American social scientists have long been interested in community power structures, but most methodological and substantive developments in this area of research have occurred only in the past fifteen years or so. The published social science literature bearing on this topic now includes well over six hundred items written primarily by political scientists and sociologists. There have been over eighty systematic attempts to present an overall, composite description of the structure of power in particular communities; this research will be our central concern in this paper. These studies are accompanied in the literature by hundreds of critiques of methodological approaches, attempts at conceptual refinement, studies of narrower facets of community political processes, and reviews and commentaries on particular studies.
The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to consider the field of community power from a sociology of knowledge perspective by extending the discussion in an earlier research note, and secondly, to point to some procedural guides that seem appropriate for use in further research in this and other areas characterized by "chronic controversies."
SOCIOLOGISTS HAVE long been aware of the existence of relations between sociocultural variables and the development of types of scientific knowledge. Until relatively recently, the systematic study of the importance of these relations for knowledge in the social sciences has been more or less overlooked. To be sure, there was speculation about the impact of social and cultural factors upon the works of intellectuals in early studies by Veblen ( 1918), Mannheim (1936), and Weber (translated, 1949, and in later works by Lynd (1939), Znaniecki (1940), Wilson (1942), and Myrdal (1959. Sociologists, however, have appeared especially reluctant to test empirically the relevance of many hypotheses for the development of knowledge in sociology suggested in these works. Studies regarding the function of the social organization of the discipline, climates of opinion, and the social backgrounds and personal values of researchers have tended to be unfashionable. The assumption has been that improvements in research techniques and the rigors of the scientific method rule out significant influences by such factors (Curtis and Petras, 1970a). Some research, however, has begun to evolvc in this area, and our purpose in this article is to examine the nature and types of works that have been done.No major American or European scholar has yet specialized in research in the sociology of sociology (but see Waller
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