Crisis Talks: Comments on McLaughlin's 'Canada's Impossible Science'

In two recent papers on the "succession question" in English-Canadian sociology (Curtis and Weir 2002; Weir and Curtis 2003), we argued for the advantages of reflexivity as a shared orientation for scholars engaged in investigations of the social (also, Curtis 2004). The context of our argument is the rapid aging of the 800-odd people working in full-time positions in departments of sociology in Canada, ongoing transformations in university funding and university governance, and marked shifts in the course-stream selections of undergraduates. We called attention to increased state intervention into the university sector, whose concomitant demands for "accountability," "objective performance indicators," and student "retention" lead to the promotion of vocational training. We see the transformation of university education into vocational training as something that would impoverish our intellectual and working lives and as something likely to narrow the possibilities for a diverse, multi-disciplinary, independent and critical sociology. The period of succession is full of potential for the configuration of many different sociologies. We argued for a reflexive sociology, and urged colleagues on hiring committees and on comprehensive examination boards to promote it.

Our sense of reflexivity derives from the work of Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu 2005). Here reflexivity means that one works consciously at once to operate concepts and to interrogate the grounds of one's conceptual repertoire. As sociologists, we use concepts as instruments with which to grapple with the social, while we seek to preserve an awareness of the social determination of our own concepts. As well, this version of reflexivity attends to the relation between the sociologist's personal location in the field of scholarly, professional, and political practice, and the stances and tactics s/he adopts in debate and in career choices. Every science, in Bourdieu's analysis, is organized around an interest in disinterest (Bourdieu 1975). Disinterest is an orientation to the more or less firmly established collective norms that regulate a science's truth claims. Interest refers to the striving of those in the scientific field for distinction for themselves, their research specialty, or their academic unit in relation to the field's valued practices. One of the stakes in play in any scientific field is the nature of its regulatory norms.

We suggest that sociology has (but does not monopolize) a common object of investigation: "the social." The social is a surprisingly elusive object, which sociologists often define tautologically.¹ It was invented in eighteenth century Scotland and France. In the works of Adam Ferguson and other members of the Scottish Enlightenment, it appears as a realm of human bonds that shadowed the invention of the economic domain as it split off from the ancient oikos (the patriarchal productive household) and faced the political. The social was invented as a plane of thinking and acting which contrasts with economic and political reasoning. It has continuing utility in normative terms as the claim to the existence of a terrain outside state and capitalist relations.

Analytic heterogeneity marks the study of the social, positioned precariously as it is between the natural sciences and the humanities; both have striven consistently to annex the social sciences. But we would agree with Habermas (1988 [1967]) in arguing that social science has three basic analytic divisions: the interpretive study of human action, the study of institutions that enable and constrain action, and historical narratives of practical action. It is concurrently subjective, structural and normative, with individual researchers tending for the most part to specialize in one of these forms of knowledge production. The relations among these differing forms of social scientific knowledge have been, and continue to be, ones of rivalry.

In addition to pointing to the possible consequences of the "security state" for sociology, our articles sought to defend the integrity of sociological knowledge in the midst of the "strife of the faculties," strife which has worked to render it (in the Canadian context at least) without a sense of purpose. The strife of the faculties includes a hermeneutic offensive that seeks to assimilate social science to the humanities and a left cynicism that...