Here is an interesting survey of sociologists I recently found: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12108-018-9381-5
Some particularly interesting stats: 81% of women and 58% of men agree with “sociology should be both a scientific and moral enterprise”. 18% of women and 46% of men agree with “sociology is undermined by excessive activism”. 31% of women and 53% of men agree with “advocacy and research should be separate for objectivity”.
So essentially, the vast majority of sociologists think that not only is activism in sociology okay, NO AMOUNT of activism would undermine the field. Many sociologists also support mixing activism with inquiry. (If you’ve noticed these stats, you’d also see these stances are much more common in female sociologists, which is relevant since 2/3 of sociology PhDs are women nowadays.) And frankly, even disregarding the data, you can definitely see this mindset is quite common anecdotally.
So the next thing that comes up is- doesn’t this support the narrative that sociology is ideologically compromised and thus outsiders shouldn’t take it seriously?
I’m sure that there are indeed many people in sociology committed to inquiry via the scientific method. But there are also many activists who are NOT purely committed to inquiry, and willing to conduct bad faith scholarship to advance their agenda. So since sociology is inherently a very fuzzy field in which key results are not objective truths but subjective narratives agreed on by the community, how can outsiders trust the community consensus?
From my perspective as an outsider, community consensus in soft sciences is reliable when the community is overwhelming committed to objective inquiry. But when a significant fraction of the community is willing to neglect this in favor of activism, community consensus is no longer a reliable approximation of truth, especially due to zealous activists having the loudest voices and sociology self-selecting for a very specific demographic (that’s not at all representative of the general population along any axis).
Comments
I’m a social scientist from a different branch, Iinguistics. To a degree, all fields are subjective, even the hard sciences. They’re subjective in the sense that the researcher can manipulate the data, decide which questions are investigated, which variables are tested, etc.
My concern with blending activism and scientific inquiry is that the quality of the data, its presentation, and the conclusions drawn could be affected. The same would happen if other scientists picked and chose from among their data sets to get the results they wanted.
I’m in biology. There are subjective interpretations in all fields. The framing and discussion within a broader context is what sets apart many mediocre and good papers. It affects every field, but in the case of people studying humans, it just happens that some of the interpretation can overlap with societal issues. What matters is whether your results are reproducible. this is a big issue with observational human studies in general, not just fields with activism
I think sociology can be by its very nature benefitial to collective activism. I think the problem more comes with the rise of social media activists who happen to also be sociologists and who prop up narratives as if they are uniformily true rather than questioning them. This is especially problematic if it is one that can lead to dehumanization or particpation in metadehumanization. I think on some level all sociologists will particpate in politics yet in doing so they should be even more aware than the average population if they are being a commentor versus someone who is justifying misinformation that may already be out in the public and that is where the difficult line lies. They need not be perfect but i have been disappointed to find how often it seem academic are divided between being what i would describe as meme activists and otjers just not talking. We should comment but we must also be willing to discuss enabling us to expose and critique diverse data and perspectives