Throwing the Sociologists Out? A Reply to Smith
反驳史密斯对社会学家研究劳动力市场的批评，指出其信息不足且误解了经济学内部分歧，认为排除社会学会阻碍研究进展。
T he late George Homans was a naval commander as well as a sociologist. Commanding men came naturally to him, which may be why his ASA presidential address was entitled Bringing Men Back (Homans 1964). This title has inspired several sociologists of labor market, so that we now have articles such as Bringing Boss Back (Stolzenberg 1978), Bringing Workers Back (Kalleberg 1989), and Bringing Firms Back (Baron and Bielby 1980). Evidently sociologists of labor market as well as former naval commanders enjoy commanding discipline to perform acts of inclusion. Smith (1990), on other hand, moves in opposite direction. In his critique of the new structuralism, he commands discipline to exclude sociologists from research on labor market. He concludes that contributions of sociologists to understanding labor markets are at best relabelled economics, and inferior at that. I believe that Smith's intelligence about his target is seriously deficient, and that he does not appreciate extent to which his own forces economists concerned with labor markets are themselves divided. This leads him to fight wrong opponent about wrong issues in a manner that I believe will impede progress of sociology and of labor market research. Baron and Bielby (1980) coined term the new structuralists for sociologists interested in labor market structures and outcomes. It is not a homogeneous group. The literature they have produced in last dozen years contains a variety of conceptualizations of labor market. Some of most prominent members of group have made a virtue of this conceptual heterogeneity by advocating a multivariate structuralism (Kalleberg and Berg 1987). One may be skeptical about usefulness of this multiconceptual approach (S0rensen, 1986), but they have produced a respectable body of research and new empirical knowledge.