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Sociological Engagements: Institutional Racism and Beyond

Karim Murji
Sociology 2007; 41; 843
DOI: 10.1177/0038038507080440

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 Sociology
Copyright © 2007
BSA Publications Ltd®
Volume 41(5): 843–855
DOI: 10.1177/0038038507080440
SAGE Publications
Los Angeles, London,
New Delhi and Singapore

Sociological Engagements: Institutional Racism and

Beyond
■ Karim Murji
The Open University

ABSTRACT
The concept of institutional racism emerged in 1967, the same year that this jour-
nal began. This first part of the article traces the origins and context of the term
in the black power movement of the 1960s. Its subsequent adoption by sociology
shows its engagement with issues of race and racism, though sociology itself
became the object of critique for its understanding and explanation of racial
inequalities. Links and differences between the USA and Britain are used to reflect
on the different public roles of their national sociological associations.The second
section draws on the example of the Macpherson inquiry and its difficulty in
conceptualizing institutional racism. This shows that sociology’s public role is
contested and that trying to develop a public voice through the media is chal-
lenging. Overall, while focusing on some of the problems for developing public
sociology, the article argues that confronting such problems is essential for the
vitality of the discipline.

KEY WORDS
ASA / BSA / Burawoy / Stephen Lawrence / white sociology

n this article I draw on the concept of institutional racism to explore some of

I the public faces of sociology. A discussion of the concept is particularly

appropriate for a 40th anniversary issue of this journal because the dates of
their inception coincide exactly. In charting the origins and some of the context
and consequences of the idea, I offer some critical reflections on Michael
Burawoy’s manifesto for public sociology in his American Sociological
Association (ASA) presidential lecture. Although Burawoy does not discuss insti-
tutional racism as such, his statement is significant for current purposes because

843
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844 Sociology Volume 41 ■ Number 5 ■ October 2007

it leads to consideration of some of the differences between the USA and

Britain, and between the ASA and its British counterpart, the British
Sociological Association (BSA). The cross-linkages between these two opening
strands are apparent in the first paragraph of the entry for institutional racism
in the Oxford Dictionary of Sociology.
In a remarkable episode in the history of ideas the concept of ‘institutional racism’
emerged in the context of radical political struggle and the Black Power movement
in the United States in the 1960s and then traversed three decades, two continents
and the social class structure to be adopted by a member of the British nobility.
(Scott and Marshall, 2005: 311–12)

This quotation usefully frames the two sections of this article. First, it makes
the link between sociology and social movements and indicates that the idea of
institutional racism has travelled extensively since. Second, the ‘member of the
British nobility’ refers to Sir William Macpherson of Cluny who chaired The
Stephen Lawrence Inquiry (Macpherson, 1999). The inquiry received wide
publicity both while it was sitting and particularly after the publication of its
report (Cathcart, 1999, is still the most detailed account). The main focus of the
media coverage was the fact that the report concluded that the police failures
to prosecute the killers in the murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence
were due to institutional racism. His death in 1993 has become one of the high-
est profile murders in Britain; it ranked as the fourth most covered homicide in
the UK in the period from 1977 to 1999, based on a survey of The Times Index
(Soothill et al., 2002). The process by which it achieved such prominence is a
separate, though important, story (see Cathcart, 1999). Eight years after the
publication of the report, discussions of institutional racism can still create a
media storm; while 14 years after the murder, it is still capable of being the lead
news item, most recently following a prime-time BBC TV programme in July
2006, which described it as ‘Britain’s most famous unsolved murder’.1

Black Power and White Sociology

The Macpherson report’s discussion of institutional racism draws extensively on

evidence submitted by several sociologists to the inquiry – which it describes as
‘very helpful’ – as well as the 1967 book, Black Power by Stokely Carmichael
(later known as Kwame Ture) and Charles Hamilton, in which they first devel-
oped the main features of the term. So while it has often been dismissed as a piece
of sociological jargon – its association with sociology being what detractors use
to damn both the idea itself and sociology in general – it actually emerged from
a 1960s’ social movement. Black Power is an explicit critique of the white estab-
lishment in the USA. It calls for radical or militant black political activity to com-
bat racism, which Carmichael and Hamilton argued was pervasive and systemic.
They introduced the term ‘institutional racism’ to account for attitudes and prac-
tices that led to racist outcomes through unquestioned bureaucratic procedures.

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 Sociological engagements Murji 845

They treated individual and institutional racism as comparable to the distinction

between overt and covert racism. While individual racism could be seen and
heard, institutional racism was a more subtle process that could not be reduced
to the acts of individuals. They made it clear that white people collectively bene-
fit from the process, even if individual whites did not wish to discriminate. In
regarding institutional racism as a form of internal colonialism in the USA they
maintained that, although blacks had the same citizenship status as whites, they
stood in as colonial subjects in relation to white society.
While neither of the authors of Black Power were sociologists (Carmichael
was one of the leaders of the Black Panthers; Hamilton was based in Political
Science at Columbia University), the meaning and utility of institutional racism
has been debated, sometimes in very heated forms, in sociology, in the media
and in public discourse ever since. Their understanding of the key term ‘insti-
tutional’ is close to sociological conceptions that use it to refer to processes that
are persistent, beyond the control of one or a group of individuals and do not
rely upon intention. It marked a shift from seeing racism and racial disadvan-
tage as a psychological or cultural trait of individuals and groups (for example,
‘the authoritarian personality’) or based on anthropological models of a culture
of poverty. While such racism may be difficult to detect, its manifestations are
observable in patterns of systematic inequality produced by bureaucracies.
Sociologists adopted and developed the term as a way of analysing and explain-
ing racial disparities even when individuals acted without racist intent. It use-
fully underscored a view of institutional practices as embodying assumptions
and values that produced skewed and racist outcomes (see Miles, 1989, for
wider discussion).
The appeal of the term to sociologists and its transplantation from the field
of political activism is a clear demonstration of sociology acting ‘parasitically’
(Urry, 2000). Urry maintains that ‘Most important developments in sociology
have at least indirectly stemmed from social movements with “emancipatory
interests” that have fuelled a new or reconfigured social analysis’ (2000: 210).
This comment shares an affinity with Burawoy’s (2005: 260) sense of the ‘pas-
sion for social justice … that drew so many of us to sociology’. Despite its
appeal, doubts were also raised about institutional racism as a concept. Its orig-
inal formulation was seen as overly Manichean, dividing blacks and whites into
separate and opposed camps; it was also thought to ignore intra-ethnic/racial
variations in power.
The context and consequences of black power as a social movement have other
implications for sociology’s internal debates and public role. In the 1960s, the USA
witnessed a series of ‘race riots’ across the country along with a flourishing move-
ment for civil rights that aimed to tackle the racial inequalities manifest in housing,
employment, criminal justice and democratic representation (Singh, 2004). The
extent to which some sociologists identified with the radical political and ideologi-
cal shifts of that time supports a view of sociology as a discipline and a practice
committed to egalitarianism and to challenging existing structures of power
and authority. However, it is easy to over-read the radicalism of sociology and

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846 Sociology Volume 41 ■ Number 5 ■ October 2007

sociologists. As Burawoy (2005) points out, in 1968 two-thirds of ASA members

were against taking a view on the Vietnam war (he adds that in 2003, the same pro-
portion favoured a resolution opposing the war in Iraq). Following from this, two
nuances from this period bear scrutiny in grasping the relationship between sociol-
ogy and issues of racism, institutional or otherwise.
The first comes from Singh’s (2004) revisionist history of black struggles in
the USA. He is critical of the ‘abbreviated periodization’ (2004: 6) that dates the
inception of the civil rights struggle in the USA to the 1950s and so ignores the
heterogeneity and depth of black struggles. He also questions ‘King-centric’
accounts of the period that draw a sharp distinction between the conciliatory
approach of Martin Luther King and the more revolutionary approach of groups
such as the Black Panthers. Singh argues that King was in fact a more radical fig-
ure than many accounts suggest. However, for current purposes his main point
is a stress on the ‘long civil rights’ era from the 1930s. Taking this longer view,
Singh’s historiography centres on various black intellectuals, particularly the
neglected sociologist W.E.B Du Bois who campaigned actively against imperial-
ism and colonialism. The writers discussed by Singh also argued that blacks in
the USA experienced a form of internal colonialism, which would be repeated in
Carmichael and Hamilton’s (1967) characterization of institutional racism.
Singh shows that black intellectuals and social movements made a key link
between racism and liberalism, and connected those to US globalism. While they
did not use the term institutional racism, they certainly offered a powerful cri-
tique of nation-state institutional power across and over the globe. Thus, for
Singh, black power in the 1960s marked a return to earlier radical and interna-
tionalist tendencies that connected equality and civil rights concerns with a cri-
tique of empire. While, politically, this internationalism was a precursor to the
black power struggles of the 1960s, in sociological terms it marked a critique
and a rejection of the nation-state centred vision of racial absorption evident in
works such as An American Dilemma2 (see Singh, 2004).
There is a second issue or corrective flowing from the 1960s and the idea
of institutional racism: the censure of ‘white sociology’ by other sociologists. In
The Death of White Sociology, Ladner (1973) stated the need for a black soci-
ology as a counter to the mainstream, white liberal sociology that had, ‘in the
main, upheld the status quo’ (p. xx), though she left open the question of
whether there could be a black sociology founded on the rejection rather than
the affirmation of traditional sociology. One contributor to that volume,
Robert Staples, had a stronger answer. He castigated white racist sociology
from the classical period through to the pro-segregationist arguments of early
20th-century US sociologists (Staples, 1973). He later (1976) developed a fuller
account of a black sociology, in which the definition of racism as a form of
dehumanization and a system for the maintenance of white power bears clear
links to the Black Power view of institutional racism. In one of the two case
studies of institutional racism in the collection, Billingsley (1973) attacked
social science research on the family for either ignoring black families, or for
producing distorted and pathological views of them when they were included.

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 Sociological engagements Murji 847

The latter approach drew on notions of the nihilism of ghetto culture and
matriarchal families to explain black disadvantage. It neglected, Billingsley
(1973) argues, the impact of institutional racism on blacks; indeed he went fur-
ther and saw institutional racism as an endemic force within white social sci-
ence that made it unable to correct its distortions and stereotypes of black
families. It regarded unstable, low income families as the cause of wider disad-
vantages that blacks experienced in society; it employed outdated methods
based on statistical techniques; and it ignored stable black families as well as
black scholars and experts. Overall, Staples (1973) maintained that the role of
a sociologist was to be both theorist and activist. While this is not a formula-
tion Burawoy (2005) uses, it indicates the engaged public sociology that the
contributors to Ladner (1973) envisaged.
I now turn from the USA to Britain to look at some parallels and variations
in debates about racism, and what it suggests about the public role of sociol-
ogy. Race and racism had not been neglected by sociology in the period after
the publication of Black Power. The sociology of race and racialism was the
theme of the 1969 BSA conference, a book of essays from which was published
a year later (Zubaida, 1970). For current purposes, there are several notable
features of that book. First, the Introduction says that the aim of the conference
was to integrate race into general sociological theory; that is, to bring it from
the margins nearer to the centre of sociological concerns. However, while the
censure of race relations studies as largely atheoretical and ahistorical, unsys-
tematic and as concerned with prejudicial attitudes rather than social structure
is well founded, it is noticeable that this is not a criticism of sociology as such;
rather it seems to be aimed at anthropology. Second, there is a sense that the
subject is an internal debate in the social sciences rather than a public discus-
sion about racism as a pressing issue (although the Foreword to the book does
say this). Linked to that is the now striking and unexplained preference for
‘racialism’ rather than racism in the title. Finally, although Wolpe (1970)
employs the idea of structural racism as akin to institutional racism – and as
distinct from intentional racism – there is only one other chapter (Lockwood,
1970) that discusses black power as a social movement at all. Lockwood’s main
concern was whether race required a special theory or set of concepts, or
whether it could be seen as a sub-set of class and stratification.
Greater controversy about sociology and racism is apparent in the subse-
quent decade. In her history of the BSA, Platt (2003) refers to an un-dated
memo in the BSA archive in which the convenor of the BSA Race group
expresses the view that its main concern was to make a ‘sociology that is geared
to exposing and explaining white institutional racism’ (cited in Platt, 2003: 57).
Platt adds that the group sought to prevent John Rex from speaking, for rea-
sons which are not specified, though a sense of this is apparent from other
sources. In the late 1970s, Rex became the second director of the SSRC (later
ESRC) Research Unit on Race and Ethnic Relations. Highly critical views of his
Weberian sociology as a governmental tool to manage race as an increasingly
visible social problem appeared subsequently (Bourne and Sivanandan, 1980;

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848 Sociology Volume 41 ■ Number 5 ■ October 2007

Gilroy, 1980). Criticisms of Rex and other race relations sociologists were
extended in The Empire Strikes Back (1982) from the Race and Politics group
at the Birmingham University Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
(CCCS). Lawrence’s contribution in particular – in what is the most direct par-
allel with Ladner and Billingsley’s work in the 1970s – condemned sociology’s
role in producing pathological accounts of black culture and families based on
questionable ideas about identity crises and inter-generational conflict. In a
period of what he and other CCCS authors perceived as intensifying British
state racism, policy-oriented sociology was seen as easily incorporated into state
ideology. Such failings are explicitly attributed to white sociology, which refers
not just to white personnel, but also is a critique of sociology’s reformism and
its neglect of the historical conditions in which sociological ideas about race
and racism developed (Lawrence, 1982).
The preceding discussion of the USA and Britain leads me on to what seem
to be quite diverse forms of engagement with publics between national socio-
logical associations. A proper comparison between the ASA and the BSA would
require more space than I have here. But, in terms of issues of race and racism,
the extent and willingness of the ASA to get involved in controversial public
policy issues is striking (Burawoy, 2005, mentions other areas). One is the ASA
Council statement affirming the necessity of collecting and using data based on
racial and ethnic categorization in order to address racial disparities. This state-
ment was drawn upon in the ASA’s recommendation to voters in California to
vote against Proposition 54, which would have limited the ability of state agen-
cies to collect such data. The most prominent recent involvement of the ASA in
race issues has been in a case involving the University of Michigan. The
University’s admissions policy went beyond exam scores in order to try to
increase the numbers of ethnic minority students. In Grutter v. Bollinger, a
white student protested that this policy denied her entry into the law school.
When the case reached the US Supreme Court, the ASA – acting in concert with
other learned societies – prepared an amicus brief for the court. This would
draw on ‘sound sociological research that addresses the need for affirmative
education in legal education’.3 The brief argued that race had a powerful impact
on the life chances of black people in the USA and so had to be taken into
account in admissions decisions. The Supreme Court backed the University’s
admission policy, though Singh (2004) argues that in a later judgement it nar-
rowed the scope of affirmative action policies. While critical sociologists might
have wished to stress the historical and structural legacy of institutional racism,
these activities are a conspicuous demonstration of the ASA’s mission of
advancing sociology and serving the public good.

The Macpherson Inquiry and the Media

The main public policy and academic context for discussions of institutional
racism in the 1980s flowed from Lord Scarman’s report on the riots or disorders

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 Sociological engagements Murji 849

in Brixton, London, in 1981. During the inquiry, it was put to him that the
over-policing of young black people was a major cause of the events and that,
more widely, discrimination and disadvantage against blacks was due to insti-
tutional racism. He famously rejected that suggestion if, he said, it meant ‘a
society which knowingly, as a matter of policy, discriminates against black
people’ (Scarman, 1981: para. 2.22). He acknowledged ‘unwitting’ discrimina-
tion as a factor (as we will see, this set up a problem of witting/unwitting racism
for Macpherson). Scarman’s rejection of unseen institutional factors re-opened
the debate on institutional racism and on sociology’s contribution to anti-racist
theory and policy. For example, Mason (1982) argued that the term suffered
from ‘imprecision in many of the formulations of the concept’. Such ‘imprecise
formulations, whose validity cannot be demonstrated, are a very poor basis
indeed for the formation of policies or programmes of political action designed
to combat racial disadvantage and oppression’ (Mason, 1982: 44). Others, like
Miles (1989), argued against an ‘inflated’ conception of racism, and sought to
link it to class and gender relations.
Nearly two decades on – and for all their considerable criticism of the
Scarman report in the 1980s – the Metropolitan police’s written submission and
oral evidence to the Macpherson inquiry relied on very similar grounds to
Scarman. The police argued that a finding of institutional racism would mean
that the public would regard all police officers as acting with racist intentions
(see Macpherson, 1999: chap. 6). Indeed, despite his personal acceptance of
institutional racism, this is what still worries Sir Ian Blair, the Commissioner of
the Metropolitan Police:
I know that the definition of institutional racism – of some form – has been around
for some years before Macpherson reported. But, I think it was a profoundly diffi-
cult concept for the police service to understand, in particular for individual, rela-
tively junior police officers to understand. It seemed to them to be literally an attack
on their personal integrity, on whether they were racist or not. The definition that
Macpherson gave is in my view a very good definition but I’m not sure that it was
very helpful in the context of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, it needed far more
explanation, I think, than it was afforded … it needed a very very large health warn-
ing across it which said, this is about the organisation, its not about individuals.4

In the wake of the Scarman debate, this is perhaps a key area where sociology
could make a difference. A reading of the evidence submitted by various sociol-
ogists shows that they emphasized it as a structural process and not as a catch-
all term with which to brand individuals (cf. Holdaway, 1999). However, a
weakness of this general approach is that it can be read as implying that no prej-
udiced or racist individuals are required to produce institutionally racist out-
comes. Indeed, as Miles (1989) observes, this is taken to be a virtue of the idea
because intentionality is regarded as secondary to the consequences of actions.
Hence, if the cause and remedy are linked solely to institutions, individuals can
appear to be ‘dupes’ without agency. In other words, the individual/institutional
dichotomy in the idea of institutional racism remained unresolved. As Essed
points out, a dichotomous view of racism as either one thing or the other is

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850 Sociology Volume 41 ■ Number 5 ■ October 2007

dubious because it places individuals outside of institutions, ‘thereby severing

rules, regulations and procedures from the people who make and enact them, as
if it concerned qualitatively different racism rather than different positions and
relations through which racism operates’ (1991: 36). This reinforces Mason’s
(1982) argument for theoretically informed explanations that could capture the
inter-connection of structure and agency.
Viewed over a span of either two or four decades, this is a paradoxical
position to have arrived at. Institutional racism has become a commonplace
term widely debated in policy arenas and in the media. It has moved from the
margins of political activitism and sociological analysis into mainstream politi-
cal discourse. In 1999 the Labour government welcomed Macpherson’s
approach and accepted the inquiry’s recommendations. The Home Secretary of
the time said in parliament that the government was committed to tackling
institutional racism in the public services; this was later backed up the Prime
Minister. Thus, in terms of official policy over 20 years, British governments
had gone from completely denying racism as a trait of British society to official
acceptance of it as a matter that was embedded in all the institutions of gov-
ernment and society. While sociologists cannot take the credit for coining the
idea, it is credible to suggest that sociological work on institutional racism had
contributed to the longevity and currency of the term for some time after the
social movement from which it originated had fizzled out.
However, the other side of the coin is that public discourse on racism and
institutional racism – at least as far as that can be gauged from media commen-
tary – had moved on little in the same period. A dichotomous view of individu-
als and institutions dominated the backlash against Macpherson’s view of
institutional racism. For example, the Daily Telegraph columnist Janet Daley
maintained that the claim of institutional racism was both vague and dangerous.
She argued that Macpherson disconnected racism from the intentions of indi-
vidual people – ‘benighted and vicious members of society’, as she puts it – and
made it a form of ‘thought crime’ (1999). In similar vein, McKinstry felt that
Macpherson’s discussion of the concept sounded ‘like a lecturer in sociology
from the Sixties … indulg[ing] in a series of sweeping generalisations’ (1999).
Several observations about public sociology flow from this episode. The first
is that sociologists cannot claim an exclusive expertise in defining and explaining
institutional racism, and this is probably appropriate given the origins of the
term. The Macpherson inquiry apparently received 16 definitions of institutional
racism in the evidence submitted to it, including ones from voluntary groups.
Some ‘sociological’ input came via other sources: for example, Holdaway (1999)
worked with and through the official body responsible for addressing racism in
the UK, the Commission for Racial Equality. Reflecting on this in Network, he
welcomes the opportunity to work on the boundaries between academia and pol-
icy, seeking to influence both. Given this dual orientation, it is hard to pin down
whether this is policy sociology as encapsulated by Burawoy’s characterization of
it as sociology ‘in the service of a goal defined by a client’ (2005: 266). A wider
issue is whether sociology can have a privileged role in situations of multiple

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 Sociological engagements Murji 851

expertise and how it ‘competes’ for attention. Does academic social science
possess authority to speak or pronounce on matters such as institutional racism,
which emerge from elsewhere, and where sociology itself has been accused of
racism? There is obviously no simple answer to these questions, but they do illus-
trate the challenges confronting a discipline committed to engaging publics.
Second, whatever the sociological merits of any particular definition or
approach, Macpherson’s actual and widely cited definition of institutional
racism was the product of a ‘power game’ between the inquiry and the police.
Dr Richard Stone – one of the three advisers to Macpherson – told me that it
was a political necessity for the inquiry to define institutional racism in a way
that would convince and be acceptable to the then Commissioner of the
Metropolitan Police, who had been publicly opposed to it. This resistance
meant that the inquiry was aware that its policy impact would suffer if it did
not come up with a form of words that might be able to carry such opponents.
Furthermore, as Dr Stone goes on to reveal, there are varied and idiosyncratic
factors behind the production of reports and definitions:
I think the chapter on racism is the longest chapter in the report … We spent more
time on it certainly than anything else. I hadn’t really quite realised it had come from
the American civil rights movement … how much it had been used or hadn’t been
used, all these academic advisers giving us advice on how you might word these
things. Then you look at our definition; it was going to be one line, one sentence
that was it. Then all of us felt that there were certain words that weren’t in, which
is why we had the second paragraph. Then we had to work out how you’re going
to typeset it so [that] the second paragraph doesn’t get lost in the first paragraph …
that’s why you’ve actually got two paragraphs looking as if they’re one paragraph
but in fact they’re two ….

And a typical sort of bartering goes on … The prime example is that I went to Bill
Macpherson one day and said, ‘Bill this unwitting prejudice, very unhappy with
unwitting because I think it’s very often witting [racism]. Ah, but he said, you don’t
understand Richard, this is a judicial inquiry and we have to rely upon precedent.
There’s only one precedent and that’s Scarman. Scarman used the word unwitting
and I think that it’s very important we put it in so that people can see that we are
not ignoring our precedents. And anyway, he said, you asked for racial stereotyping
[to be included in the definition] yesterday and you got it in.’ And that completely
undermined my challenge …5

Third, while all of the sociologists who submitted evidence to Macpherson have
been involved in extra-academic activities such as advising the police or commu-
nity campaigns, none of this seems to be sufficient to escape an ‘ivory tower’ image
of academia. Post-Macpherson, the only significant media coverage of sociology
was in September 2000 when many national newspapers considered a report from
a think tank, the Institute for the Study of Civil Society (ISCS) by Norman Dennis
and two colleagues. It rejected the whole idea of institutional racism as incoherent
and circular and argued that Macpherson was unable to demonstrate any instance
or evidence of it. For the Sunday Times columnist Melanie Phillips (2000)
the report was clear evidence of ‘the truth [that] the police are not racist’. As a

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852 Sociology Volume 41 ■ Number 5 ■ October 2007

manifestation of a public face of sociology, the wide publicity given to the Dennis
et al. (2000) report is impressive. However, critics might argue about whether or
not the report is ‘sociological’; it may be the case that the extent of the coverage it
received stems from the fact that it confirmed views about institutional racism
already expressed by some newspaper columnists.
However, if the ISCS report is treated as a form of public sociology it raises
a wider question. Although Burawoy (2005) maintains that public sociology has
no necessary normative stance, part of what is in contention is how ‘progressive’
or ‘reactionary’ particular approaches are. This is evident in his questions,
‘Knowledge for whom and knowledge for what?’ His charting of the multiple
answers to these questions does not – indeed it obviously cannot – resolve the
question of what happens when diverse forms of, or claims to, public sociology
conflict. Are such differences to be adjudicated by other sociologists, by
different publics, and, in either case, on what basis? Burawoy (2005) does stress
the need to distinguish good from bad sociology and emphasizes that public soci-
ology needs to be the former and not the latter. He hopes that mutual recogni-
tion, rather than antagonism, is possible between professional sociology’s
accountability to peers and public sociology’s accountability to publics. This is
commendable; however, the deep divergences within professional and
public sociologies on institutional racism suggest that the mechanisms for
adjudication remain underdeveloped in anything other than the professional
realms of peer review.
Burawoy exhorts sociologists to take a more public role through writing
‘op ed’ columns in newspapers for example. The willingness and opportunities
to do so may coincide haphazardly, however. Access into the media may rely
upon networks between individual sociologists and journalists and editors,
rather than the intrinsic merit of their work, or its assessment by professional
peers. Similarly, the opinions of media commentators on institutional racism
may be formed without any recourse to sociologists, as seems to be the case in
the articles mentioned previously. The contested nature of sociological knowl-
edge and differing views of what constitutes ‘good’ sociology may mean that
essentially scholarly disagreements are unlikely to appeal to media editors.
Hence, the impact of sociology in the media is highly uneven and unlikely to
reflect anything other than a highly partial view. This implies that public soci-
ology is currently rather hit and miss, instead of a programme of public engage-
ment. Burawoy (2005: 265) asks ‘why should anyone listen to us rather than
the other messages streaming through the media?’ Part of his answer to that is
that sociology has an underdeveloped conception of publics and still has much
to do in understanding how to engage them.
One of the concerns about advocating public sociology can be captured as
‘dumbing down’. Burawoy acknowledges that public sociology in pursuit of
popularity may be ‘tempted to pander to and flatter its publics, and thereby
compromis[e its] professional and critical commitments’, or it may speak ‘down
to its publics, a sort of intellectual vanguardism’ (2005: 277).6 Ericson adds to
this that the medium of communication matters. He points out that:

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 Sociological engagements Murji 853

There is a world of difference between communicating in the British Journal of

Sociology, twelve-second news clip on television news, government policy report, and
testimony before a court of law or commission of inquiry. The sociologist’s text escapes
her as it moves into these new contexts that reconfigure how she thinks and acts.

The translation process entailed in fitting in with populist politics and confor-
mity to narrow media criteria of relevance can, Ericson suggests, produce out-
comes that do ‘not look like sociology at all, but rather journalism, government
consultancy or expert witnessing’ (2005: 369–370). In any case, the willingness
of sociologists to speak and communicate to wider audiences has to be matched
by an audience that is receptive, or at least open, to hearing such communica-
tion, as Scott (2005) points out. The engagement and cultivation of such
addressees is not something that has been pursued in a systematic or concerted
way even by those sociologists who might be regarded as public intellectuals.

Conclusion

This article has sought to look at both the possibilities for and problems with pub-
lic sociology. The emergence and later life of the idea of institutional racism sug-
gests that sociology can combine with social movements and public inquiries to
advance an engaged anti-racist sociology seeking to influence public policy and
discourse, although it is arguable that such engagement led to a lack of theoretical
advancement of the idea itself. On the other hand, sociology’s reflexive knowledge
means that it can itself become the object of critique around racism and institu-
tional racism, just as sociologists have criticized other disciplines on these matters.
The internal debates are an inescapable feature of sociology’s contested nature.
Just as sociology cannot be pictured as a cohesive and integrated discipline (and
Burawoy points out that it is misleading to imagine that the sciences and other
areas are integrated), the publics we wish to engage are also diverse and frag-
mented. The route to a better public sociology is to find ways of working through
and with such diversity, rather than against it. While engagement with publics via
the media is problematic for the various reasons discussed above, in a mediatized
world it remains one essential route through which such work might occur and
efforts to do so require more sustained engagement. Nonetheless, other avenues of
engagement – linked to the conceptual development of what we understand by
publics – remain underdeveloped. While all of this makes Burawoy’s vision of pub-
lic sociology a considerable and perhaps distant target, making the journey in that
direction is important because sociological engagements with public issues are a
key part of its capacity to be a vibrant and attractive discipline.

Acknowledgment

I would like to thank the editors of this special issue and the three anonymous ref-
erees for their helpful suggestions on a previous version of this article.

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854 Sociology Volume 41 ■ Number 5 ■ October 2007

Notes

1 ‘The boys who killed Stephen Lawrence’ was broadcast on BBC 1 on 26 July
2006.
2 An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944)
by Gunnar Myrdal.
3 From Footnotes, March 2003. This and other references to the ASA in this sec-
tion are taken from its website: www.asanet.org (accessed February 2007).
4 Extracted from recorded face-to-face interview in July 2006 carried out by the
author.
5 Extracted from recorded face-to-face interview in June 2006 carried out by the
author.
6 He also acknowledges, in the USA, the public sphere is ‘not only weak but over-
run with armies of experts and a plethora of media. The sociological voice is
easily drowned out’ (Burawoy, 2005: 279).

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Karim Murji

Is a senior lecturer in Sociology at The Open University. His research examines several
aspects of culture, ethnicity and racism. His most recent book (co-edited with John
Solomos) is Racialization: Studies in Theory and Practice (Oxford University Press, 2005).
Address: Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes
MK7 6AA, UK.
E-mail: k.murji@open.ac.uk

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