Criticism of Sociological Orthodoxy Needs to be Substantive
Sociology is under intense pressure these days.
Many individuals criticize the discipline for its lack of rigor, an almost single-minded preoccupation with inequality (that’s right) and a chronic lack of “viewpoint diversity.” Such criticisms have important institutional repercussions: legislatures in several U.S. states now treat the discipline as politically “captured,” most notably in Florida, where the field is cast as an incubator of left-wing activism.
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| Sociology in Florida |
Jukka Savolainen’s recent essay in Unsafe Science reiterates this criticism.
Savolainen, who is the moderator of the Heterodox Academy’s sociology community, argues that sociology has abandoned impartial scholarship and become an activist echo chamber.
His solution to this issue—citing the case of University of Copenhagen—is to empower ideologically diverse review boards, provide targeted grants for heterodox work and encourage independent advisory boards to ensure that sociology can, check notes, “adhere strictly to the scientific ethos.”
Admittedly, I share several of Savolainen’s frustrations. I usually find the discipline quite boring, and sociology is filled with bad empirics because they give some good narratives, etc.
Yet, recognizing these flaws should only raise the bar for critique, rather than pushing us to call the party commissars for duty: proper reform demands proper critique, and proper critique requires that we should have an effect on how people engage, in their day to day academic lives, in sociological scholarship. Savolainen’s piece exemplifies this deeper problem with much contemporary criticism of sociology. However heated, such debates seldom turn on substantive engagement with the field’s actual theories, methods, or evidence.
Put bluntly, the supposed “heterodox” criticism of sociology is never substantive, with no practical implication for sociological scholarship and practice. It is a heterodox critique in search of its orthodoxy.
The Unbearable Lightness of Meta-Criticism
Critiques like this, mostly coming from the Heterodox Academy quarters of academia, share a familiar structure. They contend that sociology is “politically captured,” yet when it is time to say what scholars should actually do differently, the prescriptions are procedural (new review boards, special grants, and viewpoint diversity pledges), rather than intellectual.
The problem with this approach is quite simple: there is no clear definition as to what would count as “orthodox” versus “heterodox” knowledge in sociology. Thus, the criticism is just not at the level of theoretical or methodological conflict. A good reform movement, instead, should have a clear and actionable conflict: open-science movement places the conflict in open science practices, providing a specific set of reforms aiming at the conventional know-hows. The advocates of credibility revolution place the conflict in discussions about research design. Scholars associated with Rational Choice Theory not only criticize sociology’s macro focus; they actually produce research serving as a “template” for the mode and genre of scholarship they advocate for.
The genre of meta-criticism we encounter, however, is necessarily thin. They point to bias, but propose no substantive theory of action, no new mechanism of social change, or no basic alternative model worth resisting. Suppose the viewpoint is restored, sociology is now largely apolitical, and we are close to this mysterious “scientific ethos.” What happens to the median ASR article, then? What is the precise DAG that channels my-kind-of-people-in-committees to good sociology?
Reasons for “Bad Sociology”
Why does bad sociology happen, then? Two boring reasons: theoretical fragmentation and weak empirical standards. A core theoretical framework would regulate what people would say and not say. It would constrain “nuance” (Healy 2017). It would also lead to proper “policing” of sociological work. Same goes for rigorous empirical standards. Both would give sociology its disciplinary focus and autonomy that would organize the scholarship on its own terms. No wiggle room. All this is to say that viewpoint diversity is a normative good, but it is not a substantive fix. Shared theory, rigorous designs, and disciplined empirical practices are.1
1 Let me be even more blunt. The median sociology paper usually fails because it is boring (“I regressed an outcome on a group variable”). The problem is that a heterodox read on that regression doesn’t change the fact that it is just a boring regression.
The bottom line is that what our field needs is not a new balance of opinions per se (whatever that means), but a higher bar for research. It is that simple.