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32. Sociology
If the applied ethics discipline examines
which social norms and standards can and
ought to be applied for everyday practical
moral questions, sociology studies exam-
ines the general condition and varieties of
social order and its relationship to the asso-
ciated issues. From the sociological point of
view, this elevates apprehending the general
problem of social order and its relationship
with social norms into a necessary condi-
tion for understanding and answering these
questions.
The applied dimension of ethics has always
been a part of sociology. This has been true
also more generally for social science, whose
development into discrete organised and insti-
tutionalised scientific disciplines has been
accompanied by debate over the relationship
between scientific knowledge and political/
social participation. Indeed, the emergence
and maturation of sociology was not solely an
intellectual endeavour; this was, in addition,
a socially and politically motivated move-
ment to ward off social unrest and instability
in the aftermath of the French, American,
and Industrial Revolutions. Thus, it arose in
response to the problem of order in so-called
modern, capitalist societies (Bannister 2003).
However great the variation between thinkers
and in the contexts from which and within
which sociology developed, conceptions of
stability, change, continuity, and the exist-
ence of society in general were at the heart of
its development.
This brief and necessarily selective
entry approaches the relationship between
sociology and applied ethics mostly from
a classical perspective. This is because the
history and origins of sociology are so closely
bound up with the general question of order
and the resulting social norms at its centre.
Accordingly, sociology can be reconstructed
as a science of norms in aims of under-
standing the normative preconditions for the
general phenomenon of social order (how
things ‘are’). This thread connects the classic
works of sociology presented here but also
weaves in philosophy. What, again, could
be called deviation from social order lies
behind sociology as a normative science: this
field delves into social contradictions, con-
flicts, and heterogeneity, thereby also calling
on its practitioners to participate in society
(how things ‘ought to be’). The difficulty
of drawing a distinction between ‘norma-
tive’ and ‘scientific’ sociology is highlighted
through these perspectives. After all – as
sociology itself would say – there are no
non-social yardsticks for evaluating practical
ethics questions.
Background
Sociology has its origins in the Enlightenment
and moral philosophy, political economy,
history, and the natural sciences (e.g., Maus
1962; Swingewood 1991). The more general
term ‘social science’ entered Western vocab-
ulary at the time of the French Revolution.
It entailed an attempt to comprehend the
forces of social cohesion, their instability,
and progress at a level far more fundamen-
tal than mere politics or individuals’ psy-
chology (Porter & Ross 2003). From the
Enlightenment point of view, social science
was born as rational emancipation from the
feudal and divine order with the idea that the
natural-scientific and historical worldviews
and methods could be extended to politics,
economy, and ethics. After all, before the
eighteenth century, ‘Almost any interpreta-
tion of man … presumed an understanding
of the biblical story of creation, and of doc-
trines of sin and salvation’ (Porter 2003: 15).
Enlightenment philosophy suggested that
history would be produced, and the present
administered rationally, by not divine powers
but the people themselves, who share the
right to be free from oppression.
The concepts of ‘society’ and ‘social’
gained popularity in France and Scotland
in the 1760s. Sociology would come to
understand both of them as expressions of
normative human conduct and social order.
These notions developed in parallel with,
for example, French physiocrats’ articulation
of ‘moral and political sciences’ (Heilbron
2003: 41). For the Scottish Enlightenment,
again, the project was to translate moral phi-
losophy into empirical science and to under-
stand the histories of civil society as ‘natural
histories of man in his social state’ (2003:
45).
Prominent eighteenth-century Scottish phi-
losopher David Hume insisted that societies’
contracts and rules, with the corresponding
understandings of what is good and right, are
based on customs and conventions rather than
some natural law. Knowledge of these and
230 Concise encyclopedia of applied ethics in the social sciences
Olli Herranen
the reasoning of the moral subjects, as the
subtitle of his A Treatise of Human Nature
(2004 [1739]) suggests, would be acquired
via an experimental method. When Adam
Smith, another prominent Scot, presented his
most famous political-economy principle of
the ‘invisible hand’, he too attempted to
show how individual actions could promote
the public good irrespective of the intent.
The peaceful exchange and pursuit of profit
in an industrialising commercial society
with well-developed division of labour, he
contended in his Wealth of Nations (1776),
could be expected to end up both promoting
advancement of the entire society irrespective
of intent and, thereby, operating as an engine
of historical social development. These
notions that were pivotal to the birth of the
social sciences combined awareness of the
customs and sentiments behind the contracts
and morals with a perspective from which
the developing division of labour, with its
unintended consequences, propels humans’
historical trajectory.
It was the jurist, philosopher, and man of
letters Baron de Montesquieu, however, who
was seen by the founding figure of sociology,
Émile Durkheim, as the greatest sociologist
of the eighteenth century, though not the
only one. According to fellow Frenchman
Durkheim, Montesquieu with his The Spirit
of the Laws (1748) became the first to lay
down ‘the fundamental principles of social
science’, with an appreciation for the ‘vari-
ability, complexity[,] interdependence[, and]
specificity of social phenomena’ (Lukes 1985
[1973]: 278, 279). Montesquieu portrayed
society as a structural whole by incorporating
an understanding of the general social laws
with sensitivity for the specific causes behind
historical changes and particular social phe-
nomena. He paid attention to the principles
of social life and the general factors contrib-
uting to history and to moral and physical
nature. Still, matters of social progress and
the conflicting forces behind them remained
a blind spot for Montesquieu, because of his
positioning in the feudal world.
Another blind spot for most social thinkers
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was
women’s rights. One voice, that of English
writer, philosopher, and pioneering feminist
Mary Wollstonecraft in her A Vindication
of the Rights of Woman (1792), repeatedly
pleaded the case of ‘one half of the human
species’, oppressed for reasons similar to
those behind African sugar plantation slaves
seemingly existing solely ‘to sweeten the
cup of man’ (Wollstonecraft 2014 [1792]:
174). By drawing together elements of the
Enlightenment spirit and educational and
epistemological philosophy with English
poetry and moral theology, she promoted
women’s rights as human rights at a time
when the idea of universal human rights was
a radical notion. Her Vindication, one of the
few female-penned texts to have become rec-
ognised as a Western classic, strongly influ-
enced several early sociological thinkers’
conceptualisations of the sexes. Regrettably,
their output has not always reflected this
contribution by one of the most important
figures in cultivating feminism, for reasons
that have nothing to do with philosophical
argumentation (Botting 2014).
These various inroads notwithstanding,
only in the nineteenth century did the term
‘society’ gain the meaning of ‘a dynamic,
progressive, possibly unstable entity that
was, in a way, more fundamental than the
state’ (Porter 2003: 33). This was because
the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, while
emphasising customs, conventions, contracts,
rational governance, and individual-level
interests, could not provide an explanation
for social phenomena or the ‘social’ per
se, let alone fully appreciate social con-
flict. The nineteenth century also brought
a break with physics, whereupon the focus
of social science began shifting from that
arena toward biology’s key concepts – adap-
tation, function, specialisation, etc., with
explicit reference to evolutionary theory. For
the precursors to sociology, ‘society’ and
‘the social’ came to represent the historically
adaptive organising principles of modern
societies with function-linked needs, a highly
specialised division of labour, and other
aspects of non-feudal life. Although their
thoughts diverged greatly in many respects,
Karl Marx, Auguste Comte, and Herbert
Spencer, who had a vast impact on sociology,
all were influenced by natural-scientific ideas
(evolution-related ones especially). They
strove to venture beyond the ‘economic’
and ‘political’ to understand the forces
behind these – forces evading the naked eye
(Bannister 2003; Porter 2003; Ross 2003).
In sum: While modern societies are gov-
erned and held together without a religious
set of values, social contracts or utilitarian
principles of individual-specific gains did
Sociology 231
Olli Herranen
not provide a plausible reason for the evident
social order. Norms offered one of the soci-
ological solutions central to tackling the
problem of order.
Sociology as a science of norms
As an academic discipline, sociology arose
in response to the modern society’s problem
of order as related concerns coalesced in the
late nineteenth century. However, the general
problem of order had been formulated much
earlier – by Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan
(1651). In the seventeenth century, Hobbes
asked how social order is possible in condi-
tions wherein ‘two men desire the same thing,
which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy’
(1996 [1651]: 87). In the ‘natural’ state of
man, per Hobbes, everyone wants things
of which only a few can partake, and this
results in a war of all against all: everyone
seeks command over the means, ultimately
by force or fraud. Through his question per-
taining to the link between allocation of
scarce resources and social order, Hobbes
formulated not only one of the most impor-
tant problems for classical political economy
and modern economics but also for sociol-
ogy. In modern terms, what keeps people
in check and upholds order in conditions of
divine enchant ment evaporating and societies
growing increasingly atomised, differenti-
ated, and commercial?
Hobbes’ solution was the social contract.
In short, rational actors relinquish a portion
of their sovereignty and, in exchange, receive
security for their life. That is, people make
a deal with the absolute sovereign, the state,
to secure the general order, since such a con-
tract gives them more than they lose. While
early sociologists fully appreciated Hobbes
looking at ‘the problem with a clarity which
has never been surpassed’ (Parsons 1949
[1937]: 93), dissatisfaction with any solution
that admits only rational calculation based
on self-interest gave them impetus to seek an
alternative via norms and values.
In his article ‘On the Relation between
Sociology and Ethics’, Danish philosopher
Harald Høffding (1905: 177) brings out how
the ideals of ethics ‘are themselves effects
and symptoms of social condition, results of
social development’. He saw a definite rela-
tionship between social development and the
development of values in society. By focus-
ing on social conditions, sociology offers
a perspective on ethics that attends specifi-
cally to how ‘A thing which at first had value
as a means, may later on acquire immediate
value – value as an end in itself’ (1905: 179).
The task of sociology, here, is to elucidate the
prerequisites for social development that is
based on transformation of values as means
into values as ends.
The most famous formulation of this notion
of values as an end in themselves comes to
us from an early German sociologist, Max
Weber. He defined the value-rational action
to be ‘determined by a conscious belief in
the value for its own sake of some ethical,
aesthetic, religious, or other form of behav-
ior, independently of its prospects of success’
(Weber 1978 [1922]: 24–25). This articula-
tion distinguishes from instrumental ration-
ality, where the latter involves calculated
use of the environment and other human
beings as means to rationally pursued ends.
Economic market action serves as a prime
example. In contrast to instrumental orienta-
tion, value-rationality involves commitment
to shared ideals of something that is consid-
ered good and meaningful in itself, irrespec-
tive of the possibility of translating these ends
into calculated profits or other gains.
In Weber's most famous work, The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
(2014 [1930]), he sets out to explain the
mechanism behind Western capitalism in
terms of religious ethics that render the con-
nection between ethical reality and ethics as
a research object visible. He did not confine
his scientific explanation efforts to the moral
order, however. He is remembered also for
his thoughts on scientism and its normativ-
ity. His famous lecture titled ‘Science as
a Vocation’, given in 1917, features the claim
that ‘politics has no place in the lecture
room as far as the lecturer is concerned’. His
explanation is that ‘the genuine teacher will
take good care not to use his position at the
lectern to promote any particular point of
view, whether explicitly or by suggestion’
(Weber 2004 [1919]: 20). Still, in an essay
written earlier, in 1904, about ‘objectivity’
in social science, he denies any possibility
of objective science – ‘all knowledge of
cultural reality … is always knowledge from
particular points of view’, so the events of
the real world must always be understood in
the context of cultural values (Weber 1949
[1904]: 81–82). An understanding wherein
stances to the subject matter may be derived
232 Concise encyclopedia of applied ethics in the social sciences
Olli Herranen
from the ‘facts themselves’ is only ‘due to the
naïve self-deception of a specialist’ who is
unaware of his own, unconscious evaluative
ideas (1949: 82).
Durkheim is the classic sociologist who
most resolutely sought an answer to the
problem of order by turning to the norma-
tive nature of societies, which also could be
investigated scientifically. As he stated when
writing the preface to the first edition of his
The Division of Labour in Society, ‘We do
not wish to deduce morality from science, but
to constitute the science of morality, which
is very different. Moral facts are phenomena
like any others. They consist of rules for
action that are recognisable by certain dis-
tinctive characteristics … human volition is
always linked to some external forces’ (1984
[1893]: xxv). In the preface to the second
edition, he states that a political society gives
birth to restricted groups, whereby attach-
ments form between its members, and ‘this
attachment that transcends the individual, this
subordination of the particular to the general
interest, is the very well-spring of all moral
activity’ (1984 [1893]: xliii).
For him, the utilitarian principles of polit-
ical economy and the economics of his time
fundamentally lacked a connection to ‘the
rules that function before our very eyes’
(1982 [1895]: 66). The deceitfulness of
these rules, social norms, is that, though
regulating our most ordinary behaviour, they
usually stay invisible to us until we challenge
them. Durkheim’s meaning here is that if we
conform to the prevailing ways of thinking
and behaving, we do not encounter their
coercive nature; we confront it only when –
and as soon as – we try to resist, when ‘they
impose themselves upon’ us (1982 [1895]:
51). The research object of sociology should
be the mechanisms by which we integrate
ourselves with the collective and hence into
the normative regulation of our social lives
that serves as a foundation also for the current
moral order.
Before the Second World War, (in)famous
American structural-functionalist Talcott
Parsons took on the task of uniting European
and American social science under the rubric
of sociology by producing a unified, holistic
theory base. This project was, on one hand,
anchored in the problem of order and, on
the other, built around the idea of normative
integration of society and its institutions,
carrying Durkheim’s project to its logical
conclusion. In his own words, Parsons sought
to show how ‘diverse authors, who were
contemporaries but had little or no influence
upon one another’s work in general social
science, converged upon the same basic con-
ceptual scheme’ (Parsons & Johnson 1975:
81). The work of sociologists Durkheim,
Weber, and Wilfredo Pareto was brought
together with economist Alfred Marshall’s
thinking in his most well-known work, The
Structure of Social Action (1949 [1937]). The
resulting synthesised theory formed the basis
for Parsons’ more comprehensive theory of
structures and functioning of modern soci-
eties, presented in his post-war The Social
System (1991 [1951]), addressing what we
might call the theory of peaceful reproduction
of society. Two years after its publication, he
presented advances related to the integration
of economic and social theory via reference
to ‘one set of fundamental variables of the
social system which are just as fundamental
in its economic aspect as in any other, and of
course vice versa’ (Parsons 1991 [1953]: 16).
Parsons found social norms to be stand-
ards that organise collective behaviour (1991
[1951]). When they have become so widely
shared that they are independent of indi-
viduals’ intent or will, they have gained
structural properties. How these norms
actually work is another question entirely,
boiling down to how the mundane relations
between people are practically organised.
Here, values come into play. They manifest
the normative cultural standards for accept-
able behaviour, but also incorporate some
profound individual-specific motivations into
those standards. They create attachment, as
Durkheim highlighted, that binds together the
members of a society or community by sup-
plying a shared cultural code of conduct and
a reference point for appreciation. The nub
of the matter is that the general social order
we perceive ‘before our very eyes’ would be
impossible without the organising standards,
since they inform us about what is acceptable,
appropriate, and even desirable.
People are not born and raised in a vacuum.
According to Parsons (1991 [1951]), our
historical process of becoming civilised
individuals includes socially learning the
proper ways of behaving. This is governed by
a social performance control mechanism that
is a part of our everyday interaction. Hence,
becoming and staying a member of society
operates through processes of socialisation
Sociology 233
Olli Herranen
and social control. These processes internalise
social norms but also constantly govern those
norms in connection with mundane social
relations and cultural practices. So-called
third parties, usually the state machinery of
violence, safeguard the most institutionalised
norms, expressed in laws, the Constitution,
etc. Obedience is rewarded with continuity
that goes largely unnoticed amid day-to-day
life – again, it is change or deviance from the
norm that grabs our attention. We know how
to play our part just as well as we know what
to expect from the others, even though we
would not be able to enumerate all the rules
we follow.
When stepping out into the streets, at least
of so-called modern developed societies, we
do not encounter chaos. We face relatively
predictable circumstances without fear of
being assaulted by passers-by. This is the
order Hobbes meant but also the one that
the classical sociologists were reluctant to
explain in terms of selfish interests alone.
In sociology, the social integration theory
of order examines the non-individual-based
foundations of norms and thus relates peo-
ple’s actions to the prevailing sets of mean-
ings and values. Throughout the twentieth
century, these ideas and the processes they
imply developed into theories of various dif-
ferentiated branches of sociology, such as
phenomenological sociology, ethnomethod-
ology (e.g., Heritage 1984), and sociology of
knowledge. The last of these most famously
gave birth to social constructionism (Berger
& Luckmann 1991 [1966]), with its critical
variants (e.g., Haslanger 2012).
As values operate as a yardstick for col-
lective behaviour, they also can be seen
to operate as applied ethics for social life.
They enable the peaceful reproduction
of our everyday social conditions. While
social norms reproduce the conditions for
our peaceful coexistence, they also tend to
reproduce the asymmetrical power positions
and subordination structures along the way,
with their various underlying contradictions
and conflicts.
Sociology as a normative science
To understand the sources of that social
conflict, we must return to the Hobbesian
problem of order. One of its key implications
is that we live in a world of differences: not
everyone can always have everything. The
main dispute about these differences pertains
to the factors that operate behind them. The
general sociological point of view is that
these differences are socially manufactured
and regulated. Whereas, for example, eco-
nomics would claim that the scarce resources
and positions ought to be (and may indeed
be) allocated efficiently, sociology tells us
that even the criterion for efficiency is a nor-
mative matter (e.g., Meyer & Rowan 1977).
From the normativity perspective, the distri-
bution of resources in practice proceeds from
the socially constructed rules by which the
social production is organised. In this, it oper-
ates in parallel to the principles for how roles,
statuses, and positions within this production
are to be distributed.
The scientific and political programme of
Karl Marx is probably the most famous in
its aspirations to transcend the distinction
between ‘is’ and ‘ought’. Marx and Marxist
theory have also been cited as a prime
example of normative thinking in the ‘ought’
sense (Abend 2008). This is fairly easy to
see since one can find several positions in
his oeuvre where he distances himself from
a so-called value-neutral position. According
to his famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach,
‘The philosophers have only interpreted the
world in various ways; the point is to change
it’ (Marx 2010 [1845]: 5).
Marx aimed simultaneously to understand
the progress of human history and to agitate
for political change through materialist cri-
tique of philosophy and political economy.
In their ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’,
Marx and his close colleague Friedrich Engels
(2010 [1848]: 482) state that ‘The history of
all hitherto existing society is the history of
class struggles’. They go on to describe the
bourgeoisie as having ‘created more massive
and more colossal productive forces than
have all preceding generations together’.
Those forces and the production relations
behind them are akin to a ‘sorcerer, who is no
longer able to control the powers of the nether
world whom he has called up by his spells’
(2010 [1848]: 489). The analysis culminated
in Marx’s Capital, with discussion of how
capitalist production is set in motion primar-
ily because of profit-making – not human
needs – creating a unique set of self-sufficient
dynamics that is prone to conflicts and crises.
Profits in capitalism ultimately are made
through exploiting the working class within
a competitive system that is beyond even the
234 Concise encyclopedia of applied ethics in the social sciences
Olli Herranen
capitalists’ control. Marx hence found the
uncontrollable and unstable social dynamics
of capitalism to stem from the combination of
class struggle and capital’s logic of competi-
tiveness (2010 [1867]).
Marx’s work inspired social and labour
movements around the world but also served
as inspiration for twentieth-century state
socialisms. Moreover, his ideas had a sig-
nificant impact on the critical and conflict
theories of the social order in modern capital-
ist societies. Whereas the European Marxist
theorists developed philosophical-historical
social critique, the so-called conflict theo-
rists characterised the structural-functionalist
portrayal of society as overly abstract, static,
and conservative. Parsons was a lightning rod
for this criticism. The latter theorists saw him
as blind ‘to a world of alienation and class
struggles [as] unpleasant facts of real life’
within his ‘integrated and equilibrated social
system’ (Dahrendorf 1958: 120), and struc-
tural functionalism as a whole was accused
of ‘inability to deal with change, especially
change resulting from [a social system’s]
internal contradictions’ (Therborn 1976:
16). American sociologist C. Wright Mills
concluded that, at the most general level,
Parsons’ ‘grand sociological theory’ – along-
side other, similar theories – could easily end
up legitimating the prevailing order since it
does not enable efficient criticism thereof.
Mills’ The Sociological Imagination (2010
[1959]: 23) refers to Parsons’ theory as an
‘elaborate and arid formalism’ that fails to
deal with the central problems facing society.
For Mills, this represented sociology failing
as a social science in that the science held
no utility for ordinary citizens’ fight for their
rights or as a tool for self-understanding.
Until things thus came to an end in the
1960s, the Americans had successfully built
a somewhat unified sociological commu-
nity where Parsons was a leading figure.
This development was supported by the
anti-Communist climate of the Cold War era.
One of its manifestations was the establish-
ment of the National Science Foundation’s
‘official standard for social research of
“objectivity, verifiability, and generality”,
which tended in practice to mean methods
modelled on the natural sciences and polit-
ically acceptable practical purposes’ (Ross
2003: 320). In this time of Americanisation
of social science, this also meant inscribing
American values into European settings and
other parts of the social-scientific world (for
a more detailed account of the post-Second
World War history of sociology, see, for
example, Münch 1991; Platt 2010).
Criticism of structural-functional-
ist theories more generally stemmed from
observing various ways in which a ‘white
middle-class man’ portrayal of the empiri-
cal reality obscures underlying conflict and
growing social heterogeneity. Parsons (1949)
responded to these concerns by pointing out
that the roots of inequality go beyond con-
ventional conceptions of class structure and
conflicts and that attention must be extended
to encompass, for example, kinship also. He
saw the mounting inequality in American
societies also as deeply intertwined with reli-
gious, ethnic, and racial diversity, drawing
from the principles of value integration for
his analysis (Parsons & Johnson 1975). This
response proved insufficient. In Europe, the
rise of socialism and fascism had already
shuttered several sociology departments
and pressed others into service to legitimise
state ideology, and fractures in American
sociology followed in the mid-1960s. The
above-mentioned criticisms, in combination
with such events as the 1968 New Left
student revolt, American embroilment in
the Vietnam War, and the sexual liberation
movement, culminated in the eventual down-
fall of structural functionalism.
Another profound influence given impetus
by the events of 1968 was third-wave fem-
inism. It had a huge impact on the rise
of feminist sociology and, through this, on
male-dominated academia and academic
knowledge. In addition to drawing broader
attention to contemporary gender inequalities
in academic discourse and general public
debate, it produced feminist rereadings of
sociological canon that homed in on women’s
position as presented in the classic works but
also on the ways in which all of the grand nar-
ratives are gendered constructions in one way
or another (Delamont 2003; Skeggs 2008).
Parsons was again in the line of fire. In her
The Feminine Mystique (1963: 121), Betty
Friedan states that Parsons’ theory leaves ‘no
alternative for a woman other than the role
of “housewife”’, whereby sexual segregation
becomes a ‘functional’ feature. Moreover,
many authors of classic works, several male
sociological thinkers of the twentieth century
among them, have been criticised for con-
crete actions against women. Sara Delamont,
Sociology 235
Olli Herranen
writing in Feminist Sociology (2003: 98–99),
cites the following problem as plaguing the
classics:
Women in the European countries where soci-
ology began after 1770 were denied access
to formal education, could not attend … uni-
versities, and had no scholarly occupations
available to them. Female contemporaries of
Comte, Marx, Weber, and Durkheim were
less likely to be able to invent and develop
sociology. It is unreasonable, and unschol-
arly, to expect a twenty-first century sensitiv-
ity to gender issues in eighteenth-century and
nineteenth-century people.
Delamont presents us with a difficult ques-
tion: how should we deal with the classical
canon, which is integral to the pillars of
our discipline, as discussed here? History
has already been formed, and some of the
most pertinent questions for sociology as an
academic discipline were presented and scru-
tinised by men at a time that did no favours
to women – or to numerous other groups. We
must continue the critique and the debate,
but the child should not go with the bathing
water, which is precisely what happened in
the wholesale abandonment of Parsons and
structural functionalism. Perhaps Mills, from
the inherently limited perspective of a male
sociologist and a human more generally, can
guide us with the rule of thumb that was
carved on his tombstone: ‘I have tried to be
objective. I do not claim to be detached.’
This idea, which permeates his oeuvre, holds
merit far beyond it, in that social-scientific
research must be truthful and committed to
the struggle for a just world (Suoranta 2017).
This could be seen as a principle of applied
ethics for sociology.
Conclusion: applying ethics in
sociological practice
Today, sociology is among the most encour-
aging platforms for people interested in a
‘home discipline’ for social-scientific
research and participating in resolving practi-
cal ethics questions. One eminently practical
way of gaining familiarity with the field in this
respect is via American sociologist Michael
Burawoy’s (2005) typology, wherein soci-
ology is a professional, critical, policy, and
public science. Professional sociology could
be described as the mainstream ‘scientific’
approach, whereas the critical arm of sociol-
ogy examines the explicit, implicit, norma-
tive, and descriptive foundations of society
and (reflexively) of sociology. Marxism and
other critically oriented approaches fall under
this category, which is usually regarded as
‘normative’. Policy-oriented sociology, in
turn, usually serves clients who have com-
missioned solutions to policy problems and,
finally, public sociology works in close con-
nection with various publics, engaging in
conversation with them for mutual education.
It also serves an integrative function, apply-
ing the results from the other branches of the
discipline and operating alongside them for
the benefit of the entire profession (2005).
This typology may be used for structuring
sociology’s relationship to practical ethical
questions.
This short entry critically evaluated the
meaning of ‘normative’ and its acritical use
as a synonym for pursuing political purposes
as opposed to ‘value-neutral’ science. It was
further argued that it is the social norms
whereby the peaceful coexistence in modern,
highly differentiated capitalist societies is
arranged. Going about their life, the people
still fulfil their purpose in this highly spe-
cialised division of labour because they have
shared organising standards to follow. Norms
and values serve as yardsticks for what is
good, appropriate, and to be desired, but
they simultaneously reproduce and support
oppressive and inequality-rife structures/
practices of various sorts. From the sociolog-
ical angle, the important thing is that they are
not eternal any more than they are objective
in the natural-scientific sense. They are social
at base, so they can be changed.
Olli Herranen
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