Sociology in America: The Discipline and the Public American Sociological Association, 1988 Presidential Address

When I first began to think about the presidential address, I planned to choose one of the research areas in which I've worked all of my professional life. I considered a paper on Sociology and the City, urban sociology currently being in an exciting intellectual transition, and also one on Poverty and Inequality, a topic about which sociologists have far more to contribute than they now do. I would also have liked to discuss Sociology and the Mass Media, an ever more significant field which still has not received the attention and respect from the discipline that it deserves. Instead of writing a paper that might have been relevant to only some colleagues, however, I chose a topic in which all of us are or should be interested, the discipline.' More particularly, I want to discuss our relations with America's nonsociologists, the lay public: both the very large general public and the smaller well-educated one which does much of the country's professional-level analytic and creative work. Since the lay public includes the country's entire population, less the approximately 20,000 sociologists, my topic is also an intrinsic part of Sociology in America. Although I shall concentrate on what we