Page 103 - The ISA Handbook in Contemporary Sociology

9781412934633-Chap-06 1/10/09 8:46 AM Page 74

6

New Ways of Relating

Authority and Solidarity:

Theoretical and Empirical

Explorations 1

Elisa P. Reis

INTRODUCTION sciences into specialized disciplines can be
connected to historical-cultural challenges
The profound changes the world has experi- that made the old theoretical concepts sound
enced in the last three or four decades pose wrong or too limited (Elias, 1984).
great intellectual and political challenges to In the present context, I will focus on a
us sociologists. No doubt, the world has specific contemporary challenge, one that
always faced crises and undergone changes. concerns many of us trained in the old tradi-
Of course, social sciences usually view such tion of historical sociology with regard to the
events as challenges. However, it is also true standard ways of looking at society and at its
that, at some particular moments, society basic forms of organization. As I see it, there
experiences turning points, ones at which are recent conceptual changes in sociology
conventional frameworks of understanding that respond to actual transformations in both
seem inadequate, and they make room for objective and subjective social processes. At
feelings of rupture or discontinuity. To con- the same time, I agree with Sommers and
ceive of the economy as a distinctive dimen- Gibson (1994: 45) when they observe, ‘Social
sion of life, for example, is something that theory is as much history and narrative as it
took place only after there emerged a notion is metatheory. In its very construction,
that the public and private spheres of social all theory presumes a prior question the
life were not the same. In a sense, the very theory is designed to answer – hence the
process of fragmentation of the social theory itself is already an intervening