As the title intimates, this book is in principle concerned with the role of discourse in the generation, utilisation and development of knowledge. Written as it is by an author professionally employed as a sociologist, this relationship will be investigated more specifically with reference to the process through which sociology arose, became established and is continuously being maintained, revised and developed. Despite this emphasis, however, knowledge is confined here neither to scientific knowledge created by paid professionals, such as myself, nor more generally to the systematised and formalised knowledge of academia. Rather it is broadly understood as the tools or instruments and the working materials used by people at all levels and in different contexts to make or construct their world. In this sense, it includes the widest variety of kinds of knowledge, from the informal, everyday knowledge of ordinary people, through the more formal, systematised knowledge of professionals, to public knowledge such as frameworks of meaning and cultural models that reach people through public communication, controversies and the media. At the centre of interest is precisely how discourse makes possible and facilitates the interrelation or interconnection of all these different kinds of knowledge in the course of the constitution of social reality.

Rather than embarking at this point on an outline of the theoretical and methodological positions and steps that will be taken in order to be able to pursue the intended investigation of the relation between discourse and knowledge, I want to provide the reader with as clear and substantive a point of access as possible to the material presented in this book. Such an access is to be found in the concern of the book with the history of sociology. What I propose to do is briefly to confront a number of more or less widely accepted conventional explanations of the rise of sociology and then, against that background, to suggest an alternative account that will be presented in detail later in this book. This preliminary overview will make possible the introduction in an intelligible manner of the key theoretical, methodological and epistemological concepts adopted in the book for the purposes of analysing the relation between discourse and knowledge.