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14ПУБЛИЧНАЯ СОЦИОЛОГИЯ: ОБЗОР ТЕНДЕНЦИЙ / Телемост с Майклом Буравым Public sociology in review / Telebridge with Michael Burawoy;
Higher school of economics (Moscow, Russia) -University of California (Berkeley, USA), 18 December 2009
Майкл Буравой
Выдающийся американский социолог, в настоящее время профессор Университета Калифорнии, Беркли, на XVII Всемирном социологическом конгрессе был избран президентом Международной социологической ассоциации на период 2010-2014 гг. Майкл Буравой наиболее известен как автор работы «Производство согласия: Изменения в трудовом процессе в условиях монополистического капитализма» (1979). Первые работы Майкла Буравого были построены на методе включенного наблюдения в производственные процессы на промышленных предприятиях в различных странах: в Замбии, США, Венгрии, России. Отстаивая концепцию «публичной социологии», Буравой акцентирует свое внимание на том, каким образом социология как тип знания внедряется в публичную сферу, становится общественным достоянием. Для этого в качестве аналитических идеал-типических конструкций используются сферы академической / профессиональной социологии, прикладной социологии, критической социологии и непосредственно социологии публичной. Среди последних публикаций: «Что случилось с рабочим классом?» (2002), «Приватное беспокойство и публичные проблемы» (2007), «Публичная социология в Калифорнии» (2008).
Participants
MB - Michael Burawoy, University of California NP - Nikita Pokrovsky, HSE Q - Questions from HSE MA students.
MB: What I want to do is to give an introduction to public sociology based on my own experience and then more abstractly so you have a sense of its genesis and then we can have a discussion about its relevance for Russia.
I am going to start in 1990. I was invited to join a boat full of Russian sociologists going down the Volga river for 10 days - it was a wonderful trip and introduced me to Russian sociology - many of these sociologists, of course, were working in large enterprises and so were very applied sociologists. 1990 was a very exciting year in the history of the Soviet Union, it was just about the end although at that time we did not know it. I had been to the Soviet Union before but this was the first time I had a chance to speak to sociologists on an informal basis.
After Moscow I went to South Africa. This was the first time I had been there since 1968. I had never returned because of the academic boycott against the South African apartheid regime organized by the African National Congress. But I was invited in 1990 after the boycott had been lifted to go and address sociologists in South Africa. This was a very strange and extraordinary experience for me particularly after going down the Volga with all those Russian sociologists.
What I discovered in South Africa was a sociology I had never seen before, just as Russian sociology was also quite unique at that time. I found sociologists - as well as people whom I had known for many years in exile - people who were deeply engaged in the social movements of the time whether in communities or factories. These sociologists, deeply embedded in such movements and doing a very activist sociology, were generating all sorts of new ideas and challenges to the conventional sociology I was accustomed to. This was my first intimation that sociology could be really different than the sociology I practiced and that was generally practiced in United States. It was a very professional -by «professional» I mean sociologists in the United States spend a lot of their time talking to one another, exchanging papers with one another and evaluating one another's work, teaching students in the university but for the most part they are insulated from the wider society.
I was intrigued by this new alternative sociology and I came back to the United States with an imagination of how sociology could be different - the combination of going down the Volga with Russian sociologists at the time of the disintegration of the Soviet Union and being in South Africa with South African sociologists challenging the apartheid regime.
Out of this emerged, over time, reflections that became the basis of my vision of sociology as composed of 4 elements: professional, public, policy and critical. The idea of public sociology emerged very much from my experience in South Africa in 1990 and indeed in subsequent trips to South Africa during the 1990s and I still continue to go back there. That is the context within which my understanding of public sociology developed - that and the contrast with US
sociology, which was so involuted and so professionalized.
* * *
DIVISION OF SOCIOLOGICAL LABOR
^^ Audience Knowledge ^^ Academic Audience Extra-Academic Audience
Instrumental Knowledge PROFESSIONAL POLICY
Reflexive Knowledge CRITICAL PUBLIC
The prototype of professional sociology can be found in the United States. It is the extreme form of professional sociology and I am going to contrast it with what I call «public sociology». In professional sociology sociologists engage with one another, work within their own research programs, develop research agendas. A variety of research programs exist and are developed usually in a university or academic context, sometimes in institutes outside the university. Professional sociology is a sociology for sociologists or largely for sociologists as opposed to public sociology, which engages broader publics, lay audiences - it is a dialogical relationship in which each side is accountable to the other in which sociologists respond to the problems and interests of publics and publics respond to sociological insights. So here the idea is not to produce a sociology only accessible to professionals but to produce a sociology that can provide the foundations of public debate and public discussion.
I want to contrast public sociology with what I call policy sociology. Policy sociology is less a dialogic relationship, it is the application of professional sociology in the service of some client. The client may be a government agency, an NGO, a labor organization. In policy sociology it is the client that determines or defines the terms of sociology, defines a problem to be solved by a sociologist.
And finally, there is a fourth type of sociology, which I call critical sociology. Critical sociology is often in opposition to policy sociology but aims first and foremost at professional sociology. Critical sociology is sociology that in-
vestigates, interrogates the assumptions of professional sociology and subjects them to critical discourse, critical discussion.
Where do we find a lot of policy sociology? I talked about professional sociology in the US, public sociology in South Africa. I found a lot of policy sociology in what was the Soviet Union. In fact sociology in the Soviet Union was largely a sociology that was orchestrated and organized on behalf of the Party. It was a sociology that provided the ideology of the Party state. So the prototype of policy sociology could be found in the Soviet Union.
Critical sociology you might say emerged in response to policy sociology -in places like Hungary or Poland where socialist regimes called forth critical sociology, critical of the policy sociology - although that could be very risky. In the West, on the other hand, critical sociology was more oriented to professional world. In the United States we think of people like C. Wright Mills or Robert Lynd, one could even include Pitirim Sorokin who, in his later years, played the role of the critical sociologist in the United States.
NP: How about Robert Merton, where would you put him?
MB: That is interesting. He was a key architect of professional sociology in the United States although one of the ways he built professional sociology was by giving it a public image -so he was also a public sociologist but only in the service of professional sociology. His student, Alvin Gouldner was very much a critical sociologist, critical of the professional sociology that was current in the 1950s and 1960s.
Anyway there we have our two-by-two table, and the question is: how do we justify it? I have constructed it inductively and, thus, justified it empirically, but I think that we can also generate these four types of sociology by asking two fundamental questions:
1. Knowledge for whom?
This is a question that sociologists and social scientists ask too infrequently. Who are we writing for? Are we writing for ourselves, an academic audience, or are we writing for an extra-academic audience? That is one dimension of our two-by-two table.
2. Knowledge for what?
For what ends, purposes do we want to produce sociology? When we are policy sociologists we have an extra-academic audience, a client who defines the problem, and we, sociologists, try to solve the problem, that is one form of instrumental knowledge. On the other hand, as professional sociologists we have an academic audience and we are in the business of solving puzzles. I think that is what we do as social scientists, we have our research programs or paradigms, and they generate puzzles and as sociologists we try to solve those puzzles, that is how Thomas Kuhn defines science and I think that is what we do as scientists. Those are the two types of instrumental knowledge - solving puzzles which is professional sociology or solving problems, which is policy sociology.
Now we turn to the second dimension - reflexive knowledge, which is not so much concerned with means for given ends but concerned with discussion of those ends, ultimate goals, values of society. This reflexive knowledge is what Max Weber would call «value discussion» and this distinction between instrumental and reflexive knowledge is at the heart of the Frankfurt School of critical theory.
In the extra-academic context reflexive sociology is public sociology -that is a dialogue among sociologists, social scientists and broader publics about the directions or the values of the society in which they live. Critical sociology, on the other hand, is a discussion within the sociological community itself, a discussion about the methodological and philosophical assumptions of professional sociology, about the foundations of our discipline. It is important to interrogate the values that inform professional sociology, but that interrogation -that critical sociology - should also infuse public and policy interventions. The values that form the foundations of sociology - notions of justice, of rationality or equality - should also inform public and policy sociologies. So if professional sociology is the «brain» then critical sociology is the «heart» of sociology - it is where we find our reason for existence and the motivation for our work.
This is my division of sociological labor. Now let me make a few qualifying remarks. First, individual sociologists can be professional and public sociologists at the same time or they can be policy and professional sociologists, or they could be simply public sociologists alone. The link between sociologist and type of sociology is not given, it is a complex relationship and indeed sociologists often have careers that take them sequential through these various boxes.
What about the relationships among the 4 sociologies? The underlieing assumption of this division of labor is that they these four types are in a relationship of interdependence. That is to say, each one of these sociologies depends upon the other three. The flourishing of each depends upon the flourishing of all.
To the extent that these four types of sociology are in intimate connection with one another we have a vibrant discipline. To the extent - this is the danger -that the public sociologist becomes populist sociologist and is only concerned with being accountable to publics and loses touch with policy and critical and professional sociologies, that is a problem for public sociology and a problem for the discipline as a whole. To the extent that professional sociology insulates itself from policy, critical and public sociologies, as to some extent it does in the United States, that is a problem not for professional sociology but for the discipline as a whole. Insofar as critical sociology becomes simply dogmatic sociology and becomes unresponsive to professional, public and policy sociologies, it too becomes problematic.
So my claim is that flourishing discipline depends upon the interrelationship, upon a synergy of these interdependent sociologies, forming what we might call an organic solidarity. That is my dream. But reality, of course, is very
different. The reality is that these four sociologies - in whatever context we look at them whether it be local, national, regional, global - are turn out to be part of a hierarchy, they are in relationship of domination whose configuration
looks very different in different countries.
* * *
Let's have a little fun. All the following people are sociologists in one way or another. By talking about them the idea is to show the ways in which they do not fit perfectly into these boxes. All I want to suggest by these short biographies how different people are located at different places in this matrix, often people combine different types of sociology together and we can see in the Russian context that different generations of sociologists are engaged with the wider world and with sociology in different ways.
Leon Trotsky. Trotsky was of course a very public figure and a wonderful orator, he spent a lot of time haranguing people about the revolution, especially in 1917 with those in Saint Petersburg. But he was also an architect of the early Soviet state - his policies under war communism during the civil war and the militarization of labor afterwards turned out to be very authoritarian. But he was a major figure in charting out economic policy and he was, of course, the brilliant commander of the Red Army during the The Civil War. An extraordinary character. On the one hand he was a public sociologist - his History of the Russian revolution is still one of the greatest books ever written about the Russian revolution, and one written by a participant observer. You might say he was a professional sociologist but there was no professional sociology He was also a critical sociologist. The History of the Russian revolution was written in exile as a critique of what became of the revolution. We see how he is located in at least three of these boxes.
Alexander Chayanov was a great rural sociologist who defended the idea of the peasant economy against collectivization. And his theories of the peasant economy are widely read, at least, in the West to this day. Theodor Shanin, a well-known sociologist and big figure in peasant studies, and who has now returned to Russia, became Chayanov's champion and popularizer in the West. Chayanov was also a policy sociologist and a critical sociologist like Trotsky.
Nikolai Bukharin. He wrote a book called Historical materialism and a very famous book on imperialism as well. So you might say he too was a policy sociologist but also contributing to the emerging paradigm of Marxist sociology, but from outside the professional world.
But what do all these three people have in common? All are public sociologists in one way or another but they have something else in common. They were members of a single party but what happened to all of them? They were killed by the Stalinist regime (Bukharin 1938 as far as we know, Chayanov was 1937, and Trotsky was assassinated in 1940). My point is this: public sociology is not for sissies, it can be very dangerous. For example, public sociologists in South Africa were assassinated, others found themselves in prison and harassed.
If we think about the Iran today, sociology is under assault precisely because it has public moments and critical moments. Here in the United States, there is no threat to your life, there is nothing at stake - it is just a matter of what you might lose in terms of your career.
Pitirim Sorokin. In his early years in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s Sorokin was a major figure in professional sociology. He introduced the idea of social mobility into US sociology - something we now take completely for granted. He was also a major figure in bringing history to sociology. Yes he brought it to sociology in a relatively crude manner but his vision, his panorama was extraordinary. That is on the one side. But on the other side he tried to promorte a public sociology with his ideas of love or altruism, which he thought of in religious terms and sought to disseminate them among publics beyond sociology. In fact he lost his sociological audience because he was so critical of sociology. In his Russian phase Sorokin was also a policy sociologist - he was a secretary to Kerensky in the Provisional Government during the Revolution and after the Revolution he conducted sociological surveys investigating rural policies. His work became a real challenge to the regime and he was imprisoned. He secured a reprieve from Lenin but was expelled from the country. That is how he survived as a critical-public sociologist and escaped the tragic fate of so many others. He is a fascinating figure because he moved between all four types of sociology at different periods in his life.
Tatiana Zaslavskaya. In Novosibirsk, she worked on inequality within Soviet society. But she was more than just a professional sociologist.
NP: She issued a very important report in 1980 about the social conditions of Soviet society which was very critical, challenging its foundations. It was a very important professional deed and very risky in a certain way. She was highly criticized by the Communist party bosses and was almost on the edge of being expelled from the university in 1980. It was the late Brezhnev period, we call it the time of «The dream of reason». Zaslavskaya was a rebel, she started a very important movement and I think she is the founder of contemporary Russian sociology - public sociology as well as professional. But she is also a policy sociologist. She worked with clients, with contracts and she conducted her research not just for the sake of academia but for practical applied purposes, especially in rural sociology.
MB: I think she used to say that being in Novosibirsk there was no way to punish her as there was no place further from Moscow where they could send her. So she could be critical and safe in Novosibirsk.
Vladimir Yadov. He is of course another figure very similar to Zaslavskaya - similar generation, similar public role and similar professional role in sociology.
* * *
MB: Let me summarize where we are by presenting this in a different way - not talking about individual sociologists but the sociologies of different countries.
Here is the United States.
UNITED STATES
This is my impression of the United States, a gross generalization of a complex field. Still, we can say it is heavy on professional sociology with relatively weak public, policy and critical sociologies. The professional dominates the discipline.
NP: Why do you have such a big professional sociology - because there is no public demand for sociology? What is the social reason for having such an enormously huge bulk of professional sociologists in your country?
MB: We can say historically that all the disciplines not just sociology are hyper-professionalized in the United States, and they developed in the mid- and post-war period with what we call «the Academic Revolution», with the rapid expansion of the universities that combined both teaching and research, universities became societies into themselves.
This is interesting: we always asked the great French philosopher, Michel Foucault, when he used to come to the University of California, «Why do you come to Berkeley? Why would a French intellectual want to come to the United States?» He said, «Because in the United States the university is like a huge public sphere unto itself». And he was able here to debate with people as though it were a public sphere. Such a university does not exist in France.
Specifically about sociology, we have a real problem - why is the public, the critical and the policy so small? Because sociology has always had a problem in the United States in conveying its wisdom to a broader community. Why? Because in the United States the idea of the social, the very assumptions of sociology are antithetical to the common sense of its people. In the United States people think as individuals, they think psychologically, the world and so the sociological perspective has great difficulty in conveying the social structural limitations of human action. In the US individuals believe they can accomplish anything, they just have to want to do it badly enough! Why is policy sociology so weak? Policy science was stronger in the period when there was a more elaborated welfare state in the 1960s, when there were publicly recognized «social problems», such as poverty, or civil rights, but today these problems may be worse but they are not defined as social problems - the welfare state has shrunk and problems are defined as an individual affair. The concept of society is alien not just to the citizens but also to the state. We sociologists are on a very defensive position: we exist because we have so many students to teach, it is our major function. In my view, teaching is a very important aspect of public sociology and we should think of students as our publics with whom we have conversations, two-way conversations, about the world.
NP: But why would your students take sociology courses if they are not applicable to what is happening in the country?
MB: Sociology is very applicable to what is happening in the country! While the world at large may not see it that way, many students do. For example, many of our sociology students are immigrants: when they come to the United States they find themselves in a very difficult situation to grasp. Sociology gives them a vision of how this society is constructed, they recognize hierarchy, domination, inequalities but also diversity, plurality, different ethnic and racial groups. But the wider public does not see the world through a sociological lens. Not to say the sociology does not explain the world - far from it, it is just that its explanations, the emphasis on social structure is not in the common sense, not readily accessible to people. It's very different in France, Scandinavia, England, for example. There they do understand social structure, but the United States is a mass society which worships the individual, has created what Durkheim called «the cult of the individual». Therefore it is difficult to get the ideas of sociology across.
SOUTH AFRICA
In South Africa there was a strong public sociology because it was so linked to the apartheid struggles of the 1970s, 1980s and the early 1990s. What is interesting, today in a new post-apartheid South Africa sociology is in retreat, it is becoming less public. Civil society is now much more contained, leaders of the civil society have moved into the state, the state itself has insisted that sociologists spend more time teaching and has made the conditions of sociology more and more difficult. So what you have is a movement back out of the society, away from public sociology into the professional and policy sphere. Many sociologists in South Africa cannot exist on their university income alone, but have to supplement it with policy work for NGOs or often state organizations. A similar story we could tell for India or Brazil.
In 1990 Russian sociology was in a very vibrant mood. This was the Perestroika period in which civil society and sociology took on a new lease of life particularly around small cooperatives which energized civil society. I think in the post-Soviet era, the public face of sociology has been in retreat. Elena Zdravomyslova has said that public sociology in Russia has to be the public defense of professional sociology. Only now is professional sociology being built up, like here at the HSE. But it is still fragmented without a coherent framework. This the legacy of the Soviet period when sociology - inasmuch as it existed - was the ideological arm of the party state. That is to say, with a few exceptions such as those I have already mentioned, sociology was an extremely limited policy science. You live with that legacy today, as we can see in the abundance of survey research for NGOs, for corporations, for government
agencies, for politicians. An autonomous professional sociology is still very weak.
RUSSIA
NP: I have pretty much the same type of understanding of what is happening. The only point is that we probably need to put those circles closer to one another because critical and public sociology are not isolated from policy and professional - many figures among my colleagues work in all four domains simultaneously. They come closer with an exception that probably policy sociology is a little more distant from the others. Policy sociologists feel like being more self-contained, they are more or less well paid, they probably do not need us, they have their own world - their own contracts, their own clients - probably not in the time of crisis today but a few years ago.
What is your anticipation of the future development of public sociology in your country and in our country? Do you think it could be on the rise and under what conditions? What can our students do with the knowledge of public sociology in the future?
MB: The future of public sociology varies from country to county. When I was talking about public sociology in the US this time last year I was optimistic that the new Obama regime, facing an economic crisis, would subscribe to a more sociological vision of the world. And I was not the only one hoping this might be the case. This hasn't come to pass even though the economic crisis continues. Particularly hard hits are the universities which are moving ever more in the direction of privatization, corporatization and there is now the question of what will happen to disciplines like sociology, or history or English that
cannot deliver commercially redeemable goods. The public universities in the United States at this moment in history - and we feel it very strongly here in Berkeley - are very much in retreat, in a defensive position. Of course the university is organized so that the first to suffer are the non-academic staff who get laid off and the students who have to pay higher fees, but, slowly but surely, it is going to affect everybody and, indeed, it is already affecting everybody. Under these circumstances sociology has both greater obstacles to overcome but it will also be presented with new opportunities. We have to think of new ways of giving sociology a public face in these new circumstances. Today public sociology is ever more necessary because there are no clear economic solutions to our economic problems, there are only sociological solutions. Still, as I have said, it is not clear who believes this - even many sociologists don't - and, therefore, what constituencies public sociology will have. That is the story here in the United States.
NP: How about China? I am asking because you are a great admirer of inviting Chinese colleagues into the ISA so I am asking you about your evaluation of the perspectives of the Chinese sociology. They have very special social and political conditions.
MB: It is a very fascinating story and very different to the Russian one. Chinese sociology did not exist until the 1980s. It had been squashed by the state. How was it resurrected? In the 1980s they brought in experts of Chinese descent from the United States - Nan Lin was the most famous of these - to bring US sociology to China and they did that very successfully. At the same time the government sent lots of Chinese students mainly to the United States, but Europe too, where they were trained. Many of them returned with their PhDs and now populate the major departments of sociology. Sociology is also very strong in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences where more policy driven work is done. All this indicates that the Chinese state considers sociology as having great potential in tackling social problems and also creating an ideology that will cement a society that is dangerously falling apart. The state has much more faith in sociology than most other states!
Now, alongside this professional and policy driven sociology, there also inevitably develops a critical sociology and even a public sociology. Today in China it is possible to actually have a public sociology because there exists a thin and precarious but nevertheless real public sphere. There is the possibility through the Internet, through NGOs, through social movements of a very limited kind to convey sociology to a wider society. And there have been some very interesting projects conducted by sociologists working with communities and labor organizations in different parts of China. You never know if and when the state will stamp them out of existence, but nevertheless this is a very promising development of sociology. At this point Chinese sociology is one of the most vibrant sociologies in the world.
Another interesting part of the world is Latin America with a long tradition of engaged sociology, public and policy sociology. There we find politi-
cians who are sociologists or were sociologists and public intellectuals orchestrating debates about the direction of society. Brazil is the best example, but also Mexico, Bolivia and Argentina.
NP: Cardoso, a very famous sociologist who was once the president of the ISA, became the president of Brazil. And I heard that there are more sociologists in Brazil than in the United States.
MB: If you are a sociologist in a university in Brazil, you can live on your salary - that is not true in any other country in Latin America where a sociologist employed in the university has 2-3-4-5 other jobs. This really limits the effectiveness of teaching, conducting research, becoming a public figure. Brazil has always funded its public universities in a way that was quite unusual for the third world. But you find a lot of organic public sociology, that is sociologists working closely with communities in many parts of Latin America. They have developed what is called «participatory action research» - that is collaborative research between sociologists as well as other social scientists and communities. It is quite a fascinating region of the world with respect to public sociology!
* * *
Q: Can sociologists exist in countries which don't have civil society? What do you think about civil society in Russia?
MB: As I see it sociology is a view of the world taken from the standpoint of civil society, so if there is no civil society there is no sociology. And I think there is a lot of evidence for that - in Stalinist Russia there was no sociology, in Mao's China there was no sociology, and there was no civil society in either of those countries. The same happened in Pinochet's Chile, or in Nazi Germany. Without civil society sociology cannot survive, they are connected by an umbilical cord. They are Siamese twins, firmly attached to one another, growing up together.
I think what we sociologists have failed to do is to develop a convincing scheme of mapping civil societies in different parts of the world. Any such map must also show the relationship between civil society and the state, civil society and the economy at the same time as being sensitive to the internal structure of civil society. What is civil society? Its elements are institutions, organizations, social movements and publics that are neither part of the state not part of the economy. What does it look like in Russia? It looks very different in Moscow than it does in Syktyvkar; Novosibirsk is different from Saint Petersburg. Russia is an enormous country and I think the first thing to say is that Russian civil society is not a single integrated one, it is a fractured civil society and therefore you get a fractured sociology. It is no accident, therefore, that sociology tends to develop in one or two centers in Russia. I have not been studying Russia since 2002 so I don't have a good sense of what has happened since then in terms of the development for example of social movements or organizations that transcend regional boundaries.
NP: I agree with you again. Sociology is fragmented and, in my opinion, civil society today in this part of the world is not living through its happiest times. The public demand for sociology is falling as compared to what it used to be, let's say 5-8 years ago. We probably need to agitate publics, this is why we have invited our students to study public sociology, because we cannot wait to be asked to do something in society, we need to look for work in society, to recruit more publics to study sociology, to take the initiative in meeting people, in going on television and radio, the press so as to convey analysis, our critical evaluation of what is happening in society. This is what we can and should do -there is some room for that, there is a freedom today to do that. In other words we need to be a little bit more militant.
MB: Absolutely. On the one hand, there is the idea of a traditional public sociology in which you communicate sociological visions and their relevance through the mass media. On the other hand, there is the organic public sociology in which you have direct face-to-face unmediated relationships between sociologists and communities, building up projects and researches through collaboration.
Sociology has its own projects but it cannot be isolated from other disciplines. Particularly in public sociology, we have to collaborate across disciplinary boundaries. That is not to say that we dissolve sociology, it means that we strengthen the discipline by having relationships with other disciplines. I think public sociology must become a part, a distinct part of a public social science.
Some people think that there should be only one social science, that there should not be sociology, political science, geography, anthropology or economics but instead just one social science. This one social science at this time in history would turn out to be economics and that would be problematic, at least from my point of view. Social sciences have different interests: although each social science is a complex and contested field, nevertheless each has a dominant perspective: in political science it is to support the stability of political orders, in economics it is to expand markets. As I've said I think sociology's interest is to defend civil society and I think these are antagonistic projects. Particularly in an era of run-away marketization, sociology has a very important role to play - to keep markets and the state at bay, to prevent them from destroying civil society. In this regard sociology is at odds with the dominant perspectives in economics and political science, but it is allied to anthropology and to geography. I suppose I am a «sociological chauvinist» - I still believe in the importance of a sociological vision. And as I say this is very much tied to civil society.
Q: Can one be a sociologist without having a credentialed official training as a sociologist?
MB: I don't think there is any doubt that one can be a public sociologist without a diploma in sociology. In this country, there are thousands of journalists, many of whom are spontaneous, intuitive sociologists or even sociologists that have read a lot of sociology. There are quite a few outstanding journalists
who write brilliant analyses of important issues of a sociological character. The New Yorker is particularly strong in this regard, and the New York Times is like a daily journal of sociology!
So, yes, there are public sociologists doing good work, who are not part of a university, who may not even be trained in sociology and it is our role, sociologists in the university, to enter into a dialogue, a discussion with them. When I was a president of the American Sociological Association, I introduced a new award for excellence in the reporting of social issues. The idea was to reward and recognize people outside the discipline who are doing good sociology, and that is what we do every year. We should not see them as competitors but as collaborators and we should learn from them.
Q: What type of knowledge and practical skills are important in training a public sociologist?
MB: There are two types of public sociology, traditional and organic, and they require very different skills. The traditional public sociologist has to be very skilled at translating - they both have to be of course - sociological ideas into an accessible language so that they resonate with the experience of those with whom we are communicating. Training to be an ethnographer who joins communities in their time and space would be good training for all forms of public sociology. Before we can communicate sociology, we have to understand the common sense of the people with whom we are communicating. That is a necessary foundation for both the organic and the traditional type of public sociology.
In training public sociologists, we should also spend much more time listening to journalists talk about how they communicate and write for public audiences - they do it every day of their lives. We should bring in photographers and see how they think and how they imagine their subjects. We should bring in practitioners of communication and become apprentices to such experts.
Sociology has not done enough to explore different media; anthropologists are way ahead of us. If we are a part of sociology, we should very deeply engage with, for example, film as a way of presenting our ideas. There are all sorts of ways of presenting our ideas through the Internet, just like the very conversation we are having today. We should be doing more of this. A friend of mine, Erik Wright, who teaches in Wisconsin holds conversations between himself and political activists in Bogata, Columbia, about his ideas on participatory government and democratic budgeting. This trans-continental dialogue is now facilitated by the communications technology that we have. That is the optimistic side of public sociology - we have at our disposal new technologies that would facilitate getting our ideas across.
Q: On the one hand, sociologists should work with concrete publics that exist in reality. On the other hand, public sociologists should create and organize their own public. What do you think about sociologists themselves constituting a public?
MB: One of my projects in the International Sociological Association has been to create a global community of sociologists. We have to learn to talk to ourselves and among ourselves, to constitute ourselves as a public before we can be effective in communicating with others. Or at least these two should go hand in hand. We are simultaneously observers of society but also participants in society. As observers we constitute ourselves as scientists, professional sociologists, but as participants we constitute ourselves as public sociologists. I feel strongly that we have to think of ourselves as a collective actor and we have to turn sociology on ourselves and think imaginatively how we can work together across national boundaries, overcoming all the inequalities and differences that divide us. It is a difficult project particularly especially if we are thinking globally, but I am encouraged that this is really possible - to develop a distinctive vision of sociology that we can indeed all share.
