16 ● Kate van Heugten and Anita Gibbs
both disciplines pulled them further apart. Sociologists focused on carving out
a place in the universities. Narratives, or historical stories, were constructed to
present particular views of the relationship with social work, sometimes to the
extent of pretending there had never been a relationship. Dominant sociolog-
ical narratives cast economists, political scientists, and social philosophers—
such as Comte (France), Spencer (England), and Ward (United States)—as
forebears. Sociologists pointed (somewhat erroneously) to Weber’s views on
values to insist that real sociologists abstained from practice and from making
value judgments. Sociologists disparaged social workers as meddlers, and gen-
der was invoked to explain disciplinary differentiation, not just in Chicago
but also at other United States universities. It was suggested that social work
was an expression of women’s natural skills and an extension of their domestic
roles, whereas men were expected to be disinterested in family and instead
suited to grand theorizing about society and to scientific research involving
hypothesis testing (Calhoun 2007; Lengermann and Niebrugge 2007).
By the 1930s, academic sociologists in the United States had also shifted
their focus to national rather than local issues and were gaining grants from
national foundations, governments, and industries rather than from local
donations and charities (Bannister 2003). The separation of sociology from
its activist roots further widened (Calhoun 2007), and the idea of a value-
neutral science of society continued to be promoted throughout the 1940s in
most United States sociology departments (Chriss 2002).
New VoicesPublic Sociology
Despite the power of the dominant value-neutral and nonactivist perspectives
among sociologists, pockets of activism persisted. The kinds of topics that
sociologists researched and the concerns that drove students to become inter-
ested in the subject—including poverty, class, gender, and race inequalities—
invited involvement to overcome these injustices. During the 1960s, activist
voices began to reemerge more openly, in the context of civil rights move-
ments worldwide. Educators and citizens became increasingly interested in a
more praxis oriented “public sociology” (Calhoun 2007; Oppenheimer and
Stark 1999). Internationally, new voices emerged in academia and in published
sociological texts, challenging not only the appropriateness but even the
possibility of a value-free sociology.
One of these voices was that of Alvin Gouldner (1962). Gouldner had
been a respected industrial sociologist, based at the University of Washington,
until he began to express views against the notion of a value-free sociology.