Social science
Social science is a category of academic disciplines, concerned with society and the relationships among individuals within a society. Social science as a whole has many branches. These social sciences include, but are not limited to: anthropology, archaeology, communication studies, economics, history, human geography, jurisprudence, linguistics, political science, psychology, public health, and sociology. The term is also sometimes used to refer specifically to the field of sociology, the original "science of society", established in the 19th century. For a more detailed list of sub-disciplines within the social sciences see: Outline of social science.
Public sociology
Debates over public sociology have rekindled questions concerning the extra-academic "purpose" of sociology. Public sociology raises questions about what sociology is and what its goals ought to (or even could) be. Such debates (over science and political advocacy, scholarship and public commitment) have a long history in American sociology and in American social science more generally. Historian Mark C. Smith, for instance, has investigated earlier debates over the purpose of social science in his book "Social Science in the Crucible: The American Debate over Objectivity and Purpose,1918-1941" (1994), while Stephen P. Turner and Jonathan H. Turner argue in their book, "The Impossible Science: An Institutional Analysis of American Sociology" (1990), that sociology's search for purpose, through dependence on external publics, has limited the discipline's potential.