Sociology in the USA and beyond

Introduction: a note on nostalgia

Reflecting on the fact that I have now taught sociology for 42 years, it is difficult to avoid nostalgia. Born in Britain immediately after the Second World War and enjoying the economic boom of the 1960s and early 1970s, my baby-boomer generation had considerable social and economic advantages. As then Prime Minister Harold Macmillan expressed it, we had ‘never had it so good’. My generation avoided wars in Korea and Vietnam and, equally importantly, avoided military conscription. We watched the empire collapse after Suez, but we didn’t shed a tear.

Entering Leeds University in 1963, I was already too late to be taught by John Rex, Alasdair MacIntyre and Bryan Wilson, who had lectured there. However, nourished by Rex’s Key Problems of Sociological Theory (1961) and the teaching of Alan Dawe (one of Rex’s students), I acquired a view of social science in which sociology, via Dawe’s influential articles on ‘The Two Sociologies’ (1970) and ‘The Role of Experience in the Construction of Social Theory’ (1973), was understood to be vitally relevant to the interpretation of the key political issues of the time – Soviet communism, the Cuban missile crisis, nuclear disarmament, South African Apartheid, the Prague Spring of 1968 and the tribulations of the British Labour Party. Through the teaching of Trevor Ling, who later held a chair of comparative religion at the University of Manchester, I acquired a keen interest in comparative religion, especially the sociology of Islam. Leaving Leeds in 1970, with a PhD and no debt, I entered into my first lectureship, at the University of Aberdeen, and there published Weber and Islam in 1974. By 1982 I had been appointed to my first professorship, at Flinders University in South Australia. As I often say to my students, it’s been downhill ever since. I can now allow the nostalgia to serve as background and move on to my main goals.

In this article I trace the fortunes of sociology in the United States, Britain and Australia over the course of some 60 years. I compare the impact of professionalization, migration and institutional location on the character and contents of sociology in these countries. While recognizing the many achievements of professional sociology, I argue that the modern auditing frameworks by which the careers of academic sociologists are measured have had the effect of standardizing teaching and research in sociology to the point of marginalizing the discipline in many institutions. Such marginalization has occasionally encouraged creativity, but it has nonetheless left many sociology offerings in a fragile position. As part of my historical overview I challenge the stereotypical contrast between American empiricism and European theoretical flair. While American sociology has been subject to professionalization much more than has the discipline in Britain and Australia, its sheer size has somewhat protected it from intellectual dilution. What is noticeable in all three countries is the decline of comparative and historical studies of societies, and the predominance of descriptive micro-sociology. In this context historians, economists and philosophers have come to dominate public debate about major social and political issues.

A brief overview of British and Australian sociology

By the end of the last century British sociology had fragmented into, or had been absorbed by, various interdisciplinary ‘studies’ projects, most notably women’s studies, cultural studies, dance studies and film studies. British sociology was also a site of changing fashions – cultural theory, post-structuralism, postmodernism, actor-network theory and then globalization – and these were not necessarily sympathetic to traditional sociology. Aspects of sociology were also siphoned off into sports science, organizational studies, and health and illness courses. As I hinted earlier, sociological communities with underdeveloped professionalism tend to acquire fashions more quickly than is the case in more established departments. Within the British university system those departments that were not heavily invested in the British Sociological Association were also more inclined to embrace interdisciplinarity and passing fashions. Where the London School of Economics (LSE), for example, sustained a strong but conventional sociological syllabus, those universities that had grown out of the technical and educational colleges in the 1970s and 1980s had unstable departments, often recruiting staff with little or no sociological training. As a result, much of the sociological tradition, from Max Weber to Talcott Parsons, was jettisoned or ignored. The consequence is that some sociology departments now start their theory courses with, for example, the postmodernism of J.-F. Lyotard, thereby studiously avoiding any engagement with traditional sociology. Some influential journals which appeared in Britain in the late 20th century, such as Theory, Culture & Society and Body & Society, had little obvious connection with the sociological networks from which their editors originally sprang. While ‘culture’ was on the rise, demography, which in my view is crucial to any sociological explanation of social change, along with criminology and the sociology of law, disappeared from the curriculum of most sociology departments.

In Australia sociology did not gain a permanent place anywhere during the period stretching from the establishment of the country’s oldest universities in the second half of the 19th century right up to the late 1950s. In the period just after the First World War, it is true that there were experiments with the discipline at both the University of Sydney and the University of Melbourne, but in both cases the experiments were abandoned (see esp. Bourke, 1981; Harley, this volume). Yet in the late 19th century it is also the case that Australian universities developed an outstanding tradition of anthropological research on Aboriginal communities. We must not forget that Émile Durkheim’s sociology of religion was inspired by Spencer and Gillen’s (1997 [1902]) research into the northern tribes of central Australia, first published in 1902. Since then anthropologists have turned more of their attention to urban Australia, making it difficult to distinguish between anthropological ethnography and qualitative sociology; as such some Australian sociology – for example at the University of Western Australia – has always been practised under the umbrella of social anthropology.

Returning to the history of sociology per se in Australia, the first successful department was established in 1959 at the University of New South Wales, under the leadership of Sol Encel (1971), soon followed by the University of Tasmania, which for many years had an outstanding department of sociology, featuring Jan Pakulski, Malcolm Waters, Stephen Crook and even the young John Holmwood (now President of the British Sociological Association). With 1960s and 1970s radicalism creating a ready audience, a few more of the traditional universities and many of the newer universities (those established between the end of the Second World War and the 1980s) built popular sociology programmes, including James Cook, Queensland, Griffith, New England, Newcastle, Macquarie, Western Sydney, UTS, Wollongong, Charles Sturt, Australian National University, La Trobe, Monash, RMIT, Victoria, Deakin, Flinders, and Murdoch. By the 1990s even Sydney and Melbourne had relented and formally embraced sociology (see esp. Baldock, 2005; Crozier, 2005).

While important teaching and research in the discipline was and is undertaken in all these universities, the truth is that these sociological presences (not many are fully fledged ‘departments’) are rarely strong, with little political ‘clout’ when it comes to struggles over resource allocation. In such internal political contests in Australia the discipline has never achieved the same level of prestige as has economics, history or politics, and has recently achieved relatively low scores in the new national research assessment exercise. In addition, the long years of the conservative government of John Howard (1996–2007) were not auspicious for sociology. As with Britain, rising student fees have limited the number of students entering sociology courses, though it can be said that, in this respect at least, American sociology faces similar problems, inasmuch as the expansion of the MBA as a general degree has occurred alongside the decline of general degrees in the humanities and social sciences.

In Britain the Thatcher years (1979–90) were similarly unfavourable to academic sociology, especially as a consequence of the prime minister’s infamous pronouncement in 1987 that ‘there is no such thing as society, only individuals and their families’. Her critical views on the ‘Nanny State’ were also counter to the values and assumptions of the majority of academic sociologists, who were themselves products of the Keynesian welfare state. Inasmuch as it can be argued that the so-called ‘cuts’ to the welfare state were not strikingly significant and that the efficiency of welfare provision was actually improved over the period (Sked and Cook, 1993: 482), it might be said that it was Mrs Thatcher’s bark rather than her bite that frightened sociologists in the 1980s. The Iron Lady was followed by the relatively mild and weak John Major, but the policies did not change significantly. British sociology, despite the cuts to university budgets and the decline of the economy towards the end of the century, managed to sustain through this period three very credible journals – the British Journal of Sociology, Sociological Review and Sociology. As well, a number of major departments of sociology – Essex, Lancaster, Leicester, LSE and Warwick – prospered as centres of teaching and research. While Oxbridge has not been especially important in British sociology, Anthony Giddens, subsequently Lord Giddens, did create a tradition of Cambridge sociology when he taught and wrote there on theory, though his numerous theoretical works were not connected to large-scale empirical research. Giddens has commented on rather than undertaken social research (Loyal, 2003). Similarly, while the theoretical work of Zygmunt Bauman has contributed much to British sociologists’ understanding of postmodernism, he has not had any consistent involvement in empirical research.

One important contrast here is with earlier generations of British sociologists, many of whom, such as Basil Bernstein, Tom Bottomore, David V. Glass, John H. Goldthorpe, A.H. Halsey, Richard Titmus, David Lockwood and T.H. Marshall, engaged with serious empirical issues about class, inequality, social mobility and welfare policies. The postmodern turn is unlikely to leave any such enduring legacy. What postmodern study of status and class in Britain will have the some lasting impact as Lockwood’s The Blackcoated Worker (1958)? What publication of postmodern cultural studies in Britain is likely to have the enduring influence or qualities of Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957) or Raymond Williams’s (1958) Culture and Society? Hoggart, who had no formal sociological training, established the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in 1964, which was further developed by Stuart Hall, who made it a major site for the study of youth culture, race relations and delinquent subculture. Hall was perhaps unusual in having a clear focus on local empirical studies while also engaging in ‘high theory’ and in a personal campaign against Thatcherism.

Another important contrast might be drawn with a few American social theorists, such as James Coleman, who developed major theoretical ideas about social exchange as well as undertaking influential empirical work on education (Coleman, 1990a, 1990b), or Robert Putnam, whose research on Italian politics led to the idea of social capital (Putnam, 1993, 2000), or more recently Jeffrey Alexander, who has produced major works of theory in tandem with empirical studies of politics, including the Arab Spring (Alexander, 2010, 2011). On this front, however, it must be said that while American sociology has made important contributions to sociological theory, there are few mechanisms in the US for integrating various theory traditions. As Crothers (2005: 99) puts it, ‘American sociology … is globally hegemonic, but … fails to be too concerned with theoretical synthesis.’

The earlier mention of Stuart Hall serves to remind us that he was one of the first British sociologists to put race and ethnicity on the research agenda. When T.H. Marshall published his great work on citizenship in 1950 he did not see the need to include any reference to race relations in his treatment of British social rights. As another illustration of this lacuna in Britain we might note that Daniel Patrick Moynihan (Weisman, 2010: 482) complained in 1986 that Britain’s Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought (Bullock and Stallybrass, 1977) had no entry on ‘ethnicity’, referring by contrast to the wealth of American literature on the subject, including his own cooperation with Nathan Glazer in Beyond the Melting Pot (Glazer and Moynihan, 1963). By the 1960s and 1970s the arrival of Caribbean and Asian workers in the British Midlands was dramatically changing the character of the nation’s social stratification. In 1967 Rex and Moore, anticipating Hall by a few years, published their study of ‘housing classes’, Race Community and Conflict (1967). More recently Paul Gilroy has boosted the stocks of the sociology of race and ethnicity in Britain, especially with his ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’ (1987). Gilroy soon enough became Professor of Sociology and African-American Studies at Yale University, but he has since returned to Britain to become the first occupant of the Anthony Giddens chair of social theory at the LSE.

What I have said so far in this piece about Britain and Australia suggests that sociology in these places is in decline. Elsewhere I have been more specific. Together with Chris Rojek, for example, I have argued that sociology has become merely decorative rather than a substantial and influential discipline (Turner and Rojek, 2000). A feature of the decline in Britain is the fact that sociologists are nowadays rarely engaged with large-scale research projects with a long time-span, which formerly helped to build the institutions that characterized the academic lives of an earlier generation. I think here of Peter Laslett and Michael Young. Laslett played a major role in (re)establishing the importance to political theory of the work of Sir Robert Filmer and John Locke, and went on, with E.A. Wrigley, to co-found the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. Combining history and demography, Laslett changed the way in which we thought about the history of the family and generations with The World We Have Lost (1965). Young was closely associated in Britain with community studies, poverty research, education reform and, together with Laslett, the creation of the University of the Third Age. He was politically more prominent than Laslett, being responsible for drafting the Labour Party’s manifesto for the 1945 election. He was a pioneer social reformer and was instrumental in the creation of the National Consumer Association, the Open University and the National Extension College. Young developed the idea of ‘meritocracy’ in his The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958). He was also very committed to the study of local areas, particularly the East End of London, publishing, with Peter Willmott, a classic of urban sociology, Family and Kinship in East London (Willmott and Young, 1957). As well, with Edward Shils, Young published a much criticized article on ‘The Meaning of the Coronation’ in 1955 in The Sociological Review.

Perhaps one test of the role of sociologists in public life is whether their theories and concepts come to penetrate public discourse or their policies influence government action. This was certainly true for Young with his notion of ‘meritocracy’, which became widely used, despite the fact that he coined the term partly as an ironic criticism of dependence on credentials for promotion and advancement. Giddens is perhaps the only current example of a public intellectual in British sociology. After becoming Director of the LSE in 1997 he was a major advisor to Prime Minister Tony Blair and formulated much of the Labour Party’s policies around ‘the Third Way’. Both Blair and Giddens were convinced that the decline of the working class and the erosion of trade union membership in Britain had sapped the social basis of the parliamentary Labour Party, requiring a transformation of its ideology and policy. They believed that the party was faced with a stark choice: preserve the integrity of the original socialist base of the movement and never win an election, or move to a centre position with the Third Way doctrine and win power. Giddens may have remained more popular among sociologists had Blair failed politically and had ‘Blairism’ never taken hold over the centre of electoral politics.

Giddens’s contributions to sociology and pubic life cannot be underestimated (he is one of the few sociologists invited to give the prestigious Reith lectures on the BBC, for example, which he did in 1999), but he has been criticized for downplaying the role of power and interest in society, appealing instead to cosmopolitan ethics and political compromise in a period when British government policy was turning against immigration and Europe was becoming ‘fortress Europe’ (Callinicos, 2001). Other critics complain that his approach lacked ‘a thoroughgoing historical and social foundation’ (Loyal, 2003: 174). Since the Labour Party has recently been removed from office by the Conservatives, under the coalition government of David Cameron Giddens’s conceptual apparatus is no longer part of the public discourse.

The importance of migrating sociologists

There has been much speculation in the sociology of knowledge about how the success of scientific knowledge is deeply influenced by the movements of individual scientists, as they form influential cohorts and networks (Collins, 1998). In a similar way, 20th-century migration by sociologists has created distinctive features. For example, at various points in that century British and American sociology were the recipients of many Jewish academic refugees. The refugee intellectuals who came to British institutions included such exemplary figures as Norbert Elias, Sigmund Freud, Ernest Gellner, Karl Mannheim, Alfred Sohn-Rethel and many more. Australia, for its part, was host to the so-called Budapest Circle that included figures such as Agnes Heller, the Marxist philosopher, and Ivan Szelenyi, the economic sociologist and critic of Soviet-style authoritarianism in Eastern Europe. In the US the contribution of the Frankfurt School has been much documented and explored, especially in attempting to understand post-war American sociology (Jay, 1973).

Although somewhat different in their origins and destinations, the New York intellectuals Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz were of considerable importance, particularly through journals such as Fortune and The Public Interest, founded by Kristol in 1965. The Public Interest hosted major articles from James Coleman and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Bell’s articles in Fortune formed the foundation of his influential book The End of Ideology (Bell, 1960). One might also mention second-generation Jewish migrants such as Edward Shils, who managed to address both the natural and the social sciences as the founding editor of Minerva, which he ran for 25 years, and who became a member of the governing body of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations (Shils, 2006).

Migration did not always produce mutual recognition and benefit, however. Claus Offe (2005), in giving us an insightful evaluation of the different personal responses of Tocqueville, Weber and Adorno to America, argues that Adorno fostered the idea that Americans are hopeless positivists while Europeans are sophisticated theorists. Adorno was indeed very critical of many American intellectual practices, especially ‘teamwork in social research’ (Adorno, 1972). In adopting this position he was much closer to the Institut fur Sozialforschung in Frankfurt (home of the Frankfurt School, mentioned earlier) than he was to the Institute for Social Research, which had been set up at the University of Michigan in 1949; while the two institutions had the same name, they had, and continue to have, very different agendas. In following a ‘Frankfurt line’ Adorno created a synthesis of sociology and critical theory, a synthesis which left little room for empiricist sociological thinkers like Paul Lazarsfeld. Adorno came to be regarded as the outstanding intellectual of his generation (Muller-Doohm, 2005), particularly for his attack, with Herbert Marcuse, on American culture. In his wake, in many parts of the world, the view became widespread that US sociology is dominated by a narrow empiricism, whereas in Europe and beyond critical theory is the driving force. This view is still influential, to the point that when sociologists today refer to ‘Theory’ it is typically with reference to figures like Jean Baudrillard, Luc Boltanski, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, Hans Joas or Niklas Luhmann.

To return to British sociology, the migration has since the 1970s been mostly outwards. An impressive diaspora has been created, a fact that is too often overlooked. The ‘exiles’ include among others, Michael Burawoy, Stewart Clegg, Steven Crook, Paul Gilroy, John Hall, John Heritage, Barry Hindess, Robert Holton, Michael Mann, Stephen Mennell, Jeffrey Minson, John O’Neill, Roland Robertson, Ian Taylor and Jock Young. Some of these sociologists eventually returned to British shores, but generally speaking the outward migration was the equivalent of a sustained brain drain. As a consequence, much of the energy and talent of the 1970s and 1980s was lost.

The professionalization of academic sociology and its nationalist agenda: an important difference between American sociology and the rest

Perhaps the most crucial difference between sociology in America and that practised elsewhere is the size and professional strength of the American Sociological Association (ASA), which exerts much greater influence than do its equivalents in other countries (certainly in Britain and Australia) over recruitment to chairs, the careers of young professionals, the development of the curriculum, the promotion of certain journals over others, the maintenance of departments and the distribution of honorific rewards. Among other things this situation means that journals not recognized by the ASA lack status, which not only drives young academics into the fierce competition for space in the mainstream journals but also helps to determine which university publishing houses have credibility. Professionalization is, in this way, clearly a process of social closure and capture. Whereas the annual conference of the ASA will host over 5000 sociologists, the annual conference of the British Sociological Association (BSA) might attract 1000 participants and the Australian Association (TASA) might draw only 450. Size counts. Anybody who fails to grasp the scale of American sociology should examine the ASA centennial publication Sociology in America (Calhoun, 2007).

While the institutional power of the ASA protects the discipline from erosion and attack it also tends to stifle innovation. In contrasting America and elsewhere on this point, consider, for example, the growth of the sociology of the body in Britain and Australia from the 1980s. I published Body and Society in 1984 and Chris Shilling brought out The Body and Social Theory in 1993. By the mid 1990s many British departments had courses in the sociology of the body. Yet it was not until 2011 that the ASA recognized ‘the body and embodiment’ as areas of professional development. Yes, Judith Butler had published Bodies that Matter in 1993, but as a professor of rhetoric; she is not and would not want to be recognized as a sociologist. Similarly, the field of disability studies has enjoyed a remarkable development in Britain (Barnes et al., 1999) but is barely visible in the US. Other examples might include research on masculinity, which has flourished in Britain, with Jeff Hearn and Ken Plummer, and in Australia with R.W. Connell, but has not been so prominent in America. In other words, weak professionalization has its advantages, creating niches or gaps within which more innovative work can blossom.

Professional associations also reinforce the national rather than international character of the professional communities they serve. Generally speaking the national journals – the American Journal of Sociology, the British Journal of Sociology and the Journal of Sociology (Australia) – use their considerable prestige to reinforce national agendas. This can be also seen in Neil Smelser’s introduction to his 1988 Handbook of Sociology. A glance at this piece allows us to contrast the issues that confronted sociology in the 1980s with the issues and opportunities that face sociology over twenty years later. Smelser (1988: 15) stressed that ‘[t]his volume is … predominantly a book on sociology as it stands in the United States’. In saying this Smelser was responding directly to Talcott Parsons’s essay of 1959, ‘Some Problems Confronting Sociology as a Profession’, and he was also reflecting upon Robert E. Lee Faris’s 1964 Handbook of Modern Sociology. Parsons’s article had been optimistic about the consolidation of sociology and Faris’s Handbook had developed this optimism into a set of outstanding contributions from leading sociologists. Smelser’s introduction was more uncertain and defensive. Smelser (1988: 12) noted that sociology had experienced ‘increased specialization of inquiry, diversification of both perspectives and subject matter studied, and considerable fragmentation and conflict’, using as examples the sociologies of education, medicine, gender, leisure and age stratification.

Today these trends towards fragmentation and conflict have, if anything, become more intense and problematic. Because sociology lacks an integrative theoretical paradigm, the number of topics the discipline addresses continues to increase in an unwieldy manner. One indication of the absence of stable theoretical paradigm has been the persistent inability over the last hundred years or more to agree on a definition of ‘the social’ (Elliott and Turner, 2012; see also Dean, 2010; Wickham this volume). A fragmented and unstable discipline is under severe pressure, especially when there is relatively little agreement about basic concepts and methodology.

Another point which might be made in comparing sociology in 1988 to the discipline as it is practised today concerns the acknowledgement of globalization in reshaping the social world and in influencing the development of sociology, as a profession and as a way of understanding this social world. While Smelser did acknowledge a distinction between the national and international dimensions of sociology, his Handbook was overwhelmingly American in its contents and presuppositions. In fact the early sociological theorizing of globalization was undertaken in Britain, by Roland Robertson at the University of Essex, and since then most of the sociological work on the subject has taken place outside America, especially through the work of British and Australian sociologists such as Gerard Delanty, Robin Blackburn, Chris Hudson, Robert Holton, David Inglis and Anthony Elliott. A similar example involves the notion of risk society. In European sociology Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society, first published in Germany in 1986 and first translated into English in 1992, has had a major impact in Europe (including Britain) and Australia but has had few followers in the US.

Putting the shoe on the other foot, where American sociology stresses the importance of the work of W.E.B. Dubois, his name rarely comes to the attention of sociologists outside the US. Dubois’s famous notion of ‘double consciousness’, from Souls of Black Folk (1903), has had little impact in other countries. Another ‘America ahead of the rest’ example is the sociology of religion. While two important books in this field were published in Britain before 1980 – Bryan Wilson’s Religion in a Secular Society (1966) and David Martin’s A General Theory of Secularization (1978) – on the whole religion has not been taken seriously by British sociologists. Giddens, for example, has had virtually nothing to say about religion in British life. By contrast, religion has been a crucial theme in American sociology from its earliest days, particularly through the influence of Robert Bellah, Peter L. Berger, Harvey Cox, Kai T. Erikson, Talcott Parsons, Robert Wuthnow, Alan Wolfe and Wade C. Roof. American sociology has even generated a new wave of research using the ‘rational choice’, ‘economic’ or ‘market’ theory of religion, as featured in the work of R. Finke, Laurence R. Iannaccone, Rodney Stark and R.S. Warner, who complained that too much attention in the sociology of religion was being given to demand-side issues (such as the quest for meaning) at the expense of supply-side issues (relating to the competition between churches for adherents). American sociology seems able to produce an inexhaustible supply of major works on religion, with two likely classics appearing in the last two years – American Grace (Putnam and Campbell, 2010) and Religion in Human Evolution (Bellah, 2011). In neither British nor Australian sociology is there anything to match this, nor to match the extent of the debate about ‘civil religion’ that was generated by Bellah’s much earlier ‘Civil Religion in America’ (1967). From Alexis de Tocqueville onwards, it is clear that religion and democracy are interconnected in the US in a manner that is largely foreign elsewhere. With some exaggeration we might say that R. H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926) was the last great study of religion in British sociology, perhaps with the exception of David Martin’s Pentecostalism (2002).

Is it the case, then, that insufficient attention has been given to what Pierre Bourdieu referred to as ‘The Social Conditions of the International Circulation of Ideas’ (1999)?

Macro comparative and historical sociology

The educational policies that have been applied to universities in both Britain and Australia, in a bid to micro-manage academic behaviour, may have increased productivity but they have also encouraged young academics to write one-off articles in refereed journals at the expense of demanding, long-term historical and comparative studies of whole societies. In other words, government auditing schemes have tended to drive young academics into safe areas of the discipline, where they can get a number of articles published quickly. In Britain, for example, the RAE (the research assessment exercise) and the QAE (the quality assurance exercise) almost guarantee that no young academic will ever undertake the task of writing books on the same scale as Elias’s historical studies, let alone Weber’s works on comparative religion. Established sociologists who have embraced Elias’s figurational sociology, such as Stephen Mennell, with his study of the civilizing process in American history (2007), show what can be done. It is true that historical and comparative work in the US has also suffered a slight decline. However, European sociologists who dismiss American sociology on the grounds that it is narrow and trivial need to consider Michael Mann on power, or Charles Tilly on social movements, or Craig Calhoun on the financial crisis, or Theda Skocpol on states and revolutions.

The government auditing strategies mentioned above are part and parcel of the growing emphasis on the measurement of success and excellence in modern universities, which have become increasingly drawn into the corporate world. The result has been to divide the academy more sharply into high-profile research staff and low-profile teaching faculty, and similarly to rank universities globally according to the number of Nobel Prizes, citation points, foreign fee-paying students, PhD completions, research grants and so forth. Because the natural sciences prosper more effectively under these schemes, the social sciences are in most universities in decline. The crisis in the humanities is, perhaps, even worse (Burawoy, 2012). Unsurprisingly, only the elite universities have been able to attract huge resources; in 2008 Harvard had an endowment of $37 billion.

American sociology, this is to argue, is productive and diverse despite rather than because of professionalization. In part this is an effect of size but it also reflects differences in academic culture. The private colleges and universities in the American system are typically the elite institutions. They have the resources to reward curiosity-driven research, which cannot flourish so easily in state-run institutions. The obvious examples are Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Columbia, which have the wealth and influence to avoid excessive regulation. Even the small liberal arts colleges – such as Bard, Vassar and Wellesley – can host influential sociologists who are not confronted with the strait-jacket of the British-style research and quality audits.

Conclusion

In this article I have tried to avoid too much nostalgia. I have also struggled to avoid the trap by which one regards the whole of American sociology as narrow, parochial and empiricist at the same time as regarding sociology elsewhere as clever, sophisticated and theoretical, albeit small and impoverished. We must recognize excellence where it exists. On the other hand we must recognize that outside the US, especially in Britain and Australia, sociology has suffered from weak professionalization and the institutional marginalization that attends it. Sociology in Britain and Australia has largely been confined to newer universities and, while it appears to have been more successful in these two countries under centre-left governments, enjoying periods of growth after the Second World War in Britain and in the 1970s in Australia, it has never been as successful as it has been in America.

The British and Australian auditing exercises of recent decades have standardized both teaching and research such that careers now depend on shorter-span research published as refereed articles rather than on longer-term and larger-scope projects. Under these circumstances it is more difficult for new areas of creative research to emerge and for existing areas to be sustained, because the new system rewards, in the language of Max Weber, legal rationality rather than charisma. I suspect that my teachers from the 1960s (and perhaps Weber himself!) would not do well in these exercises.

I find it difficult to be optimistic about modern sociology and its future. Where might we find our C. Wright Mills, an academic role model whose Sociological Imagination (1959) provided a compelling reason for wanting to study sociology? His approach to the discipline not only gave him considerable commercial success, it also had a major impact on the growth of the New Left. While rejected or neglected by professional sociology in his time, his analysis of the class structure in The Power Elite and his critique of ‘Grand Theory’ and ‘abstracted empiricism’ were hugely influential. By contrast, the public intellectuals of the modern world are not notably connected with sociology as a profession. Here I would mention Alan Wolfe, Director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, whose The Future of Liberalism (2009) is still widely discussed, or Stephen Pinker, or Francis Fukuyama, or Niall Ferguson, or Simon Schama or the late Tony Judt. I would also add to this list the American historian Sean Wilentz, who has not only written one of the best books on the history of American democracy (Wilentz, 2005), but also a superb study of Bob Dylan in America (2010). All these writers have an ability to capture the public imagination and simultaneously address large historical and political questions about the character of the modern world.

In the end, I wonder whether the main thing restricting the wider relevance of sociology today is not a matter of scale or professionalism or investment or institutional location but a lack of nerve.