Who Pays for Sociology?

Who Pays for Sociology, Who Wants Sociological Research? Students are often a bit perplexed about who the hell sociologists are anyway, and who pays them. So - a few remarks on this.

Many, if not most sociologists work in universities. This means a lot of them will be university teachers who do as much research as they can on top of a teaching job. Others work in research institutions - which are often themselves parts of universities. You might find other people in a range of professions who could reasonably call themselves sociologists as well. And sociology can work its way into other areas of life e.g. politicians or journalists might come up with sociological findings. The book No Logo - which has become very well known and features on many university reading lists, was in fact written by a journalist, Naomi Klein. It’s not necessarily the most rigorously sociological of books, but I think its fair to see it in broad terms as a contribution to sociology.

Generally though, sociologists will work as I’ve described above. So who pays them?

University lecturers are of course paid by their university. But what about the research? That needs to be paid for too. Research costs money - usually to pay interviewers, data analysts, administrative staff, and the researchers themselves. Most sociological research in the UK therefore, is conducted by academic researchers, who are either full time researchers or university lecturers. They get funding to pay for their research, in the main, by applying to funding bodies. These are institutions with money! They are often government sponsored - like the ESRC. The disadvantage here for the sociologists is that bodies like the ESRC only want to fund certain types of research on certain topics. If the topic you happen to be interested in is not of interest to the ESRC and the government, then you’ll probably have to look elsewhere. There are also private research funds, set up by philanthropists, like the Leverhulme Fund, or charities like the Joseph Rowntree Trust - you can easily look these up on the web.

Just one more point to bear in mind. Once you start looking at sociology at this level, you’ll see that its not the case that all sociological research is carried out by people with degrees in sociology, nor is it published in academic journals with the word ‘sociology’ in the title.

There’s a huge amount of sociological research going on which gets hidden from the view of students and teachers. Take the Medical Research Council - MRC - for example. The link will take you to the page of the Director of the MRC, Professor Diana Kuh. As you can see, she has a degree in Economics and a PhD which is hard to categorise! Look around the MRC site - and the range of work they do covers medicine, psychology, economics and sociology. Much work like this may lack the sort of theory which many sociologists like to get involved with, but its still broadly sociological in its character.

Sociology has evolved quite a bit since the 1970s and 80s when some of the main AS/A2 textbooks - or the sources of many of the current texts - were written. The sort of research described here can be criticised on various grounds. But it seems to me that its important for students to see that sociology is taken seriously in the wider society, and that research is often interdisciplinary in nature. Don’t be a narrowminded sociologist - take in ideas, methods, and skills from a range of disciplines.