Agassi, Sztompka, Kincaid, and Crothers argue, in various ways, that Merton should not be held responsible for his published views on theory construction, and they provide psychological or strategic explanations for his failure to resolve issues with these views. I argue that this line of defense is unnecessary. A better case for Merton would be that theories in his middle-range sense were a nontechnical alternative solution to the problem of spurious correlation. Middle-range theory was not, however, a solution to the (...) problem of diverse approaches. Merton also did not resolve the problems with his account of functionalism, and the problems undermine the claim that he had a distinctive “structural” approach all along. (shrink)

How has sociology framed places of knowledge production and what is the specific power of the laboratory for this history? This article looks in three steps at how sociology and Science and Technology Studies have historically framed the world as laboratory. First, in early sociology, the laboratory was an important metaphor to conceive of sociology as a scientific enterprise. In the 1950s, the trend reversed and with the emergence of a ‘qualitative sociology’, sociology was seen in opposition to laboratory work. (...) With the ascent of laboratory studies, the laboratory perspective was again applied to many fields, including sociology itself. Based on a definition of a laboratory as aiming at placeless knowledge and being inconsequential this article argues that the two waves of laboratorization were metaphorical and did not really turn the world into a laboratory. Instead, two alternative concepts, those of the unilatory and the locatory, are proposed to gain a more precise understanding of some of these metaphorical uses of the term ‘laboratory’. (shrink)

In this article I argue for a transdisciplinary approach to the human or social sciences. There is little ontological or epistemological justification for a division among these disciplines. I recommend that sociology stop worrying about policing its disciplinary boundaries and begin to encourage various forms of intellectual transculturation. I then analyze barriers to transdisciplinarity by comparing disciplines to states and comparing the relations among disciplines to different sorts of imperial practice, or interstate relations. The most common interdisciplinary strategies are analogous (...) to the informal, nonterritorial imperialism practiced globally by the United States. Three other forms of interdisciplinarity are discussed: the annexation of one discipline by another — a situation that is analogous to colonialism; nonhegemonized systems of equal disciplines (analogous to the Westphalian state system); and nonimperial `traveling' and transculturation among disciplines (analogous to the practices of members of weak or declining imperial states). (shrink)