What Use is Sociology? by Bauman Zygmunt; Jacobsen Michael Hviid; Tester Keith

Author:Bauman, Zygmunt; Jacobsen, Michael Hviid; Tester, Keith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley

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What does sociology achieve?

MHJ and KT What is the use of sociology?

ZB I believe that sociology should be judged by its relevance to experience and humans’ struggles with their own life problems, and not by loyalty to methodology. It’s risky, very risky, full of traps and ambushes whenever we want to speak, not so much to illustrious colleagues, as to the ordinary people out there. All the same, they are the genuine recipients of our services. Either they are our genuine recipients, finding our services of importance, use and benefit to them, or there’s no point in doing our job at all because the fear that sociology is losing touch with the public sphere will really be true. The relevance to common mundane experience is in my view the only link nowadays connecting us to ‘the public sphere’.

Recently, an insightful (some might say whippersnapper) sociology undergraduate blatantly stated during an examination: ‘The biggest challenge confronting sociology today is how to be taken seriously.’ Do you agree with this? Or are there other challenges to sociology that we need to be concerned about?

Knowingly or not, your undergraduate compressed two (or is it three?) questions into one. Two obvious questions are (1) can sociological interpretations of worldly things be taken seriously, and (2) can the things sociology interprets be taken seriously? Yet there is, I suspect, a third question underlying the first two and prodding your undergraduate, and not just him, to ask them: are we, the intended addressees and beneficiaries of sociological interpretations, able or inclined to take seriously the messages they convey? Of the three, only the first question, embracing and presuming the other two and doing it explicitly, addresses, as your graduate probably assumed, sociological craftsmanship and implies the need to take a closer look at sociological practice; to compose a list of its deficiencies and to propose, as well as apply, effective remedies. The second question and particularly the third, however, inquire into affairs well beyond the reach of the self-referential preoccupations of the practitioners of sociological craftsmanship and their self-criticizing, self-reforming and self-healing capacities.

‘Taking sociology seriously’ is a challenge not essentially different from the charge to take seriously any other kind of knowledge – to take it seriously on the strength of the assumed expertise of its sources in a world saturated with opinions vying with each other and corroding each other’s genuine or imputed veracity. Not ‘essentially’ different, yet more difficult to handle than in the case of many other academically institutionalized sciences, and that, I suggest, for a reason which lies in the very nature of sociology as a dialogue with so-called ‘common sense’: the subject-matter of sociological investigation is shared with its objects. Sociologists and the (similarly human!) objects of their study tell stories about ‘the same’ experience, and there is no immediate reason to assign greater value to the stories told by the craftspeople of sociology – unlike in the case of stories told by physicists, geologists or astronomers, stories concerning objects and

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