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Sociology – professional or pragmatic?

Once again I came away from the BSA Conference with the message that sociology was in crisis but at the same time at a moment of great opportunity if only it could sort out precisely what it is and what it’s for. And once again I came away feeling cautiously optimistic. One source of this optimism was the presentation given by John Holmwood Sociology’s ‘moments’: Democracy, expertise and the market. A major contention of his paper, and one that has significant consequences for sociology, is that the dominance of neo-liberal public policy since the late 1970s has sought to replace ‘publics’ with ‘markets’.

In elaborating on the problems this presents to sociology, not least because the discipline and its institutional home in Universities are also being subject to a process of marketization and financialization, John contrasted the Parsonian project to create a professional sociology immune to ideological distortion with the American Pragmatists that developed the notion of the social self in the process of a critique of liberalism (1). It was Mead at the turn of the 19th century that saw the increasing tendency for government to merge with business and the industrial world. Dewey maintained that government did not so much represent the public interest as those of corporations and markets. Then, as now, this has significant consequences for our notions of democracy and the political role of the public sphere. But, according to Mead, this presents opportunities to the ‘public’ that emerge from forms of resistance and moments of critique.

A conception of a different world comes to us always as the result of some specific problem which involves readjustment of the world as it is, not to meet a detailed ideal of a perfect universe, but to obviate the present difficulty …. [The Working Hypothesis in Social Reform American Journal of Sociology, November 1899]

This has implications for the nature of sociology as a form of expertise and its role, according to John. It could be in the service of government and its partnership with the corporations and industry. Or it could serve the more public project of adjusting and coping with the effects and consequences, intended and unintended, of neoliberal corporatist policies. This implies a role for sociology in dialogue with ‘publics’ as they try to organise around the effects, to paraphrase C Wright Mills, that public issues have on private lives and communities. This may not sound radical or ‘activist’ enough for some but it is worth serious investigation and consideration. John makes the point that this is not an ’emancipatory’ sociology. It is not a programme or project to bring into being ‘a detailed idea of a perfect universe’. However it does confront and critique the taken for granted assumptions of reality and the doxa that supports and reproduces it. It does expose the historicity and contingency of the taken for granted and demonstrates that other realities are imaginable. In serving the public rather than the dominant troika of government, industry and finance, sociology serves democracy in that it exposes and resists the multifarious processes and policies that combine to hollow out and neutralise democratic institutions. In a previous ‘radical moment’, in the 1960s and 70s, sociology could be seen as harnessed to a project of institutionalised reform and betterment operationalised by the welfare state and influenced by the new social movements focused on forms of equality and inclusive citizenship. But from that time on sociology has been squeezed between a neoliberal critique of the welfare state and citizenship rights and its denigration as a form of expertise in the service of a now derided and demonised programme of betterment and entitlement. John concluded with the question, what is it to practice sociology in a profoundly undemocratic system where reform has been de-institutionalised and sociology has lost its institutional locus and legitimacy? One suggestion is that it should revivify itself in response to a new radical moment and in doing so can revisit and be informed by some of the lessons and messages of the American pragmatists of the early 20th century. Sociology can inform a defence of wider social values in the face of a declining democracy. It can do this by providing publics with new and alternative accounts of the present and possible futures. In the face of TINA (there is no alternative) it can be asserted there always were and still are. To this end sociology (and therefore sociologists and their practice) must occupy (with all its post financial crash connotations) public debate in the service of democracy (not markets) and make inequality matter.

A great deal of John’s paper seemed to chime in well with the rather modest and arguably realistic (pragmatic) claims Zygmunt Bauman makes for sociology. Like John in his paper, Zygmunt offers a history of the development of sociology mapped onto key stages in the development of modernity and the state. In Zygmunt’s account this can be represented by his distinction between sociologists as legislators and, as this function is stripped away from them, as interpreters. He also offers a diagnosis of the current parlous state of democratic institutions based on a corporatist account of government and the separation of power from state politics as a result of economic aspects of globalisation. His conclusions for the contemporary role of sociological practice are similar too in that it should engage in dialogue with various publics in the service of wider social values, democracy and justice. I’m not claiming that John’s account and Zygmunt’s are reducible to one another. I’m sure there would be points of disagreement and differences in emphasis. I only draw attention to a similarity in their conclusions for the practice of sociology today.

There are two points of interest that I’d like to pursue. The first one is the notion that sociology develops in confrontation with ‘radical moments’ that are precipitated by social developments external to its discourse and therefore changes in the environment with which it has symbiotic and what might be called co-evolutionary relationships. The second is the notion that sociology should concern itself with and service democracy and wider social values such as those that are concerned with inequality and justice. I will return to the second point in another post but in the spirit of John’s return to the early American pragmatists I thought I would revisit an influential reflection on sociology at another radical moment in its history, the 1950s and 60s, by Alvin Gouldner. This will draw on two of his writings. The first is Anti Minotaur: The Myth of a Value Free Sociology (Social Problems, Volume 8, Number 3, Winter 1962, pp. 199 ff.) first given as a Presidential Address to the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP) in 1961. The second is The Sociologist as Partisan: Sociology and the Welfare State (The American Sociologist Vol. 3, No. 2, May, 1968, pp. 103-116). This was a critical reaction to the Presidential Address given by Howard Becker to the SSSP 6 years later entitled Whose Side Are We On (Social Problems, Vol. 14, No. 3, Winter 1967, pp. 239-247) where Becker advocated we should conduct our sociological practice from the point of view of the ‘underdog’. Both these articles are conveniently collected together as chapters 1 and 2 of Gouldner’s book For Sociology: Renewal and Critique in Sociology Today Allen Lane 1973. (I first looked at these readings in 1977 when I was doing A level sociology at an evening class and frankly hardly understood a word of it)! This critique is quite damning and one wonders if Gouldner and Becker where friends! Gouldner’s critique of Becker’s attempt to side step the problem of values in sociology is instructive for thinking about the grounds upon which an engaged sociology should focus on social values concerned with inequality and justice as advocated by both John Holmwood and Zygmunt Bauman.

I’ll commence Gouldner’s discussion of the myth of a value free sociology with an extended quotation that mirrors very well some key concerns we, or some academics at least, still have today with respect to the role and practice of sociology.

The problem of a value-free sociology has its most poignant implications for the social scientist in his (sic) role as educator. If sociologists ought not to express their personal values in the academic setting, how then are students to be safeguarded against the unwitting influence of these values which shape the sociologist’s selection of problems, his preferences for certain hypotheses or conceptual schemes, and his neglect of others? For these are unavoidable and, in this sense, there is and can be no value-free sociology. The only choice is between an expression of ones’ values, as open and honest as it can be […] and a vain ritual of moral neutrality which, because it invites men (sic) to ignore the vulnerability of reason to bias, leaves it at the mercy of irrationality.

In Gouldner’s view a value free sociology is impossible due to the unavoidable necessity of making choices between subject matters, research hypotheses, concepts and explanatory frameworks. To mistakenly claim and offer value free knowledge, however sincerely, is to obscure the inevitability of this process, the values that inform it and its knowledge productions. If it is claimed that social values can only distort knowledge when in fact they are an indispensable condition of its production, then all knowledge is distorted. Distortion in the sense of partial, selective, contingent, is inevitable. But the term ‘distortion’ can be left out of this characterisation of knowledge as it implies the possibility of an undistorted knowledge that is impartial, complete(able), absolute and universal. This is the modernist utopian vision of knowledge that underpins the post-political world of techno-managerialism and expertise. For Gouldner, claims of value freedom translate into moral and value relativism. This leads to the claimed ‘value free’ sociology being at best politically irrelevant and at worse it surrenders authority, legitimacy and power to the dominant discourses of the status quo in which it becomes complicit. It is in danger of becoming the hand servant of and harnessed to the technologies of domination, legitimation and obfuscation. ‘Nudge theory’ springs to mind here along with behavioural economics and sociologically informed tools of post-political techno-management. A purported value free professional sociology can be used to help sell cigarettes as well as advise those who wish to reduce smoking. The domain of the value-free morally neutral sociology is that of the “spiritless technician who will be no less lacking in understanding than they are in passion, and who will be useful only because they can be used”. Gouldner warns us that however blunt and dull these sociologically informed tools are they are capable of building a social technology “powerful enough to cripple us”. In his day prisoners of war and GIs were being systematically brain washed and compulsive consumerism was being driven by advertising and scientific marketing. As he observed, the social science technologies of the future will “hardly be less powerful than today’s”.

Within the institutionalised forms of sociology this can be experienced by its students and practitioners as isolating and alienating. In the words of Gouldner, “They feel impotent to contribute usefully to the solution of [society’s] deepening problems and, even when they can, they fear that the terms of such an involvement require them to submit to a commercial debasement or a narrow partisanship, rather than contributing to a truly public interest”. There are two strategies for psychological accommodation for the institutionalised sociologist. One is to embrace relativism, particularistic anthropology or the post-modern turn, solving the problem of value-freedom by promoting it to an intellectual principle. The other is to become a sociologist of sociology and engage in a learned and scholarly critique of its competing paradigms and methods. Both are ways of sheltering from the real world of political action and passion, uncertainty and messy pragmatism. “It evokes the soothing illusion, amongst some sociologists, that their exclusion from the larger society is a self-imposed duty rather than an externally imposed constraint”. It disguises the fact that to refrain from social criticism reflects the personal interests and insecurities of some sociologists rather than “reflecting a higher professional good”.

So two tendencies that Gouldner identified in the 50s and 60s are for some sociologists to either ‘sell out’ or ‘opt out’ neither of which sound particularly edifying as a job descriptions for young sociologists today. Arguably the two tendencies are still alive and well but fortunately they don’t represent the only options available or for that matter already manifest. In his day Gouldner was not saying that the ‘critical posture’ is dead in American sociology, only that it was ‘badly sagging’. He cited several authors that were bucking the trend many of whom would be largely unknown today but C Wright Mills, Dennis Wrong, Lewis Coser, Bernard Rosenberg and David Riesman may still stir the memory of some of us. Gouldner considered these to be intellectuals no less than sociologists, the larger tradition from which sociology evolved and which is itself founded on the assertion of the right to be critical of tradition. We have our own contemporary representatives of this contrary and troublesome breed.

For me, at least, a number of problems emerge from this. What is it to be critical? What is practically entailed in practising a sociology that engages in dialogues with various publics? On what basis do we choose the publics to engage with? What is the justification for adopting and focusing on values associated with inequality and justice? (2) Don’t financiers, bankers, the police, torturers and hedge fund managers constitute publics and operate in their own universe of values? If we claim we should side with the victims, given a sociologist’s systemic sensibilities, are we not all victims one way or another? And in a world of unavoidable and irreducible uncertainty in which we have abandoned utopian visions and meta-narratives, political and scientific, isn’t pragmatic adaptation and problem solving doomed to be absorbed and neutralised, even exploited, by the status quo to enhance its legitimacy and wealth and further secure its domination? As Zygmunt Bauman, John Holloway and Slavoj Žižek all say, in no particular order, there are no guarantees this will all end happily. Perhaps the best we can do is live in the limbo of a hopeful resignation. Perhaps it is, after all, quite rational to tend our own gardens, retreat behind the barricades of relativism and incestuous methodological flagellation? Or make alliances with the centres of unassailable power to minimise our own victim-hood? I think there are positive, life enhancing and, yes, emancipatory answers to these questions. The next post will continue with Gouldner and examine his account of why we should side with the exploited and those that are subjected to an excess of suffering, given that to suffer to some extent is part of the human condition.

Notes:
(1) In another session devoted to an exploration of the relationship between economics and sociology it was pointed out that Parsons claimed that sociology is concerned with the residual problems left over by economics.
(2) It is not clear that a sociology that is informed by a concern with inequality and justice and that exposes the complex and contingent mechanisms that work ‘behind the curtain’, as Bauman and Kundera would have it, and therefore debunk the assertions of TINA cannot and will not be used to inform the policies and strategies, both explicit and hidden, of the dominant classes to preserve something like the status quo. This would mean that a body of critical knowledge would not be enough to produce a society that embodied the preferred social values of equality and justice. The knowledge would have to be translated into countervailing political and cultural processes and activities – a call for an engaged activist sociology perhaps using ‘action’ forms of research and engagement.

Of possible interest is the post I did last year reflecting on the BSA conference in 2012 http://terrywassall.org/2012/04/14/reflections-on-britsoc12/

Paths in the fog – Milan Kundera

Norbert Elias writes, I think in his book What is Sociology, that it is only with hindsight that we can see that A led to B to C and so on because the contingency and uncertainty of how myriad actions and consequences, intended and unintended, worked out to produce what actually happened are open to historical and sociological investigation. However, in the present, as we stand today, in conditions of endemic and permanent uncertainty (to paraphrase Zygmunt Bauman’s description of liquid modernity) we cannot know for certain how things will turn out. The best we can do is to map out possible more and less likely future scenarios and, as actors and citizens, be as informed as possible in what direction we as individuals and collectively strive for. Certainly a starting point for this would be the unmasking of the ideological myth that there is no alternative.

One of Bauman’s favourite authors is Milan Kundera. Bauman has a particular view on the relationship between literature and sociology, or more precisely a certain sort of literature as sociology, that I find very interesting and will post about later. Here is an extract from one of Kundera’s essays that expresses well what Elias was saying about retrospective certainty versus forecasting uncertainty. The list of intellectuals and literary figures he refers to in this quote are all individuals who have been put on trial by history for supporting the wrong side, fascist or communist and some for both at different times. His argument is that looking at the present and future from their position and perspective might produce a very different appraisal of their character and their work. We are looking back with the clarity of hindsight; they were looking forward through the fog. The references to Tolstoy all relate as far as I can tell to War and Peace.

Tolstoy looks back on the Napoleonic Wars from a distance of fifty years. In his case, the new perception of history not only affects the structure of the novel, which has become more and more capable of capturing (in dialogue, in description) the historical nature of narrated events; but what interests him primarily is man’s relation to history (his ability to dominate it or to escape it, to be free or not in regard to it),and he takes up the problem directly, as the very theme of his novel, a theme he explores by every means, including novelistic reflection.

Tolstoy argues against the idea that history is made by the will and reason of great individuals. History makes itself, he says, obeying laws of its own, which remain obscure to man. Great individuals “all were the involuntary tools of history, carrying on a work that was concealed from them.” Later on: “Providence compelled all these men, each striving to attain personal aims, to combine in the accomplishment of a single stupendous result not one of them (neither Napoleon nor Alexander and still less anyone who did the actual fighting) in the least expected.” And again: “Man lives consciously for himself, but is unconsciously a tool in the attainment of the historic, general aims of mankind.” From which comes this tremendous conclusion: “History, that is, the unconscious, general herd-life of mankind …” (I emphasize the key phrases.)

With this conception of history, Tolstoy lays out the metaphysical space in which his characters move. Knowing neither the meaning nor the future course of history, knowing not even the objective meaning of their own actions (by which they “involuntarily” participate in events whose meaning is “concealed from them”), they proceed through their lives as one proceeds in the fog. I say fog, not darkness. In the darkness, we see nothing, we are blind, we are defenseless, we are not free. In the fog, we are free, but it is the freedom of a person in fog: he sees fifty yards ahead of him, he can clearly make out the features of his interlocutor, can take pleasure in the beauty of the trees that line the path, and can even observe what is happening close by and react.

Man proceeds in the fog. But when he looks back to judge people of the past, he sees no fog on their path. From his present, which was their faraway future, their path looks perfectly clear to him, good visibility all the way. Looking back, he sees the path, he sees the people proceeding, he sees their mistakes, but not the fog. And yet all of them–Heidegger, Mayakovsky, Aragon, Ezra Pound, Gorky, Gottfried Benn, St.-JohnPerse, Giono–all were walking in fog, and one might wonder: who is more blind? Mayakovsky, who as he wrote his poem on Lenin did not know where Leninism would lead? Or we, who judge him decades later and do not see the fog that enveloped him?

Mayakovsky’s blindness is part of the eternal human condition.

But for us not to see the fog on Mayakovsky’s path is to forget what man is, forget what we ourselves are.

Milan Kundera 1995 Testaments Betrayed: An Essay In Nine Parts. Extract from Part Eight, Paths in the Fog pages 237-238. [The book is available on-line at http://www.scribd.com/doc/46475877/Milan-Kundera-Testaments-Betrayed]

Would C Wright Mills have kept a blog?

C Wright Mills on his BMW motorbike — I love this picture. I still have two motorbikes and ride them regularly

After a particularly inspiring session at the BSA Conference this year to celebrate the 50th anniversary of C. Wright Mills’ death, I have started to read The Sociological Imagination again. It was a standard introductory book for sociology students and I first read it when I was studying for A Level sociology at an adult education centre as a mature student in 1977. I have used the famous quote about private problems and public issues on many occasions over the years as a teacher. In fact the opening lecture of a research methods course I taught for 22 years used this quotation alongside a passage from H G Wells’ History of Mr Polly that beautifully illustrates, in the context of the desperate fate the bewildered Mr Polly was experiencing in common with much of the Victorian petty bourgeoisie, the sociological imagination.

I re-read the opening chapter of the book, The Promise, and then turned to the appendix, On Intellectual Craftsmanship. I’m not sure I’d read it before as it didn’t ring any bells but to my surprise I found myself reading a strong rationale for and recommendation to keep a blog. It is essential, he claims, to not keep your scholarly work and your life separate. You must learn to use your life experience in your intellectual work, to continually examine and interpret it. To this end you should keep a file. “The sociologist’s need for systematic reflection demands it”. It is worth reading the detailed account he gives on how the file should be used to achieve this. In almost every particular he is describing why and how I and others I know use a blog.

The file should contain as separate items records of personal experiences relevant to self and sociological reflection, ‘fringe’ thoughts, snatches of conversation, half formed ideas, notes on current and possible projects and plans, quotations from and reviews of books and articles, biographical items, all filed under various headings. Even in his time he identified the stultifying affects of putting together research plans to satisfy funders and how the planning is geared up to attracting money. In addition to this (necessary) pursuit the social scientist should find time to review ‘the state of my problems and plans’ and think in broader terms than the agenda as specified by the available funding opportunities. As projects take shape and firm up various items in the file can be re-ordered in terms of relevance for the projects. Items can be re-categorised and reordered as necessary. “The file will contain a growing store of facts and ideas, from the most vague to the most finished”. One key organising principle of the file is to pay attention to the stratified nature of society – history, structure and processes but also individual experience, understandings and problems, your own and others’. As your sociological imagination develops, so does your intellectual capacity. He recommends writing a reasonably substantial piece at least once a week. For students and early career sociologists the file is a way of developing a writing style, finding a voice and gaining confidence.

Many reading this will recognise the similarity of this account with discussions of why use a blog. It certainly coincides with my own practice. This blog is full of the items listed above. It also has over 40 draft and private entries that are work in progress or items waiting to become parts of a more polished post to share with readers. Some will never see the light of public day. The facility to categorise and tag posts makes a blog an ideal tool for flexibly re-ordering and associating different items. Obviously text can be cut and paste from posts at will. One advantage of using a blog that was not available to C. Wright Mills is the ability to have a public aspect to engage with a broad readership and exchange comments on items and pieces of writing, or for others to discover you via overlapping readerships and social networking, and to develop a digital presence and identity. I would guess that, if C. Wright Mills was alive today he would at least be encouraging his students to keep a blog and probably be keeping one of his own.

Reflections on #britsoc12

I enjoyed the BSA 2012 conference in Leeds that finished yesterday and came away re-enthused about sociology as a vocation and as a political project and mildly optimistic about its future. I have come away with my head buzzing with half formed ideas, fragments of talks and conversations, pages of barely legible notes and a dozen or more issues I want to follow up and projects I want to start or be involved in. It seemed to me that in the presentations I went to and in conversations I had a few interconnected themes kept recurring – the problem of sociology’s publics, the necessity for sociology to de-objectify society and social actors, and the practice of sociology as a normative and politically engaged vocation. While I can still remember them, these are a few initial notes and observations around these topics.

Zygmunt Bauman in his talk to the PG Forum on Tuesday and in his keynote on Wednesday acknowledged there is the perception of a crisis in sociology. This is usually construed as sociology losing touch with its public. For Zygmunt this is a due to the public that sociology emerged historically to serve – legislators, managers, bureaucrats, administrators, more generally those concerned with and responsible for social control, social order, making people and processes predictable – having changed so that it no longer requires the services of a sociology of order and control, or as Zygmunt termed it, a sociology of unfreedom. Without going into much detail, he puts this down to some key aspects of what he calls liquid modernity. This includes a growing awareness of the fact that change is the only constant and the only certainty is the permanence of uncertainty. This has had a profound effect on institutions and organisations, effects that can be evidenced and demonstrated in many ways. It has also had a profound effect on individuals. Organisations deal with uncertainty by developing new organisational forms and management techniques. These are based on strategies that externalise aspects of organisation, risk and responsibility coupled to what Zygmunt calls ‘the managerial revolution Mark II’ and new forms of social control and domination. The effect of outsourcing, contracting out, off shoring and subsidiarising shifts responsibility to often far flung complex chains made up of units of ever diminishing power and control. This was amply demonstrated by the last keynote where we were told how financialisation has led to virulent forms of profit seeking and has changed the way businesses are structured and organised and their relation to their employees. The shift indicated in this presentation from ‘managerial capitalism’ to ‘financial capitalism’ seems to map quite nicely onto Zygmunt’s claimed shift between the first wave of ‘scientific’ management to the less easily characterised managerial revolution Mark II. Somewhat flippantly, I tend to think of this as, let a thousand flowers bloom (to slightly misquote Mao Zedong) and we will find a way of making money out of all of them, passing as much risk as possible to suppliers, labour, governments and the public. It is evident that not everyone is equal in a world of uncertainty. Those closer to the sources of uncertainty have greater risks and more precarious lives. In the corporate and financial world this is signalled to some extent by a shifting emphasis from the ‘sustainability’ of business and operations to their ‘resilience’, a rather less inclusive term that implies processes of casting adrift and sacrificing in order to protect the ‘core’ business and key objectives – basically to extract profits and preserve shareholder value.

Business now is geared to an operational environment and a world of uncertainty that does not require explicit micromanagement of populations. Individuals, faced with uncertainty, with no guarantees of a final destination or happy ending, the withering of public goods like the welfare state, etc. relate to this new world as competitors seeking security as best they can. Social control is now largely exerted through a combination of fragmentation, individuation, debt and fear alongside forms of persuasion and the manufacture of desire. As Burawoy pointed out in his talk, many of the precariat and unemployed are seeking opportunities to be exploited. Trades Unions are fighting on behalf of their members to be exploited. Zizek, in a recent article, described this as being one of the main driving concerns of recent student protests. To a certain extent, historically, the middle classes have been incorporated and controlled by being given a reasonable share of the surplus and secure employment. Increasingly sections of this class have seen their job security diminished, their wages and conditions of work eroded and are, in short, becoming part of the precariat. Precariousness is not new. It’s just novel for a much larger section for the population who have not experienced it and don’t expect it. According to Zizek, student protest can be seen as a reaction to and a resistance against the attack on the sections of the occupational structure they assumed they were destined for and its, up to now, taken for granted privileges. In other words, an attack on their futures. I would say there is some evidence of this from my own experience and observations but personally I am much more hopeful of the sorts of politicised consciousnesses and concerns that I see in play. This, I think, points to the continuing and growing importance of encouraging the spread of a sociological imagination.

On the question of the public, John Holmwood made some interesting observations in one of the sessions drawing on, I think, the ideas of Dewey. Publics are not a given. They are in any case, intrinsically, or at least originally, passive, made as they are by forces external to individuals that create the conditions for them to form a public, recognise themselves as members of that public and therefore have the potential to become active citizens. (This sounds a bit like Marx’s ideas on the socialisation of an industrial proletariat and the development of class consciousness in the context of factory organisation and work, etc. A problem today is that with the shift to a society of individualised consumers and a fragmented competing precariat, the conditions for developing forms of solidarity are much harder to identify). Citizenship in this (Dewey’s?) view depends upon individuals coming to see themselves as members of a public with interests in common with other members. If this is the case sociology by itself cannot conjure up its putative public but must look for trends and circumstances where publics are being formed and hitch their wagon to these as partners. I guess this is tantamount to looking for processes of politicisation where individuals and groups, through force of circumstance, are developing a reflexive and reflective capacity to confront their problems and issues. Then the question is how to engage with these individuals, groups and processes.

Several things follow from this that are worth thinking about. Seeing yourself as a member of a public, the notion that your individual worries and problems are in common with others in a similar position and are linked to conditions you have in common and that your fate as an individual is tied up somehow with other members of that public is itself an act of sociological imagination. Everyone has the potential to be, in fact is to some extent, a sociologist in this sense. Taken further, a sociological imagination can be seen as a requirement of citizenship, in fact is a constitutive component of citizenship. This has implications for professional and institutionalised sociology and the teaching of sociology. Whatever else we do as teachers of sociology, we are sending tens of thousands of individuals each year into the world of work and, hopefully, active citizenship, whatever they end up doing for a job. Employability is important and it would be a dereliction of duty not to help students prepare for the world of work. But with the ever increasing colonisation of the public by the private, the uncoupling of power from politics that so many people spoke about at the conference, the hollowing out and destruction of our democratic institutions and processes, and the rapid destruction of spaces and forms of public discourse and/or their hijacking by the neoliberal agenda and ideology, active citizenship informed by sociological imagination is more important than ever. To end for the moment on a more optimistic note, according to Zygmunt Bauman, the decoupling of sociology from its old public of legislators, bureaucrats and managers, far from being a crisis is a great opportunity for sociology to rediscover its true vocation as a science of freedom. Rather than seeing sociology as in crisis he sees it as having a crucial role in relation to what he calls the current ‘crisis in agency’. He claims, and who am I to disagree, that in his over 60 years of being a sociologist, this is the most exciting and important time for sociology he can remember. I have been a sociologist for 34 years and the statement certainly rings true for me. Obviously there is a lot more that needs to be said about what sort of sociology he and/or we are talking about, its practice, its relation to the experience, the commonsense and knowledge of the public we wish to engage with and how that engagement can take place. For the moment I will be pursuing this personally through Zygmunt’s ideas on what sociology should be and its role today. He certainly sees sociology as a vocation and a way of being in the world. To repeat one of his favourite quotes from Jeffrey Alexander – “sociology’s future, at least its immediate future, lies in an effort to reincarnate and re-establish itself as a cultural politics in the service of human freedom”. But I would add to this, as Burawoy stated at the beginning of his talk, we need a theory of capitalism. To be of service in the cause of human freedom we need a pretty good understanding of the causes of unfreedom.

I would be very happy to learn of other blog posts reflecting or reporting on the conference. Please let me know, perhaps by leaving a comment here or tweeting using the #britsoc12 tag. The posts I am aware of so far are:

Sociology in distress? From austerity to a way forward by Paola Tubaro

The British Sociological Association Annual Conference by Mark Hawker

The trouble with being human these days – a review by Graham Stacey. This film was shown 3 times over the conference!

Becoming Sociological by Sarah Burton

My reflections on my first conference by Jon Rainford

Student loans offer financial support for students who would otherwise be unable to attend college. It’s a massive deal, and it’s only getting bigger. According to Bloomberg, the debt owed by these students is now over $1 trillion and it is expected to be $7 trillion within 10 years. This is where those options found on websites like https://www.sofi.com/refinance-student-loan/ come in handy.

But there’s more to the growth in student debt than just the higher cost of attending school.

One of the most profound problems has been the increasing number of American students dropping out of college. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the amount of students that dropped out of college in 2013 was 29.3 percent.

Student Loan Debt Crippling Retirement Savings by Millennials - 401k Plan Optimization, Compliance, Investment & Partners

Additionally, many of these students are choosing not to go back to school at all. Many decide they’ve had enough and get rid of the degree that they were denied before. It is currently estimated that close to half of all undergraduate students drop out of college by the end of their freshman year.

It’s important to note that there are numerous factors that have contributed to this state of affairs. The U.S. economy has struggled in the past few years. The health care crisis, financial fears, and decreasing productivity among the workforce all contribute to the seemingly infinite number of dollars the nation is willing to spend for education.

But one of the greatest factors, at least for some, has been the rise of the millennial generation. What started out as a relatively young group of children with unrealistic expectations of the economy has now transformed into the largest generation of citizens in the history of the nation.

These people don’t want the American dream anymore. They’ve grown up with a different, more humble idea of what a college education could be.

What You Need to Know About College Debt

Regardless of what you make, getting a college education is incredibly difficult. This is a fact that many graduates find to their dismay.

It has become a cornerstone of American society that the highest paying jobs require a college degree. Those with degrees tend to be highly rewarded in the workplace and earn an average of $32,900 a year, while people without a degree earn only $24,300. That doesn’t leave a lot of money left over for college.

Young people are continually bombarded with surveys that claim that college is the ticket to success. But when you dig a little deeper, it becomes clear that there are far more students with high aspirations that are unable to go through with their dreams.

According to a 2014 report from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, only 25 percent of students who start college report being able to complete a degree within four years.

There are more of these students than ever before, but very few universities are willing to admit them. Colleges are being forced to open doors to higher learning and offer financial aid, but it’s unclear how this will solve the problem. The most experienced colleges are also failing to attract students. A study from the National Center for Education Statistics recently showed that only 54 percent of students who enter community college are able to complete their degree within six years.

All this makes it extremely difficult for young people to start out their education without many of the resources that are offered by the most expensive universities. There is a growing sentiment in the nation that college is no longer affordable, and this is being seen in a number of different ways.

Socialisation as reflexive engagement

Thanks to Mark Carrigan for bringing this to my attention http://markcarrigan.net/2012/01/15/margaret-archer-socialization-as-reflexive-engagement/ As he notes, Margaret Archer’s presentation starts about 8 minutes into the video. Some quick initial notes:

Archer refers to the traditional theory of socialisation as the ‘blotting paper model’. She picks out Parsons for particular condemnation and Mead as the most sensitive to the problems with this model in that he at least recognises that the modern world of globalising capitalism has undercut some of the preconditions for the traditional model to be adequate. Her critique rests on the crucial question she claims realists ask as an opening gambit in all their enquiries – what are the necessary conditions for something to be the case – the transcendental argument. She adopts this approach in her critique of the traditional theory of socialisation. What are the necessary conditions for the theory to be correct? Having enumerated these and found them lacking, the theory can be exposed as inadequate.

Under current conditions of globalising capitalism the ‘reflexive imperative’ has intensified due to the increased pace of change, particularly since the 1980s. Due to changes in the family initially but the wider world which growing children and young people enter, the ‘communicative reflexive’ – the socialised individual assumed by the traditional theory – is now a minority. Two other types of ‘socialised’ individuals now predominate – the autonomous reflexive and the meta reflexive. The first of these is the entrepreneurial chancer on the lookout to exploit opportunities, individualistic, supporter of capitalism and by implication selfish and amoral. The meta reflexive is critical of society and hopes for change and is constantly disappointed that it doesn’t happen. Archer says that they tend to become volatile and wander from job to job. These seem to me to be rather overdrawn, at least in the presentation. There is a forthcoming book. Some characteristics of the meta reflexive can be seen, for instance, in radical academics and employees in the public sector. Perhaps it’s best to see Archers’ reflexive types as ideal types. The fate of the old style communicative reflexive is uncertain as they are peculiarly unfit for this stage of modernity, their form of socialisation does not fit current conditions and therefore they potentially become ‘fractured reflexives’. This is a condition where they relinquish a large degree of autonomy. They become passive subjects at the mercy of circumstances that they do not actively engage with to achieve a degree, at least, of self determination.

I wonder how this maps onto Ulrich Beck’s classification of responses to risk society – active engagement, resigned acceptance and confused denial? Perhaps the different sorts of socialisation and forms of reflexive engagement Archer outlines may lead to differential propensities to fall into Beck’s categories later in life.

It might be interesting to revisit Dennis Wrong’s 1961 article ‘The Over-socialised Conception of Man in Modern Sociology’ http://www.jstor.org/pss/2089854

Also worth a look may be the chapter of Sennett’s new book ‘Together: The Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics of Cooperation’ which appears to be about early years socialisation http://politics.salon.com/writer/richard_sennett/

There is a set of notes on another Margaret Archer video I posted earlier Margaret Archer on Reflexivity

Mark has also posted some reflections provoked by the ‘Socialisation as reflexive engagement’ video at http://markcarrigan.net/2012/01/16/some-thoughts-on-socialization-and-personhood/

Zero growth and austerity as opportunity

This post is initial thoughts and ideas on a new research project. The post degenerates into a set of notes that will be fleshed out over the next few weeks and various issues will become the topics of further posts.

It looks like we will have flat-line growth for another 4 to 5 years due to the economic crisis by which time the evidence we are closing in on the ecological buffers and unsustainable reliance on fossil fuel, oil in particular, will be even more irrefutable. In a recent talk by John Hollway in which he discussed three ways we can start both imagining and living in a way that is not dependent on monetary relations and consumerism he pointed to the role of necessity in Greece and Argentina as the driver for beginning to organise socially and live differently.

Tim Jackson in his book Prosperity Without Growth demonstrates very clearly that we are in a confronted with a seemingly impossible dilemma between social and economic collapse if we don’t continue to grow (as defined by GDP) on the one hand and ecological collapse (leading to social and economic collapse) if we do. His book is concerned with defining a new form of macro-economics that is based on new definitions of prosperity that does not rely on continuing capital accumulation and consumption of consumer goods. The sort of decoupling between economic growth and the throughputs of energy and material that is needed to preserve the rate of growth capitalism needs will be impossible to achieve. The only alternative is to devise a zero growth economy and find new ways of defining and achieving prosperity and a meaningful and satisfying way of life.

We seem to have achieved a zero growth economy.

Survival, Greece, Argentina, Detroit, etc. How are people adapting through necessity – the wasted lives and collateral damage of globalised and deregulated capitalism. Growth me return in the short to medium term but the ecological horn of the dilemma will kick in as some time. With peak oil this could be well before the end of this century. If so a zero growth economy and life style will only be delayed. The conditions we now face may just be a dress rehearsal for what the current younger and subsequent generations will have to deal with as their enduring reality.

Opportunities in terms of investigating new ways of living, new ways of deriving meaning, satisfaction and fulfilment from life, new ways of relating to one another, new forms of sociability and conviviality, new understanding about the social function of work, a new understanding of the public sector and civil society, new forms of citizen local, national and global citizenship. Empirically, what is happening already as a reaction to and accommodation of austerity – philosophically, culturally, economically and socially. What is the significance of this for imagining a more generalised non-growth economy and way of life. What are the implications of this for education, given the massive and cumulative investment in indoctrinating individuals socially and psychologically into the world based on monetarised social relationships, mediated through the language and ownership of consumer goods, carried out by the marketing and advertising industries explicitly and government policy and subtler forms of ideological indoctrination.

Related resources:

One small Greek island’s relentless struggle to get by
http://www.redpepper.org.uk/greek-crisis-samos-chronicles/

Can austerity save the planet?

At a recent talk by John Holloway at the Space Project in Leeds he mentioned a number of ways that people and communities around the world were organising politically to resist the ‘restructurings’ being used to bail out the banks and sovereign debt. He also gave examples of how people were surviving massive increases in costs, decreases in income and very high levels of unemployment at precisely the same time benefits and services were being cut, citing some of the things going on in Greece. Coincidently a couple of days later an article was published about Samos, a Greek island, covering this exact topic.

As I was thinking about this I also received a number of reports about the progress of the current talks in Durban (http://unfccc.int/2860.php) about climate change and the attempts to come to some new international agreement now the Kyoto agreement is coming to the end of its time span. It seems clear that several of the rich countries, for instance Canada and the USA, are resisting any new agreement in, one would suppose, what they see as their national interest. I’m convinced that the warnings about the consequences of climate change, peak oils and so on, are correct and that sooner or later circumstances will force some sort of draconian reaction by governments. Given their current perspective is driven by narrow self interest (and when I say ‘government’ I mean of course the corporatist amalgamation of politics, the State and business) I see no reason to hope this will not also be the case when we are running into the buffers. Militarism, a diminution of democracy and war are just as likely an outcome as some sort of national and peaceable agreement on how to cope with the coming disasters. Rather like Stalin’s attempt at achieving communism in one country, there may be attempts to circle the wagons and attempt continued western style growth in specific parts of the world and let the rest go hang. The German military establishment has already produced a report anticipating a number of possible future scenarios and their military implications. One conclusion is that the German government may well have to dilute and even abandon its position on human rights in order to achieve the strategic alliances and partnerships it will need to secure energy supplies. It’s hardly surprising there has been a recent renewed interest in Carl Schmidt’s theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Schmitt) on exceptionalist government power, the idea that in periods of exceptional danger, in states of emergency, governments have the right and responsibility to adopt a dictatorial mode beyond the law.

But of course growth is the issue and the problem. What would a non-growthist way of life look like? This is were I need to read Tim Jackson’s ‘Prosperity without Growth’. As it happens the way of life we need in the west is probably very similar to those that are emerging as a response to austerity programmes. As Holloway says, there is no point in making demands of politicians as they do not have any answers or the power to grant our demands. In fact to make demands concedes that they have the power and we are the supplicants. And it means that, in principle, we wait on them.

This is why it is so important to see how the Greeks and others are taking their lives into their own hands and getting on with the job of living without money, without the props of and services of the consumerist society, and finding new meanings, new satisfactions and new values to live by. What may be thought of as a temporary survival strategy to hang on until the good times return may turn out to be an enduring solution to the deeper environmental problems we confront and, in the process, a new sort of ‘good times’ will also emerge.

Critical pedagogy group meeting: the Space Project 23rd November

On the evening of Wednesday 23rd November, the Critical Pedagogy discussion group had its second meeting at the Space Project in Leeds, described as a radical education project. Of the small group that attended half had not been at the initial meeting so this meeting started with a brief report on what had been discussed then but quickly moved on to a discussion of why each individual was interested in the topic. In some cases it was a concern to develop a more relevant and critically engaged approach to teaching within higher education. In others the interest is to see if critical pedagogy has anything to offer when thinking about engaging with groups and communities outside of formal education. One of the reasons that the Space Project was interested in starting the critical pedagogy group in the first place is to explore how it might be relevant and useful for engaging with groups beyond the university who could be brought into the project and use the space. There seemed to be a general consensus that a critical pedagogy should be ’emancipatory’, in itself or in its objectives. Emancipation from what was not explicitly discussed although it became clear that there was a shared dissatisfaction with many aspects of contemporary society and defective democratic political processes. Likewise, the meeting didn’t start with any attempt to define critical pedagogy in advance.

Apart from the inside and beyond the university distinction, there was also some discussion of the difference between critical pedagogy as a set of teaching methods and techniques and as a process. One concern was about how to change the relationship between teachers and students and get away from the so-called ‘transmission belt’ and ‘banking’ models of education where teachers are seen to have the knowledge, students suffer from a knowledge deficit and it is just a question of the former transferring their knowledge to the latter who ‘bank’ it for later use. In practice this leads to forms of hierarchy and dependency and ignores the knowledgeability of students and that knowledge construction is a continuous social process. It implies knowledge is a ‘thing’ of some sort and down plays the fact that knowledge is always incomplete, always developing, always partial and open to negotiation. Students are assessed in terms of how much knowledge they have absorbed and can reproduce competently. The participation in and awareness of knowledge as a process is confined to the academic. Critical pedagogy opens the possibility that the relationship between teacher and student could be one of collaboration in a knowledge construction process where the historical, social and contingent nature of knowledge is recognised and exploited in a joint project that respects and utilises the knowledge and reasoning capacity of students. Critical pedagogy introduces and embeds criticality into the content and process of teaching and learning, a process where the distinction between teacher and learner breaks down so that everyone is a collaborative learner. However, it is still the case that not everyone will be equivalent in terms of their expertise and experience or their facility to articulate these in discussion. There will be different sorts of ‘cultural capital’ attached to individuals. Clearly the collaborative knowledge construction process would need to be able to exploit individuals’ expert knowledge and broader experience without lapsing back into the disabling hierarchical ‘transmission belt’ model. This requires the critical problematisation of the notion of legislative expert knowledge and the development of non-hierarchical forms of consensual decision making. Expert knowledge, like any other, is contextual and historically contingent and subject to change in the face of challenges and changing circumstances. This is usually a process that is confined to other ‘qualifying’ experts. But when the expert knowledge is deployed in a collaborative process with ‘lay persons’ in real life situations about which they are already knowledgeable, intellectually and in their lived experience, then the expert knowledge can be modified through exposure to concrete situations that require consensus based pragmatic decisions and actions that cannot be simply ‘read off’ from expert knowledges.

That this is in fact very hard to achieve in the current educational context of assessment, metrics and measurements was also a point of discussion. Several of us have experienced the resistance to these ideas, or, more accurately since the ideas are rarely discussed, to the practice of these ideas, by students. It can lead to anxiety and discomfort as putting this into practice subverts expected and familiar roles and procedures. It may well be that the intention is to empower students and broaden the context within which they think and understand, but this is experienced as a threat very often, of lecturers not doing their job properly and jeopardising the students’ ability to perform according to assessment criteria. Basically they want to know what knowledge they need to reproduce, what are the best books and articles to read that will give them the answers and how many references are deemed to be sufficient, and so on. Critical pedagogy as a set of techniques and practices may prove very difficult to apply in practice unless the organisational context simultaneously embraces critical pedagogy as a process that modifies the administration and assessment of learning outcomes. This may not be quite such a problem outside of and beyond the organisation of formal education.

There was some discussion of ‘levels’ or modalities of criticality and a distinction was made between ‘surface’ or shallow versions, as in the examples of quality circles, suggestion boxes and so on, and the deep criticality of questioning the surface reality, getting behind it, seeing how contingency is packaged and presented as taken-for-granted ways of thinking and doing, custom and practice, exposing and examining the underlying social process of construction, of framing, the networks and mechanisms of power and control, interest and repression, inclusion and exclusion. This is clearly fundamentally connected to the analysis of ideologies and ideological processes. The first ‘surface’ criticality reproduces the status quo, the second questions and problematises it. The first ‘perfects’ and focuses on the resilience of the existing reality. The second, by demonstrating the contingency of reality, as represented and as materially existing, as the result of specific contingent historical events and processes, demonstrates the world was different before it got this way and could be different from what it is now, and so opening up the discussion of possibilities.

There was some discussion of the knowledge and knowledgability of individuals, groups and communities beyond the university and the Space Project. One suggestion was that critical pedagogy as a process might suggest a way of aligning with radical groups and issues and bringing to struggles and movements a broader explanatory framework that recognises and exploits the existing knowledge and experience of the group and that has strategic and practical significance. As an aside, this is where I mentioned Harry Collins’ research on ‘interactive expertise’ where, for example, a group interested in critiquing and campaigning against certain forms of biotechnology recruited and worked with experts in biotechnology and where the experts and the lay members of the group learnt from each other, developing the more technical aspects within a practical social and political context. An example of this perhaps closer to home is the process whereby various specifically focussed anti-cuts movements, for instance against the cuts in HE and another against the attack on pensions, come to identifying the common connection their issues have and recognising the broader underlying system that each are a symptom of – the ideologically and powerful interest driven process of privatisation and hyper-marketisation. This coming together of groups and issues has developed ‘on the ground’ as the groups have formed links and communicated largely via the Internet and social media. But a wide variety of students and academics from different disciplines and with different expert knowledges have contributed to this development right from the start and increasingly academics and research students are in discussion and participating in ‘teach-ins’ and other events in newly emerging public events and spaces including occupations, sit-ins and squats.

Finally there was some discussion of the way forward. Two strands to follow were identified. One was to do some reading and research on the ideas around critical pedagogy and alternative forms of education. This might take the form of a traditional study group. The other strand was to look for and think about concrete examples of what could be seen as a critical pedagogy in practice. This could include some aspects of the current occupations, for instance, but could also look at some examples from Italy, South America, and so on. What we didn’t leave the meeting with was a reading list. The final decision was to find a way of including anyone who is interested who cannot make all, or indeed any, of the meetings. Some sort of on-line presence and reporting would seem to be the obvious solution. Again, no concrete proposal was made other than to have a dedicated Facebook group. This will probably happen but, as was noted at the time, not everyone is in or wants to be in Facebook. Another suggestion was a blog, or a section in the Really Open University web site. Look out for announcements any day now. In the meantime theses notes are my recollection of what was discussed at the last meeting with a few additional observations. No doubt others will add to these and, where I have misremembered, put me right!

Leeds Radical Library – ‘crisis’ discussion group

The Space Project in Leeds has recently started a new initiative, the Radical Library Collective. In addition to accumulating books and resources that encourage critical, systemic political thought to help understand the society we are part of, the project aims to encourage “a culture of discussion” through a reading group New Weapons, by inviting speakers and hosting book launches. In January next year the the first discussion group meetings will address the issue of Crisis. Quoting from the blurb on the Space Projects Facebook community page:

From bankrupt PIGS, revolting Greeks and an £1 trillion hole in Italy abroad, to riots, banker bailouts and strikes at home, wherever you look these days there’s banter about ‘crisis’. But what crisis? Where, and for whom? Facilitated by Leeds Radical Library, this first discussion series, Crisis!, aims to provide a lively forum for debate about some of the key issues of our time: what is capitalism and why does it seem to break again and again? Taking short, weekly texts as a starting point, we want to explore the history of capitalist crisis to find out what ‘our crisis’ has in common with previous crises, and what might be unique about it. While economists and bankers whom we’ve never met or elected seem able to make more and more decisions about the way we run our lives, Crisis! aims to unravel from the very beginning the modern day myths about ‘finance’, ‘capital’ and ‘democracy’.

It would be great if some ‘out-of-towners’ could come along. Hopefully the discussions will be blogged.