Global warming would be related to energy supply. The USA, which account for 5% of the world population, account for 25% of carbon emissions. What Jeremy Leggett calls the empire of oil and transport would be important influencing factors. Zygmunt Bauman argues that mobility is one of the most important values today and that it is an unequally distributed commodity. Urry stressed especially that neoliberalism has generated new forms of mobility that have generated an excesses that have caused high carbon consumption.

As a result, sociology would have to take the future more serious than in the past and there would be a need for sociology to imagine alternative futures. Alternative systems would be needed. Potential negative scenarios for future society would for example be oil, gas, and water wars and the restriction of travel to the super-rich. Nicholas Stern, an anti-neoliberal thinker, has argued that climate change is the greatest market failure. The problem according to Urry is that 20th century capitalism has generated unprecedented levels of carbon emissions.

I liked about this talk that John Urry abstracted a specific problem and analyzed it within its societal and capitalist context. He gave a realistic and materialistic analysis. In comparison, Castells – who covered another issue (the network society), but nonetheless a comparison in respect to the means of analysis can be made – did not see capitalist development as a problem and was not much concerned with problems of current and future society and the role of the economy. Urry talked about the need for alternative systems and an interventionist sociology, whereas Castells was keen to draw a separating line between political action and sociology and was mainly concerned about the development of new sociological methods for the future of sociology. It is alarming that someone, who is considered as one of the most important sociologists by many, is mainly talking about new rigorous research methods and not about global societal problems when addressing the future of sociology in a society that is full of global problems. John Urry’s talk differed radically in this respect.

I discovered and found interest in John Urry’s work on “Global Complexity” some years ago, when in the EU-funded research project “Human Strategies on Complexity”, I tried to apply the notion of self-organization that we had developed in the project to the phenomenon of globalization (”Globalization and Self-Organization in the Knowledge-Based Society“). I found interesting the connection of social theory and complexity theory that Urry has made because I have also had a comparable endeavour in the past 8 years, which has resulted in my recent book. I lost sight of Urry’s work in the past years. His talk given in Barcelona has renewed my interest in reading some of his works that have ever since been published.

One question remained unanswered for me: Does building new systems only mean to establish new forms of consumption, or does this also involve the need for new economic forms of production? Mobility based on neoliberally caused excesses today surely not only means that people move globally, but also that commodities move globally because the practice of globally outsourcing and diffusing production has become so common in order to reduce capital investment costs (constant and variable capital in Marxian terms). For me the primary problem concerning travel is not personal travel by private people, but commodity transport and business-related travel. Also according to statistics energy production itself is the highest source of carbon emissions today, not transport. It might not suffice to change consumption, there might be a need to find alternatives to capitalist production. A pure focus on consumption could even distort the analysis of the importance of the role of production. I did not get from the talk in how far what Urry was saying about the problems’ causes and building alternative systems is related to production as well.

In the final plenary session, Michael Burawoy spoke about “Whose Knowledge? Varieties of Public Sociology”. He distinguished four types of sociology: Professional sociology is instrumental in producing knowledge and addresses an academic audience. Policy sociology produces knowledge for a client external to the academic system. Critical sociology is reflexive and tries to provide alternative foundations to sociology. Especially value foundations are discussed. Public sociology engages in dialogue with publics. The typology based on the distinction between academic and non-academic audiences and instrumental and reflexive knowledge. The latter is taken from Horkheimer and Adorno. Burawoy added another dimension: Gramsci’s distinction between traditional and organic intellectuals. Traditional intellectuals would address the public with the help of public media such as newspapers, whereas organic intellectuals would have unmediated relations to the public and would conduct a more activist type of sociology. As examples for traditional public sociologists, Burawoy mentioned Bourdieu, Mills, and Giddens, as examples for organic public sociologists; Gramsci, Freire, Touraine, and feminism. He concluded by arguing that all four types of sociology are important and should be connected and that his work has focused on building space and acceptance for critical and public sociology within sociology.

Alberto Martinelli, a former ISA president, criticized Burawoy. He argued that Burawoy sometimes makes a clear hierarchy between the four types. The most important form would then be public sociology, followed by critical sociology, professional sociology, and policy sociology. The latter would then be presented as corrupted by money and power. Martinelli called such a distinction fundamentalist and saw the focus on subordinate groups as rather dangerous. There would be dangers of dogmatism, elitism, and vanguardism. Martinelli stressed the importance of policy sociology and called for a connection of sociology to the natural sciences.

Alain Touraine on the one hand argued that it is important to defend the autonomy of sociology because it would have been distorted and limited by ideological interests in the past. Sociology would have to be protected from ideology. But contemporary society would be dominated by violence, war, and an extreme gap between the rich and the poor. Therefore on the other hand a second type of sociology would be needed, one that defends human rights for all. Sociology would have to uncover and eliminate the presence of hell in society. Sociologist would be responsible for the whole world and society would be full of forces that destroy human rights. Sociology would have to connect to the new generation that is eager to intervene and attack. This should be accompanied by the necessary reconstruction of many concepts of sociology. Touraine’s statements were closer to Burawoy than to Martinelli.

The debate showed that the issues that were underlying the positivism dispute between Popper and Adorno in German sociology in the early 1960s, are still at the core of discussions on the current and future state of sociology more than 45 years later. There are some who want to directly connect sociology to social struggles and the problems of the time, whereas others (including not only Martinelli, but in my opinion also Castells) claim that sociology can and should be neutral and value-free.

For me, Burawoys position is good, but not radical enough. He argues that public sociology has no intrinsic normative valences and that it can also be conducted in the interest of Christian fundamentalism. Burawoy bases his distinction between instrumental and reflexive knowledge on Horkheimer and Adorno. But for Horkheimer (in essays like “Traditionelle und kritische Theorie” or “Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft”) the distinction was between instrumental and critical knowledge. The latter is a specific form of normative knowledge, it operates according to Horkheimer with categories such as class, exploitation, surplus value, profit, misery, and breakdown, and is oriented on a “society without injustice”, “man’s emancipation from slavery”, and “the happiness of all individuals”. Therefore Horkheimer would consider a sociology conducted in the interest of Christian fundamentalism always as an instrumental type of sociology and would argue for a left-wing sociology. So in my opinion Burawoy should either drop his reference to Horkheimer or reformulate his concept of public sociology as critical public sociology. In my opinion Burawoy has a too positive picture of NGOs, the public sphere, and civil society. NGOs frequently support also conservative values. And the public is not automatically rational and willing to discuss, especially under neoliberal conditions, where people first of all have to struggle to survive and might not find the time and energy needed for engaging in public discourse. Horkheimer: “It is possible for the consciousness of every social stratum today to be limited and corrupted by ideology, however much, for its circumstances, it may be bent on truth. For all its insight into the individual steps in social change and for all the agreement of its elements with the most advanced traditional theories, the critical theory has no specific influence on its side, except con¬cern for the abolition of social injustice”. In my opinition, public sociology means a public interest sociology, a sociology that defends public interests, i.e. provides intellectual means and arguments for establishing conditions that benefit all. An such a public defense should also be made, if there is no or only a small critical public. When speaking about public intellectuals, my first example would be Marx, and my second, and most important one, Herbert Marcuse.

Also political reforms of society, the political system, the economy, and the public sphere might be needed. Civil society alone is not enough. It needs to be combined with progressive institutional politics. Public sociology has to confront the situation of a disinterested public and the role of ideology in public life. Burawoy hardly gives attention to these phenomena. Public sociology should not be seen as a solution to all problems, it has many difficulties. If I were to describe myself as being a public academic due to my intellectual and political engagement in the basic income movement, then I would mainly reflect about the difficulties involved, the notion of a limited public with limited consciousness, limited resources, etc. Failure and defeat are permanent features of civil society under contemporary conditions. Civil society also has a role of legitimating domination, as Gramsci already knew. This can for example be seen in the outsourcing of welfare functions from the state to civil society under neoliberal political conditions. Burawoy’s picture of civil society is too idealistic. Nonetheless his typology is very important because it has started a debate in sociology that could open up new spaces for critical, radical, and progressive theories and studies.

In the opening session, the president of the Catalan Association of Sociology, Arturo Rodriguez Morató, argued the anti-sociological character of neoliberalism, disciplinary competition and fragmentation in sociology, and the colonization of sociology by journalistic logic has affected the possibilities for doing sociology. In this situation, public sociology that according to the American Marxist sociologist Michael Burawoy is sociology that speaks to and with the public, would be necessary for renewing sociology. The overall question of the conference would be: How can sociology make a contribution to public debates?

Saskia Sassen argued that powerless individuals and groups could find ways of resistance. Two master categories for contemporary sociology would be the global and the national. The only truly global organizations would be the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the International Criminal Court (ICC). Others would be not really global, but mixtures of global and national organizations. So for example global finance would need financial centres in global cities. I found her analysis undialectical and dualistic. Isn’t there a dialectic of globalization and localization, so that all globalization processes are in need of national or local appropriation and the global emerges from interactions of non-global actors? Roland Robertson has spoken in this context of glocalization. So for example the WTO can only meet and thereby enforce its power in local settings, which has enabled anti-WTO demonstrations by activists who come from different nations, but travel globally and interact to form a global movement that protests in different local settings. Powerful institutions according to Sassen create powerless actors. But the latter would not be victims, they could find ways to resist. For example in the US law suits against multinational corporations that abuse workers in different countries would have been successful by making use of national laws. Immobile local activists could make use of the Internet for forming a global identity. It would be possible to act and resist in local spaces in ways that have more global impact. I found Sassen’s analysis too optimistic, voluntaristic, and advancing a subjective determinism. Isn’t it the case that powerless humans frequently fail, because they do not have the time, money, resources, motivation, energy etc for activism due to structural features of their existence like precarious labour, ideology, manipulation, etc? Concerning the Internet, most social movement- and Internet researchers agree that the Internet alone does not suffice for the establishment of collective political identity and that face-to-face interaction is needed because it is less anonymous and more easily supports emotional cohesion.

Michael Wievjorka, the president of the ISA, said that in professional sociology there would only be talk between experts and a neglect of the public. He distinguished three positions: An elitist one that sees the public as stupid and neglects it. The position of restitution, which wants to give back something to the people that are studied by providing them with knowledge and analysis. And the one of deliberative democracy, in which researchers generate knowledge and debates with a public that wants to discuss. The most important traditions of public sociology would be action research and participatory research.

My personal position is that not just a public sociology is needed, but a critical public sociology, by which I mean a sociology that opposes all forms of domination, supports the interests of dominated, oppressed, and exploited groups, is partial for these people, and aims at contributing to the establishment of a co-operative society. This would be a sociology that acts in the public interest, a public interest sociology that wants to create societal situations in which all, not just certain elitist classes, benefit. This also means that public sociology that supports conservative or right-wing causes is undesirable and should be eliminated. Therefore what is needed is a radical, critical, left-wing sociology and the goal should be that a day will come where instrumental, uncritical sociology will cease to exist and all sociology becomes left-wing. Therefore I agree with Francis Fox Piven that a “dissident and critical public sociology” is needed.

I found worrying that starting with the opening session, the habit was taken to focus on pure penal discussions in the plenary sessions without involving the audience. Typically, three experts discussed and the audience listened. This practice runs totally counter to the idea of public sociology and it is questionable that those who discuss about public sociology in a non-public and elitist way are good role models for practicing public sociology.

The parallel sessions typically consisted of 80 (!) parallel events. I found this practice troublesome because there were always at least four parallel panels that I found interesting and that I would have loved to attend and the practice resulted in a very low number of participants (typically 10-15, sometimes 20) in the sessions. Therefore the academic audience was minimized by an idiosyncratic practice that is unsuitable for the issue of public sociology because it fragments the audience into many specialized parts that even in plenary sessions are excluded and not enabled to talk with each other in a general universal space that all share.

In the evening, a very nice welcoming party in the courtyard of the Centre of Contemporary Culture took place that featured fine drinks, Catalan food, and a relaxed atmosphere that enabled good talks and nice personal encounters.