Critical

Sociology
http://crs.sagepub.com/

How Epistemology Matters: Five Reflexive Critiques of Public Sociology

Christopher Powell
Crit Sociol 2013 39: 87 originally published online 25 January 2012
DOI: 10.1177/0896920511434217
The online version of this article can be found at:
http://crs.sagepub.com/content/39/1/87

Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com

Additional services and information for Critical Sociology can be found at:
Email Alerts: http://crs.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts
Subscriptions: http://crs.sagepub.com/subscriptions
Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav
Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
Citations: http://crs.sagepub.com/content/39/1/87.refs.html

>> Version of Record - Dec 11, 2012

OnlineFirst Version of Record - Jan 25, 2012
What is This?

Downloaded from crs.sagepub.com by guest on August 13, 2014

434217
2012

CRS10.1177/0896920511434217PowellCritical Sociology

Article

How Epistemology Matters:

Five Reflexive Critiques
of Public Sociology

Critical Sociology
39(1) 87104
The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permission:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0896920511434217
crs.sagepub.com

Christopher Powell
University of Manitoba, Canada

Abstract
This article analyses Michael Burawoys vision of public sociology in light of five distinct epistemic
strategies, each of which generates substantially different expectations regarding the challenges
and opportunities facing public sociologists. The five epistemic strategies range along a spectrum
from methodological individualism at one end to holism at the other. Between these two poles,
considerations of the social relativity of scientific knowledge arise. Constructionist theories
highlight the performative dilemma entailed when science reveals itself to be one narrative
among others. Hierarchical theories such as Marxism suggest that public sociology is torn by
the irreconcilable contradiction between hegemony and counter-hegemony. Heterarchical
theories address both of these two problems together. Heterarchy suggests that sciences claim
to universality may interfere with public sociologys social-transformative aspirations. However,
the dynamic complexity of public social struggles generates opportunities to rethink the place of
difference in the production of scientific knowledge.
Keywords
public sociology, epistemology, reflexivity, social change, heterarchy, systems, relativism,
sociology of knowledge

Introduction
Since Michael Burawoys presidential address to the American Sociological Association
(Burawoy, 2005d; see also especially Burawoy, 2005a, 2005b, 2005c, 2007, 2008a, 2008b, 2008c,
2009), the idea of public sociology has spread through our discipline like a prairie fire, generating
hundreds of articles and several books by authors from around the world (for a bare introduction,
see Clawson et al., 2007; Jeffries, 2009). Much of this literature has focused on the merits of
Burawoys proposal and the challenges of implementing it in differing contexts. Unsurprisingly,
some authors oppose Burawoys vision altogether, defending the non-partisanship of professional

Corresponding author:
Christopher Powell, Department of Sociology, University of Manitoba, 318-183 Dafoe Road, Winnipeg, MB,
R3T 2N2, Canada
Email: chris_powell@umanitoba.ca

Downloaded from crs.sagepub.com by guest on August 13, 2014

88

Critical Sociology 39(1)

sociology as necessary for the survival of the discipline and as a condition of possibility for its
having any public relevance or political influence at all (Holmwood, 2007; McLaughlin et al.,
2005; Turner, 2005, 2006, 2009). On a more sympathetic but still critical note, some Canadian
scholars (Creese et al., 2009; Davies, 2009; Goldberg and Van den Berg, 2009; Helmes-Hayes,
2009; Helmes-Hayes and McLaughlin, 2009; Kowalchuk and McLaughlin, 2009; Mesny, 2009)
have pointed out the parochialism of Burawoys analysis of sociology, noting that Canadian
sociologists have their own traditions of public engagement and that would-be public sociologists
in Canada face strategic considerations different from those of their American counterparts.
Criticisms from feminists (Creese et al., 2009; Glenn, 2007; Grauerholz and Baker-Sperry, 2007;
Lal, 2008; Risman, 2006; Rosenberg and Howard, 2008; Sprague, 2008; Sprague and Laube, 2009;
Stacey, 2008), the occasional Marxist (Paolucci, 2008), and other critical sociologists (Hadas and
Nichols, 2007; Keith, 2008; Mello e Silva, 2009; Touraine, 2007; Yuan, 2008) raise more troubling
issues still. These writers, speaking from projects that have long had a public dimension through
their ambitions for transformative praxis, tend to dispute the validity of Burawoys classification
of sociology into professional, policy, critical, and public, while suggesting that Burawoys
notion of public sociology may have a conservative tendency that perpetuates, or fails to address,
marginal subjects and neglects the lessons of past social movement struggles.
In this article I will use five different epistemological frameworks to examine the potential challenges that face public sociology as a form of praxis, that is, as a mode of intellectual production
engaged with practical efforts at social transformation. If theory provides intellectual frameworks
for establishing and evaluating factual claims and relating them to one another, epistemology provides frameworks for constructing, evaluating, and organizing theoretical claims. Sociologists
commonly organize epistemological frameworks into two dichotomously opposed strategies,
reductionism and holism,1 but it is possible to organize epistemological claims into a broad spectrum differentiable into at least five distinct categories or epistemic strategies (Kontopoulos,
1993: 75). Each of these strategies involves a qualitatively distinct conceptualization of social
structure by attributing differing degrees of emergence to collective social phenomena. Shifting
ones thinking from one epistemic strategy to another does more than entail differing claims about
a common set of observed phenomena; such a shift constitutes, in the observers perceptual field,
new structures and relational dynamics which otherwise do not appear, or appear less importantly.
By moving through all five epistemic strategies in comparatively short order, I will show how each
of these strategies or frameworks maps differently the terrain of public sociology, and the differing
challenges it faces as an intellectual and a sociopolitical strategy.

The Spectrum of Emergence

The term emergence refers to the quality of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, or
much coming from little (Holland, 1998: 2); more rigorously, it can refer to the arising of novel
and coherent structures, patterns, and properties during the process of self-organization in complex
systems (Goldstein, 1999: 49). Questions about emergence have played an important part in
sociologys epistemological debates (Sawyer, 2001, 2005). Strong claims of emergence appear in
statements like Durkheims famous dictum that we must treat social facts as things (Durkheim,
1982 [1895]: 60). Strong stances against emergence appear in the work of methodological
individualists who, like Weber, insist that
When reference is made in a sociological context to a state, a nation, a corporation, a family, or an army
corps, or to similar collectivities, what is meant is, on the contrary, only a certain kind of development of
actual or possible social actions of individual persons. (Weber, 1978a [1922]: 1314)

Downloaded from crs.sagepub.com by guest on August 13, 2014

89

Powell
Table 1. Five epistemic strategies
Epistemic strategy

Distinguishing explanatory features

Characteristic theorist

5Holism
4Hierarchy
3Heterarchy
2Compositionism

Totalizing organically unified system

Totalizing system
Multiple internally contradictory
systems
Structures, but no systems

1 Methodological individualism

Individual action

Durkheim, Parsons
Marx, Firestone
Bourdieu, Foucault,
Giddens
Simmel, Berger and
Luckmann, Lyotard
Weber, Homans

For much of the 20th century, theoretical debate over social structure tended to polarize
towards one of these two stances (Kontopoulos, 1993: 75). However, in practice sociologists
can take and have taken various positions along a continuum of emergentist claims of which
individualism and holism are only the end-points. Kontopoulos divides this continuum into five
broad types of position, which he calls epistemic strategies. Since nearly all sociologists, even
methodological individualists, conceptualize supra-individual phenomena, we may distinguish
among the epistemic strategies by noting the epistemological status given these phenomena.
Although emergent phenomena in sociology go by many names (forms, figurations, networks,
discourses, structures, and so on), for the sake of convenience I will use the familiar terms
structure and system.2
I describe the five epistemic strategies in detail elsewhere (Powell, 2010). Briefly, however,
they work as follows. In strong methodological individualism, social structures have no explanatory weight or distinct properties of their own; they function as mere heuristics which must
reduce entirely to explanations in terms of individual action. In epistemologically constructionist or compositionist theories, social structures appear as distinct phenomena with properties
irreducible to individual action, which thereby account for external or objective constraints on
action. Theorizing the further emergent dynamics generated by the interaction of social structures leads beyond compositionism to heterarchy, or tangled-systems theories. Social order
derives from the complex interaction of multiple systems, each driven by its own logic, and
none of which can successfully constitute itself as a totality that embraces all the others.
Totalization emerges in epistemologically hierarchical theories. Although multiple systemic
logics may still apply in hierarchical theories, one of these systems determines all the others, at
least in the last instance (Althusser, 2005). However, the totalizing system does not produce
an organic unity of society; the logic of the system contradicts itself, generating irreconcilable
antagonisms within the social order. In contrast to this, holist theories conceptualize social
conflicts or contradictions as pathological exceptions to the strong integrative tendency of the
social system.
Weber, rational-choice theorists, and behaviourists assert methodologically individualist
positions, as did Karl Popper in philosophy (Kontopoulos, 1993: 86). Berger and Luckmanns
social constructionism, social network analysis and game theory fall within the compositionist
range of the spectrum, (Kontopoulos, 1993: 102122), as do the work of Simmel, actor-network
theorists (Callon, 1988; Latour, 1993 [1991], 2005), Scott Lashs cultural theory (e.g. Lash and
Leury, 2007), and the liberal postmodernisms of Lyotard and Rorty (Lyotard, 1984; Rorty, 1989,
1991; see also Mirchandani, 2005). Bourdieu, Giddens, Bhaskar, and arguably Foucault all
adopt heterarchical epistemological positions (Kontopoulos, 1993: 214ff.), as does Luhmann

Downloaded from crs.sagepub.com by guest on August 13, 2014

90

Critical Sociology 39(1)

(1995 [1984]). Marx provides a paradigmatic example of hierarchical theory (Kontopoulos,

1993: 192); in my view, other radical theories that explain all social conflicts in terms of one
underlying contradiction also fit into this category (e.g. Firestone, 1970; Millett, 1970). The
organicism of Durkheim and Parsons exemplify the holist epistemic strategy (Kontopoulos,
1993: 153154).
Each epistemic strategy enables different kinds of theoretical claims and, as a consequence,
generates different frameworks of expectation regarding the constraints and opportunities faced by
sociology in general and public sociology in particular. This consideration applies even if one
holds an unreflexive conception of sociological rationality itself. Ones conception of the internal
and external relations of sociology, about sociologists relations to each other and to their publics,
necessarily varies along with ones conception of society itself. Things get more interesting, however, if one turns a reflexive sociological gaze onto sociological rationality itself: not only on the
activities by which that rationality is expressed and applied, but on the constitution of that rationality, on the structured processes through which sociologists produce and legitimate the limited
consensus that certifies particular statements as sociological knowledge. Like other kinds of scientist, sociologists produce not only specific pieces of knowledge characteristic of their field but also
the standards of validity that legitimate that knowledge in the face of competing claims to knowing, claims made by other kinds of scientist, by dominant political actors, and by the very publics
whom the public sociologist claims to represent. Therefore, which epistemic strategy one uses to
theorize sociological rationality has consequences for how one expects sociology in general and
public sociology in particular to work. Just as different optical instruments reveal different structural features of, say, an astronomical body, the different epistemic strategies reveal different
reflexive dilemmas likely to confront public sociologists.
Briefly, the main such dilemmas are as follows. Methodological individualism highlights the
conflicts of interest that may emerge between sociologists and the publics they study.
Compositionism locates such conflicts within the wider problem of competing discursive constructions. Composition also brings out the performative contradiction that results when sociology, by de-reifying socially dominant discursive formations, also de-reifies itself and risks its
own legitimacy. Hierarchical analyses, particularly those that operate in a dialectical mode, bring
out sociologys enmeshment in an unresolvable social contradiction that leaves no middle
ground between hegemonic and revolutionary science. These problems all concern difference;
holist analyses form a special case wherein problems of difference are theoretically subordinate
to problems of integration.3 In rigorously holist analysis, public sociology appears as a pathology
because it does not articulate the organic functional integration of society. Treating heterarchy out
of order, I argue that it allows an analysis of both performative and social contradictions. In radical, dialectically heterarchical theories, sociologists are faced with the challenge and opportunity
of developing a science that is not premised on consensus but that can still transform the world
through praxis.

Methodological Individualism
In methodologically individualist theories, collective concepts appear as heuristic tools with no
epistemic status of their own. In other words, institutions, systems and the like appear as a
convenient shorthand for patterns in individual social action but cannot in themselves explain that
action; all explanations framed in terms of collective concepts must in principle reduce to explanation in terms of individual action (Weber, 1978a [1922]: 6, 9, 1314, 1922). Such concepts

Downloaded from crs.sagepub.com by guest on August 13, 2014

91

Powell

provide a convenient shorthand for aggregates of individual-level phenomena but cannot in

themselves provide an explanation for such action. Only individuals and their actions including
individuals motives, perceptions, emotions, values, and rationalizations do count as explanations for social events. Applying a methodologically individualist epistemology to understanding
science in general and sociology in particular leaves open two divergent possibilities regarding
the origin of scientific rationality. In the first alternative, scientific rationality may merely provide
a social instantiation of values and dispositions that are biophysically innate to all healthy human
beings.4 In this case, scientific rationality is universally inscribed in human nature. Humans
are born without knowledge of science but with a universally shared science-generating set of
dispositions in a manner analogous to the universally shared generative grammar of Chomskyan
linguistics. This position is consistent with the hard individualism of rational choice theory (see
Kontopoulos, 1993: 3338) and is explicitly articulated by cognitive theorists (e.g. Heintz, 2004).
In the second alternative, scientific rationality emerges contingently as a widespread subjective
response to particular historical conditions. In this case, scientific rationality is not properly
universal, only very widespread, and only under specific conditions (those of modernity).
Biophysically innate dispositions still operate, but they underdetermine the type of action called
science. Weber himself tended towards this view, treating science as one way of knowing among
others (Weber, 1949 [1897]: 110), albeit one with special powers of prediction and control over
causal forces (Weber, 1978b [1913]).
If one theorizes rationality in individualist terms, then the main challenge facing public
sociologists is that of legitimating their own activities to their publics, to the wider society that
includes the dominant groups that public sociology aims to challenge, to their own colleagues,
and to themselves. Legitimation concerns how public sociologists establish the validity of the
knowledge they produce, how they answer the question of why anyone would be interested in or
believe what they have to say. If we understand sociologists and their publics as interest groups
(Dahrendorf, 1959: 157ff.), then it appears that sociologists can build legitimacy by serving the
interests of their publics. This can happen in at least two distinct ways: either by granting mastery
over causal social forces, or by producing representations which that public finds politically
useful (these two options intersect, of course).
As a third option, public sociologists may also appeal to publicly held values and dispositions, i.e. to the general legitimacy of scientific discourse. This third type of appeal takes on a
vital importance in the wider societal arena where public sociologists challenge the interests of
state and market elites. Without scientific legitimacy, public sociology loses some of its usefulness for the publics it is meant to serve. Capitalist and state elites can try to dismiss public
sociology as yet another partisan voice on behalf of so-called special interest groups; or, more
radically, they can undercut the authority of science as such in the realm of public decisionmaking.5 The specific origin of scientific rationality therefore affects the political calculus connecting sociologists, their publics, and their professional colleagues. If scientific rationality
simply instantiates essentially pre-social rational dispositions, then science will enjoy more
legitimacy the more that society allows individual human nature to flourish, and conflicts
between science and its detractors appear essentially as conflicts between objective reason and
mere ideology. But if sciences legitimacy depends on historically variable subjective valueorientations, then public sociologists who dismiss their opponents as mere ideologues will be
gravely underestimating the social resources available to their opponents. In this case, the
concerns of professional sociologists that public sociology could undermine the discipline as a
whole are well-founded.

Downloaded from crs.sagepub.com by guest on August 13, 2014

92

Critical Sociology 39(1)

Compositionism
In compositionist epistemologies, bottom-up analyses of individual action lead to the theorization
of emergent, supra-individual social forces. With the shift from individualist to constructionist or
compositionist6 epistemologies comes a radical break in the status of sociological knowledge
itself: as emergent social forms displace the internal teleology of the personality system
in accounting for social action, the prospect of universal rationality recedes, and with it, the
scientists privileged epistemological status. However, this break does not happen all at once. For
instance, Berger and Luckmanns The Social Construction of Reality (1966) posited emergent
structures in the form of institutions that, once externalized and objectified, possessed their own
capacity to determine individuals experiences of reality. Although the reality of socially constructed institutions derives from individuals actions, these institutions confront individuals as
an external and exigent force. But Berger and Luckmann did not turn this constructionist analysis
back on sociology itself, leaving sociology exempt from its own de-reifying gaze. Full reflexivity
requires applying a compositionist epistemology to scientific rationality itself.
Since the emergence of their strong programme (Barnes, 1977; Barnes et al., 1996; Bloor, 1976;
Knorr-Cetina, 1981), sociologists of scientific knowledge have moved beyond individualist
accounts of rationality to employ explicitly constructionist analyses. These accounts relativize scientific rationality, treating it as something made by human beings under specific socio-historical
conditions made, in Shapins phrase, as if it was produced by people with bodies, situated in
time, space, culture, and society, and struggling for credibility and authority (Shapin, 2010). In this
framework, science appears not merely as organized common sense (How to Think about Science,
2009) but as a particular institution with its own specific practical norms. Their unit of analysis is
not the individuals social action but social practices. Practices are constituted through (and work
to constitute) relations among actors, actors with interests (in both the intellectual and political
senses of the term) defined by their location and movement within institutional structures. (At the
same time, this programme is merely constructionist or compositionist in the sense that grand
systemic concepts like the capitalist mode of production or the state system have little or no
epistemic value.) The defining principle of this programme is the rule of symmetry: one cannot
explain only false scientific claims as a product of social forces while leaving true social claims
outside the scope of sociology; both true and false scientific knowledge are equally socially
constructed. Pursuing this insight has provoked intense controversy, in the form of the so-called
science wars (Hacking, 1999; How to Think about Science, 2009; Ross, 1996; Sokal, 1996), as
sociologists of knowledge (among others) have de-reified science and delegitimized its foundational myths of objective universality and transcendence of social contingency. This position
gives rise to a performative contradiction. Constructionist accounts of science apply equally to
sociology, including the sociology of scientific knowledge itself.
Compositionist sociology of scientific knowledge bears directly on the interests of public
sociologists. Neoliberal discourse makes abundant use of the fetishized authority of experts to reify
and naturalize the ongoing commodification and marketization of social practice. Subordinated
publics have an interest in de-fetishizing expert authority stripping the experts, so to speak
(Martin, 1991), in favour of their own local narratives. And to the extent that civil society actors
aim to establish a common discourse, more democratic and egalitarian than that of neoliberalism,
viewing this project as a deliberate act of construction has advantages over viewing it as the mere
realization of an already existing truth. Public sociologists can contribute to these efforts by
drawing on the sociology of scientific knowledge and other projects, like genealogy (Foucault,
1984, 1997) and standpoint epistemology (Smith, 1990) that disrupt expert authority. Paradoxically,

Downloaded from crs.sagepub.com by guest on August 13, 2014

93

Powell

they can lend expert authority to the liberating assertion that truth is not found but made. But in so
doing, public sociologists inadvertently undermine their own professional authority, opening
themselves to the nihilist rejoinder: If no way of speaking has universal validity, then why should
I listen to your narrative? This is precisely the legitimation crisis identified by Jean-Franois
Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition (1984). This crisis arises not from subjectivist solipsism, but
from a pragmatic, even materialist, constructionist sociology of knowledge.
The performative contradiction of constructionism about science bears mainly on sociologys
struggles with more powerful narratives. The insights of actor-network theory highlight a related
problem concerning public sociologists relations with those weaker than themselves. Callons
classic exposition of the formation of an actor network provides the vocabulary that lets us identify this problem (Callon, 1988; see also Latour, 2005; Law and Hassard, 1999) In Callons analysis, scientific researchers do not encounter the objects of their investigation ready-made and do
not perform only a passive role of recording what they see before them. Instead, researchers must
actively work to reconfigure their objects in ways that enable the production and publication of a
peer-reviewed journal article. To this end, researchers begin by interposing their research between
actors7 and their interests (problematization); they then lock those actors into place to form a
network configured according to the demands of research methodology (interessement); they
ensure that the members of that network accept their various roles, especially their roles as
representatives of larger populations (enrolment); and they read the actions of enrolled actors to
produce an account of a reality that is then held to have existed independently of the research
process (mobilization). Callon calls this entire process translation. Translation does not simply
represent the objects of scientific study as they are in nature; it symbolically and practically
remakes them into forms suitable for scientific discourse. Notably, the work of mobilization
involves the silencing of the mobilized actors, for to speak for others is to first silence those in
whose name we speak (Callon, 1988: 216).Civil-society actors approached by would-be public
sociologists might well exercise scepticism over just what it is that they are being enrolled in and
how their perceptions, actions, and desires will be translated.

Modular Hierarchy
Rather than write immediately of heterarchy, the most complex of epistemic strategies, I will
next discuss hierarchical and holist strategies before returning to heterarchy at the conclusion of
this article.
Fourth on the epistemic ladder from methodological individualism to holism lie those theories
that Kontopoulos (1993: 1213, 22, 42ff.) calls hierarchies. In this terminology, hierarchy refers
not to the existence of dominance and subordination among actors (which of course appear in theories of all types) but to the organization of social structures into a descending tree of nested modules: for instance, society as a whole, divided into classes, divided further into class fractions, and
so on. Hierarchical theories invoke holistic concepts of system or totality but eschew reference to
strong functional integration as an explanatory force. Rather, the tensions, dissonances, or antagonisms generated by partially disarticulated modular subdivisions of society explain the particular
phenomena apparent in any given historical situation. Moreover, this incomplete integration
appears as a normal, not pathological, feature of actually existing society. Marxian theory provides
a paradigmatic example of a hierarchical theory, one whose principle of modular subdivision (class
difference) derives from differing relations to the means of production (Marx and Engels, 1976
[1846], 1988 [1848]). Radical feminist theories provide an alternative whose principle of modular

Downloaded from crs.sagepub.com by guest on August 13, 2014

94

Critical Sociology 39(1)

subdivision (sex difference) derives from relations of biological reproduction (Firestone, 1970;
Millett, 1970).
I contend that hierarchical theories so conceived come in two flavours: dialectical and nondialectical. Non-dialectical theories frame the agonistic relations among structural modules in terms
of conflict, locating the motive forces of those conflicts within each module and thus tending
towards more reductionistic analysis. From such frameworks we get conceptions of Marx as a
limited, unidimensional conflict theorist (e.g. Collins, 1994). More interesting are the dialectical
versions of hierarchical theories, in which social contradictions emerge from the relations (Ball,
1978; Ollman, 1976) between social forces. For Marx, capital and labour do not exist independently
of one another, but constitute each other through their mutual relation. The simultaneous sale and
purchase of human labour-power creates the worker as a worker and the capitalist as a capitalist
(Marx, 2000c [1847]: 283), so that workers, by producing wealth, society and the conditions of
human existence, simultaneously produce their own poverty, alienation, and dehumanization (Marx,
2000a [1844]: 8692). We could say that conflict arises from the non-integration of individuals or
of local institutions, whereas contradiction arises precisely from the integration of society.
In a hierarchical view of rationality, truth is just as socially constructed as it is in compositionism. But instead of those constructions spinning off into a limitless plurality of differing local
narratives, they resolve into a single bifurcated structure. In Marxian theory, labour and capital
produce opposed forms of rationality, and in meeting, mixing, struggling with each other, give
rise to a complex duality in the activity of reasoning and the outcomes towards which it tends.
Every institution of capitalist society inescapably articulates this capital-labour contradiction. But
while some institutions act purely on behalf of one or the other force, others provide sites for the
war of position to which Gramsci attached such decisive importance (Gramsci, 1971: 514,
234235, 245). Academic sociology is one of those sites. In a dialectically hierarchical view such
as Marxs, therefore, Burawoys confidence that public and critical sociologists can get along
with professional and policy sociologists, that organic and traditional intellectuals complement
each other, actually expresses a political conviction that societal contradictions can be resolved
within the existing framework of society. To a dialectical hierarchist such resolution is impossible, making Burawoys conception of public sociology nave at best and hegemonic at worst.

Holism
The implications of a holist conception of rationality are laid out vividly in Durkheims account
of sociologists as the agents uniquely qualified to diagnose the normal and pathological states of
the social body and prescribe remedies for the latter. Durkheim explained society as an organically unified whole composed of objectively existing emergent structures (Durkheim, 1982
[1895]; Powell, 2010). This organic unity of society operates as a developmental tendency; modern society characterized by pathological levels of conflict and alienation should evolve towards
greater integration and unity (Durkheim, 1984 [1893]: 172175, 178183, 339340). Throughout
this process, higher-order forces, the objective developmental tendencies of the social organism,
exert determining effects on individual human beings, constituting their very subjectivity.
Subjects in modern societies perceive and conduct themselves as individuals because modern
society individualizes them (Durkheim, 1992 [1957]: 6567). Individual consciousness has a
social origin; it grows out of the collective consciousness. This applies to sociologists as much as
to anyone else. As the social organism evolves, it tends to produce the forms of ideation that it
needs for its own functioning. This includes the science of society, capable of discovering the
objective functional needs of the social body, diagnosing its pathologies, and prescribing

Downloaded from crs.sagepub.com by guest on August 13, 2014

95

Powell

remedies (Durkheim, 1982 [1895]: 102107). Sociologists can do this with objective validity
because their rationality derives from the same objective forces that give society its organization
and unity in the first place. Sociologists speak with binding validity because the totality speaks
through us, because our thoughts are the organic products of that totality. We are reflexively
embedded in the object of our study, but to achieve objective knowledge we do not need to inhabit
differing subject positions (as standpoint epistemology requires), because our connection to the
totality enables us to articulate the meta-interests that bind all members of society.
When perceived through the terms of a holist conception of rationality, Burawoys subdivision
of sociology into four types and his call for more public sociology appear either as the symptom
of a pathological state of society, or as themselves pathological. A properly constituted scientific
sociology making objective diagnoses of the developmental needs of society should simultaneously fulfil the imperatives of professional, policy, critical and public sociology. Or, if these categories express a useful division of disciplinary labour, professional sociology should reign
supreme, providing the overarching analysis of which the other sociologies merely work out
detailed applications. Conversely, any tendency of public sociologists to go native by siding with
their constituents against the dominant social order would be clearly pathological. In a holist
framework, a universalist conception of rationality cannot abide a pluralist proliferation of public
sociologies. At worst, public sociology would appear to add to the social disintegration of which
it itself appears symptomatic.

Heterarchy
Heterarchical analyses of public sociology fall well short of such bleak dismissal, but do suggest
that the enterprise faces some formidable challenges. Heterarchy sits between compositionism
and hierarchy on Kontopouloss scale of epistemic strategies, more systematic than the former
but less totalizing than the latter. Heterarchical theories frame the social world in terms of
multiple systems that overlap, intertwine, reinforce each other, subvert or oppose one another,
each striving for totality but unable to achieve it, so that the combined product is less a metasystem or system of systems than a perpetually incomplete and unstable tangle of systems
(Kontopoulos, 1993: 6272). This complex entanglement reconciles notions of social-structural
determination with individual agency: in overlapping with one another, working to different ends,
and so disrupting one another, systems may in their very overdetermining tendencies foster situations of local indeterminacy, in which individuals have the scope to innovate new structured
practices (Kontopoulos, 1993: 18, 235236, 318). This turbulence means that causality is not
always scale-bound, so that microsocial and even biophysical forces can have macrosocial consequences and vice versa, obeying complex logics that are neither reductionist nor holist
(Kontopoulos, 1993: 32, 173, 238). Heterarchy has become a common epistemological strategy
in contemporary sociological theory, at least in its non-dialectical articulations; it appears in
Foucaults analysis of the swarming of institutions (Foucault, 1990 [1976], 1995 [1975]), Giddenss
multidimensional theory of modernity (Giddens, 1984, 1990), Bourdieus multiple fields of capital
(Bourdieu, 1984, 1990; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992), the multi-level institutional analysis of
contemporary organizational theory (Boltanski and Thvenot, 2006; Friedland and Alford, 1991),
Luhmanns complexity-oriented systems theory (Luhmann, 1995 [1984]), and elsewhere.8 But
certain implications of a heterarchical approach to rationality itself have yet to be explored
thoroughly, perhaps for fear of their relativizing implications.
Like hierarchy, heterarchy comes in dialectical and non-dialectical forms. In its non-dialectical
forms, scientific rationality appears as a social construction, as in compositionist frameworks, but

Downloaded from crs.sagepub.com by guest on August 13, 2014

96

Critical Sociology 39(1)

the formative influence of global systems on local processes of construction mitigates the
incommensurateness of local narratives, establishing a heterogeneous network of epistemic bridges
among those narratives. Public sociology can operate on those bridges; in effect, the public
sociologist can say to the indigenous traditionalist, You and I have up to this point narrated the
universe in fundamentally different terms, but we both have to deal with neoliberalism, so lets
start from there and see what we can do together. Sociology still commits itself to a performative
contradiction, its own epistemic logic compelling it to expose its own founding myths and defetishize its own sources of authority. But public sociology might help to remedy this by replacing
eroding authority with new relations of solidarity. Feminist work on intersectionality (e.g. Collins,
2000; Crenshaw, 1991; hooks, 1984; McCall, 2005) and on kyriarchy (Bruns, 2011; Pui-lan, 2009;
Schssler Fiorenza, 1999) speaks to the challenges and opportunities of this situation.
Dialectical heterarchy presents an even more complex picture. Social contradictions work
counter to the commensurating tendencies of global systems, introducing multiple bifurcations
into the heterogeneous network of truth-making. So if consciousness and hence rationality are
engendered socially by multiple contradictory systems, then the relative uniformity of scientific
rationality in the modern world its de facto quasi-universality needs explaining. A dialectically
heterarchical framework suggests that such quasi-universality may result from the confluence of
multiple systems working together to overdetermine the practical epistemologies of societal
members. If so, then professional sociology more or less confidently occupies this zone of multiple forms of naturalized privilege, while public sociology can be entirely uncritical, critical along
some axes of oppression but not others, or radically critical along all. The more critically that
public sociology engages with marginalized publics and counterhegemonic struggles, the more
dispersed and disunified its discourse will become, and the more quixotic will appear the goal of
establishing universal truth in the sense of a rational consensus.
The reasons for this can be clarified by applying the reflexive analyses of Dorothy Smith and
Pierre Bourdieu to the problem of the performative contradiction. If the performative contradiction impinged only on sociologys claim to public legitimacy in the face of dominant interests,
then public sociologists might willingly pay that price. Taking professional risks in the service of
public good against the interests of neoliberal elites is what gives public sociology its heroic elan.
But conflicts of interest may also emerge between public sociologists and the publics they wish
to study. Sociologists engaged with community-based research or with critical or anti-oppressive
methodologies have already noted the potential conflicts between the imperatives of socialscientific research and the needs of politically engaged, and potentially vulnerable, civil society
organizations (see e.g. Cooke and Kothari, 2001; Holland and Blackburn, 1998; Mohan and
Stokke, 2000). This goes deeper than the conflict between the necessary political opportunism of
social movements on the one hand and the intellectuals need for consistency, coherence, and
honesty (Wallerstein, 2007: 170) on the other. Social movements have extra-scientific political
interests, of course, but they also have their own distinct epistemic interests. Social science in its
normal mode of operation proceeds by objectifying the social world, translating the subjectively
unique and relationally embedded particular experiences of particular subjects into abstract and
labile data that can be subjected to the context-nonspecific operations of statistics or qualitative
content analysis or middle-range theories and so on, and thereby articulated into the general
academic conversation. In the process, knowledge is alienated from the people whose lives that
knowledge represents; research subjects do not normally control what is done with data collected
from them once that data enters the symbolic economy of academic production. As Smith has
pointed out, this objectification has an affinity with the objectification instantiated through
relations of rule, whereby dominated subjects suffer having their lived experience denied or

Downloaded from crs.sagepub.com by guest on August 13, 2014

97

Powell

mutilated to meet the instrumental needs of those who govern (Smith, 1990). In the conflict
between the objectified discourse of ruling and the fiercely idiographic narratives of the ruled, a
sociologist who does not practice reflexive awareness risks representing the latter in the terms
and categories of the former, even if the content of that representation is otherwise favourable. In
this way, even an overtly progressive social science may readily become complicit with governmentality (Foucault, 1991). At the very least, these considerations require public sociologists to
act with great care and to reflexively account not only for their subordinated position in relation
to state and market elites, but also for their privileged position relative to many of the publics they
wish to ally themselves with.
The effective exercise of such reflexive care requires serious commitment, however. For whatever their values, public sociologists must still obey the logic of scientific capital (Bourdieu,
2004: 55). In Bourdieus theory, cultural capital (cultural know-how, including useful skills and
dispositions; see Bourdieu, 1984: 1214,5354, 7071, 120122; Bourdieu, 1990: 66ff.; Bourdieu
and Wacquant, 1992: 119) becomes symbolic capital (loosely speaking, prestige; see Bourdieu
and Wacquant, 1992: 119) when it is externalized and reified (Berger and Luckmann, 1966:
8992). The authority of scientific knowledge is a specific form of symbolic capital, and the production of scientific knowledge requires the ongoing reproduction, on an expanding scale, of this
scientific cultural capital (Bourdieu, 2004: 55). Sociologists, public or otherwise, are not free to
represent the world as they will; they must work entrepreneurially to expand their own scientific
symbolic capital and so, indirectly, that of their field as a whole (regarding fields, see Bourdieu
and Wacquant, 1992: 9697, 104109). This imperative generates strong pressures to adhere to
scientific norms, norms that tend to objectify that which is studied. Among the possible antidemocratic effects of this scientific translation, governmentalization is a relatively mild form. More
severe symbolic violence (Bourdieu, 1991: 5152; Bourdieu, 2001: 33ff.) can result when the
sociologist as a destroyer of myths (Elias, 1978 [1970]: 50ff.) does uncompensated harm to
myths that oppressed groups use to construct positive self-identities. The risk of this harm is
greater the further removed such myths are, in their value-rationality, from the particular values
that underpin scientific normativity. Stark examples of this can be found, for instance, in encounters between anthropologists conducting field research and indigenous groups struggling against
colonialism and cultural genocide. Not for nothing has research become a dirty word in many
indigenous communities (Tuhiwai Smith, 1999: i).
We could say that the process of scientific investigation entails a contradiction of its own
between the active, speaking subject of knowledge and the passive, silent object of knowledge.
Critically reflexive public sociologists must negotiate this contradiction while simultaneously
also negotiating the contradictions between capital and labour, sovereign and subject, patriarchal
masculinity and its various others, and so on. In these difficult struggles, the claim that scientific
rationality provides an exclusive, objective, universally valid form of knowledge favours the
epistemic interests of the dominating sides of these contradictions. The Marxian or Gramscian
problem that sociologys institutional legitimacy varies inversely with the effectiveness of its
counter-hegemonic praxis appears again in heterarchy, and multiplied. However, the competing
systemic logics pull in contrary as well as complementary directions, and these incoherencies
produce zones of underdetermination through overdetermination that avail subjects of opportunities to develop new structures. Concretely, the imperatives of state power do not always align
with those of the market, which do not always align with those of patriarchy, and so on. Subjects
in civil society already engage in struggles that play one system off against the other; these kinds
of struggles may enable the construction of new institutions not premised on contradiction. The
view from dialectically heterarchical epistemology suggests that, one way or another, a critical

Downloaded from crs.sagepub.com by guest on August 13, 2014

98

Critical Sociology 39(1)

public sociology must help build the new institutions that will legitimate it, in a race against the
loss of institutional support from patron institutions whose dominance it helps to undermine.
In the process it works to supersede its own internal contradiction between the knowing expert
subject and the unknowing, known-about object.
One way to think about this formidable task is in terms of epistemic difference. In compositionist theories, differences appear plural, separate, endlessly profuse; in hierarchical theories,
difference appears dual, the two halves of the duality connected through their antagonism. In
dialectical heterarchy, differences appear dual, interconnected, overlapping, riven with contradictions, endlessly dynamic, inseparable but also unresolvable within the existing social order.
Difference creates a problem for science, which, despite the provisionality and contestability of
all scientific truth-claims, and despite the heterogeneity of its disciplines, depends for its legitimation and much of its practical appeal on the myth of universal truth. In a compositionist
universe, one can deal with difference through translation, interpretation in Baumans terms
(1987); in a dialectical hierarchy, the aim is transcendence. The ambition of the former might be
merely to travel looking, looking, breathlessly (Castaeda, 1968: 137),9 while the latter aims
to change the world (Marx, 2000b [1845/1888]). A public sociologist in the dialectical heterarchical mode might well combine both of these ambitions. Such a person might ask, how could science work if it no longer reproduced expert authority and no longer pretended to generate a
unitary truth? How can socio-political praxis work without either depending on consensus or
devolving into new forms of authoritarianism? Auguste Comte, sociologys nominal founder,
believed in a world where a technocratic elite advised authoritarian governments on how to solve
social problems with scientific efficiency, avoiding the messy complications of democracy. Public
sociology appeals to a radically different belief. But how radical is it willing to be?

Conclusion
Public sociology, as conceived by Burawoy, offers sociologists exciting opportunities for social
engagement that serves both the professional interest of bringing our work to wider audiences and
the moral purpose of aiding the dominated against the forces of domination. My purpose here has
been to push reflexive thinking, on which public sociology is premised, further than its proponents
have done so far. What a reflexive analysis will reveal depends on the epistemological assumptions of that analysis. Kontopouloss five-part classification of epistemic strategies draws out a
wider, more complex range of positions than allowed for by the simple opposition of holism and
individualism. In a methodologically individualist frame, the main challenges to public sociology
come from conflicts of interest: between public sociologists and the elites whose dominance
sociology opposes, but also between sociologists and the publics they work with, publics who may
have their own epistemic interests threatened by the scientific ethos. In a compositionist frame,
these challenges appear more starkly in the form of the performative contradiction entered into by
a science whose own logic compels it to construe all possible forms of knowledge, including itself,
as historically particular and contingent social constructions. On the other side of the spectrum,
both hierarchical and holist epistemologies suggest more insurmountable obstacles to public
sociology. What appears in a compositionist framework as a performative contradiction becomes,
in a (dialectically) hierarchical mode of theorizing, the symptom of a social contradiction. The
opposition of capital and labour is such that hegemonic and counter-hegemonic modes of knowing
are incommensurable; methodological rigour and institutional autonomy will not suffice to bridge
the gap between traditional and organic intellectual activity, between reform and revolution. At the
holist end of the epistemological spectrum, the logic of public sociology collapses altogether:

Downloaded from crs.sagepub.com by guest on August 13, 2014

99

Powell

sociology derives its authority from its own organic integration into the social order, an integration
that enables and demands strict objectivity and non-partisanship. A sociology whose agenda is
defined by any extra-scientific considerations appears to the strict holist as a pathology.
Heterarchy, the position in the middle range of this spectrum, presents the most complex
ensemble of challenges and opportunities. In heterarchical analysis, public sociology must contend not only with a plurality of overlapping and intersecting forms of domination, as in methodologically individualist and compositionist theories, but with multiple emergent systems of
domination, systems that sometimes reinforce each other and sometimes compete with one
another to determine action within the social field. Opportunities for radical transformation can
emerge from zones of indeterminacy created when competing systemic logics partially cancel
each other out. But a specifically dialectical heterarchical framework implies multiple social
contradictions, multiple forms of hegemony and counter-hegemony, multiple ways in which the
institutional interests of academic sociologists and the epistemic needs of movements for social
transformation will pull too far apart to be bridged by the tools currently available to us. These
pressures may impel sociologists to reconsider one of their own foundational myths: that of
the universality of scientific rationality. For all the de facto heterogeneity of scientific discourse,
the principle of rational consensus remains essential to many scientists, including sociologists.
The complex multiple forms of epistemic difference implied by a heterarchical conception of
social structure suggest that the scope for rational consensus is always limited, even among those
working on counter-hegemonic projects.
The current ongoing crisis of neoliberal capitalist society, the multiple forms of resistance that
have emerged, and the experiments in radically democratic decision-making that some of those
movements have engaged in (e.g. Gelderloos, 2006; Graeber, 2009; Vannucci and Singer, 2010) are
opening up new zones of indeterminacy in which individuals and groups can innovate genuinely
new structural practices, even to the point of reinventing their modes of discourse. Will sociology
venture into those zones? And what new forms will it take as it engages with epistemic difference
in an egalitarian spirit? This may be public sociologys true adventure: discovering not only new
truths about the social, but new ways of making truth, new ways of being a sociologist.
Acknowledgements

For their feedback and encouragement in the drafting of this article I would like to thank Sheryl Peters,
Christopher Fries, and Jean-Sebastian Guy.

Notes

1 Less commonly, relational thinking or relationism is proposed as a third alternative to these two (Elias,
1987 [1983]; Emirbayer, 1997; Powell, 2007, 2011). The specific implications of relational as opposed to
objectivist conceptions of social structure are complex enough to warrant an entire other article. However,
readers familiar with relational thinking will notice its influence on my discussion in this article.
2 I will use these terms because of its familiarity, despite reservations about their baggage. My own preferred concept would be figurations; see Elias (2000 [1939]).
3 For instance, Durkheims work treats social differentiation as either normal (conducive to social solidarity)
or pathological (destructive of that solidarity); in his analysis, difference matters because of its relation to
social integration and not vice versa.
4 Alternatively, scientific rationality may constitute an emergent psychological phenomenon that is not
itself inscribed within biophysically innate cognitive dispositions, but one that operates universally or
near-universally because it constitutes the singular functionally optimal resolution of the interaction of
innate dispositions with the social and physical environments in which human beings operate. Emergence
happens in what Parsons (1951: 610) called the personality system, without engendering a social

Downloaded from crs.sagepub.com by guest on August 13, 2014

100

5
6

7
8
9

Critical Sociology 39(1)

system. However, for the purposes of my discussion here the effects of this position are indistinguishable
from those of biophysical reductionism.
In Canada, the former process has been used at least since the Mulroney government of the 1980s, and the
latter has manifested itself in, for instance, the Harper governments decision to gut the long-form census
by making it no longer mandatory.
Kontopoulos uses constructionism and compositionism interchangeably to refer to this type of epistemic strategy. However, since the word constructionism has acquired so many diverse connotations
(Hacking, 1999), I prefer the relatively unfamiliar word compositionism, which, if it evokes anything at
all, suggests a sociology in which society appears as the mere composite sum of its structures.
Actor-network theory treats not only humans but also nonhumans animals, plants, even non-living
matter as capable of social action, and hence as social actors (see also Latour, 1988).
Considerable heterogeneity still exists within this category, however. Foucaults work, for instance, lies
more towards the compositionist end of this category while Bourdieus lies towards its hierarchical end.
Of course, Castaedas purported anthropology is well known to have been a hoax. But as mere poetry it
sometimes expresses the spirit of a science that eschews both reductionism and systematicity.

References

Althusser L (2005) For Marx. London: Verso.

Ball T (1978) Two concepts of coercion. Theory and Society 5(1): 97112.
Barnes B (1977) Interests and the Growth of Knowledge. London: Routledge.
Barnes B, Bloor D, and Henry J (1996) Scientific Knowledge: A Sociological Analysis. Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press.
Bauman Z (1987) Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-Modernity, and Intellectuals.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Berger P and Luckmann T (1966) The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of
Knowledge. London: Penguin Books.
Bloor D (1976) Knowledge and Social Imagery. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Boltanski L and Thvenot L (2006) On Justification: Economies of Worth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Bourdieu P (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Bourdieu P (1990) The Logic of Practice. Translated from the French by R Nice. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
Bourdieu P (1991) Language and Symbolic Power. Translated from the French by G Raymond and M Adamson.
Edited by JB Thompson. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bourdieu P (2001) Masculine Domination. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Bourdieu P (2004) The Science of Science and Reflexivity. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Bourdieu P and Wacquant LJD (1992) An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press.
Bruns CM (2011) Feminism and feminist therapy across generations. Women and Therapy 34(1/2): 1937.
Burawoy M (2005a) The critical turn to public sociology. Critical Sociology 31(3): 313326.
Burawoy M (2005b) The return of the repressed: recovering the public face of U.S. sociology, one hundred
years on. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science600: 6885.
Burawoy M (2005c) Third-wave sociology and the end of pure science. The American Sociologist 36(3/4):
152165.
Burawoy M (2005d) 2004 Presidential address: for public sociology. American Sociological Review 70(1):
428.
Burawoy M (2007) Public sociology vs. the market. Socio-Economic Review 5(2): 356367.
Burawoy M (2008a) The public turn: from labor process to labor movement. Work and Occupations 35(4):
371387.
Burawoy M (2008b) Rejoinder: for a subaltern global sociology? Current Sociology 56(3): 435444.

Downloaded from crs.sagepub.com by guest on August 13, 2014

101

Powell

Burawoy M (2008c) What is to be done? Theses on the degradation of social existence in a globalizing world.
Current Sociology 56(3): 351359.
Burawoy M (2009) Public sociology in the age of Obama. Innovation: The European Journal of Social
Science Research 22(2): 189199.
Callon M (1988) Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen
of St. Brieuc Bay. In: Law J (ed.) Power, Action, and Belief. London: Routledge, 196233.
Castaeda C (1968) The Teaching of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. New York, NY: Pocket Books.
Clawson D, Zussman R, Misra J et al. (eds) (2007) Public Sociology: Fifteen Eminent Sociologists
Debate Politics and the Profession in the Twenty-First Century. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Collins PH (2000) Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment.
London: Routledge.
Collins R (1994) Four Sociological Traditions. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Cooke B and Kothari U (eds) (2001) Participation: The New Tyranny? London: Zed Books.
Creese G, McLaren AT and Pulkingham J (2009) Rethinking Burawoy: reflections from Canadian feminist
sociology. Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie 34(3): 601622.
Crenshaw KW (1991) Mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women
of color. Stanford Law Review 43(6): 12411299.
Dahrendorf R (1959) Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Davies S (2009) Drifting apart? The institutional dynamics awaiting public sociology in Canada. Canadian
Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie 34(3): 623654.
Durkheim E (1982 [1895]) The rules of sociological method. In: Lukes S (ed.) Durkheim: The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and Its Method. New York, NY: The Free Press, 31166.
Durkheim E (1984 [1893]) The Division of Labour in Society. New York, NY: The Free Press.
Durkheim E (1992 [1957]) Professional Ethics and Civic Morals. London: Routledge.
Elias N (1978 [1970]) What is Sociology? Translated by S Mennell and G Morrissey. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Elias N (1987 [1983]) Involvement and Detachment. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Elias N (2000 [1939]) The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization.
Translated by E Jephcott. Revised edition. Oxford: Blackwell.
Emirbayer M (1997) Manifesto for a relational sociology. The American Journal of Sociology 103(2):
281317.
Firestone S (1970) The Dialectic of Sex. New York, NY: Bantam Books.
Foucault M (1984) Nietzsche, genealogy, history. In: Rabinow P (ed.) The Foucault Reader. New York, NY:
Pantheon Books, 76102.
Foucault M (1990 [1976]) The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Translated by R Hurley.
Vintage Books Edition. New York, NY: Vintage Books.
Foucault M (1991) Governmentality. In: Burchell G et al. (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 87104.
Foucault M (1995 [1975]) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by A Sheridan. 2nd
Edition. New York, NY: Vintage Books.
Foucault M (1997) What is enlightenment? In: Rabinow P (ed.) Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth: Essential
Works of Michel Foucault 19541984, Volume I. New York, NY: The New Press, 303320.
Friedland R and Alford RR (1991) Bringing society back in: symbols, practices, and institutional contradictions. In: Powell WW and DiMaggio PJ (eds) The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 232266.
Gelderloos P (2006) Consensus: A New Handbook for Grassroots Social, Political, and Environmental
Groups. Tucson, AZ: See Sharp Press.
Giddens A (1984) The Constitution of Society: Outline of a Theory of Structuration. Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press.
Giddens A (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Downloaded from crs.sagepub.com by guest on August 13, 2014

102

Critical Sociology 39(1)

Glenn EN (2007) Whose public sociology? The subaltern speaks, but who is listening? In: Clawson D et al.
(eds) Public Sociology: Fifteen Eminent Sociologists Debate Politics and the Profession in the TwentyFirst Century. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 213230.
Goldberg A and Van den Berg A (2009) What do public sociologists do? A critique of Burawoy. Canadian
Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie 34(3): 765802.
Goldstein J (1999) Emergence as a construct: history and issues. Emergence: A Journal of Complexity Issues
in Organizations and Management 1(1): 4972.
Graeber D (2009) Direct Action: An Ethnography. Oakland, CA: AK Press.
Gramsci A (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Translated by Q Hoare and GN Smith. New York,
NY: International Publishers.
Grauerholz L and Baker-Sperry L (2007) Feminist research in the public domain: risks and recommendations.
Gender and Society 21(2): 272294.
Hacking, I (1999) The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hadas M and Nichols LT (2007) Much ado about nothing? Remarks on Michael Burawoys presidential
address. The American Sociologist 38(3): 309322.
Heintz C (2004) Introduction: Why There Should Be a Cognitive Anthropology of Science. Journal of
Cognition and Culture 4(3): 391408.
Helmes-Hayes R (2009) Engaged, practical intellectualism: John Porter and new liberal public sociology.
Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie 34(3): 831868.
Helmes-Hayes R and McLaughlin N (2009) Public sociology in Canada: debates, research and historical
context. Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie 34(3): 573600.
Holland JH (1998) Emergence: From Chaos to Order. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Holland J and Blackburn J (eds) (1998) Whose Voice? Participatory Research and Policy Change, Publications in Participation. London: Intermediate Technology.
Holmwood J (2007) Sociology as public discourse and professional practice: a critique of Michael Burawoy.
Sociological Theory 25(1): 4666.
hooks b (1984) Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.
How to Think about Science (2009) Episode 1 Steven Shapin and Simon Shaffer. CBC Radio. Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation. Available (consulted 11 January 2012) at http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/2009/01/02/how-to-think-about-science-part-1-24-listen/
Jeffries V (ed.) (2009) Handbook of Public Sociology. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Keith M (2008) Public sociology? Between heroic immersion and critical distance: personal reflections on
academic engagement with political life. Critical Social Policy 28(3): 320334.
Knorr-Cetina KD (1981) The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual
Nature of Science. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Kontopoulos KM (1993) The Logics of Social Structure.[Structural Analysis in the Social Sciences Series,
edited by M Granovetter] New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Kowalchuk L and McLaughlin N (2009) Mapping the social space of opinion: public sociology and the op-ed
in Canada. Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie 34(3): 697728.
Lal J (2008) On the domestication of American public sociology: a postcolonial feminist perspective. Critical
Sociology 34(2): 169191.
Lash S and Leury C (2007) Global Culture Industry: The Mediation of Things. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Latour B (1988) Mixing humans and nonhumans together: the sociology of a door-closer. Social Problems
35(3): 298310.
Latour B (1993 [1991]) We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by C Potter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Latour B (2005) Reassembling the Social Sciences: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Law J and Hassard J (eds) (1999) Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell.
Luhmann N (1995 [1984]) Social Systems. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Downloaded from crs.sagepub.com by guest on August 13, 2014

103

Powell

Lyotard J-F (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by G Bennington and B
Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
McCall L (2005) The complexity of intersectionality. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30(3):
17711800.
McLaughlin N, Kowalchuk L, Turcotte K et al. (2005) Why sociology does not need to be saved: analytic
reflections on public sociologies. The American Sociologist 36(3/4): 133151.
Martin B (1991) Strip the Experts. London: Freedom Press.
Marx K (2000a [1844]) Economic and philosophical manuscripts. In: McLellan D (ed.) Karl Marx: Selected
Writings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 83121.
Marx K (2000b [1845/1888]) Theses on Feuerbach. In: McLellan D (ed.) Karl Marx: Selected Writings.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 171174.
Marx K (2000c [1847]) Wage-labour and capital. In: McLellan D (ed.) Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 273294.
Marx K and Engels F (1976 [1846]) The German ideology. In: Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected
Works, Volume 5, Marx and Engels: 184547. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Marx K and Engels F (1988 [1848]) The communist manifesto. In: McLellan D (ed.) Marxism: Essential
Writings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2049.
Mello e Silva L (2009) Touraine, Burawoy, Gramsci: from social to politics. Caderno CRH 22(56): 281296.
Mesny A (2009) What do we know that they dont? Sociologists versus non-sociologists knowledge.
Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie 34(3): 671696.
Millett K (1970) Sexual Politics. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Mirchandani R (2005) Postmodernism and sociology: from the epistemological to the empirical. Sociological
Theory 23(1): 86115.
Mohan G and Stokke K (2000) Participatory development and empowerment: the dangers of localism. Third
World Quarterly 21(2): 247268.
Ollman B (1976) Alienation: Marxs Conception of Man in Capitalist Society. 2nd Edition. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Paolucci P (2008) Public sociology, Marxism, and Marx. Current Perspectives in Social Theory 25: 353382.
Parsons T (1951) The Social System. New York, NY: The Free Press.
Powell C (2007) What do genocides kill? A relational conception of genocide. Journal of Genocide Research
9(4): 527547.
Powell C (2010) Four concepts of morality. In: Hitlin S and Vaisey S (eds) Handbook of the Sociology of
Morality. New York, NY: Springer, 3556.
Powell C (2011) Barbaric Civilization: A Critical Sociology of Genocide. Montral: McGill-Queens
University Press.
Pui-lan K (2009) Elisabeth Schssler Fiorenza and postcolonial studies. Journal of Feminist Studies in
Religion 25(1): 191197.
Risman BJ (2006) Feminist scholarship and public sociology. Paper presented at the XVI International
Sociological Association World Congress of Sociology, Durban.
Rorty R (1989) Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rorty R (1991) Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Rosenberg KE and Howard JA (2008) Finding feminist sociology: a review essay. Signs 33(3): 675696.
Ross A (1996) Introduction. Social Text 46/47: 113.
Sawyer RK (2001) Emergence in sociology: contemporary philosophy of mind and some implications for
sociological theory. American Journal of Sociology 107(3): 551585.
Sawyer RK (2005) Social Emergence: Societies as Complex Systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Schssler Fiorenza E (1999) Jesus: Miriams Child, Sophias ProphetCritical Issues in Feminist Theology.
New York, NY: Continuum.

Downloaded from crs.sagepub.com by guest on August 13, 2014

104

Critical Sociology 39(1)

Shapin S (2010) Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as if It Was Produced by People with Bodies,
Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority. Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Smith D (1990) The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge. Toronto: University
of Toronto Press.
Sokal AD (1996) Transgressing the boundaries: towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity.
Social Text 14(1, 2): 217252.
Sprague J (2008) Sociology: the good, the bad, and the public. Gender and Society 22(6): 697704.
Sprague J and Laube H (2009) Institutional barriers to doing public sociology: experiences of feminists in the
academy. The American Sociologist 40(4): 249271.
Stacey J (2008) Cautions on performing feminist sociology on public stages. Empiria: Revista de Metodologia
de Ciencias Sociales 15: 1936.
Touraine A (2007) Public sociology and the end of society. In: Clawson D et al. (eds) Public Sociology: Fifteen Eminent Sociologists Debate Politics and the Profession in the Twenty-First Century. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 6778.
Tuhiwai Smith L (1999) Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed
Books.
Turner JH (2005) Is public sociology such a good idea? The American Sociologist 36(3/4): 2745.
Turner JH (2006) American sociology in chaos: differentiation without integration. The American Sociologist
37(2): 1529.
Turner JH (2009) Against public sociology: not the best way to make sociology relevant. Caderno CRH
22(56): 255269.
Vannucci D and Singer R (2010) Come Hell or High Water: A Handbook on Collective Process Gone Awry.
Oakland, CA: AK Press.
Wallerstein I (2007) The sociologist and the public sphere. In: Clawson D et al. (eds) Public Sociology: Fifteen Eminent Sociologists Debate Politics and the Profession in the Twenty-First Century. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 169175.
Weber M (1949 [1897]) Objectivity in social science and social science policy. In: Shils EA and Finch HA
(eds) The Methodology of the Social Sciences. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 50112.
Weber M (1978a [1922]) Economy and Society, Volume 1. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Weber M (1978b [1913]) Value-judgments in social science. In: Matthews E (ed.) Weber: Selections in
Translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 6998.
Yuan S (2008) Strong and weak intervention: two pathways for sociological intervention. Current Sociology
56(3): 399404.

Downloaded from crs.sagepub.com by guest on August 13, 2014