The Future of Sociology

Like a hurricane, third-wave marketisation is picking up velocity and destroying societies in its path, destroying the very grounds upon which sociology grows. Sociology and humanity have a common interest in upholding civil society, and keeping state and market at bay. Working with Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation, I diagnose three waves of marketisation associated with the commodification of labour, money and land, generating counter-movements at local, national and global levels. I argue that sociology is reshaped with each wave: in the first, it is utopian; in the second, it is driven by policy concerns; whereas emerging with the third wave marketisation is public sociology. The possibilities and challenges of public sociology as well as its relation to policy, critical and professional sociology are the subjects of this paper.