Sociology has existed in universities and as a research and scholarly profession for more than a century, but it has serious problems in justifying its existence in terms of demonstrating that the knowledge it produces is useful. In its early stages of development, sociology was often coupled with social work or with other fields such as anthropology, political science, and economics. However, as universities grew, the social and behavioral science fields became differentiated, and in the post–World War II period sociology not only grew but flourished and developed a major identity in the universities. However, more important, within the field applied interests were often disparaged. In large part, fields such as social work, family studies, industrial relations, systems analysis, administration, criminology, penology, and others became independent major entities as sociologists denigrated the notion...