Page "Public sociology" Paragraph 3

Debates over public sociology have rekindled questions concerning the extra-academic purpose of sociology.

Public sociology raises questions about what sociology is and what its goals ought to ( or even could ) be.

Such debates-over science and political advocacy, scholarship and public commitment-have a long history in American sociology and in American social science more generally.

Historian Mark C. Smith, for instance, has investigated earlier debates over the purpose of social science in his book, Social Science in the Crucible: The American Debate over Objectivity and Purpose, 1918-1941 ( Duke University Press, 1994 ).

And Stephen Park Turner and Jonathan H. Turner showed how the discipline's search for a purpose, through dependence on external publics, has limited Sociology's potential in their book, The Impossible Science: An Institutional Analysis of American Sociology ( Sage, 1990 ).