what is “public sociology?”

Fabio

It’s now been a few years since Burawoy’s call for public sociology. I didn’t know what to think because I thought sociology already was public. Isn’t it enough to spend your time studying things like the outcomes of divorce? Or black-white income gaps? Doesn’t the public care about those topics?

Lately, I’ve been giving it some more thought. Here are some different versions of “public sociology” that I could imagine:

1. Publicity: In this model, you don’t do anything different, but you just make a better effort at explaining yourself to people. “Newsworthiness” is your goal.
2. Applied work: You switch from basic science research to policy driven work. Public sociology is sociology that tells you if program X makes a difference. If you take this view of public sociology seriously, then sociology quickly veers into social work and public policy studies.
3. Problem advocacy: You use social science research techniques to draw attention to your personal causes.
4. “Social problem” research: You do basic science, but on topics you deem politically relevant.
5. Political selections of theory: I think this is closer to what Burawoy raises in “The Critical turn to Public Sociology.” You study the same things as other folks, but you substitute theories inspired by your political view. E.g, you dump stratification research and go to Marxian class analysis.

Now, as you can easily see, public sociology is complicated and each version has problems. Option #1 is the safest – you don’t really have to anything different, just ask your colleagues to drop the media relations office a line whenever you have a good paper coming out. However, it’s an option that reduces professional sociology to the occasional news headline and talk show clip. #2 is probably a non-starter – too much blurring of disciplinary boundaries. Too bad, a consistent discussion of policy would probably help sociologists get the public hearing economists take for granted. #3 seems dead on arrival if we take value neutrality to be a serious imperative.

#4 actually has a long and distinguished track record. DuBois was probably the most prominent person who pursued #4. Relevance was a key issue for him, but he wouldn’t do any project that didn’t meet the scientific standard of the day. He’s a hero to a lot people who wish to pursue technical advances while being relevant.

#5 is probably what upsets people like Mathieu Deflem, who claims that public sociology is the “fast food of social science.” It’s not hard to where the skepticism comes from – sociology has a really tough time convincing people it’s science. Any explicit linkage to a political agenda guarantees sociology’s relegation to the dustbin of politically charged scholarship. It also encourages people to spend time on political relevance when they should be thinking about normal science. And of course, if your views don’t match the politics of public sociology, you’ll be a very lonely scholar. There’s also the problem that our research findings often contradict our political views, which is a big problem for public sociology #5.

Personally, I see my self living in zones #1 and #4. I’ll gladly share the results of my research with the media, but I also think that it’s good to work on problems that have a normative dimension. We aren’t chemists who study lifeless atoms. We study ourselves. If we don’t derive some knowledge about the world that has moral relevance, we do a disservice to our subject of study.

Readers shouldn’t take this as a call to abandon technical work and run to the intellectual barricades. Instead, we should recognize the sources of our scientific concerns. Ultimately, we build contingency tables and block models to help us understand the world we’ve made. Judging that world is both a technical and ethical effort. Forgetting that our scientific efforts have these dual inspirations could lead us to the dreaded world of useless sociology.