Dimensions of Association in Sociology: an Organizational Map of an Academic Discipline

Abstract

Sociologists' voluntary memberships in specialty sections within the American Sociological Association (ASA) can be assumed to reflect both the social organization of an intellectual society and the cognitive structure of the discipline's subject matter. Data aescribing the frequencies of joint memberships in each pair of the ASA's specialty sections from 198U to 1984 are analyzed using multidimensional scaling and clustering techniques. A large joint frequency of membership in two sections is taken as an indicator of intellectual affinity between the two specialty areas. We find that sociology has developed a multidimensional associational structure with three dimensions able to account for most of the relational structure. Nine broad specialty areas subsume the twenty-three specialty sections. A major bifurcation of the discipline appears between the explicitly Marxist specialty (and related "critical" specialties) and "Standard American Sociology" (SAS). A few specialties, notably among them tne Sociology of Population, appear as isolates. The major cognitive aimension, therefore, appears to be a parauigmatic divergence between the Marxist-Critical school and a collection of specialties oriented around the major institutions and problems of the welfare state. The other major dimensions accounting for the overlaps in section membership appear to be methodological distinctions based on different units of analysis (micro vs. macro) and, to a lesser extent, different degrees of quantification. Sociology in North America, viewed through its formally organized association, displays a complex pattern of differentiation, but the discipline nevertheless remains segmented by competing paradigms.