The Promise and Perils of Applied Sociology: A Survey of Nonacademic Employers

Using data collected from sixty‐five nonacademic employers, who either advertised in the ASA Employment Bulletin between January 1979 and January 1981 or who registered with the employment service at the ASA annual meetings in 1979 or 1980, we examine what nonacademic employers are looking for when they recruit sociologists, how they recruit such employees, what tasks employers assign sociologists, and what they perceive to be the major shortcomings of sociologists they have hired. Guiding the inquiry is our belief that programs and policies for expanding nonacademic job opportunities and the arguments for increasing the emphasis placed on applied sociology in graduate training have been more concerned with molding individuals to fit certain perceived occupational roles outside of academia than with training sociologists. We suggest that an uncritical acceptance of the nature of demand in the current labor market may ultimately lead to a deskilling of the sociological profession and the homogenization of the nonacademic labor markets open to social scientists.