SYMPOSIUM: THE CHANGING SHAPE OF HIGHER EDUCATION SINCE THE 1960S
The Structural Transformation of Sociology
Mathieu Deflem
Published online: 20 February 2013
© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
Abstract The advent of public sociology over the past
decade represents the end of a string of crisis moments in
sociology. Since the 1950s and, especially, the 1960s, sociology
was argued to be in a crisis because the discipline was thought
to be conservative and contributing to sustain the status quo. As
a result, the 1970s witnessed a radicalization of sociology, but
the 1980s saw a general decline of sociology. Upon a resur-
gence during the 1990s, the crisis advocates have come back
with a vengeance in the form of a renewed commitment to a
heavily politicized sociology under the heading of public soci-
ology, a perspective that is now thoroughly institutionalized
and widely embraced. In sociology, the effects of the 1960s
thus began to be felt in earnest some 40 years late.
Keywords Sociology . Public sociology . Sociological
profession . Radical sociology . Higher education
Against the background of the development of academic
culture since the 1960s, I discuss selected prospects and
problems in the institutionalization of American sociology,
especially with respect to the organization of the sociolog-
ical profession and the repercussions thereof for the teaching
and learning of sociology in higher education. I begin by
describing the role of sociology as it was envisioned by the
discipline��s founders. In the development of modern sociol-
ogy, I will show, sociology almost immediately became
preoccupied with the idea that it was not doing what it ought
to be doing and that the discipline therefore was in some
state of crisis. Certain cultural currents of the 1960s ampli-
fied these ideas and greatly influenced the practice of
sociology in the following years, especially in terms of the
professional organization of sociology and its teaching in
higher education.
It should come as no great surprise that the sixties had a
special impact on the discipline of sociology in a manner
other sciences will not have experienced, given the simple
fact that sociology and society are specially connected. The
crisis of (Western) society that was proclaimed during the
1960s indeed also brought about the argument that sociolo-
gy was in a crisis. More striking and, I suspect, much less
well known is that more recent decades have seen a rein-
vigorated response to the idea of sociology��s crisis, with an
increasing impact far beyond what the older crisis guard
may have anticipated and others will have feared. Situated
in the context of the history of sociology��s crisis moments, I
discuss the implications of these developments for the pro-
fessional organization of sociology and its standing at
America��s colleges and universities. I argue that, among
other transformations, a renewal of the moral functions of
education will be in order to restore the true nature of
sociology.
The Promise of Sociology
The word ��
sociologie�� was invented by Auguste Comte as
early as 1838, but the science of sociology did not begin to
develop and become institutionalized until later in the
second half of the 19th century. Sociology as an academic
discipline owes its birth to the endeavors of such notable
classic scholars as Herbert Spencer, William Graham
Sumner, Albion Small, Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies,
and —the two undisputed classics of sociology— Emile
Durkheim and Max Weber. It was readily understood by
these classics, and often also explicated in their written
works, that sociology was both a discipline and a profession
M. Deflem (*)
Department of Sociology, University of South Carolina,
911 Pickens Street,
Columbia, SC 29208, USA
e-mail: deflem@sc.edu
Soc (2013) 50:156–166
DOI 10.1007/s12115-013-9634-4
and that a great responsibility was placed on the practitioners
of the new science of society to take on the right to practice
their duties with all due consideration of scientific rigor and
academic professionalism.
Emile Durkheim (1858–1917), more than any other classical
sociologist, made great efforts to institutionalize sociology as
an academic discipline with its own distinct rules and object of
study within the context of the university (Durkheim 1895).
Durkheim had been educated in philosophy and education and
also took up professorships in those fields, but only to introduce
and practice a new field of study, sociology, that was occupied
with the scientific study of society as a reality in itself. In the
course of practicing his scholarship, Durkheim was also a
teacher and a builder of a veritable school of sociology, with
its own research programs and publications (most notably, the
periodicals
L��
Annee Sociologique and the
Annales Sociologi-
ques), which involved a multitude of sociologists as well as
scholars in related scientific fields, such as history, law, and
criminology.
Whereas Durkheim primarily advocated the role of the
sociological professional by practicing it, Max Weber
(1864–1920) was less directly involved in building a school
of sociology because, hindered by poor health, he held
formal teaching positions only for a limited number of years
over the course of his career. Weber nonetheless contributed
greatly to the formal standing of sociology as an academic
field, first of all because of his broad appeal as an important
public intellectual. Additionally, along with Georg Simmel
and Ferdinand Tönnies, Weber founded the German Society
for Sociology in 1909 and thus had a direct influence on the
institutionalization of sociology.
Most importantly in the present context is that Weber also
explicitly explicated the role of the scientist in a systematic
way. Specifically in his famous lecture on science as a
vocation, Weber (1918) suggested how the graduate student
can work towards becoming a professional scientist, taking
into account certain external conditions but also relying
upon an internal calling to the profession and its mission.
Written as the professional counterpart to his methodologi-
cal treatise on value-freedom and value-neutrality (Weber
1904), Weber��s writing remains among the most quoted
authoritative statements on what it means to be a sociologist
and what the challenges and the rights and responsibilities
are of those who choose to practice sociology professional-
ly. Among his prescriptions, Weber especially highlighted
the duty of the teacher to keep politics out of the lecture-room
and practice an intellectual integrity to rely upon analyses and
perspectives that are located within the province of one��s
discipline and specialties (Weber 1918, 145–146).
In the development towards modern sociology, the name of
Talcott Parsons stands out above all others, both in scholarly
respects and in matters of professionalization. Originally ed-
ucated in sociology in Heidelberg, Germany, just a few years
after Max Weber had died there, Parsons had an initially slow
rise in his career. He joined the faculty at Harvard in econom-
ics in 1927 and, in 1931, moved to the sociology department
that had been newly founded by Pitirim Sorokin. The dynam-
ics of the ensuing internal struggle for domination between
Sorokin and Parsons need not concern us here. Suffice it to
know that Parsons came out victorious because of the intrinsic
contributions of his great scholarly work, no doubt, but also
because of his keen awareness that sociology as a practice
involves a professional dimension as well. In fact, among
Parsons�� major substantive areas of research is the sociology
of professions (especially in the fields of medicine and law), a
specialty area of which he is considered the founding father.
Not content with writing about the professions, Parsons
also worked concretely towards the institutionalization of
sociology and its professionalization in a number of ways.
He was instrumental in establishing and leading Harvard��s
famous Department of Social Relations, a unit that housed
sociology along with psychology and anthropology. This
interdisciplinary experiment lasted for almost three decades,
from 1946 to 1972, during which time Parsons was also
widely revered as the leading sociologist (especially theo-
rist) in the United States and much of the rest of the world.
Whatever the intrinsic merits were of Parsons�� work and
whatever the extent to which those merits were responsible
for his stature among other sociologists, there is no denying
his factual impact in building sociology as a scholarly field
by attracting sociologists into the profession, both directly
via his work at Harvard as well as indirectly because of his
reputation, and giving them a core set of concepts and
shared values of scholarly commitment.
Parsons also contributed to the professionalization of
(American) sociology by founding the specialist journal
The American Sociologist, devoted to professional issues
concerning the community of sociologists (as a counterpart
to the leading journals of sociological scholarship: the
American Journal of Sociology and the
American Sociolog-
ical Review). The professional journal, edited by Parsons
from 1965 to 1970 , was expressly conceived as a forum for
communications among sociologists about professional
issues in order to itself with the self-study and understanding
of the profession (Parsons 1965). But despite Parsons�� noble
intentions, this profession of sociology was not to be.
Sociology��
s Original Crisis
In his historical study of the modern prison system, Michel
Foucault once argued that it was astonishing to observe that the
reform of the prison system was virtually contemporaneous
with its development. As soon as new prison models were
introduced, a crisis was proclaimed, necessitating reform and
the development of alternative models of punishment (Foucault
Soc (2013) 50:156–166
157
1975, 234). A similar story can be told of sociology in the
modern age. Sociology in the post-World War II period had
barely begun when voices could be heard that proclaimed an
intellectual and professional crisis. The trouble with this rela-
tively young science of society was basically argued to be an
absence of a more critically oriented scholarly perspective,
basically the absence of Marxian thought in modern
(American) sociology. An intellectual change was therefore
needed that should (and would) also impact the standing of
the profession.
In Europe, where the science of sociology originated, there
was historically no need for a re-orientation of sociology and
the social sciences on the basis of Marx, because social philos-
ophy and sociology had retained a connection more intimate
than in the United States. To be sure, Durkheim and Weber
mostly reacted against Marx, but they did relate their respective
works to him as well as other classics of social philosophy.
There was a mutual recognition, if not always admiration, of
sociology and philosophy. Following the tragedy of the Great
War, this situation changed and Marx began to be entertained
favorably within the European social sciences. In the 1930s, for
instance, the Institute for Social Research was founded in
Frankfurt, Germany, to develop the so-called Critical Theory
tradition that was developed by the likes of Max Horkheimer,
Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse. Explicitly inspired by
Marx, these scholars sought to respond social-scientifically to
deeply troubling currents in society, rapid change, economic
trouble, and the rise of fascism and Nazism.
In Europe, the Marxist orientation in the social sciences
was always an intellectual undertaking and was embedded
within, rather than a reaction against, the sociological profes-
sion and related academic enterprises. In the United States,
however, the importation of Marx into the pantheon of socio-
logical thought and the re-direction of the works of other
classical scholars in a critical or conflict-theoretical direction
also involved, and was deliberately meant to be, an attack on
the objectives of sociology, both as scholarship and as profes-
sion. Since this re-direction took place after World War II, the
shift in world power towards the United States would not be
without consequence for the standing of sociology on a global
level as well. From within American sociology, a revolution
could now take place with all due consequence for world
sociology. Specifically, since the 1950s, sociology was
claimed to be in a crisis as explicated in some publications
at least once every two decades. I will show that the direction
of these crises and their suggested resolutions have not been
stable and greatly impact sociology in the academia today.
Crisis 1a:
The Sociological Imagination by C. Wright Mills,
1959
In this popular book, C. Wright Mills has little to say about
what the sociological imagination would be other than the
capacity to relate private troubles with public issues or to
bridge biography and history and to do so in a simple lan-
guage. On both counts, of course, Mills is reacting against
Parsons, whose work Mills dismisses as a ��grand theory�� that
is too abstract and insufficiently tuned to analyze conflict. The
leisurely times of the 1950s allowed other sociologists to
make similar critical statements: Ralf Dahrendorf��s ��Out of
Utopia�� (1958) and Dennis Wrong��s ��Oversocialized Concep-
tion of Man in Modern Sociology�� (1961) are among the more
noteworthy efforts. The important consequences of these pro-
grammatic statements are not merely intellectual but were also
meant to involve a reorientation of the sociological profession.
Once power, inequality, and conflict are introduced as analyt-
ical categories of sociological thought, an activist attitude
positioning the sociologist as an advocate of change is never
far behind. Mills (1959, 179–181) explicitly clarifies this role
of the new, radical sociologist as one being directed simulta-
neously at the king and to the public, rather than being a
philosopher-king or a royal advisor.
Crisis 1b:
The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology by Alvin
Gouldner, 1970
In this highly influential book, Alvin Gouldner seeks to
resolutely destroy the Parsonian framework by claiming it
to be conservative. Even more strongly, Gouldner argues
that any endeavor to develop sociology as an objective
science would be doomed to fail from the very start. For
that reason, Gouldner not only condemned the entire world
of Parsons but also a range of alternative theories that were
developed in response to his thinking (e.g., exchange theory
and ethnomethodology). And, unlike Mills in the 1950s,
Gouldner could now rely on a new generation of sociolo-
gists, the generation of the ��young radicals�� of the 1960s,
who had ��sentiments�� which the ��old theories�� could not
meet (Gouldner 1970, 7). In other words, Gouldner argued
that the subjective nature of social life should also be
recognized by the sociologist as being applicable to
sociological knowledge itself. Sociologists should there-
fore translate their attitudes, their sentiments, their feelings into
their work and thereby seek to liberate society and practice a
truly radical sociology.
The crisis pronouncements of the 1950s and 1960s effec-
tively brought about an activist radicalization of sociology
(Lipset 2001). Especially the early 1970s, when the 60s
generation came off age, witnessed the production of many,
more and less radical variations of a new sociology. Some of
these developments were intellectual and some of them were
waged at the professional level.
In matters of scholarship, a slue of radical sociological
writings began to be published from the early 1970s on-
wards. Almost overnight, Karl Marx became one of the
founding fathers of sociology (Manza and McCarthy
158
Soc (2013) 50:156–166
2011). Marxist sociological research began to appear more
and more in the established sociology journals, while new
specialized journals of an explicitly critical bent were
founded as well and major books in the field were influ-
enced by Marxian and otherwise radical thought.
On a professional level, there occurred a radicalization of
sociologists as well, specifically in the American Sociological
Association (ASA). This redirection involved a call for
broader acceptance of more diverse perspectives and sociolo-
gists of diverse backgrounds. The ASA at times engaged in
explicitly political and moral issues and accordingly did not
even shy away from acting against some of its own members.
Two moments stand out. In 1967, a demonstration was orga-
nized at the annual meeting in San Francisco against the
Vietnam War (Rhoades 1981). The Sociology Liberation
Movement sponsored an ASA resolution that called for an
end to the War. The resolution was defeated when a majority
of members voted for the Association not to adopt a formal
policy. Reintroduced in 1968, the resolution was again
defeated. The other telling episode occurred in 1976, when
the ASA leadership, under direction of then ASA President
Alfred McClung Lee, sought to have Chicago sociologist
James Coleman censured by the Association because of his
work on education and desegregation policies. In his research,
Coleman had found that whites tended to move out of the
public schools that had busing programs. The censure effort
failed, but only after a plenary session had been held at the
Association��s annual meeting where posters were displayed
with Coleman��s name appearing alongside of Nazi swastikas
(Coleman 1989).
The radical crisis sociologists relied on favorable demo-
graphic circumstances. The 60s generation of sociology was
notable in terms of size, especially because the optimism
that existed in sociology in the post-World War II period had
contributed to an increase in the number of students major-
ing and receiving graduate degrees in sociology (Turner and
Turner 1990). By 1960, the American Sociological Associ-
ation had more than 6,000 members, more than twice as
much as 10 years before. The 1960s were no doubt a fruitful
decade for sociology, to wit not just the numbers but also the
kind of and, especially to be noted in the present context, the
variety of sociologists produced in those days (see, e.g., the
autobiographies in Sica and Turner 2005).
The New Crisis and the Anti-Crisis
During the 1980s, the decade which the owner of the famous
New York nightclub Studio 54 once called the ��dull age,��
sociology was not doing well. The heyday of the post-1960s
generation was leveling off and the number of students and
sociological professionals was declining. In 1970, the ASA
had again been able to more than double its membership from
the decade before to almost 15,000, but by the mid-1980s the
number was down to about 11,000. Sociology��s negative
growth was a curious outcome considering the renewed
optimism, in a radical direction, that was ushered in
during the 1970s.
More bad news came by the end of the dull decade as an
assault was taking place on the very existence of sociology
in higher education, an event that even reached the popular
press (something very rare for sociology) (Kantrowitz
1992). Among the most troubling signs were the plan to
cut the Sociology Department at Yale University by 40 %
and the actual closure of some sociology departments, such
as at the University of Rochester and at Washington
University in St. Louis. Although it is not clear if those events
were disconnected incidents or if there was a trend that affected
sociology more broadly, the discipline was thought to be in
trouble. In response, a new and altogether different crisis of
sociology was announced.
Crisis 2a:
The Decomposition of Sociology by Irving Louis
Horowitz, 1993
This book by a critical biographer of C. Wright Mills (Horowitz
1983) develops the argument that sociology is in decline as a
discipline because of its ideological leanings, especially in the
Marxist vein, and its simultaneous irrelevance to policy
(Horowitz 1993). Infested with ideology, Horowitz maintains,
sociology is at the same time very fractured and lacking in
cohesion. Moreover, certain areas of study, such as crime and
law, have become subject matters of newly developing fields
of study (criminology, law and society) and have thus been
taken out of sociology, which has, in consequence, been
shrinking.
Crisis 2b:
What��
s Wrong with Sociology? Edited by Stephen
Cole, 1994/2001
Originally published in 1994 as an eight-article special issue
of the journal
Sociological Forum and expanded with an
additional eight chapters as an edited book appearing in
2001, this volume addresses a wide variety of troubles
associated with sociology��s radicalization (Cole 2001a).
The authors chiefly lament the ideological nature of sociol-
ogy and, relatedly, point out various commonplace and
largely unacknowledged intellectual deficiencies in socio-
logical theory and research. The answer to the question of
the book, then, was decidedly that a lot was wrong with
sociology and that the prospects for improvement were not
good. How much was really wrong with sociology could not
even have been foreseen by those who accepted the basic
premise of the new crisis of an ideologically perverted and
intellectually incoherent sociology. For whereas the old
crisis could rely on the counterculture generation of the
Soc (2013) 50:156–166
159
1960s to radicalize sociology, the new crisis had to deal with
the implications of sociology��s decline during the 1980s.
Anti-Crisis: Public Sociology by Michael Burawoy et al
.
(1999–2004)
The final moment in sociology��s history of crises did not
originate or crystallize with a specific publication but began
with a professional event in the history of American sociol-
ogy. In 1999, the then Chair of the ASA Publications Com-
mittee, Michael Burawoy, decided to resign from his
position in protest of the fact that his Committee��s sugges-
tions for the editorship of the
American Sociological Review
were not followed by the Council of the ASA, which instead
appointed another team of two sociologists to edit the
organization��s flagship journal (ASA 1999). The resignation
was Burawoy��s prerogative, but he also elected to commu-
nicate with others about his decision and divulge informa-
tion about the selection process, thereby violating the
Association��s confidentiality policy.
The resignation of the Chair of the ASA Publications
Committee received a lot of attention among sociologists,
especially in view of the fact that the matter had political
and racial undertones as the new editor was projected to be a
person of color and the decision was also hoped, and delib-
erately crafted, to involve a substantive re-orientation of the
journal to reflect more diverse forms of sociology. No doubt
sensing that the time for victory and revenge was upon him,
Burawoy almost immediately following his resignation, in
2001, ran for the Presidency of the ASA. A year later, he
was elected (beating out Teresa Sullivan, then a professor at
the University of Texas in Austin) and he took up the
Presidency in 2003 after serving a year as President-Elect.
Burawoy had run on a platform of a program that he
dubbed ��public sociology�� and which he defined in terms of
sociology��s function as ��mirror and conscience of society��
inspired by an explicitly activist notion that ��the world
could be different�� (Burawoy 2002). By the time the annual
meeting organized by Burawoy under the theme of public
sociology was held in San Francisco in August 2004, the
perspective had already garnered broad support for what
was a heavily politicized understanding of sociology in the
tradition of the usual leftist activism. The meeting was not
only the most explicitly politicized but also the best-
attended meeting the ASA had ever held (ASA 2004).
The precise nature and problems of public sociology
need not concern us here (Deflem 2004a, 2005), but suffice
it to say that public sociology has, since its initial introduction,
continued to be eagerly embraced, in all kinds of meanings
and with all kinds of variations, not only in the United States,
but in many other parts of the world where sociology is
practiced. This world-wide absorption was aided by the fact
that Burawoy was funded by the ASA as its President to tour
the country and many parts of the world to lecture on the
virtues of public sociology. More than two dozen symposia
have to date been devoted to public sociology in academic
journals across the world. In 2010, Burawoy took up a 4-year
term as President of the International Sociological Association
(ISA Website). Considering its global success, it can safely be
concluded that public sociology has ushered in a new era of
sociology, one without any sense of crisis at all. Sociological
radicalization has now been accomplished to the point of a full
institutionalization of public sociology as an approach that can
no longer be objected to without destroying or, at least,
attacking the whole of actually existing sociology itself.
In what follows, I discuss some of the conditions and
implications of this development, especially with respect
to the position and role of sociology in the university.
Sociological Professionals and Professors
The Organization of Sociology The sociological profession
is presently doing extremely well in a quantitative sense, to
wit the increase in membership in the ASA since 2001
(since when annual membership is around 13,000) and the
consistently high attendance at the Association��s annual
meetings (Scelza et al. 2010). I argue that this success of
the sociological profession has taken place with an extreme-
ly underdeveloped group of sociologists who are educated
and skilled with less distinction than ever before. It is not
entirely without merit to suggest that entrance into the
profession of sociology has moved back from achievement
to ascription as an ever-growing group of politicized sociol-
ogists and activists has taken over the ranks of the profes-
sion. Today��s professionalization of sociology has been
enabled by unprofessionalism. The old crisis of sociology
has ended in a two-fold sense: sociologists today are many,
and many are political.
The success of this new radical, highly politicized soci-
ology cannot simply be the result of an increased politiciza-
tion of its practitioners, for most people who practice
sociology have generally always been left-leaning to some
degree or another. Even the older (and younger) guard of
sociologists who lamented the decomposition and wrong
turn of sociology in the early 1990s were themselves, polit-
ically, most all leftists. However, as Lipset (2001) notes, this
generation of sociologists kept their politics and activist
orientations clearly separated from their scholarly activities,
even when the initial impulse to do the latter was rooted in
the former. Once a field of study was selected, at least partly
under the influence of explicit political and otherwise moral
concerns, the further development of theory and research
was conducted scientifically.
But the analytical separation between theory and praxis is
no longer widely accepted today, as political and activist
160
Soc (2013) 50:156–166
agendas are now much more easily embraced by sociolo-
gists in conducting various activities of their profession. The
ASA��s most promoted and visible recent activities, for in-
stance, have nothing to do with the scientific study of
society or the improvement of sociological scholarship
(even though that is explicitly stated as the Association��s
objective in its constitution1). Instead, the organization is
more predominantly oriented at political-activist issues that
aspire to relate to certain important issues of the day.
With respect to its organization, for example, the ASA is
committed to a ��Diversity Statement,�� which reads that it is
the organization��s policy ��to include people of color, women,
gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered persons, persons
with disabilities, sociologists from smaller institutions or
who work in government, business, or other applied settings,
and international scholars in all of its programmatic activities
and in the business of the Association�� (ASA Website). It
would be awkward, to put it mildly, for any professional
organization in the United States that it would exclude any
of the specified categories. But why the organization chooses
to include only some categories (and lump them all together
on some sort of equal footing of repression) and why it
excludes others is far from clear. The Diversity Statement is
also decidedly skewed and outdated. Most strikingly, the
number of minorities in sociology continues to be extremely
low, so low in fact that it must be asked what is wrong with
sociology that it has not been more effective in recruiting
scholars of color irrespective of any structural obstacles and
cultural dispositions. In 2010, the ASA counted only 6 %
African-Americans and 4.3 % Hispanics among its total
13,708 members (Scelza et al. 2010). In contrast, the number
of women in sociology has increased sharply, and since the
early 1990s, women in the ASA and in sociology at large
outnumber men, especially among students.
Among its activist programs, the ASA has passed reso-
lutions against the war in Iraq in 2003 and in favor of same-
sex marriage in 2004 (Deflem 2005). The Association fur-
ther prides itself on having filed
amicus curiae briefs in
several Supreme Court cases (ASA Website). Activism also
rules supreme at the Association��s annual meetings. The
themes of the most recent meetings include such topics as
��Social Conflict�� (2011), ��Real Utopias�� (2012), and
��Interrogating Inequality�� (2013). Politicized sociology
even fills the pages of the sociology journals, where it co-
exists with bland work that is highly scientific in its methodo-
logical approach rather than its substantive orientation, where-
by the latter which occasionally masks political motives.
No doubt, without Burawoy��s introduction of public
sociology, the recent history of sociology would have been
different. But even a professor of sociology at the University
of California at Berkeley needs favorable circumstances to
successfully execute his revenge and launch an effective cru-
sade to take over the whole of the sociological profession. In
that respect it can be noted that the concept of public sociology
had been introduced in American sociology once before,
when Columbia University sociologist Herbert Gans sug-
gested the term, with a different meaning than Burawoy, in
his 1988 address as ASA President (Gans 1989). By Gans��
(2011) own admission, his effort had not been able to greatly
affect the discipline. Things changed when Burawoy appro-
priated the term, an event greeted with initially reserved, but
eventually less qualified enthusiasm by Gans. When Burawoy
had announced his candidacy for the ASA Presidency on a
public sociology platform, Gans quickly sought to remind
sociologists that he had introduced the term (Gans 2002).
Since the success of public sociology following the 2004
ASA meeting, however, Gans has accepted his status as a
founding-father of a public sociology he does not advocate
(Gans 2011). In 2006 he was given the Career of Distin-
guished Scholarship Award from the ASA. The matter over
the proper meaning of public sociology, in any case, is now
mute as a strategic and convenient move has taken place
towards the acceptance of
any kind of public sociology (some-
times expressed in the pluralized version of public sociolo-
gies). Based on the understanding of public sociology, then,
the discipline is now well beyond the crisis, not because a
postmodern condition would have been reached in which no
one can agree anymore (Lemert 1995), but, on the contrary,
because there is nothing but agreement among sociologists as
all are expected to be adherents of public sociology. Those
who disagree no longer belong.
Given the warm embrace of public sociology, in whichever
meaning found suitable, and its continued success among a
large group of sociologists, it can be assumed that the return of
the old-crisis proponents was enabled, in no small measure, by
the impact of the cultural climate that was created during the
U.S. Presidency of George W. Bush. Yet, there must have
been more, for the political turn to the right can only have
contributed to the success of public sociology from about
2004 onwards following the invasion of Iraq, but cannot be
responsible for its initial rise in 1999 when such politically
divisive issues were not yet formulated (and possibly also not
since the election of President Obama, when all would have
been normalized again).
I argue that it is not the political orientation of many of
today��s sociologists, but the relative weakness of their intel-
lectual prowess that must be considered to account for the
contemporary radicalization of sociology. Many sociologists
today have fallen for the trappings of a radicalized sociology,
under the seemingly benign heading of public sociology,
1 Article II of the ASA constitution reads: ��The objectives of the
Association shall be to stimulate and improve research, instruction,
and discussion, and to encourage cooperative relations among persons
engaged in the scientific study of society.�� http://www.asanet.org/
about/constitution.cfm
Soc (2013) 50:156–166
161
simply because they do not have the intellectual skills neces-
sary to think critically about their own activities, to take
epistemological challenges seriously, to differentiate between
theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches, on
the one hand, and the professional questions of the various
sociological crises, on the other, or even to conceptualize the
distinction between profession and scholarship, let alone un-
derstand its implications.
At the organizational level of the profession of sociology,
especially in the ASA, the rise and rise of public sociology
has been able to connect itself with the organization��s turn
towards a market model, the managerialization of its staff,
and an organizational quest for publicity. Rather than orient
itself towards advancing sociological scholarship, the ASA
has been publishing press releases and issuing statements
concerning political and moral issues, while boasting suc-
cesses of the profession in quantitative terms. Examples
include reports on the number of students in sociology
programs, the number of graduate degrees awarded, and
the participation at the ASA annual meetings (ASA
Website). On the wikipedia page, the ASA is described as
��the largest professional association of sociologists in the
world, even larger than the International Sociological Associ-
ation�� (Wikipedia). The statement is definitely the product of
the ASA itself –in 2001 the Association initiated a �� Sociology
in Wikipedia�� project— and a deliberate form of self-
presentation, betraying a market orientation that is amazingly
lacking in geo-cultural sensitivity or even a simple under-
standing of demographics. Otherwise it would have been
recognized that the number of sociologists per capita in the
U.S. is actually lower than in many other western nations.
The marketization of the sociological profession was
already going on for some years before the advent of public
sociology. The development was largely the result of the
flight of intellectually qualified members of the sociological
community away from the time-consuming duties of pro-
fessional positions and, concomitantly, the importation of
managers into central positions in the profession. Especially
noteworthy in this respect is the fact that the position of
Executive Officer in the ASA has since about two decades
now been in the hands of individuals who are primarily
known as managers with highly developed technical skills
and whose earned doctorates in sociology merely serve as a
legitimizing tool. The adoption of public sociology could
rely on earlier publicity efforts that were oriented at making
sociology more policy relevant, for instance by setting up a
��Public Affairs�� division (ASA Website), even when public
sociology defines itself as being distinctly different from
policy sociology. Relatedly, the ASA sells various promo-
tional items —featuring the organization��s logo and annual
meeting themes— such as sweatshirts, mousepads, mugs,
buttons, dog t-shirts, bibs, and infant creepers (Deflem
2004b).
The managerialization of sociology should cause no great
consternation on the part of anyone, least of all the informed
sociologist. After all, it would be intellectually puzzling to
assume that what applies to most organizations under condi-
tions of advanced capitalism would not also apply to the
profession of sociology. As an organized profession, sociology
is an economic entity as well. This is no problem as such, as
every human endeavor, however noble or ideal, needs an
organizational infrastructure to sustain itself. What is more
problematic is that the dictates of the material infrastructure of
sociology have also intruded upon the discipline��s mission and
have redirected what sociologists think about who they are and
what they should do. The ironic conclusion, in any case, is that
the radicalization of sociology has been facilitated by the pro-
fession��s marketization. The success of sociological Marxism is
a product of American capitalism.
The Education of Sociology How has sociology��s perpetual
crisis until the turn of the current century and its resolution
by public sociology��s anti-crisis since then affected the
discipline as it is taught in the setting of American colleges
and universities? To some extent, of course, things have
gone on as before and they may also go on as usual for
some time to come. Courses are taught and degrees are
awarded. But there have been important changes as well.
Confirming what I said about the intellectual standing of
sociological professionals, students who major in sociology
at America��s colleges and universities do not tend to be
recruited from the top-performing categories, as measured
by GPA and test scores such as GRE results (D��Antonio
1992). Especially in recent decades, smart students do not
tend to think of developing a career in sociology. Of course,
our society being what it is, the brightest students will
disproportionately move to disciplines with more financially
rewarding prospects. Yet that cannot be the only reason, for
the post-World War II era did attract highly talented people
even though the stratification of the professional reward
structure could not have been much different then than it
is today. The post-War golden era of sociology can be said
to have benefitted from the urgency that was felt to study
society and to work towards alleviating social ills by means
of sociological scholarship. Yet every era has its own press-
ing social needs and concerns, and societal changes will
always affect academic sociology differently and more pro-
foundly than other disciplines. Today��s problems with re-
spect to such issues as international violence and economic
turmoil can hardly be assumed to be any less relevant to
sociology than the problems societies were facing in earlier
decades. The conclusion must therefore be that sociology is
no longer able to deliver on its original promise. Society is
still relevant to sociology, but sociology is not generally
thought to be relevant to society. The problem, then, must
be at the supply side of sociological education.
162
Soc (2013) 50:156–166
Sociology can only reap what it has sown. Attracted to
sociology because of ill-conceived political leanings and
poorly educated at a time when sociology was thought to
be in an intellectual crisis but also enjoyed the richness of
being able to graduate a multitude of students, many of the
students of sociology from the 1970s onwards could only
become poorly educated professionals. And poorly educated
professionals can simply not be expected to educate well.
Because sociologists today do not even agree on what is
most important to study and what the most appropriate
perspectives and methodologies are, they are accordingly
inconsistent in teaching what they think is most necessary.
The lack of consensus among sociologists what constitutes
good work implies that people working in the most
esteemed schools or receiving the most attention for their
work are not necessarily the brightest (Stinchcombe 2001).
As a result of the poor understanding of the mission of
sociology, politics has now taken the place of scholarship.
Max Weber��s (1918, 146) admonition that ��the prophet and
the demagogue do not belong on the academic platform�� has
been completely lost on a considerable number of sociology
professors today. Adherents of public sociology, in particular,
have done much to advocate the activist sociologist on the
college campus, one of the few terrains incidentally where
they have been able to do so, as their skills as individual
scholars affecting society otherwise are extremely weak. Pub-
lic sociology has even become an area of specialization and/or
teaching subject or perspective at several U.S. college colleges
and universities.2 As a result, left-leaning students are more
drawn to sociology than their conservative counterparts, con-
tributing to a further homogenization of the political make-up
of the discipline (Fosse and Gross 2012).
The effects of the radicalization of sociology are mostly
felt on campus. On the few occasions when public sociology
actually manages to venture out into the mainstream, espe-
cially in the media, the consequences are dumbfounding.
The blandest dribble is presented as a grand act of public
sociology just because it appears in the popular press. Even
a theoretical sociologist esteemed and (rightly) acclaimed as
Jeffrey Alexander recently described one of his writings as
public sociology because it appeared in the
Huffington Post
(Yale Sociology website). The article explains that Barack
Obama lost the first presidential debate with Mitt Romney
because of the ��theatrical failure�� that Obama��s ��gestures
were not eloquent�� (Alexander 2012). More than a month
after the article had been posted online, it had received a
mere 11 Facebook shares and 25 Twitter posts.
Unlike the politicized populists in the profession, sociologists
who remain committed to scholarship on the basis of scientific
standards do not become as well known to the public at large or
to potential students, because the relatively high degree of
scienticity (even when it is low as compared to other sciences)
of their work will be perceived as an obstacle. And when
popular themes are taught from a scholarly perspective, it will
be perceived through the hazy mist of a perverted context. As
somebody who works mostly in the area of law and society, I
can testify to the negative implications of teaching classes on
topics that have a high degree of societal relevance (e.g., crime,
police, terrorism) but that are, within the present academic
context, also easily misunderstood. I became even more acutely
aware of this problem when I began teaching a sociology course
that contains the words ��Lady�� and ��Gaga.��3
Scientifically minded sociologists face an uphill battle
against their politicized and less than stellar colleagues. As
sociologist of science Stephen Cole (2001b) has remarked,
many sociologists are not only ideological but so overtly
ideological that it has contributed to the widespread notion
that sociology itself is all-out and necessarily leftist. Not
rarely enough, the perception among students is that sociology
is not a science and is often seen as or confused with socialism.4
Sociologists who see themselves as committed to a political
cause in their teaching would not wish to see it any other way.
When public sociology was launched a decade ago, Michael
2 After 2004, several sociology departments spontaneously began to
self-identify as having a special interest or concentration in public
sociology. Examples include departments at George Mason University,
Ithaca College, Florida Atlantic University, American University, and
UC-Berkeley (Deflem 2005). Based on an online search, the number of
departments explicitly espousing a public sociology agenda has in
recent years increased manifold and now also includes Missouri State
University, Syracuse University, Saint Louis University, the University
of North Carolina at Wilmington, Salem State University, Humboldt
State University, and Baker University, among others (Google search,
October 30, 2012).
3 When my course ��Lady Gaga and the Sociology of the Fame�� at the
University of South Carolina was first announced late October 2010, it
became the number-one Lady Gaga news story in the world, with
multiple thousands of news reports and commentaries appearing on
the internet, in print, and on radio and television. Sadly indicative of
the public perception of sociology but ironically also confirming the
societal relevance of fame and celebrity, the course objectives were
routinely misunderstood, not only by the sensationalist entertainment
media, but also by certain conservative outlets, where the course was
misinterpreted as part of a non-academic trend in higher education
(e.g., Allen 2011) when the exact opposite was true (Deflem 2012).
In organized sociology, the situation was even more troublesome. The
ASA newsletter
Footnotes published two notices about the course
(mentioning only three media sources) despite the fact that I was no
longer a member of the Association and had not given permission for
the notices to be published. Public sociologists even claim what is not
theirs.
4 An article in the
American Sociological Review (Volschoa and Kelly
2012) was recently received on a blog to imply that sociologists had
declared that Republicans would be bad for America (Science Codex
2012). Even more interestingly, in the comment section, somebody
remarked that ��anthropologists�� should not write such work, especially
not just before a national election, to which another commentator
remarked: ��If only they were anthropologists, then it would just be
90 % non-scientific. Since this was a sociologist and a political scien-
tist this was instead 100 % made up.��
Soc (2013) 50:156–166
163
Burawoy (2002) immediately emphasized the centrality of
teaching and the relevance of students as ��our first public.��
The politicized nature of sociology has influenced university
administrators, policymakers, and the general public to doubt
the credibility of the discipline. The truly sad aspect of such
perceptions is not so much that it is not true that sociology is
necessarily political or even that some sociologists obviously
do not have leftist leanings and not even that some sociologists
still manage to keep their politics out of the classroom. Instead,
it is most troublesome for sociology, as it has to be for any
academic discipline, that the intellectual incapacities of many
sociologists are not recognized and are perceived as a matter of
politics. No science can advance, by definition, if it refuses to
entertain the force of the better argument rather than rely on the
comfort of political expediency.
It is one thing for sociologists to be political and to act
accordingly in their teaching. It is quite another to contemplate
on the reasons if and why this attitude can persist and flourish
in the setting of higher education. To some extent, sociology
has been in trouble over its politics, to wit the discussions on
the closing of some departments. However, in view of the
politicization of sociology on a much larger scale than the few
departments that faced cancelation in the early 1990s and in
view of the fact that the politicization of sociological
education has increased exponentially in more recent years, it
is more remarkable that so many sociology departments in
America��s higher-educational settings still exist today and still
operate as if nothing has changed at all.
It has occasionally been remarked that university
administrators, deans in particular, have rather low ideas about
sociology departments and their faculty (Lipset 2001). A
recent study found that academic deans rate sociology profes-
sors unfavorably on several other important areas, such as
maintaining academic rigor, success in attracting graduate
students, ability to secure grants and publish peer-reviewed
publications, and overall prestige on campus (Hohm 2008). It
has also been suggested that deans hold relatively negative
views of their sociology departments because they generally
attract leftist and otherwise activist-leaning students, lack
consistency and agreement on substantive and methodological
issues, and espouse anti-rationalist currents (Huber 2001).
What deans say does not necessarily harmonize with
what they think and do. If the problems of sociology are
so obvious and so clearly recognized by deans, the important
question is why the departments have allowed to continue to
exist. In this respect, I maintain that it is not the supposed
political nature of higher education that has sustained the
politicization of sociological education, but instead its market-
ization. The former argument is a popular one and is often
voiced in the media or among the public at large: that colleges
and universities are leftist across the board, that they breed
liberals, that they tend to secularize students, and so on. But
this idea is neither descriptively accurate not analytically
capable to account for the development of higher education.
Rather, the politicization of sociology has been able to con-
tinue to exist in American colleges and universities because of
the economic functions that sociology departments can fulfill.
Universities today have lowered their standards of admission
and accepted more students regardless of their level of prepa-
ration. For example, at the University of South Carolina, where
I am presently employed, the number of undergraduates has
gone up from about 18,000 in 2006 to 22,000 in 2011. As a
purely educational matter, the masses of students that have to be
taught despite their relatively low intellectual skills place a
rather distinct pressure on teachers to maintain standards in
the face of resistance. Even for the best teacher working under
these circumstances it is not an easy job to maintain academic
standards to accommodate students and avoid trouble (Becker
and Rau 2001). Political correctness has brought about that
holding a student to an intellectual standard may be perceived
to imply a political act as part of a politics of exclusion. Most
tragically, there are pressures exerted by university administra-
tors towards departments to maintain enrollment. Students of
lesser skill-levels are not only admitted, they must also gradu-
ate. Obtaining a college degree has become a matter of justice,
and the very notion of an earned degree has become a mockery.
The integrative functions that are attributed to higher education
and the need for increasing diversity of the student population
produce additional ironic consequences.
In their comprehensive study
Academically Adrift, soci-
ologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa (2011) indeed
show that there exists a dual structure of students in colleges
and universities today. A large and growing proportion of
undergraduate students lack adequate reasoning and writing
skills. Unfocused and lacking in purpose, they tend to
choose the easiest courses and spend as little time as possi-
ble studying. Professors and (an increasing proportion of)
graduate assistants who teach these courses are pressured,
and often surrender, to give unearned grades. Other stu-
dents, who typically come from privileged backgrounds
and good high schools, are still intellectually challenged
and do learn significantly during their college careers. Ac-
ademic administrators are well aware of these issues, but
their managerialized thinking leads them to accommodate
the situation rather than deal with the problem.
The societal changes influencing the organization of
higher education affect the various disciplines differentially.
It is extremely doubtful that a department of chemical engi-
neering or cell biology will have to welcome a lot of the
supplementary admitted students who lack the necessary
intellectual abilities for higher education. But sociology
and other social and behavioral sciences and the humanities
that are somehow thought to be less challenging are more
adversely affected and have to accept the worst students.
Ironically, ever more sociologists today can fulfill this task
rather well. And the deans know it and like it. Where once
164
Soc (2013) 50:156–166
sociologists feared that their departments would be vulner-
able to budget cuts and lose respect from the university
administration because the discipline attracted the least in-
tellectual students (Becker and Rau 2001), today the exact
opposite is true as administrators warmly embrace sociology
for the very same reason. Sociology is allowed to continue
to exist for fulfilling an economic function. University
administrators have reconfigured universities as businesses
and have abandoned the idea of teaching as a calling. Again
using the university that presently employs me as an exam-
ple, the University of South Carolina in 2012 launched an
��integrated marketing and branding campaign�� in which
students and university employees are encouraged to ��Live
the Brand!�� (USC Times 2012). Under such circumstances
of the entrepreneurial university (Etzkowitz et al. 2000), it is
a lack of morality, not a particular political or ethical direction,
but an absence of any moral guidance that has contributed that
sociology has been able to go on in its own radicalized and
politicized form.
Sociology and Politics
Sociology has historically gone through various cycles, pass-
ing from and to dominant explanations and their opposing
approaches. Today, the cycle of crises has ended as a new era
of stability has been ushered in. I showed that the current
success of sociology on campus is a result of the manner in
which economic changes interact with developments in soci-
ology. Societal changes that are external to sociology (espe-
cially the fiscal crisis) have led university administrators to
cop out to a marketization model and make an irresponsible
economic choice that
de facto abrogates the academic mission
of the university and evades any sense of individual respon-
sibility in the name of a sustained sound financial position.
This culturally weak response has allowed a heavily politi-
cized sociology to continue to exist in the university because it
is intellectually not as challenging and therefore more popular.
Sociology��s politicization is itself a result of the poor intellec-
tual development of its practitioners who, in view of the
direction of sociology since the discipline��s anti-crisis, do
not even understand their proper role as scholars and educa-
tors and do not know better than to have their politics take the
place of scholarship. The fact that politicized sociology is
predominantly leftist in orientation is but a modality of its
deeper causes in a lack or, at least, low degree of intellectual-
ism. The war on science is bipartisan.
External societal changes and sociology-internal dynamics
have met at the institutional level of higher education where
colleges and universities have abandoned their moral missions
in favor of a business model based on the bottom line. A
century ago, Max Weber (1918) already remarked that ��the
American��s conception of the teacher who faces him is: he
sells me his knowledge and his methods for my father��s
money, just as the greengrocer sells my mother cabbage��
(149). Today, the administrators of higher learning ask their
teachers to adopt the same attitude and consider themselves
greengrocers and their students customers. In contemporary
sociology, there are many who comply.
Much of sociology today is too political to attract good
students and intellectually not sufficiently equipped to prop-
erly teach the ones that do enter. What is to be done?
Internally, in the discipline of sociology, what has to happen
is to launch a new crisis, to strengthen the idea of sociology
as a science, to emphasize quality instead of quantity, to
make sociology unpopular, and to relaunch the original
promise of sociology. Sociologists should become more
rigid in their work on the basis of a clear scientific standard.
Towards students, this attitude should translate in specifying
precise criteria for theory and research and judge work
accordingly rather than on the basis of political or humane
considerations (Cole 2001b). Externally, in the face of eco-
nomic pressures, changes need to take place as well. Be-
cause these problems are structural, this task cannot be easy.
Yet, it is necessary that we work collectively towards a
renewal of the moral functions of education.
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Mathieu Deflem is Professor of Sociology at the University of
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Sociology of Law
(Cambridge University Press 2008). This article was written for a
conference co-sponsored by the Manhattan Institute and
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October 2012.
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