ABSTRACT
Academic navel-contemplation is hard to justify. Like the early omphalopsychics, we are likely to find that too much self-reflection leads to an obsessive absorption with the minutiae of individual academic struggles whilst the over-arching disciplinary quest is neglected. At a time when the ideological climate is firmly rooted in technological rationality on the one hand and hedonism on the other, we cannot afford to become preoccupied with the pursuit of sociological niceties. At the same time however, it is the very nature of the prevailing climate for academic research that makes the need for an understanding of the relationship between the discipline and its context particularly pressing. The role enjoyed by sociology in the late 50s and 60s as a major informant of various branches of social policy has evolved in more recent decades into one where the very legitimacy of its voice as an independent subject is being challenged. The failure of the policies it helped to inform, along with its inherent radicalism, makes sociology a ready scapegoat for the conservative backlash that the current combination of economic and social problems have combined to produce. In no area of social policy is this more apparent than in education, in which not only research, but even the perceived relevance of the traditional sociological input into initial training, is under attack.
