{"id":1014,"date":"2013-05-13T15:29:54","date_gmt":"2013-05-13T14:29:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/terrywassall.org\/?p=1014"},"modified":"2013-05-13T15:29:54","modified_gmt":"2013-05-13T14:29:54","slug":"sociology-professional-or-pragmatic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/terrywassall.org\/index.php\/2013\/05\/13\/sociology-professional-or-pragmatic\/","title":{"rendered":"Sociology – professional or pragmatic?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u00a0precisely\u00a0what it is and what it’s for. And once again I came away feeling\u00a0cautiously\u00a0optimistic. One source of this optimism was the presentation given by John Holmwood Sociology\u2019s \u2018moments\u2019: Democracy, expertise and the market<\/strong><\/em>. 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 \u2018publics\u2019 with \u2018markets\u2019.<\/p>\n

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G H Mead\u00a0(1863\u20131931)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In elaborating on the problems this presents to sociology, not least because the discipline and its\u00a0institutional\u00a0home 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\u00a0American\u00a0Pragmatists 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\u00a0industrial\u00a0world. 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\u00a0critique.<\/p>\n

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 …. \u00a0[The Working Hypothesis in Social Reform<\/a>\u00a0American Journal of Sociology, November 1899]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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 \u00a0consequences, intended and unintended, of neoliberal corporatist policies. This implies \u00a0a role for\u00a0sociology in dialogue with\u00a0\u00a0‘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’ \u00a0enough 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\u00a0dominant\u00a0troika\u00a0of government, industry and finance, sociology serves democracy in that it exposes and\u00a0resists\u00a0the multifarious processes and policies that combine to hollow out and neutralise\u00a0democratic\u00a0institutions. In a previous ‘radical moment’, in the 1960s and 70s, sociology could be seen as harnessed to a project of\u00a0institutionalised\u00a0reform and betterment operationalised by\u00a0the\u00a0welfare\u00a0state and influenced by the new\u00a0social\u00a0movements 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.\u00a0\u00a0John concluded with the question, what is it to practice sociology in a profoundly undemocratic system where reform has been\u00a0de-institutionalised\u00a0and sociology has lost its\u00a0institutional 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\u00a0American\u00a0pragmatists of the early 20th century. Sociology can inform a defence of wider social values in the face of a\u00a0declining\u00a0democracy. 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\u00a0financial\u00a0crash connotations) public debate in the service of democracy (not markets) and make inequality matter.<\/p>\n

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 \u00a0history 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\u00a0interpreters. He also offers a diagnosis of the current parlous state of democratic institutions based on a corporatist account of government and the\u00a0separation\u00a0of 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\u00a0engage 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\u00a0reducible\u00a0to 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.<\/p>\n

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Alvin Gouldner (1920 – 1980)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There are two points of interest that I’d like to pursue. The first one is the notion that sociology\u00a0develops\u00a0in\u00a0confrontation\u00a0with ‘radical moments’ that are precipitated by social developments external to its discourse and\u00a0therefore\u00a0changes in the environment with which it has symbiotic and what might be called co-evolutionary\u00a0relationships. The second is the notion that sociology should concern itself with and service democracy and wider social values such as those that are\u00a0concerned\u00a0with 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<\/strong><\/em> (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<\/strong><\/em> (The American Sociologist Vol. 3, No. 2, May, 1968, pp. 103-116). This was a critical reaction to the Presidential Address\u00a0given\u00a0by Howard Becker to the SSSP 6 years later entitled Whose Side Are We On<\/strong><\/em> (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:\u00a0Renewal\u00a0and Critique in Sociology Today<\/strong><\/em> Allen Lane 1973. (I first looked at these readings in 1977 when I was doing A level sociology at an evening class and frankly\u00a0hardly\u00a0understood a word of it)! \u00a0This 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.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0academics\u00a0at least, still have today with respect to the role and practice of sociology.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The 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\u00a0safeguarded\u00a0against 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\u00a0open\u00a0and honest as it can be […] and a vain ritual of\u00a0moral\u00a0neutrality which, because it invites men (sic) to ignore\u00a0the\u00a0vulnerability\u00a0of reason \u00a0to bias, leaves it at the mercy of irrationality.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In Gouldner’s view a value free sociology is impossible due to the unavoidable necessity of making choices between subject matters, research\u00a0hypotheses,\u00a0concepts and\u00a0explanatory 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\u00a0knowledge\u00a0when in fact they are an\u00a0indispensable\u00a0condition 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\u00a0world 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\u00a0irrelevant and at worse it surrenders authority,\u00a0legitimacy\u00a0and power to the\u00a0dominant\u00a0discourses\u00a0of the status quo in which it becomes complicit. It is in danger of becoming the\u00a0hand servant\u00a0of and\u00a0harnessed\u00a0to 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\u00a0professional\u00a0sociology 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\u00a0sociologically\u00a0informed tools are they are capable of building a social technology “powerful\u00a0enough\u00a0to cripple us”. In his day prisoners of war and GIs were being systematically brain washed and compulsive consumerism was being\u00a0driven\u00a0by advertising and scientific marketing. As he observed, the social science technologies of the future will “hardly be less powerful than today’s”.<\/p>\n

Within the institutionalised forms of sociology this can be experienced by its students and practitioners as isolating and alienating. In the words of Gouldner, \u00a0“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\u00a0involvement\u00a0require 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,\u00a0particularistic\u00a0anthropology or the post-modern turn, solving the problem of value-freedom by promoting it to an intellectual\u00a0principle. \u00a0The other is to become a sociologist of sociology and engage in a learned and\u00a0scholarly\u00a0critique\u00a0of its competing paradigms and methods. Both are ways of sheltering from the real world of political action and passion,\u00a0uncertainty\u00a0and messy pragmatism. \u00a0“It evokes the soothing illusion, amongst some sociologists, that their exclusion from the larger society is a self-imposed duty rather than an\u00a0externally\u00a0imposed constraint”. It disguises the fact that to refrain from social criticism reflects the personal interests and\u00a0insecurities\u00a0of some sociologists rather than “reflecting a higher professional good”.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0particularly\u00a0edifying as a job descriptions for young sociologists today. Arguably the \u00a0two 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 \u00a0and 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\u00a0itself\u00a0founded on the assertion of the right to be critical of tradition. We have our own contemporary representatives of this\u00a0contrary\u00a0and\u00a0troublesome\u00a0breed.<\/p>\n

\"\"For me, at least, a number of problems emerge from this. What is it to be critical? What is practically entailed in\u00a0practising\u00a0a sociology that engages in dialogues with\u00a0various\u00a0publics? On what basis do we choose the publics to engage with? What is the\u00a0justification\u00a0for adopting and focusing on values associated with inequality and justice? (2) Don’t\u00a0financiers, bankers, the police, \u00a0torturers\u00a0and hedge fund managers constitute publics and operate in their own universe of values? If we claim we should side with the victims, given a\u00a0sociologist’s\u00a0systemic sensibilities, are we not all victims one way or another? And in a world of unavoidable and irreducible\u00a0uncertainty in which we have\u00a0abandoned\u00a0utopian visions and\u00a0meta-narratives, political and scientific, \u00a0isn’t pragmatic\u00a0adaptation\u00a0and problem solving doomed to be absorbed and neutralised, even exploited, by the status quo to enhance its legitimacy and wealth and further\u00a0secure its domination? As Zygmunt Bauman, John Holloway and\u00a0Slavoj\u00a0\u017di\u017eek all say, in no\u00a0particular\u00a0order, there are no\u00a0guarantees\u00a0this 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\u00a0gardens, retreat behind the barricades of relativism and incestuous methodological flagellation? Or make alliances with the centres of\u00a0unassailable\u00a0power to\u00a0minimise\u00a0our own\u00a0victim-hood? \u00a0I think there are positive, life enhancing and, yes, emancipatory answers to these questions. The next post will\u00a0continue\u00a0with Gouldner and examine his account of why we should side with the exploited and those that are subjected to an excess of\u00a0suffering,\u00a0given\u00a0that to suffer to some extent is part of the\u00a0human\u00a0condition.<\/p>\n

Notes:
\n(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\u00a0concerned\u00a0with the residual problems left over by economics.
\n(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 \u00a0perhaps using ‘action’ forms of research and engagement.<\/p>\n

Of possible interest is the post I did last year reflecting on the BSA conference in 2012\u00a0http:\/\/terrywassall.org\/2012\/04\/14\/reflections-on-britsoc12\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u00a0precisely\u00a0what it is and what it’s for. And once again I came away feeling\u00a0cautiously\u00a0optimistic. One source of this optimism was the presentation … Continue reading “Sociology – professional or pragmatic?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,4,15,8,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-capitalism","category-general","category-ideology","category-public-policy","category-sociology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/terrywassall.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/terrywassall.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/terrywassall.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terrywassall.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terrywassall.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1014"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/terrywassall.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1014\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/terrywassall.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terrywassall.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terrywassall.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}