A Sociology of Sociology

January 17th, 2008 Posted in Analysis, Sociology of Sociology

Sociology is a social enterprise attached for rations and support to the modern university system. It is part of a long-time absorption of studies of the real world into this formal order. The new specialties have been breaking off from the modernizing medieval studies of philosophy and theology. The shift accompanied the political and economic move away from the the long dominant royals to the bourgeoisie and their worker associates.

Sociology is a direct descendant of the intellectual ferment before and around the American and French Revolutions–Voltaire, Hegel and associates. That’s my guess. People of the pen supported as curiosities by kings, queens and nobles. After, like a flock of hungry pigeons the gang of scribblers, parading as philosophers with an interest in economics, politics and assorted social studies, lighted on the academic world and found an audience among the students of the humanities.

The academic order imposes an administrative cover representing a funding and ideological authority over the knowledge specialists who in turn oversee the formal study of the several subjects into which our total reality/mystery has been divided. The control belongs to the organizing group that represents religions or the state or private entrepreneurs. The faculty, similar to a trade union of craft workers, theoretically has an independent voice, now mainly silent. Though mainly non-commercial the academic organization is constrained by the economic order and has to maintain some balance between income and expenditures. Income comes from student fees, endowments, collections for special projects and grants from both state and commercial agencies.

In its basic form the university remains medieval. The cap and gown rituals, the titles of academic officers, and the ordering of the departments with faculty committees, prestige and income ranks, the measures of achievement in intellectual development and originality. It continues a modified guild system of masters and apprentices. Each graduate student linked to a faculty adviser and a course of study, and responsible for a dissertation that is the intellectual equivalent of the masterpiece.

Each faculty is made up of masters (doctors of philosophy) and assumes the authority to train new members of the craft who on successful completion of the requirements step toward becoming masters themselves.

There are other gates, five years of teaching and research as a junior member and then the acceptance into tenure, perpetual holding of one’s position, and becoming a more senior member of a particular faculty.

Not everyone succeeds. Some drop out, others are refused appointment. It is a flexible system within a standardized pattern. Tenure is the key acceptance and usually takes place when the candidate is well into maturity, middle thirties to middle forties.

So each academic subject and its specialties has its master cadre who through their training of graduate students and the long certification process replicates itself. Almost all professional sociologists are teachers and start and remain within the academic system.

Like among the other university subjects, the certified and recognized members of each department work to preserve and enhance their accumulated and shared knowledge and to train new functionaries to carry the task continually onward. The gathering of scholars and their built-up canon preserves and continues our civilization. In some ways it is a priestly activity. The whole system is also a giant certification process and the claim to the forefront of specific knowledge is buttressed by research projects and publications. The unity in the occupation is in the passage through all the steps of academic certification. This process marks the shared and established identity.

Sociology departments are interrelated through cross appointments. Faculty and students shift back and forth. They belong to formal associations at local, nation-state and international levels with annual meetings, published journals, lectures. Some basic unity is achieved but the system also permits differences in subject emphasis and content. It encourages, even demands, creativity. There are ideological and methodological disagreements and confrontations but more generally the evaluation of the other is limited to students and junior staff. Senior established figures may bicker and fight publicly but this is rare. Overtly everyone tends his own garden.

Now we come to an astonishing observation. Academic sociology and its carriers have at most a truncated array of clients. Exaggerating a bit, we could say that sociology has little or no practice-praxis. Sociologists have no stall at the market. If sociologists were carpenters, the framing for the house would yet to be discovered.

Some university departments like medicine, law, engineering, architecture have clients–a direct demand for service but others like sociology approach an all theory and little or no practice form.

Have I gone too far? Perhaps, but compared to the thousands of degreed economists in government and business and the thousands of psychologist-therapists with their patients, the practical practice of sociology is very limited and even minuscule.

The pool of users starts with undergraduate students. They select from a varied menu within which sociology is included. Most of them smell the topic but do not eat. Those who pay attention still only snack. The complete meal requires participation in the guild. Sociology is usually thought of as a snap course demanding little effort. A soft and insubstantial jelly against the crusty, jaw-breaking physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology, or even physical training. A discouraging and wasteful use of the process.

There are other routes to income and service for the more successful workers through writing-up studies and text books and popular essays. But, as noted, the objective usually is not profit. A comfortable life will do, thank you.

The more useful practice-praxis is approached through special studies like economic sociology, medical sociology, military sociology. In all the more practical sectors of our reality part of the task involves social organization and process. The specialist sociologists reach out to these other workers with offers of useful back-up. You find most of the valuable praxis here. But each of these sectors has an ordinary sociology of its own, home-grown and practical. Sociology offers a bit of candy at most; each form of practice (used by social workers, soldiers, teachers, architects, athletes and so on) cooks its own social meat and potatoes. Sociologists find their most serious and demanding clients are their own members.

Further there is an alternate, though informal, sociology offered by journalists and literati (novelists, essayists, travel writers, reporters and so on). You find their work in magazines or the daily press, in films and stories and notes on the Internet. They do not recognize the established academic canon. They fashion their own methods and concepts independently. They feed very directly into the general ordinary sociology that permeates our society. The two streams of work hardly ever merge or even attend one another. The formal academic system tends to marginalize any contribution from any outside source. Mutual recognition and exchange are limited.

Another group of sociologists under another identifying name (usually in psychology, political science, economics and even engineering) compete with academic sociologists for consulting and research jobs in government and industry. So even where there is a need for service the sociologist by identity and academic right might not be the selected supplier.

The call to praxis was issued by Marx. The call to priestly civil service was issued by Comte. Sociologists are assigned an active role in political economy as revolutionaries or change agents (harbingers and carriers of an alternate order) or as advisers and bureaucrats (the mechanics who keep the current system operational). Even here in troubled waters the unhappy (because potentially violent and destructive) sociological practice is contested by workers from other traditions: medicine (Guevara), professional revolutionaries (Lenin, Trotsky, Castro, Mao, Tito), law (Mandela), political consultant (Karl Rove), religious fanatic/engineer (Bin Laden), house painter (Hitler). It is not clear to me whether Abimael Guzman of Peru is a sociologist or a philosopher. From this side the practice of sociology tries to impose an ideological pattern on the real world. Depending upon one’s view point, practice/praxis can be very bad news.

Please remember that the issue of practice/praxis is arguable. Sociologists acting as an attending cult around their treasured relics can be enough; they can satisfy a cultural function. In a violent and uncertain world, the three monkeys who neither see, hear or speak (advocate) evil can be a relief.