Book Review: What Use is Sociology?

Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman, Michael-Hviid Jacobsen and Keith Tester

The London School of Economics and Political Science - May 26, 2014

This conversational book with Zygmunt Bauman looks at the usefulness of sociology with an aim to inspire future conversations about the discipline. Olivia Mena found this book to be a sounding board of the timeless but central questions which social theorists and practitioners must revisit regularly in the everyday practice of the ‘scientific sorcery’ that is sociology. 

What Use is Sociology? Zygmunt Bauman, Michael-Hviid Jacobsen and Keith Tester. Polity Press. March 2014.

Sociology is a part of the social world that it seeks to explore and explain. It is constantly evolving inside its duty to provide orientation in a changing world, and as such, it is usually in a perpetual state of crisis, as it must defend and legitimate its ongoing existence at every turn. It is a quality of thinking that can be used for different ends, but when used at its best, like Zygmunt Bauman does, it is when it is taken up as a tool to where people can make sense of their lives and the world around them and aspire to better possibilities and futurities (p. 6).
Bauman has authored many different works on the subject during his long and illustrious career, from introductory classroom texts like Thinking Sociologically (1990) to insightful histories and insights into the discipline in Towards a Critical Sociology: An Essay on Commonsense and Emancipation (1976) and Collateral Damage (2011), and this latest collaboration is a timely follow-up on his earlier book of conversations with Keith Tester, Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman (2001).
What Use is Sociology? is a series of intimate conversations, which mine Bauman’s more than half a century of experience in the disciple—discussions which revisit truisms of the “sociological imagination” and which are littered with interesting anecdotes and asides particular to Bauman’s own intellectual journey. Its chapters are loosely structured around four core questions: What is sociology? Why do sociology? How to do sociology? What does sociology achieve?

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