Institutionalisation of Professional and Policy Sociology

Abstract

The chapter tells the story of how Danish sociology moved from almost being completely erased from the academic landscape to an established institutionalised social science discipline. However, the process of ‘re-establishing’ also came with consequences for sociological knowledge. In the chapter Kropp analyses the local configuration of two general strategies applied by Danish sociologists, a professional strategy and a policy-oriented strategy. In the analysis Kropp shows how the two played out locally at different university departments and governmental research institutions and how the two strategies aligned sociological knowledge with dominating interests of other social science disciplines and not least the welfare-staThe bureaucracy.