How did you get into sociology?
When I entered college in the early 1960s, I was leaning toward becoming a lawyer. At the time, a general liberal arts education sufficed as preparation for law school, and so I embarked on that path. My trajectory changed dramatically in my sophomore year when I took a sociology course with Professor Neal. He taught in a remarkably interactive format—unusual for that era—posing problems and eliciting our responses. To my surprise, I often had the “right” answers. While many of my classmates were still grappling with the sociological imagination, I found it aligned with how I already thought about the world.
In retrospect, I see that I had long been traversing diverse social terrains. I grew up in a rural-suburban area and attended a small school where many classmates came from farming and blue-collar families. My own father managed a small craft-based business that took him throughout the region, while other relatives worked in white-collar professions in the city. With a paper route and part-time jobs in both rural and urban settings, I inhabited—and learned to navigate—vastly different social worlds. These experiences gave me an intuitive grasp of class, occupation, mobility, and inequality.
Sociology offered a conceptual language for what I had previously understood only through experience. I learned how to name and analyze the dynamics I had long observed: social stratification, status inconsistency, in-group and out-group relations, and the structural foundations of inequality. By the time I was a senior, I had completed all the available undergraduate sociology courses and was permitted to take graduate seminars. These deepened my sociological identity, as did coursework in economics, psychology, political science, and philosophy.
Law school no longer appealed to me. I had found a discipline that didn’t just describe the world, but explained how it was structured—and how it might be changed. By the time I entered graduate school, I had thoroughly internalized a sociological perspective. It was no longer simply a mode of analysis; it had become a way of being in the world.
What makes you sociologically curious?
For decades, I have been fascinated by entrepreneurship—particularly the cultural persistence of a belief in success, even among those with little chance of achieving it. From an actuarial perspective, the odds of starting and sustaining a successful small business are daunting. Yet since the U.S. industrial revolution, entrepreneurship has been held up as a central component of the American Dream. I have sought to understand the social and institutional conditions under which people start new ventures and manage to endure.
Sociology is uniquely positioned to explore this paradox. Entrepreneurial action is rarely an isolated, individual decision—it is profoundly shaped by group identity, community ties, and cultural narratives. The persistence of the entrepreneurial ideal reveals much about the symbolic rewards of risk-taking, the legitimating function of optimism, and the structural supports (or barriers) that shape outcomes.
I remain intrigued by how deeply embedded these cultural scripts are, and how they help reproduce inequality under the guise of opportunity. If belief in entrepreneurial success ever collapses, so too might one of the legitimating myths of capitalist societies.
What challenges does sociology face as a science?
Sociology asks difficult questions, especially for those in positions of power. Many dominant ideologies explain success in terms of individual merit: talent, hard work, perseverance. Sociology complicates these narratives by examining the structural conditions that make such outcomes possible—or impossible—for different social groups. Our discipline highlights how privilege is often inherited, institutions are path-dependent, and social mobility is highly contingent.
Over the last half-century, sociology has moved far beyond speculative theorizing. Our analytical tools are increasingly rigorous, our data sources expansive, and our methods sophisticated. Yet the political climate has become more resistant to the kind of evidence-based critique sociology offers. Our findings are often dismissed as ideological rather than empirical, especially when they challenge comforting beliefs about meritocracy, family, or tradition.
Moreover, we must acknowledge our own limitations. In an age of rising inequality and democratic backsliding, sociology has sometimes failed to communicate its insights to those most affected. Critics argue that we have not done enough to connect with non-college-educated publics or to render our findings intelligible beyond academic circles. If we are to fulfill the promise of sociology—as both a science and a public good—we must do more to bridge that divide. We must articulate not only what is wrong with the world, but also why our explanations matter for those whose lives are shaped by the very inequalities we study.
Howard Aldrich is Kenan Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.