The Good News and the Bad News

There is much that is attractive about Michael Burawoy’s examination of the critical turn to a public sociology. I find plausible his account of the academic nature of 1970s radical sociology especially that mobilized notions such as Althusser’s “theoretical practice.” I also was cheered to read the account of the positive developments currently in train in the USA and especially with how social movements have got inside American sociology and are changing it from within. And I was with his advocacy of sociology developing new forms of engaging with and responding to multiple publics and modes of participation, to bring the public and sociology into intimate juxtaposition. But from the other side of the pond Burawoy’s argument seems at the same time rather strange. The paper is unambiguously written from within American sociology (as a footnote acknowledges). Sociologists from nowhere else could treat their sociology as nationally bounded and unrelated to global processes that in all other fields are transforming the social world (as brilliantly revealed in Burawoy’s Global Ethnography). This means first that the stories of other sociologies are necessarily different form that of the USA, but second that much about the story of any sociology cannot be understood without situating it within wider globalizing processes that sociology everywhere struggles to engage with. And indeed of course part of contemporary globalisation is the power of the “American empire” and its domination of many fields including the social sciences. This American domination of sociology is achieved through exclusionary mechanisms, funding regimes, hierarchical publishing arrangements, and huge resources that swamp the sociologies, public or otherwise, of any other society. American sociology thus deploys an array of McDonald-ising