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Sociology in the 21st century: Challenges old and new

Article in Journal of Sociology · December 2017

DOI: 10.1177/1440783317747443

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JOS0010.1177/1440783317747443Journal of SociologyPossamai-Inesedy et al.

Editorial
Journal of Sociology

Sociology in the 21st

2017, Vol. 53(4) 723­–729
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1440783317747443
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Alphia Possamai-Inesedy
Western Sydney University, Australia

David Rowe
Western Sydney University, Australia

Deborah Stevenson
Western Sydney University, Australia

In What Use is Sociology? Michael-Hviid Jacobsen and Keith Tester (Bauman, 2014)
pose a series of double-edged questions to the (now deceased) prolific sociologist
Zygmunt Bauman :

Does your productivity reflect an attempt to keep the conversation going or, by contrast, is it an
attempt to make the conversation happen? Put another way, is your productivity a sign of the
presence or absence of dialogue? Or is it a more simple case that the sociological vocation
makes us all Puritans, working hard in our calling, without ever knowing if we are destined for
the secular salvation of being heard? (2014: 62)

Bauman, impressed, responds that perhaps we are now indeed all Puritans, but by ‘decree
of history rather than by choice’. In an age of intellectual super abundance and high
turnover, ‘messages, however loud and bright, nowadays come with a “use by” date
printed or presumed, and vanish as fast as they appear’. For this reason, he says, ‘“to
keep the conversation going” you have “to make it happen” – repeatedly, untiringly’
(2014: 62–3).
Bauman’s call to keep the sociological discourse going, particularly at a time when the
world appears to require a continuous reorientation, has been taken up by the outgoing

Corresponding author:
Alphia Possamai-Inesedy, Director of Western Sydney University, Sydney Campus, Sydney, Australia.
Email: alphia.possamai@westernsydney.edu.au
724 Journal of Sociology 53(4)

editorial board of Journal of Sociology (2013–16).1 As our last editorial task, we sought to
engage with the key contemporary debates within our discipline. Here we make no claim
to comprehensiveness, but present to readers a special edition that outlines both global
social issues and disciplinary debates. Although the Journal of Sociology is an interna-
tional journal, it is based in Australia, and the influence of place (or, more precisely, of
spatiality) is reflected to some degree in the text and its concerns. This journal issue could
be tinged with the ‘Southern theory’ proposed by the Australian sociologist Raewyn
Connell (2007), in that it has been produced out of the global South without necessarily
being about it. Connell notes that: ‘The relationship between colony and metropole has
been formative for Australian sociology, though the terms of that relationship have
changed’, meaning that it is ‘now possible to think, from an Australian starting point,
about global structures and connections’ (2007: 84–5). In this special issue we recognise
that, while sociological knowledge self-evidently bears the traces of the conditions of its
production, it can never – nor should it – be wholly subjected to them. Thus, as will be
clear from the following articles, a discipline once largely confined to a series of single-
society frames, sometimes compared as bounded units, cannot function effectively with-
out a thorough grasp of the cosmopolitan, the transnational and the global (Urry, 2000).
In pursuing a global conversation, we invited sociologists who are largely outside our
geographical space to provide commentary on the articles in this issue. The article com-
mentators were given a wide brief, being asked not just to reflect on the relative strengths
and limitations of a contribution that had already been subjected to ‘blind’ peer review,
but also to canvass issues of relevance to general sociology and its sub-disciplines.
Although it has emanated from the specific context of a peer-reviewed journal, we hope
that this discussion will spread to other discursive domains, including the ‘digital social’
addressed in one of its articles. The special issue’s focus on contemporary sociological
debates is designed to address the challenges of what Ulrich Beck (2016) has called, in a
work finished by others after his sudden, untimely death, the current state of ‘metamor-
phosis’, where our old ways of acting and understanding no longer work, and the new
approaches – those better suited to this rapidly shifting world – are still developing. This
uncertainty generates, in diverse ways in this journal issue, arguments about the chal-
lenges faced by our discipline and world, with many articles offering, if not blueprints
for change, then at least some rigorously imaginative sketches for dealing and living with
it. While, we have not turned our backs on the old, proven skills that provide the founda-
tion of sociology, there is an acknowledgement throughout that new sociological capaci-
ties are called for, and that reinvention has been at the heart of the sociological project
since it was first conceived as the science of society in the 19th century.
If sociology, though, is to sustain itself and remain integral to the understanding of
past, current and future worlds, the discipline must substantiate its own knowledge claims.
It is for this reason that the issue opens with a consideration of epistemology. Rob Stones’s
article ‘Sociology’s Unspoken Weakness: Bringing Epistemology Back In’, argues that
the ontological turn – towards ‘being’ – that enabled sociology to address all manner of
social phenomena, has tended not to be accompanied by a corresponding development of
a sophisticated grasp of the intellectual dynamics of ‘knowing’. In seeking to address this
relative absence and what he regards as the hegemony of epistemological relativism,
Stones argues that the ‘quality’ of competing knowledge claims can be ascertained through
Possamai-Inesedy et al. 725

an approach that combines ontological concepts (‘intransitive reality’) with a considera-

tion of evidence from similar social situations. Commentator Dave Elder-Vass suggests,
in response, that the principal challenge is to identify a rationale for the differential assess-
ment of knowledge and the uncoupling of things, as objects of analysis, from the theoreti-
cal language that explains and evaluates them.
Epistemological matters play out across the full repertoire of the discipline’s domain
concerns, one of the most important of which has been the social structuring of work and
employment. In ‘A Discipline at the Crossroads? Using a Gender-inspired Paradigm to
Reposition the Sociology of Work and Employment’, Kate Huppatz and Anne Ross-Smith
comment on a growing concern that sociology has lost ground within universities to the
more explicitly applied approaches of management and business, and that one of the ‘cas-
ualties’ of this shift away from a sociological perspective has been attention to the pivotal
gender–work nexus. Their aim is to take this apparent situation as the starting point for
repositioning the sociology of work and employment by putting gender, and the gender–
work nexus, at the centre of the endeavour. Huppatz and Ross-Smith are optimistic, in the
face of a subdiscipline ‘in crisis’, that a gender-inspired paradigm would be both interdis-
ciplinary and informed by an understanding of the connections between work and every-
day life. In her commentary on the article, Ruth Simpson applauds their proposed
initiative, arguing that it not only allows for critical examination of the ‘crisis’ debate, but
also highlights the importance of paid, unpaid and new forms of labour and work and their
connection to individual identities, as well as to collective experiences. Simpson argues,
however, that gender scholarship must include critical masculinity studies, thereby broad-
ening the focus of research beyond feminism and the experiences of women.
Just as job security and quality is a major underlying concern in the previous article,
food security and quality are important subjects for the sociology of agriculture and food.
‘Re-evaluating Food Systems and Food Security: A Global Perspective’ by Geoffrey
Lawrence critically analyses how the mega-processes of neoliberal globalisation and
financialisation are profoundly re-shaping the social dynamics of food production and
distribution. In Lawrence’s view, these processes are simultaneously hegemonic and
‘indeterminate, contradictory and ultimately contested’. He points to the increasing sus-
picion with which the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa)
regard neoliberal globalisation and financialisation as a locus of potential structural vul-
nerability. It is this very issue of contestation that Gerardo Otero is keen to take up in his
response to Lawrence’s article. Highlighting the influence of modes of food production
that build on traditional food systems, he argues that, in order to initiate change, it is
imperative to identify instances where the dominance of neoliberal globalism has been
forcefully challenged.
In moving from the traditional sociologies of work, employment, agriculture and food
to the more recently established (and nominated) sociology of emotions, the widening
sweep of the discipline in the 21st century is amply demonstrated. Rebecca Olson, Jordan
J. McKenzie and Roger Patulny’s ‘The Sociology of Emotions: A Meta-reflexive Review
of a Theoretical Tradition in Flux’ emphasises the need for critical reflexivity and inter-
disciplinarity in an area of research and scholarship where contending approaches have
tended to oscillate between exaggerated forms of rationalism and irrationalism.
Positioning articles on the sociology of emotions as ‘cultural artefacts’ and utilising
726 Journal of Sociology 53(4)

Bourdieu’s notion of the field as a ‘metaphor for the academy’, the authors highlight the
dynamic, contested and interdisciplinary nature of the field, before going on to suggest
that there is emergent agreement concerning the importance of the pre-conscious and
physiological dimensions of emotion. Significantly, they speculate that this convergence
points to an emerging paradigm shift in the subdiscipline, a contention that is questioned
by Åsa Wettergren in her response. Wettergren’s acknowledgement of the changes or
fluctuations occurring within the subdiscipline of the sociology of emotions leads her
both to applaud and to criticise Olson, McKenzie and Patulny’s argument. She finds their
work simultaneously inspiring, provocative and problematic, the latter due to her con-
cerns that their argument risks overstating the importance of one, albeit important, devel-
opment in the field. Wettergren reflects a concern that is woven throughout this special
issue – that there is a clear need to be conscious of the dangers of theoretical and meth-
odological fetishism.
If the sociology of emotions offers a relatively recent subdisciplinary focus on topics
such as feeling, reason and belief, the sociology of religion has long dedicated itself to
them, especially in dealing with the theoretical proposition of its own obsolescence; the
secularisation thesis. Adam Possamai addresses the latest stage of sociological debate
over religion and the secular by proposing that, in taking a global perspective, secular-
ism, far from superseding religiosity, is itself being superseded – and in multiple forms.
In ‘Post-secularism in Multiple Modernities: Multiple Secularisms or Late Secularism?’,
he argues that, rather than representing the re-emergence of the importance of religion in
the public sphere, post-secularism is better understood as a specific form of secularism
– late secularism – that is specifically associated with neoliberalism. Possamai contends
that there are multiple secularities, just as there are multiple modernities, and that they
coexist and are in tension. Expressive of Beck’s (2016) position regarding metamorpho-
sis, he argues that sociology’s task is to find a theoretical language and methodological
set that are capable of dealing with this complexity. James A. Beckford concurs with this
proposition in his commentary on the article. Yet, Beckford, known for his critical
engagement with post-secularisation (Beckford, 2012), argues against Possamai’s use of
a term that is suffused with contradictory definitions and applications. In this sense,
Beckford takes up the challenge of moving from the confines of ‘dead’ or ‘zombie’ cat-
egories (Woodman et al., 2015) to capture the shifting terrains of the religious, the non-
religious and the anti-religious.
While the sociology of religion has been significantly shaped by its engagement with
secularity, the sociology of art and culture has been required to face the challenges of
changing regimes of production and consumption, and of a revitalised role in urban place-
making. As Deborah Stevenson and Liam Magee argue in their article ‘Art and Space:
Creative Infrastructure and Cultural Capital in Sydney, Australia’, there is an increasing
emphasis on the role of what are now conceived as the ‘creative industries’ in the econom-
ics and imaging of cities, and rather less on the social dimensions of aesthetics. However,
in drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, they retain a concern with the relations
between social, economic and cultural capital in their examination of the spatial dimen-
sions of artistic consumption, deploying a perspective often overlooked in sociological
analyses. Stevenson and Magee argue from their analysis of data drawn from a major
study of cultural consumption in Australia (Rowe et al., 2016) that the spatial diffusion of
Possamai-Inesedy et al. 727

art consumption does not readily reflect the accepted indicators of socio-economic class,
while the link with levels of education appears to be strengthening. As Dave O’Brien
observes in his commentary on the article, these ‘fascinating findings’ point to the emer-
gence of new forms of distinction that are reflecting new social divisions.
In closing the special issue, Alphia Possamai-Inesedy’s and Alan Nixon’s article ‘A
Place to Stand: Digital Sociology and the Archimedean Effect’ returns to the questions of
epistemology and method raised by Rob Stones at its opening, but this time in the defini-
tively 21st-century milieu of the ‘digital social’. Although the dizzying possibilities of
accessing and using ‘big data’ (Burrows, 2016) suggest that sociologists now have an
unprecedented capability to research social structures and relations at many scalar levels in
myriad social variable combinations, they must devise ways of generating and using
knowledge in a manner that is not placed in the algorithmic service of panoptical social
surveillance, manipulation and control. In response, Mike Savage reflects on the debates
which emerged when his own and Roger Burrows’s (2007) work on the impending ‘crisis
of empirical sociology’ was published, noting, in particular, the scepticism with which
sociologists at the time viewed the digital. Savage welcomes Possamai-Inesedy’s and
Nixon’s article as an ‘excellent reflection’ on how contemporary sociologists might proac-
tively work within the digital sphere to shape knowledge and probe pressing social issues.
This special issue, then, concludes with a discussion of new sociological methods and
resources, combined with enduring subjects and issues. As an intellectual product of
modernity, sociology has always been required to deal with a sense that society is being
transformed (or metamorphosed), and successive generations of sociologists (like many
others in the social sciences and humanities) have tended to regard their ‘times’ as
uniquely disruptive. While there is inevitable disputation concerning which historical
periods have experienced most social upheaval (consider the epochal significance of
world wars, for example), perhaps it is the sheer volume of information at hand, and the
speed of its delivery and mutation, that have had a vertiginous effect on sociologists and
others who seek to make sense of contemporary life. Irrespective of the level of appre-
hension of, and towards, accelerating change, sociology remains firmly anchored in its
founding preoccupations with how society is made and remade, and how social institu-
tions, power structures and practices affect everyday lives. It is for this reason that soci-
ologists should never allow their knowledge to be merely descriptive, technicist and
institutionally captured (a point repeatedly made by Bauman, 2014). As Possamai-
Inesedy and Nixon argue here, the very digital technologies that can impair sociological
understanding can be turned to valuable use in a ‘public sociology’ (see, for example,
Fleck and Hess, 2016) that is readily accessible to more people than ever before. The
Journal of Sociology may be a specialist textual site where the professional discipline is
practised, but its analyses and concerns extend far beyond formal organisations such as
universities and the print, broadcast, online and mobile public sphere.
Sociology’s old ways of ‘knowing’ and acting, developed in an attempt to understand
and illuminate the social, no longer work as effectively as when the certainties of its
progressive modernist modus operandi imbued it with disciplinary confidence. It is for
this reason that, for example, a publication arising from an International Sociological
Association seminar is entitled The Shape of Sociology for the 21st Century: Tradition
and Renewal (Kalekin-Fishman and Denis, 2012). In contributing to this urgent task,
728 Journal of Sociology 53(4)

each article and commentary within this special issue is, then, a conversation and ques-
tioning of our discipline’s current state, its potential future of engaging with its multiple,
overlapping subjects, as well as its conceivable contribution to society.
In the final passage of Sociology: A Brief but Critical Introduction, Anthony Giddens
(1982: 178) – who has variously been a prolific scholar, executive of a major university,
media figure, and (for good or ill) a policy adviser, including to a national government
– in reflecting on Karl Marx’s ‘confidence in the progressive development of human-
kind’, states:

Surely we can no longer share that confidence: but neither need we lapse into resigned despair.
For human beings do make their own history, and we can still retain the hope that an
understanding of that history will help us to change it – or at very least will permit us to ensure
that it is a continuing one …

For Giddens, a radical social theory is integral to the survival of the world in the face of
environmental degradation; racial, ethnic and sexual oppression; and violent state power
in a world nation-state system that is capable of catastrophic destructiveness. Giddens
may not himself have found ‘the way’ to radical social-theoretical renewal, but sociolo-
gists, following Bauman, need no further invitation to ‘“to keep the conversation going”
… repeatedly, untiringly’.

Note
1. Alphia Possamai-Inesedy (Editor-in-chief), Rebecca Olson, Adam Possamai, Kerry Robinson,
Rob Stones, David Rowe, Deborah Stevenson and Bryan Turner (Editors), and Kate Huppatz
(Book Reviews Editor).

References
Bauman, Z. (2014) What Use is Sociology? Conversations with Michael-Hviid Jacobsen and Keith
Tester. Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity.
Beck, U. (2016) The Metamorphosis of the World: How Climate Change is Transforming Our
Concept of the World. Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity.
Beckford, J.A. (2012) ‘Public Religions and the Postsecular: Critical Reflections’, Journal for the
Scientific Study of Religion 51(1): 1–19.
Burrows, R. (2016) ‘“Studying Up” in the Era of Big Data’, pp 65–80 in L. McKie and L. Ryan
(eds) An End to the Crisis of Empirical Sociology? Trends and Challenges in Social Research.
London: Routledge.
Connell, R. (2007) Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science.
Sydney: Allen and Unwin.
Fleck, C. and A. Hess (eds) (2016) Knowledge for Whom? Public Sociology in the Making.
London: Routledge.
Giddens, A. (1982) Sociology: A Brief but Critical Introduction. London: Macmillan.
Kalekin-Fishman, D. and A. Denis (eds) (2012) The Shape of Sociology for the 21st Century:
Tradition and Renewal. London: Sage.
Rowe, D., G. Noble, T. Bennett and M. Kelly (2016) ‘Transforming Cultures? From Creative
Nation to Creative Australia’ (Introduction to Special Issue), Media International Australia
158: 6–16.
Possamai-Inesedy et al. 729

Savage, M. and R. Burrows (2007) ‘The Coming Crisis of Empirical Sociology’, Sociology 41(5):
885–99.
Urry, J. (2000) Sociology beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-first Century. London:
Routledge.
Woodman, D., S. Threadgold and A. Possamai-Inesedy (2015) ‘Prophet of a New Modernity:
Ulrich Beck’s Legacy for Sociology’, Journal of Sociology 51(4): 1117–31.

Author biographies
Alphia Possamai-Inesedy is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Western Sydney University.
She was the recent editor-in-chief of the Journal of Sociology (2013– end of 2016) as well as the
co-creator of the Risk Societies Thematic Group within The Australian Sociological Association.
She is also the Springer co-editor for the series ‘Religion, Spirituality and Health: A Social
Scientific Approach’. She is the current Director of the Sydney City Campus of Western Sydney
University and the Vice President of The Australian Sociological Association. Her recent work on
digital research has resulted in two forthcoming books, the co-authored Digital Social Research:
Theory and Methods (Sage) and the co-edited volume Religion and Belief through the Digital
Social (De Gruyter). She is currently involved in ongoing research that focuses on risk society,
religion, digital health, and methodologies.
David Rowe, FAHA, FASSA is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Research, Institute for Culture and
Society, Western Sydney University and Honorary Professor, Faculty of Humanities and Social
Sciences, University of Bath. A member of both the Australian and British Sociological
Associations, his principal research interests are in the sociology of culture, especially media,
sport, leisure and journalism. His most recent books are Global Media Sport: Flows, Forms and
Futures (Bloomsbury, 2011), Sport Beyond Television (co-authored, Routledge, 2012), Digital
Media Sport: Technology, Power and Culture in the Network Society (co-edited, Routledge, 2013),
Sport, Public Broadcasting, and Cultural Citizenship: Signal Lost? (co-edited, Routledge, 2014),
and Making Culture: Commercialisation, Transnationalism, and the State of ‘Nationing’ in
Contemporary Australia (co-edited, Routledge, 2018, forthcoming).
Deborah Stevenson is Professor of Sociology and Urban Cultural Research in the Institute for
Culture and Society at Western Sydney University and Honorary Professor in the Faculty of
Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Bath, UK. Her research is focused on cities
and urban life, arts and cultural policy, and place and tourism, and her many publications include
the recent books: Cities of Culture: A Global Perspective (Routledge, 2014), The City (2013) and
Tourist Cultures: Identity, Place and the Traveller (co-authored, Sage, 2010). She is also co-editor
of the Ashgate Research Companion to Planning and Culture (2013) and the forthcoming
Routledge Urban Media Companion.

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