From John Holmwood and John Scott (eds) A Handbook of British Sociology (Palgrave 2014) From the conclusion …”The public university had a social mission and an association with a secular trend up until the late 1970s of narrowing social inequalities (of income and social status). At a moment when the university is being directed toward the service of widening social inequalities, perhaps the fate of sociology is symptomatic of the fate of civil society and social justice. The fate of the discipline matters because it mirrors the fate of disadvantaged fellow citizens whose claims to be recognised as a proper audience for social scientific inquiry are eclipsed by their depoliticised constitution as ‘consumers’. The neo-liberal knowledge regime is continuous with the reduction of society and politics to the market.”
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The British Journal of Sociology
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Michael Burawoy's project of public sociology provoked major debate within the sociological community about the tasks and nature of the discipline. While most participants in the debate are sympathetic to his call for a more publicly engaged sociology, many criticise him for politicising the discipline and claim that sociologists should not devote their work to promoting social justice or certain political agendas but concentrate instead on building an objective, evidence-based knowledge of society. This article argues that neither Burawoy's public sociology nor the so-called scientific sociology constitute a proper way to address the problems of sociology's identity crisis and its growing public irrelevance. It is suggested that Karl Mannheim provided the best answer to the questions of what it means to practice sociology and for what purposes it should be practiced. Following Mannheim's line of thinking, the article argues that the real issue is not whether sociologists should be committed to promoting social justice or accumulating objective knowledge about society, but whether they can offer a comprehensive interpretation of the current situation and develop effective strategies to transform the existing patterns of society.
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