Friday, September 28, 2007
The necessity of sociology
What did everyone think about the notion that there will eventually be no need for sociology (as discussed in Wolfe's piece last class)? In class, I expressed my view that society will never be able to go "unstudied," and that a subject as diverse and fascinating as human society will always demand its own discipline in order to examine it. I was just wondering what everyone else thought about this, especially those of you who are senior sociology majors and will be looking for jobs soon.
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2 comments:
I agree with you that it is hard to believe that the field of sociology will eventually disappear, which is why I think that it won't happen. However, if it did, I'm not so sure the other fields outside of sociology would notice the difference. As we were saying in class, sociologists don't have much of an influence on public policy, so would anyone know that we were gone?
I have to agree with both of you. Comte was around in the 1800's and was dealing with sociology so why would it all of a sudden just disappear? I google everything and i actually googled "if sociology disappeared" and a couple of articles came up but one in particular said "if disciplinary sociology disappears, so long as sociological ways of thinking are apparent in other disciplines, in transdisciplinary work, and in practical affairs. To substantiate his case he employs the Foucauldian image of the archipelago: ‘sociology has gone underground and pops up like the islands of an archipelago in unexpected places’. His analogy belies his conclusions. If sociology has ‘gone underground’, it must still exist somewhere apart from the ‘islands’ in which it is manifest. Islands in the ocean exist only as the pinnacles of the submerged land mass that connects them: they cannot exist as an archipelago without that land mass"
I thought that was pretty interesting...
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