Goldsmiths economic sociology conference

A Goldsmiths colleague and I are organising an economic sociology conference for 6th March of next year. It's going to explore some of the recent cultural approaches to markets that have followed the work of Michel Callon, and a call for papers is currently out. Keynote speakers are:

- Dr. Fabian Muniesa, Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation, Ecole des Mines de Paris
- Professor Philippe Steiner, IRISES, Université Paris-Dauphine
- Professor Nigel Thrift, University of Warwick

The full programme and details of call for papers is here. Email me for more details or if you want to come/speak.

Giddens on the demise and rise of sociology

Anthony Giddens has an article on the Guardian blog today, asking the question - why is sociology not closer to the centre of public debate? He argues that the rise of free market thinking and the demise of utopian politics are two prominent reasons. The solution may look as follows:

The answer for me is a return to the style of thinking that originally drove the sociological enterprise. A little bit more utopian thinking might help too - well, why not? Politics in some ways has become deadly dull. We need more positive ideals in the world, but not empty ones - rather, they should be ideals that link to realistic possibilities of change. Most of all, though, we need to confront the big problems that face us, and provide a field of debate for helping us understand them better.

Pod-cast of joint NYLON - Young Foundation seminar

On Friday afternoon, we held a joint NYLON -Young Foundation seminar in London, entitled 'Sociology in the Public Sphere: What role should it play?'. The discussion began with contributions from Richard Sennett and Geoff Mulgan, Director of the Young Foundation (more on him here), and was chaired by me.

You can listen to the various bits of the seminar below:
- Geoff Mulgan (15 mins, 4mb)
- Richard Sennett (10 mins, 3mb)
- Exchange between Geoff and Richard (7 mins, 2mb)
- Discussion first half (40 mins, 11mb)
- Discussion second half (31 mins, 9mb)
- Closing summary (2.5 mins, .7mb)

Any participants (or non-participants) who would like to continue the debate, please do so in the comments below.

Don't Go Postal

Donna Haraway gave the Nelkin Memorial Lecture at NYU Law School on October 16 and encouraged us not to be post-humanists or post-feminists. She said that although we may be able to think beyond categories like "human" and "woman," there is still plenty of work to be done under the sign of those categories. So just in case anyone doubted that gender is more than just conceptual category, I came across the following study which neatly illustrates how gender matters in the real world:

In "The Importance of Women’s Status for Child Nutrition in Developing Countries" by Lisa C. Smith, Usha Ramakrishnan, Aida Ndiaye, Lawrence Haddad and Reynaldo Martorell, the authors find that "a mother’s ability to make decisions at home and in her community not only affects the care she receives and thus her own nutritional well-being but also enables her to provide better care and nutrition for her children. In South Asia, where women’s status is particularly low, the report finds that improvements in women’s power relative to men’s, both within the household and in the community, strongly influence children’s nutritional status."
Basically, the report shows that although overall poverty may appear more severe in Africa than in South Asia, in fact there is more malnutrition in South Asia than in Africa because of women's comparatively low status there.

The study is published as Research Report 131 of the International Food Policy Research Institute, at http://www.ifpri.org/

capitalism's self-image

If there is such a thing as doing sociology 'in the wild', as there is for economics, then one of its manifestations may be the vast industry through which capitalism attempts to represent itself. As Nigel Thrift argues in Knowing Capitalism, academia no longer has (and in truth, never did have) a monopoly on theories of capitalism, for we now live in an economic era in which seminars, books, theorising, lectures and all the other techniques of intellectual enquiry are now part of the process of capitalism itself. Business thinkers, gurus and business schools now produce rival representations of capitalism. The system has become self-conscious.

I'm very aware of this right now thanks to some freelance work I'm just embarking on, in which I've got to assist the client develop their qualitative understanding of how the structure and mood of the economy is changing. It is certainly not economic advice that's expected of me (I can't do economics), and if there is one academic specialism that it comes closest to, it would have to be sociology. Dig beneath the commercial brief, and the question I'm being asked to answer is 'what is British capitalism like for those involved at the sharp end of it?'.

Except I'm not being asked to answer that question as such. Certainly I have to produce answers, but not the answer. What is curious is that capitalism needs and devours representations of itself, but these have to fit a certain mould, which I would define as follows:

- It cannot be reassuring: business does not like being told that everything is going to be fine. Instead, it demands a form of consultancy S&M, in which it pays to be told that the future is very uncertain, that only the most innovative companies can survive, that the future is far riskier than the past, and so on. In particular, the notion that technology is about to wreak havoc in entirely unpredictable ways is a threat that they demand to receive, even if - by definition - the prediction is entirely vague.

- It cannot be depressing: the story that must be fed back to business about itself must focus only on those areas where change is fastest, and excitement is highest. Anyone who were to tell a business that the future of capitalism consists of a small section of the population growing even richer, and a large low-wage underclass developing to serve them, would simply be telling the 'wrong' story. I doubt they would be viewed as politically threatening, nor even as empirically misguided; they would simply have missed the point about what is a useful story to tell. In all liklihood, they may be accused of being somewhat old-fashioned.

These two necessary characteristics make for a strange self-image. Capitalism does not want sociological news of what is really going on - it gets its truth via its accountants, lawyers, McKinseyites and experts. But nor does it want sociological optimism or quietism. It feeds off self-representations that are frightening but not demoralising.

Ultimately this is a symptom of the reflexivity that accompanies any attempt to theorise oneself. The more it becomes established that the 'future is uncertain' and that 'change' is ubiquitous, the more it becomes necessary to commission studies of the rapid changes that are affliciting our economic environment. These studies uncover very little, and so inevitably come back with the worrying response that 'the future is uncertain', but will be nothing like the past. A study that came back with the response that 'the future will contain many of the same relationships of exploitation of the past' would be simultaneously far too ambitious (for having deigned to specify what is going to happen next) and way too cautious (for having ignored the whirwhind of change that is around the corner).

But this leave one open question: can capitalism survive indefinitely without ever confronting sociological truths, and if so, why can it? If it is the case - and I'm sure it is - that changes in the structure of capitalism are recreating the geography and class structure of the UK (not with the huge speed that consultants see everywhere, but with gravitas nonetheless), one would think that a knowledge-hungry business culture would want to know about this, in addition to the more blinkered account it consumes endlessly. OK, perhaps it wouldn't want a fully Marxist version of events, given the doom that this would spell, but perhaps something akin to Saskia Sassen or Manuel Castells's explanation of how technology and capital are recreating social relations. If business wants a self-representation, why does it not at least flirt with a truthful one, and see what happens?

Specialised Research Training in Sociology

Goldsmiths College (University of London) is running a series of workshops on "real time" ethnographic research using new media.

Details can be found here (there are some great images on the Goldsmiths site):

http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/livesociology/index.htm

(Summary)

http://www.jobs.ac.uk/jobfiles/EL059.html

Parties for the Public Good

A report from the Young Foundation about the decline of political parties...

Over the last 20-30 years political parties have lost members, voters and trust. Some celebrate parties decline. This report argues that parties continue to have a vital role to play in making democracy work – and that neither voluntary organisations nor the media can adequately fulfil these roles. It shows that the big parties took a wrong turn in the 1980s and 1990s by adopting a model that is more centralised, more centred on marketing and advertising, and more dependent on a small number of very wealthy donors. And it unveils a major new survey of public opinion which shows that the public continue to see parties as vital channels for shaping the future.

Download it here: http://www.youngfoundation.org/Parties_for_the_Public_Good.pdf

I was involved with the research that went into it and it was interesting seeing some of the more sociological explanations (i.e. consumerism, the rise of the choice agenda in public service provision) getting sidelined partly because there was little practical or realistic policy recommendations that could be made plus the fact it also highlights the incompatibility of trying to merge democracy with market-consumerism as it effects, quite fundamentally to my mind, the way people see (and relate to) the state and the function of politics (the rise of citizen-consumer). This is not necessarily a message that wants to be heard nowadays by some politicans.

Public Value

I've been working on a paper with my colleagues Richard Naylor and Kate Oakley about the current fascination in policy circles (particularly in cultural and media policy) with the notion of 'public value'. It's called "Giving them what they want: the construction of the public in 'public value'". Our paper explores the routes of transmission of this voguish idea from Harvard (Mark Moore) to Broadcasting House via Geoff Mulgan when he was at the Strategy Unit.

Our argument essentially is that public value, whilst it has inherent potential as a way of developing public services, has become bogged down in a consumer-citizen ideology (around choice, personalisation, etc) that is particularly associated with the current neoliberal hegemony, and that its use within the BBC's strategy for future services is far more rhetorical than anything else. In fact we argue that there are fundamental dangers for the BBC in adopting this strategy. I'd be really interested to know what you think about the paper.

How We Live Now...

Social History in the Making

Similar to the Mass Observation studies of the 1950s and 1960s (http://www.massobs.org.uk/), this is an interesting project that encourages people to record one average day in contemporary history and is simultaneously an excercise in social history, everyday ethnography and public sociology.

Worth a look!

http://www.historymatters.org.uk/output/Page1.asp

the tests that define worth in britain

A terrifying sociological portrait of British norms emerged in the news this morning, with these two monstrous and entirely unrelated reports of how we set about attributing social worth:

- By 2020, the government wants 70% of the UK population to be engaged in sport five times a week (sic), in order to cut £2.3bn off its health budget (here's the research underpinning this). Can one even imagine how this Foucaultian apocalypse will actually work? After all, this is not just children, but the whole population. Is our era's equivalent of the Victorian rail and postal networks to be a vast outlay on public gymns? Worse, the rugby authorities are making plans to try and gobble up some of this investment (for non-British readers, rugby is low-tech american football), and - according to reports on the radio this morning - expect to be able to tackle endemic problems of social exclusion and poverty through getting a larger number of people to jump on each other in mud.

- The Guardian reports today on the types of interview questions that are now fired at applicants to Oxford and Cambridge: "are you cool?", "how might you argue that what everyone says is a banana is not a banana?", "here is a piece of bark. Talk about it". How terribly amusing! So the gatekeepers of the British establishment have decided that they will revel in their reputation for unimaginative eccentricity, rather than do anything about it. A shame, because for a while they looked like trying to rethink this approach.

Both sport and interviews are examples of what Boltanski calls a 'test' in On Justification, that is, an agreed way of distributing worth in society. Politics, for Boltanski, is the battle between different mechanisms for justification, which themselves are not ways of creating consensus, but operate as broadly acceptable rules of disensus. In a world governed by the test of rugby, the physically weak individual will do what they can to avoid being pummelled into the mud, but will accept the reasons given for it happening. In a world governed by the test of clever-clever interview questions, the person devoid of smug debating skills may have a strong desire to attend Britain's elite universities, but will understand that this is not possible. Put the two together, and you have a dystopian science fiction. Unfortunately for us, it's not fiction, but dominant policy.