The British Journal of Sociology in the 1990s disintegration and disarray?

When I announced to a colleague that I had been tasked with surveying the British Journal of Sociology in the 1990s, he grunted ‘rather you than me’. It was with huge trepidation that I approached a decade that I had been led to believe represented a discipline in crisis. That apprehension was compounded enormously by the impossible task of having to select two articles that represented ‘the best’ of the BJS in that decade.2 A crescendo of complaints about sociology in the 1990s sustained the truism that the sociological enterprise was at that time in a severe state of disintegration and disarray. Horowitz stated this boldly: sociology had fallen into a ‘dismal abyss’ (Horowitz in Good 1994). Whilst some sociologists disagreed with this diagnosis, a significant number believed that there were serious problems with both the intellectual coherence and professional organization of the discipline. Some of the loudest complaints came from those defending paradigms that had long held the discipline captive, but were now under attack. Predictably, sociologists were divided over what divided sociology. It is worth reprising some of these complaints here.