The Three Axes of Sociological Practice: The Case of French Quebec
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Public sociology is all too often presented as the polar opposite of the detached, purely objective observation of society (Clawson et al., 2007). Such a portrayal is misleading, for it tends to give credence to the idea that academic sociology is torn between two extremes, the political and the empirical poles. In this article I will not contest this divide from within. I shall not, for instance, claim that sociology is inherently politicised, each epistemology necessarily proposing a different ontology (Blau and Smith, 2006). Considering the problem differently, and referring to a historical period spanning from the late 19th century to about 1980 (Fournier, 1986; Warren, 2003), I propose a three-faceted portrait of sociology. In my view, the discipline is structured around not two but three fundamental axes or dimensions: professional, descriptive, and political, embodying three essential aims. In turn, these constitute the respective roles it can play in academia and society depending on the specific publics it seeks to address. In his much debated ASA 2004 presidential speech, Burawoy (2005a) has claimed that public sociology should be defined by its audience, whether academic (professional, critical) or extra-academic (policy and public). Without directly challenging this view, I intend in this paper to illustrate how the scholar’s individual positioning offers a slightly different perception of public sociology than the discipline’s external dynamics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".