Critical Nexus or Discipline?

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

ANTONY J. PUDDEPHATT

Lakehead University

NEIL MCLAUGHLIN

McMaster University

While some scholars believe in a transdisciplinary future for the socialsciences and humanities, we argue that sociology would do well tomaintain its disciplinary borders, while celebrating the plurality of itsintellectual, social, and political content. Although a pluralist positioncan threaten disciplinary coherence and increase fragmentation, weargue the counterbalance ought to be convergence around sharedinstitutional norms of knowledge production. Establishing these normsis not easy, since there is a great deal of institutional ambivalence at playin the field of sociology. As such, sociology is pushed and pulled betweentwo poles of at least four major continuums of knowledge production,which include the following: (1) interdisciplinary versus discipline-basedresearch; (2) political versus analytical scholarship; (3) professionalversus public/policy sociology; and (4) local/national versus globalaudiences. Since both sides of these ideal-typical continuums containtheir own pathologies, we propose adopting a balanced position to correctfor the shortcomings of each. Rather than imposing one philosophical ortheoretical paradigm for the field, we suggest that embracing the "chaos"

We would like to thank Scott Davies, Jeff Denis, Dalibor Misina, John Myles, Jane Nicholas, DavidNock, Kyle Siler, Lisa-Jo van den Scott, Zubairu Wai, and Pamela Wakewich for reading earlier draftsof this article and providing useful feedback, as well as Isabelle Lemee for translating the abstractinto French. The three anonymous reviewers of the Canadian Review of Sociology gave us incrediblydetailed and constructive feedback as well, which improved this article markedly. Most importantly,we thank Rima Wilkes for her patience and sound editorial guidance through this process. Of course,the views presented here are ours alone, and do not necessarily represent the opinions of any of theaforementioned scholars, many of whom may well disagree with us.

Antony J. Puddephatt, Department of Sociology, Lakehead University, 955 Oliver Road, Thunder Bay,Ontario P7B 5E1, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]

C© 2015 Canadian Sociological Association/La Societe canadienne de sociologie

Institutional Ambivalence and Canadian Sociology 311

of our diverse forms of knowledge and centralizing and integratingfindings will serve to strengthen our collective efforts in the long term.

Alors que certains chercheurs croient en un avenir transdisciplinairepour les sciences sociales et humaines, nous soutenons qu’il seraitpreferable pour la sociologie de maintenir ses frontieres disciplinaires,tout en celebrant la pluralite de son contenu intellectuel, social, etpolitique. Bien qu’une telle position pluraliste puisse menacer lacoherence disciplinaire et accroıtre la fragmentation, nous defendonsl’idee que la contre-balance doit converger vers des normesinstitutionnelles communes de production de connaissances. La mise enplace de ces normes n’est pas chose aisee. Une large quantited’ambivalence institutionnelle est en jeu dans le domaine de lasociologie. Ainsi nous tendons vers quatre grands continuums deproduction de connaissances : (1) la recherche interdisciplinaire enopposition a la recherche par discipline ; (2) une erudition politique enopposition a celle analytique ; (3) une sociologie professionnelle contreune sociologie publique / politique ; et (4) un public local / national contreun public mondial. Dans la mesure ou deux cotes de ces continuumsideaux-typiques contiennent leurs pathologies propres, nous proposonsd’adopter une position equilibree pour corriger les lacunes de chacun.Ceci devrait etre mieux reflete dans nos systemes de recompense. Plutotque d’imposer un paradigme philosophique ou theorique pour undomaine en question, nous suggerons de prendre en consideration le«chaos» de nos diverses formes de connaissances, tout en centralisant eten integrant plus efficacement nos conclusions. Ceci permettra derenforcer nos efforts collectifs sur le long terme.

THERE HAVE BEEN MANY arguments over the years for enhancedtransdisciplinary scholarship that moves beyond the limits of traditionaldisciplinary borders (Klein 1996; Wallerstein 1996). At the same time,there have been arguments for more politically engaged research practices,in which sociologists might better connect with the publics they serve andstrive to bring about progressive social change (e.g., Burawoy 2005). Theseideas were creatively brought together by William Carroll (2013), who ar-gued that sociology should embrace its potential as a transdisciplinary“nexus” of ideas in the wider social sciences and humanities, guided bythe philosophical foundation of critical realism, to solve pressing socialproblems of the twenty-first century. We consider this argument and pro-vide a two-pronged critique; first, of the unquestioned virtue of transdisci-plinary knowledge, and second, of the narrow emphasis on critical realism.This critique enables us to present an alternative vision for sociology thatis intellectually diverse, yet often caught in the tensions of competingand contradictory roles and demands that result in a state of “institu-tional ambivalence” (Merton and Barber 1976).1 By taking these competing

1. The first author would like to dedicate this essay to the memory of Dr. Sharon Dale Stone, who passedaway tragically in the summer of 2014. An engaged scholar who often wrote from a radically critical

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pressures seriously, we argue that a more realistic institutional strategyof knowledge production in sociology can be achieved.

Inspired by Michael Burawoy (2005), we sketch out four differentand competing institutional aspects of knowledge production in sociology,and highlight each of their functions and pathologies when taken to theextreme. These include the tension between (1) interdisciplinary versusdiscipline-based research, (2) political versus analytical scholarship, (3)professional versus public/policy sociology, and (4) local/national versusglobal audiences. Envisioning the future of sociology requires understand-ing these conflicting pressures and the trade-offs that accompany the re-sultant institutional strategies. Too much of a strategic push to any oneside of these continuums at the expense of the other will lead to problems.We argue that recognizing the ambivalence of our discipline and keepingthese conflicting strains in tension is the best way forward at both theindividual and collective levels of our field.

More importantly, reflecting on the institutional ambivalence of soci-ology enables us to develop an alternative model for integrating the dis-cipline that is not rooted in any particular philosophy of science, politicalideology, theoretical paradigm, or methodological approach. The sociologywe have in mind is built around a pluralist commitment to intellectual di-versity, respecting the “chaos” that ultimately drives our research forwardand reshapes the intellectual parameters of our field over time (Abbott2001). To maximize the value of this intellectual diversity in content wemust push for increased knowledge integration through convergent insti-tutional norms in form. To enable this, a balanced and transparent rewardstructure is necessary to assure professional competence, fair standardsof practice, enhanced knowledge integration, and credible scholarly andpublic communication. We outline what this might mean for sociology ina more global and universal context, as well as for how we do sociology“here at home” in Canada. We conclude with a set of guidelines for howto best reward the diverse forms of research we do given the complexitiesand trade-offs identified throughout.

SOCIOLOGY AS A CRITICAL NEXUS

Drawing on Immanuel Wallerstein’s (1996) argument for “opening thesocial sciences,” William Carroll (2013) argues that unlike the natural sci-ences, the social science disciplines are not demarcated from their neigh-boring disciplines because they reflect natural reality, but are insteadpolitically and socially constructed. In brief, empirical reality consists ofa variety of ontological levels, starting from the level of basic physical

perspective, Sharon always believed in the importance of intellectual and political plurality in ourdiscipline. This is not to say that she would necessarily agree with the arguments put forth in thisessay! She will be sorely missed.


laws, and moving to higher, emergent levels that cannot be reduced orexplained fully with reference to the level below. Thus, physics representsthe study of a more basic level of reality than chemistry, which is a morebasic level than biology, which is a more basic level than physiology, andso on. These disciplinary divisions hence make sense, as each accords to adifferent ontological level of reality. Once we reach the ontological level ofhuman society, we now have an emergent level at play that is above thephysiological and biological. This is what Marx might call our “species be-ing,” characterized by abstract intelligence, language, complex social, eco-nomic, and political organization, and perhaps the capacity to revolutionizeour means of production. It is at this ontological level where the variousdisciplines of the social sciences and humanities focus their attention.

As such, the social science disciplines are not really demarcated byontological differences, since all of them focus on the same emergentlevel of reality: the linguistically and culturally enabled human species.Carroll (2013) points out that these disciplines came into being in the nine-teenth century along with industrial and political revolutions, colonialism,and capitalist expansion, and were organized in ways that were complicitwith the ideology of neoliberalism. Today, economics, politics, and cultureare increasingly intertwined in our condition of late modernity, and artifi-cially dividing these realms only leads to partial, or worse, distorted, viewsof the human condition. Throughout history, Carroll (2013) argues, variousforms of “boundary work” (Gieryn 1999) were conducted to construct andpolice the intellectual borders of the sociological field. Unlike in the naturalsciences, these borders are not ontological givens, but objects of academicand political contestation. This argument could be challenged on the basisof contemporary social studies of science, of course. Thomas Gieryn (1999)would be the first to correct the notion that the disciplinary organizationof the natural sciences accords only to natural ontological divisions, sincehe analyzed the boundaries of science as social and political, and thus notwholly natural, demarcations. Still, let us assume that the modern disci-plines are less reflections of human society divided naturally, as W.V.O.Quine (1969) might put it, “at its joints,” and more like Bourdieu’s (2004)social and political fields. The question then remains, what good are thedefense of these arbitrary disciplinary boundaries for the science of thehuman condition? If anything, these artificial divisions serve only to ob-scure knowledge of the human condition by generating theoretical andempirical half-truths that emerge from the vantage point of disciplinaryblinders. Thus, instead of reaching for this intellectually simplistic anddefensive “silo” mentality, sociology should give up on its traditional dis-ciplinary identity, and embrace its relative permeability, openness, andpotential within transdisciplinary work. If so, we can become a dynamicnexus within the social sciences and humanities, using our breadth andcentrality between disciplinary fields to be the overriding conceptual glue

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of the whole, positioning us as intellectual leaders as we fight for economic,social, and environmental justice.

In order to combat the potential fragmentation of such an open, trans-disciplinary approach, Carroll (2013) looks to unite our sociological tradi-tion around the philosophical stance of critical realism. Rather than fallinginto the epistemological pitfalls of postmodernism or radical social con-structionism, Carroll argues that critical realism allows us to distinguishbetween true and false forms of knowledge. We can then provide expla-nations for why false knowledge persists as a reflection of ideology thatdrives the “replication of problematic ways of life” (Carroll 2013:20). By fo-cusing on the pursuit of positive potentialities in human development, andattempting to negate those which are unjust and harmful, critical realismcombines a faith in epistemological surety with solid empirical methodsto allow a foundation for critique. We are to be a crucial leader in the so-cial sciences and humanities by developing a critical collective intellectualconsciousness as we help shape the future of human development.

While this vision for the future of sociology is inspiring, we argue that itis also problematic. First, the call for more-porous boundaries and transdis-ciplinary engagements ignores the intellectual and institutional trade-offsat stake in the broader context of the university system. This transdisci-plinary world of scholarship, if it was ever actually realized, would not havesociologists in a privileged position in the social sciences, and in contrast,would only make us more vulnerable. Second, we argue that the call forcritical realism, while drawing on and representing a useful sociologicalperspective in its own right, cannot work as a unifying philosophy for thewhole of the discipline. This strategy is too narrow on both political andepistemological grounds, and is counter to the broader plea for opennessthat a long-term transdisciplinary vision otherwise suggests.

Interdisciplinary Rhetoric, Institutional Realities, and the Placeof Sociology

It is certainly true that sociology is a field well situated to transfer knowl-edge from neighboring disciplines and contribute to valuable interdisci-plinary work. Yet care should be taken not to get carried away with therhetoric of interdisciplinarity that is the conventional wisdom among ad-ministrators and academic entrepreneurs in the contemporary researchuniversity. There are both positives and negatives to interdisciplinary or-ganizational forms, and much of this is context dependent, not universal. Ameaningful engagement with the issues of interdisciplinarity requires adeeper institutional analysis of the place of sociology in higher education.

Administrations, the state, and interdisciplinary pressures. Propo-nents of transdisciplinarity models for the social sciences often as-sume that support for these trends comes mainly from the intellectual,


philosophical, and pedagogical concerns of progressive-thinking scholars.Yet these trends are favored even more by budget-driven administratorswho are concerned with making higher education more economically sus-tainable, often without regard for the value of scholarship or intellectualautonomy. As Burawoy (2013) has argued, interdisciplinarity is “Janusfaced – a vehicle for abetting rationalization and commodification as wellas a defense against such destructive forces” (p. 19). The rhetoric of inter-disciplinarity can be strategically used to leverage for institutional changeand take advantage of trends and niche advertising to relatively naıve andunderserviced students, while jeopardizing the very architecture of themodern university. Interdisciplinarity is an excellent rhetorical instru-ment to combine departments that seem less relevant and steer them intocommonly funded projects. Indeed, creating interdisciplinary umbrella de-partments with only a few sociologists is a great way to reduce the overallnumber of faculty required to resource degrees.

These pushes for interdisciplinarity are nothing new. Andrew Abbott(2002) notes that interdisciplinary initiatives have been around since the1930s in North America, and the rhetoric surrounding them have remained“more or less constant over the last forty years” (p. 215). This is becausedisciplines have always overlapped and shared common topics, philoso-phies, theories, and methodologies. The idea that Marx was read by his-torians, sociologists, and political scientists has stared every generationin the face equally. Yet Abbott (2002) points out that the traditional dis-ciplinary structure has a remarkable staying power. First, it provides animportant academic job market for Ph.D. graduates. Second, disciplinesprovide a “conception of intellectual existence” and provide the legitima-tion of partial knowledge, which prevents intellectual overload. Third, dis-ciplines are constantly renewing themselves through internal and externaldebates with, as well as intellectual thefts from, neighboring disciplines.As such, the actual intellectual work of scholars already goes far beyonddisciplinary borders in the existing system, providing informal routes forinterdisciplinary needs. Fourth, disciplines help forge scholarly identities,and provide students an early intellectual self-concept. Fifth, disciplinesare very good at correcting the mistakes of their neighbors through con-tinual and often polarized critique. Sixth, breaking up the disciplines intospecialty “problem areas” would create too many islands of research activ-ity, thus Balkanizing the university. Finally, with no serious alternativeto the current economic, intellectual, and institutional system in place,the chances of a broad sweeping shift to transdisciplinarity looks highlyunlikely. Given the history of the issue, it should have happened alreadyif it was going to happen at all.

If one looks at the terrain of disciplinary and interdisciplinary pro-grams across the United States and Canada, the reality is quite mixed. AsAbbott (2002) would predict, the vast majority of undergraduate degreesare still granted through traditional disciplinary programs, and the

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creation of various women’s studies, indigenous studies, and environmen-tal studies programs operate on the margins of a system primarily orga-nized around traditional disciplines (Jacobs 2013). Applied programs suchas criminology, and more recently, legal studies and health studies, aremaking inroads. Still, the basic architecture of undergraduate educationremains remarkably stable. As Dimaggio and Powell (1983) might predict,turning away from this entirely would be detrimental, since universities,as organizations, must act isomorphically, and provide the same basiceducation and services as their competitors to survive (Frank and Gabler2006). Interdisciplinary research centers will continue to be supported,especially at elite universities, and faculty and student interest will likelysustain smaller interdisciplinary programs. Yet the dominance of theinternational disciplinary system is most likely here to stay (Sa 2008).

The traditional disciplines are indeed historically contingent con-structs that often bleed into one another. Still, the breakdown of politicalscience covering the state, economics covering the market, history coveringthe past, psychology covering the individual mind, and sociology coveringthe social is well established, intellectually coherent, and has generatedrobust traditions of research. This is institutionalized in the training ofscholars, the establishment of programs, and academic conferences andjournals, resulting in manageable boundaries for scholars and students.All social science disciplines are facing enormous institutional pressures toincrease enrollments, to connect to local community needs, to raise grantmoney, and show practical relevance by connecting to applied fields. Yetwe must not lose sight of the trade-offs at stake in potentially losing disci-plinary and intellectual autonomy in doing so, a resource that economists,historians, and psychologists guard with energy and resolve. The nexusidea seems to resonate with low status and newer fields but is largelymarginal among the leaders of stronger, established disciplines, who havelittle interest in dismantling the boundaries that serve to protect theirdisciplinary advantages.

The intellectual and practical challenges of interdisciplinarity. Thereare real intellectual reasons to value thinking that moves beyond tradi-tional disciplines: building bridges and overcoming divides is often key toprogress and innovation. Changing times and intellectual developmentssometimes demand organizing knowledge in more relevant and often in-terdisciplinary ways in both the natural and social sciences (Christakis2013; Klein 1996; Weingart and Stehr 2000). There is very good evidence,however, that we are already the most interdisciplinary of all the other tra-ditional disciplines in the social sciences, so it becomes a strategic questionof how much to spread out versus solidify our intellectual base. Moody andLight (2006) conducted a network analysis of citations, reporting that so-ciology is very broad in scope as compared to other traditional disciplines.We do not have a pattern of dense, internal citation patterns, but draw on


a much wider set of research literatures, sitting as a central hub withinand between our social science neighbors. Jacobs and Frickel (2009) reporton data from the National Science Foundation that shows sociology had48.5 percent of references cited in journal articles coming from outside ofthe discipline. This number might be compared to the same statistic fromeconomics, where only 18.7 percent of citations were from outside. Indeed,sociology has always been, and will likely remain, deeply interdisciplinaryin scope.

Those who want us to radically accelerate this trend, however, tend toignore the institutional advantages disciplinary consolidation has broughtto us, and fail to examine the downsides of excessively open boundaries.Just how interdisciplinary we ought to be in the future should not beforced any more than it already is by administrators and governmentofficials, who are looking to their own budgetary interests and strategicplans. While there has been much rhetoric about the unquestioned valueof interdisciplinary work, empirical evidence points to the need to treadcarefully. It is not clear that interdisciplinarity is universally superiorto traditional disciplinary research, and many are critical of the room foramateurism and lack of standards that can result from the lack of qualifiedexpertise brought to the table by disciplinary experts (Davis 2007; Jacobs2013; Jacobs and Frickel 2009; Mansilla and Gardiner 2003).2

There is also the danger of losing intellectual autonomy. Interdis-ciplinary research projects are often not determined internally by thetheoretical interests of sociologists, but rather by outside communitypartners, government agencies, and private industries. These entities pro-vide valued funding but tend to ignore deeper theoretical issues and re-search questions posed by the discipline. As a result, such work is rarelypublished in mainstream sociological journals, and too often ends up asreports for the particular organizations and institutions served. This of-ten results in some direct policy impact, but little scholarly or scientificimpact. If the work is not funneled centrally into the many and widely di-verse sociology journals found on popular social science indexes, it meansit is spread out over reaches of intellectual space that are less organized.In Richard Whitley’s (1984) terminology, we lose our collective sense of“task certainty” and “mutual dependence” in the discipline in the longrun, which results in eroding and unmeasurable standards, and declinesin quality and productivity. Thomas Kuhn’s (1962) history of science hasshown that this lack of intellectual convergence weakens the potential forrapid, innovative, and productive science. Moody (2004) has noted that so-ciology has a great deal of intellectual breadth through our connections to

2. For example, Hackett and Rhoten (2008) found that of students enrolled in a National ScienceFoundation-funded interdisciplinary program, those with one to two years of training outperformedthose with three or more years’ training. This led them to question the expertise accumulated in theseprograms, many of which do not benefit from a foundation of many years of evolved and accumulatedtheory and methods.

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neighboring disciplines and wide range of topics, but we pay for this withfar less intellectual coherence and cumulative theory.

The argument often used for transdisciplinary approaches is that tra-ditional forms of academic production are outmoded. This is seen to be awider structural shift according to the logic of what Nowotny, Scott, andGibbons (2003) term “Mode 2 knowledge production,” which challengesThomas Kuhn’s (1962) imaginary of discipline-specific paradigms leadingresearch inquiry. For Nowotny et al. (2003), Mode 2 knowledge finds in-tellectual questions not from internally driven theoretical paradigms, butfrom complex real-world problems that demand multifaceted solutions. Forexample, granting agencies such as SSHRC are increasingly pushing forgreater interdisciplinary cooperation and larger teams of researchers. Wedo not doubt the value of some of these initiatives, but their proponentsgenerally never look at the downside of these trends. Some of the research,for example, that passes itself off as “interdisciplinary” is actually more like“nondisciplinary” work, involving little more than common sense logic anddescriptive data. As Burawoy (2013:13) argues, pushing too fast towardevermore interdisciplinarity would “abandon disciplines for a superficialfusing of incompatible frameworks, repressing their elaborate structuresthat have been created in a painstaking fashion by the collaborative workof generations of scholars.” For interdisciplinary collaborations to result intheoretically informed empirical projects that accord to established stan-dards of practice, we require the base of strong disciplinary foundations tobegin with.3

Further, if such interdisciplinary work truly draws on core sociologi-cal theories to help inform the analysis, there is no reason why such workwould not be interesting to sociological audiences as well. The danger oftoo much interdisciplinarity, and particularly the lure of applied grantmoney, is the undermining of any commitment to sociology as a disciplineand stock of collectively shared knowledge that is rooted in generations ofideas, theories, methods, findings, and insights. Scholars may develop intoserious experts in a particular topic, and even publish in high-ranking jour-nals in law, criminology, social work, or health. But this poses challengeswhen such people are expected to teach students how to foster expertisebased on sociological theory and methods. How can these faculty membershope to teach graduate students how to publish in sociology journals, if

3. Small (1999) compared the style of African-American studies practiced at Harvard University withTemple University. Harvard built its program by hiring cross-appointments to existing traditional dis-ciplines, while Temple created its own independent department of African-American studies by hiringonly scholars who published in African-centered academic publications, and who adopted an “African-centric” perspective that is at odds with Western/European scientific epistemologies. The result wasthat Harvard produced much more empirically grounded research that made use of large data setsand archives, where the analysis was grounded in the standards of each of the traditional disciplines.Temple, lacking roots in traditional disciplines and rejecting their epistemological and methodologicalstandards as Euro-centric, was much more engaged in polemical critiques and arguments designed tobring about liberation, which were less entrenched in programs of empirical research.


they are not used to this style of publishing? Sociological publishing hasits own specific standards, styles of presentation, theoretical preferences,and research methods. If these skills are not honed, at least in part, inthe sociologists’ portfolio of research, there is little evidence these can betaught in a robust and serious way to students who, in fairness, signed upfor sociology, not law, criminology, education, or health studies.

Taken to its logical extreme, the consequences of an open-nexus strat-egy would not place us in a position of leadership among the other socialsciences but would leave us in an even more vulnerable position. If dis-ciplinary divides did begin to collapse, then sociology, as one of the lowerstatus disciplines in the social sciences, would get merged with anthropol-ogy or social work, or turned into a vocationally oriented criminology orlegal studies department, or become a generic cultural studies field. Betterorganized and more scientifically armed sectors of the social sciences thatreflect powerful societal influences, such as those from economics, politicalscience, and psychology, would fare much better (Burawoy 2013). Not onlysociology but also history, philosophy, and the humanities would also bein serious crisis if a transdisciplinary future ever came to be fully real-ized. Such movements hence devalue the accumulated cultural capital ofour rich and unique intellectual traditions of thinking about social life.Dissolving the social sciences and humanities into a vast sea of transdis-ciplinary ideas would be detrimental to the intellectual progress of whatsociologists collectively strive for. Such a move would be part of a neoliberaleconomic restructuring of the modern university, jeopardizing our intel-lectual autonomy and standards of research, and the quality of educationwe provide our students.

Critical Realism: Politics, Freedom, and Science

In a context where conservative intellectuals in the United States andCanada are aggressively challenging the legitimacy of radical scholarspromoting their political agendas in higher education, we find the rallyingcry for a sociology defined exclusively around critical realism problematic.It is in this political reality that Stephen Harper infamously suggestedthat now is not the time to “commit sociology.” Sociology is not being de-fined here as a discipline nor a nexus, but as a political ideology that looksto blame society for the root causes for social problems such as violence,terrorism, drugs, and crime, downplaying individual choice and responsi-bility. In contrast, Harper argues we should capture or kill terrorists, putcriminals in prison, and put poor people to work because attempts to dealwith social problems in structural ways are illegitimate, left-wing ideol-ogy. Indeed, he follows the ideological vision of Margaret Thatcher whofamously said that there is no such thing as “society.” One can critique ordismiss the former prime minister’s comments, but there are larger ideo-logical issues at stake here that we ignore at our peril. Sociology has what

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Gary Alan Fine (2001) would call a “difficult reputation” as an excessivelyleft-wing and dogmatic enterprise. Embracing critical realism as the mainvision for sociology would only further this reputational dilemma, sincecitizens are not likely to support the funding of a leftist transformativeproject.

Instead, the legitimacy of sociology depends on our success in estab-lishing our credibility as a scholarly enterprise. Research on the politicsof professors makes it clear that sociology is on the left-liberal side of thepolitical spectrum in Canada (Nakhaie and Brym 1999) and the UnitedStates (Gross and Fosse 2012). There are good reasons to be proud ofthe critical perspectives that have emerged in sociology, and we shouldbe clear that this is no time to back down or capitulate to the conservativepolitical climate. We encourage Canadian sociologists to continue to takeon the issues of growing economic inequality; our declining welfare state;environmental sustainability; indigenous rights; social justice in regard torace, gender, sexuality, and disability; debates about language and culturethat often divide Quebec and the rest of Canada; our increasing propensityfor war in the Middle East; and challenges to our civil liberties in whathas sometimes been called a surveillance society. But we must also beable to recognize the difference between our politics and our scholarship.Further, as a scholarly discipline, we should entertain a broad range ofpolitical perspectives, leaving space for those who may wish to defend thestatus quo, suggest only minor progressive reforms, or argue for radicalsocial change, but from all sides of the political spectrum. Researchers insociology might well derive their motivation from social, cultural, and in-tellectual interests and questions that have no obvious political agenda.We should be most concerned with inspiring good empirical research andanalysis into the collective human condition, without resorting to politicallitmus tests. Indeed, conservative critics would like nothing more than forCanadian sociologists to announce they are not really part of a traditionalscholarly discipline, but are a nexus for radical political activism. A purelyleft-wing, progressive political mission for our discipline thus unwittinglyplays right into the hands of conservative critics. Many sociologists do notshare a left-wing political agenda anyway, and as such, it should not beimposed on our colleagues any more than it should be on our students.

Further, a critical realist position, on its own, would end up excludinga number of important sociological traditions. These include a range ofqualitative theoretical approaches such as symbolic interactionism, Goff-man’s dramaturgy, and Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology. There are a rangeof other relatively “noncritical” (but still analytic) sociological approachesthat exist in Canadian sociology, including network theory, actor-networktheory, organizational theory, the sociology of creativity and ideas, scienceand technology studies, and the sociology of culture. Does it make senseto exclude these sociological traditions from our vision for sociology be-cause they do not always criticize the status quo? By further reinforcing


the norm that progressive left politics is the only truly enlightened po-sition in sociology, we risk setting up reward structures that are unfairat best, but at worst, generate dogmatism, and threaten political andintellectual diversity and academic freedom. Any kind of politically basedclosure in this regard is indefensible in our view, and belies the opennessany scholarly discipline should aspire to.

Even critically minded scholars, moreover, would not necessarily becomfortable with the ontological and epistemological positions of criticalrealism. What about the broad range of critical scholars who are more inline with the ontological and epistemological approaches of postmodernismor strict social constructionism? Such theorists are deeply engaged in cri-tique, but would never agree that they have the privilege of deconstructingone set of facts while holding another set as uncritically true (Woolgar andPawluch 1985). The attempt to forge a more politically efficacious form ofsocial critique based on realism and a faith in science has our sympathies,but not all sociologists will agree nor should they have to.

Institutional Ambivalence and the Canadian Sociological Imagination

If we are to imagine a better institutional mandate for our discipline,we must first recognize the competing and often contradictory demandsplaced on what we as sociologists do. In this sense, we argue that sociologyis best understood as operating in a state of “institutional ambivalence,”where conflicting roles and responsibilities are apparent (Merton andBarber 1976). We draw out the major structural ambivalences faced bysociology through four continuums of knowledge production (see Table 1).Much like Michael Burawoy’s (2005) now famous two-by-two grid of dis-ciplinary modes in his plea for public sociology, each ideal type identifiedin our chart has its advantages and also carries damaging pathologies.As such, we argue that a model favoring any of these extreme directivesis doomed to fail, and instead, we argue for a more balanced strategy forknowledge production. This more complex picture of our field will enable abetter strategy for recognizing and rewarding the range of work that soci-ologists do within the intellectual “chaos” of our discipline (Abbott 2001).

In composing our chart, we could have listed other sets of tensions.For example, there are methodological tensions between qualitative andquantitative research. There are ontological and epistemological tensionsamong postmodernism, social constructionism, and positivism. There aretheoretical tensions that highlight different aspects of social life as themost important to prioritize. Some of these tensions interact to some de-gree with what we present below. We avoided exploring the tension ofintellectual differences in the discipline for the following reasons: (1) theseare relatively well-worn debates, and will likely remain this way, as theyare for all intents and purposes irresolvable; (2) we emphasize that an in-dividual’s allegiance to any epistemological, theoretical, or methodological

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Table 1

The Institutional Ambivalence of Knowledge Production inCanadian Sociology

Continuums ofknowledgeproduction Functions Pathologies

Mode Disciplinary Clear standards ofquality

Rigid and inflexible

Interdisciplinary Flexibility,collaboration,innovation

Unclear standards

Purpose Political Passion, socialchange

Dogmatic, lackscredibility

Analytical Emphasizes logicand evidence

Politicallyunreflexive

Audience Professional Grounds forexpertise

Less value as apublic good

Public/policy Social capital,serves public

Threatensintellectualautonomy

Scope National/local Serves localinterests

Lacks generalcontributions

Global Prestige and status Americanhegemony

style of sociology is not to be seen as pathological, since it contributes tothe diversity of sociological knowledge and enriches the discipline (Abbott2001); and (3) instead of trying to resolve the tensions between diversephilosophies, ideas, or methods, compromise ought to happen at the insti-tutional and organizational levels instead.

Let us now consider the four institutional-level continua at stakein sociology, and the various strengths and weaknesses associated witheach. The first source of ambivalence is located in the contradictory pres-sures between different modes of knowledge production. One can imaginea continuum spanning pure disciplinarity on the one hand, and a com-pletely open transdisciplinary nexus on the other. Proponents of Mode 2knowledge production (Nowotny et al. 2003) would point to the complexworld of problems-based priorities, arguing that the luxury of researchingdiscipline-driven theoretical questions is now in the past. There are also,however, competing pressures for disciplinary boundary-maintenance, asthe most prestigious journals in our field require much more adherence todiscipline-specific norms. Thus, the individual academic is pulled in twoopposing directions, both of which have advantages and disadvantages.


The problem with purely discipline-based knowledge is that it is nar-row, rigid, and partial, while interdisciplinarity knowledge may be moreflexible, innovative, and applicable to real-world problems.

Yet plunging headfirst into interdisciplinarity has the consequenceof unclear standards in the field, fuzzy and nontransparent reward sys-tems, and questionable curriculum and training for students (Jacobs 2013).Drawing on the strengths of disciplinary knowledge can remedy this byemphasizing a well-defined and consistent set of theoretical and method-ological skills during training and research practice, creating a foundationfrom which to contribute more fruitfully to interdisciplinary collaborationswhen they make sense to pursue. The problem is that the rhetoric of in-terdisciplinarity can be used to justify and legitimate the production ofnonsociological research. Instead of being “discipline bound” and using in-terdisciplinary work to enrich our existing traditions in sociology, someseem content to leave the discipline entirely, never to return. At a bareminimum, there must be at least a balance between sociologically cen-tered publishing and more interdisciplinary work. As long as this normcontinues to be ignored, or is actively rejected, we only encourage the prac-tice of exclusively publishing outside of our discipline, potentially passingon poor, undisciplined standards to our students.

A second source of ambivalence involves the purposes of sociologicalresearch, along a continuum between politically driven versus analyticallydriven approaches. This characterizes the split in attitude put forwardby Davies (2009) between what he terms “critical” and “mainstream” soci-ology in Canada. When research becomes primarily a form of critical polit-ical intervention, bad research habits often result. Contradictory evidencemay be ignored or denounced, rather than used to enrich and complicateresearch in interesting ways. This can get to a point where the sociologistis seen more as a political pundit or activist than a serious researcher. Apurely analytical approach is less prone to these problems, but has thedanger of merely supporting, or failing to seriously question, the statusquo (Wacquant 2002), remaining an implicit yet powerful conservativeforce. One’s own privileged political biases might be hidden, rather thanreflexively analyzed and made explicit (Bourdieu 2004). Indeed, a criti-cal, political approach can have its merits, helping to drive the passionof the investigator, and aiming for social change beyond the ivory tower.But such political energy has to be balanced with a disciplined, analyticaland empirical approach for the sake of scholarly integrity and credibility.One’s opposing political views should not be ignored, but imaginativelyutilized in the research design as a way to reflexively anticipate criticismsbefore they happen. This is not to say that ideological claims cannot also betrue claims, of course. Certainly, strong ideological points of view can oftenbe the engine for energized and rigorous research practices. Our worry isnot with explicitly political research, as a great deal of Marxist, feministand indigenous research shows both a commitment to ideological values

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and carefully qualified empirical research. The problem for us is how will-ing researchers are to subject their value-laden hypotheses to fair empiricalscrutiny, and report, when necessary, disconfirming evidence.

A third source of ambivalence is to be found in the tension betweenwhat sorts of audiences we privilege in our research, whether professionalor public. As Robert Lynd (1939) might have asked, this concerns “knowl-edge for what?” or, nowadays, the feminist question about “knowledge forwhom?” (Smith 2005). As we begin to see our audiences more as activecollaborators and community partners in the research process, we mightadd the question “knowledge with whom?” Here again, there are competingpressures at work. Certainly the Social Sciences and Humanities ResearchCouncil of Canada (SSHRC) is pushing for more community partnershipsas evidenced by its emphasis on “Community University Research Agree-ment” grants. Here, large, team-based, multiuniversity research that re-quires community or organizational partners is more common. And, withMichael Burawoy’s (2005) now famous call for a more public sociology, weare building research projects that partner with, are informed by, and dis-seminate information to organically conceived publics. Historically, Cana-dian sociology has a tradition of linking with the public in conducting anddisseminating research (Helmes-Hayes and McLaughlin 2009). Still, thereare opposing pressures at work to remain committed to professional au-diences. Davies (2009) believes that professional allegiance must remainfirst and foremost if we are to maintain the solid peer-review processesthat assure strong scientific credibility. If we do proper professional soci-ology, so the argument goes, we are a better service to the public, and themedia will seek us out rather than ignore us.

A related issue that demonstrates this tension is concerned with demo-cratically conceived knowledge production versus the claiming of expertauthority (Collins and Evans 2007). In simple terms, we might ask howmuch expertise we can or should try to claim over the publics we workalongside and hopefully serve. Is it arrogant to try and claim expert au-thority when we are striving to work openly and in a democratic fashionwith community organizations to collaborate in research? If we argue forour own professional authority we might alienate our publics and mis-represent or mischaracterize their perspectives. This is a major issue, forexample, in working with First Nations communities in Canada wheretrust is fragile at best (Boffa et al. 2011) as mainstream non-Indigenousscholars have a long history of implicitly supporting settler colonialismwith scientific “truths.” Yet if we eschew our expertise entirely, and allowvarious publics to determine the questions that are relevant, the methodswe use, the arguments made, and the policy implications to follow, thenwhat price do we pay in terms of intellectual autonomy? This is a tightropein collaborative work, determined in often complicated contexts of ethical,practical, and instrumental grounds where such claims to authority mustbe negotiated.


Our final source of institutional ambivalence is to be found in the tug ofwar between national and global sociological research. Certainly there arepressures in Canada and abroad, connected with public and policy sociol-ogy especially, to study “home-grown” issues. And SSHRC certainly favorsCanadian-centric issues concerning the environment, the digital economy,aboriginal issues, northern development, and so forth, in its mandates oftopic-directed grants. There is a strong sense that knowledge of Canadianculture, in all of its facets, is important as a contribution to our rich andgrowing cultural stock. If we are serious about public sociology that in-volves community partnerships, there is an undeniable need to immerseourselves in local Canadian sites and communities. Sociology in Quebechas a long history of connecting to local political issues, as is true in ourdepartments in the Atlantic Provinces, the Prairies, and British Columbia.Yet there are competing tensions as sociology is a global enterprise, withits own global currency of status and esteem. Canadian sociology is a smallpond of research activity within that much larger global enterprise. If so-ciologists want to find a place in high-impact journals where our work willbe more widely read and utilized, we must look to publish south of the bor-der, or across the pond in the European Union, and in the global south. AsJosee Johnston (2005) argues, we need to utilize a “second shift” strategyof performing as both Canadian and global sociologists. A balanced ap-proach would avoid the dangers of both narrow parochialism and unrooteduniversalism.

Publishing in the Canadian Journal of Sociology or Canadian Reviewof Sociology simply does not bring about the same prestige or internationalvisibility as the top American or British journals. Yet there is the pressingdanger that doing “general” sociological research actually equates to doingAmerican research, since scholars need to learn how to game the systemand tailor their research to the types of literatures, styles, and scholarlytraditions favored by the top American journals. This can result in a hege-monic pattern of too often fitting in with an American standard of practice,since these journals command the most dominant space in the global field.Further, too global a lens may lead to research that ignores the culturaland political issues most germane to Canada. In Canadian universities’quest for status, there is often an impulse to hire scholars from top Ameri-can universities, which can result in the practical problem of top Canadiandepartments doing research that ignores Canadian issues. This is an oldstory, but one that is still relevant and worrying in the contemporary in-tellectual landscape (Cormier 2004; Gingras and Warren 2006; Wilkinsonet al. 2013).

Yet too local or nationalistic a lens may lead to work that has littleto do with building or testing general theoretical propositions, and willbe ignored by the rest of the sociological world. Many of our top sociolo-gists will be known only as top Canadian sociologists. Perhaps the problemhere is a widening divide, as scholars congregate to either of the extreme

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positions of the local/national versus global research continuum. There arethose working in Canadian departments who care only about contributingto global or American sociology, and those who ignore the global disciplinefor work that is exclusively Canadian in scope. Perhaps we should encour-age more Canadians to do locally and nationally relevant work, but striveto undertake a level of conceptual analysis that would make valuable con-tributions to more general theoretical developments in the global field.This would serve to contribute to Canadian society while still garneringinternational status for our research, helping to bolster and strengthenour national discipline.

Each relationship of ambivalence points to realistic ways to compro-mise as we consider how to train our students, choose who to hire asfaculty, and reward different forms of research and publication throughour careers. Perhaps the problem in debating our “crisis” (McLaughlin2005) is that we have too long pushed for extreme solutions on either sideof these ambivalent strains, and have not tried to find reasonable middleground. In trying to draw out the potential pathologies of both sides ofsome key institutional choices, we hope to have established a new tone fordebate that calls for eschewing sharp divisions, correcting existing imbal-ances, and looking for reasoned compromise. The following section offerssome suggestions of how we might move toward a more integrated disci-pline through fair reward structures that consider the unique character,strengths, and potential of sociology in Canada.

CONCLUSION: INTEGRATING AND REWARDINGSOCIOLOGY IN CANADA

What do these debates mean for sociology in Canada? And what, if any,guidelines might lead us in the right directions? In this concluding section,we offer 10 suggestions in this regard in the hope we can begin a usefuldialogue. To this end, it might be helpful to first consider what is unique,if anything, about Canadian sociology, and where the strengths of the dis-cipline in Canada lie. McLaughlin (2005) has suggested that Canadian so-ciology is characterized by strong and balanced methodological traditions,with relatively equal weight given to historical-comparative, qualitative,and quantitative approaches in comparison to other national traditions,and holds an “optimally marginal” position from the United States thatcan be quite powerful in critique and in the design of comparative research(see also McLaughlin and Puddephatt 2007). Building from the “staplestheory” of Harold Innis, Mathews (2014a) has recently argued that Cana-dian sociology is unique in its focus on regional issues and the impact ofdifferent natural resource economies on the fabric of our society. With aunique history and geography, Canada has also developed a unique setof theoretical and methodological traditions. By updating staples theorywith issues of globalization, neoliberalism, climate change, and aboriginal


justice, Mathews (2014a) argues for a distinctive Canadian sociology withmuch to offer the rest of the world (see also Mathews 2014b; McLaughlin2014; Stanbridge 2014; Tindall 2014). This underlines the previous argu-ment that Canadian sociologists ought to focus on Canada while buildingon our unique strengths, contributing unique Canadian data and insightsto the global discipline.

Certainly, Canadian sociology is no exception when it comes to thediversity of the field, which leads us to our first suggestion. We ought to(1) celebrate our intellectual plurality, since attempting convergence atthis level is ultimately untenable as we would risk shutting out too manyvalued traditions. Indeed, it would be impossible to police what forms oftheory and method are valid without unfairly imposing our own subjectiveviews about quality onto others. If we were to choose some kind of philo-sophical basis for disciplinary cohesion, perhaps it would be in the broadphilosophical tradition of pragmatism. Pragmatism relates things on thebasis of action and signs, which can be understood in an abstract-enoughlevel to bridge quite radical differences. Bakker (2011) incisively argues forsociology to develop a meta-metaparadigm that is broad enough to unitethe otherwise fragmented sections of our discipline. Meant as a bridgingapproach, this attempt at unification would risk imposing an epistemo-logical view (pragmatism) on practitioners who begin from quite differentphilosophical standpoints. Also, simply finding a model for unification thatis technically abstract enough to bridge all of our differences does not meanthat the solution is practically efficacious in the real world.

Given this, we argue it is better to celebrate differences rather thanstriving for conceptual convergence, as there are advantages to a disciplinethat is rife with disagreement, conflict, and tension. These sometimes po-larized differences provide the very conceptual parameters that provide forthe rich and engaging “chaos” of debate and exchange that shape the con-tours and parameters of the discipline over time (Abbott 2001). These ten-sions and differences are only maximized, however, when they are broughttogether in communication and open debate, rather than left as many tinyislands of insular scholarly production. In other words, we must encouragedisciplinary integration at an institutional level even while celebratingradical differences at the level of ideas.

Other strategies to better integrate our discipline while still respect-ing the unique character of Canadian sociology are not difficult to imagine,aided by our previously sketched ambivalences. Sociologists ought to (2)pursue research that moves beyond our disciplinary boundaries, whilestill respecting them. Instead of leaving the borders of sociology entirelyto pursue research in other venues, sociologists should be expected to uti-lize interdisciplinary excursions to enrich their own practice of sociology.In other words, the center of research practice for sociologists ought tobe sociological, such that we can offer outsider collaborations our owndiscipline-specific strengths and expertise, and in turn, benefit our own

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sociological theory and practice from the lessons of interdisciplinary re-search.

Sociologists should also (3) be encouraged to celebrate their politicaland social values, and build on these to fuel their passion for research;but this must be balanced with a strong analytic and methodological dis-cipline if the data and interpretations are to remain credible. At the sametime, we must generate not only a tolerance for, but a much greater open-ness toward, diverse political viewpoints in our discipline from both theright and the left, while trying to remain equally critical of the shortcom-ings and blind spots of these ideological viewpoints in peer reviewing theresearch that follows. We should (4) continue to build partnerships andcooperation with community groups and diverse publics, but in doing sowe should preserve our intellectual autonomy and professional expertise.Further, we ought to (5) celebrate our unique Canadian heritage and iden-tifiable style of sociology by doing research, at least in part, on issues facingCanadian society, including the challenges to that very identity posed byindigenous perspectives. Again, this should not be at the expense of con-tributing to theoretical, conceptual, and empirical insights to sociology asa global tradition. Pushing too far in any of these directions, both at thecollective level of the discipline and even for any one scholar, leads to theinstitutional problems we have identified above.

Linked to these issues, we must (6) embrace new technological modesof scholarly publication and public outreach that will be part of twenty-first century sociology, but we cannot do so at the expense of traditionalacademic standards of peer review. This is particularly relevant in thewake of news that the tri-council has recently required all funded researchto be published in an accessible form through open-access journals. Thisis an important movement and should be encouraged, since our librariesface increasingly insurmountable costs for paywall subscriptions for tra-ditional journals (Eve 2014), and some university libraries have begun toterminate their subscription contracts. Open-access publishing may carrythe benefit of increased visibility and potentially higher impact for schol-ars, particularly in the age of public sociology, where relevant audiencesmay well reach beyond the ivory tower. To do this however, sociologistsmust sacrifice the highest impact journals in our field, which all currentlylie behind paywalls, and must be careful to discern the quality and credi-bility of these new open-access journals, which proliferate constantly, withpotential implications for quality control.

Building on these observations, (7) a reward structure for Canadian so-ciology would simply recognize these balancing acts, and judge the merit ofresearch performance and intellectual production accordingly. Still, theremust (8) be evidence of publishing in core sociological journals. How cansuch journals be judged? At the very minimum, a strong majority of sociol-ogists’ publications should at least be searchable in sociologically relevant


databases. Articles in mainstream generalist journals should be recognizedas more meritorious than highly specialized journals, and high-impactjournals with high rejection rates must be given due credit. Rewarding thepractice of publishing in central spaces in the discipline results, on bal-ance, with better research and writing practices. It also forces the diversetraditions of sociology, all of which should be celebrated and encouraged,into a more convergent space of communication. Filtering the best researchof these diverse groups and distilling them into our major mainstream gen-eralist journals increases the chance of reading the best examples of otherstyles of work and learning from our differences. It is also a way to main-tain quality control and discourage streams of research practice that arenot sufficiently analytical or empirical in their approach. Yet we shouldalso (9) celebrate research that appears in the Canadian Journal of Soci-ology or Canadian Review of Sociology more than the rankings and impactfactors of these journals suggest, so as to help build a distinctly Canadiansociology, centralize our findings, and support and enhance the qualityof these important journals for our national discipline. And of course, (10)book publishing should still be encouraged and valued, while avoiding van-ity presses and instead rewarding the best peer-reviewed university-basedand high-quality commercial presses.

Our vision for sociology in Canada should not be all that contentious.We wish to embrace the social, political, ontological, epistemological, the-oretical, and methodological diversity of Canadian sociology. Rather thantrying to force this diversity into one theoretical-philosophical box, wewant to maintain the differences that make our tradition so exciting andvibrant. Certainly, to define in a definitive way what it is that sociologistsdo, or ought to do, is doomed to fail, as sociology’s beliefs and practices arehistorical, social, and political products that are bound to be reconstructedthrough the decades as a result of our internal and external strugglesas a dynamic and shifting field. But it is that energized dynamism thatrepresents the sovereign power of our discipline, and must remain at thecenter of what we all do, and form the basis for what we expect from eachother. Intellectual autonomy is a precious resource that must be protectedagainst administrative and state pressures. This autonomy can be pro-tected, and our differences best maximized, when our discipline convergesinstitutionally, through shared norms and common spaces for intellectualexchange and peer review. The more we can push to maximize social, po-litical, and intellectual diversity while converging in organizational andinstitutional form, the healthier we will be as a discipline. But a disci-pline we must remain, resisting the trendy rhetoric of interdisciplinarityand transdisciplinarity, which would ultimately see the sociological imag-ination dissolved and marginalized, while neoliberal universities look forways to cut back even further the diverse forms of research and educationwe provide.

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Documents

Critical Nexus or Discipline?