ABSTRACT
To be proactive is to act in ways that either keep unwanted things from occurring (negative proactivity) or promote or make more probable a desired future state of affairs (positive proactivity). As a concept proactivity is championed in a variety of social science and policy arenas, including management and organizational studies, trend analysis and social prediction, public health, small group research, and increasingly across the criminal justice and juvenile justice systems. But where and when did the concept of proactivity begin? This chapter provides an answer to that question, and in so doing ties together a string of intellectual undertakings—running from the 1880s through the 1960s (and beyond)—that heretofore have only been dimly perceived as sharing a lineage. Perhaps surprisingly, the classical innovator of proactivity within sociology is neither Simmel nor Weber nor even Durkheim. Instead, the classical innovator of the concept of proactivity within sociology is the early American sociologist Lester Frank Ward. Since Ward’s time the concept of proactivity has continued to be refined and applied in more areas, including most prominently modern municipal policing.
