For sociologists to accept the label voluntarily is for them to reduce the legitimacy of their own work. C. This, then, is to set SRM's remarks in a wider political context, but there is also the matter of the logic of the social sciences. Though this may seem a heretical statement for a sociologist of scientific knowledge, we need to distinguish between the politics and the methodology of our work. Just as, as analysts, we would not use our findings to prescribe the proper methodology for research on, say, gravity waves, we should not allow our analytical sensitivities to affect our own research in inappropriate ways. We need, then, to distinguish between how we do our work and its impact.
Neutrality is a methodological prescription.
One may try to be methodologically neutral while accepting that one's work will have an asymmetrical impact on the world. If you think that the impact will be bad, you may well pull out of the research. For example, natural scientists have pulled out of research on nuclear weapons because they fear its consequences, even though, as far as they were concerned, the consequences did not affect the way they did their research. The effects and the worries are, however, not related to the methodology of the studies. Mulkay, Potter, and Yearley claimed that our research was not methodologically neutral.