The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A Study in Sociological Semantics and the Sociology ofScience by Robert K. Merton and Elinor BarberThe Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A Study in Sociological Semantics and theSociology of Science by Robert K.  Merton; Elinor  BarberReview by: Arthur StinchcombeAmerican Journal of Sociology, Vol. 111, No. 1 (July 2005), pp. 344-346Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/491779 .

Accessed: 27/05/2013 17:42

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toAmerican Journal of Sociology.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 79.175.121.210 on Mon, 27 May 2013 17:42:22 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

American Journal of Sociology

344

graceful scholarship by any standards. The book reaches a nadir of sortswhen, in a brief discussion about Japanese furitas (the new young aimlessgeneration of Japanese avoiding careers), Bauman briefly “quotes” Yukio,a young Japanese person. On closer inspection, even this turns out tohave been borrowed from a French newspaper article.

Bauman’s opening chapter poses the disciplinary question of how so-ciology lost its imperial mission to understand and organize society in itsown image, and hence its inability now to grasp the changes underwayin society. Bauman in fact gets this whole story back to front. It was notsociety changing that rendered sociology useless, or even something de-ficient with sociology as such. Rather, the credibility of the discipline wasdestroyed—in Britain, certainly, and in the rest of Europe, to some ex-tent—by the whole generation of prominent social theorists who, likeBauman, got lost down a postmodern cul de sac. Read with anythingother than a credulous eye, this veteran theorizer comes across as a hu-morless version of arch French ironist, Jean Baudrillard, who at least hadthe wit to acknowledge that so much of what he says about modern societyis made up. Bauman’s tone is, in contrast, ponderous and gloomy: a dismalcommentary that leads to the apparently inexorable message that a life-time’s social science only leads to a loss of faith in any kind of scientificmethod. One thing is for sure: Bauman, if nothing else, is prolific. Societyunder Siege is his fifth or sixth similar book in as many years. The pub-lisher’s sponsorship of flimsy, overwrought, speculative sociocommentary,such as this, apparently is limitless.

The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A Study in Sociological Se-mantics and the Sociology of Science. By Robert K. Merton andElinor Barber. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. Pp.xxvii�313. $29.95.

Arthur StinchcombeNorthwestern University

From its myth of origin, the word “serendipity” should now be “Sri-Lanka-ity,” hardly a promising start for Robert Merton–Elinor Barber heavy-weights. James L. Shulman’s introduction to The Travels and Adventuresof Serendipity gives its three components as a datum not expected, sur-prising, and of strategic importance to further thought (p. xxi). The sur-prising datum then is one causing a gestalt shift, or a paradigm shift,leading in new cognitive directions. The richer the preceding gestalt orparadigm, the stronger the surprise and shift, so the stronger the feelingthat happy chance caused findings.

The word then has an embedded narrative. Around that narrative ofchance cognitive success or progress coagulate all the magical responsesto uncertainty of personal agency: talent or genius, luck, the obduracy of

This content downloaded from 79.175.121.210 on Mon, 27 May 2013 17:42:22 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Book Reviews

345

tradition, the ecstasy of sudden illumination, the value of training of theprepared mind, and playfulness as a basis for originality. This gatheringof magic produced, before the word existed, a multiplicity of fairy talesof chance discovery, including the original one about Sri Lankan princesthat Horace Walpole used in inventing the word; it eventually made luckytalented scientists heroes, making the magic of discovery and scientificprogress secular: Weber’s Entzauberung der Welt (taking the magic outof the world) with flair. How could Merton and Barber resist?

“Gestalt shift” suggests oddness, paradigm shift, portentousness. Themost common experience of the oddness form is perhaps when a picturepuzzle’s pesky piece’s color, figure, shape, orientation, and fit all cometogether. For a century and a half oddness was emphasized; for three-quarters of a century now, portentousness in science driven by genius hasdominated, becoming the core of the secular theology of progress. Mertonhimself had a strong taste for oddness, and he developed a taste for portentby founding the sociology of science. This book is mainly about the odd-ness, and this was perhaps a source of the authors’ reluctance to publishit for about a half century.

The data in the book are occurrences of a rare word. Data are re-markably scarce—three or four inquiries in a bibliophile journal may beused to characterize a quarter of a century. A few features of the occur-rences (e.g., author, audience of the journal, mistakes in the text, mentionor not of the cognitive shifts) are used to guess at the general features ofthe context, together with a mass of secondary sources. These sparse dataare used to analyze variations over time and among social locations inthe meaning and popularity of the word. This is the speculative end ofa variable stretching from a historian’s deep exploration of the contextof an event, about which we usually already knew a lot, up to sociologists’grand sweep of ideas with an occasional illustration.

The text reflects consciousness of the high level of uncertainty of sucha method, producing a nuanced running assessment of inferences (e.g.,“again we have an inkling”; p. 97). I myself would boost these assessmentsa notch or two upward toward “reckless,” but I agree with the relativerankings—I am not sure whether there is a notch between “an inkling”and “irrelevant.” Quite often the interpretation relies on trusting uneval-uated secondary sources. For example, the linguistic relation betweenproper names and words in a source by Eric Partridge (p. 89) refers tothe samoyed breed of dogs: the samoyeds are not a Mongol people asalleged in the source, but speak languages related to Finnish; the wordis a Russian name for Siberian peoples who call themselves by namesrelated to nenets. The word has the Russian root saami (Sami is also usedfor the related Lapps in Norway, and Finns call themselves Suomi) ratherthan the root samo- (self-) of samovar. In spite of Partridge’s understand-ing, most Mongols are about a thousand miles from the nearest samoyedic-speaking peoples. The text clearly shows that the authors here know

This content downloaded from 79.175.121.210 on Mon, 27 May 2013 17:42:22 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

American Journal of Sociology

346

Partridge’s definition is a speculation. My own unevaluated secondarysource is an old Britannica.

The book as a whole makes no attempt to be a coherent, well-docu-mented history, as Barber is famous for, nor a coherent theory, as Mertonis famous for. It most closely resembles Horace Walpole’s fondness forelegantly expressed clever uses of oddness—which Merton and Barbercharacterize, when Walpole does it, as aristocratic playfulness. I supposethat Walpole and the two of them qualify for Jefferson’s “natural aris-tocracy among men [and women],” justifying calling the book itself ar-istocratic playfulness. Read it for amusement or as an interesting sidelighton the biographies of some of our intellectual heroes.

New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of ’58. BySherry B. Ortner. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003.

William H. Sewell, Jr.University of Chicago

In New Jersey Dreaming, the anthropologist Sherry Ortner turns herethnographic eye on a topic very close to home: her own high school class.Weequahic High School in Newark, New Jersey, was a predominantlymiddle-class and overwhelmingly Jewish school when the class of 1958graduated. Ortner uses her class—or the 246 of 304 graduates she wasable to locate—as a lens through which to study a number of issues incontemporary American society. Foremost among these is the question ofclass, which she sees as a pervasive social reality largely repressed fromconciousness in contemporary American culture. She obtained survey datafrom nearly all of the classmates she located and conducted extensive andextremely rich interviews with over 100 of them. These interviews enableher to trace out how class, although almost never spoken of as such, isexperienced and interpreted through languages of ethnicity, success, andsuch seemingly personal attributes as brains, motivation, and“personality.”

Ortner’s theoretical proclivities are importantly shaped by Bourdieu’spractice theory, especially as embodied in Distinction (Harvard UniversityPress, 1984), but this book is refreshingly clear and jargon free. One ofits most distinctive and agreeable features is that it is pitched simulta-neously to an audience of professional social scientists and to Ortner’shigh school class members—and by extension to graduates of other highschools who will undoubtedly read it with some of the mildly voyeuristicguilty pleasure that is never absent from high school reunions. This ac-cessibility should make it eminently suitable for undergraduate sociologycourses.

Although Ortner is an anthropologist, this is in many ways a stronglysociological book, which makes modest but crucial use of quantitative

This content downloaded from 79.175.121.210 on Mon, 27 May 2013 17:42:22 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions