THE RISE AND DECLINE OF AREAS OF SPECIALIZATION.

This article discusses the rise and decline of areas of specialization in sociology. There are two predominant explanations for the choice of persistence of professional interests in the scientific community. The first explanation is the more prominent and may be referred to as professionalization. This term commonly implies a shift in values in which the professional becomes less concerned with the opinions of laymen and more concerned with the opinions of his tutors and peers. The second explanation for the choice and persistence of professional interests in less deterministic and provides for an interchange of forces in the process of professionalization. In this case the novice, is both actor and reactor, initiating and negotiating change. The dialectical process of professionalization is more applicable to the current academic scenario that is the indocrination-conformity model of professional socialization for two reasons. First, change in society is evident and is having an impact on sociology. Second, evidence of change within sociology seems to be mounting. The basic question in this paper is to ascertain how sociologists currently define their own professional interests and to what extent they have changed their interests over time.