The article starts with a discussion detached from the premises about relevancy and reflexivity of sociological knowledge for the social development of contemporary society (Coleman,1990). The challenges of “the new social structure” dedicated the so-called “knowledge society”, in which scientific knowledge is shaping individuals, developments, institutions but also creates societal risks generated by recent science and technology innovations. The social significance of this topic consists in the answer given to the question: What kind of sociological knowledge is most proper for the actual social construction in Romania? The hypothesis of the article is that the scientific production of sociology at this moment is unable to contribute to the use of its own results, because of the lack of a truly interested audience in both academic and extra-academic sphere. The arguments that I want to demonstrate contain, on the one side, critical explanations about the current issues of the “knowledge society” (Coleman, 1990) or about the “risk society” (Beck, 1986), and on the other side, they refer to the relevancy of the scientific production of sociology in a modern “reflexive society” (Giddens, 1990). The article also includes references to the “division of sociological labor” (Burawoy, 2004), a concept which introduces a critical perspective on the idea of the “Romanian public sociology” in the post-communist society. From an epistemological perspective, the interest in exploring concepts like “internationalization” and “institutionalization” belonging to the sociology developed after 1989 in Romania is an important objective in order to formulate explanations about the challenges of the new knowledge society and the answers given by sociologists.

Keywords: Romanian sociology, knowledge society, the division of labor, circulation of ideas, post-communism.

Full text