Sociology in (a time of ) crisis

Sociology loves a crisis, this is evident in the two renowned books and two articles, all of them dealing with the crisis in sociology, that lay the ground for the discussion in this chapter. In chronological order, the first one by Robert Angell, (1951) Sociology and the World Crisis, explores the notion of a global society and argues for an engaged and inclusive sociology. This was Angell’s presidential address at the American Sociological Association conference delivered in the shadow of the Cold War. The next one is Alvin Gouldner’s (1970) book, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, that makes the argument for a critical sociological turn away from objectivity and towards acceptance of the subjectivity of sociology and knowledge more generally. Then, Raymond Boudon’s (1980) The Crisis in Sociology also refers to the disciplinary crises inherent to sociology that are derived from contextual crises but also fundamental epistemological challenges. Finally, there is also a more recent resurrection of the idea of crisis within sociology as evident in Mike Savage and Roger Burrow’s (2007) article, ‘The Coming Crisis of Empirical Sociology’, which opened up a new round of debates and critiques regarding the practice of the sociological craft and the out-dated models and methodologies used to describe a highly connected, globalised social world. The deep interrelationship between cataclysmic events, such as the current economic crisis, and scholarly reactions is also explored in Costas Douzinas’ (2013) Philosophy and Resistance in the Crisis; Alain Touraine’s (2014) After the Crisis; and Michael Burawoy’s (2005) call for a Critical Turn to Public Sociology. These works are the starting points of exploring the relationship between socio-political tensions and upheavals and their effects on the discipline and vice versa. The current intersections of global financial crisis, the resurgence of civic participation in protest against injustice, and the decline of faith in the processes of democracy provide a challenging but invigorating terrain for sociological research. The urgent political and theoretical project now is how to engage with opening spaces for critical reflection in order to advance views of how civil society changes, and make claims for new mechanisms and processes towards such change. This task highlights the tension between ways of knowing and ways of doing in the discipline. From a sociological perspective, there is a distinction between the technical, bureaucratic understanding of the crisis that has

presupposed a technocratic solution, and the softer, social experience of crisis on a local, everyday level. As such this chapter proposes a set of questions: how does the social absorb, adopt and replicate the logic of crisis? What is the impact of the crisis on the sociological imagination? What is the role of crisis in constituting knowledge? In order to provide answers, the chapter starts with a historical analysis of the discipline and the ways sociology reacted to previous crises. It then moves to an inquiry of the current crisis and the epistemological and ontological challenges it poses to the discipline. As a consequence, the chapter engages with the tenets of the sociological imagination (Mills, 1959) and puts forward an agenda of why we need an engaged, public, critical and innovative sociology. The chapter concludes with an investigation of the role of sociologists (and intellectuals) in times of crisis, in an attempt to reposition the value and contribution of the discipline in the era of crisis and beyond. This critical investigation of the sociological discourse is precisely what makes this study timely and urgent, as academics and public intellectuals have been widely criticised for not being able to predict or improve the effects of the current crisis. In November 2009, the Queen of England visited the London School of Economics to celebrate the opening of its new academic building. During her visit, the Queen asked the very acclaimed and prestigious academics why they could not predict the global economic crisis. Yet, no one had an immediate reply to the Queen’s question, and because it is not very easy to ignore the Queen, or to tone down the publicity of this event, after six long months of debates, round-table discussions and further pontificating, the gurus submitted their answer in the form of a three-page missive. The missive stated that they had not seen the crisis coming because ‘financial wizards managed to convince themselves and the world’s politicians that they had found clever ways to spread risk throughout financial markets – whereas it is difficult to recall a greater example of wishful thinking combined with hubris’ (cited in Steward, 2009: online) and the experts continue:

Everyone seemed to be doing their own job properly on its own merit. And according to standard measures of success, they were often doing it well. The failure was to see how collectively this added up to a series of interconnected imbalances over which no single authority had jurisdiction. [. . .] In summary, Your Majesty, the failure to foresee the timing, extent and severity of the crisis and to head it off, while it had many causes, was principally a failure of the collective imagination of many bright people, both in this country and internationally, to understand the risks to the system as a whole.