This is how one pictures the angel of history. His
face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive
a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe
which keeps piling wreckage upon
wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The
angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and
make whole what has been smashed. But a
storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got
caught in his wings with such violence that the
angel can no longer close them.This storm irresistibly
propels him into the future to which his
back is turned, while the pile of debris before
him grows skyward. This storm is what we call
progress.
—Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin wrote his famous ninth
thesis on the philosophy of history as the
Nazi army approached his beloved Paris, hallowed
sanctuary of civilization’s promise. He
portrays this promise in the tragic figure of the
angel of history, battling in vain against civilization’s
long march through destruction. To
Benjamin, in 1940, the future had never looked
bleaker with capitalism-become-fascism in a
joint pact with socialism-become-Stalinism to
overrun the world.Today, at the dawn of the 21st
century, although communism has dissolved
and fascism is a haunting memory, the debris
continues to grow skyward. Unfettered capitalism
fuels market tyrannies and untold
inequities on a global scale, while resurgent
democracy too often becomes a thin veil for
22000044 PPRREESSIIDDEENNTTIIAALL AADDDDRREESSSS
FFoorr PPuubblliicc SSoocciioollooggyy
Michael Burawoy
University of California–Berkeley
Responding to the growing gap between the sociological ethos and the world we study,
the challenge of public sociology is to engage multiple publics in multiple ways. These
public sociologies should not be left out in the cold, but brought into the framework of
our discipline. In this way we make public sociology a visible and legitimate enterprise,
and, thereby, invigorate the discipline as a whole. Accordingly, if we map out the division
of sociological labor, we discover antagonistic interdependence among four types of
knowledge: professional, critical, policy, and public. In the best of all worlds the
flourishing of each type of sociology is a condition for the flourishing of all, but they can
just as easily assume pathological forms or become victims of exclusion and
subordination. This field of power beckons us to explore the relations among the four
types of sociology as they vary historically and nationally, and as they provide the
template for divergent individual careers. Finally, comparing disciplines points to the
umbilical chord that connects sociology to the world of publics, underlining sociology’s
particular investment in the defense of civil society, itself beleaguered by the
encroachment of markets and states.
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Direct all correspondence to Michael Burawoy,
Department of Sociology, University of California,
Berkeley, CA 94720 (burawoy@socrates.
berkeley.edu). Innumerable people, impossible to
acknowledge by name, have contributed to this project.
However, the author would like to thank Sally
Hillsman, Bobbie Spalter-Roth and Carla Howery in
the American Sociological Association office, all of
whom helped in many ways, not least in providing
facts and figures, and organizing speaking engagements.
For their comments on a draft of this paper
thanks to Barbara Risman, Don Tomaskovic-Devey,
and their students, as well as to Chas Camic and
Jerry Jacobs. The live version of this address can be
obtained on DVD from the American Sociological
Association.
powerful interests, disenfranchisement, mendacity,
and even violence. Once again the angel
of history is swept up in a storm, a terrorist
storm blowing from Paradise.
In its beginning sociology aspired to be such
an angel of history, searching for order in the
broken fragments of modernity, seeking to salvage
the promise of progress. Thus, Karl Marx
recovered socialism from alienation; Emile
Durkheim redeemed organic solidarity from
anomie and egoism. Max Weber, despite premonitions
of “a polar night of icy darkness,”
could discover freedom in rationalization, and
extract meaning from disenchantment. On this
side of the Atlantic W. E. B. Du Bois pioneered
pan-Africanism in reaction to racism and imperialism,
while JaneAddams tried to snatch peace
and internationalism from the jaws of war. But
then the storm of progress got caught in sociology’s
wings. If our predecessors set out to
change the world we have too often ended up
conserving it. Fighting for a place in the academic
sun, sociology developed its own specialized
knowledge, whether in the form of the
brilliant and lucid erudition of Robert Merton
(1949), the arcane and grand design of Talcott
Parsons (1937, 1951), or the early statistical
treatment of mobility and stratification, culminating
in the work of Peter Blau and Otis Dudley
Duncan (1967). Reviewing the 1950s, Seymour
Martin Lipset and Neil Smelser (1961:1–8)
could triumphantly declare sociology’s moral
prehistory finally over and the path to science
fully open. Not for the first time Comtean
visions had gripped sociology’s professional
elite.As before this burst of “pure science” was
short lived.A few years later, campuses—especially
those where sociology was strong—were
ignited by political protest for free speech, civil
rights, and peace, indicting consensus sociology
and its uncritical embrace of science. The
angel of history had once again fluttered in the
storm.
The dialectic of progress governs our individual
careers as well as our collective discipline.
The original passion for social justice,
economic equality, human rights, sustainable
environment, political freedom or simply a better
world, that drew so many of us to sociology,
is channeled into the pursuit of academic
credentials. Progress becomes a battery of disciplinary
techniques—standardized courses,
validated reading lists, bureaucratic rankings,
intensive examinations, literature reviews, tailored
dissertations, refereed publications, the
all-mighty CV, the job search, the tenure file,
and then policing one’s colleagues and successors
to make sure we all march in step. Still,
despite the normalizing pressures of careers,
the originating moral impetus is rarely vanquished,
the sociological spirit cannot be extinguished
so easily.
Constrictions notwithstanding, discipline—
in both the individual and collective senses of
the word—has born its fruits. We have spent a
century building professional knowledge, translating
common sense into science, so that now,
we are more than ready to embark on a systematic
back-translation, taking knowledge back
to those from whom it came, making public
issues out of private troubles, and thus regenerating
sociology’s moral fiber. Herein lies the
promise and challenge of public sociology, the
complement and not the negation of professional
sociology.
To understand the production of public sociology,
its possibilities and its dangers, its potentialities
and its contradictions, its successes and
failures, during the last 18 months I have discussed
and debated public sociology in over 40
venues, from community colleges to state associations
to elite departments across the United
States—as well as in England, Canada, Norway,
Taiwan, Lebanon, and SouthAfrica.The call for
public sociology resonated with audiences wherever
I went. Debates resulted in a series of symposia
on public sociology, including ones in
Social Problems (February, 2004), Social Forces
(June, 2004), and Critical Sociology (Summer,
2005). Footnotes, the newsletter of theAmerican
Sociological Association (ASA), developed a
special column on public sociology, the results
of which are brought together in An Invitation
to Public Sociology (American Sociological
Association 2004). Departments have organized
awards and blogs on pubic sociology, the
ASA has unveiled its own site for public sociology,
and introductory textbooks have taken up
the theme of public sociology. Sociologists have
appeared more regularly in the opinion pages of
our national newspapers. The 2004 ASA annual
meetings, devoted to the theme of public
sociologies, broke all records for attendance
and participation and did so by a considerable
margin.These dark times have aroused the angel
of history from his slumbers.
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I offer 11 theses.They begin with the reasons
for the appeal of public sociologies today, turning
to their multiplicity and their relation to the
discipline as a whole—the discipline being
understood both as a division of labor and as a
field of power. I examine the matrix of professional,
policy, public, and critical sociologies as
it varies historically and among countries, comparing
sociology with other disciplines, before
finally turning to what makes sociology so special,
not just as a science but as a moral and
political force.
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The aspiration for public sociology is stronger
and its realization ever more difficult, as sociology
has moved left and the world has moved
right.
To what shall we attribute the current appeal of
public sociology? To be sure, it reminds so
many of why they became sociologists, but public
sociology has been around for some time, so
why might it suddenly take off?
Over the last half century the political center
of gravity of sociology has moved in a critical
direction while the world it studies has
moved in the opposite direction.Thus, in 1968,
members of the ASA were asked to vote on a
member resolution against the Vietnam War.
Of those who voted, two-thirds opposed the
ASA taking a position, while in a separate opinion
question, 54% expressed their individual
opposition to the war (Rhoades 1981:60)—
roughly the same proportion as in the general
population at the time. In 2003, 35 years later,
a similar member resolution against the war in
Iraq was put to the ASA membership and twothirds
favored the resolution (Footnotes
July–August 2003). Even more significant, in
the corresponding opinion poll, 75% of those
who voted said they were against the war, at a
time (late May, 2003) that 75% of the general
population supported the war.1
Given the leftward drift of the 1960s this is
an unexpected finding. Despite the turbulence
of the 1968 Annual Meeting in Boston, which
included Martin Nicolaus’s famous and fearless
attack on “fat-cat sociology,” and forthright
demands from the Caucus of Black Sociologists,
the Radical Caucus, and the Caucus of Women
Sociologists, oppositional voices were still in a
minority. The majority of members had grown
up in and imbibed the liberal conservatism of
the earlier postwar sociology. Over time, however,
the radicalism of the 1960s diffused
through the profession, albeit in diluted form.
The increasing presence and participation of
women and racial minorities, the ascent of the
1960s generation to leadership positions in
departments and our association, marked a critical
drift that is echoed in the content of soci-
ology.2
Thus, political sociology turned from the
virtues of American electoral democracy to
studying the state and its relation to classes,
social movements as political process, and the
deepening of democratic participation.
Sociology of work turned from processes of
adaptation to the study of domination and labor
movements. Stratification shifted from the study
of social mobility within a hierarchy of occupational
prestige to the examination of changing
structures of social and economic
inequality—class, race, and gender. The sociology
of development abandoned modernization
theory for underdevelopment theory, world systems’
analyses, and state orchestrated growth.
Race theory moved from theories of assimilation
to political economy to the study of racial
formations. Social theory introduced more radical
interpretations of Weber and Durkheim,
and incorporated Marx into the canon. If feminism
was not quite let into the canon, it certainly
had a dramatic impact on most substantive
fields of sociology. Globalization is wreaking
havoc with sociology’s basic unit of analysis—
the nation-state—while compelling deparochialization
of our discipline. There have, of course,
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1 Data for public support of theVietnam War come
from Mueller (1973: Table 3.3), while data for public
support of Iraq War come from Gallup Polls.
2 In 1968, the 19 elected members of the ASA
Council were white and male, except for one woman,
Mirra Komarovsky. In 2004, the 20 member Council
was exactly 50% female and 50% minority.As to the
broad profession, between 1966 and 1969, 18.6% of
sociology PhDs were earned by women, whereas the
figure was 58.4% in 2001. Figures for racial breakdown
begin later. In 1980, 14.4% of sociology PhDs
were earned by minorities, whereas in 2001 the figure
was 25.6%.
been counter-movements—for example, the
ascendancy of assimilation studies in immigration
or the neoinstitutionalists who document
the worldwide diffusion of American
institutions—but over the last half century the
overwhelming movement has been in a critical
direction.
If the succession of political generations and
the changing content of sociology is one arm of
the scissors, the other arm, moving in the opposite
direction, is the world we study. Even as the
rhetoric of equality and freedom intensifies so
sociologists have documented ever-deepening
inequality and domination. Over the last 25
years earlier gains in economic security and
civil rights have been reversed by market expansion
(with their attendant inequalities) and coercive
states, violating rights at home and abroad.
All too often, market and state have collaborated
against humanity in what has commonly come
to be known as neoliberalism. To be sure, sociologists
have become more sensitive, more
focused on the negative, but the evidence they
have accumulated does suggest regression in so
many arenas. And, of course, as I write, we are
governed by a regime that is deeply antisociological
in its ethos, hostile to the very idea of
“society.”
In our own backyard, the university has suffered
mounting attacks from the National
Association of Scholars for harboring too many
liberals. At the same time, facing declining
budgets, and under intensified competition,
public universities have responded with market
solutions—joint ventures with private corporations,
advertising campaigns to attract students,
fawning over private donors, commodifying
education through distance learning, employing
cheap temporary professional labor, not to mention
the armies of low-paid service workers
(Kirp 2003; Bok 2003). Is the market solution
the only solution? Do we have to abandon the
very idea of the university as a “public” good?
The interest in a public sociology is, in part, a
reaction and a response to the privatization of
everything. Its vitality depends on the resuscitation
of the very idea of “public,” another casualty
of the storm of progress. Hence the paradox:
the widening gap between the sociological ethos
and the world we study inspires the demand
and, simultaneously, creates the obstacles to
public sociology. How should we proceed?
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There are multiple public sociologies, reflecting
different types of publics and multiple ways of
accessing them.Traditional and organic public
sociologies are two polar but complementary
types. Publics can be destroyed but they can also
be created. Some never disappear—our students
are our first and captive public.
What should we mean by public sociology?
Public sociology brings sociology into a conversation
with publics, understood as people
who are themselves involved in conversation. It
entails, therefore, a double conversation.
Obvious candidates are W. E. B. Du Bois (1903),
The Souls of Black Folk, Gunnar Myrdal (1994),
AnAmerican Dilemma, David Riesman (1950),
The Lonely Crowd, and Robert Bellah et al.
(1985), Habits of the Heart. What do all these
books have in common? They are written by
sociologists, they are read beyond the academy,
and they become the vehicle of a public discussion
about the nature of U.S. society—the
nature of its values, the gap between its promise
and its reality, its malaise, its tendencies. In
the same genre of what I call traditional public
sociology we can locate sociologists who write
in the opinion pages of our national newspapers
where they comment on matters of public
importance.Alternatively, journalists may carry
academic research into the public realm, as they
did with, for example, Chris Uggen and Jeff
Manza’s (2002) article in the American
Sociological Review on the political significance
of felon disenfranchisement and Devah
Pager’s (2002) dissertation on the way race
swamps the effects of criminal record on the
employment prospects of youth. With traditional
public sociology the publics being
addressed are generally invisible in that they
cannot be seen, thin in that they do not generate
much internal interaction, passive in that
they do not constitute a movement or organization,
and they are usually mainstream. The
traditional public sociologist instigates debates
within or between publics, although he or she
might not actually participate in them.
There is, however, another type of public
sociology—organic public sociology in which
the sociologist works in close connection with
a visible, thick, active, local and often counterpublic.
The bulk of public sociology is indeed
of an organic kind—sociologists working with
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a labor movement, neighborhood associations,
communities of faith, immigrant rights groups,
human rights organizations. Between the organic
public sociologist and a public is a dialogue,
a process of mutual education. The recognition
of public sociology must extend to the organic
kind which often remains invisible, private, and
is often considered to be apart from our professional
lives. The project of such public sociologies
is to make visible the invisible, to make
the private public, to validate these organic connections
as part of our sociological life.
Traditional and organic public sociologies
are not antithetical but complementary. Each
informs the other.The broadest debates in society,
for example about family values, can inform
and be informed by our work with welfare
clients. Debates about NAFTA can shape the
sociologist’s collaboration with a trade union
local; working with prisoners to defend their
rights can draw on public debates about the
carceral complex. Berkeley graduate students,
Gretchen Purser, Amy Schalet, and Ofer
Sharone (2004), studied the plight of low-paid
service workers on campus, bringing them out
of the shadows, and constituting them as a public
to which the university should be accountable.The
report drew on wider debates about the
working poor, immigrant workers and the privatization
and corporatization of the university,
while feeding public discussion about the
academy as a principled community. In the best
circumstances traditional public sociology
frames organic public sociology, while the latter
disciplines, grounds, and directs the former.
We can distinguish between different types of
public sociologist and speak of different publics
but how are the two sides—the academic and the
extra-academic—brought into dialogue? Why
should anyone listen to us rather than the other
messages streaming through the media? Are
we too critical to capture the attention of our
publics? Alan Wolfe (1989), Robert Putnam
(2001), and Theda Skocpol (2003), go further
and warn that publics are disappearing—
destroyed by the market, colonized by the media
or stymied by bureaucracy. The very existence
of a vast swath of public sociology, however,
does suggest there is no shortage of publics if
we but care to seek them out. But we do have a
lot to learn about engaging them. We are still at
a primitive stage in our project. We should not
think of publics as fixed but in flux and that we
can participate in their creation as well as their
transformation. Indeed, part of our business as
sociologists is to define human categories—
people with AIDS, women with breast cancer,
women, gays—and if we do so with their collaboration
we create publics. The category
woman became the basis of a public —an active,
thick, visible, national nay international counter
-public—because intellectuals, sociologists
among them, defined women as marginalized,
left out, oppressed, and silenced, that is, defined
them in ways they recognized. From this brief
excursion through the variety of publics it is
clear that public sociology needs to develop a
sociology of publics—working through and
beyond a lineage that would include Robert
Park (1972[1904]), Walter Lippmann (1922),
John Dewey (1927), Hanna Arendt (1958),
Jürgen Habermas (1991 [1962]), Richard
Sennett (1977), Nancy Fraser (1997), and
Michael Warner (2002)—to better appreciate the
possibilities and pitfalls of public sociology.
Beyond creating other publics we can constitute
ourselves as a public that acts in the
political arena. As Durkheim famously insisted
professional associations should be an integral
element of national political life—and not
just to defend their own narrow professional
interests. So the American Sociological
Association has much to contribute to public
debate as indeed it has, when it submitted an
Amicus Curiae brief to the Supreme Court in the
Michigan Affirmative Action case, when it
declared that sociological research demonstrated
the existence of racism and that racism has both
social causes and consequences, when its members
adopted resolutions against the War in Iraq
and against a constitutional amendment that
would outlaw same-sex marriage, or when the
ASA Council protested the imprisonment of
the Egyptian sociologist, Saad Ibrahim.
Speaking on behalf of all sociologists is difficult
and dangerous. We should be sure to arrive
at public positions through open dialogue,
through free and equal participation of our
membership, through deepening our internal
democracy. The multiplicity of public sociologies
reflects not only different publics but different
value commitments on the part of
sociologists. Public sociology has no intrinsic
normative valence, other than the commitment
to dialogue around issues raised in and by sociology.
It can as well support Christian
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Fundamentalism as it can Liberation Sociology
or Communitarianism. If sociology actually
supports more liberal or critical public sociologies
that is a consequence of the evolving
ethos of the sociological community.
There is one public that will not disappear
before we do—our students. Every year we create
approximately 25,000 new BAs, who have
majored in sociology. What does it mean to
think of them as a potential public? It surely does
not mean we should treat them as empty vessels
into which we pour our mature wine, nor blank
slates upon which we inscribe our profound
knowledge. Rather we must think of them as
carriers of a rich lived experience that we elaborate
into a deeper self-understanding of the
historical and social contexts that have made
them who they are. With the aid of our grand traditions
of sociology, we turn their private troubles
into public issues. We do this by engaging
their lives not suspending them; starting from
where they are, not from where we are.
Education becomes a series of dialogues on the
terrain of sociology that we foster —a dialogue
between ourselves and students, between students
and their own experiences, among students
themselves, and finally a dialogue of students
with publics beyond the university. Service
learning is the prototype: as they learn students
become ambassadors of sociology to the wider
world just as they bring back to the classroom
their engagement with diverse publics.3 As
teachers we are all potentially public sociolo-
gists.
It is one thing to validate and legitimate public
sociology by recognizing its existence, bringing
it out from the private sphere into the open
where it can be examined and dissected, it is
another thing to make it an integral part of our
discipline, which brings me to Thesis III.
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Public sociology is part of a broader division
of sociological labor that also includes policy
sociology, professional sociology and critical
sociology.
Champion of traditional public sociology,
C. Wright Mills (1959), and many others since
him, would turn all sociology into public sociology.
Mills harks back to the late 19th century
forefathers, for whom scholarly and moral
enterprises were indistinguishable. There is no
turning back, however, to that earlier period
before the academic revolution. Instead we have
to move forward and work from where we really
are, from the division of sociological labor.
The first step is to distinguish public sociology
from policy sociology. Policy sociology is
sociology in the service of a goal defined by a
client. Policy sociology’s raison d’etre is to provide
solutions to problems that are presented to
us, or to legitimate solutions that have already
been reached. Some clients specify the task of
the sociologist with a narrow contract whereas
other clients are more like patrons defining
broad policy agendas. Being an expert witness,
for example, an important service to the community,
is a relatively well-defined relation with
a client whereas funding from the State
Department to investigate the causes of terrorism
or poverty might offer a much more open
research agenda.
Public sociology, by contrast, strikes up a
dialogic relation between sociologist and public
in which the agenda of each is brought to the
table, in which each adjusts to the other. In public
sociology, discussion often involves values
or goals that are not automatically shared by
both sides so that reciprocity, or as Habermas
(1984) calls it “communicative action,” is often
hard to sustain. Still, it is the goal of public
sociology to develop such a conversation.
Barbara Ehrenreich’s (2002) best-selling
Nickel and Dimed—an ethnography of lowwage
work that indicted, among others, WalMart’s
employment practices is an example of
public sociology, whereas William Bielby’s
(2003) expert testimony in the sexual discrimination
suite against the same company would
be a case of policy sociology. The approaches
of public and policy sociology are neither mutually
exclusive nor even antagonistic. As in this
case they are often complementary. Policy sociology
can turn into public sociology, especially
when the policy fails as in the case of James
Coleman’s (1966, 1975) busing proposals or
when the government refuses to support policy
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3 There is a vast literature on service learning.
Two volumes of special relevance to sociology are
Ostrow et al. (1999) and Marullo and Edwards
(2000).
proposals such as William Julius Wilson’s
(1996) recommendation to create jobs in order
to alleviate racialized poverty, or Paul Starr’s
involvement in abortive healthcare reforms of
the Clinton administration. Equally, public sociology
can often turn into policy sociology. Diane
Vaughan’s (2004) widely reported engagement
with the media over the Columbia Shuttle disaster,
based on her earlier research into the
Challenger disaster, paved the way for her ideas
to be taken up in the report of the Columbia
Accident Investigation Board (2003) and, in
particular, its indictment of the organizational
culture of the National Aeronautical and Space
Administration (NASA).
There can be neither policy nor public sociology
without a professional sociology that supplies
true and tested methods, accumulated
bodies of knowledge, orienting questions, and
conceptual frameworks. Professional sociology
is not the enemy of policy and public sociology
but the sine qua non of their existence—providing
both legitimacy and expertise for policy
and public sociology. Professional sociology
consists first and foremost of multiple intersecting
research programs, each with their
assumptions, exemplars, defining questions,
conceptual apparatuses, and evolving theories.4
Most subfields contain well established research
programs, such as organization theory, stratification,
political sociology, sociology of culture,
sociology of the family, race, economic sociology,
etc. There are often research programs
within subfields, such as organizational ecology
within organization theory. Research programs
advance by tackling their defining
puzzles that come either from external anomalies
(inconsistencies between predictions and
empirical findings) or from internal contradictions.
Thus, the research program on social
movements was established by displacing the
“irrationalist” and psychological theories of
collective behavior, and building a new framework
around the idea of resource mobilization
which in turn led to the formulation of a political
process model, framing and most recently
the attempt to incorporate emotions. Within
each research program, exemplary studies solve
one set of puzzles and at the same time create
new ones, turning the research program in new
directions. Research programs degenerate as
they become swamped by anomalies and contradictions,
or when attempts to absorb puzzles
become more a face saving device than a genuine
theoretical innovation. Goodwin and Jasper
(2004, chap. 1) argue that such has been the fate
of the social movement theory as it has become
overly general and ingrown.
It is the role of critical sociology, my fourth
type of sociology, to examine the foundations—
both the explicit and the implicit, both normative
and descriptive—of the research programs
of professional sociology. We think here of the
work of Robert Lynd (1939) who complained
that social science was abdicating its responsibility
to confront the pressing cultural and institutional
problems of the time by obsessing about
technique and specialization. C. Wright Mills
(1959) indicted professional sociology of the
1950s for its irrelevance, veering toward
abstruse “grand theory” or meaningless
“abstracted empiricism” that divorced data from
context. Alvin Gouldner (1970) took structural
functionalism to task for its domain assumptions
about a consensus society that were out of
tune with the escalating conflicts of the 1960s.
Feminism, queer theory and critical race theory
have hauled professional sociology over the
coals for overlooking the ubiquity and profundity
of gender, sexual, and racial oppressions.
In each case critical sociology attempts to make
professional sociology aware of its biases,
silences, promoting new research programs built
on alternative foundations. Critical sociology is
the conscience of professional sociology just as
public sociology is the conscience of policy
sociology.
Critical sociology also gives us the two questions
that place our four sociologies in relation
to each other.The first question is one posed by
Alfred McLung Lee (1976) in his Presidential
Address, “Sociology for Whom?” Are we just
talking to ourselves (an academic audience) or
are we also addressing others (an extra-academic
audience). To pose this question is to
answer it, since few would argue for a hermetically
sealed discipline, or defend pursuing
knowledge simply for knowledge’s sake. To
defend engaging extra-academic audiences,
whether serving clients or talking to publics, is
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4 In the formulation of the idea of research programs
I have been very influenced by Imre Lakatos
(1978) and his debates with Thomas Kuhn, Karl
Popper, and others.
not to deny the dangers and risks that go with
it, but to say that it is necessary despite or even
because of those dangers and risks.
The second question is Lynd’s question:
“Sociology for What?” Should we be concerned
with the ends of society or only with the means
to reach those ends.This is the distinction underlying
Max Weber’s discussion of technical and
value rationality. Weber, and following him the
Frankfurt School were concerned that technical
rationality was supplanting value discussion,
what Horkheimer (1974 [1947]) referred to as
the eclipse of reason or what he and his collaborator
Theodor Adorno (1969 [1944]) called
the dialectic of enlightenment. I call the one type
of knowledge instrumental knowledge, whether
it be the puzzle solving of professional sociology
or the problem solving of policy sociology.
I call the other reflexive knowledge because it
is concerned with a dialogue about ends,
whether the dialogue takes place within the academic
community about the foundations of its
research programs or between academics and
various publics about the direction of society.
Reflexive knowledge interrogates the value
premises of society as well as our profession.
The overall scheme is summarized in Table 1.5
In practice, any given piece of sociology can
straddle these ideal types or move across them
over time. For example, already I have noted that
the distinction between public and policy sociology
can often blur—sociology can simultaneously
serve a client and generate public
debate.
Categories are social products. This categorization
of sociological labor, redefines the way
we regard ourselves. I’m engaging in what
Pierre Bourdieu (1986 [1979], 1988 [1984])
would call a classification struggle, displacing
debates about quantitative and qualitative techniques,
positivist and interpretive methodologies,
micro and macro sociology by centering
two questions: for whom and for what do we
pursue sociology?The remaining theses attempt
to justify and expand this classification sys-
tem.
TTHHEESSIISS IIVV:: TTHHEE EELLAABBOORRAATTIIOONN OOFF
IINNTTEERRNNAALL CCOOMMPPLLEEXXIITTYY
The questions—“knowledge for whom?” and
“knowledge for what?”—define the fundamental
character of our discipline. They not
only divide sociology into four different types,
but allow us to understand how each type is
internally constructed.
Our four types of knowledge represent not only
a functional differentiation of sociology but
also four distinct perspectives on sociology.The
division of sociological labor looks very different
from the standpoint of critical sociology
as compared, for example, with the view from
policy sociology! Indeed, critical sociology
largely defines itself by its opposition to professional
(“mainstream”) sociology, itself
viewed as inseparable from renegade policy
sociology. Policy sociology pays back in kind,
attacking critical sociology for politicizing and
thereby discrediting the discipline. Thus, from
within each category we tend to essentialize,
homogenize and stereotype the others. We must
endeavor, therefore, to recognize the complexity
of all four types of sociology. We can best
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Table 1. Division of Sociological Labor
Academic Audience Extra-academic Audience
Instrumental Knowledge Professional Policy
Reflexive Knowledge Critical Public
5 This scheme bears an uncanny resemblance to
Talcott Parsons’s (1961) famous four functions—
adaptation, goal attainment, integration, and latency
(pattern maintenance) (AGIL)— that any system has
to fulfill to survive. If critical sociology corresponds
to the latency function based on value commitments,
and public sociology corresponds to integration,
where influence is the medium of exchange, then
policy sociology corresponds to goal attainment, and
professional sociology with its economy of credentials
corresponds to adaptation. Habermas (1984,
chap. 7) gives Parsons a critical twist by referring to
the colonization of the life-world (latency and integration)
by the system (adaptation and goal attainment).
As we shall see Thesis VII combines
Habermas’s colonization thesis with Bourdieu’s (1988
[1984]) field analysis of the academic world.
do this by once again posing our two basic questions:
knowledge for whom and knowledge for
what? This results in an internal differentiation
of each type of sociology, and, therefore, a more
nuanced picture. We also learn about the tensions
within each type driving it in this direction
or that.
Let us begin with professional sociology. At
its core is the creation, elaboration, degeneration
of multiple research programs. But there is
also a policy dimension of professional sociology
that defends sociological research in the
wider world—defense of funds for politically
contested research, such as the study of sexual
behavior; the determination of human subjects
protocols; the pursuit of government support,
say, for minority fellowship programs, etc.This
policy dimension of professional sociology is
concentrated in the office of the American
Sociological Association, and represented in
the pages of its newsletter Footnotes.Then there
is the public face of professional sociology, presenting
research findings in an accessible manner
for a lay audience. This was the avowed
purpose of the new magazine, Contexts, but a
similar function is performed by the regular
Congressional Briefings organized by theASA
office. Here, also, we find the plethora of teachers
who disseminate the findings of sociological
research and, of course, the writing of
textbooks. It is a delicate line that separates this
public face of professional sociology from public
sociology itself, but the former is more intimately
concerned with securing the conditions
for our core professional activities.
Finally, there is the critical face of professional
sociology—debates within and between
research programs such as those over the relative
importance of class and race, over the effects
of globalization, over patterns of overwork, over
the class bases of electoral politics, over the
sources of underdevelopment, and so forth.
Such critical debates are the subject of the articles
in The Annual Review of Sociology, and
they inject the necessary dynamism into our
research programs. The four divisions of professional
sociology are represented in Table 2.
Because of its size, we can discern a functional
differentiation, or asAbbott (2001) might
call it “fractalization,” of professional sociology,
but the other types of sociology are less
internally developed so that it is better to talk
of their different aspects or dimensions. Thus,
the core activity of public sociology—the dialogue
between sociologists and their publics—
is supported (or not) by professional, critical and
policy moments. Take, for example, Boston
College’s Media Research and Action Project
that brings sociologists together with community
organizers to discover how best to present
social issues to the media. There is a professional
moment to this project based on William
Gamson’s idea of framing, a critical moment
based on the limited ways in which the media
operate, and a policy moment that grapples with
the concrete aims of community organizers.
Charlotte Ryan (2004) describes the tensions
within the project that stem from the contradictory
demands between the immediacy of
public sociology and the career rhythms of professional
sociology, while Gamson (2004)
underlines the university’s limited economic
commitment to a project to empower local
communities.
Policy sociology also has its professional,
critical and public moments. Here an interesting
case is Judy Stacey’s (2004) experience as
an expert witness defending same-sex marriage
in Ontario Canada. The legal opponents of
same-sex marriage drew on her widely read
article published in the American Sociological
Review (Stacey and Biblarz 2001). The authors
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Table 2. Dissecting Professional Sociology
Professional
Research conducted within research programs that
define assumptions, theories, concepts, questions,
and puzzles.
Critical
Critical debates of the discipline within and between
research programs
Policy
Defense of sociological research, human subjects, funding,
congressional briefings
Public
Concern for the public image of sociology, presenting
findings in an accessible manner, teaching basics of
sociology and writing text books
argued that while studies show some slight differences
in the effects of gay parenting on children—that
they were more open to sexual
diversity—there was no evidence that the effects
were in any way “harmful.” Opponents of samesex
marriage argued that Stacey and Biblarz
had drawn on studies so scientifically weak that
no such conclusions could be drawn. Judy
Stacey, therefore, found herself in the unaccustomed
position of defending the scientific rigor
of her conclusions. Moreover, her defense of gay
civil liberties entailed the defense of marriage—
an institution she had subjected to intense criticism
in her scholarly writings. In this case, we
see how constraining policy sociology can be
and how its dependence upon professional sociology
can pit it against critical and public sociologies.
The four faces of any given type of
sociology may not be in harmony with each
other.
We can see this again in critical sociology. In
her classic article, “A Sociology for Women,”
Dorothy Smith (1987, chap. 2) took sociology
to task for its universalization of the male standpoint,
especially the standpoint of ruling men
who command the macro-structures of society.
Drawing on the canonical writings of Alfred
Schutz, she elaborates the standpoint of women
as rooted in the micro-structures of everyday
life—the invisible labor that supports the macro
structures. Patricia Hill Collins (1991) further
developed standpoint analysis by insisting that
insight into society comes from those who are
multiply oppressed—poor black women—but
she too drew on conventional social theory, in
her case not Schutz but George Simmel and
Robert Merton, to elaborate the critique of professional
sociology. Moreover, for her there was
a public moment too—the connection of black
female intellectuals to the culture of poor black
women was necessary to bring greater universality
to professional sociology.Thus, we see the
professional and public moments of critical
sociology but what of its policy moment? Could
one argue that here lies the realpolitik of defending
spaces for critical thought within the university,
spaces that would include
interdisciplinary programs, institutes, and the
struggle for representation?
These are just a few examples to illustrate the
complexity of each type of sociology, recognizing
their academic and an extra-academic as
well as their instrumental and reflexive dimensions.
We should not forget this complex internal
composition as we refocus on the relations
among the four major types.
TTHHEESSIISS VV:: LLOOCCAATTIINNGG
TTHHEE SSOOCCIIOOLLOOGGIISSTT
A distinction must be made between sociology
and its internal divisions on the one side and
sociologists and their trajectories on the other.
The life of the sociologist is propelled by the mismatch
of her or his sociological habitus and the
structure of the disciplinary field as a whole.
We should distinguish between the division of
sociological labor and the sociologists who
inhabit one or more places within it.About 30%
of PhDs are employed outside the university, primarily
in the world of policy research from
where they may venture into the public realm
(Kang 2003). The 70% of PhDs, who teach in
universities, occupy the professional quadrant,
conducting research or disseminating its results,
but they may hold positions in other quadrants
too, at least if they have tenure track positions.
By contrast, the army of contingent workers—
adjuncts, temporary lecturers, part time instructors—are
stuck in a single place, paid a pittance
($2,000 to $4,000 a course) for their often dedicated
teaching, with insecure employment and
usually without benefits (Spalter-Roth and
Erskine 2004). They are more prevalent in the
high prestige universities where they can amount
to 40% of employees teaching up to 40% of
courses. These are the underlaborers who subsidize
the research and the salaries of the permanent
faculty, releasing them for other
activities.
Thus, many of our most distinguished sociologists
have occupied multiple locations. James
Coleman, for example, simultaneously worked
in both professional and policy worlds while
being hostile to critical and public sociologies.
Christopher Jencks, who has worked in similar
policy fields, is unusual in combining critical
and public moments with professional and policy
commitments. Arlie Hochschild’s sociology
of emotions is strung out between
professional and critical sociology whereas her
research on work and family combines public
and policy sociology. Of course, these sociologists
have or had comfortable positions in top
ranked sociology departments where conditions
of work permit multiple-locations. Most of us
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only occupy one quadrant at a time. So we
should also focus on careers.
Sociologists are not only simultaneously
located in different positions, but assume trajectories
through time among our four types of
sociology. Before the consolidation of professional
careers, movement among the quadrants
was more erratic. Increasingly disaffected with
the academy and marginalized within it by his
race, after completing The Philadelphia Negro
in 1899, and after setting up and running the
Atlanta Sociological Laboratory at the
University of Atlanta between 1897 and 1910,
W. E. B. Du Bois left academia to found the
National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP) and become editor of
its magazine, Crisis. In this public role he wrote
all sorts of popular essays, inevitably influenced
by his sociology. In 1934 he returned to the
academy to chair the sociology department at
Atlanta, where he finished another classic
monograph, Black Reconstruction, only to
depart once again, after World War Two, for
national and international public venues. His
relentless campaigns for racial justice were the
acme of public sociology, although, of course,
his ultimate aim was always to change policy.
Public sociology is often an avenue for the marginalized,
locked out of the policy arena and
ostracized in the academy.
While W. E. B. Du Bois was taking the route
out of the academy, his nemesis, another major
figure in the sociology of race, Robert Park, was
traveling in the opposite direction.6 After years
as a journalist, which included radical exposés
of Belgium’s atrocities in the Congo, he became
Booker T. Washington’s private secretary and
research analyst, before entering, and then shaping
and professionalizing the department of
sociology at the University of Chicago (Lyman
1992).
C. Wright Mills was of a later generation, but
like Du Bois he became increasingly disaffected
with the academy. After completing his
undergraduate degree in philosophy at the
University of Texas he went to Wisconsin to
work with the German émigré Hans Gerth.
There he wrote his dissertation on pragmatism.
Robert Merton and Paul Lazarsfeld recruited
him to Columbia University because he showed
such promise as a professional sociologist.
Unable to tolerate the “illiberal practicality” of
Lazarsfeld’s Bureau of Applied Research he
turned from instrumental sociology to a public
sociology—New Men of Power, White Collar
and Power Elite. At the end of his short life he
would return to the promise and betrayal of
sociology in his inspirational The Sociological
Imagination.This turn to critical sociology coincided
with a move beyond sociology into the
realm of the public intellectual with Listen,
Yankee! and The Causes of World War Three—
books that were only distantly connected to
sociology.7
Today careers in sociology are more heavily
regimented than they were in Mills’s time.A typical
graduate student, perhaps inspired by an
undergraduate teacher or burnt out from a draining
social movement—enters graduate school
with a critical disposition, wanting to learn
more about the possibilities of social change,
whether this be limiting the spread of AIDS in
Africa, the deflection of youth violence, the
conditions of success of feminist movements in
Turkey and Iran, family as a source of morality,
variation in support for capital punishment,
public misconstrual of Islam, etc. There she
confronts a succession of required courses, each
with its own abstruse texts to be mastered or
abstract techniques to be acquired. After three
or four years she is ready to take the qualifying
or preliminary examinations in three or four
areas, whereupon she embarks on her dissertation.The
whole process can take anything from
5 years up. It is as if graduate school is organized
to winnow away at the moral commitments
that inspired the interest in sociology in the
first place.
Just as Durkheim stressed the non-contractual
elements of contract—the underlying consensus
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6 Thanks to Stephen Steinberg for pointing out
this coincidence. Although he played a major role in
professionalizing sociology, Park did not give up
social reform, and this despite his endorsement of
detached social science and his proclaimed opposition
to the action sociology of the women of Hull
House.
7 The distinction between “public sociologist” and
“public intellectual” is important—the former is a
specialist variety of the latter, limiting public commentary
to areas of established expertise rather than
expounding on topics of broad interest (Gans 2002).
and trust without which contracts would be
impossible—so equally we must appreciate the
importance of the non-careerist underpinnings
of careers. Many of the 50% to 70% of graduate
students who survive to receive their PhD,
sustain their original commitment by doing
public sociology on the side—often hidden from
their supervisor. How often have I heard faculty
advise their students to leave public sociology
until after tenure—not realizing (or realizing
all too well?) that public sociology is what keeps
sociological passion alive. If they follow their
advisor’s advice, they may end up a contingent
worker in which case there will be even less time
for public sociology, or they may be lucky
enough to find a tenure track job, in which case
they have to worry about publishing articles in
accredited journals or publishing books with
recognized university presses. Once they have
tenure, they are free to indulge their youthful
passions, but by then they are no longer youthful.They
may have lost all interest in public sociology,
preferring the more lucrative policy world
of consultants or a niche in professional sociology.
Better to indulge the commitment to public
sociology from the beginning, and that way
ignite the torch of professional sociology.
The differentiation of sociological labor with
its attendant specialization can create anxiety for
the sociological habitus that hankers after a
unity of reflexive and instrumental knowledge,
or a habitus that desires both academic and
extra-academic audiences.The tension between
institution and habitus drives sociologists restlessly
from quadrant to quadrant, where they
may settle for ritualistic accommodation before
moving on, or abandon the discipline altogether.
Still, there are always those whose habitus
adapts well to specialization and whose energy
and passion is infectious, spills over into the
other quadrants. As I shall now argue specialization
is not inimical to public sociology.
TTHHEESSIISS VVII:: TTHHEE NNOORRMMAATTIIVVEE MMOODDEELL
AANNDD IITTSS PPAATTHHOOLLOOGGIIEESS
The flourishing of our discipline depends upon
a shared ethos, underpinning the reciprocal
interdependence of professional, policy, public
and critical sociologies. In being over-responsive
to their different audiences, however, each
type of sociology can assume pathological
forms, threatening the vitality of the whole.
Those who have endorsed public sociology
have often been openly contemptuous of professional
sociology. Russell Jacoby’s (1987)
The Last Intellectuals began a series of commentaries
that lament the retreat of the public
intellectual into a cocoon of professionalization.
Thus, Orlando Patterson (2002) celebrates
David Riesman as “The Last Sociologist,”
because Riesman, and others of his generation,
tackled issues of great public significance
whereas professional sociology of today tests
narrow hypotheses, mimicking the natural sciences.
In asking “Whatever Happened to
Sociology?” Peter Berger (2002) answers that
the field has fallen victim to methodological
fetishism and an obsession with trivial topics.
But he also complains that the 1960s generation
has turned sociology from a science into
an ideology. He captures the cool reception of
public sociology among many professional
sociologists who fear public involvement will
corrupt science, threaten the legitimacy of the
discipline as well as the material resources it
will have at its disposal.
I take the opposite view—that between professional
and public sociology there should be,
and there often is, respect and synergy. Far from
being incompatible the two are like Siamese
twins. Indeed, my normative vision of the discipline
of sociology is of reciprocal interdependence
among our four types—an organic
solidarity in which each type of sociology
derives energy, meaning, and imagination from
its connection to the others.
As I have already insisted, at the heart of our
discipline is its professional component. Without
a professional sociology, there can be no policy
or public sociology, but nor can there be a
critical sociology—for there would be nothing
to criticize. Equally professional sociology
depends for its vitality upon the continual challenge
of public issues through the vehicle of
public sociology. It was the civil rights movement
that transformed sociologists’ understanding
of politics, it was the feminist
movement that gave new direction to so many
spheres of sociology. In both cases it was sociologists,
engaged with and participated in the
movements, who infused new ideas into sociology.
Similarly, Linda Waite’s (2000) public
defense of marriage, generated lively debate
within our profession. Critical sociology may be
a thorn in the side of professional sociology, but
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it is crucial in forcing awareness of the assumptions
we make, so that from time to time we may
change those assumptions. How bold and invigorating
were Alvin Gouldner’s (1970) challenges
to structural functionalism, but also to the
way policy sociology could become the unwitting
agent of oppressive social control.Today we
might include within the rubric of critical sociology
the movement for “pure sociology,” a scientific
sociology purged of public engagement.
What was professional sociology yesterday can
be critical today. Policy sociology, for its part,
has reenergized the sociology of inequality with
its research into poverty and education. More
recently, medical research has married all four
sociologies through collaboration with citizen
groups around such illnesses as breast cancer,
building new participatory models of science
(Brown et al. 2004; McCormick et al. forth-
coming).
Such examples of synergy are plentiful, but
we should be wary of thinking that the integration
of our discipline is easy. Connections across
the four sociologies are often difficult to accomplish
because they call for profoundly different
cognitive practices, different along many dimensions—form
of knowledge, truth, legitimacy,
accountability, and politics, culminating in their
own distinctive pathology. Table 3 highlights
these differences.
The knowledge we associate with professional
sociology is based on the development of
research programs, different from the concrete
knowledge required by policy clients, different
from the communicative knowledge exchanged
between sociologists and their publics, which in
turn is different from the foundational knowledge
of critical sociology. From this follows
the notion of truth to which each adheres. In the
case of professional sociology the focus is on
producing theories that correspond to the empirical
world, in the case of policy sociology knowledge
has to be “practical” or “useful,” whereas
with public sociology knowledge is based on
consensus between sociologists and their
publics, while for critical sociology truth is
nothing without a normative foundation to guide
it. Each type of sociology has its own legitimation:
professional sociology justifies itself on the
basis of scientific norms, policy sociology on
the basis of its effectiveness, public sociology
on the basis of its relevance and critical sociology
has to supply moral visions. Each type of
sociology also has its own accountability.
Professional sociology is accountable to peer
review, policy sociology to its clients, public
sociology to a designated public, whereas critical
sociology is accountable to a community of
critical intellectuals who may transcend disciplinary
boundaries. Furthermore, each type of
sociology has its own politics. Professional sociology
defends the conditions of science, policy
sociology proposes policy interventions,
public sociology understands politics as democratic
dialogue whereas critical sociology is
committed to opening up debate within our dis-
cipline.
Finally, and most significantly, each type of
sociology suffers from its own pathology, arising
from its cognitive practice and its embeddedness
in divergent institutions. Those who
speak only to a narrow circle of fellow aca-
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Table 3. Elaborating the Types of Sociological Knowledge
X Academic Extra-academic
Instrumental Professional sociology Policy sociology
—Knowledge —Theoretical/empirical —Concrete
—Truth —Correspondence —Pragmatic
—Legitimacy —Scientific norms —Effectiveness
—Accountability —Peers —Clients
—Politics —Professional self-interest —Policy intervention
—Pathology —Self-referentiality —Servility
Reflexive Critical sociology Public sociology
—Knowledge —Foundational —Communicative
—Truth —Normative —Consensus
—Legitimacy —Moral vision —Relevance
—Accountability —Critical intellectuals —Designated publics
—Politics —Internal debate —Public dialogue
—Pathology —Dogmatism —Faddishness
demics easily regress toward insularity. In the
pursuit of the puzzle solving, defined by our
research programs, professional sociology can
easily become focused on the seemingly irrelevant.8
In our attempt to defend our place in the
world of science we do have an interest in
monopolizing inaccessible knowledge, which
can lead to incomprehensible grandiosity or
narrow “methodism”. No less than professional
sociology, critical sociology has its own pathological
tendencies toward ingrown
sectarianism—communities of dogma that no
longer offer any serious engagement with professional
sociology or the infusion of values
into public sociology. On the other side, policy
sociology is all too easily captured by clients
who impose strict contractual obligations on
their funding, distortions that can reverberate
back into professional sociology. If market
research had dominated the funding of policy
sociology, as Mills feared it would, then we
could all be held to ransom. The migration of
sociologists into business, education and policy
schools may have tempered this pathology
but certainly not insulated the discipline from
such pressures. Public sociology, no less than
policy sociology, can be held hostage to outside
forces. In pursuit of popularity public sociology
is tempted to pander to and flatter its publics,
and thereby compromising professional and
critical commitments. There is, of course, the
other danger that public sociology speak down
to its publics, a sort of intellectual vanguardism.
Indeed, one might detect such a pathology in
C. Wright Mills’s contempt for mass society.
These pathologies are real tendencies so that
the critical views of Jacoby, Patterson, Berger
and others with regard to professional sociology
are not without foundation.These critics err,
however, in reducing the pathological to the
normal. They conveniently miss the important,
relevant research of professional sociology,
showcased, for example, in the pages of
Contexts just as they overlook the pathologies
of their own types of sociology. The professionals
are no less guilty of pathologizing public
sociology as “pop sociology,” while overlooking
the ubiquitous and robust but, often, less
accessible public sociology.As a community we
have too easily gone to war with each “other,”
blind to the necessary interdependence of our
divergent knowledges. We need to bind ourselves
to the mast, making our professional,
policy, public and critical sociologies mutually
accountable. In that way we would also contain
the development of pathologies.
Institutionalizing reciprocal interchange would
also require us to develop a common ethos that
recognizes the validity of all four types of sociology—a
commitment based on the urgency of
the problems we study. In this best of all worlds,
in this normative vision, one would not have to
be a public sociologist to contribute to public
sociology, one could do so by being a good professional,
critical or policy sociologist. The
flourishing of each sociology would enhance the
flourishing of all.
TTHHEESSIISS VVIIII:: TTHHEE DDIISSCCIIPPLLIINNEE AASS AA
FFIIEELLDD OOFF PPOOWWEERR
In reality disciplines are fields of power in which
reciprocal interdependence becomes asymmetrical
and antagonistic.The result, at least in the
United States, is a form of domination in which
instrumental knowledge prevails over reflexive
knowledge.
Our angel of history, having aroused himself in
the 1970s, was swept back in another storm
during the 1980s. Sociology was in crisis—
undergraduate enrollments plummeted, the job
situation for qualified sociologists worsened,
there were rumors of department closures, and
intellectually the discipline seemed to lose direction.
From the pen of Irving Louis Horowitz
(1993) came The Decomposition of Sociology
complaining of the politicization of sociology.
James Coleman (1991, 1992) devoted articles
to the dangers of political correctness and the
invasion of the academy by the social norm.
Stephen Cole’s (2001) edited collection, What’s
Wrong with Sociology? brought together such
distinguished sociologists as Peter Berger, Joan
Huber, Randall Collins, Seymour Martin Lipset,
James Davis, Mayer Zald,Arthur Stinchcombe,
and Howard Becker.They mourned sociology’s
fragmentation, incoherence, non-cumulativeness
as though a true science—using their image
of natural science or economics—is always inteFFOORR
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8 I say “seemingly” irrelevant because first and
foremost one’s research program defines what is
anomalous or contradictory. If the results may seem
trivial, then the research program itself must bear the
burden of relevance and insight.
grated, coherent and cumulative! Their 1950s
optimism had turned sour in the face of the barrage
of critical challenges to consensus sociology
during the 1960s and 1970s. Now the
chickens were coming home to roost and sociology,
or their vision of it, was in jeopardy
Perhaps the most interesting and thoroughgoing
of this genre of writing was Stephen
Turner and Jonathan Turner’s (1990) The
Impossible Science that reconstructed the history
of sociology from this bleak standpoint.
From the beginning, they aver, sociology had
neither a sustainable audience nor reliable clients
and patrons. It was continually overrun by political
forces, interrupted by a transitory scientific
ascendancy in the period after World War
Two. If there is a common thread running
through all these narratives of decline it is one
that attributes sociology’s malaise to the subversive
power of its reflexive knowledge,
whether this be in the form of critical or public
sociology.
In one respect I concur with the “declinists”:
our discipline is not only a potentially integrated
division of labor but also a field of power, a
more or less stable hierarchy of antagonistic
knowledges. My disagreement, however, lies
with their evaluation of the state of sociology
and the balance of power within our discipline.
Sociology’s decline in the 1980s was short lived.
Far from being in the doldrums, today sociology
has never been in better shape.The numbers
of BAs in sociology has been increasing steadily
since 1985, overtaking economics and history
and nearly catching up with political science.
The production of PhDs still lags behind these
neighboring disciplines, but our numbers have
been growing steadily since 1989. They will,
presumably, continue to grow to meet the
demand for undergraduate teaching, although
the trend toward adjunct and contingent labor
shows no sign of abating. Membership of the
American Sociological Association has been
mounting rapidly for the last four years, restoring
the all time highs of the 1970s. Given a
political climate hostile to sociology this is perhaps
strange, yet it could be that this very climate
is drawing people to the critical and public
moments of sociology.
My second point of disagreement with the
“declinists” concerns the threat to sociology. I
believe it is the reflexive dimension of sociology
that is in danger not the instrumental dimension.
At least in the United States professional
and policy sociologies—the one supplying
careers and the other supplying funds—dictate
the direction of the discipline. Critical sociology’s
supply of values and public sociology’s
supply of influence do not match the power of
careers and money.There may be dialogue along
the vertical dimension of Table 1, but the real
bonds of symbiosis lie in the horizontal direction,
creating a ruling coalition of professional
and policy sociology and a subaltern mutuality
of critical and public sociology. This pattern
of domination derives from the embeddedness
of the discipline in a wider constellation of
power and interests. In our society money and
power speak louder than values and influence.
In the United States capitalism is especially
raw with a public sphere that is not only weak
but overrun by armies of experts and a plethora
of media. The sociological voice is easily
drowned out. Just as public sociology has to face
a competitive public sphere, so critical sociology
encounters the balkanization of disciplines,
and as a result critical discussion is deprived of
access to its most powerful engine—parallel
dispositions in other disciplines.
The balance of power may be weighted in
favor of instrumental knowledge, but we can still
make our discipline ourselves, creating the
spaces to manufacture a bolder and more vital
vision. To be sure there is a contradiction
between professional sociology’s accountability
to peers and public sociology’s accountability
to publics, but must this lead to warring
camps—each pathologizing the other? To be
sure critical and policy sociologies are at odds—
the one clinging to its autonomy and the other
to its clients—but if each would recognize parts
of the other in itself, mutuality could displace
antagonism. Instead of driving the discipline
into separate spheres we might develop a variety
of synergies and fruitful engagements.
Here there is no space to explore any further
the potential antagonisms and alliances within
this field of power. Suffice to say, if our discipline
can be held together only under a system
of domination, let that system be one of hegemony
rather than despotism. That is to say the
subaltern knowledges (critical and public)
should be allowed breathing space to develop
their own capacities and to inject dynamism
back into the dominant knowledges.
Professional and policy sociology should rec-
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ognize their enlightened interest in flourishing
critical and public sociologies. However
disruptive in the short term, in the long term
instrumental knowledge cannot thrive without
challenges from reflexive knowledges, that
is, from the renewal and redirection of the
values that underpin their research, values
that are drawn from and recharged by the
wider society.
We have sketched out the field of power that
comprises the relations among the four sociologies
in a relatively abstract manner. Their
concrete combination will vary among departments,
over time within a single country, among
countries, and even assume a changing global
configuration. Accordingly, the next three theses
explore the specificity of the contemporary
configuration of United States sociology by
pursuing a series of comparisons and in this
way we will deepen our encounter with the
national and global forces shaping disciplinary
fields.
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In the United States the domination of professional
sociology emerged through successive
dialogues with public, policy and critical sociologies.
But even here the strength of professional
sociology is concentrated in the research
departments at the top of a highly stratified
system of university education while at the subaltern
levels public sociology is often more
important if less visible.
Today we accept the domination of professional
sociology as a normal feature of United States
sociology but it is actually a quite recent phenomenon.
We can plot the history of United
States sociology as the deepening of professional
sociology in three successive periods.
Professional sociology began in the middle
of the 19th. century as a dialogue between ameliorative,
philanthropic and reform groups on the
one side, and the early sociologists on the other
side. The latter often came from a religious
background but they transferred their moral
zeal to the fledgling secular science of sociology.After
the Civil War the exploration of social
problems developed through the collection and
analysis of labor statistics as well as social surveys
of the poor. Collecting data to demonstrate
the plight of the lower classes became a
movement unto itself that laid the foundations
of professional sociology. Sociologists would
remain in close contact with all manner of
groups in a burgeoning civil society even after
the formation ofAmerican Sociological Society,
as it was called then, in 1905. In its origins,
therefore, sociology was inherently public.
The second phase of sociology saw the shift
of engagement from publics to foundations
and government. Beginning in the 1920s with
the Rockefeller Foundation’s support for the
Institute for Social and Religious Research
(which would sponsor the famous Middletown
studies) and then its support for community
research at the University of Chicago and at the
University of North Carolina, foundations
became increasingly active in promoting sociology.
At the same time rural sociology managed
to create a research base within the state
itself (Larson and Zimmerman 2003).As director
of the President’s Research Committee
(1933), William Ogburn pulled together a massive
volume on Recent Social Trends in the
United States. During World War II, state sponsored
sociology continued, the most famous
being Samuel Stouffer’s (1949) multi-volume
study of morale within the United States army.
After the war a new source of funding
appeared, namely the corporate financing of
survey research, epitomized by Lazarsfeld’s
work at the Bureau of Applied Social Research
at Columbia University. The more sociology
depended upon commercial and government
funding the more it developed rigorous statistical
methods for the analysis of empirical
data, which invited criticisms from many
quarters.
The third phase ofAmerican sociology, therefore,
was marked by critical sociology’s engagement
with professional sociology. Its inspiration
was Robert Lynd (1939) who criticized sociology’s
narrowing of scope and its claims of value
neutrality. It was perhaps most famously continued
by C. Wright Mills (1959), who referred
to sociology’s originating engagement with
publics as “liberal practicality” and to the second
period of corporate and state funding as
“illiberal practicality.” He did not realize, however,
that he was inaugurating a third phase of
“critical sociology,” which would redirect both
theoretical and methodological trends within
the discipline.Alvin Gouldner (1970) produced
a milestone in this third phase, attacking the
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foundations of structural functionalism and
allied sociologies, and creating space for new
theoretical tendencies influenced by feminism
and Marxism. This critical sociology provided
the energy and imagination behind the reconstruction
of professional sociology in the 1980s
and 1990s.
From where will the next impetus for sociology
come? Thesis I claimed that the gap
between the sociological ethos and the world is
propelling sociology into the public arena.
Moreover, professional sociology has now
reached a level a maturity and self confidence
that it can return to its civic roots, and promote
public sociology from a position of strength—
an engagement with the profound and disturbing
global trends of our time. If the original
public sociology of the 19th. century was
inevitably provincial, it nonetheless laid the
foundation for the ambitious professional sociology
of the 20th. century, which, in turn, has
created the basis for its own transcendence—a
21st century public sociology of global dimen-
sions.
This is not to discount the importance of
local public sociology, the organic connections
between sociologists and immediate communities.
Far from it. After all the global only manifests
itself through and is constituted out of
local processes. We must recognize that so much
local public sociology is already taking place in
our state systems of education where faculty
bear the burden of huge teaching loads. If they
can squeeze some time beyond teaching, they
take their public sociology out of the classroom
and into the community. We do not know about
these extra-curricular public sociologies because
their practitioners rarely have the time to write
them up. Fortunately, Kerry Strand, Sam
Marullo, Nick Cutforth, Randy Stoecker and
Patrick Donohue (2003) have cast a beam on to
this hidden terrain by putting together a handbook
on organic public sociologies or what they
call community-based research. The volume
lays out a set of principles and practices as well
as numerous examples, many of which combine
research, teaching and service.
The broader point is that the US system of
higher education is a large sprawling set of
institutions, steeply hierarchical and enormously
diverse.Therefore, the configuration of our four
sociologies looks very different at different levels
and in different places.The concentration of
research and professionalism in the upper reaches
of our university system is made possible, at
least in part, by the overburdening of our teaching
institutions, the four-year and two-year colleges.The
configuration of sociologies in these
institutions is analogous to that in poorly
resourced parts of the world. As the next thesis
intimates diversity within the United States mirrors
diversity at the global level.
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United States sociology presents itself as universal,
but it is particular—not just in its content
but also in its form, that is, in its
configuration of our four types of sociology. At
the same time it exercises enormous influence
over other national sociologies, and not always
to their advantage. Thus, we need to remold
not only the national but also the global division
of sociological labor.
The term “public sociology” is an American
invention. If, in other countries, it is the essence
of sociology, for us it is but a part of our discipline,
and a small one at that. Indeed, for some
U.S. sociologists it does not belong in our discipline
at all. When I travel to South Africa,
however, to talk about public sociology—and
this would be true of many countries in the
world—my audiences look at me nonplussed.
What else could sociology be, if not an engagement
with diverse publics about public issues?
That the American Sociological Association
would devote our annual meetings to public
sociologies speaks volumes about the strength
of professional sociology in the United States.
Moreover, in a world where national professional
sociologies are often weaker than public
sociologies, focusing on the latter signifies a
challenge to the international hegemony of
United States sociology, and points toward sociology’s
reconstruction nationally and globally.
The configuration of our four types of sociology
varies from country to country. In the
Global South, as I have intimated, sociology
has often a strong public presence. Visiting
South Africa in 1990 I was surprised to discover
the close connection between sociology
and the anti-apartheid struggles, especially the
labor movement but also diverse civic organizations.
While in the United States we were
theorizing social movements, in South Africa
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sociologists were making social movements!
This project drove their sociology, stimulating
a whole new field of research—social movement
unionism—which U.S. sociologists rediscovered,
as though it were a brand new idea, 20
years later! But South African sociology not
only focused on social mobilization but on the
targets of such mobilization. Sociologists analyzed
the character and tendencies of the
apartheid state, debated the strategy of the antiapartheid
movement. They asked whether they
should be servants or critics of the movement.
Today, however, ten years after apartheid South
Africa presents a less favorable context for public
sociology, as sociologists are drawn off into
NGOs, corporations or state apparatuses, as the
new government calls on sociologists to withdraw
from the trenches of civil society and
focus on teaching, and as social research is
channeled into immediate policy issues or
“bench-marked” to “international,” i.e.
American, professional standards. The demobilization
of civil society has gone hand in hand
with a shift from reflexive to instrumental sociology
(Sitas 1997; Webster 2004).
Similar tendencies can be found elsewhere,
but each with their national specificity. Take
the Soviet Union. Sociology disappeared underground
in the Stalin era, only to resurface as a
weapon of official and unofficial critique under
the post-Stalin regimes. Opinion research
became a form of public sociology during the
thaw of the 1960s before it was monopolized by
the party apparatus. Under the stalwart leadership
ofTatyana Zaslavskaya, Perestroika brought
sociologists out in force. Sociology became
intimately connected to the eruption of civil
society. With the evisceration of civil society in
the post-Soviet period, however, the fledgling
sociology proved defenseless against the invasion
of market forces. With but a few exceptions
sociology was banished to business schools and
to centers of opinion and market research.
Where it exists as a serious intellectual enterprise,
it is often funded by Western foundations,
employing sociologists trained in England
or the United States.
The situation is very different in Scandinavian
countries with their strong social democratic
traditions. Here sociology grew up with the
welfare state, which conferred a strong policy
orientation but an equally strong public moment.
Norwegian sociology, very much influenced by
American sociology, was nonetheless also
geared to the policy world and here the feminist
input was very important. With a population of
only 5 million and less than 200 registered sociologists
the professional community is small, so
that the more ambitious seek a place in the
wider society whether in government or as public
intellectuals.They are regular contributors to
newspapers, radio and television. Norwegians
have energetically taken their public sociologies
abroad, becoming an international hub with
links not to just to the United States but to
Europe and countries of the Global South.
The rest of Europe is quite variable. France
has one of the longest traditions of professional
sociology, and at the same time cultivated a
traditional public sociology, with such leading
lights as Raymond Aron, Pierre Bourdieu and
Alain Touraine. In England professional sociology
is of a more recent, post-World War Two,
vintage, easily vulnerable to the Thatcher
regime that sought to muzzle public and policy
initiatives fostering a more defensive inward
looking profession. The return of a Labour
government gave sociology a new lease of life,
expanding the sphere of policy research and
propelling its most illustrious and prolific public
sociologist, Anthony Giddens, into the
House of Lords.
In mapping the fields of national sociologies
one learns not only how particular is the
sociology of the United States but also how
powerful and influential it is. Turning out 600
doctorates a year, it strides like a giant over
world sociology. Many of the leading sociologists,
teaching in other parts of the world, were
trained in the United States. The American
SociologicalAssociation has over 14,000 members
with 24 full time staff. But it is not simply
the domination of numbers and resources but,
increasingly, governments around the world are
holding their own academics, sociologists
included, accountable to “international” standards,
which means publishing in “Western,”
journals, and in particular American journals.
It’s happening in South Africa and Taiwan but
also in countries with considerable resources,
such as Norway. Driven by connections to the
West and publishing in English, national sociologies
lose their engagement with national
problems and local issues. Within each country,
states nurture global pressures, which fracture
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the national division of sociological labor, driving
wedges among the four sociologies.
Without conspiracy or deliberation on the
part of its practitioners, United States sociology
becomes world hegemonic. We, therefore,
have a special responsibility to provincialize
our own sociology, to bring it down from the
pedestal of universality and recognize its distinctive
character and national power. We have
to develop a dialogue, once again, with other
national sociologies, recognizing their local traditions
or their aspirations to indigenize sociology.
We have to think in global terms, to
recognize the emergent global division of sociological
labor. If the United States rules the
roost with its professional sociology, then we
have to foster public sociologies of the Global
South and the policy sociologies of Europe. We
have to encourage networks of critical sociologies
that transcend not just disciplines but also
national boundaries. We should apply our sociology
to ourselves, become more conscious of
the global forces that are driving our discipline,
so that we may channel them rather than be
channeled by them.
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The social sciences distinguish themselves from
the humanities and the natural sciences by their
combination of both instrumental and reflexive
knowledge—a combination that is itself variable,
and thereby giving different opportunities
for public and policy interventions.
Interdisciplinary knowledge takes different
forms in each quadrant of the sociological field.
It is said that the division of the disciplines is
an arbitrary product of 19th. century European
history, that the present disciplinary specialization
is anachronistic, and that we should
move ahead toward a unified social science.
This positivist fantasy was recently resurrected
by Immanuel Wallerstein et al. (1996) in the
Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the
Restructuring of the Social Sciences. The project
looks harmless enough but in failing to pose
the questions—knowledge for whom? and
knowledge for what?—the new unified social
science all too easily dissolves reflexivity, that
is, the critical and public moments of social
science. In a world of domination unity too easily
becomes the unity of the powerful.To declare
the division of the disciplines as arbitrary, just
because they were created at a particular
moment of history, is to miss their ongoing and
changing meaning and the interests they represent.
It is to commit the genetic fallacy. In order
to underline the grounds for the division of the
disciplines, and in the interests of brevity, I fall
back on schematic portraits of academic fields,
inevitably sacrificing attention to both internal
differentiation and variation over time and place.
The natural sciences are largely based on
instrumental knowledge, rooted in research programs
whose development is governed by scientific
communities. The extra-academic
audience is from the policy world—industry or
government—ready to exploit scientific discoveries.
Increasingly, this extra-academic audience
enters the academy to direct or oversee its
research, prompting opposition to collusive relations,
whether these be in the area of medical
research, nuclear physics or bioengineering
(Epstein 1996; Moore 1996; Schurman and
Munro 2004). Such critical reflexivity, often
extending into public debate, is not the essence
of natural science as it is of the humanities.
Thus, works of art or literature are ultimately
validated on the basis of a dialogue among narrower
groups of cognoscenti or within broader
publics. Their truth is established through their
aesthetic value based on discursive evaluation,
that is, as critical and public knowledges,
although, of course, they may be elaborated
into schools of instrumental knowledge and
even enter the policy world.
The social sciences are at the crossroads of
the humanities and the natural sciences since in
their very definition they partake in both instrumental
and reflexive knowledge. The balance
between these two types of knowledge, however,
varies among the social sciences. Economics,
for example, is as close as the social sciences
get to what we might call a paradigmatic science,
dominated by a single research program
(neo-classical economics).The organization of
the discipline reflects this with its paucity of
prizes (Clark Medal and Nobel Prize), elite control
of the major journals, clear rankings not just
of departments but of individual economists,
and the absence of autonomously organized
subfields. Dissident economists survive only if
they can first establish themselves in professional
terms. Indeed, one might liken professional
economics to the discipline of the
Communist Party with its dissidents and its
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coherent doctrine that it seeks to spread the
world over, all in the name of freedom.9 The
internal coherence of economics gives it greater
prestige within the academic world and greater
effectiveness in the policy world.
If economics is like the Communist Party,
American sociology is more like AnarchoSyndicalism,
a decentralized participatory
democracy. It is based on multiple and overlapping
research traditions, reflected in its very
active 43 sections and their ever proliferating
awards (Ennis 1992), and in the over-200 sociology
journals (Turner and Turner 1990: 159).
Our institutional mode of operation reflects our
multiple perspectives—although not always
adequately. The discipline, a hierarchical and
elitist caste system though it is (Burris 2004),
nonetheless is more open than economics as
measured by faculty mobility between departments
and the patterns of recruitment of graduate
students (Han 2003).The discipline is more
democratic in its elections of officers. Member
resolutions are not restricted to professional
concerns, and they require the support of only
3% of the membership to be put to a vote.Thus,
if economics is more effective in the policy
world, the structure of the discipline of sociology
is organized to be responsive to diverse
publics. To the extent that our comparative
advantage lies in the public sphere, we are more
likely to influence policy indirectly via our public
engagements.
Looking at the other social sciences, political
science is a balkanized field but one more
inclined toward policy than publics, toward
instrumental rather than reflexive knowledge.
Today tendencies toward rational choice modeling
have led to a reaction in a reflexive direction.The
Perestroika Movement within political
science upholds a more institutional approach
to politics, and buttresses political theory as
critical theory. Anthropology and geography
are balkanized across the instrumental-reflexive
divide, so that cultural anthropology and
human geography often react against the scientific
models of their colleagues, while serving
as bridges to the humanities. Philosophy,
another cross-over between social sciences and
humanities, finds its distinctive niche in critical
knowledge.
Disciplinary divides are far stronger in the
United States than elsewhere, so that “interdisciplinary”
knowledge leads a precarious existence
at the boundaries of our disciplines. Each
of the four types of sociology develops a distinctive
exchange and collaboration with neighboring
disciplines. At the interface of
professional knowledge there is a cross-disciplinary
borrowing. When economic sociology
and political sociology borrow from the neighboring
disciplines the result is still distinctively
part of sociology—the social bases of markets
and politics. At the interface of critical knowledge,
there is a trans-disciplinary infusion.
Feminism, poststructuralism and critical race
theory have all left their mark on critical sociology’s
engagement with professional sociology.
But the infusion has always been limited.The
development of public knowledge often comes
about through multi-disciplinary collaboration
as, for example, in “participatory action
research” that brings communities together with
academics from complementary disciplines. A
community defines an issue—public housing,
environmental pollution, disease, living wage,
schooling, etc.—and then works together with
a multi-disciplinary team to frame and formulate
approaches. Finally, in the policy world
there is joint-disciplinary coordination, which
often reflects a hierarchy of disciplines. Thus,
state funded area studies often worked with
well-defined policy goals that gave precedence
to political science and economics.
Having recognized the power of the disciplinary
divide, captured in varying combinations
of instrumental and reflexive knowledge, we
must now ask what this variation signifies?
Specifically, is there anything distinctive about
sociological knowledge and the interests it represents?
Might we as well be economists or
political scientists and by happenstance we end
up as sociologists—a matter of little consequence,
a biographical accident? Do we have an
identity of our own among the social sciences?
This brings me to my final thesis.
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9 Marion Fourcade-Gourinchas (2004) documents
the enormous international influence of American
economics. Working off the ideas of Amartya Sen
(1999), Peter Evans (2004) has striven valiantly to
push economics toward an organic public engagement,
an economics sensitive to local issues and
deliberative democracy.
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If the standpoint of economics is the market
and its expansion, and the standpoint of political
science is the state and the guarantee of
political stability, then the standpoint of sociology
is civil society and the defense of the
social. In times of market tyranny and state despotism,
sociology—and in particular its public
face—defends the interests of humanity.
The social sciences are not a melting pot of
disciplines, because the disciplines represent
different and opposed interests—first and foremost
interests in the preservation of the grounds
upon which their knowledge stands. Economics,
as we know it today, depends on the existence
of markets with an interest in their expansion,
political science depends on the state with an
interest in political stability, while sociology
depends on civil society with an interest in the
expansion of the social.
But what is civil society? For the purposes of
my argument here we can define it as a product
of late 19th. century Western capitalism that
produced associations, movements and publics
that were outside both state and economy—
political parties, trade unions, schooling, communities
of faith, print media and a variety of
voluntary organizations.This congeries of associational
life is the unique standpoint of sociology
so that when it disappears—Stalin’s Soviet
Union, Hitler’s Germany, Pinochet’s Chile—
sociology disappears too. When civil society
flourishes—Perestroika Russia or lateApartheid
South Africa—so does sociology.
Sociology may be connected to society by an
umbilical cord, but, of course, this is not to say
sociology only studies civil society. Far from it.
But it studies the state or the economy from the
standpoint of civil society. Political sociology,
for example, is not the same as political science.
It examines the social preconditions of politics
and the politicization of the social just as economic
sociology is very different from economics,
indeed it looks at what economists
overlook, the social foundations of the market.
This tripartite division of the social sciences—I
have no space here to include such
neighbors as geography, history and anthropology—was
true of their birth in the 19th. century,
but it became blurred in the 20th. century
(with the fusing and overlapping boundaries of
state, economy and society). For the last 30
years, however, this three-way separation has
been undergoing renaissance, speared-headed
by state unilateralism on the one side and market
fundamentalism on the other. Through this
period civil society has been colonized and coopted
by markets and states. Still, opposition to
these twin forces comes, if its comes at all,
from civil society, understood in its local, national
and transnational expressions. In this sense
sociology’s affiliation with civil society, that is
public sociology, represents the interests of
humanity—interests in keeping at bay both state
despotism and market tyranny.
Let me immediately qualify what I’ve said.
First, I do believe that economics and political
science, between them, have manufactured the
ideological time bombs that have justified the
excesses of markets and states, excesses that are
destroying the foundations of the public university,
that is, their own academic conditions
of existence, as well as so much else. Still, while
acknowledging this I would not want to write off
all political scientists and economists.
Disciplines, after all, are fields of power, each
with its dominant and oppositional forces.Think
of the Perestroika Movement in political science
or the network of Post-Autistic Economics—an
economics that recognizes individuals as mature
and multi-faceted human beings.As sociologists
we can find and, indeed, have found allies in and
collaborated with these oppositional forma-
tions.
The field of sociology is also divided. Civil
society, after all, is not some harmonious communalism
but it is riven by segregations, dominations,
and exploitations.11 Historically, civil
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10 Taken fromAlvin Gouldner’s (1968) essay of the
same title. Equally pertinent to Thesis XI are the
challenging words of Pierre Bourdieu: “The ethnosociologist
is a sort of organic intellectual of
humankind who, as a collective agent, can contribute
to denaturalizing and defatalizing existence by putting
her competency at the service of a universalism
rooted in the understanding of particularisms.” Cited
in Wacquant (2004)
11 It is here that I part company with the Durkheimian
perspective of communitarians, such as
Amitai Etzioni (1993) and Philip Selznick (2002),
society has been male and white. As it has
become more inclusive it has also been invaded
by state and market, reflected in sociology by
the uncritical use of such concepts as social
capital. Civil society is very much a contested
terrain but still, I would argue, in the present
conjuncture the best possible terrain for the
defense of humanity—a defense that would be
aided by the cultivation of a critically disposed
public sociology.
How can we accomplish this goal?As I have
already suggested in Thesis VII the institutional
division of sociological labor and the corresponding
field of power have hitherto restricted
the expansion of public sociologies. We would
not have to defend public sociology if there
were not obstacles to its realization. To surmount
them requires commitment and sacrifice
that many have already made and continue
to make. That was why they became sociologists—not
to make money but a better world. So,
there already exist a plethora of public sociologies.
But there are also new developments.
Thus, the magazine Contexts has taken a major
step in the direction of public sociology. The
ASA head office has made vigorous efforts in
outreach and lobbying, with its congressional
briefings and its regular press releases, but also
in the columns of our newsletter Footnotes.This
year the ASA has introduced a new award that
will recognize excellence in the reporting of
sociology in the media. We need to cultivate a
collaborative relation between sociology and
journalism, for journalists are a public unto
themselves as well as standing between us and
a multitude of other publics.
TheASA has also established a task force for
the institutionalization of public sociologies,
which will consider three key issues. First, it will
consider how to recognize and validate the public
sociology that already exists, making the
invisible visible, making the private public.
Second, the task force will consider how to
introduce incentives for public sociology, to
reward the pursuit of public sociology that is so
often slighted in merits and promotions.Already
departments have created awards and blogs,
and have begun designing course syllabi for
public sociology. Third, if we are going to
acknowledge and reward public sociology then
we must develop criteria to distinguish good
from bad public sociology. And we must ask
who should evaluate public sociology. We must
encourage the very best of public sociology
whatever that may mean. Public sociology cannot
be second rate sociology.
Important though these institutional changes
are, the success of public sociology will not
come from above but from below. It will come
when public sociology captures the imagination
of sociologists, when sociologists recognize
public sociology as important in its own right
with its own rewards, and when sociologists
then carry it forward as a social movement
beyond the academy. I envision myriads of
nodes, each forging collaborations of sociologists
with their publics, flowing together into a
single current. They will draw on a century of
extensive research, elaborate theories, practical
interventions, and critical thinking, reaching
common understandings across multiple boundaries,
not least but not only across national
boundaries, and in so doing shedding insularities
of old. Our angel of history will then spread
her wings and soar above the storm.
Michael Burawoy is Professor of Sociology at the
University of California–Berkeley. After studying
industrial workplaces in Zambia, Chicago, Hungary,
and Russia, he is turning his attention to the academic
workplace.
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