The Swedish book on Sociological Theories, studies in the history of sociology, edited by Johan Asplin (in 5 editions from 1967 to 1978), was long one of the basic textbooks in Scandinavian university studies in sociology. In the chapter, 'George A. Lundberg och operationalismeen', Mia Berner Öste refers to the thesis of Robert Priddy of the University of Oslo.

In the Swedish text (below) Mia Berner writes: of "new, young voices which complain in similar language: << reification may occur when social phenomena or entities are considered without taking into account their social or meaningful nature >> , says Robert C. Priddy in an analysis of the social sciences', chiefly sociology's <<objectivity>> (Priddy 1968, s .36) and later...

"Priddy regards such reification is a source of error, a kind of backward anthropomorphism.... The starting point for Priddy's argument is mainly phenomenological with a strong component of Sartre's marxist existentialism. His criticism of operationalism builds mainly on Lundberg, Schrag and Larsen's sociology textbook from 1954. When human groups become a natural phenomena, this leads to a depersonalization which eliminates the human being as an acting social and historical being. Strictly speaking, this viewpoint also makes an explanation of social change impossible, since this - among other things - arises when the human being restructures his perception of reality, of the socially conditioned circumstances.

More precisely, sociology is sooner a mapping of organisational, legal, political etc. structures - cut off from the social logic of human and social actions. When what happens in a group can be traced back to individual actions, we can call that praxis, says Priddy (with Marx and Sartre), while when the group acts it is without the realisation of intentions. Reading an analysis such as this, one feels that phenomenologically-oriented sociologists are scientists who one may say have come in from the cold. For example, it them becomes fully possible to defend the emotional factors in the research process: feelings need not be blindly opposed to the intelligence, but rather be a valuable complement to it."

"The though of Unified Science, which bore up so much of Lundberg's and operationaismen's perspective is also seen as poverty: << The cultural scientists, blinded by naturalism, have completely neglected even to raise the problem of a universal and true cultural science>>,. says Alfred Schultz (still according to Priddy)."