As someone who works on theory myself and would love to have my own articles published, I was excited to read a recent Twitter thread by a journal reviewer who tells us how to correct common faults. Cite previous publications, help build theory, add only one or two new things, and include the empirical evidence that your ideas explain – these are some of the big do’s. This advice is practical, straight forward, and shows us how to give journal editors what they are looking for. So, maybe, all we have to do is follow the rules. But strangely, it seems that authors of papers keep repeating the errors; they start afresh, ignore past theory, are too complicated, and don’t include empirical evidence. Something strange is clearly bedeviling sociological theory.
Could the persistent failures of theory authors be telling us that educated sociologists cannot keep it simple? Why can’t they build on past sociologists? Is there a deeper problem here? Are sociologists wrongly trained or is it just that existing theory is impossible to build on? To me, this situation looks like it needs a ‘reverse hermeneutic’ analysis.
‘Building on past work,’ I twist the ideas of Habermas (1970) and Giddens (1982) around and run the hermeneutic in the opposite direction. Sociologists should not assume that the clients of any institution, in this case the publisher of a journal, are simply stubborn and resistant to learning. ‘Using the empirical evidence’ that writers get things wrong, we can draw a reverse inference. Perhaps theorists, and sociologists generally, cannot get from current theory what they really need. Maybe popular ‘ignorance’ is telling us that current theory, even when added to bit by bit, isn’t delivering for them? Isn’t the real problem that aspiring sociologists need practical explanations of society and how its people connect with it? If adding ‘itty bitty’ to theory is itself the problem, because it doesn’t weave society together conceptually, this may explain why every new article attempts to create, de novo, what is currently absent from theory.
I sympathize with these struggling theorists. I too want to work in a discipline that can define its main macro concept, society. I’m working on the answer myself but I would love to discover that someone else has done the hard work and put together a connected theory. What I am sure of is that this won’t happen by adding a few bite-sized concepts to existing theorists. So, while the reviewer offers us practical advice for getting published, my bet is that authors will continue to submit awkward, complex and non-incremental theory manuscripts. Sociologists evidently want something better from their theory; let’s hope we can soon explain society’s big questions in a conceptually connected way. On that day, authors, journal editors, reviewers, and practical sociologists will all be happier.