ABSTRACT
When I find myself coming back, although in new forms, to issues I faced in my first years as a sociologist, it must be time for me to bring this venture to an end, and try to sum up what I think I have learned about social behavior and how I learned it. Remember that this has been an intellectual autobiography: it has been concerned with ideas. I have talked of my life in the everyday world only enough to show that I never quite became a disembodied mind. Remember also that, though this was certainly not the intent of an early teacher of mine like Mayo, I have not studied social science in order to help change the world for the better— though I am sure my studies have done no harm—but to understand its intellectual problems and perhaps resolve some of them. I am sure I have described the progress of my ideas as more straightforward, in the sense of one idea’s leading naturally to another, than it really was. Instead it was marked by turns up blind alleys, by doubts and backslidings, by the abandonment of positions once taken and their later recovery, right up to the present. It was heavily influenced by chance, which means only that some highly improbable, yet not undetermined, events made a difference to it. Above all, it was marked by a dialogue with myself that seldom rose into consciousness but, when it did, showed me that it had not been standing still.
