(Re)Making Sociology: Breaking the Bonds of Our Discipline

Abstract

What is sociology? The question tends to focus our attention on issues of topic and/or method, and at that point we can see why the question emerges. We are increasingly diverse on both dimensions. Of course, any good sociologist, certainly Dorothy Smith ( 198 7, 1990), could tell us that sociology is what we make of it. So, the question really is, how are we making sociology? Asking it that way focuses our attention more on the organization of the discipline, on the practices by which we produce and reproduce ourselves. Then we can see that what ties us together is the bonds of our discipline. The nod to Foucault (1980) is intentional. I want to argue that what could unite us is c)ur potential to support informed social action. Yet the way we construct our discipline makes it increasingly difficult to facilit:ate an informed public discourse. Ironically, what ties us together tends to keep us from uniting. For one thing, as diverse as we are becoming, the sociology we have inherited and work within is the product of a particular subgroup's perspective on society. Feminist and other critical scholars have been demonstrating for some time that the substance of sociology is how society looks from the standpoint of social elites, typically racially and economically privileged men (see, for example, Collins 1991; hooks 1994; Smith 1990; Sprague 1997). For instance, our conceptual preference is for decontextualized abstractions. Our unit of analysis is more often an abstract individual than a person who lives within and actively negotiates a complex web of social relations, including class, gender, and race. The standpoint of the privileged also comes through in our conventional segmentation of social life, where we often downplay, or even hide, the experience of the least powerful (Smith 1990). For instance, we separate work and family, making it harder to see that maintaining a family involves work and that households can be sites of both paid and unpaid labor and production for the market (Cancian 198 5; Collins 199 1; Oak ley 1974; Mies 1986). Everywhere, and usually by inattention, we discount the work of caring, of physical and emotional nurturance, especially if it is done by subordinate groups in general and women in particular (Cancian and Oliker forthcoming; G lenn 199 2) . Feminist and other scholars have also criticized the way the standpoint of economically and racially privileged men underlies the emphasis on separation, abstraction, and control in the methodological tradition we have inherited (Collins 1991; Foucault 1980; Keller 1985; Habermas 1971; Smith 1990). In that tradition, researchers' values and personal history are to be hidden from view, intellectually isolated from the development of research agendas and from their interpretation of data. Our methods direct us to convert the lives of those we study into data, using our frameworks to the excltlsion of theirs and without attending to the interpersonal and social structural relationships of power and privilege through which researchers and researched are connected.