Public Sociology “from the file” . . .

The following exchange between Henry Brownstein and Robert K. Merton is reprinted from the December 1986 ASA Footnotes, p.11. (We thank Henry Brownstein for allowing us to publish Merton’s still-timely letter about an enduring issue: the often difficult choice between an academic versus a public/practicing sociology career path.)
—The Editor

The Practice and the Discipline: Why Must We Choose?

It was a gray morning; the day had begun with freezing rain. I was sitting at my desk in a state office, facing both the glumness of the day and the dreariness of my day’s work.

The Monday past was my first back to work after a two-week vacation. Upon my return home and to the office, piles of mail awaited me. Included were several journals from the sociological associations to which I pay dues. In recent years, I’ve found little use for most of these, but overall the association memberships do provide me with a link to the field I embraced as an undergraduate and graduate student.

One of the journals waiting for me was the first edition (Volume 1, Number 1) of Sociological Forum the new journal of the Eastern Sociological Society. It included two articles of particular interest in a section of the journal called “Notes and Insights.” One, by Charles Page, was about the history of “young turk” movements in sociology. It discussed four movements by young or deviant sociologists to influence the discipline/field. The other, by Charles Perrow, discussed—as a heuristic device—how the author had made a name for himself in sociology.

Reading the articles, I thought about my own situation, my position as a sociologist (anyway, someone with a PhD in sociology) working for a state government bureaucracy, doing applied work for bureaucratic policymakers. The articles were fascinating in their record of sociology as a living discipline. Perrow talked about getting published: where, when, how, why. Page talked about having an impact (or not) on the field. Together their articles brought attention to what sociologists today are reading, doing, and even, to some extent, thinking.

The works were interesting to read, but I felt apart from the ideas. I’ve grown accustomed, over the years since I left academia, to the alienation and anger I feel when lip service is given in association newsletters to sociologists working outside of the academy; the need for and goal of inclusiveness is expressed in the newsletters, but is not pursued in the journals or at the meetings. Even when there are relevant meeting sessions, applied or practicing sociologists are still viewed as outsiders—second rate sociologists. The ideas from these papers made me feel all the more distant.

For one thing, my thinking is no longer wholly academic—it’s become practical. I rarely read the theoretical literature anymore; the time I have for reading (don’t forget, I’m at my job twelve months a year, full-time) is mostly spent instead reading government and privately produced reports on crime and crime processing. My thinking, to my dismay, has become excessively atheoretical (a derogatory term in my graduate school days). I’ve come to think of research as a practical/policy­oriented matter. In my past life as a college teacher, I thought as I stood in front of my classes or as I conducted the small-scale studies of my own research agenda, of how society was and continues to be constructed. I thought of the relationships of social structure and culture, of how institutions of society were and are created, maintained, and changed. Now I think less often about those things. I think, instead, of the political implications of my work: not of what it contributes to the knowledge, but rather of what it contributes to policy. Reading Page and Perrow, I did not feel part of the tradition of theory build­ing that they reminded me is essential to the study of society.

Also, my activities and projects are no longer academic. My work is policy-oriented. I design projects the value of which are measured against the standard of practical application. This is clear in what I do for the state bureaucracy. I design a survey instrument (that probably will never be used since its political implications may make its utilization unacceptable) to assess attitudes of some group of actors in the system toward some component or process of the system. I write reports explaining why one evaluation study or another is not feasible. (Sadly, this has become too important a part of my work; people in a bureaucracy seem to like “good” reasons for not doing things.) Fortunately, however, the practical/policy focus has not been fully successful in infiltrating what I consider to be my (as opposed to their) work: the work of nights and weekends when I am away from the bureaucracy. There I like to write conference and journal papers on topics of intellectual rather than practical interest (my personal escape to the academic). Plans for research that might be marketable do invade this realm, but mostly I write about what I think.

I chose the world in which I live; I gave up a tenured teaching position, thinking I could take a job that would give me access to the decisionmakers of our society without fully giving up my sense of myself as an academic sociologist. I do not regret my decision. Despite its force as a bureaucracy, the state has actually done little to discourage me from being privately academic on my own time.

The problem for me is that my academic colleagues have yet to figure our where I fit in the world of contemporary sociology. Maybe Page and Perrow are speaking of someplace else, of a world that existed onlv in history. If they are not, if they describe sociology today, then they describe a world that closes itself to me and, from what my colleagues in practice tell me, to all who reside outside the academy. Ironically, we need the associations of fellow sociologists more now than we did when we lived among them.

Henry H. Brownstein, Albany, New York

References

Page, Charles H. 1956. “Young Turks in Sociology: Yesterday and Today.” Sociological Forum 1(1): 158-168.

Perrow, Charles. 1986. “Journaling Careers.” Sociological Forum 1(1): 169­177.

Brownstein’s letter inspired the following response from Robert K. Merton:

20 December 1986, Saturday

Dear Dr. Brownstein,
Just a few words of appreciation. Your piece on the place of the sociological practitioner in the discipline says much that needs to be said—alas, over and over again. It takes me back to the early 1940s when I arrived at Columbia and met Paul Lazarsfeld. It was from him, far more than from anyone else, that I came to understand something of the prime role of ‘applied social research’ in its own right and, further, in the development of the discipline. That, as you know, remained a major commitment of Paul Lazarsfeld’s throughout his life; it is reflected in the decision to devote his presidential year in the ASA to “The Uses of Sociology” and to continue with other articles and books devoted to explicating (and trying to understand) the complexities of sociological practice. Along the way, I tried my hand as well at explicating the complex role and role set of the research practitioner in our field, principally in the form of a basic ‘position paper’ for a conference of the Social Science Research Council back in 1948 (I believe). A version of that paper was published as RKM, “The role of applied social science in the formation of policy: A research memorandum.” Philosophy of Science, July 1949, 16, 161-181.

To my regret, I have no offprints to send to you. I am asking Rosa Haritos, my research assistant, to send a scattering of some other papers bearing on the practice of sociology which I put in print in those early days. But, of course, the prime, continuing source over the decades is PFL’s work.

With collegial regard and regards,
Robert K. Merton