Rhetoric CFPs & TOCs

Rhetoric CFPs & TOCs
Photo: Kristoffer Trolle (creative commons)

Monday, September 2, 2019

Blogora Classic: Aune on Gouldner on Theory-Making, 2006-07-23

Gouldner on Theory-Making

I've been meditating today on this statement by sociologist Alvin Gouldner (probably the main influence on my own work):
"Much of theory-work begins with an effort to make sense of one's experience. Much of it is initiated by an effort to resolve unresolved experience; here, the problem is not to validate what has been observed or to produce new observations, but rather to locate and to interpret the meaning of what one has lived. . . . Theory-making, then, is often an effort to cope with threat; it is an effort to cope with a threat to something in which the theorist himself is deeply and personally implicated and which he holds dear" (The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, 1970: 484).