Aditya Chakrabortty says that sociologists take refuge in debating quibbles instead of tackling the neoliberal economic and social disaster head-on, and that a politics professor resorted to "vein-bulging outbursts" when confronted with his arguments (The academics show their anger but they can't answer my criticism that there's too little analysis of our current crisis, 8 May).

It makes for an entertaining column, but honestly, it's less anger on our part and more a simple wish that some shades of grey could have been added. Chakrabortty complains that we don't engage beyond academia: "Confronted with the biggest crisis since the 30s, the trade body for British sociologists proudly displayed its engagement by enumerating articles in the Journal of Niche Studies." But we had already given him a list of sociologists who have published books, placed their work in sociology journals, or written newspaper and magazine articles, around the origins of the crisis and its consequences.

On the shelves of our office are books written by colleagues, with titles such as Material Markets: How Economic Agents are Constructed. And among the journals is our publication Work, Employment and Society, whose December 2011 issue was devoted to the recession, with articles on macroeconomic policy and theorising financialisation. The journal also hosted an international conference on the banking crisis in 2010.

Chakrabortty takes issue with our annual conference: "Many academics haven't begun digging into the banking crisis, but instead ploughed on with researching – to pick examples from the last British Sociological Association conference – the real-ale industry." In fact our conference, to which journalists were invited, had three main sessions, each attended by hundreds of researchers: on private equity firms; the failure of Marxism to predict the downturn; and the uncertainty created by new management models such as that at Enron.

Chakrabortty pulls us up for what he sees as a lack of "depth of research on finance", but if we want to understand the crisis fully we need to understand how organisations work, how unions function and how labour markets have developed, in addition to examining the raw figures. Sociology is tackling all of these.

I can reassure readers that sociology and the social sciences, both in the UK and US, are concerned not just with how we can clear this mess up but how we can stop it happening again. Chakrabortty is right to raise this vital issue, and to ask if more could be done. The answer to that is, of course, yes: more can be done by both academics and journalists. Academics – from sociology and other disciplines – and research funding bodies have to work together to ensure there is funding to tackle these issues in-depth.

Chakrabortty complains that we would only communicate with him by offering a broader email exchange on this issue: "Hardly the spirit of academic debate," he says. Well, why not? It's the clearest and most transparent way of having an informed conversation that might benefit all of us. We're still offering it, Aditya – you know our email address.

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