Read between the lines by John Brewer

Whenever I teach interactionism and refer to the famous idea of ‘the definition of the situation’, I always refer to a cartoon in a Victorian-era issue of Punch. An elderly lady alights from a London omnibus after purchasing a ticket to Piccadilly, only to be told by the conductor the stop is Marble Arch. ‘It is what I call Piccadilly’, she defiantly says.

Everybody views the world from their own point of view but there are some people whom we expect to take in all sides. Social scientists and journalists come to mind. I was reminded of this cartoon on reading Aditya Chakrabortty’s latest attack on sociology. As an economist he has accused the other social sciences of failing to predict the financial crisis and while this might be thought to reflect a failing in economics rather than sociology, in the process he has taken aggressive side swipes at sociology and political science in particular. I have written to him three times, with one letter printed in the online edition of the Guardian (with Howard Wollman), responding to the first diatribe.  He sees the financial crisis as an issue about the responsibility of social science; I agree. However, I see his reporting of it as an issue about the responsibility of financial journalists.  To assist in responsible reporting for his last piece (printed in the Guardian on 8 May) the BSA collated a lengthy document at short notice outlining some of the sociological work we were aware of on the financial crisis and its aftermath . This was ridiculed by him as work from the Journal of Niche Studies. I’ll leave it to you to judge whether the work should be so easily dismissed. But I was deeply disappointed at his claim that on our part we refused to engage with him. I repeat here the email I sent him to which I attached the document above. It was sent on the 4 May, well in advance of his deadline.

“I understand you have been wishing to contact me as President of the BSA. We have been unable to ascertain from you what it is specifically you wish to talk to me about, so I have tried to anticipate what it is you would like to know and we have compiled the attached document. This lists some of the work that sociologists have done in the area of the financial crisis over the past few years, including some work presented at our conference and in our journals. I’m afraid it lists only the things that come immediately to mind but I am sure it will be helpful to you. To give you a sense of the books being written now, the document also lists books on the topic awaiting review that have arrived in the BSA Office. We have put this document in the public domain ahead of your piece on Monday so that it is plain we have been trying to anticipate your requests. I am very shortly leaving for a family break in Donegal until Monday night. If you wish to let us know your specific questions, please email them to Judith Mudd, our Chief Executive, and/or Tony Trueman, our media officer, and they will try to help you. Their addresses are below: judith.mudd@britsoc.org.uk, tony.trueman@britsoc.org.uk. I have also copied them into this email. Best wishes.”

Again I’ll leave it to you to judge whether his accusation is fair. One of the casualties of the financial crisis has been the credibility of economics; another is the reputation of financial journalism.  This makes you realise just how far neoliberalism has penetrated financial journalism. It made me think also whether it is necessary for those who work in the public sphere to have an ego. Probably. But even so, it is impossible to work in the public sphere and believe one is always right and to always retain for oneself the last word. Not unless you want to be like the old lady from Punch and live in a world of your own. It is time for me, I think, to update my example when teaching interactionism from 19^th century eccentricism to 21^st century financial journalism.

John Brewer, BSA President

The Big Society needs the New Society by John Brewer

Warm springs bring out in some people an interest in the cricket averages. Others are concerned about ‘examination weather’, that unusual climatic phenomenon that delivers uncomfortable weather conditions at exactly the time when comfort is what is desired in all matters in order to achieve full potential. Whatever it may be, the influences of climate on society are everywhere to be seen in everyday cultural life in spring and early summer.

This time of year, however, brings out in the Times Higher an obsession with exam howlers; something as predictable as concern about the erosion of standards at the late summer announcement of school examination results. Such are the routines that normalise life at this time of year. 

One of my routines at this time of year, however, is external examining and I cannot fail to be impressed wherever I go with the quality of the exam work I see in people who struggle the most to study as non-traditional students. This may not reveal itself in 1^st class awards – although sometimes it does – but mostly in significant added value. Looking at what some people exit with compared to what they and came in with, gives a far better measure of performance than howlers. Why not ask academics for cases of unusual added value not exam howlers? But what are the chances of the Times Higher making this its summer ritual? The question is rhetorical because we know the answer.

Coverage of social science is very poor – I think I am right in saying that this year’s 60^th anniversary conference of the BSA did not merit mention in its pages – and the attention devoted to campaigns to protect the social sciences pales in comparison to that of arts and humanities. And this is not for the want of the Academy of Social Science or the BSA trying. If you follow the biographies of the journalists and see their degree subjects it is easy to proffer a sociological explanation for this interest.

How it makes me miss the New Society.  Generations of sociologists will not know of this magazine. It focused on social science and had articles written by the leading social scientists. It was public social science by people eager to communicate popular social science. I recall it even had a series on the history of social science, articles that were later published by Penguin in a book collated by the then editor of New Society, Timothy Raison. It has a wonderful Wikpedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Society).

It folded in 1988, just at the time when a social science perspective was under most attack. You could say that something like the New Society is needed now more than ever. It is deeply ironic that the Big Society is emerging as the political motif of our time but is so disconnected from social science analysis of society. It would be nice to see the New Society interrogate the Big Society.

John Brewer, BSA President

Independence and freedom in the university sector by John Brewer

Comments recently by AC Grayling and Frank Furedi remind me of the hoary old joke about foreign tourists lost in the West of Ireland asking a local man map directions, to which he replies they shouldn’t start from here. I once thought this a version of the anti-Irish stupidity joke but I now see it as belonging to a genre that sociologists of humour call resistance jokes, which challenge moral boundaries and stereotypes by overturning them. In this case, it reflects the local person’s realisation of the complexity of the myriad highways and byways and the impossibility of giving the uninitiated clear guidelines. It is a commentary on the unrealistic expectations of the people making the request. 

The UK university sector is as complex, unfathomable and undescribable as any network of country lanes. The regulatory framework that defines the British system is worsening at precisely the time that its privatisation and marketisation proceed apace.

Recently, I had the pleasure of dinner with a guest speaker from Yale who asked innocently what ‘REF Returnable’ meant and who found it difficult to reconcile privatisation with regulation. A quick discourse about neo-liberalism tried to help him understand, as a non-social scientist, that some forms of marketisation enhance regulation not relinquish it, and that the peculiarity of higher education in the UK is that the government retreats from public funding while reinforcing public regulation.

The call by Grayling and Furedi for freedom from regulation comes with a different meaning of the term marketisation. They want private universities that are outside both government funding and government control. I can’t help but feel this makes them a little like the lost foreign tourists seeking help in finding their way through the maze and confusion. It might be freedom from government regulation but only enhances the control of the market; one form of freedom leads to other forms of domination. That is, the local Irishman was right. Don’t start from here: fully privatised universities are not the way to go to avoid regulation. Better to have a publicly funded sector that is free from government interference. Or is that where we started from?

John Brewer, BSA President

The New Public Social Sciences 2 by John Brewer

Sociology is necessarily a transgressive discipline and its critical edge is what makes sociology distinctive. The new public social science to which I have referred must maintain its identity as a form of critique. The new public social science as I see it, however, is necessarily transgressive. I can think of at least three borders it transgresses – disciplinary, national and moral – and it transcends at least one divide – that between teaching and research.

The new public social science is a research and teaching agenda. It is multi-disciplinary and global. For example, in my work on peace processes, disciplines like sociology, politics, international relations, transitional justice studies, economics, offer perspectives better in combination than separately. This multi-disciplinarity is finding expression in hived-off new subject areas, like transitional justice studies and memory studies; its home might better be found in the idea of public social science itself. And peace processes cannot be studied within the boundaries of any single nation state; peacemaking is a genuinely glocal process, where there is a constant up and down between the local, national and global.

But, it’s the moral boundaries that might sound the strangest. The new public social science has to engage with those considered by us up to now as ‘strangers’ – natural scientists, governments, INGOs. For example, using climate change as the instance, there has to be useful engagement between sociologists, environmentalists, transport policy makers, oceanographers and the like. Governments are the strangest of all our dragons. I personally think it is possible to engage without losing independence or risking co-option: anthropologists in service of the military command in Afghanistan is not our model. This is where INGOs and civil society are important in participatory forms of research, such as, using another example of work I’m involved in, incorporating victim/survivor groups in the research design of work looking at the development of compromise amongst victims/survivors of conflict.

There is an imperative here that affects our teaching too. I’m not suggesting that we need to refresh the sociology curriculum, or that some of our core courses look tired and traditional, since a core sociology curriculum is a bulwark against fragmentation. I do think, however, that alongside the core, we need courses that both deal with some of the public issues that affect the future of human kind, in which sociology’s lens is put in combination with other social sciences and beyond. Teaching courses on sustainability, oceans, East-West, and climate, for example, makes us inherently multi-disciplinary and transcend the social/natural science divide. INGOs and civil society groups can be brought into the class room so that, in our teaching, students can see what it means to think globally and act locally. But there is an understandable anxiety lurking anxiety in all this, can we have ‘impact’ – in our teaching and research –and remain transgressive?

John Brewer, BSA President

A new kind of public university and a new kind of social science? by John Brewer

My last blog was on Michael Burawoy’s idea of the new kind of public university – ‘public’ not in the sense of funding anymore from the state but in terms of the relationships universities develop with civil society and the sort of teaching and research they undertake directed toward public issues. The university crisis to which the new kind of public university is a response is, as Barry Gibson notes in his thoughtful blog, one of both increased marketisation and regulation. And while Martyn Hammersley is absolutely correct to argue in his reply to my blog that the crisis takes on local forms, the university crisis is a conjuncture of processes that are international – a moment marked by world-wide attacks on the idea of the public university, arising from neo-liberal attacks on ‘big government’, global economic privations and public expenditure cuts, the marketisation of higher education, the growth of the audit culture, the emphasis on accountability in public funding and increased regulation of higher education. However, Martyn throws out an interesting challenge to this analysis: what is the role of public sociology? Let me suggest that public sociology is not a big enough idea any longer.

I agree with Burawoy entirely that this moment is one of degradation for the universities that is simultaneously also an opportunity to stake the claim for a new kind of university. Public spirited, engaged with civil society – and indeed business – in a dialogue about publicly relevant research, one, as he says elsewhere, ‘that engenders, fuels and orchestrates public debate about issues we all face across the world’. The fine details of his analysis we may quibble with but the central thrust of the argument is, to my mind, indisputable: in their moment of most ruin, universities now have an opportunity to transform to become genuinely public institutions, if not any longer in terms of their finance, at least in terms of their focus and ambition.

I think, however, that we need to confront Martyn Hammersley’s challenge. If we require a new kind of university, this will call also for a new kind of social science. It is a controversial – and perhaps highly unpopular – point amongst my peers. The social sciences share the degradation that marks the university crisis: yet ours is also an occasion of empowerment for the social sciences as much as defeat, an opportunity for stating the case for what I like to call ‘public social science’. I can only hint at this idea in this blog.

Devising strategies for improving governments’ reception to social science is part of the new politics of social science as much as improving social science’s attitude toward political and public engagement and the pursuit of publicly relevant research – mostly done in participatory forms in conjunction with communities, civil society, and the people directly involved in or affected by it. It is a social science that has porous borders and greater collaboration across them; a social science that transcends national borders and is truly global in its focus.

I had a glimpse of this new kind of social science when I attended a meeting on 31 January of the RCUK Global Uncertainties Programme. It was conducted under Chatham House rules so I can’t say much, but not only were there various social science disciplines present, disciplinary openness across all subjects interested in global uncertainty existed, mixing with policy makers, civil servants, members of think tanks and the like. I had a police trainer sat beside me in my discussion group, whose job was to train police as peacekeepers in newly democratic societies, and he was talking about glocalisation and other social science ideas; the Foreign Office person at my table used the language of culture as much as gun boat diplomacy. I saw a social science with expandable boundaries, focused on real-world issues affecting the future of humanity, and one engaging with natural scientists and other ‘strangers’, including policy makers and civil society. It made me think about whether public sociology is a big enough idea any longer and whether we ought now to conceive a new public social science.

John Brewer, BSA President

The new public university by John Brewer

I attended a very interesting lecture recently. I’d like to share it with you.

Professor Michael Burawoy, Professor of Sociology at the University of California Berkeley, globally known and rightly celebrated for his challenge to the discipline to establish ‘public sociology’, has applied his ideas to the problems facing universities in the neo-liberal era. At an Academy Discourse in the Royal Irish Academy on Thursday 13th January to mark the 10th anniversary of the Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences, he delivered a lecture entitled ‘University in Crisis: A Public Sociology Response’. This is an issue dear to Burawoy’s heart. As Vice President for National Associations and now President of the International Sociological Association he initiated a blog ‘Universities in Crisis’ with over thirty reports from 35 countries (http://www.isa-sociology.org/universities-in-crisis) and he has spoken on the topic in other countries, including in South Africa in April 2010. What began as an analysis of his own university, Berkeley, and its transformation under budget cuts, has widened to be an analysis of most universities in most countries: China and Brazil are the major exceptions he notes. Burawoy has taken the opportunity of the world-wide university crisis to rethink the meaning of the university and to redefine the meaning of the public university; and in such a way as to reinforce the centrality of public sociology as an approach to the discipline and as a way of thinking about global issues.

He used public sociology to analyse the crisis as well as define the solution. The crisis is one which most people working in universities will recognise. The solution is likely to be more controversial, changing the meaning, as it does, of what a public university is about: no longer public in finance but in the ethos and focus of its teaching and research and in its direct participation with global civil society in engaging with the global issues facing the future of humankind.

The university crisis manifests itself in the commodification of knowledge, the marketization of the university and enhanced regulation of the whole higher education process. One of the paradoxes that mark this moment is the withdrawal of public funding and the simultaneous increase in public regulation: governments pay for less but intervene more and more. This gives us two forms of neo-liberal university, as he calls it: the market model, associated with the USA, with a decline in state funding and increased privatisation, and the regulatory model, associated with the UK, a form of Sovietisation of higher education, with the emphasis on regulation, targets, accountability and efficiency. The peculiarly British form of the university crisis has recently combined privatisation and regulation.

Both models involve the degradation of the university. However, this is an opportunity as well as a threat. In their moment of most ruin, universities can be transformed in positive directions.

Professor Burawoy sees an alternative model: the public university, where universities engage in a form of deliberative democracy to participate with civil society to produce reflexive knowledge. This idea involves a dramatic shift in what people in Ireland and the UK understand by the public university.

Two questions are deployed – knowledge for whom and knowledge for what – to deliver a four-fold typology: ‘for whom’ distinguishes between academic and extra-academic audiences, ‘for what’, either instrumental or reflexive knowledge. A public university deploys reflexive knowledge to speak to and with extra-academic audiences about global and local issues in a way that critiques these issues and the policy responses of governments and other academics as well as seeks to tackle challenges together with civil society and in public. It is publicly accountable, but in a deliberative democratic way to local publics, and engages with various publics rather than simply with itself in the ivory tower or narrowly with policy-makers bent on utilitarian notions of the value of universities.

The alternative to degradation, he said, is ‘to seize this opportunity, exploit the spaces for deliberation, call upon the state to honour its commitments, open up debate both within and outside the academy, a debate about the meaning of the public university’.

There is a challenge here, I think, not only to what we understand as the public university now, but to the role of social science within it. More on that anon.

An earlier version of his talk can be found at: http://publicsphere.ssrc.org/burawoy-a-new-vision-of-the-public-university/

John Brewer, BSA President

Young and early career sociologists hit hardest, especially if qualitative by John Brewer



I suspect all members will have seen the latest pronouncements from the ESRC (see below). In the midst of various commitments to improve ‘delivery’, the main delivery issue – what will they fund and by how much – seems to be seriously curtailed.  The headline cut is one of 12 per cent in real terms over the next four years. This isn’t as bad as feared but will be hard enough, especially as it is being managed in selective  ways. It seems to me to hit early career researchers the hardest. PhD studentships are not mentioned as part of the selective cuts (save their concentration in the main centres),  but the abandonment of PDFs and the small grants scheme will seriously affect the employment transition from PhD to early career sociologist. PDFs are one of the standard routes into the profession and small grants the first scheme of choice for sociologists in the first years of their career. The mid-career Research and Development scheme has one too. To compensate, the ESRC is developing a scheme for early career researchers in 2011 but we do not know how much will be ring fenced. The increase in the lower threshold for standard grants to £200,000 suggests early career researchers will need to think big and ambitious to think of projects that qualify and small-scale qualitative projects will not be funded. This is a back-door way into ensuring certain styles of research better able to meet the cut will be funded. It’s a squeeze on early career researchers and most forms of qualitative research.
 
These fears will need to be set in the context of the new postgraduate framework when details are finally announced, where it is expected to increase centralisation and concentration around fewer Doctoral Training Centres. The landscape of HE for postgraduate and early career researchers strikes me as being disproportionately disrupted; Cumbria’s earthquake caused less of a shake down.
 
The ESRC’s delivery plan is below, along with details of changes in schemes.

“The Delivery Plan sets out our commitments to:

• Align and shape our strategic research investment in three priority areas
• Focus our resources on longer, larger grants that deliver ambitious social science
• Invest in future research leaders early in their careers
• Contribute to the RCUK interdisciplinary research programmes
• Streamline existing funding opportunities
• Concentrate our PhD training in the best centres
• Protect our core investments in the national data infrastructure
• Continue to prioritise the generation of economic and societal impact
• Expand our collaborative activities with the private sector
• Continue to encourage and promote international collaboration

Potential applicants should note that some changes to the Council’s funding schemes are announced in the Plan.  These are:

• The termination of our existing Small Grants, Postdoctoral Fellowships and Mid-Career Development Fellowships Schemes on 1 February 2011.  All applications received by the Schemes closing date will be processed.
• The increase in the lower threshold for standard grants to £200,000.  Applications for standard grants up to £200,000 will only be accepted until 1 February 2011.
• The introduction of a new Future Research Leaders Scheme for early-career researchers in spring 2011.

These funding changes are designed to meet the Council’s commitments to funding more ambitious social science whilst continuing to support researchers in the early stages of their careers. Please keep an eye on the website in the early part of next year as further details are announced.”
 
John Brewer, BSA President

Sociology and the Cuts by John Brewer, BSA President

As sociologists we fully understand that the focus of the media is constructed in part by the background and interests of journalists. It is very difficult, for example, to interest the Times Higher Education in social science compared to the wealth of space devoted to the purpose and value of history and the humanities more generally. Look over back copies and you will see the attention given to defending humanities; there is nothing wrong in that, but a suggestion they do something similar for sociology was turned down every time I raised it with them. Yet the current funding crisis, that represents the complete privatisation of higher education for the humanities and social sciences, gives no better evidence of the purpose and value of social science knowledge. Sociology in particular offers a critique of policy, draws attention to the unintended consequences of policies, and locates policy in its wider social, economic and political context. The unintended consequences of the privatisation of higher education have not been thought about by policy-makers – especially for the impact on access, participation rates, future consumption patterns of debt-carrying students, mortgages and the rest. The fee debate is actually disguising the nature of the more profound policy change lying behind it – the ending of the public university. The idea of the public university has enshrined HE policy in Britain, marked the place as distinctive for a very long time, contributed to the world class reputation and quality of British universities and had the most dramatic of effects on the life chances of working class people who have had the opportunity of a university education. The abolition of the public university will have many unintended consequences. Concessions on fees, welcome as they are, leave untouched the profound process of privatisation. The Campaign for Social Science (CfSS), lead by the Academy of Social Science and its constituent learned societies like the BSA, is vitally important, but we must not forget the fact that social scientific knowledge is important for the insights it gives on policies like privatisation. Championing the idea of the public university strikes me as one of the main purposes and values of an enlightened sociological imagination.

John D Brewer, BSA President