Critical engagement in fields of power: Cycles of sociological activism in post-apartheid South Africa

Abstract

In this article, the author argues that socially engaged sociology cannot be understood as a practice isolated in the quadrant of ‘public sociology’ as suggested by Michael Burawoy’s organization of sociology into four distinct quadrants but that it is closely associated with critical policy sociology as well as critical professional sociology. The author uses a case study of hospital transformation in post-apartheid South Africa to demonstrate the way sociological activism cycles through public, policy and professional sociological fields and to explore the nature of each of these fields as contested fields of power characterized by dominant and subordinate sociologies. The author resurrects Eddie Webster’s concept of critical engagement and expands its scope to suggest that the stance of the progressive – or radical – sociologist, who is engaged and committed to subaltern publics but retains a critical independence, is reproduced in the field of professional sociology in the form of what Burawoy calls critical sociology and in the field of policy sociology as critical policy sociology. The latter is a possibility that cannot be entertained in the Burawoy model, where policy sociology occupies a quadrant constituted by instrumentality and a lack of reflexivity. The practice of critical engagement, then, has to be understood as combining public sociology, policy sociology and critical sociology in a practice that may produce new knowledge that enables a more complex comprehension of domination across these fields, the better to challenge it.