Alvin Gouldner

Alvin Ward Gouldner
Born	July 29, 1920 New York City, US
Died	December 15, 1980(1980-12-15) (aged 60) Madrid, Spain
Academic background
Education	PhD
Alma mater	Columbia University
Thesis	Industry and Bureaucracy (1954)
Doctoral advisor	Robert K. Merton

Alvin Ward Gouldner (July 29, 1920 – December 15, 1980) was an American sociologist, lecturer and radical activist.

Early life

Gouldner was born in New York City. He earned a B.B.A. degree from the Baruch College of the City University of New York and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University.

Career

Gouldner taught sociology at the University at Buffalo, Antioch College, and the University of Illinois at Urbana in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1957, he joined the joint Anthropology and Sociology department of Washington University in St. Louis. In 1968, he became the Max Weber Research Professor of Social Theory there and chair of the department. He was the president of the Society for the Study of Social Problems (1962) and professor of sociology at the University of Amsterdam (1972–1976).

His early works such as Patterns in Industrial Bureaucracy can be seen as important as they worked within the existing fields of sociology but adopted the principles of a critical intellectual. This can be seen more clearly in his 1964 work Anti-Minotaur: The Myth of Value Free Sociology, where he claimed that sociology could not be objective and that Max Weber had never intended to make such a claim.

He is probably most remembered in the academy for his 1970 work The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. This work argued that sociology must turn away from producing objective truths and understand the subjective nature of sociology and knowledge in general and how it is bound up with the context of the times. This book was used by many schools of sociology as analysis of their own theory and methods. However, Gouldner was not the first sociologist to be critical of objective knowledge of society, see for example Theodor W. Adorno's Negative Dialectics.

Subsequently, much of Gouldner's work was concerned with critiquing modern sociology and the nature of the intellectual. He argued that ideology often produced false premises and was used as a tool by a ruling elite and that therefore critical subjective thought is much more important than objective thought.

Personal life and death

Gouldner achieved public prominence when he was accused of beating and kicking Laud Humphreys, then a graduate student at Washington University, who Gouldner suspected of hanging a satirical cartoon poster criticizing Gouldner on the sociology department bulletin board. He died of a heart attack at age 60 in 1981.

Major works

• 1950: Studies in Leadership
• 1954: Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy
• 1954: Wildcat Strike: A Study in Worker-Management Relationships
• 1959: Organizational Analysis
• 1959: Reciprocity and Autonomy in Functional Theory
• 1960: The Norm of Reciprocity : a Preliminary Statement
• 1964: Anti-Minotaur: The Myth of Value-Free Sociology
• 1966: Enter Plato
• 1970: The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology
• 1973: For Sociology: Renewal and Critique in Sociology Today
• 1976: The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology: The Origins, Grammar and Future of Ideology.
• 1979: The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class: A Frame of Reference, Theses, Conjectures, Arguments, and an Historical Perspective on the Role of Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in the International Class Contest of the Modern Era
• 1980: The Two Marxisms: Contradictions and Anomalies in the Development of Theory [1]
• 1985: Against Fragmentation: The Origins of Marxism and the Sociology of Intellectuals

Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy (1954)

Gouldner led an ethnographic study in a mine and identified there various patterns of bureaucracy and bureaucratization. He analyzed how after the appointment of a new manager the bureaucratization process emerged. Gouldner identified three types of bureaucracy in his studies with very specific patterns:

• Mock bureaucracy: this type comes from outside agency and is implemented officially, but not in daily behaviors. Both management and workers agree in this case to act the same way. The rules are not enforced in this case, neither by management, nor by the workers. No conflict seem to emerge in this case. "Smoking" is in this case seen as inevitable. The no-smoking rule is an example of mock-bureaucracy.
• Representative bureaucracy: both management and workers enforced this rule and it generated very few tensions. In this context, the focus was on the education of workers as management considered them as ignorant and careless regarding security rules. The safety program is an example of representative. Meetings happened regularly to implement this program and it was as well the occasion to voice some concerns for workers. For the management, this program was a way to tighten the control over workers.
• Punishment-centered bureaucracy: this type of program was initiated by management and generated many tensions. Management viewed workers as deliberately willing to be absent. Therefore, punishment was installed in order to force the workers not to be absent. For example, the "no-absenteeism" rule is an example of the punishment-centered bureaucracy.

The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology & Gouldner's Critique of Talcott Parsons (1970)

In The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, Gouldner primarily argued that there would be a new class of sociologists emerging consisting of radical students, who rebel against what they see as the conservatism of their previous professors. The book consists of multiple parts: an attack on “objective,” “value-free” social science, a sociology of the history of sociology and a critique of Talcott Parsons, culminating in his own proposal for a new sociology.

Gouldner devotes the largest portion of his book to Talcott Parsons and to the Parsonian brand of functionalism, which in his eyes dominated American sociological thinking in the 1930’s, 40’s, and 50’s. However, many, including the late sociologist Bennett Berger, find faults in Gouldner’s argument. Berger believed that Parsonianism never dominated American sociology and that sociologists of that era followed their own preset tracks. Additionally, Berger points out how the most popular books during the 1950’s were non-Parsonian. Berger sees Gouldner’s criticism of Parsons as superficial, with Berger pointing out how Gouldner implies that Parsons is a fraud and that his reputation rests on his Harvard association. Furthermore, Berger claims Gouldner makes claims with no evidence, like that Parsons initially opposed government intervention for social reform. Gouldner’s criticism isn't without a nuanced approach however, as he trained under one of Parsons' students, Robert Merton. Berger points out how Gouldner uses this to not only a critique of Parsons' most basic ideas, but as a basis for a sociological analysis of the biographical sources of those ideas and their relevance to issues associated with laissez-faire capitalism in the 1930's and the problems of Welfare State capitalism in the 1950's and 1960's.  

Another criticism Gouldner beams at Parsons’s discussion of change is Parsons’s alleged failure to give technology the place it deserves. John Rhoads, a late sociology professor from Northern Illinois University, highlights Gouldner’s view that Parsons lists cultural legitimation, money, and democratic associations but omits science and technology as revolutionary universals. Gouldner held the view that Parsons had an objective of proving the superiority of America over the Soviet block of nations. In his view, the US institutionalized some evolutionary universals such as money and markets, legal codes, and democratic associations, which were not fully developed within totalitarian systems. However, totalitarian societies did possess science and technology and compared favorably with the United States. Yet, Rhoads believes that Gouldner’s opinion that Parsons is attempting to demonstrate American superiority is wrong. He highlights how Parsons does include technology as a universal: “These four features of even the simplest system - “religion,” communication with language, social organization through kinship, and technology - may be regarded as an integrated set of evolutionary universals at even the earliest human level. No known human society has existed without all four in relatively definite relations to each other.”

External links

• Why Mills and Not Gouldner? by Charles Lemert
• Stalinism: A Study of Internal Colonialism (Full Text) Telos 34 (Winter 1978). New York: Telos Press.
• Alvin Gouldner on Intellectuals and the Social Totality
• http://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1023&context=clsoc_crim_facpub
• E.P. Hollander & R.G. Hunt : Perspectives in Social Psychology. New York, Oxford University Press. 1963