Sociology Under Siege: Threats to Its Academic Standing

• Academic sociology is threatened by conservative politicians, natural science elitists, market-driven governance in the academy, and its own insularity.
• Academic sociology is probably safe for the time being, though there are several plausible scenarios by which it is weakened, usurped, or hollowed out.
• There are (at least) 18 things you can do to help defend and bolster sociology’s standing in the academy.

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Background

As my friend and colleague Carol Petty wrote in her excellent op-ed in The Baltimore Sun following the recent events in Florida, there’s little point in making good-faith counterarguments to bad-faith attacks upon sociology’s value. But let’s briefly do so anyway.

1) Sociology is undoubtedly a legitimate science.

Sociology is grounded in rigorous empirical research that employs a variety of methodologies, including surveys, interviews, participant observation, and content analysis. This empirical foundation allows sociologists to test hypotheses, gather data, and develop evidence-based insights into social phenomena. The discipline’s commitment to methodological rigor ensures that its findings are reliable and valid, contributing to a body of knowledge that informs both academic debates and public discourse.

2) Sociology’s contributions to society are vast and varied.

Sociologists play a crucial role in identifying social issues, analyzing their causes and consequences, and proposing evidence-based solutions. Their research can inform policies related to education, healthcare, criminal justice, urban development, and labor markets, among others. Sociological research has shed light on critical issues such as social inequality, race and ethnicity, gender dynamics, family structures, and the impact of globalization.

3) Sociology (mostly) pays well.

The skills acquired through sociological training are transferable to a wide range of careers, including social work, education, public administration, human resources, and marketing. The ability to analyze social trends, interpret data, and understand human behavior is valuable in many professional contexts. Applied sociologists working outside the academy are typically paid very well. Academic sociologists fare worse–but, as my friend and colleague Marisa Allison is fond of pointing out, this is because the academy has flooded its own labor market, churning out far more graduate students than there are positions in the academy to fill them, thus driving down the wages professors are able to command.

4) Sociology is good for personal development.

Sociology, as a discipline, offers invaluable insights into the complexities of human societies, cultures, and behaviors. It equips students with critical thinking skills, a deeper understanding of diversity and inequality, and the ability to analyze social structures and their impacts on individuals and groups. Sociologists learn to question assumptions, analyze social patterns, and appreciate the perspectives of individuals from different backgrounds. These skills are not only essential for personal development but also for fostering a more informed and empathetic citizenry.

Identifying Threats

If sociology is so great, why does its position in the academy feel so precarious? There are, I believe, four main threats to sociology’s standing in the academy.

1) Conservative Politicians

I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that conservatives have an axe to grind with sociology. I wrote at length about this in my post about the sociological imagination:

• Conservatives tend to blame individuals for their lot in life. Mills explicitly warns against this tendency to overemphasize individual factors and underemphasize the broader structural factors.
• The worldview of conservatism, with its deference to tradition and belief in a largely just world with a few necessary evils sprinkled in, resembles that of functionalism.
• By contrast, there is no deference to tradition in sociology. Every tradition has a history, and we cannot assume that history has been just. Nor should we assume there is any authority whatsoever in “the way things have always been done.”

These are not small differences. They are fundamental to the way both parties see the world. I don’t think there’s any argument that functionalism was a fundamentally conservative viewpoint. Millsian sociology (which is all sociology today) is fundamentally liberal. That’s why there are so few conservative sociologists. Even if one starts out conservative, one has to be trained not to simply take for granted that which conservatives insist must be taken for granted.

It makes sense, therefore, that as long as this is the case, conservative politicians will seek to erode the influence of sociology.

2) Natural Science Elitists

These are the natural scientists who are so wedded to the experimental method as the only valid way to acquire scientific knowledge that they cannot fathom any other way. I wrote at length about why this belief is misguided in my post, “Demystifying Sociology: What it is and why you should know:”

When we set out to study “society” or “the social,” we quickly run into a significant problem: The experiment, the gold standard of the scientific method, doesn’t work very well.

What sociologists study just isn’t as static, objective, manipulable, or replicable as what physical scientists study. Let’s look at each of these in turn:

• The laws of nature are mostly static. By contrast, the social world is dynamic, constantly in flux. Even if you take an accurate measurement of a social phenomenon at one time and place, there’s no guarantee it will be the same if you measure again, or try to find the same phenomenon elsewhere.
• Some things about society and social behavior are objective. But others are quite hard to define. For example, how do you measure “social support” in a consistent, comprehensive way that takes into account all the ways people can be supported across nations and cultures?
• Experiments require manipulable variables. They require a control group and an experimental group identical in every way, except the experimental group receives a treatment the control group does not. It’s difficult to make this work in practice in sociological studies. It may not be possible or desirable to divide subjects into two groups. People may change their behavior if they know they’re being experimented on. Depending on what’s being studied, experimenting on human subjects may even be unethical.
• Because it’s so hard to generalize findings to different times and places, it’s also hard to replicate results. With very little equipment, I can confirm experimentally that the earth’s gravity accelerates at 9.8 m/s/s. But I will never do a two-year observational study in a California high school or interview political dissidents in Myanmar. Sociologists simply have to trust each other’s results in a way other scientists do not.

As a result, sociology can’t afford to be too methodologically picky. Sure, we need to insist that those methods are as systematic and rigorous as possible, just as any good scientists would. But often, sociologists are dealing with suboptimal data with unclear generalizability.

That means sociologists must be skilled at understanding the limitations of their data, cleverly put puzzle pieces together even when some of the pieces are missing, and take great care not to overstate their conclusions. This is just how science has to be when you’re studying something as enormous, complicated, messy, and resistant to experimental methods as society.

This threat should not be underestimated. Another recent but far less publicized development (at least outside of academia) is the recent turmoil at the scholarly journal, Theory and Society:

• Its publisher, Springer, unilaterally fired Theory and Society‘s editor in chief without consulting the rest of the editorial team. The whole editorial board resigned in protest.
• The new editors in chief released a statement in which they characterized current sociological theory as little more than “righteous anger” and insisted sociology “must be [more] eager to glean valuable insights from fields such as biology, zoology, behavioral genetics, or cognitive psychology/neuroscience.”
• Unless I’m out of the loop, this hostile takeover appears to be a fait accompli under a new editorial board consisting of scholars like evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker. (The folks over at the Scatterplot blog have done a great job covering this brouhaha.)

3. Market-Driven Governance in the Academy

There’s little doubt that the exclusion of sociology from general education requirements in Florida’s state universities is indicative of a larger trend that threatens the humanities and social sciences. This trend is characterized by a growing emphasis on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields and a corresponding devaluation of disciplines that focus on critical thinking, cultural understanding, and social analysis.

As noted by Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth in their book, The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom, there is a concerning shift in higher education towards a more utilitarian and market-driven approach. This approach prioritizes fields that are perceived to have more direct economic benefits, often at the expense of disciplines like sociology that are deemed less immediately practical.

In other words, it’s not just conservative politicians and natural science elitists who have it out for sociology. University administrators, ever more concerned with their bottom line, are hungry to slash sociology budgets at the slightest possible excuse. Academic sociology must increasingly justify its existence not through its contributions to society, but through its contributions to the university’s bank accounts.

4. Sociology’s Own Insularity

It’d be great if we could stop here and attribute all of sociology’s woes to external factors. But the truth is, we sociologists bear some responsibility for our precarious position within the academy and our lack of influence outside it:

• We know all about the dynamics of ingroups and outgroups, the development of subcultures, and why specialized groups tend to develop their own jargon. But we do a poor job combating it within our own ranks.
• The incentive structure of colleges and universities prioritizes engagement in the ivory tower rather than public outreach. As a result, few are willing to invest the time and effort to engage with the public.
• It’s not just that we lack the public standing of other social sciences like psychology, political science, or economics. We are so insular that most non-sociologists don’t even know what sociology is!

I entered graduate school believing I would be a professor one day. But I was fortunate enough to earn my doctorate from George Mason University, whose doctoral program emphasizes public sociology. I quickly realized I wasn’t concerned at all about the state of scholarly sociological research. There are so many sociologists out there doing amazing work, and they are going to be just fine without me. What did concern me was the lack of engagement between sociologists and the broader public, especially in these crazy times we live in.

That’s why I decided not to work in the academy. And that’s why I decided to found this site, which I hope will become a valuable resource for thousands of sociologists and non-sociologists alike. (Please visit often, engage in the comments, and sign up for access to even more great content!)

What’s the worst that could happen?

The combined forces of conservative grievance, natural science elitism, and market-driven university governance should not be taken lightly. It’s not hard to imagine an entrepreneurial and “disruptive” university president wondering why his or her university should bother to have sociology around at all.

Whether they would succeed in their quest is a different matter. More likely, I think, is that sociology could be significantly weakened over time by these combined forces, leading to a transformation in which sociology is not “dead” but is increasingly forced to merge with other disciplines, to the point where it ceases to be its own entity.

I can imagine two possible routes by which this could happen. Let’s call them “the philosophy route” and “the criminology route.“

The Philosophy Route

Before the twentieth century, philosophy was the catch-all discipline for all forms of social scientific inquiry. But when the modern social sciences came to be, many forms of inquiry that previously happened under the umbrella of philosophy migrated to other disciplines. Philosophy of course remains a viable and important field of study, but one that has been significantly hollowed out compared to its heyday.

With continual advances in neuroscientific imaging increasingly encroaching upon psychology, it seems only a matter of time before neuroscience will come along to take a big bite out of what is now considered sociology. Computational social sciences, too, are poised to make exciting contributions and, at the same time, may shrink the footprint of contemporary sociology.

What will remain of sociology as these new disciplines make inroads into territories once occupied solely by sociologists? It’s hard to say. Surely something will remain. But what remains may resemble what philosophy has turned into–less a vast expanse of diverse topics, and more a disconnected smattering of niche topics (logic, ethics, epistemology, etc.) that have not been usurped by some other discipline.

The Criminology Route

In the 1950s and 1960s, one of the major topics of sociology was deviance. The study of how and why people choose to deviate from norms was one of the most vibrant areas of study.

Today, there are still courses on the sociology of deviance. (The first university-level course I ever taught, way back in 2009, was a deviance class.) But as an area of current research, it is pretty much defunct.

What happened? In a word: criminology. This multidisciplinary field exploded between 1960 and 2000, borrowing heavily from sociology but also other social sciences like psychology, political science, economics, social work, and law. Scholars simply found it made more sense to study crime and deviant behavior topically, drawing upon the combined knowledge of all relevant disciplines, than it did to have multiple separate and siloed literatures housed in each discipline.

The success of criminology raises the possibility that sociology will be increasingly absorbed into other topical disciplines. What sense does it make to have a separate sociology of education distinct from the field of education, for example? Why not simply absorb the sociology of education into education? Or the sociology of race into African American Studies, Asian American Studies, et al.?

In this scenario, sociology would not be hollowed out but rather spread out among many different disciplines. It would require quite a bit of reorganization for the entire academy to become topically focused in this manner. But it is a distinct possibility.

What can you do to defend sociology?

Not to get too sentimental, but I believe sociology is a gift to humanity. Here is a science that spans the smallest interaction and the largest social structures, opens people’s eyes to their place in the world, and tells us how everything is connected. Even if it is one day expelled from the academy, I don’t believe its spirit can ever be stamped out. It will simply reorganize and find a different mode of expression.

Defending sociology from various forces that seek to weaken or defeat it requires a multifaceted approach. Here are several strategies that individuals and groups can employ to support and strengthen the discipline:

1. Advocate for Sociology’s Relevance: Articulate the importance of sociology in understanding and addressing societal issues. Highlight the discipline’s contributions to policy, social justice, and public understanding.
2. Engage in Public Sociology: Increase the visibility of sociological research by engaging with the media, writing op-eds, and using social media platforms to disseminate findings and insights to a broader audience.
3. Collaborate with Other Disciplines: Foster interdisciplinary collaborations to demonstrate the value of sociological perspectives in addressing complex problems and to counter the notion that natural sciences are the only legitimate sources of knowledge.
4. Strengthen Sociology Curricula: Ensure that sociology programs offer a robust and relevant curriculum that equips students with critical thinking skills and practical knowledge, making the discipline more attractive to prospective students and university administrators.
5. Support Sociological Associations: Participate in and support professional associations, such as SSSP (my personal preference) or ASA, which advocate for the discipline at the national and international levels.
6. Engage with Policymakers: Develop relationships with policymakers and provide sociological insights to inform evidence-based policy decisions, demonstrating the practical value of the discipline.
7. Promote Diversity and Inclusion: Highlight sociology’s role in understanding and addressing issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion, which are increasingly recognized as important in academia and beyond.
8. Foster Community Engagement: Encourage sociologists to engage with local communities, applying their research to address community issues and demonstrating the discipline’s relevance to everyday life.
9. Support Early-Career Sociologists: Mentor and support early-career sociologists, helping them navigate the challenges of the academic job market and encouraging them to pursue innovative research.
10. Advocate for Research Funding: Lobby for increased funding for sociological research from government agencies, foundations, and other sources, emphasizing the discipline’s contributions to societal well-being.
11. Organize Conferences and Workshops: Host events that showcase the latest sociological research and provide opportunities for networking and collaboration, raising the profile of the discipline.
12. Publish Accessible Research: Encourage the publication of sociological research in accessible formats and venues, making it easier for non-specialists to understand and appreciate the discipline’s insights.
13. Challenge Misconceptions: Actively counter misconceptions and stereotypes about sociology, emphasizing the rigor and relevance of sociological research.
14. Build Alliances with Stakeholders: Form alliances with organizations, community groups, and other stakeholders who can benefit from and support sociological research.
15. Promote Sociology in Education: Advocate for the inclusion of sociology in high school curricula and general education requirements at the college level, exposing a wider audience to the discipline.
16. Support Academic Freedom: Defend academic freedom and the autonomy of sociology departments against external pressures from politicians, administrators, or other groups.
17. Cultivate Alumni Networks: Engage sociology alumni in supporting the discipline, whether through advocacy, funding, or mentorship.
18. Develop Applied Sociology Programs: Create programs that emphasize the applied aspects of sociology, preparing students for careers in which they can use sociological knowledge to effect change.

By employing these strategies, individuals and groups can help defend sociology from forces that seek to weaken or defeat it, ensuring that the discipline continues to thrive and contribute to a deeper understanding of social phenomena.

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I did an awful lot of editorializing in this post! What did you agree or disagree with? Did I leave out anything important? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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