9
small time-bomb…under the complacent, chair-sitting rear ends of our more traditional
colleagues in the field of sociology.”
20
Thus, Mills’s distinctive methodological ideas
were situated within, not outside, the discourse of American sociology.
Mills, Gerth, Parsons: The Turn to Social Structure and the Reception of Weber
Indeed, one of Mills’s central criticisms of social pathologists—that due to their “low
level of abstraction” they failed “to consider total social structures”—placed him in the
mainstream of 1940s sociological developments.
21
Functionalism, which became
increasingly prominent in the 1940s, sought to transcend the atomistic analysis Mills
criticized in his 1943 article for a structural approach that examined the interrelated
features of large-scale societies. “Social structure” became a buzz-word of American
sociology in the 1940s: witness the title of Robert Merton’s influential 1949 collection of
essays, Social Theory and Social Structure.
22
This new approach marked a break with
the two most important traditions of American sociology up to this point: statistical
sociology and the ethnographic approach of the “Chicago school.” While earlier
American sociologists generally investigated smaller communities, this new macroscopic
approach took the nation or even modernity itself as its subject. This greater effort to
understand total social structures owed much to the appropriation of European
sociological theory, particularly the work of Max Weber. Talcott Parsons, who made his
reputation on the basis of a textual study of European sociologists, was the most
influential proponent of this trend. Heavily influenced by Parsonian theory, the growth
of macroscopic social science at mid-century was evident in the emergence of
modernization theory.
23
Convention