Engaged, Practical Intellectualism: John Porter and ‘New Liberal’ Public Sociology

Public sociology and economic sociology: introductory remarks

This issue of SER contains three articles on public sociology and economic sociology, which all have their origin in a session on this theme that was held at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in August 2006 in Montreal. The reason for organizing this session was a sense that ‘new economic sociology’ has ignored many of the issues that are associated with the term ‘publ...

Public Service and Liberal Democracy

The debate on television’s "public service"obligations can only make full sense if integrated in the broader context of the debate on the best political model for society. In fact, the classic "public service"rationale is based in a normative conception of good and in a suspicious view of the average citizen that is largely tributary of a Platonic or Elitist approach to the political organizati...

Public Sociology and Democratic Theory

Sociology, as conceived by Comte, was to put an end to the anarchy of opinions characteristic of liberal democracy by replacing opinion with the truths of sociology, imposed through indoctrination. Later sociologists backed away from this, making sociology acceptable to liberal democracy by being politically neutral.The critics of this solution asked ‘whose side are we on?’ Burawoy provides a n...

The promise of public sociology.

Public sociology vs. the market

Building on Karl Polanyi’s theory of a societal reaction to the unregulated exchange of what he called fictitious commodities—labour, money and land— this paper links the history of sociology to the history of the market. If the first wave of marketization in the nineteenth century dwelt on the commodification of labour, prompting utopian sociologies, and the second wave of marketization of the...