Discipline, Field, Nexus: Re‐Visioning Sociology

Abstract

Cet article propose une reconceptualisation de la discipline sociologique ainsi que de sa place dans le monde actuel. Nous remettrons tout d'abord en question l'idée même que la sociologie puisse être considérée en tant que discipline académique dans le sens habituel du terme, tout comme le fait qu'il soit possible de distinguer, à la manière des sciences de la nature, autant de disciplines distinctes au sein du champ des sciences sociales. Au contraire, nous defendrons la thèse selon laquelle la sociologie et ses disciplines connexes furent plutôt constitueés en tant que champs sociaux à travers un processus historique particulier. Cette analyse nous permettra de réaffirmer la position centrale qu'occupe la sociologie dans le champ de la recherche sociale, de par les liens étroits qu'elle entretient avec les autres disciplines qui constituent ce champ, ainsi que par sa nature interdisciplinaire et critique. Cette reconceptualisation implique qu'une ontologie sociale claire fondée sur une méthodologie cohérente, en l'occurence le réalisme critique, puisse remédier aux tendences centrifuges propre à la discipline, en renforçant sa capacité à analyser les problèmes sociaux, et donc à contribuer à défendre et à élargir les pratiques démocratiques au fondement d'un avenir meilleur. This article proposes a re‐visioning of sociology and of its relationship to the late‐modern world it inhabits. I first problematize the claim that sociology is a discipline in any ordinary sense of the term, indeed, that social science can be reasonably cleaved into “disciplines” on the model of natural science. I then explore the thesis that sociology and kindred pursuits have been constituted as fields. Finally, I argue that among the fields of social scientific inquiry, the sociological terrain is of great import, as a nexus whose permeability, dense connectivity to other fields and critical transdisciplinarity are prime assets. By implication, the remedy for centrifugal tendencies that worry some sociologists is greater clarity on matters of social ontology and, on that basis, a coherent methodology (critical realism) that can strengthen sociology's capacity to understand our troubled world and to defend and enrich democratic practices that may portend a better future.

Critical Nexus or Pluralist Discipline? Institutional Ambivalence and the Future of Canadian Sociology

“…Drawing on Immanuel Wallerstein's () argument for “opening the social sciences,” William Carroll () argues that unlike the natural sciences, the social science disciplines are not demarcated from their neighboring disciplines because they reflect natural reality, but are instead politically and socially constructed. In brief, empirical reality consists of a variety of ontological levels, starting from the level of basic physical laws, and moving to higher, emergent levels that cannot be reduced or explained fully with reference to the level below.…”

“…Rather than falling into the epistemological pitfalls of postmodernism or radical social constructionism, Carroll argues that critical realism allows us to distinguish between true and false forms of knowledge. We can then provide explanations for why false knowledge persists as a reflection of ideology that drives the “replication of problematic ways of life” (Carroll :20). By focusing on the pursuit of positive potentialities in human development, and attempting to negate those which are unjust and harmful, critical realism combines a faith in epistemological surety with solid empirical methods to allow a foundation for critique.…”

Half a Century of Sociological Scholarship in the CRS(A)

“…Concurrently, beginning in the 1990s, we can discern a growing emphasis on movements and collective agency of various types, and a tendency, directly acknowledged by some special‐issue editors (e.g., Adam and Matika‐Tindale ; Lyon and Wood 2012), toward scholarship that is, at once, sociological and interdisciplinary. Whether the latter might be taken to indicate the decline of a coherent sociological community, or perhaps the elaboration of sociology's own promise as a crucial nexus bridging across disciplinary silos (as in Carroll ), is yet another topic for ongoing debate.…”

The Missing Memory of Canadian Sociology: Reflexive Government and “the Social Science”

“…THE MODEST LITERATURE ON THE development of sociology in Canada focuses on the entry of a named discipline into the academy. It pays little attention to the active process through which disciplines are made, despite the fact that sociology was and remains an unstable way of carving up a larger field of epistemological, ontological, and methodological practices and assumptions (Carroll ). That larger field was known to earlier practitioners as “the social science,” and it was visible in colonial Canada from the early nineteenth century.…”