Australian Sociology

Fragility, Survival, Rivalry

K. Harley, G. Wickham

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137379757
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Battered and bruised by injuries (often self-inflicted) sustained in the first half of the twentieth century since 1950 sociology in Australia has fought its way back into the academic mainstream. This has not been easy; its fortunes seem forever mixed – good in some places and dismal in others. But it has proved itself resilient, it is a survivor.

1

Introduction: The Main Themes and the Structure of the Book

Abstract: Sociology has operated in Australia in one form or another for just over 100 years. It can be said to have been a formidable discipline only at some times and only in some places. Fragility is the book’s first theme. The second theme is survival. Fragility, while a handicap, can also be a spur to continued existence. The discipline has shown a remarkable ability to keep going, even when some university authorities and commentators were ready to read it the last rites. The third theme is rivalry. While some rivalry within Australian sociology has proven decidedly unhelpful to the discipline’s long-term survival, other instances of rivalry have actually helped to make it stronger, whereby rivals have ended up co-operating to the benefit of the whole.

Keywords: Australian sociology; history of sociology; fragility; rivalry; survival

Harley, Kirsten and Gary Wickham. Australian Sociology: Fragility, Survival, Rivalry. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137379757.0004.

Three themes in tension

Sociology has operated in Australia in one form or another for just over 100 years.¹ It can be said to have been a formidable discipline only at some times (most of them in the period after 1945, which is the focus of this series) and only in some places. To illustrate this point we offer the following contrast. On the one hand sociology is currently flourishing at the university where it began its Australian life, the University of Sydney (over 1000 students took the ‘Introduction to Sociology’ offering in the first half of 2013). This situation is especially noteworthy because this is an institution where the discipline lacked a fully fledged presence between the mid-twenties and the early nineties. In the mid-twenties it was denied the possibility of departmental status (as it was at the only other Australian university in which it had an early entry, the University of Melbourne). On the other side of the contrast, the number of students who took the main first-year sociology offering at Murdoch University in Western Australia in 2013 was half of what it was in 2002.

As we see it, then, the main direction given by the evidence on the history of the discipline in Australia, when it is examined over the full 100-year timeframe, is that sociology’s life in this country has been and continues to be a fragile one. Nonetheless, while this is the main direction given by the evidence, it is not the only direction. As such, we are making fragility one theme among three, albeit the dominant one.

We will return to the roots of the fragility later in the chapter, where we will recount the discipline’s troubled history in Australia up to the late 1950s and compare this history to developments in America and England across the same period. Our two more pressing tasks are, first, to say something about the other two themes and, secondly, to say something about the structure of the book.

Our second theme qualifies the fragility – the theme of survival. We do not want our readers to get the impression that sociology in Australia remains so fragile that it might be blown over in the next strong breeze. It has a fragile past and, mostly, a fragile present, but counter evidence, like the 2013 first-year enrolments at the University of Sydney and plenty of other evidence to be presented throughout our book, lets us know that fragility, while a handicap, can also be a spur to continued existence. The discipline has shown a remarkable ability to keep going, albeit in different forms, even when some university authorities and some commentators were ready to read it the last rites. To paraphrase the Chumbawamba song of 1977, when Australian sociology gets knocked down it gets up again. It might have staggered at times – for instance, when the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) recently phased out its separate sociology offering, starting in 2008 (it is now gone) – but it has always struggled to its feet before the count, even maintaining a presence of sorts in that particular institution, within criminology and other sympathetic disciplines.

The third theme, rivalry, is one that seems at first glance to lean more towards the fragility theme than the survival theme. And, indeed, some of the rivalry within Australian sociology which we will describe in coming chapters has proven decidedly unhelpful to the discipline’s long-term survival. But there are also instances of rivalry which have actually helped to make sociology stronger, whereby rival sociologists and rival departments have ended up co-operating to the benefit of the whole.

The structure of the book

The book will comprise this and five other chapters, each of which is to be focused on the period 1959–2014, and most of which will feature comparisons with America and/or Britain. In Chapter 2 we will present a general overview of the discipline in Australia across this period, with regular reference made to the important early developments. Among the matters to be covered are the funding background, the growth of university sociology departments (we will use the nomenclature ‘department’ throughout the book to cover any stand-alone formal sociology offering with dedicated staff; in fact the nomenclature varies, such that some ‘departments’ are in fact ‘programs’, some ‘majors’, etc.), the uneven growth of student enrolments in sociology, the uneven growth of staff numbers in sociology, the gender balance (a trend towards feminization), and the trials and tribulations of the professional sociology association. At its core this material speaks to the theme of survival, inasmuch as it is evidence of an ongoing journey. Nonetheless, there are more than a few elements within it that highlight the fact that the ongoing journey is a comfortable one only in some places and, even there, possibly for only a limited amount of time.

Chapter 3 will turn its eye mostly to our theme of rivalry. We will describe five different aspects of the actual practice of Australian sociology in terms of rival visions for the discipline – the content of teaching, the content of research, the content of textbooks, the interests of members of the professional association, and two particular debates between disciplinary leaders over the direction of sociology in this country. In the conclusion to this chapter we will bring an argument into the book which draws on the evidence presented in the chapter. This argument, which we will ask to do service as a sub-theme of the book, concerns the dearth of awareness in the practice of Australian sociology about the history of Australian sociology.

The way theory is used by a discipline might seem a somewhat oblique aspect of its operation, perhaps not warranting a chapter of its own. But we think it to be a vital index of the way a discipline like sociology operates and this will be the focus of Chapter 4. Here we will consider six different ways in which the use of theory influences the well-being of Australian sociology, sometimes positively but slightly more often negatively.

Chapter 5 will offer a more thorough examination of just how the discipline has survived in this country, despite that prospect often looking unlikely. The examination will feature a detailed case study of one institution, the University of Sydney, in which we will present a body of concentrated evidence towards our earlier proposition about Australian sociology always getting up when it gets knocked down, even at a university where it was firmly rejected in the mid-twenties after an extremely unsuccessful trial. We will show that at Sydney, in the years between its unsuccessful trial and its successful return in the early 1990s, sociology survived in the cracks, as it were, especially the cracks of those other disciplines which were sympathetic to its broader aims, in particular philosophy, anthropology, and social work/social studies.

In a brief conclusion to the book, Chapter 6, we will summarize and reinforce the assessments offered throughout the book on the three themes – fragility, survival, rivalry – and the one sub-theme – the need for greater historical reflexivity.

The complex roots and the nature of the fragility of Australian sociology

In this and the next section we sketch the early history of sociology in Australia, occasionally situating this history against some developments in sociology in America and Britain, particularly with regard to the way in which sociological ideas and personnel were imported into Australia from these two countries. Our key purpose is to draw attention to the relative fragility of Australian sociology, but we are also using these sections to provide some historical context for our discussion of key rivalries. For example, we are keen to stress that the politics of division between Australia’s six states is even more marked by the nation’s strongly federal system of government than is the politics of division between America’s fifty states in its strongly federal system, such that Australian sociology needs always to be considered in terms of its location within a particular state and that state’s universities (only the Australian National University (ANU), established after the Second World War in the national capital, Canberra, has ever been solely overseen by the Australian federal government, all the others have to be considered, to some extent, state-based institutions). In this context it is important to note that each state has its own ‘premier’ university and all states but one (Tasmania, where the population is still today barely half a million) have other universities which battle for status and funding against the ‘premier’ institution and against each other (more details will be provided below). For most of its history, as we will discuss in more detail as we proceed, sociology has been weak in all the ‘premier’ universities (again with the exception of the University of Tasmania, where sociology has flourished since its introduction in 1969, despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that most of its initial appointments were drawn from America, with one Brit and one Pole).

In the early part of the twentieth century the Australian universities in which sociology was first taught were to some extent creatures of British imperialism. In the words of one historian of education, Stuart Macintyre, Australian universities emerged considerably later than their American counterparts and then did so ‘as a closely regulated settlement serving imperial purposes, making no clear break as it established nationhood, still tied to Britain in its political institutions and economic arrangements, and adapting them pragmatically to its own needs’ (Macintyre 2009: 354). While the University of Sydney’s crest carries the Oxford book of learning and the Cambridge lion (transported to the land of the Southern Cross), and the first Chancellor at the University of Melbourne, Redmond Barry, wanted professors who would ‘ “stamp on their future pupils the character of loyal, well-bred, English gentlemen” ’ (Macintyre 2009: 356, quoting Barry), we think it necessary to add that this British influence on early Australian universities was not imperial in a purely Oxbridge sense. For instance, Queen’s University Ireland, Trinity College Dublin, the University of London, and Edinburgh University in Scotland also served as important models and, along with America, sources of personnel. Thus, the first Australian universities were public and secular institutions, established by Acts of their respective state parliaments with their own governance boards, with professors rather than tutors the main teachers, and professional training – in Law, Medicine, and Engineering – soon added to the liberal Arts degree (Davis 2013; Macintyre 2009). Nonetheless, it is true to say that the British Empire was a strong presence in Australian universities until after the Second World War, when a more confident nation sought to slowly develop its own university tradition. (In sociology this did not mean that British and American influences faded after the war; Britain and America remained the dominant sources of books and ideas, to such an extent that in Australian universities French and German sociologists are to this day rarely taught in their original languages; they are usually translated and/or interpreted by British or American scholars.)

Until just after the Second World War Australia had only six universities. These were the ‘traditional’ or ‘sandstone’ universities, which had been established in each of the six state capitals before the First World War (Marginson 1999). The earliest were founded in the mid-nineteenth century – the Universities of Sydney (1850) and Melbourne (1853) – followed by the University of Adelaide (1874), the University of Tasmania (in Hobart) (1890), the University of Queensland (in Brisbane) (1909), and the University of Western Australia (in Perth) (1911) (Macintrye 2009).

As we will show in more detail below and in subsequent chapters, sociology in Australia has more often found a home in the newer ‘second and third tier’ universities established after 1945 than in these prestigious sandstone universities (with the exception of Tasmania, of course), though the sandstone universities have been catching up since 1990. This is not unlike the case in Britain, where sociology has flourished much more in the newer universities established after the war – like Warwick, Lancaster, Essex, and York.

The roots of the fragility of Australian sociology are not hard to see. Sociology made a disastrous entrance into Australian education institutions in the first quarter of the twentieth century, both at the full university level, at the University of Sydney and the University of Melbourne, and at the Workers’ Education Association (WEA) level. The WEA, imported from Britain and an important forum for advanced study by the general public in that period, was hosted by these two universities (among other institutions). At both levels sociology fared badly compared to economics. And it did nowhere near as well in that period as it did in America and Britain.

Early Australian advocates for sociology followed the American example and promoted the discipline as the scientific study of society, with the capacity to alleviate social problems. But where, as we will show in the following section, the American advocates had considerable success, its advocates in Australia, with very little evidence to support their claims, made little headway (Harley 2005; 2012), even with their argument that Australia was a living laboratory for new forms of society.

As a new federation with a novel program of state socialism, the country was said to offer a series of social hypotheses crying out for empirical testing (Bourke 2005: 147). This argument was not uninteresting to local authorities or to potential students, but it was hardly an argument unique to sociology. This was the ground on which all the fledgling social sciences competed, and sociology competed poorly, though not for want of trying. For example, Clarence Northcott, one of the first tutors in the WEA, had undertaken his PhD at Columbia on the topic of ‘Australian Social Development’ under one of America’s leading sociologists, Franklin Giddings (for more on Giddings, see S. Turner 2005). Northcott (1918: 7) urged the use of ‘adequate scientific methods’ to achieve ‘objectivity’ in the study of Australia’s new social democracy, which he considered to be ripe for social analysis. He believed ‘the statistical method’ would transform sociology into an ‘exact science’, freeing it from bias and ‘the errors of the analytic and the impressionistic method’ (1918: 8).

Similarly, Professor of Economics Robert Irvine, who was more a fellow-traveller than a committed sociologist, contrasted Australia’s proud reputation as ‘the social laboratory of the world’ with the lamentable ‘meagreness of investigation and criticism by Australians of their own social evolution’. He saw sociology as the ‘co-ordinating science’, the only subject capable of understanding the ‘one great unity’ of ‘human experience’ (Irvine 1914: 8).

This idea of sociology as an overarching science with a unified object was alluring to many. It was probably most alluring to those aware of the idea’s genesis in Auguste Comte’s writings. Glaswegian Francis Anderson, appointed as the first Challis professor of logic and mental philosophy at Sydney University in 1890, was clearly a keen follower of Comte. In 1911 Anderson (2005: 85) urged Australian sociology to strive to become the ‘general and fundamental science’, or the ‘mother science’. He thought sociology much better suited to this role than economics, which, he said, ‘deals with a fragment, and not with the whole. Its results are valid and intelligible only when brought into connection [by sociology] with the larger life of society, of which they form but one partial aspect’. (We will see shortly that the contrast between sociology and economics later became an outright intellectual war, a war in which sociology was the loser by quite some distance.)

Similarly, John Alexander Gunn, an important figure in Melbourne, to whom we will return shortly, relied on Comte to define sociology as ‘the positive study of social groups of mankind marked with reference to the psychological, physical and biological factors involved in the process of evolution’ (Gunn 1923: 14). Gunn’s inaugural lecture portrayed society and its progress as a combination of economics and industrialism, politics and the role of the state, psychology and human nature, education, social philosophy and morality, biology, population and eugenics (Bourke 2005: 154–55; Gunn 1923).

More evidence of sociology’s inability to formulate convincing arguments for its supposed superiority can be gleaned from the way it was taught at the WEA. This evidence highlights sociology’s clumsiness, especially when compared to economics, in presenting a case to those whose main goa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction: The Main Themes and the Structure of the Book
• 2  A Sketch of Australian Sociology, 19592014
• 3  Different Visions of/for Australian Sociology, 19592014
• 4  Theory Use in Australian Sociology
• 5  Survival against the Odds: a Case Study of Sociology at the University of Sydney
• 6  Conclusion
• References
• Index