Public Sociology as a Theoretical and Professional Concept

Abstract

Recently, fervent discussions regarding Burawoy's For Public Sociology (2004) have been carried out among sociologists worldwide. This is merely an indication of their anxiety with regard to the contemporary situation of sociology. With regard to Burawoy' s paper, most of the reviewers of the paper express their sympathy by stating that sociology should be more public, instead of professional. In other words, sociologists should address and communicate with public audiences. However, the real problem of contemporary sociology is not its lack of public communication but the lack of theoretical knowledge that needs to be communicated to public audiences. Since the 1970s, there has been a deep distrust with reference to the general theories in sociology, deploring the ethnocentrism of theories that had existed thus far such as the theory proposed by Parsons. Many different attempts have been made to base sociological inquiries upon concrete solid objective grounds. However, this resulted in a Babel in the world of sociology. The defect in Burawoy' s conceptualization of public sociology is that it is not founded on a substantial comprehension regarding the peculiar nature of the social world, which is the objective of sociology. The peculiarity of the social world, which is the main source of contemporary problems of sociology, is that the social world is a meaning world to which the classical concept of objective truth may not fully apply. The inquiries should be in terms of interpretations, and there are no established ways of conceiving the basis of the validity of an interpretation. In any case, sociology cannot only be interpretative, and yet we require certain communalities among sociological inquiries. In this paper, I suggest that the concept of public sociology should represent those sociological explorations that are oriented toward 'better' interpretation, which is inherently related to the construction of a 'better' meaning world for people in that social world. Such an exploration is not only empirical but also normative and at the same time theoretical as well as professional.