Reflections on Public Sociology: Public Relations, Disciplinary Identity, and the Strong Program in Professional Sociology

Public sociology is an attempt to redress the issues of public engagement and disciplinary identity that have beset the discipline over the past several decades. While public sociology seeks to rectify the public invisibility of sociology, this paper investigates the limitations of it program. Several points of critique are offered. First, public sociology's affiliations with Marxism serve to potentially entrench existing divisions within the discipline. Second, public sociology's advancement of an agenda geared toward a "sociology for publics" instead of a "sociology of publics" imposes limitations on the development of a public interface. Third, the lack of a methodological agenda for public sociology raises concerns of how sociology can compete within a contested climate of public opinion. Fourth, issues of disciplinary coherence are not necessarily resolved by public sociology, and are potentially exacerbated by the invocation of public sociology as a new disciplinary identity. Fifth, the incoherence of professional sociology is obviated, and a misleading affiliation is made between scientific knowledge and the hegemonic structure of the profession. Finally, the idealism of public sociology's putative defense of civil society is explored as a utopian gesture akin to that of Habermas' attempt to revive the public sphere. The development of a strong program in professional sociology is briefly offered as a means to repair the disciplinary problems that are illustrated by emergence of the project of public sociology.     

Reflections on public sociology: Public relations, disciplinary identity, and the strong program in professional sociology

Public sociology is an attempt to redress the issues of public engagement and disciplinary identity that have beset the discipline over the past several decades. While public sociology seeks to rectify the public invisibility of sociology, this paper investigates the limitations of it program. Several points of critique are offered. First, public sociology's affiliations with Marxism serve to potentially entrench existing divisions within the discipline. Second, public sociology's advancement of an agenda geared toward a “sociology for publics” instead of a “sociology of publics” imposes limitations on the development of a public interface. Third, the lack of a methodological agenda for public sociology raises concerns of how sociology can compete within a contested climate of public opinion. Fourth, issues of disciplinary coherence are not necessarily resolved by public sociology, and are potentially exacerbated by the invocation of public sociology as a new disciplinary identity. Fifth, the incoherence of professional sociology is obviated, and a misleading affiliation is made between scientific knowledge and the hegemonic structure of the profession. Finally, the idealism of public sociology's putative defense of civil society is explored as a Utopian gesture akin to that of Habermas’ attempt to revive the public sphere. The development of a strong program in professional sociology is briefly offered as a means to repair the disciplinary problems that are illustrated by emergence of the project of public sociology.     

Immigrants,Immigration, and Sociology: Reflecting on the State of the Discipline*

The growth of the field of immigration in multiple directions and across disciplines and areas presents an opportune juncture to pause and reflect on the central role sociology has played in the study of immigrants and immigration, as well as to assess the contributions that immigration research has made to sociology. This essay discusses three subfields in sociology in which the sociological study of immigrants has contributed to bring new light to long‐standing questions: family, religion, and ethnic and racial studies. At the same time, it brings up areas – culture and arts, social movements and civic engagement, and citizenship, belonging and the state – in which immigration scholars in sociology could establish a more vibrant intellectual dialog with those subfields. Far from exhausting the discussion, these comments are intended to offer potential avenues for further research and discussion.     

Urban politics and the study of urban poverty: Promising developments and future directions

The study of urban poverty is alive and well in sociology. The study of urban politics, by contrast, has stagnated. Though scholars agree that politics shapes the creation and durability of urban poverty, analytical connections between the two subfields are rarely made explicit. In this article, I make the case for a more integrated body of research. I first illustrate how urban poverty scholars implicitly discuss politics, and conversely, how urban politics scholars implicitly discuss poverty. I then highlight recent developments in the literature and propose two paths forward—by no means the only paths forward, but two ways to jumpstart greater conversation across both subfields. For the urban poverty literature, a focus on organizations can help scholars analyze political dynamics more directly. And for the urban politics literature, an emphasis on political mechanisms rather than overarching perspectives can disrupt the current theoretical malaise. These two moves can advance both literatures while drawing them closer together.     

Sociology's misfortune: disciplines, interdisciplinarity and the impact of audit culture

This paper is about tendencies to the subversion of sociology as a discipline. It connects external factors of the wider socio-political environment of higher education in the UK, especially those associated with the audit culture and new systems of governance, with the internal organization of the discipline. While the environment is similar for all social science subjects, the paper argues that there are specific consequences for sociology because of characteristics peculiar to the discipline. The paper discusses these consequences in terms of the changing relationship between sociology and the growing interdisciplinary area of applied social studies as a form of 'mode 2 knowledge'. It argues that while sociology 'exports' concepts, methodologies and personnel it lacks the internal disciplinary integrity of other 'exporter' disciplines, such as economics, political science and anthropology. The consequence is an increasingly blurred distinction between sociology as a discipline and the interdisciplinary area of applied social studies with a potential loss of disciplinary identity. The paper concludes with a discussion of how this loss of identity is associated with a reduced ability to reproduce a critical sensibility within sociology and absorption to the constraints of audit culture with its preferred form of mode 2 knowledge.     

The contemporary crisis and the social relations department at Harvard: A case study in hegemony and disintegration

The history of sociology is marked by periods of theoretical pluralism and hegemony. Their interplay has resulted in the slow and uneven development of the discipline. Today, however, bodies of theory and practice have become so diverse that many scholars worry that sociology is in a state of disintegration. The theoretical career of Talcott Parsons provides a microcosm in which to explore similar processes. Building on the success of The Structure of Social Action, Parsons led a movement that transformed Harvard's Department of Sociolgy into the Department of Social Relations. There he attempted a grander, but failed synthesis in Toward A General Theory of Action. His case provides a situation in which to explore features of disciplinary integration and fragmentation. The comparison stimulates one to fashion an informed sense of whether sociology is now facing its latest crisis or may be in the process of decomposition as a corpus of study. This research was supported by grants from the American Sociological Association's Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline and by Indiana University Northwest through a sabbatical leave.     

Social Movements,Protest and Mainstream Media

This article provides a broad, cross‐disciplinary overview of scholarship which has explored the dynamics between social movements, protests and their coverage by mainstream media across sociology, social movement studies, political science and media and communications. Two general approaches are identified ‘representational’ and ‘relational’ research. ‘Representational’ scholarship is that which has concerned itself with how social movements are portrayed or ‘framed’ in the media, how the media production process facilitates this, and the consequences thereof. ‘Relational’ scholarship concentrates on the asymmetrical ‘relationship’ between social movements, the contestation of media representation and the media strategies of social movements. Within these two broad approaches different perspectives and areas of emphasis are highlighted along with their strengths and weaknesses. The conclusion reflects on current developments in this area of study and offers avenues for future research.     

Cultural Sociology, Modes of Inquiry, and Political Analysis: A Rejoinder to Steensland

Closely bounded research programs are both common and effective in sociology. Describing such programs as operating with a "restricted code" is deeply problematic. These matters aside, the remarkable rise of cultural sociology in fact reflects adaptation to sociology's disciplinary norms and core thematic concerns. Steensland (2009) might better have reversed his argument: faced with the achievements of cultural analysis, the slumbering giant called "mainstream sociology" should wake up.     

Bourdieu's distinction between philosophical and sociological approaches to Science Studies*

Sociological inquiry into the natural sciences has shown that they are contingent, social constructions. However, Science Studies research has been obstructed by epistemological conflicts about the nature of science and theoretical perspectives upon studying it. Bourdieu's sociology of science is under‐utilized in this field, as he addresses these obstructions and offers a way forward. Bourdieu argues that researchers have failed to distinguish between sociological and philosophical approaches in social science, thus committing the ‘scholastic fallacy’. In conjunction with this fallacy, the logic of the Science Studies field produces a tendency towards disciplinary confusion, philosophical radicalization, and crisis. These patterns were expressed in the ‘science wars’. The field has followed a philosophical path rather than a sociological one, and its progress has been obstructed. While some of Bourdieu's philosophical arguments remain problematic, his reflexive sociology allows us to differentiate philosophical from sociological approaches, providing an alternative direction for Science Studies.     

The Sociology of Neuroethics: Expectational Discourses and the Rise of a New Discipline

The sudden emergence of the discipline ‘neuroethics’ is an intriguing event from the perspective of the sociologies of medicine, science and bioethics. Despite calls for greater social science engagement with neuroethics, it has so far received little attention. So that sociologists might consider how to engage with the field, and in order to simultaneously contribute towards a sociology of neuroethics, this paper explores neuroethics’ disciplinary identity via a critical analysis of literature defining neuroethics’ scope and role. Drawing on the sociologies of bioethics and expectations, I argue that in setting the neuroethical agenda, neuroethicists construct expectations about the future of neuroscience. In doing so, they align themselves with neuroscience, rather than maintaining a critical distance. Similar critiques have been made of bioethics, but in its efforts to distinguish itself from bioethics, neuroethics appears to exacerbate many of the attributes which sociologists have found problematic. This reinforces the need for critical social science perspectives to inform neuroethics, and also shows how neuroethics is potentially an interesting area of empirical study for sociology. However, the paper concludes by calling for critical reflexivity in sociology’s engagement with neuroethics, in light of recent debates surrounding the relationship between social science, bioethics, bioscience and expectations.     

Social fields,subfields and social spaces at the scale of empires: explaining the colonial state and colonial sociology

This article develops a series of arguments about social fields, subfields, and social spaces that can help us understand empires and colonies. First, we have to assume that the scale of fields is not always coextensive with the boundaries of the national state but is often much larger, or smaller. Imperial fields are among the most spatially extensive ones, though they may not be as territorially extensive as truly global fields. Second, we need to make a distinction between imperial fields and imperial social spaces (based on Bourdieu's distinction between social fields and social spaces). The third argument is that colonies in modern empires were characterized by two different kinds of fields: fields that were simply extended into the overseas territories, versus completely separate fields unique to one or more of the colonies. The colonial state is an example of a field that is specific to the colony. By contrast, scientific fields were often simply extended from the metropole into the colonies, encompassing both. The fourth argument concerns subfields. Transported into imperial realms, this distinction suggests that some colonial offshoots of fielded metropolitan practices do not constitute separate fields but are nonetheless differentiated from their main overarching field. These four points are illustrated with examples from British, French and German imperial policy, colonial statecraft and colonial sociology.     

The Science and Profession of Involved Sociology

Abstract

In this essay, I examine the contextual and historical relationship between the national and regional associations in American sociology. Four findings emerge from the analysis of this relationship. First, the regional associations underutilize the populations they represent. Second, the constituencies of the national and regional associations are diverging. Third, the regional associations appear no longer to serve as a viable pathway for involvement in the leadership of the national association. Fourth, the disciplinary visibility of the regional associations journals has declined, on average, since 1990. These four outcomes reflect a disciplinary drift toward internal differentiation, which can only be understood as a manifestation of the culture of American sociology. Specifically, the discipline is becoming increasingly incoherent as a result of the inaccurate perception it holds of itself as a science. This misperception, historically embedded within the disciplinary culture of American sociology, appears to guide the discipline toward an overemphasis on the production of research and the establishment of a governance structure that draws heavily on faculty from doctoral-granting departments. Accordingly, following from my analysis of the discipline's culture. I concude that sociology is better positioned as a profession than a science.     

“The Littlest Science” Revisited

I revisit Allan Mazur’s 1968 claim that sociology is “The Littlest Science.” In doing so, I review four decades of disciplinary battles on how sociology might raise its scientific profile. I examine data on public attitudes toward sociology as a science and how sociology is perceived by the larger scientific community. I conclude that taking a more interdisciplinary perspective will improve the scientific status of sociology.     

Social movement studies in India,within and beyond sociology: Proposing postcolonial political sociology as an evolving framework

The social movement theories, particularly emerged since the late 1960s and the empirical studies informed by these theories occupy a decisive space in the current sociological studies of social movements. Often, the theories that emerged in the American and European contexts overlooked the significance of ‘political sociology’ as a theoretical terrain while conceptualizing contemporary social movements. Thus, this paper attempted to reinvent the significance of political sociology in two-ways: a) it critically engaging with the classical tradition of political sociology; b) critical scrutiny of the major trends appeared in the sub-field of social movements within the disciplinary domain of sociology in India since the 1980s has been undertaken. Given this, the paper recognizes the theoretical urge for a new framework to understand social movements in reference to the specificities of the non-Western societies like India, and thereby proposes an approach termed as the postcolonial political sociology of social movements.     

Japanese Sociology in a Global Network. Internationalization,Disciplinary Development,and Minority Integration in the Road Ahead

The dual trajectories of Japanese sociology and Japan itself are poised at a watershed moment in their shared history. In recent years, Japanese sociology has enlarged its international presence in unprecedented fashion and the Tokyo Olympics have positioned the global spotlight on the entire nation of Japan, making it an opportune moment to reflect on the future of Japanese sociology in connection to Japanese society by way of internationalization. This article draws on the author's reflections on the latest 92nd Japan Sociological Society Annual Conference in the context of recent socio‐structural and intellectual transformations in counterpart sociological cultures in Anglo‐America. Drawing on three theorizations of disciplinary development by Abbott, Connell, and Burawoy, this article articulates two dimensions (socio‐structural and intellectual) with which to examine (i) what Japanese sociology can contribute to improve the internationalization decolonization, and pluralization of global sociology; and (ii) what global sociology can do to advance Japanese sociology's public contribution to improving and preserving LGBTQ minorities' societal well‐being.     

How Not to Establish a Subfield: Media Sociology in the United States

US-American sociology has largely failed to examine the transformation of mediated communication of the past 20 years. If sociology is to be conceived as a general social science concerned with analyzing and critically scrutinizing past, present, and future conditions of collective human existence, this failure, and the ignorance it engenders, is detrimental. This ignorance, we argue, may be traced back to the weak self-identity, institutionalization and position of media sociology in the discipline. Our argument here is threefold: 1) There was an opportunity structure for specialization, that is, a venerable research tradition in media sociology since the first half of the twentieth century. This tradition links back to classics in sociology and peaked at a time (1970s and 1980s) when the discipline differentiated institutionally and many new sections emerged in the American Sociological Association. 2) Despite this tradition, media sociology has not become established in sociology in the United States until recently. 3) Lastly, we locate reasons for non-establishment on three distinct but interconnected levels: the history of ideas in media sociology, institutional/disciplinary history, and disciplinary politics.     

Social gerontology as public sociology in action

Burawoy (2005) argues that sociology needs to re-establish a public sociology oriented toward society’s problems and the practice of its unique knowledge if it is to again be taken seriously by the public, policymakers, and others. Yet, it is unclear how best to achieve these goals. We argue that the relatively young field of social gerontology provides a useful model of successful public sociology in action. As a multidisciplinary field engaged in basic and applied research and practice, social gerontology’s major aim is to improve the lives of older people and to ameliorate problems associated with age and aging. Thus social gerontology has routinely reached beyond the academy to engage with its publics. We review the field’s historical and theoretical development and present four examples of public sociology in action. Several factors have contributed to social gerontology's success in achieving the goals of public sociology: (1) Working in multidisciplinary teams which promote collaboration and respect for diverse perspectives. (2) Its ability to advocate “professionally” for its publics without favoring one group at the expense of another. (3) The unique affinity of its theories and practices with its disciplinary values. (4) The constructive effects of its ongoing questioning of values and ethics. Working in a multidisciplinary field with multiple publics, social gerontologists have been able to blend professional, critical, policy, and public sociologies to a considerable degree while contributing toward improvements in well-being.     

Reading Ibn Khaldun in the Formative Period of Sociology

‘Abd al-Rahman Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), the founder of the science of society, became known to modern sociologists during the formative period of sociology, that is, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. There was something of a reception of Ibn Khaldun in Europe at that time by sociologists and other scholars who were not necessarily involved with Islamic or West Asian studies. In fact, the reception of Ibn Khaldun by modern scholars in the West can be differentiated into Eurocentric or Orientalist as opposed to more disciplinary attitudes. While much has been said about the Eurocentric reception of Ibn Khaldun, less is discussed about the disciplinary approach to Ibn Khaldun among thinkers who wrote when the modern science of sociology was emerging in Europe. This special issue on Ibn Khaldun in the Formative Period of Sociology provides English translations of six articles originally written in Italian, French, German, Polish, Spanish and Turkish between 1896 and 1934. Not all of these articles were written by sociologists. Together, they provide some background as to how Ibn Khaldun was conceived of in non-area studies circles, in the social sciences and humanities.     

The distinctive South and the invisible North: Why urban ethnography needs regional sociology

This article is a review of urban ethnography's Northern bias and regional sociology's Southern bias. I begin by arguing that these two subfields have reified the South's reputation for regional distinctiveness and rendered the North's regional characteristics invisible. To illustrate why urban ethnography needs regional sociology, I explain how the reluctance to view Northern cities through a regional lens has resulted in canonical conceptualizations of “the street” that lack precision and clarity. I conclude with a discussion of how efforts to revive regional sociology by conducting ethnographic research in Southern cities will need to expand beyond the study of the South to achieve lasting impact in urban ethnography more broadly.     

Sociology and American Studies: A Case Study in the Limits of Interdisciplinarity

American Studies is an academic discipline whose object of study is the United States of America and everything associated with it, and American sociologists largely ignore it. American Studies largely ignores American sociology. What causes this mutual exclusion? An outline of the disciplinary history of American Studies and journal article citation data show that the relationship between sociology and American Studies is weak and asymmetrical; American Studies cites sociology more often, but very little and not by much. I argue that mutual exclusion is due to mutual distrust in methods: sociology sees itself as a science, while American Studies, with roots in history and literature, does not. This article serves as a case study in the limits of interdisciplinarity.