Below is the opening paragraphs to The Mainstreaming of Sociology by Terry Leahy.
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I entered the profession of sociology in 1973 when I got my first lectureship at the university of New South Wales. In 2014, I attended two major conferences of sociologists, the ISA (International Sociological Association) conference in Tokyo in June and the TASA (Australian Sociological Association) conference in Adelaide in early December. This paper reflects on the changes that have taken place in the political tone of sociology over this period.
Keynote addresses for Sociologists
I have selected three presentations from the keynote addresses at these conferences to characterize the dominant position taken by the discipline today. To summarize, this is a critique of neoliberalism, with a political program supporting a variant of the welfare state or social democratic model. Overall, what is envisaged is the maintenance of the capitalist economy, more adequate social welfare, secure employment and environmental reform. Usually this is presented as a radical new suggestion rather than as a return to the policies of the past. While I have clearly ignored a number of the keynote presentations at these conferences, these are the keynotes that most clearly tackled global questions concerning the political orientation of the discipline. There was one exception to this dominant political position in the presentation by Erik Olin Wright (at the Japanese conference), which I will come back to in the final section of this paper. All the papers referred to here can be viewed on YouTube.
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