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We propose a framework for citizen social science that brings together three reinforcing elements of a research project – scale, citizen-leadership, and publicness – to improve qualitative research. Our framework was born out of necessity; a desire to involve ordinary citizens, in researching public issues, with limited funding. We illustrate the application of our framework using insights from research we have led, involving first, a series of qualitative studies of state and civil society organizations working on community engagement by three separate years of public policy students; and second, a qualitative study on the system for processing salary and injury disputes for low-waged migrant workers in Singapore conducted by over 100 volunteers and activists. Drawing on a review of the literature and our own experiences, we speak to the advantages and trade-offs of adopting this approach and suggest practical methods for conducting citizen social science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The international debate on public sociology has failed to increase our understanding of how we might engage with new publics, particularly potential research publics. Parallel literatures exploring over-research, research fatigue, non-response and public (mis)understanding of sociology can shed light on how underlying boundary disciplinary issues might influence willingness to participate in sociological research. This article explores the case study of parents of people with Rett syndrome, an over-researched group at the centre of competing research discourses following a breakthrough in genetic research. Data from a wider study was used to explore reasons for research participation, non-participation and dropout, including interviews (n = 20) and a brief survey about reasons for non-response (n = 58). An individualist perspective led to interpretations of social interventions as stigmatising and refusal to participate. Parent activists fundraising for and promoting genetic research challenged notions of voluntary groups as being receptive to organic public sociology. While individual benefits were experienced, there were signs of research fatigue from multiple approaches. Finally, the close link between social activism and research participation increased the risk of unwitting exploitation, an issue of concern for organic public sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a critical analysis of Michael Burawoy’s model of public sociology, discussing several of its epistemic and methodological limitations. First, the author focuses on the ambiguity of Burawoy’s proposal, problematizing the absence of a clear delimitation of the concept of ‘public sociology’. Second, the author links the academic success of the category of public sociology to the global division of sociological labour, emphasizing the ‘geopolitics of knowledge’ involved in Burawoy’s work and calling for the decolonization of social science. Then, the author expounds his concerns regarding the hierarchy of the different types of sociology proposed by Burawoy, who privileges professional sociology over other types of sociological praxis. Reflecting upon these elements will provide a good opportunity to observe how our discipline works, advancing also suggestions for its transformation. Along these lines, in the last section of the article the author elaborates on the need to go beyond a dissemination model of public sociology – the unidirectional diffusion of ‘expert knowledge’ to extra-academic audiences – and towards a more collaborative understanding of knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are two theses originally put forward by Michael Burawoy but which still need to be highlighted; the first is the necessity of challenging the assumed neutrality of the social sciences and the second is the necessity of public engagement in the form of encouraging co-practice in society. Burawoy suggests public sociology should play a role in the struggle to protect humanity against the tyranny of the market. I tend to challenge this by arguing that a post-secular and post-neutrality public sociology could only work as a frame of dialogue about the priority of each struggle. Otherwise, it can be easily turned into a target for the criticism of those who do not share the interest in Burawoy’s preferred struggle. The article would also suggest that Ali Shariati’s political rereading of religious ideas not only to adapt to the modern world but also to transform it makes this Iranian intellectual a classic figure of the traditional post-secular public sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses perspectives for the formation of a truly ‘global sociology’, implying active, open, mutually beneficial and equal interaction between sociologists from different locations, countries and cultures, in their joint efforts to comprehend, explain and improve the social world. The study is based on the conceptual scheme proposed by Burawoy, highlighting four different disciplinary practices: ‘professional sociology’, ‘policy sociology’, ‘critical sociology’ and ‘public sociology’. The formation of a ‘global sociology’ demands harmonious development and mutual enrichment between all the four ‘sociologies’, however, each of them has its own path in the global arena. The literature analysis demonstrates serious limitations in the global progression of ‘professional sociology’, while ‘policy sociology’ and ‘critical sociology’ also experience major difficulties. ‘Public sociology’, largely inspired by Burawoy, seems to be especially promising globally due to its key advantages: orientation towards non-academic audiences and a focus on the most acute social problems. However, currently this disciplinary practice has several fundamental constraints: marginality, radicalism, ideological bias and inherent conflict-orientation towards other ‘sociologies’. Drawing on John Meyer’s theory of ‘Scientized Environment Supporting Actorhood’, the article proposes the project of the new ‘Global Solidarity Sociology’, which utilizes the advantages of Michael Burawoy’s project while overcoming its principal limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his call for more public sociology, Michael Burawoy presents a generic framework to describe disciplinary structures in the social sciences. This model is based on a fourfold typology of knowledge which has been criticized by many. However, alternatives have fallen short of providing a convincing articulation of the social organisation and meaning of the intellectual practices the original typology was trying to describe. The debate on public sociology did not bridge differences in analytical beliefs about knowledge production and thus could not be expected to build a consensual disciplinary orientation. The current paper builds on field theory, organizational sociology, and interview data to frame the practices identified by Burawoy as social manoeuvers (i.e. ways of utilizing and legitimating knowledge) within specific social fields. In so doing, the paper provides a framework that is more flexible, more empirically adequate, and congruent with the sociology of science and the sociology of intellectuals and experts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A current debate on environmental sociology involves how the subdiscipline should conceptualise and investigate the environment and whether it should be prescriptive and deliver policy recommendations. Taking this debate as a point of departure this article discusses the current and future role of sociology in a globalised world. It discusses how environmental sociology in the US and Europe differ in their understandings of sociology’s contribution to the study of the environment. Particular stress is placed on how these two regions differ with respect to their use of the tradition of sociological thought, views on what constitutes the environment and ways of institutionalising environmental sociology as a sociological field. In conclusion, the question is raised of whether current versions of environmental sociology are appropriate for analysing a globalised world environment; or whether environmental sociology’s strong roots in European and US cultures make it less relevant when facing an increasingly globalised world. Finally, the article proposes some new rules for a global environmental sociology and describes some of their possible implications for the sociological study of climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses some of the dilemmas that sociologists in the Global South face – how does one choose between the demands of the public moment, the university as a space of work and struggle, and our duty to our ‘disciplines’? How do we engage in practically extending the democracy and equality that we routinely learn and teach about and yet seize the time and space required for reflecting and producing research that is valued to the extent that it is seen to be ‘disinterested’? And how do those of us who live and work in the global academic periphery validate our sociology in a world where the standards are often set by scholars abroad? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this appendix we describe two successive efforts in the use of digital media to develop courses that brought together distinguished sociologists from around the world. In the first course, we put together a vision of global sociology that revolved around issues of marketization while in the second we were more attentive to the public engagement of sociologists, facing very different political contexts and social issues. In the first course we faced the problem of building a global sociology that was attentive to local contexts while the second was beset by the contradictory demands of local pedagogy and global dialogue. If nothing else our use of digital media clarified some of the problems of building a global sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Public sociology and the sacrifices it entails, richly described in the case studies in this monograph, are driven by moral commitment. This is one element of sociology as a vocation. The other element is sociology as a science. The case studies are built on an embryonic sociology of commodification, understood in its historical dimensions and its global consequences. This sociology of commodification examines the disasters created by third-wave marketization and the bleak future for human existence, thereby, fueling the original moral commitment of public sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article we discuss the uneasy development of gender studies in Russia as one example of public sociology. For empirical evidence we concentrate mainly on our own experience in the Gender Studies Program at the European University in St. Petersburg, but we also refer to the other cases. We observe how the political and academic context of the 1990s created opportunities for academic innovations that ideologically challenged Soviet patriarchy and invoked gendered criticisms of post-Soviet changes. We discuss the effects of the rapid but partial institutionalization of gender studies in the Russian academic context and how gender became the umbrella term for both feminist and anti-feminist standpoints. We claim that since international support for the gender studies diminished in the 2000s, the fashion and economic benefit of doing gender studies has declined, with only a small group of researchers maintaining their commitment to the feminist approach to gender. We focus on the politicization of gender in the last decade of Putin’s Russia and the role of feminist researchers in the analysis of the new conservatism, expressed in gender ideology. We examine the problems of combining public expertise and academic work in the particular realm of gender politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, the author argues that socially engaged sociology cannot be understood as a practice isolated in the quadrant of ‘public sociology’ as suggested by Michael Burawoy’s organization of sociology into four distinct quadrants but that it is closely associated with critical policy sociology as well as critical professional sociology. The author uses a case study of hospital transformation in post-apartheid South Africa to demonstrate the way sociological activism cycles through public, policy and professional sociological fields and to explore the nature of each of these fields as contested fields of power characterized by dominant and subordinate sociologies. The author resurrects Eddie Webster’s concept of critical engagement and expands its scope to suggest that the stance of the progressive – or radical – sociologist, who is engaged and committed to subaltern publics but retains a critical independence, is reproduced in the field of professional sociology in the form of what Burawoy calls critical sociology and in the field of policy sociology as critical policy sociology. The latter is a possibility that cannot be entertained in the Burawoy model, where policy sociology occupies a quadrant constituted by instrumentality and a lack of reflexivity. The practice of critical engagement, then, has to be understood as combining public sociology, policy sociology and critical sociology in a practice that may produce new knowledge that enables a more complex comprehension of domination across these fields, the better to challenge it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Public sociologists’ deep engagement with non-academic publics tends to give research findings greater empirical accuracy, relevance and influence, as well as provide a powerful source of motivation. However, it also creates constant risks of dispersion, loss of independence, lack of analytical distance and burnout. Based on the author’s experience with research and advocacy about socio-environmental conflicts in Latin America, this article dwells on these opportunities and risks. To take advantage of the former and tackle the latter, it makes a case for ‘amphibious sociology,’ an approach that embraces hybrid styles of writing and uses advances in multimedia technology to engage several audiences, while keeping the enterprise of public sociology afloat. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This introduction sets out from the unresolved paradox to be found in the writings of Bourdieu, namely the theoretical impossibility of public sociology and his own sustained practical engagement with publics. I appropriate and develop his concept of the ‘field’ to account for his success as a public sociologist. It requires us to understand that public sociology is only possible at the intersection of two distinct fields – the academic field and the political field. Public sociology proves to be a rather precarious pursuit, then; first, because of competing demands internal to the academic field; second, because of the difficulty in operating at the intersection of the academic and political fields; and third, because of the obduracy of common sense that cannot be easily dislodged, the very attempt often arousing open hostility. Difficult though it may be, the development of its public face will be necessary for the survival of sociology as well as an important ingredient in defending human existence from extinction by market fundamentalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sociology has been a subject of extensive debate in South Africa, especially over the last two decades. Central to the debate on sociology as a discipline and practice were efforts to document its history and paradigmatic shifts that characterized it, as well as topical themes that defined its research. One key observation in its evolution pointed to a historical shift from being a service discipline to the previous racially segregatory political regimes, especially between the early 1900s and 1960s, to a multi-paradigm discipline that challenged the racial order and inequalities in the 1970s onwards. This period marked the height of public sociology. Recent observations, however, especially in the post-apartheid period, projected a scenario of the discipline in a state of decline. Counter-evidence was nevertheless also presented suggesting not only the renewal of sociology in South Africa but also its active interest and involvement in the struggle against inequalities as part of the voices of the poor. This article calls these observations as the decline thesis and the renewal thesis, and contrasts them. The latter, I argue, is more compelling than the former. Notwithstanding this, the article argues however that the extent to which sociology in involved in struggles against inequalities is under question since public sociology, unlike in the 1970s and 1980s, is underdeveloped. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Public sociology is being debated across the social sciences. This article examines how sociologists can enter concretely into a civic conversation through the research process. We present partial findings from a Canada-wide investigation into how city street video surveillance systems are implemented in various communities. Our aim is to examine some of the challenges of doing public sociology by examining sociological knowledge production and communication with diverse publics. Data gleaned from focused group interviews in the City of Kelowna, British Columbia are presented to explore the challenges of facilitating a civic conversation about public policy on city street video surveillance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically considers Michael Burawoy's 'public sociology for human rights' through the lens of Timothy W. Luke's 'rites of rule'. The author argues that, while admirable in its stated aim, public sociology for human rights neglects to reveal its roots in governmentality and thus does not recognize the empirical practice of human rights within cosmopolitan global governance as a shift to consolidated contragovernmentality. The author concludes that public sociology for human rights as it is currently framed stabilizes the practice of human rights as rites of rule in an attempt to stabilize knowledge and the relations that it orders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much discussion surrounding Burawoy's (2004; 2005) argument for public sociology has focused on concerns about the model's normative and political implications while failing to empirically analyze current practices of public academic work. The debate thus risks devolving into competing rhetorical claims about what public sociology should be. We offer a preliminary comparative analysis of one type of public academic work — the writing of books — by sociologists, political scientists, and economists in Canada. In the hope of encouraging more empirical research on the current status of public academic work in Canada, books are put into one of six categories determined on the basis of 1) the publisher's characteristics; 2) the book's intended audience; and 3) the book's intended intellectual/political purpose. We find that sociology lags behind political science in producing books intended for a public audience; however, other evidence suggests Canadian sociologists are attempting to open a public dialogue in a more "organic" way through small presses. Questions are raised about the status and rewards structure of professional sociology in Canada and how it influences public academic work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to Michael Burawoy's call for a "public sociology" and to the question of public sociology's place vis-à-vis Canadian sociology, this essay presents four major points. First, Burawoy's conception of public sociology is a hybrid of several different kinds of activities and stances which should be assessed separately on their respective merits. Second, many of his recommendations for more public activity on behalf of or by sociologists, including better marketing of the discipline, sociologists taking on various civic roles, and sociologists acting as public intellectuals, are entirely uncontroversial and/or actively and widely put into practice in Canadian sociology already. Third, two of his recommendations, the promotion of "organic" public sociology and the conversion of the discipline of sociology into a political public acting in defense of civil society, are potentially much less innocuous. They would not bring the benefits expected by Burawoy and, depending on how they were implemented, they could be self-destructive as well as politically and morally dubious. Fourth, our brief survey of some trends in Canadian social movements scholarship suggests that, first, there is no "hegemony" of "professional" sociology in Canada's universities and, second, that, promoting more public-oriented sociology in this subfield poses risks to the credibility and potential applied efficacy of Canadian scholarship and would be politically and morally dubious to boot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Michael Burawoy offers an innovative call to reintegrate our discipline. Using Canada as an example, I argue that his proposal underestimates the extent of institutional separatism among branches of sociology. Influenced by antipositivist currents in the humanities over the past two decades, critical sociologists are disconnecting from mainstream empirical research. Simultaneously, the mainstream is moving in a very different direction as it responds to developments in other social sciences, and largely ignores the humanities. I hypothesize that this institutional drift limits the possibility of mutual correction between various branches of sociology, a process that is central to Burawoy's proposal. Possible scenarios for the future of public sociology in Canada are discussed in light of this hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Michael Burawoy's plea for a "legitimate" public sociology that would help to realize a progressive, social democratic political project, in particular by contributing to the spread of human rights, has rekindled a very old, heated, and divisive debate over the nature and purpose of the discipline. My paper focuses on the contribution to this debate made by John Porter (1921-1979), probably Canada's most famous and influential English-language sociologist to date. Following in a tradition of "New Liberal" scholarship developed in England near the end of the 19th century by Leonard Hobhouse and others, and introduced into Canadian academia and public service in the early decades of the 20th century, Porter developed and practised a type of methodologically sophisticated, "scientific" sociology that rejected the doctrine of value neutrality and advocated a form of "engaged practical intellectualism" intended to create a more thoroughgoing democracy in Canada. His approach is significant not only because it is an important and undocumented development in Canadian intellectual history, but because it has current relevance. My comparison of Porter's notion of New Liberal sociology and Burawoy's public sociology reveals many parallels between the two and demonstrates that a rereading of Porter's work would add to the current debate on what a "legitimate public sociology" might look like. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the debate surrounding Michael Burawoy's plea for public sociology, it is all too often presented as the opposite of the detached, purely objective observation of society. But sociology is not torn between these two poles: the political and the scientific/empirical. Rather, the discipline is structured around three fundamental axes or dimensions: professional, descriptive, and political, embodying three essential aims which, in turn, constitute the respective roles sociology can play in academia and society depending on the specific publics the discipline seeks to address. Acting as professionals, sociologists try to attain prestige by accumulating social or symbolic capital among their colleagues. If they serve science for science's sake, they find their reward in the advancement of knowledge. If they adopt an activist political stance, they measure the value of their work on a different scale. This paper focuses specifically on French-language sociology in Quebec from the late 19th century to 1970 and argues that the dilemma of juggling these three axes, aims, and roles is one which has deeply influenced not only the discipline as a whole but the generations of Quebec sociologists who have attempted to balance these dimensions in their scholarship. There were three basic schools or approaches during this period, each embedded in the social conditions of its time. Sociologists' public engagement depended on specific historical conditions much more than it did on personal preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper clarifies and repositions some of the controversies generated by Burawoy's defense of public sociology and his vision of the mutually stimulating relationship between the different forms of sociology. Before arguing if, why, and how, sociology should or could be more "public," it is useful to reflect upon what we think we, as sociologists, know that "lay people" do not. This paper thus explores the public sociology debate's epistemological core, the issue of the relationship between sociologists' and non-sociologists' knowledge of the social world. Four positions regarding the status of sociologists' knowledge versus lay people's knowledge are explored: superiority (sociologists' knowledge of the social world is more accurate, objective, and reflexive than lay people's knowledge, thanks to science's methods and norms); homology (explicit lay theories about the social world often parallel social scientists' theories); complementarity (lay people's and social scientists' knowledge complement one another; the former's local, embedded knowledge is essential to the latter's general, disembedded knowledge); and circularity (sociologists' knowledge continuously infuses commonsensical knowledge, and scientific knowledge about the social world is itself rooted in common sense knowledge; each form of knowledge feeds the other). For each of these positions, implications are drawn regarding the terms, possibilities, and conditions of a dialogue between sociologists and their publics, especially if we take the circularity thesis seriously. Conclusions point to the accountability we face towards the people we study, and to the idea that sociology is always performative, a point that has, to some extent, been obscured by Burawoy's distinctions between professional, critical, policy, and public sociologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]