term that has been resolutely ignored by wider society). A large number of terms that we use on a daily basis were either coined or defined by sociologists. So, as part of an occasional series, I'm going to be looking at a sociologist who's come up with terms and definitions that we now consider part and parcel of our vocabulary.
First off, it's Robert K. Merton (1910-2003), who's often unfairly lumped in with Parsonian functionalism, a frequent punch bag of later sociology. He did do some work on functionalist theory, but the sheer range of areas in which he was involved in founding is quite remarkable, e.g. audience research, sociology of science, and the historical study of sociology itself. He was also rather "playful" in many of his works, for example, the previously-mentioned-on-RD On The Shoulders Of Giants is a Shandean take on the origins of that phrase. I'll look at three terms or ideas that he coined and that have since been absorbed by lay society:
1. Role model
The concept of a role had much appeal to English language sociology during the mid-part of the 20th century. It seemed to offer a link between the grand structures and institutions of society (which seemed to take on the appearance of solidity) and the messy day-to-day business of actual people. The ultimate expression of this approach to social interaction would come in Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life which would adopt wholeheartedly the full gamut of theatrical terms. Merton, however, was interested from an early stage in the question of social influence in mediating the relationships between social institutions (e.g. the media or politics) and individuals, and it was this interest that lead him to coin the term "role model". By this he meant someone who, in a particular aspect of their personality or behaviour was a model for others to imitate. This is somewhat different from the modern lay meaning of the term, which usually extends the imitation to a whole personality or lifestyle and usually in a morally desirable way (attaching "positive" is usually done for the purposes of rhetorical overkill). At the time the term used for this possible form of social influence was "reference group", but ultimately the distinction that Merton was trying to make was washed away and "role model" is now commonly taken as referring to the wider form of imitation.
2. Focus group
In conjunction with Paul Lazersfeld, Merton was responsible for much of the pioneering of radio audience research back in the 30s and 40s. As part of this process they developed the "focussed interview" technique where, after a standard quantitative questionnaire or survey, the interviewer would ask about more detail on certain responses. Merton took this a stage further and would gather together a group of the sample audience for researcher-led discussion about the topic, hence "focus group".
3. Self-fulfilling prophecy
Finally, Merton came up with a particular form of positive feedback: that a prophecy or prediction could, by its formulation and statement, cause its predicted outcome. He called this a "self-fulfilling prophecy". The classic demonstration of this phenomenon is Rosenthal and Jacobsen's Pygmalion in the Classroom, in which students who are labelled "intelligent and with great potential" after a supposed intelligence test administered by Rosenthal and Jacobsen (instead this status is assigned to a random 20% of the student population) on average did much better at the end of the year than those who weren't. Of course, Merton wasn't coming up with an entirely new concept, the idea of a self-fulfilling prophecy is there in Oedipus and Macbeth, but Merton was the first systematic exposition of the concept and he got to name it.
The vast majority of us who use these terms don't have a clue who Merton was, let alone that he coined them, however even this is something that Merton came up with a phrase for. The most successful ideas, through their very success, often end up being absorbed into the wider field and their origins sidelined: "obliteration through incorporation."