Public sociology is a subfield of the wider sociological discipline that emphasizes expanding the disciplinary boundaries of sociology in order to engage with non-academic audiences. It is perhaps best understood as a style of sociology rather than a particular method, theory, or set of political values. Since the twenty-first century, the term has been widely associated with University of California, Berkeley sociologist Michael Burawoy, who delivered an impassioned call for a disciplinary embrace of public sociology in his 2004 American Sociological Association (ASA) presidential address. In his address, Burawoy contrasts public sociology with what he terms "professional sociology", a form of sociology that is concerned primarily with addressing other academic sociologists.
Burawoy and other advocates of public sociology encourage the discipline to engage with issues that are of significant public and political concern. These include debates over public policy, political activism, the purposes of social movements, and the institutions of civil society. If public sociology is considered to be a "movement" within the discipline, it is one that aims to revitalize the discipline of sociology by leveraging its empirical methods and theoretical insights to contribute to 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 had an undeniably normativeHanemaayer, A., & Schneider, C.J. (eds) (2014). The Public Sociology Debate: Ethics and Engagement ." Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press and political character—a fact that has led a significant number of sociologists to oppose the approach.
History The term "public sociology" was first introduced by Herbert Gans in his 1988 ASA presidential address, "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. In 2000 (four years before Burawoy's ASA address), sociologist Ben Agger wrote the book Public Sociology: From Social Facts to Literary Acts, which called for a sociology that addressed major public issues.
However, the Northwestern University race scholar Aldon Morris argues in his book The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology (2015) that W. E .B. Du Bois was practicing public sociology long before the term was incorporated into the mainstream disciplinary vocabulary, and that scientific racism prevented Du Bois' contributions from being recognized by the discipline for nearly a century.
Morris argues that Du Bois built the first actual scientific department of sociology during his tenure at Atlanta University, a historically black college, predating the "scientific revolution" of the Chicago school (who are often credited with turning sociology into a rigorous, empirical social science). To Du Bois, robust empirical sociological research was necessary in order to emancipate American blacks from the tyrannies and oppressions built into the racist fabric of American society. Through thorough inductive research, Du Bois sought to dismantle and delegitimize social Darwinist, biological, and cultural deficiency explanations for racial inequality, which were not grounded in empirical evidence, but relied on grand deductive narratives that had no basis in scientific analysis.
Du Bois and his colleagues made use of the scientific method and robust empirical inquiry with the dual goals of turning sociology into a real social science committed to empirical investigation, and using their findings to liberate, empower, and emancipate American blacks from the violence of racist oppression.
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 (1994), while Stephen P. Turner and Jonathan H. Turner argue in their book, The Impossible Science: An Institutional Analysis of American Sociology (1990), that sociology's search for purpose, through dependence on external publics, has limited the discipline's potential.
Today While there is no one definition of public sociology, the term has come to be widely associated with Burawoy's particular perspective of sociology. An excerpt from Burawoy's 2004 ASA presidential address provides a succinct summary of his understanding of the term: "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."Burawoy, M. 2004 American Sociological Association Presidential address: For public sociology. American Sociological Review, 2005, Vol. 70, Issue 1, 4-28.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. If public sociology is to have a progressive impact it will have to hold itself continuously accountable to some such vision of democratic socialism."Burawoy, Michael: "The Critical Turn to Public Sociology", Critical Sociology, Summer 2005.As Mark D. Jacobs and Amy Best write, "The mission of public sociology, in Michael Burawoy's formulation, is to strengthen the institutions of civil society against the encroachments of both state and market." Indeed, Burawoy maintains that, since the last half of the twentieth century and into the twenty first, the political stance of sociology has drifted more leftward, while the all encompassing influence of neoliberalism has dragged the rest of world more rightward. In the aftermath of Reaganomics, the state and market have begun to work in collusion to propagate the ideals of market fundamentalism, replacing the state's role in redistributing resources and providing social welfare services, to one of creating economic opportunities for enterprise. In his view, this will have devastating consequences for civil society, the very subject of sociology itself, unless the discipline embraces his call to unashamedly engage with the world's diverse (and at-risk) publics to achieve some greater good, thus resisting the perverse allure of neoliberalism. One example of this can be seen in the vast increase in adjunct professors in universities and the impact that has had on the inability of professors to publish articles that would give them credence in the eyes of not only publics but also within the discipline itself.
Even in the face of such adversity, many sociologists remain optimistic about the potential latent within sociology to develop an alternative paradigm to the market fundamentalism at the heart of Burawoy's critique. The sociological discipline is dynamic and ever changing, and has a long history of incorporating new theoretical and empirical insights into its analyses, often with the goal of empowering marginalized publics. Indeed, the sociology of work has evolved from processes of adaptation to the study of domination and labor movements; the concepts of stratification theory have shifted from the study of mobility within a hierarchy of occupational prestige, to the examination of changing structures of social and economic inequality along the axes of class, race and gender; the sociology of race has moved from theories of assimilation, to those of political economy, to the study of racial formations; and social theory has allowed, and introduced, more radical interpretations of canonical figures such as Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Karl Marx, and has incorporated "subaltern" subfields, such as feminism and ethnic studies, which have had a significant impact on the discipline.
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, geography and history, and various sub-disciplines, including political ecology. 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 long-term capacities.ssrc.org 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".Calhoun, C. 2004 "The promise of public sociology". The British Journal of Sociology, 2005, Vol. 56, Issue 3, 355-363.
Future Following the 2004 annual meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA), at which Michael Burawoy's vision of public sociology was introduced during his presidential address, there has been continued interest in the topic. In recent years, numerous books and special issues have addressed public sociology, including: Public Sociology: Fifteen Eminent Sociologists Debate Politics and the Profession in the Twenty-First Century (2007), edited by Dan Clawson, Robert Zussman, Joya Misra, Naomi Gerstel, Randall Stokes, and Douglas L. Anderton; Public Sociologies Reader (2006), edited by Judith Blau and Keri Iyall Smith; Public Sociology: The Contemporary Debate (2007), edited by Larry Nichols. Public Sociology and Civil Society, Governance, Politics, and Power (2013), by Patricia Mooney Nickel; and Public Sociology: From Social Facts to Literary Acts (New Social Formations) (2nd edition, 2007), by Ben Agger.