Relevanz und Trivialität in der soziologischen Forschung / Relevance and Triviality in Sociological Enquiry

Although the word ‚relevance’ is increasingly used in current sociology, its meaning is uncertain. Three typical usages may be distinguished: epistemological, political and professional criteria of relevance. It can be shown that the first two usages may be reduced to the third one. We are thus faced with the question: how is it possible to identify a particular substance of social knowledge which is specifically the product of professional sociological work? The question is analysed in terms of T. KUHN’s notion of a ‚scientific paradigm’, as a result, normative patterns of institutionalized scientific praxis rather than formalized rules of procedure emerge as crucial to sociological relevance. Evidence to support this is obtained by comparing two paradigmati- cally representative textbooks, T. PARSONS’ „The Social System“ and H. ZEISEL’S „Say it with figures“. It appears that methodologically the two texts are astonishingly similar, despite the extreme difference in levels of abstraction: both are using the method of successive dichotomization in the formation of concepts. Moreover, both reveal a surprising degree of paradigmatic ‚stability’. But the stability rests on different modes of scientific praxis. The stability of theoretical concept formation derives from a standardized high level of abstraction; the stability of empirical (statistical) praxis is rooted in a standardized repertoire of selected independent variables. In each case, the standardized praxis has come about as a historical process, guided largely by pragmatic criteria of increasingly ‚successful’ attempts in grasping social reality. Thus, instead of one we have in fact two sociological paradigms which developed independently of each other. This makes the task of creating a new (and presumably more ‚relevant’) paradigm all the more difficult: to find out what should be centrally important to professional sociologists at present, „recalcitrant anomalies“ from both the theoretical and the empirical domain will have to be assimilated. This cannot be achieved if one continues to speak vaguely of „social-scientific“ relevance.