ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the paradoxes of the Strong Program in Professional Sociology (SPPS). It shows that SPPS is not the universalistic project it claims to be but a specific response to the early development of American sociology. The chapter also shows how SPPS belongs to a historical period, second-wave sociology that has now been transcended. It focuses on to the essays of Vincent Jeffries; Norella M. Putney, Dawn Alley, and Vern L. Bengtson; Edna Bonacich; and Chris Chase-Dunn. Rather than resurrecting a past already superseded, these four essays point to the future, toward a third-wave sociology that integrates public sociology into sociology discipline. Third-wave sociology replaces the quest for a singular object of knowledge with the embrace of multiple such objects organized around the concerns of multiple publics. The corresponding plurality of research programs combines the value commitments of early sociology with the knowledge-base of the empirical research of second-wave sociology.
