Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology 2nd Edition.

Oxford: Wiley

Sociology
Gerard Delanty

Keywords
Disciplinarity; globalization; public sociology; Weber; Durkheim

Abstract
Sociology is a form of social inquiry that takes wide-ranging forms. As is the case with many
disciplines, it is contested and there is no generally accepted definition of what constitutes
sociology. As a social science, sociology can be described as evidence-based social inquiry into the
social world and informed by conceptual frameworks and established methodological approaches.
Sociology is the only science specifically devoted to the study of society in the broad sense of the
term, meaning the social world and the open field of the social. Like many of the social and human
sciences it does not have a clearly defined subject matter. Sociology is a versatile and resilient
discipline that takes many forms. One of its enduring characteristics is that it brings to bear on the
study of the social world a general perspective born of the recognition that the sum is greater than
the parts.

Sociology is a form of social inquiry that takes wide-ranging forms. As is the case with many
disciplines, it is contested and there is no generally accepted definition of what constitutes
sociology. But we should not draw the conclusion that the contested and diverse nature of
sociology amounts to the absence of any sense of self-understanding and that the discipline has
lapsed into irreversible fragmentation. Sociology can be partly defined by citing examples of what
sociologists actually do, but it can also be defined by referring to some of the major intellectual
statements of the discipline, such as classic works or theoretical and methodological approaches
that are characteristically sociological. To begin, it is helpful to look at sociology in terms of its
subject matter, its approach, and some of the classical works that have shaped the discipline.
Many disciplines have a clearly defined subject matter, although very often this is due to the
absence of methodological scrutiny and uncritical consensus, as in the general view that "the past"
is the subject domain of historians while political scientists study "politics." Sociologists generally
have a tougher time in defending their territory than other disciplines, even though they
unhesitatingly take over on the territory of others. Sociology's subject domain can arguably be said
to be the totality of social relations or simply "society," which Durkheim said was a reality sui
generis. As a reality in itself the social world is more than the sum of its parts. There has been little
agreement on exactly what these parts are, with some positions arguing that the parts are social
structures and others claiming that society is simply made up of social actors and thus the subject
matter of sociology is social action. The emphasis on the whole being greater than the sum of the
parts has led some sociologists to the view that sociology is defined by the study of the relations
between the different parts of society. This insight has tended to be reflected in a view of societ y as
a movement or process. It would not be inaccurate to say that sociology is the social science
devoted to the study of modern society.
In terms of theory and methodology, sociology is highly diverse. The paradigms that Thomas Kuhn
believed to be characteristic of the history of science are more absent from sociology than from
other social sciences. Arguably, anthropology and economics have more tightly defined
methodological approaches than sociology. As a social science, sociology can be described as
evidence-based social inquiry into the social world and informed by conceptual frameworks and
established methodological approaches. But what constitutes evidence varies depending on whether
quantitative or qualitative approaches are adopted, although such approaches are not distinctively
sociological. There is also considerable debate as to the scientific status of sociology, which was
founded to be a social science distinct from the natural sciences and distinct from the human
sciences. The diversity of positions on sociology today is undoubtedly a matter of where sociology
is deemed to stand in relation to the experimental and human sciences. While it is generally
accepted that sociology is a third science, there is less consensus on exactly where the limits of this
space should be drawn. This is also a question of the relation of sociology to its subject matter: is it
part of its object, as in the hermeneutical tradition; is it separate from its object, as in the positivist
tradition; or is it a mode of knowledge connected to its object by political practice, as in the radical
tradition?
A discipline is often shaped by its founding figures and a canon of classical works. It is generally
accepted today that the work of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim has given to sociology a classical
framework. However, whether this canon can direct sociological research today is highly
questionable and mostly it has been relegated to the history of sociology, although there are
attempts to make classics relevant to current social research (Shilling & Mellor 2001). Such
attempts, however, misunderstand the relation between the history of a discipline and the actual
practice of it. Classic works are not of timeless relevance, but offer points of reference for the
interpretation of the present and milestones in the history of a discipline. For this reason the canon
is not stable and should also not be confused with social theory: it was Parsons in the 1930s who
canonized Weber and Durkheim as founding fathers; in the 1970s Marx was added to the list – due
not least to the efforts of Giddens – and Spencer has more or less disappeared; in the 1980s Simmel
was added and in the present day there is the rise of contemporary classics, such as Bourdieu,
Bauman, Luhmann, Habermas, and Foucault, and there are recovered classics, such as Elias and
Tarde. It is apparent from a cursory look at the classics that many figures were only later invented
as classical sociologists to suit whatever project was being announced. The word "invented" is not
too strong here: Marx did not see himself as a sociologist, Weber was an economic historian and
rarely referred to sociology as such, and Foucault was a lapsed psychiatrist; all of them operated
outside disciplinary boundaries. Durkheim and Simmel had a stronger sociological self-
understanding.
The impact of Foucault on sociology today is a reminder that sociology continues to change,
absorbing influences from outside the traditional discipline. The range of methodological and
theoretical approaches has not led to a great deal of synthesis or consensus on what actually defines
sociology. Since the so-called cultural turn in the social sciences, much of sociology takes place
outside the discipline itself, in cultural studies, criminology, women's studies, development studies,
demography, human geography, and planning, as well as in the other social and human sciences.
This is increasingly the case with the rise of interdisciplinarity and more so with post-disciplinarity,
wherein disciplines do not merely relate to each other but disappear altogether. Few social science
disciplines have made such an impact on the wider social and human science as sociology, a
situation that has led to widespread concern that sociology may be disappearing into those
disciplines that it had in part helped to create (Scott 2005).
Origins, Trajectories, and National Traditions
Sociology today still remains in the shadow of its origin. As Levine (1995) has pointed out,
sociology has always continued to return to its history and all the major schools have elaborated
trajectories of their own history. So the story of the emergence of sociology is often inseparable
from the attempt to define sociology.
In the most general sense sociology arose as a mode of knowledge concerned with the moral
problems of modernity. The origins of sociology go back to the discovery of the existence of the
social as a specific reality independent of the state and the private domain of the household. The
eighteenth century marks the emergence of social theory as a distinctive form of intellectual inquiry
and which gradually becomes distinguished from political theory. The decline of the court society
and the rise of civil society suggested the existence of the social as a distinctive object of
consciousness and reflection. Until then it was not clear of what "society" consisted other than the
official culture of the court society. By the eighteenth century it was evident that there was indeed
an objective social domain that could be called "society" with which was associated the public.
This coincided with the rise of sociology.
One of the first major works in the emergence of sociology was Montesquieu's The Spirit of the
Laws, which brought about the transformation of political theory into sociology. The central theme
in this work, which was published in 1748, was that society is the source of all laws. Society was
expressed in the form of conditioning influences on people, shaping different forms of life.
Durkheim claimed that the notion of an underlying spirit or ethos that pervades social institutions
was a resonating theme in modern sociological thought from Montesquieu – a tread that is also
present in Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The Spirit of the Laws
demonstrated the sociological notion that social laws are socially and historically variable, but not
to a point that human societies have nothing in common. According to Montesquieu, who was
acutely aware of the diversity of societies, they differ most notably according to geographical
factors, which have a conditioning influence in norms, morals, and character. His empirical method
demonstrated a connection between climate and social customs and gave great attention to the
material condition of life. It was this use of the empirical method to make testable hypotheses that
Durkheim admired and which had a lasting influence on French sociology to Bourdieu and beyond.
Although generally regarded as one of the founders of modern political philosophy, Rousseau
anticipated many sociological theories. He was one of the first to identify society as the source of
social problems. In the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, published in 1755, he argued that
inequality is not a natural characteristic, but a socially created one for which individuals themselves
are not responsible. The notion of the "general will" – itself based on Montesquieu's "spirit of the
laws" – influenced Durkheim's concept of collective representations. The general will signified the
external normative and symbolic power of collective beliefs. But Rousseau's enduring legacy is the
theory of the social contract, which can be seen as an early notion of community as the basis of
society and the state as a political community. In his most famous work, The Social Contract,
published in 1762, he postulated the existence of the social contract to describe the social bond that
makes society possible.
The discipline of sociology has been strongly influenced by the French sociological tradition, for in
France social science – where the term first arose – was more advanced as an officially recognized
activity. Auguste Comte coined the term sociology to refer to the science of social order and which
he believed to be the "queen of the sciences." Comte's plea for a positivistic sociology must be seen
in the context of the age, where social inquiry was largely associated with the speculative
approaches of Enlightenment intellectuals and the officers of the restored ancien régime. Against
the negative critiques of the intellectuals, Comte wished sociology to be a positive science based on
evidence rather than speculation. But his legacy was his notion of sociology as the queen of the
sciences. In this grandiose vision of sociology, the new science of modernity not only encapsulated
positivism, but it also stood at the apex of a hierarchy of sciences, providing them with an
integrative framework. While few adhered to this vision, the idea that sociology was integrative
rather than a specialized science remained influential and has been the basis of the idea of
sociology as a science that does not have its own subject matter but interprets the results of other
sciences from the perspective of a general science of society. From the nineteenth century this
general conception of sociology became linked with the problem of the moral order of society in
the era of social and political unrest that followed the French Revolution. This is particularly
evident in the sociology of Durkheim, whose major works were responses to the crisis of the moral
order. This was most acutely the case with Suicide, which was one of the first works in professional
sociology, but was also the central question in the Division of Labour in Society. Thus it could be
said that the French tradition reflected a general conception of sociology as the science of the social
problems of modern society.
Attention must also be paid to the Scottish origins of sociology, which go back to the moral
philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, who can be regarded as early sociologists in that they
recognized the objectivity of society (Strydom 2000). This tradition, too, provided a basis for a
tradition of sociology as a general social science of modernity. Adam Ferguson's Essay on the
Origin of Civil Society, published in 1767, emphasized the role of social conflict and in terms very
different from John Hobbes's account of conflict and individual egoism. For Ferguson, conflict
between nations produces solidarity and makes civil society as a universal norm possible. He
recognized that society is always more than the sum of its parts and can never be reduced to its
components. In marked contrast to the prevailing ideas of the age, Ferguson argued that the state of
nature is itself a social condition and that sociality is natural. John Millar's Origin of the Distinction
of Ranks, published in 1770, contained one of the first discussions of social class and can be seen as
a pioneering work in historical sociology. Millar and Ferguson were particularly interested in the
historical evolution of society, which they viewed in terms of a model of progress. But it was in the
writings of Adam Smith that the notion of progress was most pronounced. Smith developed moral
philosophy into a theory of political economy coupled with a theory of progress that was influential
for over a century later. Society progresses in four historical stages, he argued, which can be related
to stages – hunting, pastoral, agricultural, and commercial – in the development of the means of
subsistence. Commercial society is based on private property and the economic pursuit of
individual interest. Smith argued, however, that the well-being of commercial society and indeed
the very fact of society is due to a collective logic – which he called an "invisible hand" – at work,
which ensures that individual actions function to serve collective goals. Although Smith came to
personify laissez-faire capitalism, his concerns were largely philosophical and must be understood
in the intellectual and political context of the age. Like the other moral philosophers in Scotland,
Smith was acutely aware of the contingent nature of the human condition, which could never be
explained by natural law. Moral norms and the rules of justice must be devised in ways that
function best for the needs of society and in ways that will reduce evil and suffering. In this respect
Smith, Ferguson, and Millar established a vision of sociology as a moral science of the social
world, the outcome of which was that the social and the natural were separated from each other and
sociology became the science of the social.
From its early origins in Enlightenment thought, sociology emerged along with the wider
institutionalization of the social sciences from the end of the nineteenth century. In France, as
already noted, it was most advanced and the Durkheimian tradition established a firm foundation
for modern French sociology, which was based on a strong tradition of empirical inquiry. In
Germany, where sociology emerged later, it was more closely tied to the humanities. While in
France sociology had become relatively independent of philosophy, in Germany a tradition of
humanistic sociology developed on the one side from the neo-Kantian philosophy and on the other
from Hegelian Marxism. While Weber broke the connection with psychology that was so much a
feature of the neo-Kantian tradition, German sociology remained strongly interpretive and
preoccupied with issues of culture and history. Weber himself was an economic historian primarily
concerned with the problem of bureaucracy, but increasingly came to be interested in comparative
analysis of the world religions and the relation between cultural and moral meaning with economic
activity. His work was testimony to the belief that social inquiry can shed light on moral values that
are constitutive of the social condition. Where German sociology as represented by Weber was
concerned with the problem of subjective meaning, French sociology was animated by the concern
with social morality. For this reason it is plausible to argue, as Fuller claims, that sociology has
been a kind of secular theology. Underlying both the German and French traditions has been a
vision of sociology – distilled of Comtean positivism – as a general social science of modern
society.
According to Talcott Parsons in one of the classic works of modern sociology, The Structure of
Social Action, Hobbes and Locke articulated the basic themes of sociology, namely the problem of
social order. But we cannot speak of a British sociological tradition before the Scottish
Enlightenment thinkers mentioned above. Hobbes and Locke have been claimed by political theory
and were not influential in sociological thought. Modern British sociology initially emerged from
the work of such Victorian liberal reformers as J. S. Mill and Herbert Spencer. Although Spencer
broke from Mill's utilitarianism, his biological evolutionism led to a restrictive approach that has
now been largely discredited. British sociology has on the whole been shaped by a vision of
sociology as a social science concerned with specific issues. By far the dominant trend has been a
view of sociology concerned with class and social structure. The social relations and associated
social institutions – class mobility, work and industry, education, poverty, and social problems –
that defined sociology for several decades were of course closely linked to industrial society and
the kind of political values it cultivated. Modern British sociology was strongly influenced by
Marxism. Another significant British tradition in sociology was one allied to social policy, as
reflected in the tradition associated with Hobhouse and the London School of Economics, where
sociology and social policy were closely related. To this tradition belongs T. H. Marshall and what
broadly can be called policy-relevant social science. In the British tradition the continental
European vision of sociology as a general social science has mostly been absent. However, it must
be noted that much of modern British sociology was the product of continental European traditions
that had come to Britain since the 1930s. Sociologists such as Norbert Elias and Karl Mannheim
who came from Germany and John Rex from South Africa gave to British sociology a varied
character that was not encapsulated in a specific tradition. In addition, of course, there was the
Marxist tradition, beginning with Marx himself in exile in London. Nevertheless, British sociology
tended to reflect a view of sociology as in part having a special subject matter: class and social
structure.
There is little doubt that the international prestige of sociology in the twentieth century would not
have been possible were it not for the tremendous expansion and institutionalization of the
discipline in the US. American sociology arose out of economics and was professionalized
relatively early, with the foundation of the American Sociological Society by Albion Small and
others in 1905. The Society, renamed American Sociological Association in 1959, in fact was a
break-away movement from the American Economic Association. Small, Charles Horton Cooley,
and William Thomas were the most influential figures in shaping American sociology, which was
closely related to the American philosophical tradition of pragmatism at least until the 1940s.
Comparable to the British reformist concern with social policy, pragmatism reflected a belief in the
public role of social science. Early American sociology was thus shaped in the spirit of scientific
knowledge assisting in solving social problems (Lynd 1939). The twentieth century, however, saw
a growing professionalization of American sociology, which shed its reformist origins. On the one
side, a strong tradition of empirical sociology developed which was largely quantitative and often
value-free to a point that it ceased to be anything more than hypothesis testing. On the other side, a
tradition of grand theory associated with Parsons developed, but it rarely intersected with the
empirical tradition. Existing outside these traditions was the remnant of the early pragmatist
tradition in the sociology of symbolic interactionism, stemming from George Herbert Mead.
This short survey of some of the major national histories of sociology tells us that no one national
tradition has prevailed and within all these national traditions are rival traditions. This has led some
critics to complain that sociology has somehow failed. Horowitz (1993) complains that sociology is
in crisis due to its specialization and also due to its over-politicization. Sociology is decomposing
because it has lost its way. The great classical visions of sociology no longer prevail and the
discipline has lost its integrity. Much of what is called sociology is merely untheoretical empirical
case studies, he argues. Such pessimistic views often depend on whether one believes that
sociology is based on a single method or vision that can provide a foundation for the discipline. But
this may be too much to demand. It is certainly the case that a single school or method has not
emerged to define the discipline, but this could also be said to be the case for much of the social
and human sciences. It would be an over-simplification to characterize the history of sociology as a
process of decomposition or fragmentation of an inner unity guaranteed by a discipline. The
classical tradition was not a unified one and much of this has been reflexively constituted by a
discipline that changes in response to changes in the nature of society.

Institutionalization of Sociology
Sociology has been shaped in three major phases: the pre-institutional period prior to the early
twentieth century, the era of institutionalization and disciplinary specialization, and the current
period of post-disciplinarity. As discussed, sociology arose out of different national traditions of
social science. In the nineteenth century only Comte, Spencer, and later Durkheim used the term
sociology to describe their particular mode of social inquiry. Even with Durkheim this was a pre-
institutional period. Durkheim's chair was in educational thought and much of early sociology was
a development out of economics, psychology, philosophy, law, or history. In this early phase the
disciplinary identity of sociology was formed to a large extent by the question of its scientific
status. Durkheim's Rules of the Sociological Method, published in 1895, provided the first
systematic outline of sociology as a scientific inquiry. Weber's essay "Objectivity in Social Science
and Social Policy," published in 1904–5, provided an additional statement of what social scientific
objectivity consists (Weber 1949). In these accounts, despite their different perspectives and
backgrounds, sociology was established as an empirical science based on objective factual
knowledge. Both accounts (perhaps Weber more so) were aware that the scientific status of
sociology was a limited one, as is apparent from Weber's neo-Kantian styled attempt to qualify the
limits of objectivity. But social science could nonetheless attain objective knowledge. This was a
debate that continued up to the 1960s, when the neo-positivist philosophies of science espoused by
Carl Hempel and Ernst Nagel provided new justifications for sociology to claim scientific status.
The result of some of these efforts was to reduce the scope of sociology to testable hypotheses in
order to uncover the laws of society (Adorno et al. 1976). While sociology was pulled in the
direction of the natural or experimental sciences on the one side, on the other it remained allied
with the human sciences. This bifurcation of sociology led to an uncertain relation to social and
public policy, with the result that sociology tended to enter the period of instutionalization
relatively depoliticized.
The institutionalization of sociology coincided with the formation of disciplines in the twentieth
century. As a profession, one of the early statements was Weber's address "Science as a Vocation"
in 1918, which although addressed to the wider question of a commitment to science as a different
order of commitment than to politics, has been recognized as one of the major expressions of the
professionalization of sociology. The notion of beruf invoked both the idea of sociology as a
profession and as a vocation whose calling required certain sacrifices, one of which was not to seek
in science answers to fundamental moral questions. As a science, sociology is concerned with
providing explanations about social phenomena and in Weber's view it also has a role to play in
guiding social policy.
In its formative period sociology had to compete with the natural sciences. As social science gained
general acceptability as an area distinct from both the human sciences and the natural sciences,
sociology found that its greatest challenges came in fact from the more established of the social
sciences (Lepenies 1988). In Britain the prestige of anthropology overshadowed sociology. The
older disciplines, geography and economics, as well as political science tended to command greater
prestige than sociology, which never held the same degree of reliance to the mission of the national
state. It must be borne in mind that much of social science owed its existence to its relation to the
state: it was the science of the social institutions of the modern state.
The institutionalization of sociology did not fully commence until the period following World War
II, when the discipline expanded along with the rise of mass higher education. The
professionalization and institutionalization of sociology was marked by the foundation of academic
journals such as the American Journal of Sociology, founded in 1895, and the later American
Sociological Review. Professional associations such as the American Sociological Association and
the British Sociological Association, founded in 1951, greatly enhanced the professionalization of
sociology as a discipline, which subsequently underwent a process of internal differentiation with
new subfields emerging, ranging from urban sociology and industrial sociology to political
sociology, historical sociology, and cultural sociology. By the 1960s sociology became increasingly
taught in secondary schools and in the 1970s it became an A-level subject in British schools. The
1960s and 1970s saw a tremendous expansion in the discipline in terms of student enrollments and
teaching and research careers. In this period sociology became recognized by governments as a
major social science and many chairs were created. Sociological research became recognized by the
principal national research foundations and acquired prestige within the university system. In the
US there are over 200 sociology journals, a professional associational membership of some 14,000,
and more students major in sociology (25,000) annually than in history and economics (Burawoy
2005). As sociology became one of the major social sciences in universities throughout the world,
it became increasingly seen as the most comprehensive science of society. This was viewed by
some as a source of the strength and relevance of sociology, but in the view of others it was in
danger of becoming a pseudo-science, lacking subject specialization, since when sociologists
specialize they cease to be sociologists. Neo-positivist philosophies attempted to check the dangers
of over-generalization, while the growing politicization of the discipline that came with its
widening social base led to fears that sociology was too closely linked to radical causes, such as
Marxism.
Many influential sociologists openly questioned the institutionalization of sociology. If the first era
was one of the struggle for the institutionalization of the discipline, the phase that drew to a close in
the 1970s was one that was marked by calls for the political engagement of sociology with
everyday life. Gouldner (1970) argued that sociology needs to be reoriented to be of relevance to
society. In his view, sociology went through four main phases: sociological positivism in
nineteenth-century France, Marxism, classical European sociology, and finally American structural
functionalism as represented by Parsons. Contemporary sociology must articulate a new vision
based on a completely different sense of its moral purpose. For Gouldner, this had to be a reflexive
sociology and one that was radical in its project to connect sociology to people's lives. The purpose
of sociology is to enable people to make sense of society and to connect their own lives with the
wider context of society.
This turn to a reflexive understanding of sociology had been implicit in C. Wright Mills's
Sociological Imagination, which was published in 1959 and was widely read in the 1960s and
1970s. Sociologists such as Mills and Gouldner were opposed to the depoliticized kind of sociology
that was emerging in the US. They wanted to recover the moral purpose of sociology that had
become lost with its institutionalization in specialist subfields. Mills provided a definition of
sociology that continues to be relevant: "The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history
and biography and the relations between the two within society. That is its task and promise" (Mills
1970: 12). This conception of sociology was as much opposed to general theory as it was to
administrative social research. Mills was primarily inspired by the American pragmatic tradition,
which predisposed him to be critical of social science that was cut off from the practical purposes
of improving social well-being.
The vision of sociology articulated by Mills was not too far removed from the continental European
conception of sociology as a diagnosis of the age. In this tradition, which was represented by a
broad range of sociologists, such as the Frankfurt School and the humanistic tradition of western
Marxism, sociology was connected to social renewal and was primarily a critical endeavor. As
represented in the programmatic thought of Theodor Adorno, sociology must recover its mission in
philosophical thought as a mode of critical thinking. For Adorno, the rise of neo-positivism had a
detrimental effect on sociology, which had the promise to become the leading critical science of
what Daniel Bell and Alain Touraine in their respective works called the "post-industrial society."
Habermas (1978) outlined the basis of a view of sociology as concerned with critical knowledge
tied to an interest in human emancipation.
Since the 1970s, which saw the expansion and institutionalization of sociology as a discipline, the
question of the scientific status of sociology became less important. Although major
methodological differences continued to divide quantitatively oriented sociologists from those in
the humanistic tradition, sociology had become too broad to unite under a common method. With
the consolidation of the discipline, sociology developed in many directions. The large-scale entry
of women into sociology in the 1980s inevitably led to different concerns and feminist approaches
emerged around new research fields, which on the whole tended to orient sociology in the direction
of cultural issues concerning identity, gender, and biographies. The shift from industrial to post-
industrial societies and the growing impact of globalization have led to a series of shifts in the
subject matter of sociology. Without a common method, a cumulative theoretical tradition, the
result has been that sociology has been drawn in different directions. While this has led to some
weaknesses, it is also a source of strength. Today, sociology has many different approaches which
together constitute an influential body of methodologies and theories that have made considerable
impact on the wider social and human sciences.
As a discipline acutely aware of the overall reality of society and the historical context, sociology
has been more versatile than many sciences. This has been especially the case with regard to the
"cultural turn" of which postmodernism has been one expression. Sociologists have been very
prominent in developing new frameworks that have greatly advanced the scientific understanding
of the social world. One only has to consider the influence of sociologists such as Ulrich Beck on
the idea of the risk society, Pierre Bourdieu on the habitus and the forms of capital, Anthony
Giddens on structure and agency, Jürgen Habermas on modernity and the theory of communicative
action, Edward Soja on space, Bruno Latour on science and technology, Niklas Luhmann on
systems theory, Manuel Castells on the information society, Roland Robertson on globalization,
and Bryan Turner on citizenship. Sociology, in particular social theory, played a leading role in the
reorientation of human geography around space. Much of urban geography today is simply the
rediscovery of sociological approaches to the city. The shift in anthropology from the study of
primitive societies to modern western societies has made it more or less indistinguishable from
sociology. Anthropology, which enjoyed greater prestige in the past, has arguably suffered a far
greater crisis in its self-understanding than sociology. In this context the rise of cultural and
contemporary history as well as cultural studies can be mentioned as relatively new
interdisciplinary subject areas that have been closely linked to sociology.
This, however, comes at a price. Much of sociology today is outside of sociology. As sociology
becomes more specialized on the one side, and on the other more influential, the result is that it
easily loses a specific identity. Thus, the sociology of crime has influenced criminology where most
specialized research on crime now occurs and which is not essentially sociological but
interdisciplinary. Norbert Elias in 1970 complained of "pseudo-specialization" and the retreat of
sociologists into sub-areas; but he noted what was occurring in sociology was something that had
already happened in other disciplines. It would only be a matter of time, he wrote, before the
"fortress will be complete, the drawbridges raised." Like many continental European sociologists,
Elias held to the Comtean vision of sociology having the distinctive feature of a general science.
Despite Elias's resistance to specialization, sociology did undergo specialization and it may be
suggested that social theory took over the general conception of sociology (Delanty 2005b). But the
resulting kind of specialization that sociology underwent led to fears that sociology cannot in fact
be a specialized science, since what it does is merely to open up the ground for specialized
interdisciplinary areas elsewhere. Thus, specialized sociological research occurs only outside the
actual discipline – it is a question of sociologists without sociology. While some see this as the end
of sociology, others see it as a new opportunity for a post-disciplinary sociology, which should not
retreat into the false security of a discipline. John Urry (1981), for instance, argues that sociology
does not have a specific disciplinary area in terms of a method or subject matter and it has often
been (and necessarily so) "parasitic" on other sciences. Consequently, it should cease to think of
itself as a science of society and enter the diffuse territory of post-disciplinarity (Urry 2000). This is
a contentious position and there have been several recent defenses of sociology, such as the notion
of a public sociology advocated by Ben Agger (2000) and Michael Burawoy (2005) and the various
attempts of John Scott (2005) and Steve Fuller (2006) to revive the sociological imagination. On
the other side, there is a position advocated by John Goldthorpe (2002) that confines sociology to a
narrow methodologically grounded science. Is it a choice of "disciplinary parochialism" or
"imperialism," as Andrew Sayer (2000) asks?
Current Challenges
It is evident that the challenges facing sociology are no longer those that it faced a century ago; it is
no longer a question of the scientific status of the discipline and the need to demarcate a space
between the natural sciences on one side, and on the other the human sciences. Some of the major
debates of the second half of the twentieth century will continue to be important, but will not define
the field of sociology, such as the micro-macro link, agency and structure, quantitative versus
qualitative methods, the nature of theory and its relation to empirical research, the question of
normative critique, the status of evidence and the limits of explanation, etc. Three major debates
have emerged in recent times which capture the current situation of sociology more fully than these
methodological and theoretical issues: the question of the subject matter of sociology in light of
globalization; the question of disciplinarity; and the debate about the public function of sociology.
As the science of society, sociology has always been a contested inquiry. Many of the major
disputes have been about the nature of method and the scope of social science more generally. The
debate about the subject matter of sociology has mostly resolved around issues of the knowability
of the social world. In recent years an additional challenge has emerged around the very conception
of the social (Gane 2004). To a large degree this has been due to major changes in the very
definition of society. While much of classical sociology on the whole took society to be the society
of the nation-state, this is less the case today. It should be pointed out that while the equation of
classical sociology with national societies has been exaggerated, there is little doubt that sociology
arose as the science of the modern industrial nation-state. The comparative tradition in sociological
analysis, Weber's historical sociology, and much of Marxist sociology is a reminder of the global
concerns of sociology. However, as an institutionalized social science, sociology has mostly been
conducted within national parameters. By far the greatest concentration of sociological research in
the second half of the twentieth century has been in the US, where sociology has been the science
of social order and national consensus. While the national institutional frameworks continue to be
primary in terms of professional accreditation, teaching, funding, and research, the global
dimension is coming more to the fore. International sociological associations such as the
International Sociological Association and the European Sociological Association now offer rival
contexts for sociological research.
It is true too that much of what might be called global sociology is merely the continuation of the
comparative tradition, which can be located within an "international" view of sociology. But this
would be to neglect a deeper transformation which is also a reflection of the transformation of the
social itself. While many social theorists (e.g., Urry 2000) have argued that the social is in decline
and others that the social does not coincide with the notion of society, conceived of a spatially
bounded entity, it is evident that notwithstanding some of these far-reaching claims the social world
is undergoing major transformation and the notion of society is in need of considerable reevaluation
(Smelser 1997). Exactly how new such developments are will continue to be debated. A strong case
can be made for seeing current developments as part of a long-term process of civilizational shifts
and transformation in the nature of modernity. It is no longer possible to see the social world
merely in terms of national structures impacting on the lives of individuals. Such forces are global
and they interact with the local in complex ways. The turn to globality in contemporary sociology
is not in any way an invalidation of sociology, even if some of the classical approaches are
inadequate for the demands of the present day. Indeed, of all the social and human sciences,
sociology – with its rich tradition of theory and methodology – is particularly suited to the current
global context. Just one point can be made to highlight the relevance of sociology. If globalization
entails the intensification of social relations across the globe, the core concern of sociology with the
construction and contestability of the social world has a considerable application and relevance.
This leads directly to the second challenge, the question of disciplinarity. According to the
Gulbenkian Commission for the Restructuring of the Social Sciences: "To be sociological is not the
exclusive purview of persons called sociologists. It is an obligation of all social scientists"
(Mudimbe 1996: 98). Does this mean the end of sociology? Clearly, many have taken this view and
see sociology disappearing into new interdisciplinary areas and that it can no longer command
disciplinary specialization due to its highly general nature. This is too pessimistic, since the
Gulbenkian Commission report also points out that the same situation applies to other sciences:
history is not the exclusive domain of historians and economic issues are not the exclusive purview
of economists. In the era of growing interdisciplinarity, sociology is not alone in having to reorient
itself beyond the narrow confines of disciplinarity. Political scientists hardly have a monopoly over
politics. Sociology now exists in part within other disciplines, in particular in new post-disciplinary
areas which it helped to create, but it also exists in its own terms as a post-disciplinary social
science. In the present day it is evident that sociology takes disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and post-
disciplinary forms.
While much of sociology has migrated from sociology to the other sciences, sociology today is also
increasingly absorbing influences from other sciences. A survey of the discipline's most influential
works noted that a large number have been written by non-sociologists (Clawson 1998). This is
nothing new: from the very beginning sociology incorporated other disciplines into itself. Of
course, this is not without contestation, as in the debate about the influence of cultural studies –
itself partly a creation of sociology – on sociology (Rojek & Turner 2001). Sociology is well
positioned to engage with other sciences and much of modern sociology has been based on a view
of sociology as a science that incorporates the specialized results of other sciences into its
framework. As Fuller (2006) argues, today this engagement with other sciences must include
biology, which can now explain much of social life. Sociology must engage with some of the
claims of biology to explain the social world and offer different accounts. In this respect, then,
interdisciplinarity and post-disciplinarity need not be seen as the end of a sociology, but a window
of opportunity for sociology to address new issues.
One such issue is the public function of sociology. The specialization of sociological research by
professional sociology has led to a marginalization of its public role. Michael Burawoy argued this
in his presidential address to the ASA in 2004 and opened up a major debate on the future of
sociology (Burawoy 2005). Public sociology and professional sociology have become divorced and
need to be reconnected, he argues. Public sociology concerns in part bringing professional society
to wider publics and in shaping public debates and it may lead to a reorientation in professional
sociology as new issues arise. However, as Burawoy argues, there is no public sociology without a
professional sociology that supplies it with tested methods and theoretical approaches, conceptual
frameworks, and accumulated bodies of knowledge. Public sociology is close to policy-relevant
sociology, which is a more specific application of sociology to problems set by the state and other
public bodies. Public sociology is wider and more discursive and takes place in the public sphere.
Burawoy also clarifies the distinction between public and critical sociology. The latter concerns a
mode of self-reflection on professional sociology and is largely conducted for the benefit of
sociology, in contrast to public sociology. Critical sociology has a normative role to play for the
discipline. While critical and professional sociology exist for peers, public and policy sociology
exist for wider audiences. Of course, many of these roles overlap, as is apparent in the connection
between critical and public sociology.
According to many views, one of the functions of sociology is to raise social self-understanding.
Adorno (2000), for instance, held that while sociology may be the study of society in some general
sense, society as such is not a given or a clearly defined domain that can be reduced to a set of
"social facts" in Durkheim's sense. Rather, society consists of different processes and conflicting
interpretations. Sociology might be defined in terms of the critical analysis of these discourses in a
way that facilitates wider public self-reflection. This is a view of sociology reiterated by Mills
(1970) and Habermas (1978). In different ways it is present in Scott's (2005) and Fuller's (2006)
cautious defense of a disciplinary sociology. This means that sociology must be relevant; it must be
able to address major public issues (Agger 2000). Inescapably, this means sociology must be able
to ask big questions. The success of sociology until now has been in no small part due to its
undoubted capacity to address major questions, in particular those that pertain to everyday life.

Conclusion
Sociology is the only science specifically devoted to the study of society in the broad sense of the
term, meaning the social world and the open field of the social. Like many of the social and human
sciences it does not have a clearly defined subject matter. This situation often leads to the
assumption of a crisis. Sociology today is often faced with three broad choices. One is the classical
vision of a field that is based on the interpretation of the results of other sciences from the
perspective of a general science of society guaranteed by a canonized sociological heritage.
Second, those who reject the first as too generalist, parasitic, and lacking a clearly marked out
specialized field argue that sociology must confine itself to a narrow territory based on a tightly
defined conception of sociological research and disciplinary specialization. Third, those who reject
the highly specialized understanding of sociology and resist the generalist understanding of
sociology tend to look to post-disciplinarity, whereby sociology is not confined to the traditional
discipline and occurs largely outside sociology.
These are false dilemmas, despite the fact that there are major challenges to be faced.
Interdisciplinarity is unavoidable today for all the sciences, but it does not have to mean the
disappearance of sociology any more than any other discipline. It is also difficult to draw the
conclusion that sociology exists only in a post-disciplinary context. However, it is evident that
sociology cannot retreat into the classical mold of a general science. Sociology is a versatile and
resilient discipline that takes many forms. One of its enduring characteristics is that it brings to bear
on the study of the social world a general perspective born of the recognition that the sum is greater
than the parts.

SEE ALSO: Aging, Sociology of; AIDS, Sociology of; American Sociological Association;
Biosociological Theories; Body and Cultural Sociology; British Sociological Association;
Computational Sociology; Death of the Sociology of Deviance?; Durkheim, Émile; Economic
Sociology: Classical Political Economic Perspectives; Economic Sociology: Neoclassical
Economic Perspective; Economy (Sociological Approach); Environment, Sociology of the;
Existential Sociology; Family, Sociology of; Figurational Sociology and the Sociology of Sport;
Financial Sociology; Globalization; Institutional Review Boards and Sociological Research;
Knowledge, Sociology of; Law, Sociology of; Marx, Karl; Marxism and Sociology; Mathematical
Sociology; Medical Sociology; Medical Sociology and Genetics; Medicine, Sociology of;
Microsociology; Military Sociology; Neurosociology; Political Sociology; Rational Choice Theory
(and Economic Sociology); Religion, Sociology of; Revolutions, Sociology of; Rural Sociology;
Scientific Knowledge, Sociology of; Simmel, Georg; Society; Sociological Imagination; Sociology
in Medicine; Taste, Sociology of; Weber, Max; Work, Sociology of

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