Review: Now That You Mention It Author(s): Charles Tilly Reviewed work(s): The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A Study in Sociological Semantics and the Sociology of Science by Robert K. Merton ; Elinor Barber Source: Contemporary Sociology, Vol. 34, No. 5 (Sep., 2005), pp. 451-453 Published by: American Sociological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4147025 Accessed: 23/01/2009 12:41 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=asa. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
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Review Essays
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the integration and interplay between struc- to the impact of this twentieth century intelture and agency is what his work on the orig- lectual titan. ination and diffusion of scientific ideas is all about. But this book, outside the canon as it References Vitae."P. 11 in 1975."Curriculum is, will probably not change their minds. It is Elman,Richard. Man Who Ate New York OtherPoems, The (And quirky, and in some sense an indulgence by and Late,of ManhattanAnd Ossabaw Early a man in his nineties, who had the acclaim of Islands.New RiversPress. intellectuals throughout the world, but who Kuhn, ThomasS. 1970 [1962]. TheStructure of knew that for a sector of his field in the Chicago:The University ScientificRevolutions. United States, his mission to achieve and of ChicagoPress. teach the sociological perspective with clari- Lakoff,George.2004.Don'tThinkof an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. ty and interpretationwas misinterpreted or White River Ject.,Vermont:Chelsea Green viewed through a political lens, or because PublishingCompany younger cohorts have been predisposed to RobertK. 1968[1948,19571.SocialTheory Merton, differentiatie themselves from their elders. and SocialStructure.Glencoe:The FreePress. Nevertheless, virtuallyevery intellectual jour[196511993. On the Shouldersof Giants: nal and national newspaper in the United A ShandeanPostcript.Chicago:The University States, in Great Britain and, of course, in of ChicagoPress. . 1995. "TheThomasTheoremand the Italy,6 has reviewed The Travels and MatthewEffect."SocialForces.74(2):379-424. Adventures of Serendipitywith applause and . 1984. "SociallyExpectedDurations:A reverence, commenting far beyond the text Case Study of Concept Formation in 6 No doubt the book was reviewed even more Sociology." Pp. 262-83 in Conflict and extensively, but although RKM would have engaged in an extended search, I only perused the English language press. I know about the Italian press because visiting him at his home shortly before he died, he showed me the full page articles on the book that had appeared in the majorItaliannewspapers on its publication.
Consensus. A Festschrift in Honor of Lewis A.
Coser,editedby WalterW. Powelland Richard Robbins.New York:The FreePress. Merton,RobertK. and HarrietZuckerman.1993 [1968]."TheMatthewEffectin Science."In The SociologyofScience,by RobertK.Merton.1973. Chicago:The Universityof ChicagoPress.
Now That You Mention It
CHARLES TILLY
Columbia University ctl35 @columbia.edu Decades before we became Columbia University colleagues, Elinor Barber and I crossed intellectual paths as historians of eighteenth century France, while Robert Mertonand I crossed intellectualpaths as former students of PitirimSorokin.We only met face to face much later, when Barber had acquired a reputation as an astute analyst of academic careers and Merton had acquired a reputation as an elegant perfectionist in the study of knowledge and its acquisition. By then, rumors rumbled about a vast store of manuscripts authored or coauthored by Merton but shelved because they did not meet Merton's standards for publication. If memory serves, however, no word leaked out about a remarkableessay on serendipity
The Travelsand Adventuresof Serendipity: A Study in Sociological Semantics and the Sociology ofScience, by Robert K. Merton
and Elinor Barber. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. 313 pp. $29.95 cloth. ISBN: 0-691-11754-3.
until editors at Italy's II Mulino pried loose the manuscriptfrom Barber and Merton during the 1990s. Now we have an English version, complete with Preface and Afterwordby Merton, as a vivifying memorial to an outstanding pair of scholars. Their talents complemented each other. Barber remained the serious Contemporary Sociology34, 5
452 Review Essays searcher and organizer of evidence her historical training had made her, Merton the cogitator and wordsmith he had become since his graduate school acquisition of the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary. (Arrivingat page 32, I had to look in my own OED, now conveniently packed onto a CDROM, to decode the word "agelastic":one that never laughs.) Although a careful reader can detect both scholarly hands throughout the book's main text, I imagine that the early chapters on the historyof the term "serendipity"owe more to Barber,the later reflections on serendipity in science more to Merton. No matter:early and late, the book pokes and provokes, drawing on sources as diverse as Ogden Nash's verse (pp. 71, 95) and the G.E.Shareholders'Quarterlyfor 1952 (p. 208) to make points about the combination of priming and accident that produce serendipitous discoveries. For that reason, Serendipity deserves at least two readings, one for the fun, the other for the argument. For the fun, read it all: the main text, the Preface, the Afterword, the note by editor Peter Dougherty, the Introduction by James Shulman, the blurbs by Roald Hoffmann, Robert Solow, Gerald Holton, Anthony Grafton,and Wolf Lepenies, even the table of contents. Who else but Merton, for example, would think of connecting the three loanwords espritde l'escalier,Schadenfreude,and chutzpah (p. 251) to the loanword that serendipity has become since its invention in 1754?All four words, Mertonpoints out, travel well from language to language because they so nicely identify an experience widely shared across cultures that no competing term captures so deftly. In yet another coining of a memorable Mertonian phrase, Mertoncalls that sort of term a "niche-word." Amid the fun, the argument is harder to find, because so many arguments compete for a reader'sattention at one point or another. Let us settle for three of them, which we might call Initial Ambiguity, Scientific Discovery, and MertonianLegacy. In a 1754 letter by Horace Walpole to his kinsman Horace Mann, Britishministerto the Count of Florence, Horace Walpole coined the term serendipity. His letter mentioned reading The Travels and Adventures of Three Princes of Sarendip. Sarendip (or Serendip) was an old name for Ceylon or, now, Sri Lanka.Walpole rightly thought that the three princes' ingeSociology34, 5 Contemporary
nious perspicacity deserved a distinctive name: serendipity. From the start, argue Barber and Merton, the term conveyed a vexing ambiguity:Did it refer to a canny individual capacity for observation and deduction (which the three Ceylonese princes who pieced together hints about who had preceded them on the road surely possessed)? Or did it identify the value of training and foreknowledge in recognizing clues that most other people would ignore?Individualgenius or intellectualdiscipline? Understandably, Merton and Barber stress the priming provided by previous experience while allowing that some people learn more and faster from experience. Scientific Discovery takes us back to the questions that first won Merton fame as a sociologist of science. In his Poetics, Aristotle identified discovery as a fateful change from ignorance to knowledge, an awful or wonderful recognition of something previously concealed. Barber and Merton have something like that meaning in mind, but they raise doubts about whether it ever occurs as dramaticallyin science as in the tragedies Aristotle was analyzing. On one side, they say, from the time of Francis Bacon scientists have ordinarily concealed or misrepresented the process of discovery, with all its unintended consequences and, well, serendipity. On the other side, they stress how intellectual and institutionalenvironments shape discoveries, subordinating genius to discipline, but also subordinating discipline to Zeitgeist. As Merton notes ruefully in his solo Afterword, the ideas that he and Barber were developing on this score in the 1950s resembled Thomas Kuhn's famous views on scientific paradigms and drew on some of the same intellectual origins as those views. Yet the two thinkers never quite recognized their shared heritage-much less Merton's objections to the idea of a single dominant paradigm that organizes research in a given discipline, hence his objections to the Kuhnian conception of paradigm shift. That brings us to the third argument: Mertonian Legacy. In small ways, the book refers repeatedly to terms and ideas that Merton introduced into intellectual conversation far outside of sociology: unintended consequences, accident production, strategic research sites, and more. In a large way,
Review Essays it records Merton's sponsorship of serendipity as a problem in the development of science and as a more general feature of social processes. In that sense, the book doubles back on itself, biting its tail as well as its tale. Merton discovered the word serendipi-
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ty by structured accident as he searched for another word in the OED, Barber and Merton tracked down its many uses ever so systematically, and we readers enter a labyrinth of news and reflections on its applications. Serendipity wins.
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