Sociology of Structures, Structures of Sociology. An Interview with Charles Crothers

Charles Crothers is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Auckland University of Technology (AUT), New Zealand. He was born in Christchurch, NZ, but grew up in small seaside town Tauranga, attending a multi-disciplinary social science degree at the brand-new University of Waikato. He then switched Sociology as a discipline, completed his Ph.D. at Victoria University of Wellington and followed up with several years as a junior lecturer at VUW. A further 5 years with the research section of the “Town and Country Planning Division” at the Ministry of Works and Development followed, providing a very useful platform for policy work and data analysis. He then spent a decade teaching sociology at the University of Auckland and half a decade at the University of Natal, Durban (South Africa), with the final two decades back in Auckland, lecturing at AUT. He now continues as a Senior Research Associate of the Department of Sociology, University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Throughout his career, Crothers has experienced many sabbatical periods around the world: at the University of Oregon, Waterloo Canada, Kent at Canterbury and Sussex, with the most recent at Sapienza-University of Rome in 2022. From this vantage point, mixing NZ’s peculiar perspective and a variety of stays abroad, Crothers’ position in the field of sociology is fairly unique, at least socio-geographically.His career-long interests have lain with the analysis of social structures (and methods for doing so) and, hence, with Robert K. Merton, one of the leading social structural theorists, and finally how Merton’s work was set within that of the Columbia Tradition and more broadly the structuralist-functionalist school. Although these themes have been quite continuous, they have varied by context, such as settler societies and concerning linking theory and methods, as well as the connection of pure and applied sociology. Without a particular mainstream spe-cialty, his focus turned to what might be thought of an empirical version of struc-tural functionalism (“quantitative ethnography”, one could say in Bourdieusian parlance): the examination of social patterns of the social structure, and how these relate to patterns in the cultural structure.Further, his participation in the discipline of Sociology has been important (partly as a good unionist): he has served as President or other executive role in both the NZ Sociology Association and within the International Sociological Association, also editing journals and book series.This interview arose from the topics discussed during two seminars deliv-ered to postgraduate students at the Department of Communication and Social Research at Sapienza-University of Rome (October/November 2022). Two main topics are constantly (although diversely) discussed in the following pages: the sociological analysis of social structures and the particular structures that inform the field of sociology – their preponderance in this interview justifies the some-how Debordian title we have chosen.