Introduction: Sociology as a combat sport

Sociology as a combat sport

Pierre Bourdieu famously claimed that sociology is a combat sport in a film of that title (Carles, 2001), euphemized in English as ‘Sociology is a Martial Art’. Curiously, in this film, everything is quite harmonious until the last scene where Bourdieu enters a hall in the banlieue to engage with its disaffected youth. They reject him, the outside intellectual, as well as his sociological conceit that claims to know them better than they know themselves. They send him packing back to Paris. He comes out of this unnerving encounter sweating, relieved to return to his circle of admirers. It is, indeed, a brave encounter, demonstrating that bringing sociology to publics can be a precarious endeavor.

Bourdieu never spelled out what exactly was entailed in the notion of ‘sociology as a combat sport.’ Examining his writings as a whole I can discern three significant types of combat. First, there is the ideological combat, the struggle between sociology and common sense. Bourdieu’s engagement with the banlieue was such a combat. His sociology of symbolic domination, with its claims that the dominated don’t understand their domination, confronts the self-understandings and experiences of marginalized inhabitants. Sociology’s account of the way social practices are shaped by social structures clashes with the deeply entrenched common sense that suppresses its own social determinants, a common sense that characterizes virtually all strata of society. Thus, Bourdieu caused much outrage when he exposed the interests and strategies of intellectuals in Homo Academicus (1988 [1984]), when he showed how the Grand Écoles serve to reproduce the dominant class in State Nobility (1996 [1989]), or how artists misconceive their own creativity as sui generis in Rules of Art (1996 [1992]).

In Bourdieu’s view, therefore, sociology should be seen as a socio-analysis that faces the resistance of the deeply embedded interests concealed in the collective unconscious – resistance that can turn against the sociologist, endangering career and even life. The psycho-analyst faces the resistance of the individual, but the socio-analyst, i.e. sociologist, faces the wrath of society. However, it is not just an ideological combat between the sociologist and the sociologized but includes combat between the sociologist and all those pretend-sociologists – the doxosophers of journalism, television, advertising, think tanks, pollsters and so on – with whom sociologists compete as they try to disseminate their unwanted message. Beyond the doxosophers lies the state with its monopoly of symbolic violence that defines the very categories through which we apprehend the world. This is the second meaning of combat – a ‘classification struggle’ with the consecrated classifiers taking place on the political terrain (Bourdieu, 1991, 1999 [1996]).

In the light of the combat that awaits them in the ideological and political realms, it is not surprising that sociologists often prefer to throw a protective cordon around their operations in the name of science and objectivity. Rather than venture forth onto the more hazardous terrains of ideology and politics they are tempted to retreat into the cloisters of the university. But there is no escape from combat since science itself, as Bourdieu is at pains to point out, is far from being a consensual, harmonious affair. In Pascalian Meditations (2000 [1997]), science is a terrain of ‘armed struggle,’ and elsewhere Bourdieu (1975, 2004) refers to it as an intense but rule-bound competition for the accumulation of academic capital.

In short, sociology enters combat on, at least, three terrains: academic, political and ideological. We need to explore these terrains as fields of combat.

From combat to field

Bourdieu developed his notion of scientific field as early as 1975 and returned to the idea for the last time in his lectures of 2001. Throughout he was concerned with the autonomy of the scientific field, which, he claimed, rested on three pillars: the producers are simultaneously the consumers of scientific products, the accumulation of research technology which makes interference from without difficult, and the need to submit ideas to the adjudication of the real which also limited extraneous influences. In the case of sociology, however, he was concerned that the autonomy was too easily subverted: first, because sociology dealt with important public issues about which all had an opinion; second, because the lower ranks of sociologists might appeal to temporal powers over the heads of the elite; and third, because sociology was an easy target of external pressures upon which it depended. With such skewed perspective, Bourdieu never developed an adequate conception of the sociological field – a clear limit to his reflexivity – as he did for the academic field as a whole, for the bureaucratic field, the legal field, the field of power, of education and of art and literature. To develop a conception of the sociological field we would do well to borrow from his analysis of these other fields.

When writing about the emergence of the field of literature in 19th century, for example, Bourdieu (1996 [1992]) describes the way bourgeois literature (sponsored by the wealthy) gave rise to social realism (aimed at broader publics) that led to a movement of art for art’s sake (pure art), which in turn generated critique from within the art world by the avant-garde. On the one side the field is caught between an autonomous and a heteronomous pole and on the other side between dominant or consecrated forms of art as opposed to subordinate or insurgent forms of art (Table 1). The tensions and dynamics within the field derive from these antagonistic but interdependent forces that create the terrain of combat.

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Table 1.

The field of art.

	Autonomy	Heteronomy
Dominant	Pure art	Bourgeois art
Subordinate	Avant-garde	Social realism

This representation of the field of art can be mapped onto the field of sociology (Table 2). While the historical genesis of different types of sociology varies from context to context, there is a correspondence between (a) bourgeois art and policy sociology serving the dominant classes; (b) social realism and public sociology, which, as a reaction to policy sociology, engages broader dominated publics; (c) pure art and professional sociology, which involves a relatively autonomous community, defined by its research programs; and, finally, (d) avant-garde and critical sociology, which is first a critique of professional sociology but also of policy sociology while infusing its values into a public sociology.

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Table 2.

The field of sociology.

	Autonomy	Heteronomy
Dominant	Professional	Policy
Subordinate	Critical	Public

We can see how the variety of Bourdieu’s own practices fit into this conception of the sociological field. He began as an amateur ethnographer in Algeria (1962 [1958]), gathering data about the Kabyle, conducting surveys among workers (1979 [1963]). He was an aspirant sociologist-as-scientist. His recovery of the life and culture of the colonized had political implications but it was not yet public. That would come when he returned to France and wrote damning critiques of French colonialism. Here he did become a public sociologist. It was at this time that he also developed as a critical sociologist, criticizing the project of social reformism in French sociology and undertaking an offensive against the dominant US sociology of the time (Bourdieu et al., 1991 [1968]). His work on education, taste and art, and his development of the ideas of field, capital and habitus represented the construction of a new way of approaching the social world (Bourdieu, 1984 [1979], 1996 [1992]; Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977 [1970]), a research program that defined his professional sociology. It was constructed in a steady cumulative and above all scientific manner, organized within the context of the academy with an emerging theoretical framework (Bourdieu, 1977 [1972], 1990 [1980], 2000 [1997]). These works may have had policy implications but they only became policy sociology when he participated in government commissions on education. His role as public sociologist intensified through the 1980s and 1990s with a series of projects, starting with the popular, The Weight of the World (1999 [1993]), but including many public pronouncements, petitions, editorials, books and so forth.

By applying a field analysis to Bourdieu’s practice as a sociologist one can make sociological sense of his public sociology, and better understand the pressures he faced when he took his ideas into the public realm. We can then understand in what ways those pressures were specific to France and how they would differ in other places and times.

Dilemmas at the intersection of academic and political fields

If one paradox of Bourdieu’s analysis of fields lies in the omission of sociology itself, a second paradox lies in the omission of a treatment of the relations among fields. For all the focus on relational analysis within fields, Bourdieu offers no such analysis of relations between and among fields. Bourdieu has much to say about the homology between fields, that is the correspondence between fields in the patterning of their internal relations but he has very little to say about the way fields are connected to one another and how they are interrelated to form a totality. In addressing this issue Gil Eyal (2013) has written about the network that occupies spaces between fields, but here I am concerned with the intersection of fields.

When Bourdieu writes of the heteronomy of a field he is concerned with the threat to its autonomy, the invasion of external forces that have to be repelled. But heteronomy can also refer to the outward-oriented attempt to influence other fields. Indeed, that outward move is often designed to protect the autonomy of the field. Thus, without policy science and public engagement sociology’s existence becomes more precarious, not just in its wider legitimacy but also in its competitive relation with other social science disciplines. The heteronomous pole is Janus faced because it lies at the intersection of, at least, two fields, the academic and the political. Thus, policy and public sociologies are simultaneously accountable to professional and critical sociologies while also seeking to be effective in the world of politics, attentive to the logic and structure of the political field – a most challenging form of combat, as we shall see.

Just as Weber demarcated science from politics, showing how they operate in separate fields with homologous logics, so Bourdieu does the same. Both, thereby, miss the intersection of the two fields, and the very real tensions this creates. Professional and critical sociology are accountable to the community of scholars with its peer evaluation while policy and public sociology are caught between the academic community and a wide range of different forces from within the political field, forces that include, on the one hand, powerful corporate actors and, on the other, much weaker publics.

Inasmuch as public sociology is a sociology that is accessible and accountable to publics and thus necessarily relates to and builds on common sense so it is at odds with professional sociology that is accountable to the scientific community of peers. Some of Bourdieu’s writing is barely intelligible to fellow sociologists let alone lay publics, while other writings, particularly in his later years, are far more lucid, aiming to bring his critique of neoliberalism to wider audiences (Bourdieu, 1998, 2003 [2001]). And, indeed, he was very successful in doing just that. The question is, in those later writings, what concessions did he make to common sense, veering toward the pathology of populist sociology. But to make no such attempt to reach out, and to stick with professional science is not simply irresponsible as Bourdieu would say, but it endangers the very science he sought to protect. Self-referentiality is the enemy of sociology that ultimately draws its impetus from engaging with publics and public issues.

Continuing the tension at the intersection of the two fields, Bourdieu was very critical of policy sociology as it too easily becomes a servant of power and loses its critical function. Yet, just as he would become a very effective public sociologist so he also engaged with the policy world, especially around educational reform. The question is how much room for maneuver did he have and to what extent was he responsive to the findings of sociology as a science? Here the function of critical sociology is to ensure the accountability of policy sociology to professional sociology. Yet critical sociology suffers from its own pathologies as it becomes imprisoned in its own world, an incomprehensible world to which it retreats in despair, losing sight not just of the dangers of policy sociology, but of the dangers of professional isolationism and public sociology’s temptation of populism. In its retreat its critical powers evaporate.

The intersection of the two fields also affects the hierarchical conflict within the field of sociology, so that the consecrated seek alliances through policy work with rich and powerful figures in the political (and economic) realm, while the subjugated sectors make appeals to publics who share their subjugation. Indeed, this tension flows into public sociology itself, divided between the traditional mode of intervention through various media – writing for newspapers, interviewing on television, authoring blogs or writing best-selling books – and the building of organic ties to communities, that is an unmediated direct relation between sociologists and their publics. The consecrated sociologist, such as Bourdieu, holding an elite position in the academic field seeks to monopolize access to the media and disparage organic connections of less prominent or less favored sociologists to subjugated interest groups. Bourdieu mobilizes the interests of the entire academic community against those of the doxosophers, the pretenders from within as well as outside.

Once again it is the intersection of fields that sheds light on just how difficult public sociology can be. Bourdieu’s (1999 [1996]) critique of television points to combat in a field of journalism that is dominated by powers answerable to the very dominant actors whose domination sociology exposes and whose constricted modes of communication favor dilettantes and pretenders rather than academic scholars. Still, Bourdieu was successful in writing for national newspapers, creating his own publicly accessible book series, and even undertaking a critique of television on television. Bourdieu is no less critical of organic public sociology, writing contemptuously of the mythology of the organic intellectual whose habitus is so much at odds with the habitus of the dominated that either the sociologist panders to their common sense or dictates to that common sense. A reciprocal conversation is as illusory as it is impossible. And yet he embraces this very idea in The Weight of the World (1999 [1993]) where carefully chosen sociologists become organic intellectuals, intellectuals with a background that unites them to their interviewees.

The final dilemma to which I want to draw attention concerns the relation between public and policy sociology. When engaging in public sociology of close encounters – organic public sociology – one is likely to be drawn into policy sociology. Publics all too easily become interest groups less concerned with a conversation than in having the sociologist deliver something tangible by addressing the policy makers. Bourdieu (1999 [1993]: 390) himself describes how his close relations with the farmers of the Béarn led him to try to persuade government of necessary policy changes. Policy sociologists are not always keen to collaborate with public sociologists as the latter can endanger the legitimacy of the former, especially when they engage in sustained and open critique of the limitations of policy interventions and deny the neutrality of science upon which policy research depends.

These are general dilemmas that assume concreteness depending on the character of sociology and politics. In different countries the field of sociology assumes a different structure, as defined by the articulation of the four practices, just as the political field is more or less receptive to the intervention of sociologists. Moreover, the intersection itself will vary between a thin slice in countries where the academic world has more autonomy, such as the US, and the subsumption of sociology under the direct rule of the political field, denying the development of an open and autonomous science as happened, for example, in the Soviet Union under Stalin or in fascist Germany. Today we have to entertain a range of other intersections, apart from sociology and politics, such as the one between sociology and the economic field, bent on turning the university into a commercial enterprise. Equally important is the way any given national discipline becomes subjugated to an emergent global discipline dominated by resource-rich Northern countries. The 10 case studies that follow reflect these divergent pressures, making simultaneous participation in politics and sociology a risky venture. I have somewhat arbitrarily chosen to divide them according to how they look upon the competing pressures of academic scholarship and public engagement, the precariousness of political interventions, and the durability of common sense.

The sociological windmill

One of the most recurrent questions raised by the original scheme based on the division of labor was its ontological status. Are these four real practices of knowledge or only analytical types of sociology that are always found in combination? To be sure, in its original conception the idea was, indeed, to recognize an emergent division of labor, reflecting the specialization of US sociologists in one or other of these practices: professional, policy, public and critical (Burawoy, 2005). Moreover, the argument was that the different practices of knowledge were organized in a complex hierarchy that created antagonistic and interdependent relations among the different practices. Sociologists might try to accomplish two or even three of these practices at the same time and their careers can be seen as moving among them, but I focused on these as distinct specializations with their own form of knowledge, their own truth, their own mode of legitimation, their own accountability, their own politics and their own pathologies.

As soon as one shifts to the intersection of fields, one has to refer to the challenges of the simultaneous participation in different fields, what César Rodríguez-Garavito calls an ‘amphibious sociology’ – a sociology that lives in different worlds and that has the advantage of seeing the world from different vantage points, of being relevant to different audiences, of having access to different actors and of providing a constant source of motivation. These advantages have their down-side as public sociologists feel themselves to be a windmill, caught up in a ferocious storm that drives their different activities. They find their activities dispersed as they relentlessly leap from task to task. Their independence and, thus, their analytic distance are jeopardized as they become accountable to multiple audiences. Their relevance can endanger their life as they challenge the claims of violent actors. Finally, their emotional engagement can easily lead to burn-out. All this is amply illustrated from his own experience in Colombia: defending the rights of indigenous peoples in the face of paramilitary and guerrilla violence, working with human rights groups against multinational mining corporations, inserting himself into national but also international legal orders, he finds himself in a veritable social minefield. In this context, amphibious sociology calls for the use of hybrid modes of communication – sophisticated journalism, analytical videos and ethnographic policy papers. There’s no time for specialization.

Nandini Sundar further underlines just how difficult ‘amphibious sociology’ can be. Drawn into a vortex of political forces – defending indigenous groups victimized by state-sponsored vigilante groups and left-wing Maoist guerrillas – she finds it difficult to sustain the full extent of her academic life. Instead of a windmill with all blades turning at once, she points to an alternation between professional and public sociology, leading to a schizophrenic sociology, as the commitment to each pulls against the other. The very distinction between professional and public sociology becomes less important than the institutional division between academic and political fields. In a country such as India with a colonial legacy to combat, facing the domination of metropolitan evaluations, poorly resourced universities working in a colonial language (English), serious research and committed teaching take on the character of a public mission. To dedicate oneself to professional sociology is a form of public sociology.

On the other hand, like Rodríguez-Garavito, Sundar finds herself unavoidably accountable to the people she studies, and like them she is caught in the cross-fire between state violence and Naxalite guerrilla activity. Like Rodríguez-Garavito, she finds herself in a social minefield, pursuing a petition in the Supreme Court to condemn the violence perpetrated by the Chhattisgarh government. In such a politicized environment serious research becomes impossible, but she feels it is part of her professional responsibility to publicize the activities of the vigilante group, Salwa Judum. While she is caught up in this demanding political struggle her links to the university and its ethos are weakened not just because of competing time commitments but also because of incompatible ethical demands.

Beyond amphibious or schizophrenic sociology, Karl von Holdt describes ‘cycles of engagement’ that define his participation in a 10-year project to transform Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital – an enormous hospital in Soweto, indeed, one of the biggest hospitals in the southern hemisphere. A showcase for apartheid health services for the black population, the project was to create a post-apartheid hospital that would improve and broaden the service to the community and, at the same time, improve the working conditions of its employees. Working with the main union, Von Holdt and his colleagues investigated the source of the hospital’s many dysfunctions and proposed to reorganize management by giving more influence to the professionals – clinicians and nurses – and decentralizing power away from government. Resistance by the regional government was overcome by public protest that brought community and employees out onto the streets. Von Holdt’s team managed to introduce these changes in the surgical ward with clear-cut improvements in both service delivery and working conditions. In the face of concerted resistance, however, from the political administration and senior management the reorganization could not be sustained even in this one ward, let alone disseminated to other parts of the hospital. Despite the obvious success of the experiment it was aborted. Returning to the university to reflect on this seemingly irrational resistance to change, Von Holdt points to the interests of a new black administrative elite that is suspicious of the expertise of largely white professionals. He writes several papers which find their way to the president’s office whereupon he is invited to undertake a much broader study of the dynamics of the post-apartheid state and to sit on the National Planning Commission.

At a superficial level this is a move from public sociology to policy sociology to professional and critical sociology, and finally back to policy sociology. But more profoundly, Von Holdt shows how policy and public sociology are inextricably bound up with one another as is professional and critical sociology. If there is a bifurcation, it is between the academic and political fields, and within each field there is a continuum between dominant and subordinate interests, between professional and critical sociology, and between policy and public sociology. This cycling in and out of different sociologies is held together, he says, by ‘critical engagement’ that infuses political struggles whether in the realm of policy work or public sociology. Here Von Holdt converges with César Rodríguez-Garavito and Nandini Sundar since critical engagement is a combination of opposites, endowing sociology with an amphibious and schizophrenic character.

The political minefield

For the politician, politics is politics, but for the sociologist politics is a minefield so different from the customary academic life. For César Rodríguez-Garavito politics is a minefield in three senses: it is imbricated in the extraction of natural resources through the exploitation of labor and the expropriation of land; it is characterized by volatile and violent social relations; moreover, it is a treacherous arena in which real land mines are planted as a strategy of war. Nandini Sundar describes something very similar in Chhattisgarh. But the metaphor of the social minefield can be extended more broadly to capture the element of danger and surprise, especially for the academic who, as Weber said, is simply not prepared for politics. Karl von Holdt describes the attempt to reorganize Baragwanath Hospital that came up against resistance from many quarters, namely the playing out of class and race interests that have little to do with the delivery of medical services. The weaving back and forth between policy and public sociology reflect the ambushes that lay in wait for what seemed to be a simple intervention.

Whether we speak of amphibious, schizophrenic sociology or critical engagement, these are the experiences of sociologists at the intersection of two fields: the academic and the political, the one holding the sociologists to professional norms of independent inquiry while the other demands accountability to the very different rules of the political game. Let us see how different sociologist enter, negotiate and leave this place of contention.

Sari Hanafi, a Palestinian reared in a Syrian refugee camp, describes his trajectory of public engagement in Lebanon and Palestine. He began as a cautious professional sociologist, reluctant to enter the public sphere. Concerned that his research speak to the issues facing Palestine, he dived into policy research that would help build connections between Palestine and its diaspora. Turning to the place of NGOs within Palestine, he became critical of their refusal to be drawn into politics, that is, their limited horizons. Hanafi, however, entered a political minefield when he took a position at the American University of Beirut and began to address civil society directly, or particularly, when he turned from writing in English for the policy and academic world, to writing in Arabic for broader publics.

He found himself stepping on a Lebanese land mine when he condemned international humanitarian organizations for working within the framework of existing rights for Palestinian refugees. When he began defending the Palestinian right to work, he not only came up against Lebanese authorities but also Palestinian leaders who saw integration as threatening the right of return. His research into the governance of camps – a form of organic public sociology – accused Palestinian leaders of being removed from their people and the Lebanese government of policing without representation. Writing articles on these matters in the Lebanese media Hanafi was subject a barrage of public attacks for taking positions that recognized the interests of oppressed groups, and later when he insisted on his right to collaborate with dissident Israeli academics on the nature of the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

This was precarious combat, indeed, because he never found himself, definitively, on any one side. Rather, as an academic insisting on critical and analytical distance, he was caught between political forces, sometimes even criticizing those with whom he sympathized. It is this critical engagement that got him into trouble with everyone, including some of his colleagues who resented his political involvement that was bringing trouble to the university.

Clearly, the possibilities of public and policy sociology are dependent on the character of the political field and its relation to the university. As compared to China the polity in Lebanon is still quite open and, in the final analysis, the American University of Beirut provided protective covering. In China the political field is far more treacherous and university far from being a safe haven, but this did not stop Pun Ngai and her colleagues embarking on an organic public sociology designed to expose the appalling working conditions at Foxconn, the Taiwanese company that produces over 50% of the world’s electronic products, and most specifically Apple products, in Chinese factories which employ up to 400,000 workers. Sparked by a spate of suicide attempts in 2010, sociologists from universities across China, Taiwan and Hong Kong undertook a series of research projects, based on interviewing Foxconn workers and covert participant observation. Their goal was to produce a general awareness of conditions at Foxconn, and to mount a global campaign against Foxconn and Apple. To this end they produced reports and videos that they distributed internationally through such organizations as SACOM, a Hong-Kong-based labor group formed by scholars and students concerned about the violation of labor rights in mainland China. The media coverage was astonishingly broad but the response of Apple and Foxconn was more token than real, since the real bite – a consumer boycott of Apple products – could not threaten the popularity of the products. At the same time the campaign was designed to encourage Chinese workers to organize in their own defense.

Perhaps, because they were targeting a foreign company rather than the Chinese state there was no retribution against the teams of sociologists, but this was never assured in the uncertain political terrain of China. Unlike Hanafi, who insisted on keeping a critical distance from his political actors, Pun Ngai and her colleagues were unequivocal in defending what they conceived to be the interests of workers, forging ‘intellectual–worker unity.’ Sociology should serve workers, bringing ‘about new understanding of relation between global production and worker resistance in China, about university education, and about the goals of researchers.’ For them ‘social science should never be separated from politics.’ Indeed, in the Chinese context of state regulation of all spheres of life, including the university, critical sociology is immediately political and marginal as compared to an introverted professional sociology and a policy sociology serving the interests of power.

But such a radical political stance toward public sociology is, of course, not unique to the Chinese situation. Frances Piven describes a very similar militant sociology, designed to advance the strategies of social movements. Her research into the history of social movements and politics in the United States has led her to conceptualize what she calls ‘interdependent power,’ the idea that the power of subordinate groups lies not in their resources but in the leverage they exercise over the dominant groups dependent upon them. In her view, then, social movements must first recognize that they have such power, they must be prepared to break the rules that secure their subjugation, they must organize themselves to coordinate their insurgency and, then, be prepared to withstand reprisals from those whose power they challenge. This is the sociology she applies to the Occupy Movement and its strategy of ‘Strike Debt,’ that is a collective and deliberate default on loan payments and debt obligations, aimed at banks and other financial powers. What she offers, then, is a sociological analysis of strategy in the service of a social movement, a potential organic public sociology.

The dilemmas Piven refers to are the ones that arise from trying to forge a movement in the particular political context of the US where debt is normalized, where debtors do not see themselves as a group, where the Occupy Movement is fragile, radical but without sustained relations with the wider society, where repression can be ruthless. She herself, however, has had a long career of combat, fighting publicly for the voting rights and welfare rights of poor people. This public engagement has not been without its challenges. Branded by Glenn Beck of Fox Television as an extremist and ‘enemy of the constitution’ who has contributed to the economic crisis and threatened the stability of the American government, Piven is no stranger to the power of the media and the difficult terrain for public sociology in the US.

Whereas Piven’s dilemmas revolve around the realization of ‘interdependent power’ in a given political context, Ramón Flecha and Marta Soler focus on the dilemmas of engaging with subaltern communities who are suspicious of all outside interventions, especially from academics. The Institute for Overcoming Inequality (CREA) at the University of Barcelona has developed its own distinctive ‘communicative methodology’ that involves building trust through dialogue between sociologists and community. In this vision of organic public sociology each side contributes its own expertise – the public contributes the experience of marginality while the sociologist contributes specific ways of overcoming that marginality.

In the example they describe, the community creates its own Citizens Council (based on ideas offered by the sociologist) which considers the ways in which successful actions elsewhere (also provided by the sociologist) can be adapted to their community. Specifically, the sociologists import the ‘successful action’ of the Mondragon Cooperative into a barrio of Romani to create jobs that were previously outsourced. From beginning to end the sociologists are in constant conversation with the Citizens Council which itself launched a new form of community democracy based on what Flecha and Soler call a ‘Dialogic Inclusion Contract.’ This model of public sociology presumes the sociologist does have distinctive expertise in providing solutions for community problems and that these solutions or ‘successful actions’ can be adapted only through dialogue necessary to understand what is possible and what is not.

What does this methodology presume about the political field? It appears to be a harmonious world of reciprocal deliberation and constructive intervention. It is far from the social minefields of Colombia, India and South Africa. There are none of the conflicts that entangle Hanafi’s public sociology, conflicts between the sociologist representing the camp dwellers and their leaders, or the sociologist caught between the Lebanese government, Hezbola, NGOs and UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East). Yet, of course, Flecha and Soler know that conflict swirls around the Roma people. A popular television documentary series on the Roma aired a filming of a prenuptial virginity test, portraying them as a backward, even barbaric people. At the press conference there were competing interests – a politician who had built his career as a representative of the Roma, independent media, representatives from Roma women’s groups as well as a church leader who had collaborated with the filming crew. CREA had its own interest in papering over these divisions within the Roma community in order to present a successful action to the European Parliament. Policy sociology, here, requires the presentation of public sociology as a smooth dialogic process. Equally, Catalonia’s academic field is divided between the exploitative professional sociologists pursuing their own career and CREA immersed in a dialogic relation of mutual accountability with the community. The moralizing view obscures the deep struggles about which Soler has written elsewhere within what is still a semi-feudal university system, dominated by competing barons or catedraticos. As the economic pressures on the university intensify and positions become ever more scarce, so, too, do the conflicts deepen.

Communicative methodology has to negotiate the dynamics of both political and academic fields. It has to determine with whom to communicate and against whom to struggle. An effective public sociology has to function on two terrains – a political and an academic field – and it is their composition and intersection that sets the limits and possibilities of precarious engagements.

Inconvenient truths

So far we have examined the windmill experience at the intersection of political and academic fields, and then the challenges of acting as a sociologist with and against other actors in the political field. We now turn to the capacity of sociologists to affect changes in the common sense of the publics they address.

Michel Wieviorka’s public sociology is especially daunting as he is concerned to weaken or unseat deeply held prejudices such as racism and anti-Semitism. His engagements are rooted in an original perspective on sociological intervention based on a clear distinction between the production and dissemination of knowledge. But the distinction quickly blurs when the production of knowledge becomes collaboration with the subjects and thus the dissemination of sociology, while dissemination itself becomes a vehicle for validating and producing new sociology. Indeed, effective dissemination must have a practical moment – it must be a sociological intervention – otherwise it won’t dislodge deeply held common sense.

Sociological intervention, says Wieviorka, involves the co-production of knowledge, often with a few militants in a social movement. The very act of partaking in sociological research can shift a movement’s self-understanding. The activists come to believe in the new knowledge when they appropriate it as their own, and apply it to the world around them. Conversion, however, can be skin deep if the subjects are given no way of implementing their new found understanding, if there is no way of remedying the situation that produces the prejudices in the first place. Thus, Wieviorka learned how the transformation of common sense is more likely to be embraced if it comes about through democratic participation in which participants choose alternative policies or strategies. At the same time, to avoid being drawn onto the terrain of common sense, sociologists have to retain a critical distance and cling to their scientific protocols that also give their knowledge added credibility – all the more important when the research involves close encounters with their subjects.

Wieviorka takes it as an article of faith that the expansion of knowledge and creation of truth will work for the good, while recognizing that others see sociology as harnessed for evil as well as for good. This is his enlightenment bias that in part may reflect the relative openness of the French public sphere. Anna Temkina and Elena Zdravomyslova’s account of the trajectory of gender studies and feminism, operating in a more restricted public sphere and repressive political order, draws more mixed conclusions. They describe how they discover ‘gender’ in the early years of the post-Soviet transition when they came in contact with Western feminists. In this period the Russian government reacted against the Soviet past, pushing the political field in a Westerly direction, embracing human rights, and encouraging international agencies who were keen to fund ‘gender studies.’ Given the essentialism and nationalism that informs the common sense about patriarchal relations between men and women, ‘gender studies’ had a difficult terrain to conquer both outside and inside the academy. Still, a more critical approach to gender did grow within academic and intellectual circles so long as it received support from outside. As this support dried up and turned into hostility, during the Putin years, the survival of ‘gender studies’ became more difficult. The very notion of gender that it had exported into the public sphere was appropriated by conservative groups – the Russian Orthodox Church being the dominant player – to demonize feminists as dangerous upstarts, agents of Western influence. Always hard to advance, public sociology around gender became ever more difficult and its carriers were vilified in public and marginalized in the academy. Ironically, sociology’s view of gender relations and patriarchy as socially constructed rather than natural and inevitable was appropriated and turned against its originators by conservative forces. Yet, in a final twist, this reaction against gender studies also excited support from a broad range of human rights groups, suffering from a similar constriction of liberties.

Russian feminists fight courageously and against overwhelming odds to defend its truths, in the same way that Walden Bello pursues his sociological truths – inconvenient truths – against their public enemies. Thus, his account of the fall of Allende focuses on ‘counter-revolutionary’ forces within Chile, arguing against the reigning leftist orthodoxy that claimed Allende was brought down by US support for the Chilean military. Moving deeper into the public sphere in his homeland Bello investigated the disappearance of members of the Philippine Communist Party only to find that they had been executed on suspicion of being agents of the military. He dared to present his findings and suffered the consequences. The more powerful the political actor the greater is its interest but also its ability to suppress inconvenient truths. The collusion of the World Bank and the Marcos dictatorship was outside any critical investigation until Bello and his colleagues broke into the World Bank to steal crucial documents, which became the basis of a book that contributed to the downfall of the regime.

More generally, and in parallel with Wieviorka’s emphasis on practice, Bello argues that inconvenient truths become accepted as ‘true’ only through political action. Even though there had been much research to show that markets were neither efficient nor just, neoliberal beliefs reigned supreme, until protests against the WTO in Seattle and beyond effectively called those beliefs into question. As long as inconvenient truths are bottled up in the academic arena, they are innocuous. They may seep out quietly to the dominant forces in society, but when they enter the public sphere, they can become more subversive, and, for those who carry them, rather more dangerous.

Today sociology as a whole is an inconvenient truth. It is an embattled field, defending civil society against the collusive relation of state and market, reflected in the academy by attempted mergers of economics and political science. Just as sociology arose with civil society in the 19th century to oppose market anarchy and political tyranny, so once again the mission of sociology lies in opposing the rise of utilitarian and economistic thought. Against neoliberal orthodoxy, sociology poses as an inconvenient truth, along with its neighboring disciplines such as anthropology and geography, and along with dissident economists and political scientists. Sociology’s survival becomes coterminous with the survival of civil society that is the last defense against the war waged by the agents of the market economy against human existence. Sociology’s future as a discipline will depend on making its inconvenient truths everyday reality, which it can only do by entering the public sphere and becoming a social movement itself, while simultaneously holding on to its scientific basis.