Abstract
The article introduces a methodological framework for sociologists to identify, isolate, and analyze a thinker’s thought-model. The author introduces the analytical strategy through the example of Émile Durkheim and shares a research agenda and preliminary findings on the thought-model(s) of Olive Schreiner as a heuristic device to demonstrate how scholars can utilize the methodology in their own work. The article concludes with a discussion of how isolating and analyzing influential thinkers’ thought-models is critical for the history of sociology. A thorough understanding of the thought-models within the discipline will illuminate the philosophical, religious, and cultural currents that have informed the foundation of the field and reveal possible sources behind the marginalization of certain theorists. Sociologists’ ability to identify the systems of thought that facilitated past and current sociologists in conceiving innovative ideas not only contributes to the history of sociology but also to the discipline moving into the future.
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Notes
See Appendix for full description of the author’s thought-model.
Indeed, critical race theory has shown how stories are a powerful methodological tool in developing social analysis about injustice and inequalities (Donnor & LadsonBillings, 2017).
For example, a researcher could make the argument that thought-model A is more influential than thought-model B because B was encountered later in life and perhaps A led one to resonate with B in the first place. Or, that the content/form/details do not map on quite as well to B as they do to A. Alternatively, A could be detectable across more of the corpus than B.
Hobson and Schreiner met through his work at the Manchester Guardian, a major British anti-war newspaper. Schreiner is mentioned in his book The War in South Africa (1900) and her theorizing is visible in his analysis in Imperialism (1902) (Stanley, 2015).
Including but not limited to, the value and forms of labor, women in men-dominated industries, wage equality, the social construction of gender and race, homophily, militarism, globalization, and intersectionality.
John William Bertram (1845 - 1879) was the child of the missionary couple who were the predecessors to Schreiner’s family at Wittebergen Mission Station in the Eastern Cape. Bertram shared similar views to Schreiner on religion and lent her books that she later credits with having largely impacted her intellectual and ethical development (Schoeman, 1991).
Books published after 1920 were edited by her estranged husband Samuel Cronwright; thus, it is advisable to pay attention to any major differences between them and earlier work that stem from his “correcting” (Stanley, 2013[2002], p. 95). Cronwright destroyed the majority of the original materials he had in his possession, but Stanley’s (2013[2002]) comparison between a surviving manuscript of Undine and his version revealed mostly minor changes, though in some places these edits altered the meaning of her work (p. 107).
Scholars have deemed Cronwright’s biography of Schreiner to be deliberately misrepresentative in presenting Schreiner as “neurotically damaged and childish, a damaged genius” (Stanley, 2013[2002], p. 9). As such, biographies based on his accounts are problematic.
For instance, Roslynn Haynes (1981) connected Schreiner’s Story of An African Farm to Romanticism, though Simon Lewis (2013) noted that Schreiner was not well acquainted with romantic writers when she wrote the novel and argued transcendentalism was a more probable influence. Mark Sanders (2000) posited that secular Hellenism was reflected in her work.
The role of parables in the Bible are particularly evident in the Book of Matthew, as it stated, “Jesus spoke all these things in parables to the crowds; he did not speak to them without a parable” (Matthew 13:34). Schreiner also used parables to convey messages to her readers, as she wrote in a letter, “except in my own language of parables I cannot express myself” (Schreiner, 1892b).
For instance, she used the labor of the matriarchs, Miriam, and Deborah, and the full passage from Proverbs 31:10-31 to emphasize her point on the importance of women’s work (Schreiner, 1911).
In particular, economic systems and the value of labour, toleration, utilitarianism, sex relations, and the link between biology and sociology.
For example, Schreiner outlined the change in the division of labour between the sexes from “primitive” cultures to “civilized” cultures in Woman and Labour to detail the rise of sex parasitism and its deleterious impact on society. This argumentative style was the foundation of Spencer’s argument in First Principles, and the approach maps onto Mill’s enumerative induction which he described is possible through comparing societies.
In his passionate prose, Emerson argued that it is essential for individuals to speak their truths and have the courage to resist conformity, as “every revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind” (Emerson, 2001[1841]). Schreiner wrote in an 1874 journal entry that reading Emerson gave her “more strength than anything has ever done” (Cronwright-Schreiner, 1924, p. 98).
Like Schreiner, the women founders examined gender, race, class, and other inequalities and were active social reformers, many of whom engaged in cross-genre writing as a way to extend their social analysis and critique (Lengermann & Niebrugge, 2007, p. 10).
As Liz Stanley (2015) wrote, Schreiner “developed critique of the then academic way of thinking and department...which was not a rejection of analysis but a particular masculinist mode” (p. 100).
The American Sociological Association’s 2021 Annual Meeting theme is emancipatory sociology, a “rigorous science whose ultimate goal is uncovering sociological truths crucial to achieving liberation” (Morris, 2019).
Such as, just because a scholar is ethnically part of a group they must “think” like members of that group, as if each ethnic group has one system of thought and all members are equally bound to that thought-model!
A deep investigation into these figures' thought-models, particularly with curiosity to how Marx’s theories were woven into several of their works (with the exception of Patterson) would be a fruitful exercise.
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Acknowledgements
Thank you to Dr. Gillian Niebrugge-Brantley and Dr. Patricia Madoo Lengermann for their extraordinary mentorship on this article from its earliest stages. Thank you to Dr. Liz Stanley, Dr. David Swartz, Dr. Robert Wuthnow, Dr. Kim Scheppele, and Dr. Chloë Grace Fogarty-Bourget for their detailed and generous feedback. Thank you to Dr. Steven Lukes for his support on the original project on Émile Durkheim that inspired this piece. Thank you to the members of the American Sociological Association History of Sociology Section for their dedication to the mentorship and development of junior scholars, as well as, to Daniel Haboucha and Renee Kline. A final thank you to the anonymous reviewers and Dr. Larry Nichols at The American Sociologist who helped develop the manuscript into a publishable article. All mistakes are my own.
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This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under Grant No. DGE-1656466. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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Appendix: The Author’s Thought-Model
Appendix: The Author’s Thought-Model
I share additional background on my socialization and life experiences so the reader can further understand how my own thought-model informs this article and my interpretations of Émile Durkheim and Olive Schreiner. I was raised in a secular though ethnically Jewish household and lived in four different states before the age of ten, and thus, was exposed to several different regional cultures. From a young age, I was aware of how I had to manipulate my own language and accent, bodily habits, and appearance to fit into various social groups, and was ultimately able to navigate successfully from place to place. Since I was raised in an open, diverse, and diffuse cultural environment, at that point I had no particularly distinct thought-model beyond what I had tacitly learned in the home and explicitly learned in my public schools. I did have a sense of marginalization as I moved between states, and felt on some level like a perpetual outsider.
Upon entering university, I took a class on status and interpersonal relations which introduced me to literature on inequality and power relations and changed the way I looked at the world. The material resonated with the feelings of marginalization I had experienced as a peripatetic child and later as a woman navigating academic spaces. I decided to become a sociology major and learned sociological theory and research methodologies. As a sophomore, I began three years of ethnographic research into spirituality and well-being—prompted by a personal interest in Eastern spirituality and meditation as a way to cope with the stressors of college life. I found deep meaning in spiritual practice and learned through my research the importance of discipline in moving forward in a spiritual journey. I decided to investigate what discipline looked like in my own religious tradition, Judaism, and began intense Torah study that ultimately led to me spending a year in Israel after college studying traditional Jewish texts in yeshiva. I spent another year in yeshiva in New York City before starting graduate school and researched the experience of newly Orthodox Jewish women. By that point, I was very familiar with, and in many ways had adopted, a traditional rabbinic thought-model in terms of my personal religious observance and familiarity with the content and discursive strategies of Jewish texts.
During my classical theory course in graduate school, I was often frustrated with the theorists’ focus on intellect over bodily knowledge, beliefs over action, and reason over emotion and what felt to be an underlying Christian-orientation of the texts. These did not coincide with the way I saw the world nor the importance of bodily action over belief I had found in my research with spiritual seekers. As described in the article, when I read Émile Durkheim, I felt an alignment between his and my thought-models. My experiences researching Durkheim and later investigation into the experiences of new soldiers in the United States Army, particularly the cultivation of the “officer mind,” convinced me of the importance of even adult socialization in developing distinct thought-models.
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Winfield, T.P. Uncovering the Origins of a Sociologist’s Thoughts: A Methodology to Identify and Analyze Thought-Models. Am Soc 52, 449–471 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-021-09491-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-021-09491-3