Abstract
The history of sociology is sometimes simplistically understood as a harmonious success story that emphasizes the lines of continuity between the classical theories of the so-called founding fathers and today’s sociological research. Closer analyses of local developments in most countries tend, however, to deviate from or even contradict this grand narrative of the discipline. A case in point is the complicated history of Danish sociology which from its beginning in the late 19th century has been marked by fragmentation and discontinuities all the way up to the near erasure of the discipline with the dramatic closing of the two sociology departments in Copenhagen in the late 1980s. Until now, however, the Danish case has remained largely unknown to international readers.
Kristoffer Kropp’s new book on the “troubled” history of Danish Sociology is therefore a most welcome contribution to Palgrave’s rapidly expanding book series, Sociology Transformed, which offers short but detailed accounts of local histories of sociology on a country by country basis. The neat 116-page format of the book might give the impression that this is a shallow and simplified story. Nothing could be further from the truth. Instead the book, which is based on Kropp’s considerably lengthier dissertation, offers a condensed yet accessible, historically sensitive and nuanced, theoretically informed and sharp analysis of the fascinating case of Danish sociology from the 1880s up to the present.
Rather than telling the story of sociology in Denmark in terms of a simplified historical line-up of sociology professors and their departmental affiliations, Kropp applies a considerably broader perspective that takes into account not only the varying and conflicting conceptualizations of sociology, but also the organizational contexts as well as the more general societal changes. Theoretically, the book draws on Bourdieu's field analytical perspective, with an emphasis on the processual dynamics of fields and their interrelatedness. Here Kropp focuses on the relation between symbolic structures, institutional structures and other fields, such as state bureaucracies, in order to understand the ways in which sociological knowledge has entered into different coalitions and how these configurations have changed over time.
Empirically, the analysis is structured in three chronological parts. The first covers the 1880s up to the mid-1960s, a period during which several attempts were made to establish sociology inside as well as outside academia. Initially established as an academic subject by Claudius Wilkens as part of the social philosophical and evolutionist discourse of the time, sociology was more or less abolished – as in many other countries – after the First World War. During the interwar period a second attempt was made, crowned by Theodor Geiger’s professorship in 1944 at the newly established Aarhus University, just to disappear a decade later when Geiger died in 1952. After that a quite different sociological tradition was established with Kaare Svalastoga’s US-inspired positivist sociology, institutionalized with the new Department of Sociology at the University of Copenhagen in 1955. The department was soon accompanied locally by an alternative group of Continentally-inspired scholars, consolidated from 1964 with Verner Goldschmidt as professor at the Department of Cultural Sociology at the Copenhagen Business School, as well as a new extra-academic National Centre for Social Research (Socialforskningsinstitutet, est. 1959) headed by Henning Fries. Hence, by the mid-1960s Danish sociology appeared as a rather well-established academic discipline with professors, departments and a steadily growing number of students as well as clear policy applications outside academia. In spite of this, Danish sociology was confronted with a new deep crisis during the decade to follow.
In the second part Kropp offers a detailed analysis of the troubled 1970s and the growing tensions between Svalastoga’s department and Goldsmith’s group of scholars. This conflict, Kropp points out, “could easily have been told as the story of theoretical narrow-mindedness, arguing that the sociological environment was crippled by the 1970s Marxist orthodoxy”, but finds that “this story would have been hard to sustain empirically” (p.37). Instead, Kropp emphasizes that the discontents and protests among the students against the Department of Sociology initially concerned practical and administrative problems and only later became more explicitly related to epistemological issues, which resulted in an accumulation of problems and the unique political decision taken by the Ministry of Education in 1986 to close down both sociology departments in Copenhagen.
When sociology was finally re-established in Copenhagen after an eight-year moratorium in 1994, it was within a higher education landscape marked by new neoliberal policy reforms. In this context, discussed in the third part, Kropp discerns two general strategies among Danish sociologists: on the one hand a professional discipline-oriented strategy at the re-opened Department of Sociology, and on the other a policy-related strategy that aligned sociological knowledge with the welfare state bureaucracy, for example, at the Employment Relations Research Centre (Forskningscenter for Arbejdsmarkeds- og Organisationsstudier) and at the universities in Aalborg and Roskilde. In that sense, Kropp concludes, the current field of Danish sociology with its structural duality between professional sociology and policy sociology – in spite of the many apparent discontinuities and dramatic changes – resembles the situation 100 years ago. Another similarity is that sociology is still a relatively weak and heteronomous discipline, which according to Kropp calls for a more reflexive awareness of how history has marked the disciplinary identity of a whole generation of sociologists as well as the current configuration of Danish sociology.
Although Kropp’s book is empirically restricted to the particular history of sociology in Denmark, the account and not least the theoretical framework developed include more general insights and lessons to be learned that should be relevant not only for historians of Danish sociology but also for sociologists and historians of science more generally.