The Epistemological Challenge of the Early Attack on “Rate Construction”

The philosopher Alisdair McIntyre calls it an “epistemological crisis” when something that we acknowledge has just happened forces us to question the very foundation of what we otherwise have accepted as a truism. In its crispest form, that would be: “If what I am seeing is true, then other things that I thought were true are no longer certain. How can I now have condence in my capacity—or condence in the tools I have been using to assess what I thought I knew?” At mid-century, in the period when the Society for the Study of Social Problems was just coming off the starting blocks, there were two major competing sociological approaches to the study of deviance, law, and the criminal justice system in the United States. The rst was centered at Columbia and could be described, grossly, as that dominated by Merton and functionalist theory. Drawing from both Durkheim and Parsons, Merton and his students and colleagues approached the study of deviance by exploring a) the theoretical relationship between “the deviant world” and “the normal world” through b) an empirical strategy relying on statistical aggregates of deviant and criminal behavior as reected in local police records and the Uniform Crime Reports of the FBI. While there was an occasional foray into the eld site investigations, the overwhelming tendency of this approach assumed that the data from of cial statistics sufciently reected the phenomenal world that theorizing from these databases warranted little (theoretically consequential) concern. Chicago was the alternative and competitive approach, with a long-tradition of eld site investigations of particular forms of “deviance”—from “the gang” to “the hobo” to the prostitute, gambler, and other vice sets and settings. The Chicago tradition assumed the stance of “the natural world” of common-sense actors. Their practitioners literally went to those places in the society that any competent actor would presume to be the site of deviance. Folklore has it that one of the most celebrated sociologists of the era got “caught with his pants down” in an up-close ethnography of prostitution—and that both the Chicago Tribune and the University of Chicago joined in the demand that his head roll. This tale is not so much a digression, but rather one of the more colorful remembrances of the extent of Chicago’s commitment to the study of deviance in its natural setting. Yet, as Martin Nicolas would point out years later, Chicago was not doing eldwork on white-collar crimes such as the Great Electrical Conspiracy. In short, “Chicago” most generally accepted the domain assumptions about the taxonomies of the deviant world, even when challenging and correcting the accuracy of the most popular representations. While there were signicant differences between Chicago and the Columbia rendering of deviance, in very important ways, both adopted a “taken-for-granted” empirical world. As the Sixties dawned, a third set of key players would quickly shift the focus to challenge the epistemological foundations of the whole playing eld, and not just of theory and research on deviance. Egon Bittner, Aaron Cicourel, and Joseph Guseld would ride around in police