Life Trajectories of Three Swedish Sociologists

To contribute to our knowledge of the social production of sociology, this paper builds on three interviews. The interviewees are Swedish sociologists, two men and one woman, one of the men having a foreign background. They are born between 1935 and 1955 and represent the active group of the first two generations of professional sociologists in Sweden.

The first Swedish chair in sociology in 1903 (shared with economics) did not get any successor. Therefore the starting year of the next chair in sociology more often counts as the start of the discipline in Sweden, namely 1947. The discipline was built up during the first three decades and is now represented at 21 universities and colleges in Sweden.

The chosen three personalities are not “ordinary”, but they fit in based on the criterion ‘median academic rank’. One of them reached professorial status being 65 years old, and the other two are associate professors. The man with Swedish background has had the strongest career, also with an international impact. The woman could have been a top professor had she been raised now, not in the patriarchal times when she made her doctoral thesis (the 1970s).  The man with the foreign background is a political refugee from Latin America who has overcome many obstacles in his way to get to his present university position. They are interviewed as historical witnesses under their real names. As familiarity with sociological concepts can be presumed, the interviews themselves are based on an interactive sociological analysis by interviewer and interviewee. The interviewer is a Swedish, female sociologist born in the 1940’s who started to study sociology in 1968.