WHAT DO PUBLIC SOCIOLOGISTS DO? A CRITIQUE OF BURAWOY.

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]