The Global Sociology Blog

Over at Scatterplot, Andrew Perrin has a post criticizing another post by Steve Vaiseys over at Orgtheory (a post ridden with gross overgeneralizations, I might add and the author acknowledges himself). Says Perrin:

"Apparently because sociologists tend to be “liberal” (as useless a term as that is), we are less objective than we ought to be and we think stuff for partisan, as opposed to soundly scientific, reasons. (I am paraphrasing here, of course.)"

This is not a new discussion within sociology. Heck, it all goes back to Max Weber’s idea of value-free social science.

This also reminded me of a discussion, both on and offline, regarding the role of public sociology especially when Michael Burawoy was president of the American Sociological Association, pushing for more intervention in the public sphere, talking to powers, etc. On the other side were people like Mathieu Deflem arguing that sociology needed to be saved from the likes of Burawoy.

On the public sociology side, Burawoy, I think, argued for promoting sociological ideas and translating them into programs of political actions or using sociology to push certain political agendas in matter of inequalities, environmental degradation, etc.. Contra this attitude, Deflem argued that this meant throwing away the scientific nature of sociology (by turning it into political activism) and that it limited the scope of sociological research by narrowing it down to a list of issues and excluding others. Bottom line: the Marxists were taking over.

It is worth noting that Deflem’s page criticizing public sociology has not been updated since 2006 whereas I attended a bunch of sessions on public sociology as couple of weeks ago at the ASA conference.

Personally, I think this is a false dichotomy that reinforces the stereotype that sociologists are all a bunch of lefties. It seems to me that a lot of research (think marriage and family) do support a liberal view of social issues.

There is really no reason why political intervention should come at the expenses of empirical and methodological rigor and people like Bruce Western combine both public intervention with methodological sophistication. And not everybody who wishes to see sociology less confined to the ivory tower and more involved in society is a Marxist. That kind of gross overgeneralization, irrespective of Burawoy’s personal persuasion, is not helpful.

I also think the work done at a lot of socblogs find their own place on the ivory tower – public sociology continuum. Some are strictly academics (for and by academics), others – hopefully, like mine – try to strike a balance between addressing social issues with sociological tools. The efforts of Contexts should also be seen from that perspective… not a bunch of Marxists, from what I can tell.

If anything, the only thing that sociology needs to be rescued from, is its inability to carve its own public place, something that economics and psychology have been more successful at doing for a variety of reasons.