Epistemic and Social Diversity as Sociology’s Strengths

Out of Many, One?

House (2019: 6) wrote,

I recalled a picture of the Michigan sociology faculty taken in the late 1960s—38 or so white men in suits and ties. It is hard to imagine today, as that ‘unity’ has changed greatly, if gradually and often grudgingly, over the next half century.

Whether intentional or not, House’s reverie appears to reinforce a belief that disciplinary unity (despite the scare quotes) is synonymous with homogeneity—namely, the existence and dominance of white men in the field. ¹ Contrary to his claim, sociology has long been characterized by its epistemic diversity and members’ subscriptions to a number of theoretical and methodological frameworks; and others have debated sociology’s theoretical cohesion and ‘core’ (Connell 1997; Calhoun, 2007; Hunter, 2002). Across the 20th century, sociological thought has expanded from the grand- and middle-range theories of the prescribed forefathers of the discipline—Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and later Talcott Parsons, Robert Park, Robert Merton, and other men of white European ancestry to the foundational scholarship of sociologists such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Jane Addams and Anna Julia Cooper, Mirra Komarovsky, C. Wright Mills, Alvin Gouldner, Patricia Hill Collins, and many others from whom new generations have emerged—even if the white male fraternity of sociologists could not and would not invite their ideas into the mainstream (Hunter, 2002; Morris, 2015; Romero, 2020). Yet somehow, according to House, sociology was more unified and ideas coherent. And one must wonder just what and how that was?

Paradoxically, House’s lament for the past—bygone eras of denied access for all to the opportunities afforded by top Research I sociology departments, by representation in top-tier journals and on course syllabi, and by leadership in the discipline—coincides today with increased favor and recognition of female and historically underrepresented, racially minoritized sociologists, who are also more likely considered critical and public sociologists (Collins, 2002; Connell, 1997; Go, 2017; Morris, 2017; Romero, 2020). To House, these thinkers, many of whom are also practitioners of reflexive social science and qualitative research methods, are becoming the disintegrators of sociology. And he suggests that mainstream sociology should consider detaching these thinkers’ normative discourses and treatment of social problems from the discipline and instead encourage a merger of their ideas and frameworks with humanist disciplines (2019: 22). To be clear, I disagree strongly with House’s main diagnosis and prescription. To the contrary, I argue that sociology’s relevance and future as a discipline are dependent on its development of new, innovative thinking and research that contend with the enduring legacies of historical oppressions; the structural inequalities emanating from white supremacy and racism, patriarchy, and capitalism; the complexities of social differentiation and political fragmentation; policies and practices needed for equitable distributions of resources across institutions, organizations, and communities; and much more.

Strikingly, the enduring epistemic and social dynamics of our discipline and the current political conditions in the United States (from the federal to local levels) have something in common. A movement toward a shared, participatory and multicultural democracy has engendered fears, anxieties, conflicts and even reprisal over increased social representation and a plurality of ideas and viewpoints. Reactionary nationalist and populist movements, along with the meteoric rise of hate incidents against various ethnoracial and immigrant groups, might compel sociologists to revisit Herbert Blumer’s theory of group position to search for ways to mitigate the harmful consequences of historically privileged groups’ fears of de-centering, sharing their power, and eliminating their monopolies on the cultural, economic and political organizations in society. On one hand, prior logics of social mobility—advanced by numerous professional sociologists—demanded the assimilation and acculturation of historically excluded groups (Stevens et al., 2018). On the other hand, as the doors of opportunities have widened over time, additional demands for legitimation and recognition beyond established ‘comfort zones’ have emerged from historically marginalized groups. We contest existing core practices and the cultural agents of unequal institutions and organizations over the distributions of resources and power (Taylor 2016).

Frankly, I am less concerned with how sociology functioned in the past, and instead, more preoccupied with its direction now in both theorizing about the relationships between increased social differentiation—an integral component of the democratic process—and the eradication of major social problems—some deadly. The year 2020 was a pivotal moment in the United States and world—marking the largest global protest movements in modern history. Millions watched and grappled in public and private spheres with jarring images of anti-black racism and the brutal police and vigilante killings of black men and women. In 2021, state legislators passed laws against the explicit teaching of race-conscious knowledge and histories in public schools. Spurred by the judicial conservatism of the nation’s highest court, lawsuits and political contestation about voting rights and the disenfranchisement of historically oppressed groups persist. Different shades of immigrants have motivated conservative backlash and increased regulations of the territorial boundaries of the United States. As I write, the current Supreme Court majority threatens to overrule a legal precedent laid by its own predecessors and has acquiesced to a state’s demand to limit women’s reproductive rights. Although some sociologists have engaged for decades in theory, research, and social movements to address these issues, a need to eradicate their extensive harms endures. In my opinion, sociology must address its utility as an educative field to engage not only with the scholarly community but also with various publics and decision-makers about how to enable more individuals and communities full participation in the economy, polity, and greater society.

From Inside the Discipline to the World: Beyond Parochialism in Sociology

A broader framework of social differentiation demands that US sociologists expand their dialogues with other social scientists at home and abroad. American sociology, in general, is too parochial (Connell, 1990; Lie, 1995). US-based sociological scholarship that centers global societies tends to find less recognition in its own social science departments and across the national, professional community than abroad (Stevens et al., 2018; Warczok and Beyer, 2021). Further, many US sociologists (and I am self-critiquing here, as well) tend to use the world as its social laboratory (research sites) and commonly fail to center the scholarship of colleagues abroad in our analyses and argumentation. Few sociologists from around the world have entered the classical and contemporary US ‘canons,’ other than several other white European males (beyond those whom I mentioned earlier) such as Antonio Gramsci, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Pierre Bourdieu (Calhoun, 2007; Go, 2017). Noticeably, Stuart Hall, a Black Jamaican-British critical scholar who was Bourdieu’s contemporary and a founder of ‘cultural studies,’ a former president of the British Sociological Association—considered by many around the globe to be one of the most important intellectual figures of the 20th century—did not find the same appeal in US sociology. Although times are changing (and challenging), earlier critical examinations of global racism were not accorded the same regard as those of capitalism and class relations in US sociological camps. Yet, to better differentiate between universal and particular social dynamics and processes, we US sociologists might obligate ourselves to heighten our awareness of sociology as a global social science with a diverse and rich array of contributors to the knowledge base. The sun neither rises nor sets on the United States and its academy alone.

Besides the need for more global cross-fertilization of sociological knowledge, there is also the matter of multidisciplinary knowledge production for the sake of addressing multidimensional social issues. I learned this best when I crossed over into schools of education from a sociology department and was compelled to engage more with history, economics, anthropology, philosophy, psychology and human development, and more. Ironically, I was warned that I was on a ‘one-way ticket to nowhere’ professionally if I chose to leave a sociology faculty and join an education faculty. This comment could not have made the hierarchy of academic knowledge plainer (see Warczok and Beyer, 2021). How mainstream sociology tends to cede the study of education—a foundational social, cultural, and political institution—primarily to other disciplines indicates the salience of such a perception. I ignored that warning, of course, and my colleagues’ and others’ scholarship from across the spectrum of social sciences and humanities both enlightened me and augmented my understanding of society. Ironically, sociologists reproduce the very social forces and patterns that many of us investigate —discrimination, segregation, segmentation, symbolic violence, and inequality; and in fact, our discipline requires a sociological study of itself (Collins, 2002; Go, 2017; Itzigsohn and Brown, 2015; Morris, 2015; Romero, 2020).

A Call for a New Generation of Engaged Sociology

Despite the tensions between their perspectives, both Burawoy and House converge on the usefulness of public sociology (see also Gans, 1989). House emphasizes the value of policy sociology—a subset of public sociology—arguing against its relegation to a lower rung in sociology’s epistemic hierarchy. I agree with House that the current status positioning of policy sociology could lead to the discipline’s overall decline and ultimate obsolescence, if we are not mindful. In his essay, House demonstrates with graphs that the American Economic Association, the American Psychological Association, and the Association of Psychological Science have experienced membership increases steadily over 80 years, while the American Sociological Association’s numbers began a noticeable decline in the 1970s (p. 8). The membership increases of other social sciences may very well result from their continued participation in relevant, real-world problems to inform policy and practice—topics and approaches from which many sociologists, as House noted, began to withdraw because of a lack of uptake and emergent beliefs that engaged (applied) sociology was losing its identity and independence of government influences. The decline in sociologists’ policy focus also coincided with what House and others refer to as the ‘humanist’ turn (see Calhoun, 2007). Notably, racialized minorities and female social scientists had begun to articulate their frustrations with mainstream, white, patriarchal sociology and with how white men researched and discussed how to ‘help’ their communities (see Ladner, 1998).

Certainly, experts in some of sociology’s subfields have influenced key decision-makers greatly in the fields of poverty, housing, economic inequality, family, and childcare policies, for example. Still, over a 50-year period the number of public policy and political science bachelors’ and master’s degrees far outpaces sociology and economics, second only to psychology. Public policy and political science together also lead in the number of PhD degrees conferred, having converged with psychology two decades ago (House, 2019: 13). I have learned that although necessary, it is insufficient to train emerging generations of sociologists to produce only for the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, and a few elite university book presses. Both sociology and other domains of academia writ large must refine their norms and practices and learn to value more the nexus of research, practice, and policy. As Tseng and Gamoran (2017) have written,

There is no inevitable trade-off between producing rigorous research and producing research with relevance for the real world. Researchers who want their work to matter in policy and practice should begin by identifying the questions of greatest relevance and then bring the highest standards of theoretical and methodological rigor to those questions.

If more sociologists—not all (again, the landscape is wide and variegated)—made our scholarship and research more accessible, translatable, and crossover in its appeal to critically engage publics and inform problem-solving, we could elevate sociology’s educative power, utility, and stature as a discipline.

‘Diversity in the field of sociology does not require unity; that is its intellectual strength!’ an early career sociologist remarked to me not long ago. Other scholars of sociology around the globe agree (Patel, 2010). Indeed, I believe that the strength of our discipline is its ability to conceptualize and model what enlightened, socially differentiated organizations, institutions, and societies might entail. Organizational behavioral studies already show that the diversity of people, and, by extension, pluralist ideas facilitate innovation and powerful change in groups, firms, schools, and societies (Page, 2007). Sociology has the potential to be bolder in its innovation.The production of knowledge by current and future generations of thinkers who push epistemic boundaries will enrich the discipline, not diminish it. As a professional community, sociologists can either continue to reproduce society’s flaws or encourage future scholarship and research to deepen sociology’s ability to help advance societies.