Bauman's Metaphors: The Poetic Imagination in Sociology

Zygmunt Bauman is one of the most renowned and read sociologists in contemporary Continental European sociology. Throughout his lifelong work, he has provided the discipline with numerous outstanding and substantial theoretical analyses and interpretations of modernity and postmodernity, globalisation and individualisation, the Holocaust and human suffering, etc. A relatively overlooked aspect of Bauman's sociology is his alternative methodological stance lingering somewhere between social science and literature. The most prominent feature of his methodological arsenal is the metaphor. In this article, the authors delineate and discuss Bauman's metaphors and the contribution to sociology of these literary devices. Concomitantly, the present ‘case study' of Bauman's metaphors also raises more general discussions of the relationship between social science and literature, fact and faction, poetic representation and scientific description.