Theory and practice in sociological analysis: Paul F. Lazarsfeld and his critics

Abstract

This paper states the importance of Lazarsfeld’s work during his half-century of teaching, research and writing. First I write on the intellectual influences to which he was exposed from his late adolescence and outline his career as assistant to the psychologists Karl and Charlotte Bühler in the University (1927). These activities attract the Rockefeller Foundation attention, which invited him to come to the United States as a «Rockefeller Fellow» of statistical- mathematical background with interest in social psychology (1932). I write too on his institutional work from the University of Newark to the Columbia’s support of the Bureau of Applied Social Research. Lazarsfeld is most often identified as a pioneer in the field of quantitative analysis. His contributions are connected to this growing importance of empirical research at the institutional level from which we distinguish two mean trends: a) a methodological one where general problems, like setting up research, are treated with specific techniques of analysis as the latent structural ones; b) a research trend centred on problems like how we come to a decision. This first interest was in what he called «the empirical analysis of action» —the study of individual action— and sample surveys became the principal tool. The second part of this paper provides a critical overview of the more philosophical and methodological aspects of his work. First of all in the late 1930’s, when Lazarsfeld was director of the Rockefeller Funded Princeton Radio Research Project and he employed Th. W. Adorno to supervise a study on music within American culture. The cornerstone of the problem between Lazarsfeld and Adorno was the measurement of culture. Two points of view were confronted: Adorno understood the word method more in its European sense of epistemology than in its American sense of research technique. This approach pushed Adorno in the direction of being regarded as a social commentator and not a social scientist, and he was definitely dismissed. But his critique of music was not simply a musical one but a critique of the society within which such music was produced. The interactionisme of H. Blumer, the radical reaction of C.W. Mills against the abstract empirism and the marxist controversy between M. Pollack and J. Dumazedier signals the importance and the rol played by Lazarsfeld after the Second World War, and his influence on the european sociology, specially in France, and on other international institutions of social research. Finally, I try to point out a balance of his work and circumstances, with special reference to the link between theoretical and empirical approach in social science.