Jeffries Vincent (Editor). Handbook Of Public Sociology

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442 Chapter 24

public sociologists to take on this role which defined the beginnings of our

discipline in the secure knowledge that others will guard the professional

standard, serve the policy field and act as the conscience of the discipline.

CONCLUSION

The work of sociologists who engaged with social futures has opened up

different paths, each with relevance for the contemporary situation. Early

French thinkers infused their respective approaches with a sense of moral

duty to assist their contemporaries on the way to a better future. Karl Marx

identified roots of the social ills of his time and produced a utopian vision

that inspired generations. Sociologists of the future sought and are still

seeking to bring the social future into the fold of mainstream sociology.

Each of these efforts to encompass the future was and is concerned to make

social science practice appropriate to the contemporary condition. What re-

mains to be achieved, as I sought to show in this chapter, are foundational

changes at both the conceptual and the institutional level.

Sociologists are “future makers”—that was the assertion and the vision

presented by the founders of the social sciences and by the sociologists of the

future. As future makers we need to render the invisible visible, make future

presents tangible, give form to the “not yet,” provide analyses that take the

future seriously as supreme realm of social practice and transaction, and ac-

knowledge our inescapable constitutive involvement. The angel of history’s

perspective is inappropriate for this task. From the angel’s perspective we can

only survey the damage but cannot understand the processes that created it

together with our implication. We can map the resulting social ills of prede-

cessors’ future making but have no means to prevent potential future disas-

ters of our making. We can amass evidence but have no tools to intervene,

no power to change the course of history. We are observers and onlookers

rather than active participants and change agents. This surely is not the ethos

of sociology, not the reason why students join the profession. To use our

sociological imagination for the good of society requires moral commitment

together with a thorough-going futures perspective. To achieve the latter we

have to remember and reactivate our everyday skills of agile movement and

conduct in the temporal domain. We have to embark on what Michael Bura-

woy (2005:5) calls “systematic back translation” and (re)gain competence in

the dance of time, the pirouetting and swiveling that enables us to encom-

pass both past and future while keeping us grounded in space and matter.

To take on this challenge will not be easy and it will change sociology to the

core and across all its branches. But it will be worth it. It will revitalize the

discipline and ensure its relevance for the century ahead.

Futures in the Making 443

FUTURE

FUTURITY

SOCIOLOGY

Future

Futurities

Future presents

Challenge to sociology

Future makers are we

Our desires & expectations

Hopes & fears, projections & plans

All implicated in our knowledge practices

The study of futurity is focus on shadows

The shadows beckon to be illuminated

Illusions of detachment disintegrate

Implicated we are contributors

Contributors are responsible

The future their subject & duty

Present futures amenable to science

Future presents realm of values & morals

We study futurity as present future

With tools from a by-gone age

Finding answers in the past

We seek the unknowable

Challenge to sociology

Future presents

Futurities

Future

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research has been funded by the UK’s Economic and Science Research

Council (ESRC) under their Professorial Fellowship Scheme. www.cf.ac

.uk/socsi/futures/.

NOTES

1. The theses on Feuerbach were first written in 1845 in “German Ideology,” but

not published in complete form until 1932.

2. I am indebted for that distinction to Nick Brown, Brian Rappert, and Andrew

Webster (2000).

3. For a more detailed account of these dualistic distinctions and their socio-

environmental implications for contemporary social science, see Adam (1998b:385–

402).

444 Chapter 24

4. This term has been developed in my most recent work as a temporal equiva-

lent to the ecological concept of footprint, which focuses on space and matter thus

bracketing the temporal aspects of socio-environmental impacts of innovative fu-

ture making. See Barbara Adam and Chris Groves (2007), especially the entry in the

glossary of key terms.

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FUTURE DIRECTIONS

449

Reading the rich and varied chapters of this handbook one can only be

convinced of the importance of public sociology both for the world and

for our discipline. Whether we are talking of Steve Cornell’s engagement

with the political organization of Native American tribes, Lina Hu’s in-

volvement with migrant workers in China, Elizabeth Leonard’s work with

the convicted survivors of male violence, Bill McCarthy and John Hagan’s

chapter on publicizing deaths in Darfur, Robert Kleidman’s collaboration

with community organizations, Pamela Oliver’s presentations on racial

disparities of imprisonment, Rhoda Howard-Hassmann’s critical dissection

of human rights, or Ruth Horowitz’s dual role on medical licensing boards,

whether it be the chapters by Caroline Persell and Michael DeCesare on

teaching sociology, or Lawrence Nichols, Vincent Jeffries, and Edward

Tiryakian’s different accounts of the extraordinary life of Pitirim Sorokin,

the overwhelming impression is that the four sociologies—professional,

policy, public, and critical—do indeed feed one another, expand and flour-

ish on the basis of their antagonistic interdependence.

This is not to say that the fourfold scheme underlying this handbook

is without flaws. Indeed, the flaws and limitations have given energy to

an intense debate and discussion and have driven the scheme’s revision

and reconstruction. We see this in the chapters by Damon Mayrl and

Laurel Westbrook, who stress the importance of accountability to publics;

by Frank Furedi, who urges us to bring the sociological imagination into

dialogue with publics; by Norval Glenn, who interrogates the standards of

evaluating public sociology; and by Raymond Morrow, who deepens the

scheme in a number of directions. They all point to lacunae, narrowness,

and contradictions in the fourfold scheme, yet in each case they do so not

The Public Sociology Wars

Michael Burawoy

450 Chapter 25

with the purpose of jettisoning it but with the purpose of advancing it, and

the allied project of public sociology. With the exception of the chapter by

Joe Feagin, Sean Elias, and Jennifer Mueller, who consider professional-

policy sociology beyond redemption, all the contributions to the handbook

appear to be on board the fourfold ship.

One may be surprised, therefore, to learn of the hostilities aroused by

public sociology and, specifically, the fourfold scheme—hostilities from

fellow sociologists, fueled by fears that public sociology undermines our

discipline and endangers the world. For many communicating our ideas to

wider publics puts sociology at risk, threatens its integrity, and jeopardizes

its credibility. Astonished by these attacks, others respond by asking why

we would even bother to be sociologists, if public sociology is a danger-

ous pipe dream, if sociology is to become an irrelevant sinecure. Some go

further and declare war on professional sociology itself, as encumbering,

compromising, and even antithetical to the project of public engagement.

For them professional sociology traps its practitioners in a devotion to

an inaccessible science, in the trivial obsessions of methodology, mind-

less rituals of self-referentiality. The “public sociology,” formulated in the

fourfold scheme, is denounced as a public relations venture to legitimate

and conserve “mainstream” sociology. So here, ironically, we have the

joining of extremes—the radical “public sociologist” meets up with the

conservative “professional sociologist” as each denounces the other as the

anti-christ. Agreeing that they cannot both occupy the same field, they both

campaign for the abolition of the division of sociological labor. By contrast,

this volume shows how we can and, indeed, why we must all live together if

sociology is to survive—living together in tension but nonetheless recogniz-

ing the contributions of the other.

The public sociology wars are not confined to whispering campaigns or

private defamation but have come out into the open. Within a space of

four years, sociologists have penned well over 100 essays—not all hostile

by any means—in diverse symposia in such journals as Social Problems,

Social Forces, Critical Sociology, The American Sociologist, British Journal of So-

ciology, Sociology, Socio-Economic Review, Current Sociology, and Contemporary

Sociology, as well as in journals in Finland, Portugal, Italy, France, Hungary,

China, Hong Kong, Russia, Brazil, South Africa, Germany, and Iran. At the

same time several books have already appeared bringing together critical,

practical, and historical assessments as well as concrete case studies of pub-

lic sociology. They include Blau and Smith (2006), Agger (2007), Clawson

et al. (2007), Nichols (2007), Barlow (2007), Jacobsen (2008), and Haney

(2008), but also different collections in Mandarin, Portuguese, and Rus-

sian. So the flames are not confined to the United States but have spread

to other countries.

The Public Sociology Wars 451

What has prompted these wars over public sociology, over the seem-

ingly innocent proposal to take sociology’s findings, its ideas, its theories

beyond the academy, that is to carry on what is effectively its mission of

public education? Why all the heat, the defensiveness, the skepticism, and

the animosity toward public sociology? We enter our discipline with a

sense of its relevance to the pressing problems of our day, yet the rites of

passage in graduate school are like an induction into a secret society. Our

inspirational pioneers, whether Marx, Weber, or Durkheim, not to mention

Jane Addams or W. E. B. Du Bois, must surely be wondering what they have

conjured up. At a time when the world is so badly in need of rudimentary

sociological insights, why would we barricade ourselves within an ever

more fragile academic citadel or, on the critical side, turn against the one

protection we have in the uphill struggle against social injustice, inequality,

and oppression?

DEFINING THE FIELD, CLASSIFYING THE CLASSIFIERS

To make sense of the public sociology wars I believe we should follow

Pierre Bourdieu, and examine the context, or more precisely the field,

within which these wars are played out.

But our following of Bourdieu

should be a critical one. We need to problematize what, for Bourdieu, is

the relevant field, namely the scientific field, which he regards as an arena

of open competition among scientists. Competition within this field neces-

sarily leads to the concentration of scientific capital within a shrinking elite,

but, for Bourdieu, concentration also guarantees the advance of science.

The dynamism of science comes from “armed struggle among adversar-

ies who possess weapons whose power and effectiveness rises with the

scientific capital collectively accumulated in and by the field” (Bourdieu

2000:112–113). These struggles take place both within the elite and be-

tween the elite and its challenging successor generation. Scientific progress

is a permanent revolution within the elite.

For Bourdieu, the scientific field must possess a certain autonomy from

extra-scientific intervention. He is especially concerned about the dangers

of encroachment by experts, journalist pretenders, intellectual dilettantes,

and social reformers all trying to appropriate sociology’s mantle of science.

For Bourdieu sociology, in particular, is always under threat of corruption

and distortion because it delves into familiar subjects about which every-

one holds strong but ill-conceived opinions and theories. It is important,

therefore, that sociology break with and distance itself from common sense,

and defend its scientific character by developing an esoteric vocabulary,

inaccessible to lay publics.