“Fabio Rojas asks”:http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2011/01/03/should-i-drop-post-modernism-from-the-theory-course/ this morning whether he should entirely drop postmodernism as a topic in his sociological theory courses.
bq. American sociology is not really focused on PMT. The major journals simply do not publish much on PMT, at least since the mid-1990s or so. … I do not know if I can clearly say that I can judge or assess many PMT claims. I find those that I understand bizarre and unsupported … Why not teach stuff like networks, globalization, or epigenetics as “theory?” These ideas are really changing the way we think about the social world.
His commenters (with the exception of one embattled postmodernist sociologist) seem largely to agree with him. If the most prominent sociology blog is a reliable indicator, postmodernism is not (for better or for worse) considered a substantial theoretical approach among academic sociologists.
This is particularly interesting to me as an IR professor and sometime member of the International Studies Association. One of the several journals that our dues go to support is _International Political Sociology._ This is the kind of journal I would _like_ to see doing well. There are many, _many_ important things that international relations scholars can learn from sociologists. Unfortunately, this journal seems to me to publish precious little sociology, and a whole lot of postmodernism. Not usually (in my personal view) the good postmodernism either, but third or fourth rate stuff. The “current issue”:http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.proxygw.wrlc.org/doi/10.1111/ips.2010.4.issue-4/issuetoc for example, has six articles, four of which are obviously postmodern (one of which is reasonably good in my opinion – but that is rather unusual), one Bourdieuvian, and one that is recognizably sociology. I’ve heard from sociologically inclined colleagues that the journal is actually somewhat hostile to articles drawing from current sociological debates. This said, I should note that my own interactions with the editorial people, whenever I’ve reviewed something for them, have been positive, although the standard of the material I’ve been sent for review has typically been low.
There is an interesting story to be told about how ‘sociology’ in IR has become a code-word for approaches that have little to do with sociology as it is actually practiced by sociologists. This story would indeed itself be a sociological one – I think it would involve the intersection of movement building among those who see themselves as politically excluded, and the pejorative lumping together of a perceived rag-bag of ‘unscientific’ approaches under the rubric of ‘sociology’ by the powerful. But it is a bit odd that a journal which describes itself as sociological should have so little to do with sociology as it is actually practiced by sociologists. I’d like to see it do much more e.g. to draw on the work of economic sociologists and organizational sociologists who IR scholars really ought to be reading.