Sociology and its publics: the forms and fates of disciplinary
organization / edited by Terence C. Halliday and Morris janowitz. - Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. - P.137-195.No discipline has contributed more to interdisciplinary social science than sociology, and no discipline has suffered more from the poor showing of that enterprise. Sociology, according to August Comte, was to be "queen of the sciences"; more recent sociologists have generally aspired only to be the most synthetically encompassing of the social sciences. Nonetheless, as Rigney and Barnes put it, "for better or worse, contemporary sociology has inherited a dual identity. In principle it has been a synthetic discipline; more often in practice it has served as an interstitial discipline, filling in gaps among the other social sciences and working along their borders" (1980:116).
