ABSTRACT
The Lebenswelt of the social sciences has increasingly come to revolve around styles of professional work rather than individual performance. The sop to the social scientific conscience is that one may not like the fait accompli, but there it stands, in its robust glory, ready to take on the historic complaints and wails of the antiscientists. The behavioral sciences are conceptualized, not so much at a collective and macroscopic level, but in terms of individual performance patterns. The arena of behavior may be society, but society itself tends to be atomized, no less than groupized. The continual references to American anthropology, American psychology, and American sociology—instead of to anthropology, psychology, and sociology in the United States—is more than a linguistic convention or confusion. It reflects a parochial standpoint that can only hinder the cause of the behavioral sciences and feed the European stereotype that American behaviorism is simply le neo-paternalisme Americain.
