{"id":198864,"date":"2026-07-26T05:54:33","date_gmt":"2026-07-26T13:54:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=198864"},"modified":"2026-07-26T06:52:07","modified_gmt":"2026-07-26T14:52:07","slug":"the-live-questions-in-sociology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=198864","title":{"rendered":"The Live Questions in Sociology"},"content":{"rendered":"

Written with AI: The live questions, ranked by how much career consequence attaches to them. First, whether sociology<\/a> is a science or a movement. That question is live because money and state power now attach to it. Florida stripped introductory sociology from general education at its public colleges<\/a>. The Boghossian commission<\/a>, commissioned by the chancellors of Vanderbilt<\/a> and Washington University in St. Louis<\/a>, delivered a report in April 2026 that found political goals had come to sit above the advancement of knowledge in several fields, and it was addressed to presidents and chancellors rather than to the disciplines. The American Sociological Association<\/a> declined to hold a membership vote on a Sociologists for Palestine proposal to boycott Israeli academic institutions<\/a>, on procedural grounds, and the group is boycotting the August meeting<\/a> in return. ASA leadership defended the refusal by pointing to members who left after the 2024 ceasefire resolution<\/a>, saying the association had been harmed. Melissa Wilde<\/a> ran for president on associational neutrality and lost<\/a>. Every substantive question below now gets asked inside that fight.<\/p>\n

Second, what artificial intelligence<\/a> does to work, skill and authority. The weak version counts vanishing jobs. The strong version asks who gets to define skill, which workers keep discretion, whether surveillance replaces supervision, and whether automated systems hide badly paid human labor. Arne Kalleberg<\/a> won the 2026 W.E.B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award<\/a> for the institutional frame, and Allison Pugh<\/a> won the 2025 Distinguished Scholarly Book Award<\/a> for The Last Human Job<\/em><\/a>, which asks what happens when organizations economize on the human relationship. Ya-Wen Lei<\/a> is asking the sharper technological questions<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Third, what kind of inequality<\/a> now counts. Income no longer exhausts it. Wealth<\/a>, debt<\/a>, inheritance<\/a>, housing<\/a>, incarceration<\/a> and geography do more work, and the hard question is how they interact. Fabian Pfeffer<\/a> on wealth transmission, Fenaba Addo<\/a> on racial wealth and debt, Kimberly Kay Hoang<\/a> and Ken-Hou Lin<\/a> on elite wealth and financialization<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Fourth, how inequality survives after formal exclusion becomes unacceptable. Organizations endorse equality and produce unequal outcomes. Cecilia Ridgeway<\/a> built the account of how status beliefs reproduce gender inequality in ordinary interaction<\/a>. Mich\u00e8le Lamont<\/a> made evaluation and boundary work<\/a> central. Shelley Correll<\/a> showed how neutral-looking practices produce gendered results. Fabien Accominotti<\/a>‘s work on meritocratic status orders<\/a> is the most promising newer entry.<\/p>\n

Fifth, fertility<\/a>. Declines have outrun the models across countries and classes, and sociology is at risk of losing this question to economists and demographers, partly because several candidate explanations are awkward to state inside the discipline.<\/p>\n

Then polarization<\/a> and democratic strain, immigration enforcement as a producer of legal status and racial category, mortality inequality<\/a> and how to measure it, state capacity<\/a> and why competent bureaucracies fail, climate as institutional lock-in<\/a> rather than attitude, and the methods fight over whether digital traces<\/a> and language models<\/a> measure meaning.<\/p>\n

On who gains status from asking, you have to separate four currencies. Association office is one. Correll holds the presidency<\/a> and chose a theme built around solutions and externally engaged research, asking how sociology can be put to work to build a more equitable world<\/a>. Alford A. Young Jr. of Michigan<\/a> follows her. Rory McVeigh of Notre Dame<\/a>, a quantitative political sociologist of right-wing mobilization and a former ASR<\/em><\/a> editor, won the 2026 election<\/a>, with Dina Okamoto of Indiana<\/a> as vice president-elect. Awards are a second currency, and the 2026 slate<\/a> rewards two things at once: classical labor-market stratification in Kalleberg<\/a>, and global-South racial and labor history in Zophia Edwards of Johns Hopkins<\/a>, whose book on Black radical trade unionism in Trinidad and Tobago<\/a> took the top book prize<\/a>. Joya Misra<\/a> took the Jessie Bernard<\/a>, Prudence Carter<\/a> the Cox-Johnson-Frazier<\/a>, Elizabeth Wrigley-Field<\/a> and Anna Romina Guevarra<\/a> the public understanding award<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Journal control is the third and least discussed currency. The ASR<\/em><\/a> editorship sits at UMass Amherst<\/a> with David Cort<\/a>, Laurel Smith-Doerr<\/a> and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey<\/a>, joined by Misra<\/a> in 2026. AJS<\/em><\/a> sits at Chicago<\/a> with John Levi Martin<\/a>, who defends theory and mechanism against technique. Whoever holds those desks sets the price of publication for a decade of assistant professors.<\/p>\n

Citation authority is the fourth. Lamont<\/a> is the closest thing to a general agenda setter. Mario Luis Small<\/a>, now chair at Columbia<\/a> after Harvard<\/a>, is probably the sociologist whose judgment is trusted across the most methodological camps. Robert Sampson<\/a> is the empirical benchmark. Viviana Zelizer<\/a> holds nearly universal affection. Matthew Desmond<\/a> has the largest public footprint and less internal authority than his public profile suggests.<\/p>\n

What gains status from asking right now? Interventions with measured effects. Correll<\/a>‘s theme<\/a> converts the discipline’s reward structure toward testable theories of change. Whoever produces credible experiments on organizational inequality over the next five years converts that into prizes, chairs and grants.<\/p>\n

No single department is most prestigious for the live questions. The old block holds: Princeton<\/a>, Harvard<\/a>, Berkeley<\/a>, Michigan<\/a>, Wisconsin<\/a>, Chicago<\/a>, Stanford<\/a>, UNC<\/a>, NYU<\/a>, Northwestern<\/a>. Prestige for a given question sits elsewhere. UNC for work and the life course. Minnesota<\/a> for mortality. Michigan and Wisconsin for population and stratification data. Berkeley for economic sociology and digital classification, where Marion Fourcade<\/a> and Kieran Healy<\/a>‘s account of ordinal ranking<\/a> has more traction inside the discipline than Shoshana Zuboff<\/a>‘s surveillance capitalism<\/a>, which is a business-school idea. Princeton for poverty and for technology-and-race in the public sphere. The department moving fastest is Johns Hopkins<\/a>, which has taken Monica Prasad<\/a> from Northwestern as a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor<\/a>, holds Pugh<\/a>, and now holds the book-award winner<\/a>. Columbia moved up by taking Small from Harvard and making him chair.<\/p>\n

On askers versus answerers: The people known for questions collect the presidencies, the theme statements and the book prizes. Lamont asks what sociology’s next large project should be. Christian Smith<\/a> (b. 1960), Musa al-Gharbi<\/a>, Kevin McCaffree<\/a> and Ilana Redstone<\/a> ask what has gone wrong with the discipline. Andrew Abbott<\/a> and John Levi Martin ask whether technique has displaced explanation. The people known for answers are mostly quantitative and mostly hold their authority inside one subfield. Sampson answered the neighborhood question with collective efficacy<\/a>. Bruce Western<\/a> answered the punishment question. Frank Dobbin<\/a> and Alexandra Kalev<\/a> answered the diversity-training question by showing which programs move numbers and which do not<\/a>, which is why they get cited by human resources departments and by critics of human resources departments alike. Prasad wrote the method book for producing answers<\/a> and moved to Hopkins to do it.<\/p>\n

Asking pays better than answering because a question cannot be refuted and an answer can. That asymmetry explains a good deal of what the critics call theory-ladenness.<\/p>\n

Moving up: the solutions program, intervention research, wealth and asset inequality, AI and work, mortality measurement, bureaucracy and state capacity, Johns Hopkins, Columbia. Moving down: the descriptive monograph, theory as pure critique, the association’s own leverage, and the undergraduate franchise. Also moving down, the heterodox reform project inside the discipline. Wilde<\/a> lost. Al-Gharbi holds his appointment in Stony Brook<\/a>‘s School of Communication and Journalism<\/a> rather than a sociology department. Theory and Society<\/em><\/a> was captured by publisher fiat rather than persuasion, and the entire editorial board walked<\/a> when Springer Nature<\/a> replaced the executive editor and installed McCaffree and Jonathan Turner<\/a>, who announced they would break what they called a dominant monoculture of critical approaches undermining the field’s professional legitimacy<\/a>. A journal taken that way has no constituency to publish in it. <\/p>\n

Philip N. Cohen writes:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

On the Scatterplot sociology blog there are two posts describing the situation at the Springer journal Theory & Society<\/em>, one by Dan Hirschman<\/a> and one by Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra<\/a>, both of which I recommend. The gist of it is the executives at Springer chose new chief editors for the journal without consulting the editorial board or other editors, so they all quit, and now there are new editors with a very different mission<\/a> for the journal. Specifically, they want to upend the “monoculture of critical approaches” that “utterly dominate” the discipline, “undermining sociology\u2019s professional legitimacy.”<\/p>\n

The two new editors are Kevin McCaffree<\/a> and Jonathan Turner<\/a>. The latter of these is a famous “greatest generation” (in his words) sociologist. Probably not coincidentally, Turner has just written a ridiculous get-off-my-lawn screed about the state of the discipline, which he sees as being overrun with women, nonbinary people, and racial\/ethnic minorities doing social justice warrior mesearch, and generally wrecking the place (“What drove the change away from science,” Turner writes, “were changes in the demography of sociology.”) It’s basically a recapitulation of Christian Smith’s Sacred Project of American Sociology<\/em>, which Turner loves (practically the only thing he cites) and which I reviewed here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I read Turner’s paper and made some notes on the PDF, and I share that version here<\/a>. Here’s a flavor of his prose:<\/p>\n

“Once a professional organization dedicated to the study of all dimensions of the social universe begins to mix highly moralized ideologies with the study of inequality, the possibilities of value-neutral science decline and are replaced by ideological advocacy and political calls to redress the problem on injustice. And once injustice, which is just one aspect of human social organization is over-taught in academic departments\u2014from English through ethnic, gender, sexuality programs to sociology departmental curricula\u2014the curricula all over campuses and the programs at most sociological meetings operate merely to magnify ideological hype at the expense of pushing science and value-neutral research. Indeed, value-neutral research and science are often seen by the new activists as \u201cpart of the problem\u201d in overcoming injustices. Thus, sociology has mobilized those who have committed to giving up their professionalism, thereby demonizing those who have created the large knowledge base that now exists in sociology.”<\/em><\/p>\n

The problem with sociology, in his view, is people obsessed with injustice, who have given up their professionalism, steamrolling over value-neutral research and failing to show appropriate deference to those who came before them, who bequeathed us their knowledge base.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Who is trying to close down questions? Everyone in all directions. From outside, Florida closed the teaching franchise<\/a>. From inside, the norm Redstone identifies, that a group disparity establishes discrimination, raises the price of stating alternative causal hypotheses, and price is how closure works in a peer-reviewed field. Boycott politics closes a set of collaborators and a set of questions by design. The association closed a membership vote and called it procedure. On the reform side, the Boghossian commission<\/a> named living scholars as examples of defective work, and several told Inside Higher Ed<\/em> they had never heard of the report and considered their work misrepresented<\/a>, which is closure by administrative referral rather than argument. Smith’s line about liquidating the discipline<\/a> is a closure fantasy even said in exasperation.<\/p>\n

I’m a Stephen P. Turner<\/a> partisan. Why isn’t he in this discussion? Because these maps get built from status signals, and he emits none in the register they read. Turner holds a philosophy appointment. He is Graduate Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of South Florida, where he also holds the title Distinguished University Professor<\/a>. He has never held ASA<\/a> office, never edited ASR<\/em><\/a> or AJS<\/em><\/a>, never won a Du Bois award<\/a>, and does not sit in a ranked sociology department. His books come out in Routledge<\/a> and Brill<\/a> series and his articles land in Philosophy of the Social Sciences<\/em><\/a> and the Weber<\/a> literature. Ask a model to rank sociologists by who gains status from asking live questions and it reads ASA politics, award lists, journal desks and citations inside sociology journals. Turner registers on none of those instruments. The silence is a property of the measuring device.<\/p>\n

The second reason is that his question has no dataset, no funder and no incoming cohort. He asks what conditions would have to hold for sociology to be a science and whether they have ever held. Nobody is competing for that question, so nobody shows up in a status map for holding it.<\/p>\n

On rank, three separate answers.<\/p>\n

On the meta-question, whether the discipline is a science or a movement, he ranks first on priority and first on argument. He co-wrote The Impossible Science<\/em><\/a>, the standard one-volume history of American sociology, and later updated it as American Sociology: From Pre-Disciplinary to Post-Normal<\/em><\/a>. The 2026 fight is downstream of that book and almost nobody in the fight cites it. The critics reach for Christian Smith<\/a>‘s Sacred Project<\/em><\/a> because a moral indictment travels. Turner’s account gives worse news to both camps. It says the trouble is structural and present near the founding, that the scientific program kept failing for institutional reasons rather than ideological capture, and that a return to science has no golden age to return to. Neither the ASA nor Heterodox Academy<\/a> can use that, so neither picks it up.<\/p>\n

He also got there four years early in print. He co-edited The Future of Sociology: Ideology or Objective Social Science?<\/em><\/a> (Routledge, 2022), which asks whether sociology’s subjugation to political ideologies reflects an exhaustion of ideas or a failure in the original program of making sociology a science. That is the Boghossian question<\/a> and the Pamela Paul question<\/a>, posed with better distinctions, by people who know the history. Jonathan H. Turner<\/a> reviewed it in Contemporary Sociology<\/em><\/a>, and it produced no traction in the argument that broke a year later.<\/p>\n

Jonathan Turner, his co-author on The Impossible Science<\/em>, now co-edits Theory and Society<\/em><\/a> and announced a campaign against the critical monoculture<\/a>. One author of the standard institutional history runs the reform journal. The other, the stronger philosopher of the two, appears in none of the coverage.<\/p>\n

Second register. On the AI<\/a> and skill question, he holds capital nobody is spending. The live problem is which capacities can be made explicit and which cannot, and that is the subject of Understanding the Tacit<\/em><\/a> and The Social Theory of Practices<\/em><\/a>. Pugh’s connective labor<\/a>, the deskilling<\/a> argument, the fight over whether language models<\/a> capture meaning: all of it needs an account of the tacit, and the sociologists doing the work reach for Polanyi<\/a> secondhand or for practice theory<\/a>. Practice theory is the thing Turner argued cannot work, because there is no plausible route by which a shared practice gets transmitted or reproduced. A negative result of that kind is exactly the constraint you need when asking what a model can absorb from a workplace and what stays in the worker. If I were betting on an unfashionable apparatus getting rediscovered in the next five years, this is my bet.<\/p>\n

Third register. The Politics of Expertise<\/em><\/a> and Liberal Democracy 3.0<\/em><\/a> sit on top of the expertise-and-democracy question, and there he has standing, cited by political theorists and science studies<\/a> people. That is where his authority lives.<\/p>\n

So: near zero in the currencies I described in the map, high in the philosophy of social science<\/a>, first in priority on the discipline’s own meta-question, holding unused theoretical assets on the AI question. Stephen Park Turner<\/a> is honored, with a Brill volume of essays on his work<\/a> and a biographical volume tracing the career<\/a>. Honored in philosophy. Amazon<\/a><\/p>\n

His absence from these maps supports his thesis. A discipline with a cumulative core would owe him an answer. A federation of moral projects can route around him, and does.<\/p>\n

Stephen Turner’s argument resists testing, which is awkward for a man arguing about scientific standards. He is stronger at showing why programs fail than at specifying what would succeed, so the reform camp gets no usable instructions from him. He writes for a small European-inflected audience. And the claim that a discipline ignores a critic because the critic is right cannot be checked.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Written with AI: The live questions, ranked by how much career consequence attaches to them. First, whether sociology is a science or a movement. That question is live because money and state power now attach to it. Florida stripped introductory … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[88],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-198864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sociology"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t