What Sociologists Do and Where They Do It—The NSF Survey on Sociologists's Work Activities and Workplaces

We present data from the National Science Foundation Survey of Doctoral Recipients that challenges the image of sociology as a classroom-based group of professionals. Our data reveal that only 45.8% of Ph.D. sociologists teach sociology. The anachronistic and false image of sociology, we argue, is profoundly consequential to the way sociologists interact with each other and with the larger society. As a discipline we tend to ignore or dismiss the doing of sociology in favor of the teaching of sociology or of theoretically focused research. We also present data on principal tasks and job classifications for those in academic and nonacademic settings.     

Public social science in Norway: Migration research in the public debate

How do Norwegian migration and diversity researchers experience and maneuver participation in public debate? And do their experiences and strategies fit with Michael Burawoy's image of Norwegian social science and with his model of public sociology? In this article, the concept of public sociology is expanded to public social science, encompassing communication of research not just from sociology but social science in general. Semi-structured interviews with 31 Norwegian migration and diversity scholars from 10 academic institutions about their experiences of, and views on, public research communication constitute the empirical material. The article concludes that Burawoy is right about the relatively high participation in public debate among social scientists in Norway. And his ideal-typical distinction between four types of sociology is helpful in analyzing how researchers relate differently to the science-public interface. Yet the results indicate that his perspective on public sociology is overly optimistic and not sufficiently attuned to the normativity already attached to highly politicized issues in public debate.     

Cape Breton: The photographs

This paper considers the need for an image‐based research methodology. The term ‘image‐based’ is meant to reflect the use of a wide range of visuals, for example, film, video, photographs and cartoons, within a qualitative research context. It is also meant to apply generically to encompass a wide range of fields of study including sociology, anthropology, education and health studies. There are principally two reasons why an image‐based methodology is needed: in order to enhance the status and acceptability of image‐based research in the wider research community; and to provide a critical platform from which to examine and refine visual methods. A common methodology would improve the status of image‐based research in the eyes of orthodox word orientated qualitative researchers and go some way to avoiding damaging divisions within image‐based research. The paper explores three areas: How do writers of research methodology view image‐based research?; what constitutes a methodological framework?; and some important elements of a visual methodology.     

Cognitive Sociology in France

While cognitive sociology is a relatively new area in U.S. sociology, the subfield has a lengthy history in French sociology. Developing a typology based upon the existing literature, we identify three branches of cognitive sociology in France. The first was initiated by Raymond Boudon, one of the scholars most responsible for popularizing the area, who envisioned cognitive sociology as helping delineate the role of beliefs in rational action. Second, another group of researchers seeks to found sociology upon a naturalistic basis, thus drawing upon the disciplines constitutive of cognitive science (e.g., psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and cognitive anthropology). Finally, the third approach to cognitive sociology in France takes inspiration from linguistics as a foundation for sociological investigations. We conclude the paper by discussing the relationship between these three sub-fields and by examining the relationship between French and American cognitive sociologies in order to identify fruitful directions for future research.     

The relevance of Kuhn's model of science to discipline development in sociology «1»

Thomas Kuhn's model of scientific development during the last two decades is reviewed critically in light of its increasing popularity in the sociology of sociology literature. This model, along with recent criticisms and rebuttals by Kuhn, is described, and the circularity of this position as a basis for paradigm development is noted. Several problems are identified for contemporary sociology. We conclude that Kuhn's model can not be used as a strategy for generating a scientific paradigm for the discipline of sociology and, at best, Kuhn's work serves only as a heuristic device for discipline analysis.     

Contemplating a postmodern sociology: genealogy, limits and critique

As its title suggests, this paper explores certain directions a specifically postmodern sociology (rather than say a sociology of postmodernism) might take. It reinterprets Gouldner's prescient warnings of a crisis in ‘academic’ sociology as an expression of despair within modern sociology. In particular, three important ‘contradictions’ are examined as possible points of departure for a postmodern sociological discourse. Foucault's genealogical approach, it is argued, is useful in helping to orientate any attempts to develop a sociology of this kind. The analysis concludes by anticipating possible objections, showing how these might profitably be incorporated into future enquiries. The aim of the paper is not to offer concrete enunciations for a postmodern sociology, but to develop more modest rules of thumb through which such a discourse might be erected.     

The “Adventures” of the Sociology Course in Greek Secondary Education

This article reports the results of a study of the sociology course in Greek secondary education. The aim is to reveal under which circumstances the course has ended up becoming one of the most downgraded courses, and more importantly, how the specific rationale of the course’s structure has resulted in the (re)production of a distorted image of the science of sociology. For that purpose, the 25-year history of the course has been analyzed from the view of: (1) the sociology curriculum’s variations over the years, (2) the underlying rationale of the official documents and the sociology textbooks, and (3) the sociology teachers’ perceptions on the course of sociology. The findings have indicated that the downgrading of the course has resulted in the devaluation of the science of sociology inside the educational community, and that through the school’s rationale (curriculum and teacher’s) a specific interpretation of sociology is being reproduced, which presents it as an everyday and simple science that deals mostly with social problems and their solutions. The ultimate result is that the sociological imagination will possibly never become part of students’ views on life.     

Sociologization,Pedagogization, and Resociologization: Has the Post-war Japanese Sociology of Education Suffered from the Galapagos Syndrome?

When considering the trends in the Japanese sociology of education over the 70 years since the end of World War II, there have been several significant changes in the nature and social position of the sociology of education within the academic history of expansion and development. These changes can be further understood by focusing on: (i) the relationship between the sociology of education in Japan and research trends in Western sociology; (ii) the relationship between the sociology of education and pedagogy in Japan; and (iii) the relationship between the sociology of education and changes in Japanese society itself. This paper focuses on these three relationships to provide an overview of the characteristics and the future direction of post-war Japanese sociology of education. The keywords of this paper will be sociologization, pedagogization, resociologization, and the Galapagos syndrome. The post-war Japanese sociology of education has not suffered from the Galapagos syndrome. However, it is evident that it lacks transmission of research results to other countries. So, the future task for Japanese researchers in the sociology of education is to demonstrate the significance of their research on Japanese education to international sociology of education markets. To achieve a more generalized perspective and regain a sense of equilibrium within the Japanese sociology of education, a “resociologization” will be required for the sociology of education in Japan, though the Japanese sociology of education especially seems to be experiencing a pedagogization.     

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.     

Sociology and Literature: Theoretical Considerations

The authors' discussion of the theoretical issues implied in interdisciplinary studies of sociology and literature is based on their analyses of selected works of sociology, literary theory, and cultural criticism produced during the past twenty years. Attempts to integrate the areas of sociology and literature have resulted in three general approaches: sociology through literature, the sociology of literature, and the study of sociology and literature based on their common dependence on language. The authors analyze the theoretical issues and assumptions that underlie each of these approaches in order to suggest a way to study sociology and literature which retains the richness and complexity of both disciplines.     

The ‘animal‐advocacy agenda’: exploring sociology for non‐human animals

This paper focuses on sociology and the study of human non‐human animal relations. Using as a catalyst referees' comments on a previous paper about experiments using non‐human animal subjects, in this present paper three problematics are identified and discussed. These problematics centre on the ‘acceptable’ content of sociological inquiry, the ‘permissibility’ of advocacy‐oriented sociology, and the ‘admissibility’ of non‐human animal‐advocacy to advocacy‐oriented sociology. The three problematics are explored through the lens of reflexive and critical sociology. Two central questions are raised: first, should sociology include the study of non‐human animals and secondly, can sociology advocate for non‐human animals? The paper concludes with an affirmative response to both of these questions. The paper ends by stressing that sociology has so much to offer the study of human non‐human animal relations. Professional sociologists have a key role to play in enabling this work to move from margins to centre in published sociology.     

Production as social change: Policy sociology as a public good

ABSTRACT

Burawoy described two ways sociology can aid the public, through: (1) instrumental (policy) sociology and (2) reflexive (public) sociology. This article elaborates the different assumptions of how social change occurs according to policy and public sociology (and how sociology effects social change). Policy sociology assumes social change occurs through the scientific elaboration of the best means to achieve goals. However, policy sociology largely takes the public as an object of power rather than subjects who can utilize scientific knowledge. Public sociology assumes that social change occurs through the exposure of contradictions in goals, which elaborates better goals. However, the elaboration of contradictions assumes that there is a fundamental thesis/antithesis in society. If there are multiple goals/theses, public sociology fails in at least three ways. Policy sociology, when reflexively selecting its public, provides the best way sociology can aid the public.     

Sociology as a Skin Trade

The purpose of the essay is to connect the practice of sociology with the sensitizing concept of a skin trade in order to relate it to the commonsense needs of the body-politic. The critical observations on professional sociology are not the focus of the essay any more than the concerns of modern youth which are adopted as a context for its argument. The essay intentionally avoids documentation in the conventional sense for the sake of the improvisation contained in the image of the skin trade. It is the first step in a series of studies in the skin trade in which I hope to treat race, for example, as a skin disease and to develop the social and political aspects of various other body events.     

Decorative sociology: towards a critique of the cultural turn

In this paper we outline a critique of ‘decorative sociology’ as a trend in contemporary sociology where ‘culture’ has eclipsed the ‘social’ and where literary interpretation has marginalized sociological methods. By the term ‘decorative sociology’ we mean a branch of modernist aesthetics which is devoted to a politicized, textual reading of society and culture. Although we acknowledge slippage between the textual and material levels of cultural analysis, notably in the output of the Birmingham School, we propose that the intellectual roots of cultural studies inevitably mean that the textual level is pre‐eminent. In emphasizing the aesthetic dimension we seek to challenge the political self‐image of decorative sociology as a contribution to political intervention. We argue that while the cultural turn has contributed to revising approaches to the relationships between identity and power, race and class, ideology and representation, it has done so chiefly at an aesthetic level. Following Davies (1993), we submit that the greatest achievement of the cultural turn has been to teach students to ‘read politically’. The effect of this upon concrete political action is an empirical question. Without wishing to minimize the political importance of cultural studies, our hypothesis is that, what might be called the ‘aestheticization of life’ has not translated fully into the politicization of culture. We argue that an adequate cultural sociology would have to be driven by an empirical research agenda, embrace an historical and comparative framework, and have a genuinely sociological focus, that is, a focus on the changing balance of power in Western capitalism. We reject the attempt to submerge the social in the cultural and outline the development of an alternative, integrated perspective on body, self and society. We conclude by briefly commenting on three sociological contributions to the comparative and historical study of cultural institutions which approximate this research agenda: Norbert Elias, Pierre Bourdieu and Richard Sennett.     

Sports Sociology’s Still Untapped Potential

Following up on Zirin’s (2008) challenge that sports sociologists “get off the bench,” and Karen and Washington’s (2001) plea to make sports sociology more central to analyses of social power, this article empirically reviews and assesses the sociology of sports from 1977–2008. Using a sample of 441 articles selected from the three major sports sociology journals during that period, we conclude that sports sociology exhibits a strong and increasing bias toward micro‐level analyses of (for example) how the content of sports frames and constructs the social world. A smaller and shrinking body of work examines more macro‐oriented issues such as the economics and politics of sports, and there seem to be few attempts to meaningfully synthesize these micro and macro orientations. We think this partiality toward micro‐oriented frameworks is rooted in factors unique to sports sociology while also reflecting larger trends within sociology as a whole. As advocates of popularly accessible public sociology, we respectfully suggest that sports sociologists try harder to weave macro analyses into their work, not necessarily replacing micro‐level approaches, but complementing them. We believe that sports sociology is well‐positioned to become a standard bearer for public sociology, but only if it pays more attention to the way organized sports intertwines with the organizational, political, and economic forces that perpetuate and exacerbate social inequality.     

Development, Diversity, and Conflict in the Sociology of Science *

The sociology of science has undergone considerable growth and diversification in recent years. Early sociology of science was developed within philosophical debates regarding the nature of science and the social bases of knowledge in general. Karl Mannheim and Max Scheler in the 1920s gave these discussions a specifically sociological bent. In the 1930s, the theme was made into an explicit sociology of science both by Marxists and by the functionalist Robert Merton, and both approaches were followed up during the next 30 years. The takeoff of the sociology of science into a flourishing research area occurred in the early 1960s, with the publication of works by Derek Price and by Thomas Kuhn, as well as important studies by Joseph Ben-David and by Warren Hagstrom. In the 1970s, sociology of science burgeoned into a variety of approaches: citation and network studies, conflict theory, social constructivism, ethnomethologically-influenced studies of laboratory life, and others. The idealized functionalist image of science has largely given way to more critical, relativist, and highly empirical approaches to science.     

Texts,images and display conventions in sociology

This essay examines the problem of presentation of the photographic project in visual sociology. The discussion begins with Barthes' analysis of the relationship between text and image. It then addresses conventions of sociology and art, showing how these disciplines offer alternative solutions to the problem of display. Finally, a review of an exhibit of the work of visual sociologists illustrates the operation of conventions, which, seen from Barthes' perspective, appear problematic.     

Weberian Political Sociology and Sociological Disaster Studies

The specialized field of disaster studies seems to be moving farther away from mainstream sociology, to the detriment of both. For sociologists working in this field, application of Max Weber's political sociology is proposed as one way to reconnect their research with longstanding concerns of the discipline. Weber's political sociology contains a conflict model focusing on structured inequalities of class, status, and power. Its relevance to both contemporary sociology and sociological disaster studies is illustrated through a reexamination of one of the early classic studies of disaster. The paper concludes with an overview of Weber's thoughts about the role of values in research and a brief comparison of Weber's political sociology with alternative theories.