What Is the Empirical?

This special issue poses the question: what is the empirical? More specifically, it raises this question for the discipline of Sociology. This question, we believe, is a vital one to pose in our current juncture which witnesses two seemingly paradoxical movements in regard to the place, status and significance of the empirical within Sociology. On the one hand, the discipline faces what has been termed a ‘coming crisis’ of empirical Sociology (Savage and Burrows, 2007), an impending crisis created by the expansion of the production of data relating to the social world by researchers (and technologies) outside the university. This expansion puts in question the sociologist’s claim to have a monopoly of expertise in the techniques of the generation of social data and the analysis of social life