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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]

Op-eds in newspapers represent an important form of intellectual debate that helps shape public opinion and elite policy. For academics, writing op-eds offers an opportunity to publicize a book or other research findings, and to gain influence and attention for their ideas. Given a reward structure within the academy that stresses peer review publication, professors are at a decided structural disadvantage, compared to journalists, when they try to enter the oped space. Thus op-eds give us a useful window into how academics and public sociologists enter the public sphere in comparison to columnists, think-tanks, politicians, social movement activists, and corporate leaders. Drawing on the innovative theoretical approach outlined by Ronald Jacobs and Eleanor Townsley, this paper offers an analysis of a selected set of Canadian op-eds and suggests a research agenda for studying op-eds in Canada. Not surprisingly, we find that journalists dominate the space of the op-ed in Canada. We also find that sociologists are fairly underrepresented compared to our obvious competitors in the social sciences. We conclude with thoughts about the implications of our findings for further research in the sociology of sociology, public sociology and the study of the social space of opinion. We also offer informed suggestions regarding normative and practical issues that Canadian sociologists should consider in light of these broader empirical patterns. [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]