Professional Ethics in Sociology

Abstract The current atmosphere in society is heavy with words that were almost imperceptibly beginning to fall out of usage—first from official usage, and then from everyday and professional language. Sadly enough, these words referred to such concepts as personal honor, human dignity, professional conscience, and duty. Unfortunately the moral, political, and ideological climate reigning in society left its imprint on both science and on relations within the scientific environment. It exerted a direct influence on the development of sociology, which essentially was denied the status of an independent scientific discipline. First it was cut down to "applied sociological investigations," and later to "sociological investigations." Command-administrative and bureaucratic methods of management were especially burdensome for social scientists. The norms and ideals of science itself were gradually eradicated from science. It was during this time, as R. V. Ryvkina justly pointed out [2], that three types of sociologists evolved: ideological sociologists, concerned with the struggle against the penetration of ideas alien to us; pragmatic sociologists, oriented toward giving a "saleable image" to an investigation, giving due consideration to the interests of the client and the potential user; and finally, a small layer of research sociologists, gradually relegated to the second and third ranks of the official structure of the subdivisions of science.

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