This paper is about tendencies to the subversion of sociology as a discipline. It connects external factors of the wider socio-political environment of higher education in the UK, especially those associated with the audit culture and new systems of governance, with the internal organization of the discipline. While the environment is similar for all social science subjects, the paper argues that there are specific consequences for sociology because of characteristics peculiar to the discipline. The paper discusses these consequences in terms of the changing relationship between sociology and the growing interdisciplinary area of applied social studies as a form of 'mode 2 knowledge'. It argues that while sociology 'exports' concepts, methodologies and personnel it lacks the internal disciplinary integrity of other 'exporter' disciplines, such as economics, political science and anthropology. The consequence is an increasingly blurred distinction between sociology as a discipline and the interdisciplinary area of applied social studies with a potential loss of disciplinary identity. The paper concludes with a discussion of how this loss of identity is associated with a reduced ability to reproduce a critical sensibility within sociology and absorption to the constraints of audit culture with its preferred form of mode 2 knowledge.
This article addresses the colonial and racial origins of the welfare state with a particular emphasis on the liberal welfare state of the USA and UK. Both are understood in terms of the centrality of the commodified status of labour power expressing a logic of market relations. In contrast, we argue that with a proper understanding of the relations of capitalism and colonialism, the sale of labour power as a commodity already represents a movement away from the commodified form of labour represented by enslavement. European colonialism is integral to the development of welfare states and their forms of inclusion and exclusion which remain racialised through into the twenty-first century.
In this article I discuss Burawoy's (2005) The address and related writings on the topic are detailed and I do not have the space to deal with all his claims and qualifications. Like Marx in his critique of Feuerbach, he presents 11 theses, but I shall not deal with all of them. Nor shall I directly address the role of Marxism as a rhetorical trope, although I shall have something to say in passing about the origins in Marxism of his understanding of public sociology. What I shall say will largely be critical, but I do not wish to be misunderstood. I do believe strongly that a public role is central to the sociological undertaking and also that Marxist arguments make a fundamental contribution to the conversation that is sociology, but I will argue that public sociology, and Marxism alike, can only be considered as integral to sociology when the latter is conceived of as
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