What's Wrong with Sociology?

Since the 1950s sociology has experienced a decline in prestige when compared with the other social sciences. In some highly publicized cases some universities have retrenched their sociology departments, others are contemplating either retrenchment or downsizing of their departments. Although there are some practitioners of the discipline who believe that it has never been in better shape, many sociologists have come to believe that there are very serious problems both in the cognitive and social organization of the discipline. This book contains sixteen essays by sociologists who believe that their discipline faces very serious problems which must be overcome if the discipline is to survive and prosper. The contributors were selected to represent diverse views and thus there is substantial disagreement among them over what the problems are that sociology faces and how they may be remedied. In this highly provocative book readers is likely to find some essays they agree with and others they disagree with; but all the essays present important problems faced by the discipline which must be addressed. Although the authors of the sixteen essays do not agree on what is wrong with the discipline, there are some themes which appear frequently. In his introduction Cole summarizes and comments on these themes. His introduction centers on the question of whether sociology is entirely socially constructed. Is what we believe to be true about society constrained by empirical evidence or is it a result of our ideology, power, authority, and other social processes? One theme which appears in many of the essays is that sociology has become too ideological and as a result has lost credibility amonguniversity administrators, politicians and the general public. Many of the essays also stress the view that there are very low levels of consensus in sociology and that it is hard to see evidence of progress. Others criticize the discipline for not dealing with the really i

Stephen Cole, Professor of Sociology, State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Introduction: The Social Construction of Sociology 1. Why Sociology Doesn't Make Progress Like the Natural Sciences 2. Why the Social Sciences Won't Become High-Consensus, Rapid-Discovery Science 3. Disintegrated Disciplines and the Future of Sociology 4. What's Wrong With Sociology? 5. Sociology in the 1990s 6. Progress and Cumulation in the Human Sciences After the Fall 7. Dilemmas of Theoretical Progress 8. Going Out 9. Sociology: A Disinvitation? 10. Is Sociology of Gender Stratification Parochial? The Case of Women and Warfare 11. Blame Analysis: Accounting for the Behavior of Protected Groups 12. The State of American Sociology13. The Transformation of the American Sociological Association 14. Institutional Perspectives on Sociology 15. Sociology: After the Linguistic and Multicultural Turns 16. Writing From Sociology's Periphery