Customer Reviews

The Sexual Organization of the City

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An interesting book by a respected sociologist.

The previous reviewer engaged in more of an ad hominem attack than a review because he, apparently, dislikes qualitative approaches to sociology (and structural-functionalism in particular). He reviewed a discipline and methodology rather than this book, and used his review to sell his own book.

Moreover, he didn't even get the name of the school right. It is the University of Chicago, which would surely be known by any reputable sociologist as it is known for founding the enormously influential school of thought known as "the Chicago School" in the 1930s.

Sexual organizations and structures in urban environments are notoriously inaccessible to statisticians, and Laumann's subjective, qualitative approach is very appropriate in this book.

Laumann's romanticism

Sexual Organization of the City (2004) by Chicago University's Edward O. Laumann is one of several of Laumann's books reporting survey finding about sexual behaviors. Laumann received his sociology Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1964, which was during the heyday of the Parsonsonian romantic philosophy of science in sociology. Romantics construe sociology as a social psychology of subjective mental states, variously called motives, scripts, normative orientations, and other so-called "mechanisms" that define their idea of "social theory".

Laumann's romanticist philosophy of science is manifest in a chapter titled "Normative Orientations toward Sexuality" in his earlier Social Organization of Sexuality. The subjectivism is also evident in his recent article (April 2006) titled "A cross-sectional study of subjective well-being among older woman and men" in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior.

For half a century this German romantic philosophy of science, which originated in Hegel's Geist philosophy, and which Talcott Parsons imported to Harvard from Heidelberg, dominated American academic sociology. While editor of the American Journal of Sociology at Chicago University, Laumann is known to have rejected empirical contributions that do not conform to this romanticist philosophy of science.

But times have changed both in sociology and at Harvard. Years ago Harvard's Nathan Glazer exposed sociology's impotence in his Limits of Social Policy (1988), and the New York Times documented academic sociology's decline in "Sociology's Long Decade in the Wilderness" (28 May 1989). Today the American Sociological Association reports that the number of sociology Ph.D. degrees awarded is still nearly 17 percent below the 1976 peak.

Of course there have been holdouts. In a New York Times OP-ED-page article "The Last Sociologist" (19 May 2002) Harvard sociology professor Orlando Patterson complained that sociologists have adopted the methodology and language of the natural sciences focusing on building models, formulating laws, and testing hypotheses with measurement data.

The reliability of these survey data in this and Laumann's other books and papers is dubious. Just ask any market researcher who used survey research findings of subjective attitudes for deciding the acceptability of a new product, and then had to withdraw the new product after a year of test marketing due to failure.

Furthermore even Laumann's data suggest opportunities for more sophisticated empirical exploratory data analysis sometimes called data mining, artificial intelligence or discovery systems. Such an empirical approach is encouraged by the contemporary pragmatist philosophy of science, the prevailing philosophy in academia today. Pragmatists recognize only empirical criteria for scientific criticism, and subordinate all semantical and ontological claims to empirically warranted beliefs. Unlike Laumann they never require mentalistic semantics or ontologies.

Long ago Laumann brought his Harvard Parsonsonian romanticism to Chicago University. I believe that today Chicago University's sociology department, once a leader under the positivist sociologist William F. Ogburn, could recover its former status with a Harvard-style modernization today - but this time it should be a movement forward to Harvard's postpositivist pragmatism instead of backward to Parsons' prepositivist romanticism.

I recognize no useful or actionable information in this book. All I see is a waste of public tax dollars and a subsidy for academic sociologists.

Interested readers are invited to google my History of Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Science at my web site named philsci for free downloads by chapter.

Thomas J. Hickey, Econometrician