Blurring Public and Private Sociology: Challenging an Artificial Division
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article encourages sociologists to take a hybrid approach to the incorporation of public sociology into the discipline. The idea of public sociology rests upon a double conversation between sociologists as public actors, and the involvement of the ‘extra-academic’ world into the dialogue. However, the separation of public sociology from professional sociology is artificial. The division of labour between those working solely in academia, and those reaching out to the public at large is imaginary: sociologists do work in both the public and private. By blurring the line between public sociology and professional sociology (which constitutes a ‘privacy’ of sorts), sociology is able to reach a larger audience. To illustrate this argument, I examine how three theoretical approaches within sociology, governmentality literature, critical realism and second modernity, exemplify both public and private sociology, while remaining methodologically coherent and rigorous. These approaches show sociology to be a field in which disparate, multiple, fluid theories and metatheories exist side-by-side in work that is both public and professional.
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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 | 0.047 | 0.037 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.151 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.029 | 0.046 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.029 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.015 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".