Public sociology
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Public sociology is an approach to the discipline which seeks to transcend the academy and engage wider audiences. Rather than being defined by a particular method, theory, or set of political values, public sociology may be understood as a style of sociology, a way of writing and a form of intellectual engagement. Michael Burawoy has contrasted it with professional sociology, a form of academic sociology that is concerned primarily with addressing other professional sociologists.
Burawoy and other promoters of public sociology seek to encourage the discipline to engage in explicitly public and political ways with issues stimulated by debates over public policy, political activism, the purposes of social movements, and the institutions of civil society. If there is a "movement" associated with public sociology, then, it is one that seeks to revitalize the discipline of sociology by leveraging its empirical methods and theoretical insights to engage in debates not just about what is or what has been in society, but about what society might yet be. Thus, many versions of public sociology have an undeniably normative and political character.
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[edit] History
Debates over public sociology have rekindled questions concerning the extra-academic purpose of sociology. Public sociology raises questions about what sociology is and what its goals ought to (or even could) be. Such debates - over science and political advocacy, scholarship and public commitment - have a long history in American sociology and in American social science more generally. Historian Mark C. Smith, for instance, has investigated earlier debates over the purpose of social science in his book, Social Science in the Crucible: The American Debate over Objectivity and Purpose,1918-1941 (Duke University Press, 1994). And Stephen Park Turner and Jonathan H. Turner showed how the discipline's search for a purpose, through dependence on external publics, has limited Sociology's potential in their book, The Impossible Science: An Institutional Analysis of American Sociology (Sage, 1990).
The term "public sociology" was first introduced by Herbert Gans, in a 1988 address entitled "Sociology in America: The Discipline and the Public." For Gans, primary examples of public sociologists included David Riesman, author of The Lonely Crowd, one of the best-selling books of sociology ever to be written, and Robert Bellah, the lead author of another best-selling work, Habits of the Heart. Some years later, sociologist Ben Agger wrote a book entitled Public Sociology: From Social Facts to Literary Acts. But it was Michael Burawoy's discussion of public sociology during his 2004 Presidency of the American Sociological Association that inspired a great deal of attention and debate.
[edit] Public sociology today
While there is no one definition of "public sociology" on which all sociologists agree, the term has come to be widely associated with Burawoy's promotion of it. Burawoy's personal statement for the ASA elections provides a succinct summary of his position: "As mirror and conscience of society, sociology must define, promote and inform public debate about deepening class and racial inequalities, new gender regimes, environmental degradation, market fundamentalism, state and non-state violence. I believe that the world needs public sociology - a sociology that transcends the academy - more than ever. Our potential publics are multiple, ranging from media audiences to policy makers, from silenced minorities to social movements. They are local, global, and national. As public sociology stimulates debate in all these contexts, it inspires and revitalizes our discipline. In return, theory and research give legitimacy, direction, and substance to public sociology. Teaching is equally central to public sociology: students are our first public for they carry sociology into all walks of life. Finally, the critical imagination, exposing the gap between what is and what could be, infuses values into public sociology to remind us that the world could be different." Wikipedia readers are encouraged to consult some of Burawoy's many papers on public sociology in order to learn more about his views [1].
Elsewhere, Burawoy has articulated a vision of public sociology that is consonant with the pursuit of democratic socialism. In Critical Sociology, Burawoy writes: "We might say that critical engagement with real utopias is today an integral part of the project of sociological socialism. It is a vision of socialism that places human society, or social humanity at its organizing center, a vision that was central to Marx but that was too often lost before it was again picked up by Gramsci and Polanyi (Burawoy, 2003b). If public sociology is to have a progressive impact it will have to hold itself continuously accountable to some such vision of democratic socialism." [2]
In a slightly different vein, Burawoy and Jonathan VanAntwerpen of the University of California, Berkeley write that their departmental focus on public sociology aims to "turn, as C. Wright Mills would say, private concerns into public issues" [3]. The public sociology produced at Berkeley is an attempt to intervene in ongoing public debates over issues such as class and gender disparities and global inequality. Some of this work consists of attempts to refute high profile public scholarship in other fields (such as Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve) and reclaim from non-sociologists the debate and explanation of sociological problems.
Likewise, the sociology department at the University of Minnesota also advocates claiming a larger role in public life: "Although good sociological research is often difficult to reduce to a sound-bite, sociologists have an important part to play in providing useful, accurate, and scientifically rigorous information to policy makers and community leaders" [4].
Indeed, sociologists have not been alone in debating the "public role" of social science. Similar debates have occurred recently in the disciplines of economics, political science, anthropology, and history. In an effort to move these various disciplines "toward a more public social science," Craig Calhoun, the President of the Social Science Research Council, has encouraged sociologists and other social scientists to "ask better social science questions about what encourages scientific innovation, what makes knowledge useful, and how to pursue both these agendas, with attention to both immediate needs and longterm capacities [5]. Calhoun has also entered the debate about public sociology, critically evaluating the project of public sociology while acknowledging its specific "promise," and arguing that "how sociology matters in the public sphere is vital to the future of the field" [6].
[edit] Criticism
Not all those who practice sociology either as public intellectuals or as academic professionals subscribe to the specific version of "public sociology" defended by Michael Burawoy or to any version of "public sociology" at all. And in the wake of Burawoy's 2004 Presidency of the American Sociological Association, which put the theme of public sociology in the limelight, the project of public sociology has been vigorously debated on the web, in conversations among sociologists, and in a variety of academic journals.
Specifically, Burawoy's vision of public sociology has been critiqued both by "critical" sociologists and by representatives of mainstream sociology. These various discussions of public sociology have been included in forums devoted to the subject in academic journals such as Social Problems, Social Forces, Critical Sociology, and the British Journal of Sociology [7]. These debates have produced both more interest in public sociology and more disagreement over what public sociology is and what its goals ought to be.
One of the most outspoken critics of public sociology was sociologist Mathieu Deflem of the University of South Carolina. Deflem argued that public sociology “is neither public nor sociology. Public sociology is not a plea to make sociology more relevant to the many publics in society nor to connect sociology democratically to political activity. Of course sociologists should be public intellectuals. But they should be and can only be public intellectuals as practitioners of the science they practice, not as activists left or right. Yet public sociology instead is a quest to subsume sociology under politics, a politics of a specific kind, not in order to foster sociological activism but to narrow down the sociological discipline to activist sociology.” (Deflem, Letter to the Editor, The Chronicle Review, 2004). In opposition to the advent of public sociology, Deflem also privately maintained SaveSociology.org.
[edit] Academic departments
- Public Sociology site at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
- Public Sociology at Berkeley
- Public Sociology at Florida Atlantic
[edit] See also
- Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler and Steven Tipton. 1985. Habits of the Heart. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- C. Wright Mills. 1959 (2000). The Sociological Imagination. Oxford University Press.
- Sociologists Without Borders, international organization
