Category: sociology

I’m feeling a bit guilty as I haven’t posted here since November last year. My intention, on retirement, was to do the sort of sociological research and writing I had been unable to do in my role of Principal Teaching Fellow at Leeds University. To this end I was appointed as a visiting research fellow for a year, due to end this coming July. Now I have just received a letter extending the fellowship until July 2016. In practice since retirement last July I have been mostly concerned in losing weight, getting fit, walking, cycling, racketball and reading novels. All of this of course may not be unconnected to a continuing career as sociologist. As Zygmunt Bauman has shown, literature is, to some degree or another, a combination of sociology and sociological material. Reading literature can be a conscious sociological enterprise. And of course getting fitter and healthier extends my opportunity to still do some interesting and, perhaps, useful work in my later years.

There is the possibility that doing sociology in one’s twilight years, assuming reasonable retention of cognitive faculties and a continuing lively interest in the world and affairs, has some benefits for the nature and quality of the work. I am reading again David Frisby’s Fragments of Modernity in which he attempts to construct more explicitly the theories of modernity that are less systematically rendered or implicit in the writings of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin. At the end of his introduction Frisby says “all three, as outsiders, could experience modernity in a critical manner, they could all view their society as strangers”. The fact that many of the most original and productive sociologists have been outsiders to some extent, perhaps straddling two or more cultural borders, émigrés, exiles, is well known. One can think of Bauman, Elias, or Marx for instance. Other sociologist have detached perspectives on their society due to unconventional biographies of one sort or another. I think the ageing process can confer this state of outsiderness and stranger-hood on some sociologists too. In many respects we die alone, even if surrounded by loved ones. We can see the world through the eyes of someone with no axes to grind, no psychological investment in self delusion, with a degree of detached realism. Outsiders are more able to see the curtains that obscure the hidden mechanisms and processes of manifest reality and begin to pull them apart. We are able to reflect upon our own (witting and unwitting) complicity in maintaining the curtains and keeping them closed to others and to ourselves. In some respects ageing and a growing awareness of the imminence of death reintroduces a child like aspect to the experience of life. In an interview a few weeks before his death from pancreatic cancer, Dennis Potter attested to taking an intense delight in the ordinary and mundane aspects of life. Everything was intensified and imbued with a renewed sense of wonder describing, for instance, the spring blossom he sees from his study window as the most blossomest of blossom he had ever seen. Like a child, the dying can be keenly aware of and interested in the details and features of life that, by the involved and less reflective adult, are largely taken for granted or ignored. Like the child, the elderly in the shadow of the imminence of oblivion, can possess the highest degree  of interest and appreciation of their social and physical surroundings. To some extent old age potentially for some, is the recovery of childhood but with the adult capacity for reflection, expression and the power of analysis.

They say that mathematicians and similar scientists do their best work in their comparative youth. Perhaps, for some sociologists with the continuing interest and stamina, they may do their best work towards the end of their careers as their biographical trajectories propel them into the critical and creative role of detached outsider

I had a great day in Sheffield at the  The civilizing offensive (het burgerlijk beschavingsoffensief): prospects for future understanding, or an obsolete concept? symposium hosted by Sheffield Hallam University. I had prepared for this by reading an article by one of the organisers, Ryan Powell, and posted a summary – The Civilising Offensive –  and a few questions that I hoped would be illuminated during the presentations and discussion. This post is a reflection on the day and to what extent my questions were answered. I’ll start by outlining the major conclusion, as I saw it at least. This was clearly stated during the last session presented by Jason Hughes entitled ‘No smoke without fire’? Moral panics, civilising offensives and the long-term development of tobacco use. We must avoid posing the relationship between the long term blind and unintended processes of social change and development and the intended and deliberative steering processes in the here and now or any other delineated historical period as an either/or dichotomy. The plans and intentions of social groups and individuals interlock and interweave in a way that produces outcomes that were not intended by any of them. The overall process in this respect is blind and unintended by any particular agent or group. Presumably no 19th century Victorian industrialist anticipated or intend today’s problems of climate change or environmental degradation. However, this is not to say that this unintended process is understandable without reference to the intentional activities and projects in that, if these had been different, the unintended outcomes would have been different too. If the unintended outcomes would not have been different and the trajectory of development would have been the same anyway, then the overall process would not be blind or at least in any way contingent. Contingency would have been illusionary in the face of necessity. On the other hand the degree of success or otherwise of intentional projects could not be explained without reference to the unplanned aspects of the process that constraint, enable or otherwise impact on them. This also points to the the importance of political and cultural activity – both theoretically and in practice. As Jason said the concept of ‘civilising offensive’ and its focus on intentions and intentional projects is not opposed to or in contradiction to the concept of a blind and unintended process. They are both part of the same process; 2 sides of the same coin. This clearly has consequences for how we understand the micro-sociology of civilising offensives (and indeed any human interactions) and how we explain the broader and longer run ‘blind’ process of historical social development. In fact much of the day was spent directly or indirectly discussing the relationship between relatively short term intentional projects and behaviours and long term developmental processes. I was particularly taken by Jason’s distinction between ‘engines’ and ‘vehicles’.  In the context of the symposium I assume the engine is the long term ‘blind’ developmental process and the vehicles are the specific intentional civilising offensives. Clearly neither the engine of the vehicle get anywhere if not together.

I have been working in a fairly undisciplined and spasmodic way on the topic of how sociology and politics relate to one another. This clearly depends on how each is conceptualised. I want to understand politics (in various senses and at various levels) sociologically but I also want to understand how sociology can inform political programmes and activities. Obviously this depends on how one construes sociology as a form of systematic knowledge, as a ‘science’  (the inverted commas are intended to signify that this term also needs a great deal of thought and elucidation). This symposium has been extremely useful in reintroducing me to some of Elias’s ideas and offering a more structured and possibly fruitful way of thinking about these issues and making progress with some of them. It may even prompt the submission of a paper to next year’s majorElias conference at Leicester From the Past to the Present and Towards Possible Futures: The Collected Works of Norbert Elias. The mention of ‘possible futures’ indicates that different futures are possible and that the civilising process so far is not locked onto any particular future, thus not teleological. There is then the question of what sorts of futures are possible and to what extent sociological knowledge can inform the intra and intergenerational political projects and activities and influence what actually happens. If this is possible and sociology can fulfil this role then sociology itself becomes a political enterprise, even if at some remove from the sturm und drang of day-to-day political struggle, since is or could be political resource in the struggle over teh future. Only a sociologist who is indifferent to the sort of world he or she is bequeathing to their children, grandchildren and beyond can remain indifferent to the uncertain future or not have some view of what a better world could come into being if it were possible. The rest of this post is simply a set of notes on some of the key ideas that I jotted down in my notes. They are not systematic or necessarily attributed to any particular speaker of discussant. At times I have added my own observations, generally in brackets.

Notes:

Bernard Kruithof: Civilising offensives are characterised as being deliberate attempts by powerful groups, e.g. the bourgeoisie, to change the behaviour and attitudes of a relativity powerless group, e.g the labouring classes so it is in line with the powerful group’s ideas of what is decent, moral, appropriate, rational, civilised behaviour. Typical examples and case studies of this look at periods of early industrialisation and nation building. Civilising offensives are similar to whet van Gent called ‘the forces of organised virtue’ and were often strongly paternalistic and aimed at uplifting the condition of the poor. But the poor were not a blank slate. They had (and have) their own culture. There was much resistance from groups that did not want to be ‘improved’. Often the Improving Societies’ mostly benefited their middle class members.

Ali de Regt: There is a tension between the unplanned civilising process and intentional projects. There is also a distinction between civilising offensives and the ‘disciplining’ and ‘policing’ of subordinate and worrisome groups (Donzelot, Foucault). The appropriate focus and use of the term civilising offensive is where the aim and result (if successful) aids the development of the self-control and self-management of the target groups. This is a key aspect of the civilising process whereby external social controls become internal self-controls. This tends to engage with what the working class, or some sections of it, want and is distinct to what is imposed by disciplinary techniques and policing.

The development of the concept of civilising offensive form sociological from the 1980s until, by the mid 90s (as it happens corresponding with the neo-liberal attack on welfare and the development of a neo-liberal moral individualism) when it began to be seen as a possible solution to moral decline and related social problems, i.e. politicians and the media calling out for civilising offensives against specific target groups and problems, for instance urinating in the streets, drunkenness, behaviour at football matches, rudeness and antisocial behaviour. However, there were left wing progressive calls for civilising offensives too (examples?). This was also in part an attack on the heritage of the 60s which coincided with a cultural turn in public debates on social problems (presumably as opposed to more structural understandings of social problems. This is also a period of increasing individualism and the personalisation of blame). Civilising offensive became a catch phrase that was emotionally charges and self evident. It is applicable to many social problems and gives a rational and recipe for action and policy. So in the 80s the concept had a critical connotation but now it is seen with approval.

Ali claims that the moral discourse that has hijacked the concept of civilising offensive makes it difficult if not impossible to use as a sociological concept. It needs to be save and used in an Eliasian way and civilising offensives can still be objects of study and analysis, but we cannot use the concept as an explanatory concept (so only as a descriptive concept?).  As someone said in discussion, can we be held responsible for the misuse of our sociological concepts, for instance as with the notion of ‘moral panics’  or ‘the law of unintended consequences’? (But this problem, of how sociology’s concepts and language is part of the social realm it studies and there is an inevitable inter-meshing of sociological and common sense, everyday language, is well and long known).

We need to be clear about the distinction between civilising offensives as a theoretical concept and as an historically and politically situated project. Richard Kilminster made the point that there may be an historical and semantic link between civilising offensives ans the so-called ‘charm offensives’ in the cold war period seen as a military strategy in that charm offensives at the level of diplomacy wee usually a front to more aggressive intentions. (There can of course be latent more aggressive functions in the background to improving and seemingly paternalistic civilising offensives as well). ‘Offensive’ has connotations of active policy and is part of its attraction in popular moral and political discourse.

Stephen Mennell: The useful distinction between the ’emic’ and the the ‘etic. Emic is form the perspective of the ehtnograpic group being studied – so their concepts, cultural recipes for action, understandings, etc., while etic is the social science perspective of the group and their world that has a broader sociological understanding that goes beyond that of the situated understandings of the group. ( I assume the point here is that civilising offensives can be understood at the emic level, that of the participants themselves, whereas the sociologist who sees any instance of civilising offensives as part of a longer run and unintentional process are adopting the etic perspectives. I was immediately reminded of the concept of dramatic irony where the characters in a play are unaware of aspects of their situation that the audience knows). Elias used the concept of civilisation’ in both its emic and etic senses and contexts and this has been a source of confusion in readings and critique. (Useful Wikipedia article on emic and etic). The civilising process is long term and unintended but civilising offensives are the product of intentional ‘native’ meanings leading to intended and unintended consequences. Civilising offensives can be seen in terms of an analysis of shifting balances of power within the civilising process.

Stephen raised the possibility that right wing economics (presumably their application in political projects and social policy) can be seen as a ‘de-civilising’ offensive.  Other examples may be the holocaust, Stalin’s programme for instance. The state holds the monopoly of violence and of taxation.  State reduction policies may diminish and undermine  both of these. The project to shrink and defunctionalise the state could have de-civilising results and the weakening of the links of interdependence between the people and the state (the development of which was a crucial aspect of the civilising process). (If the civilising process involves a growing reflexivity due to individuation and an increasing self-control presumable de-civilising process results in a lessening of self control and a lessening of the potential for detachment and a growing emotional involvement. I need to read more on decivilising processes!). I liked Stephen’s tee shirt slogan, ‘so many right wing Christians, so few lions’.  If civilising offensives are ostensibly to improve the behaviour of the ‘lower classes’ in order to integrate them into society and introduce elements of self control, are they still civilising offensives if they produce the opposite effects, i.e. increased marginalisation and exclusion coupled to an increase of ant-social and uncontrolled behaviour? Does the attribution of ‘civilising offensive’ depend upon the intentions of the ‘civilisers’ or the object outcomes of the offensive which may be bad regardless of any good intentions? Emic intentions versus etic outcomes? My contribution to the discussion here was to point out that arguably much policy and political ideological work was in fact objectifying the poor rather than trying to reorganise their subjective understanding and their behaviour, unless it is designed to persuade them of their blame and responsibility for their condition and justify their exclusion in highly policed and surveilled ghettos. The objectification and stigmatisation of the poor serves to legitimate the policies and recruit the middles classes to them.

Matt Clement: Notes will get a bit thinner now as I was running out of steam! Today there seems to be an orchestrated attack on the poor and euphemistically termed ‘troubled’ families. As others have pointed out sometimes ‘barbarism’ can be used in the name of ‘civilisation’. The Ridley Plan was specifically and overtly an attack on the organised working class and the Trade Unions. It was claimed that these had ‘held the country to ransom’ . Can this be seen as an attempt to de-civilise the working class? Can it be construed as a de-civilising offensive?

Rob van Ginkel: Whatever the stated intentions of civilising offensives since the late 19th century, at that time informed by cultural anxiety, moral concerns and nations building, in the 20th century civilising offensives, whatever their stated aims and justifications, have tended in practice to lead to and/or reinforce social exclusion – projects amount to disciplining missions to contain the marginal masses. Since the rise of right wing populist parties this has included ethnic minorities. These moralist actions frequently have negative social consequences – stigmatised, marginalised, banished and outcast second rate citizens. (This fits well with the points made earlier about the later 20th century shift to cultural and individualistic explanations of deviant behaviour. This is also the period of increasing mass incarceration under neoliberal policies).

Gabriel van den Brink: Agrees largely with previous paper. The nature (even the existence) of civilising offensives reflect the values of the society In Holland, starting from 1670 and on to the early 20th century these were often church initiated campaigns for improvement but were also accompanied by harsh policing, literacy education and the inculcation of a work ethic in the work places. Since about 1960 however peoples’ life style has become more assertive, there has been changes in the family with more emancipation and individualism alongside the development of the welfare state. This has led to higher levels of self-esteem and narcissism which can lead to aggression and anti-social behaviour. Since 1970 three has been 100% growth in violent crime (although the status of official statistics was rightly questioned from the floor). For 40 years things have been getting worse. Public opinion now seems to be against liberal and paternalistic civilising offensives aimed at social integration and improvement but in practice the authorities and social professions are still engaged in something like the old civilising offensives.

Stephen Vertigans: Focus on social services care workers and their relative lack of awareness of the broader processes and context that impact on the success or otherwise of their efforts to help their clients and client families. Children in care in the main go on to have highly problematic adult lives. They generally removed from criminal or destitute families. They therefore tend to develop weak social bonds in childhood and these are no longer provided by the world of work. However, they respond and adapt to their circumstances knowledgeably to attains some status and forms of solidarity. There is a willingness on the part of the middle-classes to allow or ignore this as it keeps them at a physical and symbolic distance. This seems to mirror in some respect the point made in the previous presentation that ‘respectable’ public opinion is not in favour of civilising offensives and is therefore, by default, in favour of separation and containment. At the same time the authorities do their best to remain engaged in civilising offensives.

Paddy Dolan: Maps the shift in attitudes and relations between adults and children in Ireland. Historically the emphasis has been upon a fairly rigid socialisation process akin in some respects to a civilising offensive. This has tended to reinforce the notion that children and adults are very different in nature and status. In recent decades however there has been a growing emphasis on similarities and children having rights and individuality.  Paddy explains this as a product of individualism more generally and a questioning of ‘second’ nature. This can be seen as emergence of a third nature perhaps. I need to look more into this notion of ‘second nature’ as conceptualised by Elias before I can say much about the possibility of a ‘third’ nature. It seems to refer to the development of a reflexive critique and questioning of second nature brought about by a heightened reflexive ‘moment’ as an aspect of a spurt of individuation in late modernity.

[24th November. Ran out of steam here a bit and it is now about a month since the event. The following notes have had to rely to some extent on memory!]

Robert van Krieken: There is a return or rebound effect on any group that conducts a civilising offensive on a subordinate group – it also effects the powerful group. This puts civilising offensives in the context of the longer run civilising process. For example aboriginal children taken and given to European families was seen as a good thing to do but in recent times it is now seen as bad and the government has apologised for the mistake. There has been a change in how we think about children etc.  Welfare and violence (including symbolic violence, discipline, etc.) are not mutually exclusive. Two sides of the same coin.

John Connolly: Evidence of a mutual group identification in the peleton worked to resist the ‘civilising offensive’ of anti-doping initiatives. But this began to break down in the 1980s

Jason Hughes: Need to steer between and avoid the dichotomy between blind unintended processes and intended steered processes. Makes a distinction between vertical and horizontal civilising offensives. Intentions of groups and individuals interlace to produce unintended blind processes. Civilising offensives and the civilising process are different aspects of the same thing. Smoking – originally medical and then an aspect of leisure and distinction. Became widespread to all classes and then produced civilising offensives against it. There was a counter blast to tobacco when King James condemned aristocratic and plebeian smoking. But the rise of distinctive smokers, smoking schools, smoking professors. So not eradication as King James wanted, more a civilising of smoking. A shift from smoking to snuffing a la French aristocrats- aristocratic behaviour that was actually disgusting! Smoking reduced in the upper and middle classes through changes of fashion and smoking became associated with the lower classes. Filters and holders for women and the genteel stopped strands of tobacco getting detached and spat out. But in due course social dangers were superseded by medical and health dangers. Moral concerns turned to health; badness became a concern with sickness. Cigarettes got milder, ‘cleaner’ – now the e-cigarette – a keep smoking device providing a chemically synthesised form of tobacco smoke. Mentioned moral panics, as others had before in their presentations but added the aspect of the theory that points to the amplification of deviance and making true what hadn’t been before. (Links to my concern that ‘performativity’ is a key link between the symbolic and the real, between intentional processes and unintended consequences ie. W I Thomas “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences”).

Intentional and blind processes. We need to look at the ratio of intended and unintended consequences – actual outcomes versus success. Voluntarism versus blind agent-less change. The ‘vehicles’ of change versus the ‘engines’ of change. (In a tweet to Jason I asked ‘Engine=civilising process: vehicle=civilising offensives? Have I got that? Trying to writing a summary/reflection on the symposium”. He replied ‘sounds close enough’). The relationship between present focussed campaigns and the longer term process. Uses example of people on a plane that crashes – all had their own intentions, reasons to be on it, but none intended the outcome. Even if the plane didn’t crash, none of the passengers intended the flight as such. (Could refer to early industrialists and climate change of course – but in my view we cannot explain and understand the latter without understanding and explaining the agency and objectives of the former). ‘Fashions’ for change, shifting changes in behaviour, often unintended consequences. On mobile phones, stay at home geeks, the embodiment of homo clausus. (Amplified reflexivity, self consciousness and individuation in the development of complex industrial societies becomes the general experience that is normalised and naturalised in philosophical and sociological discourse as homo clausus, ironically at the time when webs of interdependence are at their greatest).

Final note of my own: Civilising process: the extent that external constraints become internal controls due to the changing density and extent of chains of interdependence. Within this process are found power struggles and shifting balances of power. Structural pressures are translated into reflective and reflexive responses (unconscious and self conscious) leading to stratagems and projects designed to produce intended and desire outcomes. These become part of the environment and the symbolic and behaviour context for other groups and individuals. Unconscious and self conscious behaviour and projects inter-mesh to produce outcomes that no groups specifically intended, for themselves, for others or for future generations. Question: what is it that drives the increasing density and extent of chains of interdependency, the process that is made manifest by agency and carried forward and shaped by local and shorter term programmes?

Conference Abstracts. This is a Google document.

Some of the papers from the conference have since been collected together as a special issue of Human Figurations

Special Issue of Human Figurations on Civilising Offensives
Volume 4, Issue 1: Civilising Offensives, January 2015
Permalink: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.11217607.0004.101

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.

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