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In this chapter Zygmunt Bauman echoes Michael Burawoy’s call for ’public sociology’. The chapter makes an impassioned call for the importance of the discipline and to communicate changing society to the public. Drawing on a wide sociological scholarship, this chapter argues that from its earliest days, sociology has not only tried to explain society, but also to improve it. The chapter argues that there has never been more necessity for sociology than in the contemporary world. Contemporary society is more managerial and individualised and much more uncertain. This is when public sociology can help the wider public understand the tumultuous social world around us.

This chapter is sympathetic to Burawoy's position. It argues that it is not just the findings of sociological research that contribute to public discourse on issues such as persistent poverty, urban planning, and criminal justice. Even more important are sociological frameworks, concepts such as labeling and concentration effects, which have become staples of public discussion and policy processes. The key to extending the range of sociological influence is lucid writing. The chapter also explicitly takes on the claim that public sociology will undermine professional sociology. Rather than challenging the legitimacy of professional sociology, public sociology will enhance that legitimacy. The chapter limits its comments to what Burawoy has called “traditional” public sociology, the sociology of op-ed pages and books written for a mixture of lay and professional audiences.

If we do not value “the idle curiosity” of leading scholars and “stick them in ivory towers with tenure and without questions on the bottom line,” we will not have any truth to speak to power. This chapter adds one more twist to this argument. Where Burawoy and most of his critics agree that sociology does have something important to say to various publics, this chapter notes that the relevant truths of sociology are truths about the future, but such truths are elusive. And to get accepted, even the limited truths of most social processes would require an understanding of how different bureaucracies institutionalize their own views of the future. As a result, the chapter suggests, people have nothing to tell public audiences about how to free up money from Star Wars to close the race and class gaps in academic achievement test scores, even if they knew how to close them.

This chapter introduces the themes and controversies of “public sociology,” focusing on Michael Burawoy. The 2004 meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA) was among the most successful in the organization's hundred-year history. The centerpiece of the meetings was Michael Burawoy's presidential address. In that address, published in the American Sociological Review, Burawoy issued an impassioned call for a revitalization of sociology in a turn to a “public sociology,” distinguished by its use of reflexive knowledge and its appeal beyond the university. Public sociology, in Burawoy's rendition, is a sociology that engages with diverse publics, reaching beyond the university, to enter into an ongoing dialogue with these publics about fundamental values.

Writing from the perspective of French sociology, this chapter holds that public sociology is in no sense peripheral to the sociological enterprise but is central to the theoretical and practical restoration of agency within the discipline. It approaches public sociology from the standpoint of an outsider to American sociology but accepts Michael Burawoy's main arguments. The chapter argues that the main task of public sociology is to study the “actors who try to link the global economy with specific cultures.” As a result, public sociology occupies the central place in sociology in its search for actors. Public sociology, is in fact reshaping professional sociology, pushing it in the direction of studying institutions in order to defend individuals and groups against dominant forces.

Writing from the perspective of the United States, this chapter expresses some doubts on seeing public sociology as an already accomplished practice. It notes that Burawoy's public address is a politician's speech designed to build consensus. What is worrying is “the tendency to accept existing hierarchies within the discipline and merely to insert public sociology among them.” This, the chapter argues, would do little to affect the conflicts and inequalities within sociology and would open up the potential for simply compartmentalizing public sociology within the discipline—thereby reproducing its second-class status. Departments and universities would have to encourage a style of teaching that engages with moral and political questions. They would have to acknowledge that public sociology is not an “extracurricular” activity, but as important as teaching, conducting research, and publishing.

Considering policies and practices in graduate admissions and curriculum; in hiring, teaching, assessment, and reward structures for faculty; and in the rhetoric and culture of sociological writing and discourse, this chapter offers a series of “not-so-modest proposals.” it explores what the departments would look like if people tried, as Burawoy advocates, to reconstruct sociology as a global discipline and constructed a field that allowed sociologists to realize their frustrated aspirations for public sociology. If proposals for internationalizing sociology are modest, the suggestions for reforming graduate education would involve nothing less than “a daunting, countercultural mission both within the discipline and far beyond.” It is little wonder that the prospect of public sociology makes some sociologists very nervous.

This chapter holds that Burawoy's conception of public sociology and reflexive knowledge is, at the same time, overly categorical—imposing sharp distinctions on a social world and underelaborated—failing to recognize the range of forms that public sociology may take. It distinguishes three types of public sociology. The first is called “discursive,” roughly similar to Burawoy's traditional public sociology, where sociologists are actively involved in public conversations with various nonsociological audiences. A second type is characterized by active, civic, especially political, engagement of the sociologist, a rough parallel to Burawoy's organic public sociology. The third type, called “professional,”is the kind of public sociology in which the scholar remains largely committed to the work but becomes involved with publics and important public issues as an expert.

Burawoy's focus on economics and political science as sociology's main competitors requires a “rhetorical sleight of hand that attributes his disciplinary selection criteria to space limitations” that exclude such fields as geography, history, and psychology. This chapter extends this argument, noting that for many scholars, disciplinary boundaries are counterproductive. It argues that Burawoy's essay is marked by a bias toward looking sideways at peers and upward at superiors, to elaborate on sociology's relation to the “peer” disciplines of economics and political science. The chapter argues that academic sociology professionalized itself by pushing public sociology out of the discipline. It holds that Burawoy's defense of sociology is a defense of privilege, an effort that will reproduce inequalities among disciplines.

The introduction sets forth the key questions this book will address concerning the causes and effects of different job-search strategies and unemployment experiences. It begins with a brief review of the recent rise of white-collar job insecurity in the U.S. Despite striking similarities in the objective conditions of white-collar unemployment in Israel, American and Israeli job search strategies and subjective unemployment experiences are very different. To make sense of these variations a new theoretical framework is developed. Existing theories tend to focus on universal and generic features of unemployment that cannot explain variations, or on cultural arguments, which are challenged by findings that national cultures are not coherent systems but complex and contradictory. An institutional approach to understanding variations in the experience of unemployment is introduced which links labor market institutions to the daily practices of job searching, and in turn, these daily practices to subjective responses. Discussing and drawing on several theories—including Bourdieu’s symbolic violence, Burawoy’s social games, and Hochschild’s emotional labor—the framework developed in this chapter examines how different institutional structures generate different unemployment experiences.

This chapter places an interest in sociology in its biographical context and stresses its role as a life enhancing and life changing discipline, one able to inform us about society and change the lives of those who study it. It addresses the emancipatory role of sociology teaching and research. C Wright Mills’s writings on the sociological imagination and Michael Burawoy’s work on public sociology are referenced as models by which new generations of sociologists might conceive the public and personal role of sociology. The personal commitments to a career in sociology intersect with the difficulties young sociologists face in the labour market to affect career paths but the discipline can be transformative for those willing to pursue this ambition.

This chapter treats tango as a contact zone for transnational encounters, whereby differently located people come together in a space that is “already invaded” by a history of affiliations across borders. Its explores how the most recent tango revival gets played out in Buenos Aires, the undisputed home of the tango, and on the local dancers who are faced with an influx of strangers who wander into their dance venues searching for a particular kind of tango experience. The chapter first draws upon Michael Burawoy's framework for thinking globally in illustrating how social, political, and economic forces generated tango's revival as a global dance. It concludes by addressing the imaginary of tango as “authentically Argentinean” or “universally global” and what this means on both sides of the Atlantic.