Concepts and the Social Order: Robert K. Merton and the Future of Sociology

11. Repetition with Variation: A Mertonian Inquiry into a Lost Mertonian Concept

Repetition with Variation: A Mertonian Inquiry into a Lost Mertonian Concept 1 Charles Camic Throughout the chapters of this volume, my fellow contributors examine a range of concepts that originate in the work of Robert Merton and continue to circulate in contemporary sociological theory and research, but which have long-since grown detached from Merton’s own name, in a clear instance of the intellectual process that Merton’s himself referred to as “obliteration by incorporation.” In this chapter, I too am concerned with a valuable Mertonian concept, albeit not one that presently commands any currency in sociology or any place in the growing scholarship on Merton’s work. This is the concept of “repetition with variation.” Mention of this concept is unlikely to strike a responsive chord among sociologists, even those closely familiar with the Mertonian oeuvre. A search of ten leading sociological journals—Acta Sociologica , the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, the Annual Review of Sociology, the British Journal of Sociology , Contemporary Sociology, the European Sociological Review, Social Forces, Sociological Theory, and Theory and Society—reveals, for example, not a single reference ever to “repetition with variation.” Likewise in the scholarly literature on Merton’s writings, the concept is entirely absent from the monographs and edited volumes that deal with Mertonian ideas and their development (see Crothers 1987; Clark et al. 1990; Coser 1975; Mongardini and Tabboni 1998; Sztompka 1986, 1996). In the spirit of Merton’s remark that “the resurrection of a term fallen into disuse is an integral part of the development” of the social 1 I want to thank my fellow participants in the Budapest seminar for their remarks on an earlier version of this chapter and especially to acknowledge Harriet Zuckerman for her very helpful advice (both at the seminar and subsequently by email). I also thank Carey Seal for answering a query about the field of classics. 166 Concepts and the Social Order sciences (Merton and Barber 2004, 67), one purpose of this chapter is to bring to light the place of the concept of “repetition with variation” in Robert Merton’s work. In pursuing this purpose, however, I have a second objective in view as well. This is to apply to the example of “repetition with variation” the distinctively Mertonian style of conceptual analysis that Merton advocated in the ambitious program for “sociological semantics” that he pioneered in a series of little-discussed writings that began appearing in the mid-1960s with On the Shoulders of Giants (Merton 1965) and became more pronounced during the last decade of his life (Merton 1995, 1995b, 1997, 2004; see also Merton and Barber 2004; Merton, Sills, and Stigler 1984; Sills and Merton 1990, 1992a, 1992b). As Zuckerman (2010) has outlined this novel program and has delineated its tenets, Merton’s sociological semantics centers sociological inquiry on “words, phrases, aphorisms, slogans and other linguistic forms,” and it then undertakes to study the linguistic terms in question from two sides: first, by examining the focal term’s social origins, identifying which social groups used the term, along with when, where, and how they did so; and second, by charting the term’s paths of diffusion , i.e., its reception and subsequent evolution, changing meanings, dissemination or disappearance (Zuckerman 2010, 1, 6; also Camic 2010). Merton’s preferred manner of addressing these questions was by means of what he described as historical case studies of “culturally strategic words” and other expressions (Merton 1977, 77; 1982, 263, 1995, 4; 1997, 225). Taking these late Merton writings as my template, this chapter is a small effort to advance the research program of sociological semantics by an abbreviated historical case study of Merton’s own concept of “repetition with variation.” I divide my analysis into four parts. In Part 1, I introduce the concept of “repetition with variation” as it appears in Merton’s early work. In Part 2, I back up chronologically to discuss some of the earlier sources, or originating contexts, that informed Merton’s use of the concept. In Part 3, I move forward in time briefly to examine the subsequent diffusion of “repetition with variation” and the place of the concept in the literature of sociology and the social sciences and humanities more broadly. In Part 4, I speculate on the reasons for this pattern of diffusion and, in so doing, return to the cor- pus of Merton’s work to consider...