I refuse to be disillusioned by David Mellor

Many sociologists have a romanticized story about how they first came to be dazzled by the revelational gift of the discipline. They make for good tales about how ‘seeing sociologically’ or developing a ‘sociological imagination’ illuminates hitherto unnoticed – yet deeply powerful – aspects of the social world. The beginning of my own love story with sociology is more farce than romance. I fell into sociology by accident, because I completed the application form for my Access to HE course in a hurry and ticked the wrong box: I had intended to study psychology. Oh, the happy accidents of history. Had I turned into a psychologist I might have spent last week in the company of monkeys in a basement rather than with sociological colleagues at the LSE in London at the BSA Annual Conference.

This sixtieth anniversary event coupled with the disciplinary uncertainty discussed across Sociology and the Cuts meant that a good deal of space was given over to soul searching. One recurring theme in this respect was ‘impact’, specifically in terms of the REF, but also more generally in terms of the ‘jurisdiction’ or in Les Back’s terms ‘constituency’ of the discipline and its practitioners. Throughout the sessions that I attended on impact, I was impressed by the desire displayed by sociologists at all career stages to at least say something about publics and audiences, to fight against growing social inequalities, and to push for the widest recognition of impact within the REF. But it’s this point that bothers me. While I appreciate their efforts, why are we waiting for the REF Sociology panel to come up with a definition of impact? Shouldn’t we be doing this already?

Just like my rushed box ticking at West Kent College back in 1997, history is littered with the unintended consequences of actions. We find ourselves in a moment of history when there is a chance for us to take the notion of impact forced down upon us and push it back out into the world in a form we have chosen. I don’t want to reheat the points made very well elsewhere about the audit culture, managerialism and neo-liberalism in HE. Rather, here I want to build on these and make a very straightforward suggestion: why don’t we use our disciplinary solidarity to define and improve impact for ourselves?

There is a great deal of talk about publics that very often fails to materialize into anything more substantial than well meaning sentiment. In my eyes this is simply due to a lack of solidarity and communal support within British sociology – a rather ironic situation really. This is not the fault of the BSA and nor should it be their job, I think, as a professional association. The BSA provides the spaces for us to be drawn together – what we do in and from these spaces is our own responsibility.

What I’m calling for doesn’t have a name yet, because as far as I know there isn’t a collective noun for a group of sociologists (jokes on a postcard to the usual address). I’d like to suggest ‘an insurrection’ of sociologists. What I’m calling for then, is an insurrection of sociologists for impact. This would entail us working collectively across institutions and beyond national borders to share our experiences, to encourage others, and to form new groupings for action. We don’t need to debate public sociology anymore; we need to get good at it. I’ve chosen the term insurrection because I think it captures the nature of what we can actually achieve. Even acting collectively with colleagues from sociology and other disciplines– and perhaps with other pressure groups and social movements – we are highly unlikely to have revolutionary impact. This doesn’t mean, however, that we will have none, or that we should just give up and lapse into disciplinary docility. On the contrary, we can use the context of impact-for-audit to create a platform for impact-for-justice, from where we can develop strategies for political and ethical struggle. Many individuals have worked hard in this area and their biographies illustrate the problems we continue to face as individual scholar-activists, particularly in the absence of a strong collective platform (see for example Max Farrar’s exemplary ‘Cracking the Ivory Tower’ in Burnett et al. (2010) New Social Connections). It’s time to make an opportunity out of a crisis and build a strong collective platform for impact-for-justice.

I stumbled into sociology by chance, but now I’m a fully signed up member of the insurrection. To paraphrase Gramsci, I think that we should be pessimists due to our sociological intelligence, but optimists because of our sociological will. And again like Gramsci, I believe we need to tread the fine balance of a life lived without illusions, without falling into disillusionment. Who’s with me?

David Mellor, University of Bristol, Convenor of the BSA Education Study Group