John Holmwood

Sociology as Public Discourse and Professional Practice: A Critique of Michael Burawoy*

In this article I discuss Burawoys (2005) argument for public sociology in the context of the sociologist as both citizen and as social scientist; that is, as simultaneously a member of any ‘society’ being researched and as researcher claiming validity for the knowledge produced by research. I shall suggest that the relation between citizenship and social science necessarily places a limit on sociological claims to knowledge in terms both of what can be claimed and of the legitimacy of any claims, but that this need not be damaging to sociology as an expert practice producing distinctive and significant forms of knowledge about the social world. Burawoys claims on behalf of public sociology take their force from the idea of the sociologist as citizen, but they go beyond this limit in a way that would not only undermine the legitimacy of sociology as professional practice, but also, I shall argue, that of public sociology itself. Ultimately, Burawoy argues for a partisan profession that actively promotes human values that he believes to be embodied in the sociological standpoint. In contrast, I shall argue that political neutrality is central to the corporate organization of sociology, not because social inquiry can, or should be, value-neutral, but because corporate political neutrality creates the space for dialogue and is the condition for any sociology to have a voice.

Realism, Regularity and Social Explanation

Stephen Kemp and John Holmwood, Realism, Regularity and Social Explanation, pp. 165–187. This article explores the difficulties raised for social scientific investigation by the absence of experiment, critically reviewing realist responses to the problem such as those offered by Bhaskar, Collier and Sayer. It suggests that realist arguments for a shift from prediction to explanation, the use of abstraction, and reliance upon interpretive forms of investigation fail to demonstrate that these approaches compensate for the lack of experimental control. Instead, it is argued that the search for regularities, when suitably conceived, provides the best alternative to experiment for the social sciences.

From social rights to the market: neoliberalism and the knowledge economy

Public higher education has a long history, with its growth associated with mass higher education and the extension of a social right to education from secondary schooling to university education. Following the rise in student numbers since the 1970s, the aspiration to higher education has been universalized, although opportunities remain structured by social background. This paper looks at changing policies for higher education in the UK and the emergence of a neoliberal knowledge regime. This subordinates higher education to the market and shifts the burden of paying for degree courses onto students. It seeks to stratify institutions and extend the role of for-profit providers. From a role in the amelioration of social inequality, universities are now asked to participate actively in the widening inequalities associated with a neoliberal global market order.

Explanation and Social Theory

Positivism relativism vertical and horizontal fallacies rationality and action action and structure power and normative order structure, function and contradiction false consciousness and ontological alienation.

The Attack on Education as a Social Right

The essay addresses recent government proposals for higher education in England. It argues that they represent a neoliberal attack on the idea of public higher education. Where public higher education had previously been widely accepted as a social right and a condition of liberal citizenship, higher education is now to be understood as a private responsibility, an investment in human capital necessary to secure positional advantage in a deeply unequal society.

Editorial Foreword: Sociology and its Public Face(s)

This issue celebrates the 40th anniversary of the British Sociological Association’s ‘flagship’ journal, Sociology. Of the ‘big three’ non-specialist sociology journals based in Britain, it is the youngest, with The British Journal of Sociology founded at the LSE in 1950 and the Sociological Review founded by the Sociological Society in 1908 and relaunched at Keele University in its new series in 1952. All three journals have reflected the strengths of British sociology, its healthy diversity and its openness to publication by sociologists outside the UK. Sociology, however, has, in addition, become the recognized voice of the profession. The leading article in the first issue of Sociology was a reflection by the then Secretary of the BSA, Joe Banks, on the first 15 years of the British Sociological Association, including the circumstances of its founding in 1951 and subsequent growth to the point where it could launch its own journal. Significantly, the launch of the BSA itself was announced in a letter to The Times, in which, as Banks says:

Viewpoint — The Impact of ‘Impact’ on UK Social Science

Government funding of research in the UK takes place in three ways. First, direct funding by contracted research commissioned by Government departments (and by local authorities). Second, funding via the QR block grant distributed through the Research Assessment Exercise (now called the REF). Third, funding via the seven research councils and their umbrella organisation, Research Councils UK (RCUK). Each of these streams of funding has been severely affected by the Government‟s concern to reduce the deficit generated by the global financial crisis. At the same time, the Government (indirectly via Treasury strictures and, more directly via the ministry responsible for higher education, the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills) is keen to ensure „value for money‟ for what it funds. 1

Sociology after Fordism: Prospects and problems:

A number of commentators have suggested that the shift from a Fordist to a post-Fordist regime of political economy has had positive consequences for sociology, including the reinforcement of critical sociologies (Burawoy, 2005; Steinmetz, 2005). This article argues that, although disciplinary hierarchies have been destabilized, what is emerging is a new form of instrumental knowledge, that of applied interdisciplinary social studies. This development has had a particular impact upon sociology. Savage and Burrows (2007), for example, argue that sociological knowledge no longer has a privileged claim to authority and is increasingly in competition with social knowledge produced by the private sector and agencies of the public sector. The response of many sociologists to such claims has been to reassert the importance of the discipline as the purveyor of critically relevant knowledge about society. The article traces how the idea of internal critique within sociology has developed to embrace ‘knowing capitalism’ (Thrift, 2005), at the same time as declaring the impossibility of sociological knowledge. The critique of sociology also becomes the critique of critique and what remains is the instrumentalization of knowledge. Where many sociologists continue to claim a special interest in critical knowledge, the article suggests that, in contrast, we potentially confront the problem that such knowledge may itself be facing a crisis of reproduction.

The Challenge of Global Social Inquiry

Calls to provincialise sociology have been criticised as relativistic and self-contradictory. Utilising the arguments of Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Peter Winch, the present paper defends a provincialised sociology against these criticisms and argues that only a provincialised sociology can meet the challenge of global social inquiry.

Rationality and Action

We have seen that the vertical and horizontal fallacies are drawn from the same sort of data and that neither represents an adequate explanation of that data. Since each fallacy derives from the same problem there can be no expression of either that does not involve the other. In the illustrations offered in the previous chapter, modern Weberians were associated with the horizontal fallacy and modern Marxists with the vertical fallacy, but the connections between them can be traced from either position.