Review of Joan Huber’s (1995) ASA Centennial Essay

Current trends in many academic and cultural institutions’ policies are strongly influenced by business models of profitability. This could prove detrimental to issues of identity and representation and to an adequate reflection of the complexities of society and culture. Huber’s uncritical positivism and objectivism reflects sociology divorced from its implications. Huber grants the safe acceptable forms of knowledge a privileged status. She concludes her paper with a call to sociologists to produce “solid facts” about the way societal organizations function and change in order to clarify the the problems experienced by individuals and groups. Giving it a comparative advantage, sociology supplies the knowledge needed to run welfare states. Sociology needs practical problems that will stimulate pressure for action, attract resources and test theories. The data produced by sociologists should be generated through the sharpest theoretical and methodological tools, while maintaining historic continuity (Huber 1995:203). Joan Huber is more concerned about the question “What do we do as sociologists, that gives us the right to make a claim for legitimacy as a scientific discipline ?” My question, “Who are we as sociologists?” should be at least recognised and investigated before we just “get to work” and produce these “solid facts about the way societal organizations function and change in order to clarify the experistates, to stimulate pressure for action, attract resources and test theories (Huber 1995:213-4).”

Zygmunt Bauman: Theorist of Postmodernity’s Ethical Turn

For Zygmunt Bauman, “sociologizing makes sense only in as far as it helps humanity” and “sociology is first and foremost a moral enterprise.” “To think sociologically can render us more sensitive and tolerant of diversity. Thus to think sociologically means to understand a little more fully the people around us in terms of their hopes and desires and their worries and concerns (Bauman & May 2001).”

The Sociological Imagination

In his influential book, The Sociological Imagination C. Wright Mills (1959) warned that the tendency to misrepresent social disorders as merely individual psychological disorders led to adepolitization of intellectual discourse and the undermining of social criticism. He challenged notions of the false dichotomy between private and public and self and society. He warned against anoverdependence on superficial psychological explanations which ignore complex social accounts. These can only be dealt with through an in-depth sociology based on the nurturing of a sociological imagination that balances the tendency to depend too much on a psychological imagination. By treating public social problems as individual and personal psychosis, the sociopolitical statusquo is maintained (Flynn-Burhoe 1999).