Sociology in the 21st Century: Reminiscence and Redefinition

Sociology in XXI century: challenges and perspectives, 2019

2008

What should be the role of sociology in the 21 st century? This question raises fundamental issues about sociology as a discipline and its utility in helping us to understand the changes that are taking place in society. I will argue that sociology is increasingly relevant and essential to explanations of a growing number of issues and problems faced by societies and nations around the world. Therefore, we need sociology now more than ever before.

1993

Written in 1992, influenced by the interdisciplinary discussions around CSST, I presented this in order to try and shift the terms of discussion within the sociology department at the University of Michigan so that the kinds of epistemological, theoretical, and cultural political issues CSST highlighted might find an easier path within disciplinary discussions. I wrote, "sociology is undergoing a cultural revolution without being able to acknowledge it as such. Explaining the formation of identities, the discovery of problems and the genesis of concepts is becoming increasingly central to our sociological imagination and is no longer merely a speciality of the sociology of knowledge. In fact, by elevating identity formation to the center of sociology, sociology might at once be able to obtain greater coherence and self-confidence in its intellectual mission by treating the discipline's own intellectual field as one of the central problems of the discipline. By doing so, it might even recover the scientific label it once wore without hesitation.... 1) I identify the "smooth extension" with the argument by some sociologists that the principal problem of the discipline it its internal dissonance and the only way to deal with this is to revalue sociology's scientific status; 2) I identify the "normalized discontinuity" as the elevation of "structure" to the core concept of the discipline; and 3) I argue that a "reflexive turn", extant in our practice, is weak because we have not elevated culture to a sufficiently central place in our disciplinary vocabulary. "

Sociology, 2007

This article is a reading of the 'new sociology' that is mainly identified with the works of C. Wright Mills and Alvin Gouldner. Its main argument is that during the past 40 years the new sociology gave back a public face to sociology. This distinguishes it from the 'old sociology' that had not been able to free itself from 'private' social values. It is argued that Mills' power elite and Gouldner's coming crisis theses provided the foundation for a common enterprise among many 'new sociologists' to develop a critical and public sociology that would seek to shape what Mills called the 'democratic society of publics'.'New sociologists' share a critique of modern societies, namely, that though most modern societies have formal democracies, a substantial democratic social structure of publics is often lacking, due to the erosion of the public sphere by private values.

Sociological Inquiry, 1999

As the scare of the '80s demonstrated, sociology finds itself in the dubious position of being vulnerable within the university while being vitally dependent upon the university for its existence. In response, sociology has accommodated market-driven changes in the university by expanding entrepreneurial forms of research and has struggled to legitimate itself professionally. These quests, however, have removed sociology further from the reaches of the broader public, diminishing its long-standing tradition of addressing public issues. Re-establishing the vitality of the discipline will require sociology to reclaim its public. To do so, changes will have to be made within the profession that encourage the role of public intellectuals, while efforts will have to be made to expand public spaces where public discourse and social action can occur. While it would be difficult to say that sociology ever experienced a heyday, it has had its moments-this however is not one of them. But neither does the discipline appear to be in a state of imminent crisis. Despite the elimination of sociology departments at Washington University and the University of Rochester and the rumblings at Yale and Duke Universities during the ' ~O S , and despite the perennial concerns with the quality of graduate students and the ebb and flow of student enrollments, sociology would appear to be currently entrenched in the university-bolstered in the very least by increasing interest and enrollments in criminology and applied sociology. Moreover, the profession itself continues to evolve across a wide range of subdisciplines, with ASA sections increasing, new professional associations emerging, journals multiplying, and theoretical and empirical debates thriving within these subdisciplines. So what is there to save? To say that sociology has weathered the storms of the '80s and has for the moment avoided crisis is not to suggest that the discipline is no longer vul- nerable to public excoriation or to fbture ax-wielding university presidents. In fact, there remains plenty to concern us. In addition to the usual run-of-the-mill problems-the lack of a paradigm, fragmentation within the discipline, poor

2016

Paul Veyne has suggested in 1971 that Sociology lacked a study object. Three quarters of a century after Durkheim’s Rules, it had yet to discover social types and orders of preponderant facts. At any rate, Veyne claimed, since Sociology or at least sociologists exist, we must conclude that, under that label, they do something else. Briefly, besides studying the logical conditions of Sociology, we should also sociologically consider it, as well as other neighbour and potentially rival disciplines. In this paper it is argued that, contrary to other scientific fields, Sociology lives in an environment of permanently renewed crisis. Different authors and traditions have indeed asserted exactly that, while based on entirely diverse assumptions. In order to justify the characteristic traits of today’s crisis, we try to list some of the little demons that have contributed to the current situation: 1) The hagiographic syndrome; 2) The

2011

and tracking their changing characteristics. Sociology is one of several social science disciplines and smaller bodies of knowledge which seeks to understand the patterns in social life. There is a broad congruence between the objective configurations of social life and the components of the disciplines studying them, the body of sociological knowledge is socially constructed and the pathways to its gaining of knowledge influenced by a variety of factors. Moreover, since social life is ever-changing, sociology often has to scramble to catch-up with the changing social world. The chapter introduces the theme and shows how social reality and its study interact.