The sociological imagination as popular culture

David Beer

Roger Burrows

pp. 233-252

in: Judith Burnett, Syd Jeffers, Graham Thomas (eds), New social connections, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

Abstract

One of us recently contributed to a polemical article claiming to be able to identify a coming crisis in empirical sociology (Savage and Burrows, 2007). The article argued that the jurisdiction of the subject rested on its ability to innovate methodologically in such a manner that it could retain some form of privileged access to knowledge about social processes. It questioned whether this jurisdiction could still pertain in an era of "knowing capitalism" (Thrift, 2005) in which many of the core methodological practices of the subject had been usurped by powerful commercial actors. The article has stimulated an interesting and lively debate (Back, 2008; Crompton, 2008; Hardey and Burrows, 2008; Hollands and Stanley, 2009; Osborne et al., 2008; Savage and Burrows, 2009; Stanley, 2008; Uprichard et al., 2008; Webber, 2009), which will likely be further fuelled by the publication of Savage (2010) which offers a monograph-length dissection of the historical and institutional processes that have presaged this state of affairs. Our ambitions here are far more modest.