Sen and sociology

There is obviously a lot of sociology in the background to Sen’s thought, sometimes quite explicit. This post just notes a number of issues that require sociological clarification so far. The reading of Sen undertaken here will be a sociological critique of Sen’s sociology.

He refers with approval the ‘anthropological’ turn in the later Wittgenstein and ‘ordinary language philosophy’ and links this to Gramsci (via Sraffa). From Gramsci he takes the idea that our language constructs our concerns, meanings and understandings. One always belongs to a particular grouping that shares the same mode of thinking and acting. We are all conformists of some conformism or other, of the group.

Sen insists on a notion of veracity and objectivity but grounded in public  standards of communication and discourse, mentioning Habermas.  He points to the need for ‘countervailing’ power in the public discussion against overly powerful sectional interests and the crucial necessity of impartiality.

In the pursuit of impartiality and objectivity he invokes Adam Smith’s idea of the ‘impartial spectator’. These can be ‘real’ outsiders or hypothetically constructed outsiders on the basis of a will to self-distancing. It will be interesting to see how this compares with Norbert Elia’s account of personal and community detachment as characterises scientists and the scientific community.

But Smith’s and Sen’s impartial observer can only be superficially impartial to the group and issues viewed as an outsider. The observer’s own way of understanding the world (familiar and alien) that is not impartial with respect to its own ‘habitus’ and will tend to translate the strange culture into its own concepts and frameworks of meaning. Also, as a reflexive exercise imagining a detached (preconcpetionless?) observer, we would understand the outsider’s apparent view in our own language and meaning frameworks. If we have access to ‘real’ impartial observers then we would likewise assimilate their account to our own language, etc.

We would need to see how Sen’s ideas and formulations stack up against or alongside reasonably established sociological ideas like, for instance, identity formation and ideological construction, the embeddedness of behaviours and attitudes in networks of social practices, the well rehearsed and established critique of methodological individualism and voluntarism, the operations and structures of power, dependency, dependency, and so on.


Basic statements about capitalism

This won’t be very systematic but Iwill be keeping notes on this blog on the basic ideas and statements about capitalism.  I have started reading Economics and the Crisis of Ecology by Narindar Singh (3rd edition 1989 OUP). For him the real villain of the piece are the petrochemical and associated industries.  The initial argument of the book is that no proposed solution to the forthcoming environmental crisis has a hope in hell of working if it tries to do so within (and thus preserve) the capitalist status quo. He goes through a range of strategies including zero growth, the marketising of externalities, population control, and technological fixes, including nuclear power, and demostrates how none of these can possibly work leaving capitalism in place as the fundamental and defining characteristic of capitalism is its need for continuous growth.

According to Marx, the capitalist “shares with the miser the passion for wealth as wealth. But that which in the miser is mere idiosyncrasy, is, in the capitalist, the effect of the social mechanism, of which he is but one of the wheels”.  Capital Vol I Allen &Unwin 1957 p 603.

Look up Schumpeter’s ideas on capitalism as creative destruction.

Treadmill of production: “In 1980, Schnaiberg developed a conflict theory on human-environment interaction. The theory is that capitalism is driven by higher profitability and thereby must continue to grow and attract investments to survive in a competitive market. This identifies the imperative for continued economic growth levels that, once achieved, accelerate the need for future growth. This growth in production requires a corresponding growth in consumption. The process contains a chief paradox; economic growth is socially desired but environmental degradation is a common consequence that in turn disrupts long-run economic expansion”. Taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_sociology.


The social history of natural disasters

Recent floods in Cumbria (UK) have been caused by record breaking rainfall (Cumbria deluge breaks historic rainfall record) due in part to unusually high temperatures, 4 degrees above the seasonal average. In one 24 hour period the rainfall has been 10% higher than what is normal for the whole month of November. The man-made built environment and infrastructures have simply not been able to cope. But the extreme weather and ensuing floods cannot be seen as a purely ‘natural’ disaster. Like many others in recent years, this disaster has had a long history in the making.

Over many hundreds of years the landscape of the Lake District has been changed by deforestation and the grazing of sheep. The Cistercian abbeys of Furness and Byland, followed by land enclosures in the 16th and 17thcenturies, exploited the area for wool production. The process of deforestation was accelerated by iron ore smelting and later by the extraction of lead and copper. The resulting transformation of the land over several centuries, particularly the removal of the original scrubland vegetation and trees, produced the Lakeland landscape as it is known and loved today. But this dramatically altered the hydrology of the land and its ability to slow down and absorb surface water. This is also part of the story of the flooding of Boscastle in Cornwall in the August 2004 which similarly suffered unusually high rainfall in the space of a few hours. Long run changes in farming practices in the area, particularly land usage and the reduction of trees and hedges were seen as contributory factors.

Coincidently, just as the flooding of Workington and Cockermouth were dominating the newspapers in the UK, the flooding of parts of New Orleans as a result of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 is in the news again. A court hearing has ruled that Hurricane Katrina and the ensuing flooding was not an act of God (Hurricane Katrina: It was not an act of God). The testimony of expert witnesses claimed that the danger of such a flood was acknowledged at least 17 years earlier and the responsibility for the devastation rested with policy failure and incompetent engineering and was as such avoidable. As for the hurricane itself it was not a 1 in a 100 year or even a 1 in 40 year storm and had not even been a direct hit.

In fact the history of flooding of New Orleans goes back to it founding in 1718 on swampland with a large proportion of the city below sea level and vulnerable to both sea surges and the flooding of the Mississippi basin. Since the growth of the city and the continual development of the Mississippi as a transport system with the rerouting of meanders and the cutting of channels for oil and gas installations the river has over the years lost the ability to deposit sediments and build up land around its mouth. It is estimated that over 2,300 square miles of the barrier islands and wetlands, the natural defence against storm surges and flooding, have already been lost. (Unnatural disaster Financial Times November 6 2009).

One way or another, adaptation to the environment has always been necessary aspect of human settlement. However, we seem to be entering a period of dramatic environmental change in which previous adaptations are becoming increasingly inadequate.


Expert knowledge and public policy

In May 2008 the then Home Secretary Jaqui Smith, against the recommendations of her own scientific advisers, reversed the government’s 2004 decision to downgrade cannabis to a class C drug, returning it to its previous status of class B. The reclassification came into effect January 2009. This reclassification caused controversy at the time but this has recently re-emerged with the publication of a paper by Professor Nutt who, until he was sacked last Friday, was chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. In the paper Nutt criticised the reclassification of cannabis and the government’s use of the precautionary principle to justify so doing. He claimed that by invoking the precautionary principle politicians had distorted and devalued the research evidence. In a recent appearance on BBC’s Question Time (Thursday 29th October) where Nutt’s paper was raised Smith again supported the use of the precautionary principle on the grounds that psychiatrists’ reports and police views on the development of new stronger types of cannabis indicate greater mental health risks. In the government’s judgement the trends in the increasing strength of cannabis and these reports indicate the possibility of health risks they are not prepared to take. The government’s responsibility is to make decisions and be accountable for them. Advisors are required only give to advice.

A number of interesting issues arise from this fracas. One key issue is the relationship between expert and scientific knowledge and the making of law and public policy. In his latest book, First as Tragedy, then as Farce, Zizek tells the story of how in 2007 in the Czech Republic a public debate raged about the proposed installation of US Army radars on Czech territory. Despite about 70% of the population not wanting this the government refused the demand for a referendum and allowed the installation of the radars to go ahead on the grounds that important decisions are not matters that can be decided by voting and that they should be left to the experts, in this case military experts on matters of National security. As Zizek observes, if this logic is carried to its conclusion what is there left to vote for? Should not economic decisions, for instance, be left to economic experts?

A related issue is that the nature of scientific knowledge is nearly always provisional. As most scientists would tell us, it is the best we have at the moment and is rarely certain. In addition, scientific knowledge is always partial in that it tends to focus on artificially separated and therefore ‘decontextualised’ aspects of the reality scientists are seeking to describe and understand. It is precisely because of this that the application of scientific and expert knowledge to social policy cannot be seen as some automatic translation of science into policy. The policy decision-making process has to allow for the provisional nature of scientific and expert knowledge and address the connecting and wider aspects of the policy making context that the scientific evidence does not address. This can be further complicated where there are competing accounts of the science within the scientific community, for instance apparent contradictions between laboratory findings and observations in the field.

As it happens, on the balance of the evidence and arguments as I understand them, I do not agree with the reclassification of cannabis and I do agree with the thrust of Nutt’s criticism of the current drug classification system and drug policy. However, the basis of his complaint that the scientific evidence has been distorted and devalued is problematic as this implies that without the alleged distortion the policy following on from the science would be self-evident. I think the government could have constructed discussable grounds for reclassifying cannabis and at the same time been perfectly respectful of the scientific evidence. The insistence that government has to take into account a range of other issues and considerations beyond the scientific evidence is correct.

On the other hand, I think Nutt’s sacking by the current Home Secretary ill advised and counter productive. Professor Nutt’s opinions and comments are valuable contributions to public understanding and debate, a debate the government should engage in intelligently and constructively. It would have been far better to engage in a public discussion of the various factors and other forms of evidence and opinion that went into the decision to reclassify cannabis. This would include the psychiatrist’s and police opinions and experience Smith alluded to in Question Time and a measured consideration of the views of social and health welfare professionals and those working in the front line of drug use and abuse. However, why this approach was not adopted by the government may have something to do with Lembit Opik’s charge made in the same Question Time discussion, that it the reclassification smacked of vote catching policy making intended to appeal to the readership of  the red tops. The history of government’s exercise of the precautionary principle demonstrates a somewhat cynical and selective attitude to its deployment. On what grounds was it not deployed by the Conservative government during the Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) crisis in the 80s and 90s? At the time the government made strenuous efforts to dismiss public fears and the views of experts on the possibility that BSE could be transmitted to humans. In 1995 John Major, Prime Minister at the time, based the government’s attitude and policy on the view that: “There is currently no scientific evidence that BSE can be transmitted to humans or that eating beef causes CJD in humans. That issue is not in question”. This was in the face of a great deal of evidence from scientists that this could not be discounted and was in fact probable. It is undoubtedly true that a variety of other forms of evidence, opinion and experience needs to provide a broader context to how scientific evidence is used in policy making. There are factors and issues that have to be considered that individual pieces of scientific knowledge do not, and by themselves cannot, address. However, it is hard to dismiss the possibility that the reactions of target voters and possible economic consequences will figure high in a government’s priorities. In fact it would be naïve to suppose otherwise.


The battle for social mobility

Today sees the publication of Alan Milburn’s Panel on Fair Access to the Professions final report. The following are two of the earliest responses in the media with a few observations of my own.

The battle for social mobility
Lee Elliot Major, guardian.co.uk, Monday 20 July 2009
“The failure to turn around the UK’s dismal level of social mobility may haunt Labour even more than Iraq or Afghanistan”

Interesting report that locates the solution to the lack of social mobility in the UK in the education system. The last time social mobility was at a high level in the UK was with the enormous increase in white collar and managerial work created by the expansion of the public sector and a rapidly growing corporate sector after the 2nd World War, all supported by a consensus around Keynesian economic policy. While the labour market is shrinking, as it is now, even a successful policy to increase social mobility will only rearrange the deckchairs on the Titanic or (for those that haven’t seen the film) shuffle the pack. Every move up from the bottom10% means a someone else will take the place. There will always be a bottom 10% of course.

Professions ‘reserved for rich’
BBC News Tuesday, 21 July 2009

Some rather mixed messages from this report so I guess I’ll have to get around to reading it! On the one hand it wants pupils from schools in underprivileged areas to be able to compete with the children of educated middle-class and professional families. This will entail finding a way to find surrogate forms of some aspects of the social capital they lack. One strategy offered is to create some State provided ‘pushy parent’ equivalent. However, it’s not evident how a surrogate network of informal contacts, well placed relatives, the ability to provide resources and engage with children’s learning (i.e. ‘discussing’ assessment work) will be provided or the money for foreign visits and cultural events, let alone the mindset that says “the world is mine and I deserve it”. All this is pre-university entrance. On the other hand there is an implication that HE institutions should provide the support required by less well prepared students to close any deficit gap.  I suspect that many Universities would say this is not our job and admissions based purely on merit would not require this anyway. The other issue that warrants attention is that a perception that large numbers of perfectly well qualified children of middle-class and professional families are being excluded due to positive discrimination for the children of the less educated and wealthy could lead to an intensification of exclusionary tactics and a reinforcement of private education and the growth of private universities. The networks of power operate outside of the education system just as effectively as within. The proposed policy seems based on the idea that education is the key. It is important but there are many other powerful process that determine access to the plum jobs in addition to educational achievement. A cursory inspection of history and sociology demonstrates that the powerful are past masters at preserving their advantage in the face of historical and legislative change.


Public sociology

I am about to try and persuade some of my colleagues to contribute to a blog devoted to public sociology. This is intended to be a response to a growing tendency for individuals and groups to develop specialist expertise in areas of concern or interest to them. A good example of this is where environmental movements wish to challenge the use of some forms of technology and even some of the scientific assumptions underlying them. This often takes the form of invoking the cautionary principle on the basis of the incompleteness or partiality of the science. Other examples are movements involved in public health and medical issues that want to challenge policy or the scientific models underpinning the policy, for example the ‘medical model’ of disability or the imposition of ‘professional’ perspectives that ignore or marginalise the views and experience of users, clients or customers. I have also noticed that friends and family members are increasingly going to their doctors and consultants armed with the results of research they have done in order to understand what the Doctor is saying and engage in an informed discussion about their condition and possible strategies. This is also true of interactions with financial advisers and the tax authorities. In fact there is an official drive in this direction with the government providing web based services like ‘the Expert Patient’ and other information sites and an increasing exhortation to all to be proactive in taking responsibility for our own lives.

It seems to me that it could be of significant benefit for individuals and groups to have a source of reliable knowledge about how societies work and the social processes that form the context of their experiences and problems and have, often pretty invisible, impacts upon their lives. It is a commonplace in sociology that the unintended consequences of intended actions often have a far greater  impact on outcomes than those intended and hoped for. These unintended consequences are often due to the way individual and group actions and behaviours connect with, reverberate through and rebound from much broader social contexts and processes. C. Wright Mills claimed that sociology is the study of the ways individual lives are linked to the historical development of social structures. To quote from his book The Sociological Imagination (1959):

It is the political task of the social scientist — as of any liberal educator — continually to translate personal troubles into public issues, and public issues into the terms of their human meaning for a variety of individuals. It is his task to display in his work — and, as an educator, in his life as well — this kind of sociological imagination.

Something if this is hinted at in H G Well’s commentary on Mr Polly’s predicament (and many of the petty bourgeoisie of the time):

I come back to Mr. Polly sitting upon his gate and swearing in the east wind, and I have a sense of floating across unbridged abysses between the General and the Particular. There, on the one hand, is the man of understanding, seeing clearly the big process that dooms millions of lives to thwarting and discomfort and unhappy circumstance […] and, on the other hand, Mr. Polly sitting on his gate, untrained, unwarned, confused, distressed, angry, seeing nothing except that he is, as it were, nettled in greyness and discomfort [..]. (H G Wells. The History of Mr Polly 1910 Chapter 7 Part III).

The man of understanding, who can provide the ‘General’ contex to Mr Polly’s ‘Particular’ circumstances in Well’s story is a social scientist of some sort.

The public sociology blog would hopefully have a number of contributors with different areas of research expertise.  The intention would be to write informative posts aimed at what might be called ‘the intelligent lay person’ and would be of interest to other sociologists and inquisitive members of the general public. Posts would be a mixture of short reports and observations on current research, opinion pieces and short commentaries on current news and issues where a more sociological perspective might add to understanding. Hopefully contributions will be made by research students as well as established academics and scholars. As a blog of course it will be possible for readers to post comments and hopefully this will be a good way for practicing sociologists to engage with and discuss issues in a public and relevant way.

Another impetus behind this idea is a recent edition of the Times Higher Education Supplement that had a couple of articles on the diminishing role of public academics and intellectuals and their increasing irrelevance. The vacuum they are leaving is rapidly being filled by populist journalism and celebrity opinion makers. The edition in question is that of May 28th 2009.

In a leader article, Go public to prevent extinction by Ann Mroz, she claims that “knockabout popular debate appeals to few scholars, but if intellectuals disappear from the public eye, academia may suffer”. Another article in the same edition is a commentary on a talk given by Professor Harris of Oxford University at a seminar marking International Academic Freedom Day,  Freedom fighters ‘when it suits’, where he  argued that the current challenges to academic freedom were threats in which the academic community was complicit. Academics protect their work from external criticism, he said, and specialisation is used as a barrier behind which academics and their colleagues can hide. The full text of his address is available online.