For Public Sociology - Michael Burawoyburawoy.berkeley.edu/Public Sociology, Live/Burawoy.pdf ·...

This is how one pictures the angel of history. Hisface is turned towards the past. Where we per-ceive a chain of events, he sees one single catas-trophe which keeps piling wreckage uponwreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. Theangel would like to stay, awaken the dead, andmake whole what has been smashed. But astorm is blowing from Paradise; it has got

caught in his wings with such violence that theangel can no longer close them. This storm irre-sistibly propels him into the future to which hisback is turned, while the pile of debris beforehim grows skyward. This storm is what we callprogress.

—Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin wrote his famous ninththesis on the philosophy of history as the

Nazi army approached his beloved Paris, hal-lowed sanctuary of civilization’s promise. Heportrays this promise in the tragic figure of theangel of history, battling in vain against civi-lization’s long march through destruction. ToBenjamin, in 1940, the future had never lookedbleaker with capitalism-become-fascism in ajoint pact with socialism-become-Stalinism tooverrun the world. Today, at the dawn of the 21stcentury, although communism has dissolvedand fascism is a haunting memory, the debriscontinues to grow skyward. Unfettered capi-talism fuels market tyrannies and untoldinequities on a global scale, while resurgentdemocracy too often becomes a thin veil for

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FFoorr PPuubblliicc SSoocciioollooggyy

Michael BurawoyUniversity 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 ([email protected]). Innumerable people, impossible toacknowledge by name, have contributed to this proj-ect. However, the author would like to thank SallyHillsman, Bobbie Spalter-Roth and Carla Howery inthe American Sociological Association office, all ofwhom helped in many ways, not least in providingfacts and figures, and organizing speaking engage-ments. For their comments on a draft of this paperthanks to Barbara Risman, Don Tomaskovic-Devey,and their students, as well as to Chas Camic andJerry Jacobs. The live version of this address can beobtained on DVD from the American SociologicalAssociation.

powerful interests, disenfranchisement, men-dacity, and even violence. Once again the angelof history is swept up in a storm, a terroriststorm blowing from Paradise.

In its beginning sociology aspired to be suchan angel of history, searching for order in thebroken fragments of modernity, seeking to sal-vage the promise of progress. Thus, Karl Marxrecovered socialism from alienation; EmileDurkheim redeemed organic solidarity fromanomie and egoism. Max Weber, despite pre-monitions of “a polar night of icy darkness,”could discover freedom in rationalization, andextract meaning from disenchantment. On thisside of the Atlantic W. E. B. Du Bois pioneeredpan-Africanism in reaction to racism and impe-rialism, while Jane Addams tried to snatch peaceand internationalism from the jaws of war. Butthen the storm of progress got caught in soci-ology’s wings. If our predecessors set out tochange the world we have too often ended upconserving it. Fighting for a place in the aca-demic sun, sociology developed its own spe-cialized knowledge, whether in the form of thebrilliant and lucid erudition of Robert Merton(1949), the arcane and grand design of TalcottParsons (1937, 1951), or the early statisticaltreatment of mobility and stratification, culmi-nating in the work of Peter Blau and Otis DudleyDuncan (1967). Reviewing the 1950s, SeymourMartin Lipset and Neil Smelser (1961:1–8)could triumphantly declare sociology’s moralprehistory finally over and the path to sciencefully open. Not for the first time Comteanvisions had gripped sociology’s professionalelite. As before this burst of “pure science” wasshort lived. A few years later, campuses—espe-cially those where sociology was strong—wereignited by political protest for free speech, civilrights, and peace, indicting consensus sociolo-gy and its uncritical embrace of science. Theangel of history had once again fluttered in thestorm.

The dialectic of progress governs our indi-vidual careers as well as our collective disci-pline. The original passion for social justice,economic equality, human rights, sustainableenvironment, political freedom or simply a bet-ter world, that drew so many of us to sociolo-gy, is channeled into the pursuit of academiccredentials. Progress becomes a battery of dis-ciplinary techniques—standardized courses,validated reading lists, bureaucratic rankings,

intensive examinations, literature reviews, tai-lored dissertations, refereed publications, theall-mighty CV, the job search, the tenure file,and then policing one’s colleagues and succes-sors to make sure we all march in step. Still,despite the normalizing pressures of careers,the originating moral impetus is rarely van-quished, the sociological spirit cannot be extin-guished so easily.

Constrictions notwithstanding, discipline—in both the individual and collective senses ofthe word—has born its fruits. We have spent acentury building professional knowledge, trans-lating common sense into science, so that now,we are more than ready to embark on a sys-tematic back-translation, taking knowledge backto those from whom it came, making publicissues out of private troubles, and thus regen-erating sociology’s moral fiber. Herein lies thepromise and challenge of public sociology, thecomplement and not the negation of profes-sional sociology.

To understand the production of public soci-ology, its possibilities and its dangers, its poten-tialities and its contradictions, its successes andfailures, during the last 18 months I have dis-cussed and debated public sociology in over 40venues, from community colleges to state asso-ciations to elite departments across the UnitedStates—as well as in England, Canada, Norway,Taiwan, Lebanon, and South Africa. The call forpublic sociology resonated with audiences wher-ever I went. Debates resulted in a series of sym-posia on public sociology, including ones inSocial Problems (February, 2004), Social Forces(June, 2004), and Critical Sociology (Summer,2005). Footnotes, the newsletter of the AmericanSociological Association (ASA), developed aspecial column on public sociology, the resultsof which are brought together in An Invitationto Public Sociology (American SociologicalAssociation 2004). Departments have organ-ized awards and blogs on pubic sociology, theASA has unveiled its own site for public soci-ology, and introductory textbooks have taken upthe theme of public sociology. Sociologists haveappeared more regularly in the opinion pages ofour national newspapers. The 2004 ASA annu-al meetings, devoted to the theme of publicsociologies, broke all records for attendanceand participation and did so by a considerablemargin. These dark times have aroused the angelof history from his slumbers.

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I offer 11 theses. They begin with the reasonsfor the appeal of public sociologies today, turn-ing to their multiplicity and their relation to thediscipline as a whole—the discipline beingunderstood both as a division of labor and as afield of power. I examine the matrix of profes-sional, policy, public, and critical sociologies asit varies historically and among countries, com-paring sociology with other disciplines, beforefinally turning to what makes sociology so spe-cial, not just as a science but as a moral andpolitical force.

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The aspiration for public sociology is strongerand its realization ever more difficult, as soci-ology has moved left and the world has movedright.

To what shall we attribute the current appeal ofpublic sociology? To be sure, it reminds somany of why they became sociologists, but pub-lic sociology has been around for some time, sowhy might it suddenly take off?

Over the last half century the political cen-ter of gravity of sociology has moved in a crit-ical direction while the world it studies hasmoved in the opposite direction. Thus, in 1968,members of the ASA were asked to vote on amember resolution against the Vietnam War.Of those who voted, two-thirds opposed theASA taking a position, while in a separate opin-ion question, 54% expressed their individualopposition to the war (Rhoades 1981:60)—roughly the same proportion as in the generalpopulation at the time. In 2003, 35 years later,a similar member resolution against the war inIraq was put to the ASA membership and two-thirds favored the resolution (FootnotesJuly–August 2003). Even more significant, inthe corresponding opinion poll, 75% of thosewho voted said they were against the war, at atime (late May, 2003) that 75% of the generalpopulation supported the war.1

Given the leftward drift of the 1960s this isan unexpected finding. Despite the turbulenceof the 1968 Annual Meeting in Boston, whichincluded Martin Nicolaus’s famous and fearless

attack on “fat-cat sociology,” and forthrightdemands from the Caucus of Black Sociologists,the Radical Caucus, and the Caucus of WomenSociologists, oppositional voices were still in aminority. The majority of members had grownup in and imbibed the liberal conservatism ofthe earlier postwar sociology. Over time, how-ever, the radicalism of the 1960s diffusedthrough the profession, albeit in diluted form.The increasing presence and participation ofwomen and racial minorities, the ascent of the1960s generation to leadership positions indepartments and our association, marked a crit-ical drift that is echoed in the content of soci-ology.2

Thus, political sociology turned from thevirtues of American electoral democracy tostudying the state and its relation to classes,social movements as political process, and thedeepening of democratic participation.Sociology of work turned from processes ofadaptation to the study of domination and labormovements. Stratification shifted from the studyof social mobility within a hierarchy of occu-pational prestige to the examination of chang-ing structures of social and economicinequality—class, race, and gender. The soci-ology of development abandoned modernizationtheory for underdevelopment theory, world sys-tems’ analyses, and state orchestrated growth.Race theory moved from theories of assimila-tion to political economy to the study of racialformations. Social theory introduced more rad-ical interpretations of Weber and Durkheim,and incorporated Marx into the canon. If fem-inism was not quite let into the canon, it cer-tainly had a dramatic impact on most substantivefields of sociology. Globalization is wreakinghavoc with sociology’s basic unit of analysis—the nation-state—while compelling deparochiali-zation of our discipline. There have, of course,

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1 Data for public support of the Vietnam War comefrom Mueller (1973: Table 3.3), while data for pub-lic support of Iraq War come from Gallup Polls.

2 In 1968, the 19 elected members of the ASACouncil were white and male, except for one woman,Mirra Komarovsky. In 2004, the 20 member Councilwas exactly 50% female and 50% minority. As to thebroad profession, between 1966 and 1969, 18.6% ofsociology PhDs were earned by women, whereas thefigure was 58.4% in 2001. Figures for racial break-down begin later. In 1980, 14.4% of sociology PhDswere earned by minorities, whereas in 2001 the fig-ure was 25.6%.

been counter-movements—for example, theascendancy of assimilation studies in immi-gration or the neoinstitutionalists who docu-ment the worldwide diffusion of Americaninstitutions—but over the last half century theoverwhelming movement has been in a criticaldirection.

If the succession of political generations andthe changing content of sociology is one arm ofthe scissors, the other arm, moving in the oppo-site direction, is the world we study. Even as therhetoric of equality and freedom intensifies sosociologists have documented ever-deepeninginequality and domination. Over the last 25years earlier gains in economic security andcivil rights have been reversed by market expan-sion (with their attendant inequalities) and coer-cive states, violating rights at home and abroad.All too often, market and state have collaboratedagainst humanity in what has commonly cometo be known as neoliberalism. To be sure, soci-ologists have become more sensitive, morefocused on the negative, but the evidence theyhave accumulated does suggest regression in somany arenas. And, of course, as I write, we aregoverned by a regime that is deeply antisocio-logical in its ethos, hostile to the very idea of“society.”

In our own backyard, the university has suf-fered mounting attacks from the NationalAssociation of Scholars for harboring too manyliberals. At the same time, facing decliningbudgets, and under intensified competition,public universities have responded with marketsolutions—joint ventures with private corpora-tions, advertising campaigns to attract students,fawning over private donors, commodifyingeducation through distance learning, employingcheap temporary professional labor, not to men-tion the armies of low-paid service workers(Kirp 2003; Bok 2003). Is the market solutionthe only solution? Do we have to abandon thevery idea of the university as a “public” good?The interest in a public sociology is, in part, areaction and a response to the privatization ofeverything. Its vitality depends on the resusci-tation of the very idea of “public,” another casu-alty of the storm of progress. Hence the paradox:the widening gap between the sociological ethosand the world we study inspires the demandand, simultaneously, creates the obstacles topublic sociology. How should we proceed?

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There are multiple public sociologies, reflectingdifferent types of publics and multiple ways ofaccessing them. Traditional and organic publicsociologies are two polar but complementarytypes. Publics can be destroyed but they can alsobe created. Some never disappear—our stu-dents are our first and captive public.

What should we mean by public sociology?Public sociology brings sociology into a con-versation with publics, understood as peoplewho are themselves involved in conversation. Itentails, therefore, a double conversation.Obvious candidates are W. E. B. Du Bois (1903),The Souls of Black Folk, Gunnar Myrdal (1994),An American Dilemma, David Riesman (1950),The Lonely Crowd, and Robert Bellah et al.(1985), Habits of the Heart. What do all thesebooks have in common? They are written bysociologists, they are read beyond the academy,and they become the vehicle of a public dis-cussion about the nature of U.S. society—thenature of its values, the gap between its prom-ise and its reality, its malaise, its tendencies. Inthe same genre of what I call traditional publicsociology we can locate sociologists who writein the opinion pages of our national newspaperswhere they comment on matters of publicimportance. Alternatively, journalists may carryacademic research into the public realm, as theydid with, for example, Chris Uggen and JeffManza’s (2002) article in the AmericanSociological Review on the political signifi-cance of felon disenfranchisement and DevahPager’s (2002) dissertation on the way raceswamps the effects of criminal record on theemployment prospects of youth. With tradi-tional public sociology the publics beingaddressed are generally invisible in that theycannot be seen, thin in that they do not gener-ate much internal interaction, passive in thatthey do not constitute a movement or organi-zation, and they are usually mainstream. Thetraditional public sociologist instigates debateswithin or between publics, although he or shemight not actually participate in them.

There is, however, another type of publicsociology—organic public sociology in whichthe sociologist works in close connection witha visible, thick, active, local and often counter-public. The bulk of public sociology is indeedof an organic kind—sociologists working with



a labor movement, neighborhood associations,communities of faith, immigrant rights groups,human rights organizations. Between the organ-ic public sociologist and a public is a dialogue,a process of mutual education. The recognitionof public sociology must extend to the organickind which often remains invisible, private, andis often considered to be apart from our pro-fessional lives. The project of such public soci-ologies is to make visible the invisible, to makethe private public, to validate these organic con-nections as part of our sociological life.

Traditional and organic public sociologiesare not antithetical but complementary. Eachinforms the other. The broadest debates in soci-ety, for example about family values, can informand be informed by our work with welfareclients. Debates about NAFTA can shape thesociologist’s collaboration with a trade unionlocal; working with prisoners to defend theirrights can draw on public debates about thecarceral complex. Berkeley graduate students,Gretchen Purser, Amy Schalet, and OferSharone (2004), studied the plight of low-paidservice workers on campus, bringing them outof the shadows, and constituting them as a pub-lic to which the university should be account-able. The report drew on wider debates about theworking poor, immigrant workers and the pri-vatization and corporatization of the universi-ty, while feeding public discussion about theacademy as a principled community. In the bestcircumstances traditional public sociologyframes organic public sociology, while the lat-ter disciplines, grounds, and directs the former.

We can distinguish between different types ofpublic sociologist and speak of different publicsbut how are the two sides—the academic and theextra-academic—brought into dialogue? Whyshould anyone listen to us rather than the othermessages streaming through the media? Arewe too critical to capture the attention of ourpublics? Alan Wolfe (1989), Robert Putnam(2001), and Theda Skocpol (2003), go furtherand warn that publics are disappearing—destroyed by the market, colonized by the mediaor stymied by bureaucracy. The very existenceof a vast swath of public sociology, however,does suggest there is no shortage of publics ifwe but care to seek them out. But we do have alot to learn about engaging them. We are still ata primitive stage in our project. We should notthink of publics as fixed but in flux and that we

can participate in their creation as well as theirtransformation. Indeed, part of our business associologists is to define human categories—people with AIDS, women with breast cancer,women, gays—and if we do so with their col-laboration we create publics. The categorywoman became the basis of a public —an active,thick, visible, national nay international counter-public—because intellectuals, sociologistsamong them, defined women as marginalized,left out, oppressed, and silenced, that is, definedthem in ways they recognized. From this briefexcursion through the variety of publics it isclear that public sociology needs to develop asociology of publics—working through andbeyond a lineage that would include RobertPark (1972[1904]), Walter Lippmann (1922),John Dewey (1927), Hanna Arendt (1958),Jürgen Habermas (1991 [1962]), RichardSennett (1977), Nancy Fraser (1997), andMichael Warner (2002)—to better appreciate thepossibilities and pitfalls of public sociology.

Beyond creating other publics we can con-stitute ourselves as a public that acts in thepolitical arena. As Durkheim famously insist-ed professional associations should be an inte-gral element of national political life—and notjust to defend their own narrow professionalinterests. So the American SociologicalAssociation has much to contribute to publicdebate as indeed it has, when it submitted anAmicus Curiae brief to the Supreme Court in theMichigan Affirmative Action case, when itdeclared that sociological research demonstratedthe existence of racism and that racism has bothsocial causes and consequences, when its mem-bers adopted resolutions against the War in Iraqand against a constitutional amendment thatwould outlaw same-sex marriage, or when theASA Council protested the imprisonment ofthe Egyptian sociologist, Saad Ibrahim.Speaking on behalf of all sociologists is diffi-cult and dangerous. We should be sure to arriveat public positions through open dialogue,through free and equal participation of ourmembership, through deepening our internaldemocracy. The multiplicity of public sociolo-gies reflects not only different publics but dif-ferent value commitments on the part ofsociologists. Public sociology has no intrinsicnormative valence, other than the commitmentto dialogue around issues raised in and by soci-ology. It can as well support Christian



Fundamentalism as it can Liberation Sociologyor Communitarianism. If sociology actuallysupports more liberal or critical public soci-ologies that is a consequence of the evolvingethos of the sociological community.

There is one public that will not disappearbefore we do—our students. Every year we cre-ate approximately 25,000 new BAs, who havemajored in sociology. What does it mean tothink of them as a potential public? It surely doesnot mean we should treat them as empty vesselsinto which we pour our mature wine, nor blankslates upon which we inscribe our profoundknowledge. Rather we must think of them ascarriers of a rich lived experience that we elab-orate into a deeper self-understanding of thehistorical and social contexts that have madethem who they are. With the aid of our grand tra-ditions of sociology, we turn their private trou-bles into public issues. We do this by engagingtheir lives not suspending them; starting fromwhere they are, not from where we are.Education becomes a series of dialogues on theterrain of sociology that we foster —a dialoguebetween ourselves and students, between stu-dents and their own experiences, among studentsthemselves, and finally a dialogue of studentswith publics beyond the university. Servicelearning is the prototype: as they learn studentsbecome ambassadors of sociology to the widerworld just as they bring back to the classroomtheir engagement with diverse publics.3 Asteachers we are all potentially public sociolo-gists.

It is one thing to validate and legitimate pub-lic sociology by recognizing its existence, bring-ing it out from the private sphere into the openwhere it can be examined and dissected, it isanother thing to make it an integral part of ourdiscipline, which brings me to Thesis III.

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Public sociology is part of a broader divisionof sociological labor that also includes policy

sociology, professional sociology and criticalsociology.

Champion of traditional public sociology,C. Wright Mills (1959), and many others sincehim, would turn all sociology into public soci-ology. Mills harks back to the late 19th centu-ry forefathers, for whom scholarly and moralenterprises were indistinguishable. There is noturning back, however, to that earlier periodbefore the academic revolution. Instead we haveto move forward and work from where we real-ly are, from the division of sociological labor.

The first step is to distinguish public sociol-ogy from policy sociology. Policy sociology issociology in the service of a goal defined by aclient. Policy sociology’s raison d’etre is to pro-vide solutions to problems that are presented tous, or to legitimate solutions that have alreadybeen reached. Some clients specify the task ofthe sociologist with a narrow contract whereasother clients are more like patrons definingbroad policy agendas. Being an expert witness,for example, an important service to the com-munity, is a relatively well-defined relation witha client whereas funding from the StateDepartment to investigate the causes of terror-ism or poverty might offer a much more openresearch agenda.

Public sociology, by contrast, strikes up adialogic relation between sociologist and pub-lic in which the agenda of each is brought to thetable, in which each adjusts to the other. In pub-lic sociology, discussion often involves valuesor goals that are not automatically shared byboth sides so that reciprocity, or as Habermas(1984) calls it “communicative action,” is oftenhard to sustain. Still, it is the goal of publicsociology to develop such a conversation.

Barbara Ehrenreich’s (2002) best-sellingNickel and Dimed—an ethnography of low-wage work that indicted, among others, Wal-Mart’s employment practices is an example ofpublic sociology, whereas William Bielby’s(2003) expert testimony in the sexual discrim-ination suite against the same company wouldbe a case of policy sociology. The approachesof public and policy sociology are neither mutu-ally exclusive nor even antagonistic. As in thiscase they are often complementary. Policy soci-ology can turn into public sociology, especial-ly when the policy fails as in the case of JamesColeman’s (1966, 1975) busing proposals orwhen the government refuses to support policy



3 There is a vast literature on service learning.Two volumes of special relevance to sociology areOstrow et al. (1999) and Marullo and Edwards(2000).

proposals such as William Julius Wilson’s(1996) recommendation to create jobs in orderto alleviate racialized poverty, or Paul Starr’sinvolvement in abortive healthcare reforms ofthe Clinton administration. Equally, public soci-ology can often turn into policy sociology. DianeVaughan’s (2004) widely reported engagementwith the media over the Columbia Shuttle dis-aster, based on her earlier research into theChallenger disaster, paved the way for her ideasto be taken up in the report of the ColumbiaAccident Investigation Board (2003) and, inparticular, its indictment of the organizationalculture of the National Aeronautical and SpaceAdministration (NASA).

There can be neither policy nor public soci-ology without a professional sociology that sup-plies true and tested methods, accumulatedbodies of knowledge, orienting questions, andconceptual frameworks. Professional sociologyis not the enemy of policy and public sociolo-gy but the sine qua non of their existence—pro-viding both legitimacy and expertise for policyand public sociology. Professional sociologyconsists first and foremost of multiple inter-secting research programs, each with theirassumptions, exemplars, defining questions,conceptual apparatuses, and evolving theories.4

Most subfields contain well established researchprograms, such as organization theory, stratifi-cation, political sociology, sociology of culture,sociology of the family, race, economic sociol-ogy, etc. There are often research programswithin subfields, such as organizational ecolo-gy within organization theory. Research pro-grams advance by tackling their def iningpuzzles that come either from external anom-alies (inconsistencies between predictions andempirical findings) or from internal contradic-tions. Thus, the research program on socialmovements was established by displacing the“irrationalist” and psychological theories ofcollective behavior, and building a new frame-work around the idea of resource mobilizationwhich in turn led to the formulation of a polit-ical process model, framing and most recentlythe attempt to incorporate emotions. Within

each research program, exemplary studies solveone set of puzzles and at the same time createnew ones, turning the research program in newdirections. Research programs degenerate asthey become swamped by anomalies and con-tradictions, or when attempts to absorb puzzlesbecome more a face saving device than a gen-uine theoretical innovation. Goodwin and Jasper(2004, chap. 1) argue that such has been the fateof the social movement theory as it has becomeoverly general and ingrown.

It is the role of critical sociology, my fourthtype of sociology, to examine the foundations—both the explicit and the implicit, both norma-tive and descriptive—of the research programsof professional sociology. We think here of thework of Robert Lynd (1939) who complainedthat social science was abdicating its responsi-bility to confront the pressing cultural and insti-tutional problems of the time by obsessing abouttechnique and specialization. C. Wright Mills(1959) indicted professional sociology of the1950s for its irrelevance, veering towardabstruse “grand theory” or meaningless“abstracted empiricism” that divorced data fromcontext. Alvin Gouldner (1970) took structur-al functionalism to task for its domain assump-tions about a consensus society that were out oftune with the escalating conflicts of the 1960s.Feminism, queer theory and critical race theo-ry have hauled professional sociology over thecoals for overlooking the ubiquity and profun-dity of gender, sexual, and racial oppressions.In each case critical sociology attempts to makeprofessional sociology aware of its biases,silences, promoting new research programs builton alternative foundations. Critical sociology isthe conscience of professional sociology just aspublic sociology is the conscience of policysociology.

Critical sociology also gives us the two ques-tions that place our four sociologies in relationto each other. The first question is one posed byAlfred McLung Lee (1976) in his PresidentialAddress, “Sociology for Whom?” Are we justtalking to ourselves (an academic audience) orare we also addressing others (an extra-aca-demic audience). To pose this question is toanswer it, since few would argue for a hermet-ically sealed discipline, or defend pursuingknowledge simply for knowledge’s sake. Todefend engaging extra-academic audiences,whether serving clients or talking to publics, is



4 In the formulation of the idea of research pro-grams I have been very influenced by Imre Lakatos(1978) and his debates with Thomas Kuhn, KarlPopper, and others.

not to deny the dangers and risks that go withit, but to say that it is necessary despite or evenbecause of those dangers and risks.

The second question is Lynd’s question:“Sociology for What?” Should we be concernedwith the ends of society or only with the meansto reach those ends. This is the distinction under-lying Max Weber’s discussion of technical andvalue rationality. Weber, and following him theFrankfurt School were concerned that technicalrationality was supplanting value discussion,what Horkheimer (1974 [1947]) referred to asthe eclipse of reason or what he and his collab-orator Theodor Adorno (1969 [1944]) calledthe dialectic of enlightenment. I call the one typeof knowledge instrumental knowledge, whetherit be the puzzle solving of professional sociol-ogy or the problem solving of policy sociology.I call the other reflexive knowledge because itis concerned with a dialogue about ends,whether the dialogue takes place within the aca-demic community about the foundations of itsresearch programs or between academics andvarious publics about the direction of society.Reflexive knowledge interrogates the valuepremises of society as well as our profession.The overall scheme is summarized in Table 1.5

In practice, any given piece of sociology canstraddle these ideal types or move across themover time. For example, already I have noted thatthe distinction between public and policy soci-ology can often blur—sociology can simulta-neously serve a client and generate publicdebate.

Categories are social products. This catego-rization of sociological labor, redefines the waywe regard ourselves. I’m engaging in whatPierre Bourdieu (1986 [1979], 1988 [1984])would call a classification struggle, displacingdebates about quantitative and qualitative tech-niques, positivist and interpretive methodolo-gies, micro and macro sociology by centeringtwo questions: for whom and for what do wepursue sociology? The remaining theses attemptto justify and expand this classification sys-tem.

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The questions—“knowledge for whom?” and“knowledge for what?”—define the funda-mental character of our discipline. They notonly divide sociology into four different types,but allow us to understand how each type isinternally constructed.

Our four types of knowledge represent not onlya functional differentiation of sociology butalso four distinct perspectives on sociology. Thedivision of sociological labor looks very dif-ferent from the standpoint of critical sociologyas compared, for example, with the view frompolicy sociology! Indeed, critical sociologylargely defines itself by its opposition to pro-fessional (“mainstream”) sociology, itselfviewed as inseparable from renegade policysociology. Policy sociology pays back in kind,attacking critical sociology for politicizing andthereby discrediting the discipline. Thus, fromwithin each category we tend to essentialize,homogenize and stereotype the others. We mustendeavor, therefore, to recognize the complex-ity of all four types of sociology. We can best



Table 1. Division of Sociological Labor

Academic Audience Extra-academic Audience

Instrumental Knowledge Professional PolicyReflexive Knowledge Critical Public

5 This scheme bears an uncanny resemblance toTalcott Parsons’s (1961) famous four functions—adaptation, goal attainment, integration, and latency(pattern maintenance) (AGIL)— that any system hasto fulfill to survive. If critical sociology correspondsto the latency function based on value commitments,and public sociology corresponds to integration,where influence is the medium of exchange, thenpolicy sociology corresponds to goal attainment, andprofessional sociology with its economy of creden-tials corresponds to adaptation. Habermas (1984,chap. 7) gives Parsons a critical twist by referring tothe colonization of the life-world (latency and inte-gration) by the system (adaptation and goal attain-ment). As we shall see Thesis VII combinesHabermas’s colonization thesis with Bourdieu’s (1988[1984]) field analysis of the academic world.

do this by once again posing our two basic ques-tions: knowledge for whom and knowledge forwhat? This results in an internal differentiationof each type of sociology, and, therefore, a morenuanced picture. We also learn about the ten-sions within each type driving it in this direc-tion or that.

Let us begin with professional sociology. Atits core is the creation, elaboration, degenera-tion of multiple research programs. But there isalso a policy dimension of professional sociol-ogy that defends sociological research in thewider world—defense of funds for politicallycontested research, such as the study of sexualbehavior; the determination of human subjectsprotocols; the pursuit of government support,say, for minority fellowship programs, etc. Thispolicy dimension of professional sociology isconcentrated in the office of the AmericanSociological Association, and represented inthe pages of its newsletter Footnotes. Then thereis the public face of professional sociology, pre-senting research findings in an accessible man-ner for a lay audience. This was the avowedpurpose of the new magazine, Contexts, but asimilar function is performed by the regularCongressional Briefings organized by the ASAoffice. Here, also, we find the plethora of teach-ers who disseminate the findings of sociologi-cal research and, of course, the writing oftextbooks. It is a delicate line that separates thispublic face of professional sociology from pub-lic sociology itself, but the former is more inti-mately concerned with securing the conditionsfor our core professional activities.

Finally, there is the critical face of profes-sional sociology—debates within and betweenresearch programs such as those over the rela-tive importance of class and race, over the effectsof globalization, over patterns of overwork, overthe class bases of electoral politics, over the

sources of underdevelopment, and so forth.Such critical debates are the subject of the arti-cles in The Annual Review of Sociology, andthey inject the necessary dynamism into ourresearch programs. The four divisions of pro-fessional sociology are represented in Table 2.

Because of its size, we can discern a func-tional differentiation, or as Abbott (2001) mightcall it “fractalization,” of professional sociolo-gy, but the other types of sociology are lessinternally developed so that it is better to talkof their different aspects or dimensions. Thus,the core activity of public sociology—the dia-logue between sociologists and their publics—is supported (or not) by professional, critical andpolicy moments. Take, for example, BostonCollege’s Media Research and Action Projectthat brings sociologists together with commu-nity organizers to discover how best to presentsocial issues to the media. There is a profes-sional moment to this project based on WilliamGamson’s idea of framing, a critical momentbased on the limited ways in which the mediaoperate, and a policy moment that grapples withthe concrete aims of community organizers.Charlotte Ryan (2004) describes the tensionswithin the project that stem from the contra-dictory demands between the immediacy ofpublic sociology and the career rhythms of pro-fessional sociology, while Gamson (2004)underlines the university’s limited economiccommitment to a project to empower localcommunities.

Policy sociology also has its professional,critical and public moments. Here an interest-ing case is Judy Stacey’s (2004) experience asan expert witness defending same-sex marriagein Ontario Canada. The legal opponents ofsame-sex marriage drew on her widely readarticle published in the American SociologicalReview (Stacey and Biblarz 2001). The authors



Table 2. Dissecting Professional Sociology

Professional

Research conducted within research programs thatdefine assumptions, theories, concepts, questions,and puzzles.

CriticalCritical debates of the discipline within and between

research programs

Policy

Defense of sociological research, human subjects, fund-ing, congressional briefings

PublicConcern for the public image of sociology, presenting

findings in an accessible manner, teaching basics ofsociology and writing text books

argued that while studies show some slight dif-ferences in the effects of gay parenting on chil-dren—that they were more open to sexualdiversity—there was no evidence that the effectswere in any way “harmful.” Opponents of same-sex marriage argued that Stacey and Biblarzhad drawn on studies so scientifically weak thatno such conclusions could be drawn. JudyStacey, therefore, found herself in the unaccus-tomed position of defending the scientific rigorof her conclusions. Moreover, her defense of gaycivil liberties entailed the defense of marriage—an institution she had subjected to intense crit-icism in her scholarly writings. In this case, wesee how constraining policy sociology can beand how its dependence upon professional soci-ology can pit it against critical and public soci-ologies. The four faces of any given type ofsociology may not be in harmony with eachother.

We can see this again in critical sociology. Inher classic article, “A Sociology for Women,”Dorothy Smith (1987, chap. 2) took sociologyto task for its universalization of the male stand-point, especially the standpoint of ruling menwho command the macro-structures of society.Drawing on the canonical writings of AlfredSchutz, she elaborates the standpoint of womenas rooted in the micro-structures of everydaylife—the invisible labor that supports the macrostructures. Patricia Hill Collins (1991) furtherdeveloped standpoint analysis by insisting thatinsight into society comes from those who aremultiply oppressed—poor black women—butshe too drew on conventional social theory, inher case not Schutz but George Simmel andRobert Merton, to elaborate the critique of pro-fessional sociology. Moreover, for her there wasa public moment too—the connection of blackfemale intellectuals to the culture of poor blackwomen was necessary to bring greater univer-sality to professional sociology. Thus, we see theprofessional and public moments of criticalsociology but what of its policy moment? Couldone argue that here lies the realpolitik of defend-ing spaces for critical thought within the uni-versity, spaces that would includeinterdisciplinary programs, institutes, and thestruggle for representation?

These are just a few examples to illustrate thecomplexity of each type of sociology, recog-nizing their academic and an extra-academic aswell as their instrumental and reflexive dimen-

sions. We should not forget this complex inter-nal composition as we refocus on the relationsamong the four major types.

TTHHEESSIISS VV:: LLOOCCAATTIINNGG TTHHEE SSOOCCIIOOLLOOGGIISSTT

A distinction must be made between sociologyand its internal divisions on the one side andsociologists and their trajectories on the other.The life of the sociologist is propelled by the mis-match of her or his sociological habitus and thestructure of the disciplinary field as a whole.

We should distinguish between the division ofsociological labor and the sociologists whoinhabit one or more places within it. About 30%of PhDs are employed outside the university, pri-marily in the world of policy research fromwhere they may venture into the public realm(Kang 2003). The 70% of PhDs, who teach inuniversities, occupy the professional quadrant,conducting research or disseminating its results,but they may hold positions in other quadrantstoo, at least if they have tenure track positions.By contrast, the army of contingent workers—adjuncts, temporary lecturers, part time instruc-tors—are stuck in a single place, paid a pittance($2,000 to $4,000 a course) for their often ded-icated teaching, with insecure employment andusually without benefits (Spalter-Roth andErskine 2004). They are more prevalent in thehigh prestige universities where they can amountto 40% of employees teaching up to 40% ofcourses. These are the underlaborers who sub-sidize the research and the salaries of the per-manent faculty, releasing them for otheractivities.

Thus, many of our most distinguished soci-ologists have occupied multiple locations. JamesColeman, for example, simultaneously workedin both professional and policy worlds whilebeing hostile to critical and public sociologies.Christopher Jencks, who has worked in similarpolicy fields, is unusual in combining criticaland public moments with professional and pol-icy commitments. Arlie Hochschild’s sociolo-gy of emotions is strung out betweenprofessional and critical sociology whereas herresearch on work and family combines publicand policy sociology. Of course, these sociolo-gists have or had comfortable positions in topranked sociology departments where conditionsof work permit multiple-locations. Most of us



only occupy one quadrant at a time. So weshould also focus on careers.

Sociologists are not only simultaneouslylocated in different positions, but assume tra-jectories through time among our four types ofsociology. Before the consolidation of profes-sional careers, movement among the quadrantswas more erratic. Increasingly disaffected withthe academy and marginalized within it by hisrace, after completing The Philadelphia Negroin 1899, and after setting up and running theAtlanta Sociological Laboratory at theUniversity of Atlanta between 1897 and 1910,W. E. B. Du Bois left academia to found theNational Association for the Advancement ofColored People (NAACP) and become editor ofits magazine, Crisis. In this public role he wroteall sorts of popular essays, inevitably influencedby his sociology. In 1934 he returned to theacademy to chair the sociology department atAtlanta, where he finished another classicmonograph, Black Reconstruction, only todepart once again, after World War Two, fornational and international public venues. Hisrelentless campaigns for racial justice were theacme of public sociology, although, of course,his ultimate aim was always to change policy.Public sociology is often an avenue for the mar-ginalized, locked out of the policy arena andostracized in the academy.

While W. E. B. Du Bois was taking the routeout of the academy, his nemesis, another majorfigure in the sociology of race, Robert Park, wastraveling in the opposite direction.6 After yearsas a journalist, which included radical exposésof Belgium’s atrocities in the Congo, he becameBooker T. Washington’s private secretary andresearch analyst, before entering, and then shap-ing and professionalizing the department ofsociology at the University of Chicago (Lyman1992).

C. Wright Mills was of a later generation, butlike Du Bois he became increasingly disaffect-ed with the academy. After completing his

undergraduate degree in philosophy at theUniversity of Texas he went to Wisconsin towork with the German émigré Hans Gerth.There he wrote his dissertation on pragmatism.Robert Merton and Paul Lazarsfeld recruitedhim to Columbia University because he showedsuch promise as a professional sociologist.Unable to tolerate the “illiberal practicality” ofLazarsfeld’s Bureau of Applied Research heturned from instrumental sociology to a publicsociology—New Men of Power, White Collarand Power Elite. At the end of his short life hewould return to the promise and betrayal ofsociology in his inspirational The SociologicalImagination. This turn to critical sociology coin-cided with a move beyond sociology into therealm of the public intellectual with Listen,Yankee! and The Causes of World War Three—books that were only distantly connected tosociology.7

Today careers in sociology are more heavilyregimented than they were in Mills’s time. A typ-ical graduate student, perhaps inspired by anundergraduate teacher or burnt out from a drain-ing social movement—enters graduate schoolwith a critical disposition, wanting to learnmore about the possibilities of social change,whether this be limiting the spread of AIDS inAfrica, the deflection of youth violence, theconditions of success of feminist movements inTurkey and Iran, family as a source of morali-ty, variation in support for capital punishment,public misconstrual of Islam, etc. There sheconfronts a succession of required courses, eachwith its own abstruse texts to be mastered orabstract techniques to be acquired. After threeor four years she is ready to take the qualifyingor preliminary examinations in three or fourareas, whereupon she embarks on her disserta-tion. The whole process can take anything from5 years up. It is as if graduate school is organ-ized to winnow away at the moral commitmentsthat inspired the interest in sociology in thefirst place.

Just as Durkheim stressed the non-contractualelements of contract—the underlying consensus



6 Thanks to Stephen Steinberg for pointing outthis coincidence. Although he played a major role inprofessionalizing sociology, Park did not give upsocial reform, and this despite his endorsement ofdetached social science and his proclaimed opposi-tion to the action sociology of the women of HullHouse.

7 The distinction between “public sociologist” and“public intellectual” is important—the former is aspecialist variety of the latter, limiting public com-mentary to areas of established expertise rather thanexpounding on topics of broad interest (Gans 2002).

and trust without which contracts would beimpossible—so equally we must appreciate theimportance of the non-careerist underpinningsof careers. Many of the 50% to 70% of gradu-ate students who survive to receive their PhD,sustain their original commitment by doingpublic sociology on the side—often hidden fromtheir supervisor. How often have I heard facul-ty advise their students to leave public sociol-ogy until after tenure—not realizing (or realizingall too well?) that public sociology is what keepssociological passion alive. If they follow theiradvisor’s advice, they may end up a contingentworker in which case there will be even less timefor public sociology, or they may be luckyenough to find a tenure track job, in which casethey have to worry about publishing articles inaccredited journals or publishing books withrecognized university presses. Once they havetenure, they are free to indulge their youthfulpassions, but by then they are no longer youth-ful. They may have lost all interest in public soci-ology, preferring the more lucrative policy worldof consultants or a niche in professional soci-ology. Better to indulge the commitment to pub-lic sociology from the beginning, and that wayignite the torch of professional sociology.

The differentiation of sociological labor withits attendant specialization can create anxiety forthe sociological habitus that hankers after aunity of reflexive and instrumental knowledge,or a habitus that desires both academic andextra-academic audiences. The tension betweeninstitution and habitus drives sociologists rest-lessly from quadrant to quadrant, where theymay settle for ritualistic accommodation beforemoving on, or abandon the discipline altogeth-er. Still, there are always those whose habitusadapts well to specialization and whose energyand passion is infectious, spills over into theother quadrants. As I shall now argue special-ization is not inimical to public sociology.

TTHHEESSIISS VVII:: TTHHEE NNOORRMMAATTIIVVEE MMOODDEELLAANNDD IITTSS PPAATTHHOOLLOOGGIIEESS

The flourishing of our discipline depends upona shared ethos, underpinning the reciprocalinterdependence of professional, policy, publicand critical sociologies. In being over-respon-sive to their different audiences, however, eachtype of sociology can assume pathologicalforms, threatening the vitality of the whole.

Those who have endorsed public sociologyhave often been openly contemptuous of pro-fessional sociology. Russell Jacoby’s (1987)The Last Intellectuals began a series of com-mentaries that lament the retreat of the publicintellectual into a cocoon of professionalization.Thus, Orlando Patterson (2002) celebratesDavid Riesman as “The Last Sociologist,”because Riesman, and others of his genera-tion, tackled issues of great public significancewhereas professional sociology of today testsnarrow hypotheses, mimicking the natural sci-ences. In asking “Whatever Happened toSociology?” Peter Berger (2002) answers thatthe field has fallen victim to methodologicalfetishism and an obsession with trivial topics.But he also complains that the 1960s genera-tion has turned sociology from a science intoan ideology. He captures the cool reception ofpublic sociology among many professionalsociologists who fear public involvement willcorrupt science, threaten the legitimacy of thediscipline as well as the material resources itwill have at its disposal.

I take the opposite view—that between pro-fessional and public sociology there should be,and there often is, respect and synergy. Far frombeing incompatible the two are like Siamesetwins. Indeed, my normative vision of the dis-cipline of sociology is of reciprocal interde-pendence among our four types—an organicsolidarity in which each type of sociologyderives energy, meaning, and imagination fromits connection to the others.

As I have already insisted, at the heart of ourdiscipline is its professional component. Withouta professional sociology, there can be no poli-cy or public sociology, but nor can there be acritical sociology—for there would be nothingto criticize. Equally professional sociologydepends for its vitality upon the continual chal-lenge of public issues through the vehicle ofpublic sociology. It was the civil rights move-ment that transformed sociologists’ under-standing of politics, it was the feministmovement that gave new direction to so manyspheres of sociology. In both cases it was soci-ologists, engaged with and participated in themovements, who infused new ideas into soci-ology. Similarly, Linda Waite’s (2000) publicdefense of marriage, generated lively debatewithin our profession. Critical sociology may bea thorn in the side of professional sociology, but



it is crucial in forcing awareness of the assump-tions we make, so that from time to time we maychange those assumptions. How bold and invig-orating were Alvin Gouldner’s (1970) chal-lenges to structural functionalism, but also to theway policy sociology could become the unwit-ting agent of oppressive social control. Today wemight include within the rubric of critical soci-ology the movement for “pure sociology,” a sci-entific sociology purged of public engagement.What was professional sociology yesterday canbe critical today. Policy sociology, for its part,has reenergized the sociology of inequality withits research into poverty and education. Morerecently, medical research has married all foursociologies through collaboration with citizengroups 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, butwe should be wary of thinking that the integra-tion of our discipline is easy. Connections acrossthe four sociologies are often difficult to accom-plish because they call for profoundly differentcognitive practices, different along many dimen-sions—form of knowledge, truth, legitimacy,accountability, and politics, culminating in theirown distinctive pathology. Table 3 highlightsthese differences.

The knowledge we associate with profes-sional sociology is based on the development ofresearch programs, different from the concreteknowledge required by policy clients, differentfrom the communicative knowledge exchangedbetween sociologists and their publics, which in

turn is different from the foundational knowl-edge of critical sociology. From this followsthe notion of truth to which each adheres. In thecase of professional sociology the focus is onproducing theories that correspond to the empir-ical world, in the case of policy sociology knowl-edge has to be “practical” or “useful,” whereaswith public sociology knowledge is based onconsensus between sociologists and theirpublics, while for critical sociology truth isnothing without a normative foundation to guideit. Each type of sociology has its own legitima-tion: professional sociology justifies itself on thebasis of scientific norms, policy sociology onthe basis of its effectiveness, public sociologyon the basis of its relevance and critical sociol-ogy has to supply moral visions. Each type ofsociology also has its own accountability.Professional sociology is accountable to peerreview, policy sociology to its clients, publicsociology to a designated public, whereas crit-ical sociology is accountable to a community ofcritical intellectuals who may transcend disci-plinary boundaries. Furthermore, each type ofsociology has its own politics. Professional soci-ology defends the conditions of science, poli-cy sociology proposes policy interventions,public sociology understands politics as dem-ocratic dialogue whereas critical sociology iscommitted to opening up debate within our dis-cipline.

Finally, and most significantly, each type ofsociology suffers from its own pathology, aris-ing from its cognitive practice and its embed-dedness in divergent institutions. Those whospeak only to a narrow circle of fellow aca-



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 —ServilityReflexive 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 thepursuit of the puzzle solving, defined by ourresearch programs, professional sociology caneasily become focused on the seemingly irrel-evant.8 In our attempt to defend our place in theworld of science we do have an interest inmonopolizing inaccessible knowledge, whichcan lead to incomprehensible grandiosity ornarrow “methodism”. No less than profession-al sociology, critical sociology has its own patho-logical tendencies toward ingrownsectarianism—communities of dogma that nolonger offer any serious engagement with pro-fessional sociology or the infusion of valuesinto public sociology. On the other side, policysociology is all too easily captured by clientswho impose strict contractual obligations ontheir funding, distortions that can reverberateback into professional sociology. If marketresearch had dominated the funding of policysociology, as Mills feared it would, then wecould all be held to ransom. The migration ofsociologists into business, education and poli-cy schools may have tempered this pathologybut certainly not insulated the discipline fromsuch pressures. Public sociology, no less thanpolicy sociology, can be held hostage to outsideforces. In pursuit of popularity public sociolo-gy is tempted to pander to and flatter its publics,and thereby compromising professional andcritical commitments. There is, of course, theother danger that public sociology speak downto its publics, a sort of intellectual vanguardism.Indeed, one might detect such a pathology inC. Wright Mills’s contempt for mass society.

These pathologies are real tendencies so thatthe critical views of Jacoby, Patterson, Bergerand others with regard to professional sociolo-gy are not without foundation. These critics err,however, in reducing the pathological to thenormal. They conveniently miss the important,relevant research of professional sociology,showcased, for example, in the pages ofContexts just as they overlook the pathologiesof their own types of sociology. The profes-sionals are no less guilty of pathologizing pub-

lic sociology as “pop sociology,” while over-looking the ubiquitous and robust but, often, lessaccessible public sociology. As a community wehave too easily gone to war with each “other,”blind to the necessary interdependence of ourdivergent knowledges. We need to bind our-selves to the mast, making our professional,policy, public and critical sociologies mutuallyaccountable. In that way we would also containthe development of pathologies.Institutionalizing reciprocal interchange wouldalso require us to develop a common ethos thatrecognizes the validity of all four types of soci-ology—a commitment based on the urgency ofthe problems we study. In this best of all worlds,in this normative vision, one would not have tobe a public sociologist to contribute to publicsociology, one could do so by being a good pro-fessional, critical or policy sociologist. Theflourishing of each sociology would enhance theflourishing of all.

TTHHEESSIISS VVIIII:: TTHHEE DDIISSCCIIPPLLIINNEE AASS AAFFIIEELLDD OOFF PPOOWWEERR

In reality disciplines are fields of power in whichreciprocal interdependence becomes asymmet-rical and antagonistic. The result, at least in theUnited States, is a form of domination in whichinstrumental knowledge prevails over reflexiveknowledge.

Our angel of history, having aroused himself inthe 1970s, was swept back in another stormduring the 1980s. Sociology was in crisis—undergraduate enrollments plummeted, the jobsituation for qualified sociologists worsened,there were rumors of department closures, andintellectually the discipline seemed to lose direc-tion. From the pen of Irving Louis Horowitz(1993) came The Decomposition of Sociologycomplaining of the politicization of sociology.James Coleman (1991, 1992) devoted articlesto the dangers of political correctness and theinvasion of the academy by the social norm.Stephen Cole’s (2001) edited collection, What’sWrong with Sociology? brought together suchdistinguished sociologists as Peter Berger, JoanHuber, Randall Collins, Seymour Martin Lipset,James Davis, Mayer Zald, Arthur Stinchcombe,and Howard Becker. They mourned sociology’sfragmentation, incoherence, non-cumulative-ness as though a true science—using their imageof natural science or economics—is always inte-



8 I say “seemingly” irrelevant because first andforemost one’s research program defines what isanomalous or contradictory. If the results may seemtrivial, then the research program itself must bear theburden of relevance and insight.

grated, coherent and cumulative! Their 1950soptimism had turned sour in the face of the bar-rage of critical challenges to consensus sociol-ogy during the 1960s and 1970s. Now thechickens were coming home to roost and soci-ology, or their vision of it, was in jeopardy

Perhaps the most interesting and thorough-going of this genre of writing was StephenTurner and Jonathan Turner’s (1990) TheImpossible Science that reconstructed the his-tory of sociology from this bleak standpoint.From the beginning, they aver, sociology hadneither a sustainable audience nor reliable clientsand patrons. It was continually overrun by polit-ical forces, interrupted by a transitory scientif-ic ascendancy in the period after World WarTwo. If there is a common thread runningthrough all these narratives of decline it is onethat attributes sociology’s malaise to the sub-versive power of its reflexive knowledge,whether this be in the form of critical or publicsociology.

In one respect I concur with the “declinists”:our discipline is not only a potentially integrat-ed division of labor but also a field of power, amore or less stable hierarchy of antagonisticknowledges. My disagreement, however, lieswith their evaluation of the state of sociologyand the balance of power within our discipline.Sociology’s decline in the 1980s was short lived.Far from being in the doldrums, today sociolo-gy has never been in better shape. The numbersof BAs in sociology has been increasing steadi-ly since 1985, overtaking economics and historyand nearly catching up with political science.The production of PhDs still lags behind theseneighboring disciplines, but our numbers havebeen growing steadily since 1989. They will,presumably, continue to grow to meet thedemand for undergraduate teaching, althoughthe trend toward adjunct and contingent laborshows no sign of abating. Membership of theAmerican Sociological Association has beenmounting rapidly for the last four years, restor-ing the all time highs of the 1970s. Given apolitical climate hostile to sociology this is per-haps strange, yet it could be that this very cli-mate is drawing people to the critical and publicmoments of sociology.

My second point of disagreement with the“declinists” concerns the threat to sociology. Ibelieve it is the reflexive dimension of sociol-ogy that is in danger not the instrumental dimen-

sion. At least in the United States professionaland policy sociologies—the one supplyingcareers and the other supplying funds—dictatethe direction of the discipline. Critical sociolo-gy’s supply of values and public sociology’ssupply of influence do not match the power ofcareers and money. There may be dialogue alongthe vertical dimension of Table 1, but the realbonds of symbiosis lie in the horizontal direc-tion, creating a ruling coalition of professionaland policy sociology and a subaltern mutuali-ty of critical and public sociology. This patternof domination derives from the embeddednessof the discipline in a wider constellation ofpower and interests. In our society money andpower speak louder than values and influence.In the United States capitalism is especiallyraw with a public sphere that is not only weakbut overrun by armies of experts and a pletho-ra of media. The sociological voice is easilydrowned out. Just as public sociology has to facea competitive public sphere, so critical sociol-ogy encounters the balkanization of disciplines,and as a result critical discussion is deprived ofaccess to its most powerful engine—paralleldispositions in other disciplines.

The balance of power may be weighted infavor of instrumental knowledge, but we can stillmake our discipline ourselves, creating thespaces to manufacture a bolder and more vitalvision. To be sure there is a contradictionbetween professional sociology’s accountabil-ity to peers and public sociology’s accounta-bility to publics, but must this lead to warringcamps—each pathologizing the other? To besure critical and policy sociologies are at odds—the one clinging to its autonomy and the otherto its clients—but if each would recognize partsof the other in itself, mutuality could displaceantagonism. Instead of driving the disciplineinto separate spheres we might develop a vari-ety of synergies and fruitful engagements.

Here there is no space to explore any furtherthe potential antagonisms and alliances withinthis field of power. Suffice to say, if our disci-pline can be held together only under a systemof domination, let that system be one of hege-mony rather than despotism. That is to say thesubaltern knowledges (critical and public)should be allowed breathing space to developtheir own capacities and to inject dynamismback into the dominant knowledges.Professional and policy sociology should rec-



ognize their enlightened interest in flourish-ing critical and public sociologies. Howeverdisruptive in the short term, in the long terminstrumental knowledge cannot thrive withoutchallenges from reflexive knowledges, thatis, from the renewal and redirection of thevalues that underpin their research, valuesthat are drawn from and recharged by thewider society.

We have sketched out the field of power thatcomprises the relations among the four soci-ologies in a relatively abstract manner. Theirconcrete combination will vary among depart-ments, over time within a single country, amongcountries, and even assume a changing globalconfiguration. Accordingly, the next three the-ses explore the specificity of the contemporaryconfiguration of United States sociology bypursuing a series of comparisons and in thisway we will deepen our encounter with thenational and global forces shaping disciplinaryfields.

TTHHEESSIISS VVIIIIII:: HHIISSTTOORRYY AANNDD HHIIEERRAARRCCHHYY

In the United States the domination of profes-sional sociology emerged through successivedialogues with public, policy and critical soci-ologies. But even here the strength of profes-sional sociology is concentrated in the researchdepartments at the top of a highly stratifiedsystem of university education while at the sub-altern levels public sociology is often moreimportant if less visible.

Today we accept the domination of profession-al sociology as a normal feature of United Statessociology but it is actually a quite recent phe-nomenon. We can plot the history of UnitedStates sociology as the deepening of profes-sional sociology in three successive periods.

Professional sociology began in the middleof the 19th. century as a dialogue between ame-liorative, philanthropic and reform groups on theone side, and the early sociologists on the otherside. The latter often came from a religiousbackground but they transferred their moralzeal to the fledgling secular science of sociol-ogy. After the Civil War the exploration of socialproblems developed through the collection andanalysis of labor statistics as well as social sur-veys of the poor. Collecting data to demon-strate the plight of the lower classes became a

movement unto itself that laid the foundationsof professional sociology. Sociologists wouldremain in close contact with all manner ofgroups in a burgeoning civil society even afterthe formation of American Sociological Society,as it was called then, in 1905. In its origins,therefore, sociology was inherently public.

The second phase of sociology saw the shiftof engagement from publics to foundationsand government. Beginning in the 1920s withthe Rockefeller Foundation’s support for theInstitute for Social and Religious Research(which would sponsor the famous Middletownstudies) and then its support for communityresearch at the University of Chicago and at theUniversity of North Carolina, foundationsbecame increasingly active in promoting soci-ology. At the same time rural sociology man-aged to create a research base within the stateitself (Larson and Zimmerman 2003). As direc-tor of the President’s Research Committee(1933), William Ogburn pulled together a mas-sive volume on Recent Social Trends in theUnited States. During World War II, state spon-sored sociology continued, the most famousbeing Samuel Stouffer’s (1949) multi-volumestudy of morale within the United States army.After the war a new source of fundingappeared, namely the corporate financing ofsurvey research, epitomized by Lazarsfeld’swork at the Bureau of Applied Social Researchat Columbia University. The more sociologydepended upon commercial and governmentfunding the more it developed rigorous statis-tical methods for the analysis of empiricaldata, which invited criticisms from manyquarters.

The third phase of American sociology, there-fore, was marked by critical sociology’s engage-ment with professional sociology. Its inspirationwas Robert Lynd (1939) who criticized sociol-ogy’s narrowing of scope and its claims of valueneutrality. It was perhaps most famously con-tinued by C. Wright Mills (1959), who referredto sociology’s originating engagement withpublics as “liberal practicality” and to the sec-ond period of corporate and state funding as“illiberal practicality.” He did not realize, how-ever, that he was inaugurating a third phase of“critical sociology,” which would redirect boththeoretical and methodological trends withinthe discipline. Alvin Gouldner (1970) produceda milestone in this third phase, attacking the



foundations of structural functionalism andallied sociologies, and creating space for newtheoretical tendencies influenced by feminismand Marxism. This critical sociology providedthe energy and imagination behind the recon-struction of professional sociology in the 1980sand 1990s.

From where will the next impetus for soci-ology come? Thesis I claimed that the gapbetween the sociological ethos and the world ispropelling sociology into the public arena.Moreover, professional sociology has nowreached a level a maturity and self confidencethat it can return to its civic roots, and promotepublic sociology from a position of strength—an engagement with the profound and disturb-ing global trends of our time. If the originalpublic sociology of the 19th. century wasinevitably provincial, it nonetheless laid thefoundation for the ambitious professional soci-ology of the 20th. century, which, in turn, hascreated the basis for its own transcendence—a21st century public sociology of global dimen-sions.

This is not to discount the importance oflocal public sociology, the organic connectionsbetween sociologists and immediate communi-ties. Far from it. After all the global only man-ifests itself through and is constituted out oflocal processes. We must recognize that so muchlocal public sociology is already taking place inour state systems of education where facultybear the burden of huge teaching loads. If theycan squeeze some time beyond teaching, theytake their public sociology out of the classroomand into the community. We do not know aboutthese extra-curricular public sociologies becausetheir practitioners rarely have the time to writethem up. Fortunately, Kerry Strand, SamMarullo, Nick Cutforth, Randy Stoecker andPatrick Donohue (2003) have cast a beam on tothis hidden terrain by putting together a hand-book on organic public sociologies or what theycall community-based research. The volumelays out a set of principles and practices as wellas numerous examples, many of which combineresearch, teaching and service.

The broader point is that the US system ofhigher education is a large sprawling set ofinstitutions, steeply hierarchical and enormouslydiverse. Therefore, the configuration of our foursociologies looks very different at different lev-els and in different places. The concentration of

research and professionalism in the upper reach-es of our university system is made possible, atleast in part, by the overburdening of our teach-ing institutions, the four-year and two-year col-leges. The configuration of sociologies in theseinstitutions is analogous to that in poorlyresourced parts of the world. As the next thesisintimates diversity within the United States mir-rors diversity at the global level.

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United States sociology presents itself as uni-versal, but it is particular—not just in its con-tent but also in its form, that is, in itsconfiguration of our four types of sociology. Atthe same time it exercises enormous influenceover other national sociologies, and not alwaysto their advantage. Thus, we need to remoldnot only the national but also the global divi-sion of sociological labor.

The term “public sociology” is an Americaninvention. If, in other countries, it is the essenceof sociology, for us it is but a part of our disci-pline, and a small one at that. Indeed, for someU.S. sociologists it does not belong in our dis-cipline at all. When I travel to South Africa,however, to talk about public sociology—andthis would be true of many countries in theworld—my audiences look at me nonplussed.What else could sociology be, if not an engage-ment with diverse publics about public issues?That the American Sociological Associationwould devote our annual meetings to publicsociologies speaks volumes about the strengthof professional sociology in the United States.Moreover, in a world where national profes-sional sociologies are often weaker than publicsociologies, focusing on the latter signifies achallenge to the international hegemony ofUnited States sociology, and points toward soci-ology’s reconstruction nationally and globally.

The configuration of our four types of soci-ology varies from country to country. In theGlobal South, as I have intimated, sociologyhas often a strong public presence. VisitingSouth Africa in 1990 I was surprised to dis-cover the close connection between sociologyand the anti-apartheid struggles, especially thelabor movement but also diverse civic organi-zations. While in the United States we weretheorizing social movements, in South Africa



sociologists were making social movements!This project drove their sociology, stimulatinga whole new field of research—social move-ment unionism—which U.S. sociologists redis-covered, as though it were a brand new idea, 20years later! But South African sociology notonly focused on social mobilization but on thetargets of such mobilization. Sociologists ana-lyzed the character and tendencies of theapartheid state, debated the strategy of the anti-apartheid movement. They asked whether theyshould be servants or critics of the movement.Today, however, ten years after apartheid SouthAfrica presents a less favorable context for pub-lic sociology, as sociologists are drawn off intoNGOs, corporations or state apparatuses, as thenew government calls on sociologists to with-draw from the trenches of civil society andfocus on teaching, and as social research ischanneled into immediate policy issues or“bench-marked” to “international,” i.e.American, professional standards. The demo-bilization of civil society has gone hand in handwith a shift from reflexive to instrumental soci-ology (Sitas 1997; Webster 2004).

Similar tendencies can be found elsewhere,but each with their national specificity. Takethe Soviet Union. Sociology disappeared under-ground in the Stalin era, only to resurface as aweapon of official and unofficial critique underthe post-Stalin regimes. Opinion researchbecame a form of public sociology during thethaw of the 1960s before it was monopolized bythe party apparatus. Under the stalwart leader-ship of Tatyana Zaslavskaya, Perestroika broughtsociologists out in force. Sociology becameintimately connected to the eruption of civilsociety. With the evisceration of civil society inthe post-Soviet period, however, the fledglingsociology proved defenseless against the inva-sion of market forces. With but a few exceptionssociology was banished to business schools andto centers of opinion and market research.Where it exists as a serious intellectual enter-prise, it is often funded by Western founda-tions, employing sociologists trained in Englandor the United States.

The situation is very different in Scandinaviancountries with their strong social democratictraditions. Here sociology grew up with thewelfare state, which conferred a strong policyorientation but an equally strong public moment.Norwegian sociology, very much influenced by

American sociology, was nonetheless alsogeared to the policy world and here the feministinput was very important. With a population ofonly 5 million and less than 200 registered soci-ologists the professional community is small, sothat the more ambitious seek a place in thewider society whether in government or as pub-lic intellectuals. They are regular contributors tonewspapers, radio and television. Norwegianshave energetically taken their public sociologiesabroad, becoming an international hub withlinks not to just to the United States but toEurope and countries of the Global South.

The rest of Europe is quite variable. Francehas one of the longest traditions of professionalsociology, and at the same time cultivated atraditional public sociology, with such leadinglights as Raymond Aron, Pierre Bourdieu andAlain Touraine. In England professional soci-ology is of a more recent, post-World War Two,vintage, easily vulnerable to the Thatcherregime that sought to muzzle public and poli-cy initiatives fostering a more defensive inwardlooking profession. The return of a Labourgovernment gave sociology a new lease of life,expanding the sphere of policy research andpropelling its most illustrious and prolific pub-lic sociologist, Anthony Giddens, into theHouse of Lords.

In mapping the fields of national sociolo-gies one learns not only how particular is thesociology of the United States but also howpowerful and influential it is. Turning out 600doctorates a year, it strides like a giant overworld sociology. Many of the leading sociolo-gists, teaching in other parts of the world, weretrained in the United States. The AmericanSociological Association has over 14,000 mem-bers with 24 full time staff. But it is not simplythe domination of numbers and resources but,increasingly, governments around the world areholding their own academics, sociologistsincluded, accountable to “international” stan-dards, which means publishing in “Western,”journals, and in particular American journals.It’s happening in South Africa and Taiwan butalso in countries with considerable resources,such as Norway. Driven by connections to theWest and publishing in English, national soci-ologies lose their engagement with nationalproblems and local issues. Within each country,states nurture global pressures, which fracture



the national division of sociological labor, driv-ing wedges among the four sociologies.

Without conspiracy or deliberation on thepart of its practitioners, United States sociolo-gy becomes world hegemonic. We, therefore,have a special responsibility to provincializeour own sociology, to bring it down from thepedestal of universality and recognize its dis-tinctive character and national power. We haveto develop a dialogue, once again, with othernational sociologies, recognizing their local tra-ditions or their aspirations to indigenize soci-ology. We have to think in global terms, torecognize the emergent global division of soci-ological labor. If the United States rules theroost with its professional sociology, then wehave to foster public sociologies of the GlobalSouth and the policy sociologies of Europe. Wehave to encourage networks of critical sociolo-gies that transcend not just disciplines but alsonational boundaries. We should apply our soci-ology to ourselves, become more conscious ofthe global forces that are driving our discipline,so that we may channel them rather than bechanneled by them.

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The social sciences distinguish themselves fromthe humanities and the natural sciences by theircombination of both instrumental and reflexiveknowledge—a combination that is itself vari-able, and thereby giving different opportunitiesfor public and policy interventions.Interdisciplinary knowledge takes differentforms in each quadrant of the sociological field.

It is said that the division of the disciplines isan arbitrary product of 19th. century Europeanhistory, that the present disciplinary special-ization is anachronistic, and that we shouldmove ahead toward a unified social science.This positivist fantasy was recently resurrectedby Immanuel Wallerstein et al. (1996) in theReport of the Gulbenkian Commission on theRestructuring of the Social Sciences. The proj-ect looks harmless enough but in failing to posethe questions—knowledge for whom? andknowledge for what?—the new unified socialscience all too easily dissolves reflexivity, thatis, the critical and public moments of socialscience. In a world of domination unity too eas-ily becomes the unity of the powerful. To declarethe division of the disciplines as arbitrary, just

because they were created at a particularmoment of history, is to miss their ongoing andchanging meaning and the interests they repre-sent. It is to commit the genetic fallacy. In orderto underline the grounds for the division of thedisciplines, and in the interests of brevity, I fallback on schematic portraits of academic fields,inevitably sacrificing attention to both internaldifferentiation and variation over time and place.

The natural sciences are largely based oninstrumental knowledge, rooted in research pro-grams whose development is governed by sci-entif ic communities. The extra-academicaudience is from the policy world—industry orgovernment—ready to exploit scientific dis-coveries. Increasingly, this extra-academic audi-ence enters the academy to direct or oversee itsresearch, prompting opposition to collusive rela-tions, whether these be in the area of medicalresearch, nuclear physics or bioengineering(Epstein 1996; Moore 1996; Schurman andMunro 2004). Such critical reflexivity, oftenextending into public debate, is not the essenceof natural science as it is of the humanities.Thus, works of art or literature are ultimatelyvalidated on the basis of a dialogue among nar-rower groups of cognoscenti or within broaderpublics. Their truth is established through theiraesthetic value based on discursive evaluation,that is, as critical and public knowledges,although, of course, they may be elaboratedinto schools of instrumental knowledge andeven enter the policy world.

The social sciences are at the crossroads ofthe humanities and the natural sciences since intheir very definition they partake in both instru-mental and reflexive knowledge. The balancebetween these two types of knowledge, howev-er, varies among the social sciences. Economics,for example, is as close as the social sciencesget to what we might call a paradigmatic sci-ence, dominated by a single research program(neo-classical economics). The organization ofthe discipline reflects this with its paucity ofprizes (Clark Medal and Nobel Prize), elite con-trol of the major journals, clear rankings not justof departments but of individual economists,and the absence of autonomously organizedsubfields. Dissident economists survive only ifthey can first establish themselves in profes-sional terms. Indeed, one might liken profes-sional economics to the discipline of theCommunist Party with its dissidents and its



coherent doctrine that it seeks to spread theworld over, all in the name of freedom.9 Theinternal coherence of economics gives it greaterprestige within the academic world and greatereffectiveness in the policy world.

If economics is like the Communist Party,American sociology is more like Anarcho-Syndicalism, a decentralized participatorydemocracy. It is based on multiple and over-lapping research traditions, reflected in its veryactive 43 sections and their ever proliferatingawards (Ennis 1992), and in the over-200 soci-ology journals (Turner and Turner 1990: 159).Our institutional mode of operation reflects ourmultiple perspectives—although not alwaysadequately. The discipline, a hierarchical andelitist caste system though it is (Burris 2004),nonetheless is more open than economics asmeasured by faculty mobility between depart-ments and the patterns of recruitment of grad-uate students (Han 2003). The discipline is moredemocratic in its elections of officers. Memberresolutions are not restricted to professionalconcerns, and they require the support of only3% of the membership to be put to a vote. Thus,if economics is more effective in the policyworld, the structure of the discipline of sociol-ogy is organized to be responsive to diversepublics. To the extent that our comparativeadvantage lies in the public sphere, we are morelikely to influence policy indirectly via our pub-lic engagements.

Looking at the other social sciences, politi-cal science is a balkanized field but one moreinclined toward policy than publics, towardinstrumental rather than reflexive knowledge.Today tendencies toward rational choice mod-eling have led to a reaction in a reflexive direc-tion. The Perestroika Movement within politicalscience upholds a more institutional approachto politics, and buttresses political theory ascritical theory. Anthropology and geographyare balkanized across the instrumental-reflex-ive divide, so that cultural anthropology and

human geography often react against the sci-entific models of their colleagues, while serv-ing as bridges to the humanities. Philosophy,another cross-over between social sciences andhumanities, finds its distinctive niche in criti-cal knowledge.

Disciplinary divides are far stronger in theUnited States than elsewhere, so that “interdis-ciplinary” knowledge leads a precarious exis-tence at the boundaries of our disciplines. Eachof the four types of sociology develops a dis-tinctive exchange and collaboration with neigh-boring disciplines. At the interface ofprofessional knowledge there is a cross-disci-plinary borrowing. When economic sociologyand political sociology borrow from the neigh-boring disciplines the result is still distinctive-ly part of sociology—the social bases of marketsand politics. At the interface of critical knowl-edge, there is a trans-disciplinary infusion.Feminism, poststructuralism and critical racetheory have all left their mark on critical soci-ology’s engagement with professional sociolo-gy. But the infusion has always been limited. Thedevelopment of public knowledge often comesabout through multi-disciplinary collaborationas, for example, in “participatory actionresearch” that brings communities together withacademics from complementary disciplines. Acommunity defines an issue—public housing,environmental pollution, disease, living wage,schooling, etc.—and then works together witha multi-disciplinary team to frame and formu-late approaches. Finally, in the policy worldthere is joint-disciplinary coordination, whichoften reflects a hierarchy of disciplines. Thus,state funded area studies often worked withwell-defined policy goals that gave precedenceto political science and economics.

Having recognized the power of the discipli-nary divide, captured in varying combinationsof instrumental and reflexive knowledge, wemust now ask what this variation signifies?Specifically, is there anything distinctive aboutsociological knowledge and the interests it rep-resents? Might we as well be economists orpolitical scientists and by happenstance we endup as sociologists—a matter of little conse-quence, a biographical accident? Do we have anidentity of our own among the social sciences?This brings me to my final thesis.



9 Marion Fourcade-Gourinchas (2004) documentsthe enormous international influence of Americaneconomics. Working off the ideas of Amartya Sen(1999), Peter Evans (2004) has striven valiantly topush economics toward an organic public engage-ment, an economics sensitive to local issues anddeliberative democracy.

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If the standpoint of economics is the marketand its expansion, and the standpoint of polit-ical science is the state and the guarantee ofpolitical stability, then the standpoint of soci-ology is civil society and the defense of thesocial. In times of market tyranny and state des-potism, sociology—and in particular its publicface—defends the interests of humanity.

The social sciences are not a melting pot ofdisciplines, because the disciplines representdifferent and opposed interests—first and fore-most interests in the preservation of the groundsupon which their knowledge stands. Economics,as we know it today, depends on the existenceof markets with an interest in their expansion,political science depends on the state with aninterest in political stability, while sociologydepends on civil society with an interest in theexpansion of the social.

But what is civil society? For the purposes ofmy argument here we can define it as a prod-uct of late 19th. century Western capitalism thatproduced associations, movements and publicsthat were outside both state and economy—political parties, trade unions, schooling, com-munities of faith, print media and a variety ofvoluntary organizations. This congeries of asso-ciational life is the unique standpoint of soci-ology so that when it disappears—Stalin’s SovietUnion, Hitler’s Germany, Pinochet’s Chile—sociology disappears too. When civil societyflourishes—Perestroika Russia or late ApartheidSouth Africa—so does sociology.

Sociology may be connected to society by anumbilical cord, but, of course, this is not to saysociology only studies civil society. Far from it.But it studies the state or the economy from thestandpoint of civil society. Political sociology,for example, is not the same as political science.

It examines the social preconditions of politicsand the politicization of the social just as eco-nomic sociology is very different from eco-nomics, indeed it looks at what economistsoverlook, the social foundations of the market.

This tripartite division of the social sci-ences—I have no space here to include suchneighbors as geography, history and anthropol-ogy—was true of their birth in the 19th. centu-ry, but it became blurred in the 20th. century(with the fusing and overlapping boundaries ofstate, economy and society). For the last 30years, however, this three-way separation hasbeen undergoing renaissance, speared-headedby state unilateralism on the one side and mar-ket fundamentalism on the other. Through thisperiod civil society has been colonized and co-opted by markets and states. Still, opposition tothese twin forces comes, if its comes at all,from civil society, understood in its local, nation-al and transnational expressions. In this sensesociology’s affiliation with civil society, that ispublic sociology, represents the interests ofhumanity—interests in keeping at bay both statedespotism and market tyranny.

Let me immediately qualify what I’ve said.First, I do believe that economics and politicalscience, between them, have manufactured theideological time bombs that have justified theexcesses of markets and states, excesses that aredestroying the foundations of the public uni-versity, that is, their own academic conditionsof existence, as well as so much else. Still, whileacknowledging this I would not want to write offall political scientists and economists.Disciplines, after all, are fields of power, eachwith its dominant and oppositional forces. Thinkof the Perestroika Movement in political scienceor the network of Post-Autistic Economics—aneconomics that recognizes individuals as matureand multi-faceted human beings. As sociologistswe can find and, indeed, have found allies in andcollaborated with these oppositional forma-tions.

The field of sociology is also divided. Civilsociety, after all, is not some harmonious com-munalism but it is riven by segregations, dom-inations, and exploitations.11 Historically, civil



10 Taken from Alvin Gouldner’s (1968) essay of thesame title. Equally pertinent to Thesis XI are thechallenging words of Pierre Bourdieu: “The eth-nosociologist is a sort of organic intellectual ofhumankind who, as a collective agent, can contributeto denaturalizing and defatalizing existence by put-ting her competency at the service of a universalismrooted in the understanding of particularisms.” Citedin Wacquant (2004)

11 It is here that I part company with the Durk-heimian perspective of communitarians, such asAmitai Etzioni (1993) and Philip Selznick (2002),

society has been male and white. As it hasbecome more inclusive it has also been invad-ed by state and market, reflected in sociology bythe uncritical use of such concepts as socialcapital. Civil society is very much a contestedterrain but still, I would argue, in the presentconjuncture the best possible terrain for thedefense of humanity—a defense that would beaided by the cultivation of a critically disposedpublic sociology.

How can we accomplish this goal? As I havealready suggested in Thesis VII the institution-al division of sociological labor and the corre-sponding field of power have hitherto restrictedthe expansion of public sociologies. We wouldnot have to defend public sociology if therewere not obstacles to its realization. To sur-mount them requires commitment and sacri-fice that many have already made and continueto make. That was why they became sociolo-gists—not to make money but a better world. So,there already exist a plethora of public soci-ologies. But there are also new developments.Thus, the magazine Contexts has taken a majorstep in the direction of public sociology. TheASA head office has made vigorous efforts inoutreach and lobbying, with its congressionalbriefings and its regular press releases, but alsoin the columns of our newsletter Footnotes. Thisyear the ASA has introduced a new award thatwill recognize excellence in the reporting ofsociology in the media. We need to cultivate acollaborative relation between sociology andjournalism, for journalists are a public untothemselves as well as standing between us anda multitude of other publics.

The ASA has also established a task force forthe institutionalization of public sociologies,which will consider three key issues. First, it willconsider how to recognize and validate the pub-lic sociology that already exists, making theinvisible visible, making the private public.Second, the task force will consider how tointroduce incentives for public sociology, toreward the pursuit of public sociology that is so

often slighted in merits and promotions. Alreadydepartments have created awards and blogs,and have begun designing course syllabi forpublic sociology. Third, if we are going toacknowledge and reward public sociology thenwe must develop criteria to distinguish goodfrom bad public sociology. And we must askwho should evaluate public sociology. We mustencourage the very best of public sociologywhatever that may mean. Public sociology can-not be second rate sociology.

Important though these institutional changesare, the success of public sociology will notcome from above but from below. It will comewhen public sociology captures the imaginationof sociologists, when sociologists recognizepublic sociology as important in its own rightwith its own rewards, and when sociologiststhen carry it forward as a social movementbeyond the academy. I envision myriads ofnodes, each forging collaborations of sociolo-gists with their publics, flowing together into asingle current. They will draw on a century ofextensive research, elaborate theories, practicalinterventions, and critical thinking, reachingcommon understandings across multiple bound-aries, not least but not only across nationalboundaries, and in so doing shedding insulari-ties of old. Our angel of history will then spreadher wings and soar above the storm.

Michael Burawoy is Professor of Sociology at theUniversity of California–Berkeley. After studyingindustrial workplaces in Zambia, Chicago, Hungary,and Russia, he is turning his attention to the academicworkplace.

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