What's Wrong with Sociology?

What's Wrong with Sociology? edited by Stephen Cole. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2001. 372 pp. $39.95 cloth. ISBN: 0-7658-0039-X.

The dust jacket of What's Wrong with Sociology? is portentous. It suggests the imminent disappearance of sociology as an intellectual project. That is neither editor Stephen Cole's conclusion nor the summary theme of this collection of previously published essays of opinion. Perhaps a more fitting jacket design would show the word, sociology, gradually disintegrating rather than disappearing below the horizon like a setting sun.

This is a provocative book, or at least it should become so. It should stir intellectual debate and, if I dare say, some research on the discipline. If it does not, then perhaps the sun truly has set and no one really cares (or perhaps, no one has noticed).

As Cole admits at the outset, this is a highly personal collection of papers about the discipline. He edited and published many of them in 1994 for Sociological Forum, the journal of the Eastern Regional Sociological Association. Only two of the sixteen (plus introduction) chapters were commissioned by Cole for What's Wrong with Sociology, so nearly all of these ideas, these various perspectives on the discipline and on its coherence and vitality, have been in play for almost a decade. Taken as a whole, they doubtless represent Cole's own assessment of the current state of the discipline. It is a disquieting assessment and begs for deeper analysis and understanding. As Cole recognizes, the intellectual and institutional stakes are too significant to ignore the challenge of the book's question or to dismiss its rather somber outlook.

Cole, a sociologist of science, tends to evaluate sociology in...