History
The term "public sociology" was first introduced by Herbert Gans, in a 1988 address entitled "Sociology in America: The Discipline and the Public." For Gans, primary examples of public sociologists included David Riesman, author of The Lonely Crowd, one of the best-selling books of sociology ever to be written, and Robert Bellah, the lead author of another best-selling work, Habits of the Heart. In 2000, sociologist Ben Agger wrote a book entitled Public Sociology: From Social Facts to Literary Acts which called for a sociology that addressed major public issues. Since Michael Burawoy's 2004 Presidency of the American Sociological Association on a public sociology platform the phrase has received a great deal of attention and debate.
Debates over public sociology have rekindled questions concerning the extra-academic purpose of sociology. Public sociology raises questions about what sociology is and what its goals ought to (or even could) be. Such debates - over science and political advocacy, scholarship and public commitment - have a long history in American sociology and in American social science more generally. Historian Mark C. Smith, for instance, has investigated earlier debates over the purpose of social science in his book, Social Science in the Crucible: The American Debate over Objectivity and Purpose,1918-1941 (Duke University Press, 1994). And Stephen Park Turner and Jonathan H. Turner showed how the discipline's search for a purpose, through dependence on external publics, has limited Sociology's potential in their book, The Impossible Science: An Institutional Analysis of American Sociology (Sage, 1990).
Read more about this topic: Public Sociology
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“The reverence for the Scriptures is an element of civilization, for thus has the history of the world been preserved, and is preserved.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Like their personal lives, women’s history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others.”
—Elizabeth Janeway (b. 1913)