Toward Hard-Science Sociology

Since sociology's inception as a discipline, basic tension between science and advocacy has always existed. This paper reviewed the arguments for and against scientific sociology with an eye to offering another way to reconcile valueneutral theory and research with what recent sociology now calls "sociological practice" or the application of sociological knowledge to real world settings. The paper has found that the only way to use theoretically informed knowledge is to reject ideology and, instead, become social engineers rather than advocates for some value-laden ideological position. It is not the goal of sociology to decide for other what is good or bad, rather, it is the goal of sociology to understand how the social world operates and, then, to make this knowledge available for those engaged in building and rebuilding sociocultural constructions.