N e w s l e t t e r o f t h e B r i t i s h S o c i o l o g i c a l A s s o c i a t i o n
Number 99 Spring/Summer 2008 • ISSN 1742-1616
BSA NEWS
WES UPDATE
INTERVIEW
PROFESSOR
LES BACK
See page 6
See page 13
See pages 9-10
Gordon Brown,
Adam Smith
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Contents
CONTENTS
03
The British Sociological Association was founded in 1951 and is a registered charitable company (charity no: 1080235).
Editorial Team
Editor:
Victoria Gosling [email protected]
Deputy Editor
Yvette Taylor
Editorial Advisor:
David Morgan
Editorial team:
Max Farrar Nic Groombridge Carrie Dunn Abbott Katz Melanie Lang Kate Woodthorpe
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© 2008 The British Sociological Association
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Membership Subscription
New Rates and Categories for 2008
04 Eds Box
05 View from the Company Secretary
06 Interview - Professor Les Back
09 Feature: Gordon Brown, Adam Smith
and an Opportunity for Sociology
11 Sociology at York
12 BSA News
- John Scott Move to Plymouth - Improving the BSA - WES Report
14 Response to Soapbox
16 Out of my... Zone
17 Occupational Mobility
20 Bookends
22 Desert Island Discourse -
Steph Lawler
24 Sociological Eye On.. Facebook
25 Soapbox – Judith Butler Lecture
26 Study Group News
29 Research News
- Salford Hydrogen Energy Research - Teaching Archive Development - The Forgotten Allegiance
33 Postgraduate News
34 Editorial Board
35 New Members
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Eds
VICTORIA GOSLING EDITOR
04
EDS
Welcome to the spring edition of
Increasingly we communicate with others in a multitude of different ways. This usually involves less face-to-face contact or listening to others. We pick up the telephone and talk to others less frequently, and for everyday services it would be quite disconcerting if we actually sat down face-to-face with another person. It was just the other day that I had the bright idea of calling a hotel to see if a ‘real person’ could give me more help (and maybe a better deal) than the deal I’d found on the Internet. To my annoyance (though not surprise) the hotel reception simply re-directed my call to an international call centre that dealt with bookings for at least five other hotel chains and probably thousands of hotels all over the world — only to be read the same information and price list that I had already obtained from the Internet. In addition when communicating with friends, family and colleagues we are much more likely to email, text or poke someone on Facebook than we are to call them. What then, I wonder, is the future for the art of listening and communication?
In our main interview Les Back tells us about his early life and career and how his interest in sociology developed. He reminds us that
‘sociology is a listeners’ art’ that involves sociologists getting out into the real world more and listening not only to what others say, but also to what they do not say.
Our main feature also highlights the importance of listening when Martin Albrow asks whether professional sociology has failed to encourage those in power to engage with people at grass roots level to gain a deeper understanding of social life. Albrow, in his article ‘Gordon Brown, Adam Smith and an Opportunity for Sociology’, highlights the importance of listening to first hand experiences in order to close the gap between those with more power and those with less.
I would also like to draw your attention to our regular features. Shamser Sinha gets on his Soapbox over why who you are matters, in terms of whether you are listened to or not? Yvette Taylor is Out of her Zone when she asks why it is that messages about good parenting and bad behaviour only seem to be targeted at the poor. In our Desert Island Discourse Steph Lawler tells us about the texts that have inspired her academic career and influenced her thinking on identity. And Nic Groombridge casts his Sociological Eye on the phenomenon sweeping the globe — Facebook.
As always I would like to thank the editorial team for all of their hard work in putting this issue together. It is a time of change on
Network as we wish a fond farewell to some ‘retiring’ members of the team and welcome in the new. I would like to say special thanks to Esther Dermott, Sara Edwards, and Pete Rogers for their years of hard work and contributions. We all wish them well with their future endeavours. I would like to welcome long-standing team member Yvette Taylor to her new role as Deputy Editor as well as welcome new team members Carrie Dunn, Abbott Katz, Melanie Lang and Kate Woodthorpe. You can read a little bit about each of them inside this issue.
Finally, I would like to wish you an enjoyable read and remind YOU, the readers, to send in your contributions. The team look forward to receiving your letters and suggestions for future interviews, DIDs and feature articles. So if you have a burning issue you’d like to write about for a Sociological Eye, Soapbox or Out of My… don’t hesitate to send them in.
Victoria Gosling
Editor
Say hello, wave goodbye
Difficult times have been experienced within the Durham office with the extended absence of our Chief Executive but everyone has worked hard to ensure the smooth running of the office and the association. I’m sure you will all join us in sending Judith our heartfelt sympathies over the sad loss of her husband.
Following Libby Marks’ resignation I am very pleased to announced that Lisa Murphy, who was covering Libby’s role on a temporary contract, has been appointed on a permanent basis. Lisa is an English and History graduate with a number of years experience in senior administration roles. She is already proving to be a welcome asset to the Association.
View from the Company Secretary
Top: Lisa Murphy, the new BSA Publications Assistant
Left: Pat Allatt presents Debbie Brown with a farewell bouquet.
VIEW FROM THE COMPANY SECRETARY
05
After more than 10 years of dedication and commitment to the BSA, Debbie Brown decided it was time to seek new challenges and opportunities and her role is currently being covered by Sandra Harris on a short term contract basis.
The new IT system has now been installed and, as was to be anticipated, it was not without teething problems as some of you may have experienced through non-access to the website on occasions. However we would like to think we are over the worst storms and sunshine and bright skies are approaching!
Kerry Collins
Interview
06
INTERVIEW
PROFESSOR LES BACK
©Max Farrar
Can I ask you about your early life; about when you started thinking about social and political issues?
My grandmother was a fantastic story teller and as a boy I spent a lot of time with her. She lived in a two-roomed terraced house in Croydon there was no bathroom and she had a tin bath that would be put in front of the fire. She had this capacity to bring to life what those pre-war working class communities were like in the stories she told. She worked in a munitions factory during the war and she told me how the men would suggest she put methylated spirit on her soft hands to harden them for factory work. They weren’t always cosy tales and sometimes they revealed just how stifling and suffocating life could be. Those stories kind of furnished my imagination even from a very young age.
We lived in a council flat in New Addington and then later got moved into a house. Jamie Reid, who designed the Sex Pistols’ artwork, did a feature on the estate in his Suburban Press Magazine and described it as the biggest council estate in Britain. People on the estate referred to it as ‘Little Siberia’. It was a massive improvement as far as my family were concerned. It was and I think still is a place in which any sense of history had been completely erased and people who live there are separated off physically. My grandmother hated it – she just thought it was a maze.
So I guess that’s where my interests in social issues begins in that cultural and historical landscape. I didn’t learn about politics from books or direct political involvements, not as a young person. I guess there were moments when politics kind of exploded in my personal relationships. Stuart Hall talks about the seventies as a crisis – it really was a crisis. The father of one of my friends was in the National Front and I remember him bringing political leaflets into school. On the other hand I had black friends too. I was more interested in sport than I was in anything else and played football and basketball. I was in the house of my friend Steve Walters and a white coach came to speak to his mother about him not turning up to practice. So his Mum is really laying down the law to this coach, ‘In my eyes I see no colour when I look at these two boys, in this house they are the same. But when they walk out of that door and walk down the street – all the rest of you see is a black boy and a white boy. My son can’t afford to sacrifice his education.’
As it turned out, Steve applied himself to his music more than his studies - he was in Simply Red’s touring band for many years. You can imagine what a wake-up call this was for a young person in the midst of the culture quake around race and nation that
INTERVIEW
PROFESSOR LES BACK
07
Professor Les Back
was going on at the time. In 1977 the National Front were stopped famously from marching through the streets of Lewisham. I was 14 or 15. I knew people on both sides of that battle and I guess my sociological intuitions and imagination was fed by those tensions and paradoxes.
So you decided to study anthropology at Goldsmiths. What was it like?
Well I didn’t really decide. I started a degree in geography and hated it. I was still spending more time in the gym than I was in the lecture theatre. I didn’t know what anthropology was. I remember Nici Nelson said to us geographers, ‘If strata make your heart beat faster then anthropology isn’t for you.’ I was definitely more interested in people than rocks so I signed up straight away. The department was small and intense, populated by wonderful mavericks like Brian Morris and feminist anthropologists like Nici and also Pat Caplan. I learned about ethnography and participatory forms of research. Also the department was very broadminded and we also read writers like Eric Fromm, Herbert Marcuse and Stuart Hall and the people associated with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham. I think we still have a collection of the original stencilled working papers in the library and shamefully some of them bear my scribbles in the margin.
Tell us about your PhD research: why did you choose that topic?
Pat Caplan became my supervisor, a wonderful woman and an extraordinary and thoughtful listener. I’ve just finished a book called
The Art of Listening which is dedicated to her. The year that I moved to live in New Cross was 1981, the year for the New Cross Fire where 13 young black people were killed in a racist arson attack. There were public issues in those private troubles as C. Wright Mills would have had it. It was an incredible experience. You might be surprised to hear me say this but I am basically quite a shy person. I think a lot of sociologists are, and Harvey Molotch has made this point. The compulsory sociability which ethnography insists on made me get over this, at least partially. I learned a lot about the sensibilities and politics of black London from carrying speaker boxes and watching reggae sound systems ‘string up’. The version of life being articulated by MCs on the mic was an alternative to the news on TV or public version of the events of the day. Politicians and the people who decide policy, be it municipal anti-racism or the educational curriculum, might learn something if they paid attention to these young voices.
I had no funding to do my PhD, it took me a long time but that was in part because I was enjoying myself too much. It was so different then, none of the pressure that students are under today. People just didn’t finish. Only at the end of the eighties things like ‘completion
ratios’ and ‘submission rates’ started to loom on the horizon. My supervisor said to me one day – ‘look, no-one has ever finished . . . someone has got to finish and you are the closest.’ That was it. Best thing she ever did for me.
Why did you switch to sociology?
Well I didn’t morph into a sociologist, I just became a contract researcher. I worked with Roger Hewitt who taught me so much, and with Ann Phoenix and Barbara Tizard at the Thomas Coram Unit, Institute of Education. Then after that I was John Solomos’ researcher. I learned an enormous amount from him and he was so generous and treated me like a colleague rather than a ‘data runner’. More and more I was drawn to sociology. I read all the American ethnographers associated with the University of Chicago at the same time as reading critical theory and the gothic Marxism of Walter Benjamin as well Stuart Hall and the people associated with the Race and Politics Group at the CCCS.
What kind of a sociologist did you become?
Nikolas Rose was Head of Department when I joined Goldsmiths, he used to joke that what we were ‘Frankfurt School meets the Chicago School.’ I always loved that image or fantasy. All the projects that I’ve been involved in have a combination of theoretical commitment and empirical engagement. At the same time I think I still feel passionately that sociology and sociologists need to ‘get out more’ – to engage with people in public whether it be visiting students in prisons on access courses or talking to kids at school about a vision of education that is actually relevant to their lives.
What’s it like doing sociology at Goldsmiths today?
08
INTERVIEW
PROFESSOR LES BACK
This book is more
personal but I hope that
it demonstrates one of
sociology’s great lessons,
namely our experiences
are not individual, we
are not alone in them
Tell us more about your latest book: what’s the big idea?
It addresses the big question: what is sociology needed for? I think the public life of the mind is in a very bad state. The profusion of information from reality TV to opinion polls makes the mundane into reality spectacles. Adorno once wrote about the ‘regression in listening’. The culture of our time speaks ignorantly rather than listens with care. In the midst of this, sociology might be best conceived as a listener’s art, the training of a radical attentiveness to not only what people say but also what they are unable to say. So the big idea in the book is to shift to an affirmative mode and I try not only to give my answer to the big question but also to demonstrate and show what it might mean in practice.
Why did you choose these topics?
Many of them are drawn from things I’ve been interested in for a long time. There is a chapter on the ‘immigration debate’ which takes as its starting point an examination of the way the immigration division works. The thing that caught my imagination was while the users are brutalised by the system, some of the immigration officers felt trapped into treating people like unwanted human waste and it corroded their sense of self. I was trying to finish this book when the London bombing of July 2005 took place. Imagine I am trying to finish this book on listening and all I can hear everyday is the sound of the police sirens. So I felt like I had to write about the damage that the war on terror is doing to the fabric of multicultural life.
Which sociologists, philosophers, novelists, poets,
photographers, musicians etc have influenced your approach to these issues?
Well, your question implies that my bibliography is a bit on the eclectic side to put it politely. Howard Becker recently visited Goldsmiths. He spent a week with us talking about his new book and about his life. He made a very important point that sociologists don’t have a monopoly on the capacity to ‘tell about society’. His new book – Telling About Society
– looks at the ways in which photographers, filmmakers, novelists, playwrights, curators tell and also what we might learn from them. So in this book I’ve drawn on classical sociologists that I admire like C. Wright Mills and also people like Becker alongside writers like Stuart Hall and bell hooks as well as Primo Levi, John Berger, Hannah Arendt and poets like Cesar Vallejo. I guess I am trying to make my own attempts at writing sociology more literary and artful.
You write with a personal touch - what do you say to those who maintain that sociology is/should be an ‘objective science’? What kinds of ‘truth claims’ are you making?
I would say they are fooling only themselves. I am a huge admirer of Zygmunt Bauman and I think he was right to warn us against trying to legislate the ways people live. Sociology is not needed to tell people how to live. We are interpreters and not legislators. As for truth, I think we need to pay truth the courtesy of serious effort but realising at the same time as Adorno warned that truth is like a handful of water, most of which slips through our fingers. The idea that we can know it all needs to be laid to rest in the graveyard of twentieth century conceits. Think about the link between psychological sensory deprivation tests and the noise bombardment interrogation and hooding techniques
being trained on prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, or the involvement of anthropologists in US military’s ‘Human Terrain Teams’ operating in Afghanistan.
Arendt draws on Kant’s scepticism about ‘solid axioms’ – the suspension of doubt. We live in a time dogged by certainty. We don’t live in a culture that suffers from doubt but rather one that is afflicted by certainty. This movement of imagination is fed by listening, but also takes place in the absence of whom we are listening to. It is a movement between being proximate and hearing and thinking and reflecting that is necessarily a movement of imagination which separates us from the phenomenal world hovering both out of place and out of time. John Berger said that writers are death’s secretaries. I am wondering if we might re-think this in terms of the way that sociology as a listener’s art might be understood as a vocation in which we become life’s secretaries.
This book is more personal but I hope that it demonstrates one of sociology’s great lessons, namely our experiences are not individual, we are not alone in them. Lindsay Waters has written an extraordinary book about academic publishing called The Enemies of Promise. A commissioning editor of Harvard University Press, he said that academic publishing, has produced libraries full of ‘unread and unloved’ books; not written to be read or to be loved but to get jobs, to satisfy the audit culture. I think I decided that I wanted to try and write a book that would be read but also I hope, and this might sound crazy, that it will also be loved.
Would you advise a keen undergraduate to become a sociologist?
Yes, I would and I do all the time. I like to go and talk to young people in schools and colleges. I probably learn more than I teach them. I am interested in what they care about, what kind of problems are they wrestling with? My heart sinks sometimes when I hear graduate students talk about the pressures they feel to not only complete their thesis but also to publish and to run conferences, but also the obsession with promotions and status and all that stuff. I still think that sociology or critical thinking is not just a job, rather a way to hold up to the world a way to live. It’s an opportunity to try to figure out the things that have impacted on us personally, but also within the wider world. The book has a final chapter called The Craft and it is addressed to young researchers and discusses the opportunities offered by sociological life as well as the perils.
Max Farrar
FEATURE
09
His ten-year reign in the Treasury saw him go native in an institutionimpervious to sociological thinking. He presided over a time when professional economists rather than talented generalists came to dominate it and he basked in their respect for his mastery of economic argument.
Did that matter for the country? As a sociologist I am inclined to think it did since one of the widely criticised failures of New Labour’s years has been policy delivery, and that requires a close understanding of the interaction of working practices and everyday behaviour.
The sad thing we have to acknowledge is that those years also represent a failure on the part of professional sociology. We have not yet succeeded in making the case to people in power for a deeper understanding of the subtleties of everyday social relations, a respect for the facts on the ground, how things are done, how offices really work, what makes for order in public places.
To be sure the disregard for these things has in part stemmed from a tendency to authoritarianism, a belief that reality can be shaped to order. But New Labour’s shortcomings arise more from a detachment from everyday life, a neglect of the intricacies of ordinary people’s lives. ‘Evidence based policy’ has too often been a set of statistical tables.
One of the glories of a century of sociological work has been to record and convey those very complexities. Those who have read their Erving Goffman, Stanley Cohen or Arlie Hochschild, all entirely accessible to the general reader, can appreciate why the Child Support Agency was bound to fail and why ASBOs have had unintended consequences. Immured in the Treasury, Gordon Brown has viewed society through the distorting screen of targets and benchmarks. It has allowed time and space for the Conservative Party, so long in thrall to the ‘no such thing’
Gordon Brown, Adam Smith and
an Opportunity for Sociology
mantra, to rediscover society, albeit only in a ‘broken’ form. But unless we rekindle a profound interest in society in Number 10, then the new incumbent is unlikely to solve the mystery of failure in policy delivery that bedevils this government.
Anthony Giddens in his Over to You, Mr. Brown: How Labour Can Win Again (2007), anticipating the change at the top, attempted a pre-emptive strike for influence by defining a range of policy issues facing the government, but, without the personal contact he had with Blair, the approach has a peremptory feel to it. Demanding, for instance, that Brown change his personal lifestyle probably only adds to the unheeded advice of a crowd of style consultants.
Brown is the most cerebral of British premiers, the first to have a PhD, renowned for devouring the work of American public intellectuals. Giddens may then have missed a trick when he asserts Labour must win the battle of ideas, but makes only passing mention of Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’. The most direct route to engage the premier’s attention could be to examine what The Economist (March 15, 2008) calls a ‘daring bid’ led by Brown to reclaim Smith for the left. Perhaps this suggests that sociologists need to compete with economics for attention on the high ground of theory too. But there is more to it than that.
Brown testifies in his ‘Foreword’ to Iain McLean’s Adam Smith,
Radical and Egalitarian: an Interpretation for theTwenty-First Century
(2006) that he prepared his budgets with The Wealth of Nations (WN) at his side. At first glance this bears out all that left critics say about the direction of New Labour. It seems designed too, to reinforce the prejudices of sociologists, who, perhaps like me teaching introductions to sociology and sociological theory off and on for 40 years, only used Smith as a foil for Marx.
Feature
10
FEATURE
Now I am not going to suggest a 40th anniversary return to 1968, pitting Karl Marx, or even Max Weber, against Adam Smith. No, we should turn our attention to the other book that Brown cites in the McLean ‘Foreword’, Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS), published in 1759, with a sixth edition produced a little before he died in 1790.1
It is there we can find ‘prudence’, Chancellor Brown’s quaintly old fashioned watchword from Treasury days.
TMS, far from being, as a popular nineteenth century view had it, at odds with WN, is foundational for it, with what we might now call a realist view of moral action that treats ethical judgement as a key component of social life. ‘By acting according to the dictates of our moral faculties we necessarily pursue the most effectual means for promoting the happiness of mankind’ (TMS: 166). Would that Labour’s ill-fated ethical foreign policy had been as steeped in Smith as much its enthusiasm for economic globalisation!
Of course if TMS simply allowed a better insight into the intellectual influences on Gordon Brown sociologists would have little cause for optimism about getting a hearing. There is, however, something much more interesting, professionally speaking. Even to this day I believe most beginning students of sociology learn about ‘the looking-glass self’. At least their lecturers once did. Smith is the real originator of this seminal doctrine rather than its populariser, Charles Cooley.
In a recent fine study of Cooley, Glenn Jacobs2 accords full recognition
to Smith’s priority even though direct reference to Smith by Cooley is lacking. But Jacobs believes they would have been familiar to Cooley via Franklin Giddings who drew on Smith for his theory of ‘consciousness of kind’ (Jacobs 2006: 23–8). Let Smith speak for himself in accounting for the origins of the moral sense:
‘We suppose ourselves the spectators of our own behaviour, and endeavour to imagine what effect it would, in this light produce upon us. This is the lonely looking glass by which we can, in some measure, with the eyes of other people, scrutinise the propriety of our own conduct. … It is evident that, in all such cases, I divide myself, as it were into two persons; and that I, the examiner and judge, represent a different character from that other I, the person whose conduct is examined into and judged of (TMS: 112–113)’.
These are much more than incidental remarks. They are integral to the core message in TMS, interwoven with a broader theory of sympathy, not in the usual sense, but as the capacity to put oneself in another’s shoes, which is then further developed into a theory of the social and unsocial passions, of rewards, punishments and justice, and of the relations between these and utility, custom and fashion. Maybe if we had accorded this book the same attention as economists have paid to WN, we would have secured a more effective theoretical base to debate with them, not to speak of influence in the corridors of power.
But sociologists in the main, with few exceptions in recent years have not actively sought that influence, for reasons that Smith understood. We like to think we act upon the dictates of what he called the ‘impartial spectator’, not serving powerful interests, but heeding the ‘abstract man, the representative of mankind’ (TMS: 130). I concur with that too, in general terms, but at this moment the powerful are fainthearted and the powerless have been neglected, and the divide between the two is precisely what we as sociologists are equipped to bridge.
For we know that the kinds of arguments that Smith employed, and that Cooley used to good effect, had a vital part in the birth of the Chicago
school of sociology. For instance the hugely influential Park and Burgess
Introduction to the Science of Sociology (1921) reproduced excerpts by Smith on sympathy. He was a vital, since forgotten, force behind the development of symbolic interactionism and the sociology of everyday life. If these roots in our discipline are not encouragement enough we should also take heart from contemporary social theory and Martha Nussbaum’s (1995: 16) plea to make the literary imagination part of public rationality, declaring her central inspiration to be TMS.3
The sociological interest in ordinary lives and a concern for the ethical foundations of society have then a common ancestor. We need to employ Smith’s ‘sympathy’ to bring the Prime Minister and his colleagues into the programme of an empirical study of people’s lives, which respects their experience, listens to their words, appreciates their world views and recommends the utmost care and circumspection in legislating for them. Emphasis on respect is part of a progressive vision and entirely in tune with Smith’s original synthesis, something Richard Sennett (2003:121) has noticed.4 To influence this government we need
to work both empirically and theoretically.
What might that mean for sociologists as professionals? Well we can’t expect as many sociologists in the Treasury as there are economists, but a drive to increase their employment, not just as researchers, but as part of a culture shift in government is as important as making the Bank of England independent. A sustained move in that direction is necessary if there is to be a chance of delivering public policy goals more effectively than New Labour has been able to achieve in the past.
Gordon Brown will have to work hard and fast to remedy the society deficit in his vision. There are promising beginnings. Paul Wiles, formerly Professor of Criminology at Sheffield University, has become Head of Government Social Research and its unit has moved to the the Treasury. Karen Dunnell, who joined the Editorial Board of our journal Sociology when I was editor in the early 1980s, is head of the Office of National Statistics. We have reason to hope that sociology may contribute increasingly not just to policy formation but to a more sophisticated understanding of the social factors underpinning successful policy delivery.
The deliberative democracy agenda is also one to which sociologists can make creative contributions. Brown and his economics guru, Ed Balls, now children’s minister, have already been converted to the idea of citizens’ juries that IPPR pioneered in this country and which have been in the past rather gingerly approached by a government wary of generating criticism.
But let’s be as careful with quick fix remedies as we must be with sound bite policy proposals. We must remember that as servants of power we may find our work put to unwelcome uses. Giddens points out Robert Merton was one of the originators of the misused focus groups. It is with critical approaches to data, profound ethnography of everyday life and sophisticated theory of social relations and processes that we can contribute most to government. And this will be true whichever party is in power after the next general election.
Martin Albrow
Emeritus Professor of the University of Wales and a Visiting Fellow in the Centre for the Study of Global Governance, London School of Economics. He was President of the BSA, 1985–87.
1 Smith, Adam. 1982. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Edited by D.D. Raphael and A.L. MacFie. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. 2 Jacobs, Glenn. 2006. Charles Horton Cooley: Imagining Social Reality. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press. 3 Nussbaum, Martha. 1995.
FEATURE
11
Sociology has had a presence at York since the foundation of the university in 1963, a time when many of the other new ‘plate glass’ universities were also establishing departments. Its first formal appointments were made in the following academic year but in 1963 it formed part of the ‘Social Sciences’ degree which included core courses in comparative analysis and ‘the theory of sociology’. The phrase a ‘humanities for the 20th century’ was actually coined in 1959 when the first plans for the university were being developed. In a Memorandum to the development group, which included senior figures from the York-based charity the Joseph Rowntree Trust, it was suggested that York would be an ‘admirable centre for sociological research inasmuch as its present day conditions offered an excellent opportunity for the study of sociology [as] ‘the humanities of the 20th century’ (emphasis in the original).The strong Quaker influence during the foundation of the new university through the legacy of the Rowntree family (notably Joseph and his son Seebohm) meant that the social sciences, and sociology in particular, were seen as important disciplines to address the social concerns of the day. Across the Atlantic, C. Wright Mills had coincidentally just published The Sociological Imagination.
Ronald Fletcher was the first Chair in Sociology, arriving in 1964. Colin Campbell (now Emeritus Professor) was also among the initial appointments, and thereafter there was steady growth and some notable arrivals including Laurie Taylor, Roland Robertson, Anne Akeroyd, Mary Maynard, Andrew Tudor, Phil Stanworth, Barry Sandywell, Michael Mulkay, and Paul Drew. It’s invidious to mention some individuals and not others but these capture the different strengths of the Department which indeed evoked a ‘humanities of the 20th century’; new deviancy theory, cultural analysis, women’s studies, critical theory, the sociology of science and the emergent conversation analysis.
I arrived in the Department as a doctoral student in 1974, to be supervised by Mike Mulkay, who had already begun to examine the discursive and rhetorical practices of science; work which was inspired by but always critical of the then Mertonian analysis. Outside of the sociology of science seminars, I found most of my postgraduate colleagues discussing, like me, relationships between discourse, knowledge claims, and cultural interaction whether this be in film analysis, social and critical theory, ethnomethodology, criminology or consumption studies. Outside of the department, an understanding of discursive and rhetorical practice was put to good use when I helped Steve Woolgar, then a fellow postgrad, deconstruct the putative value of an MGB sports car when negotiating price with a local punter.
Over twenty years later I came back to York with a Personal Chair and my research group, SATSU, as part of the RAE trade-cycle. No doubt Steve’s MGB had been scrapped or as he might say was not a ‘machine at work’. Many of those who had taught me were still in the Department. Over the past few years there have been many
‘A humanities for the
20th [and 21st ] century’:
sociology at York.
new appointments and new developments marking the technical and methodological shifts in the discipline more widely: a new spatial informatics lab for the application of GIS to socio-cultural data reflecting the ‘spatial turn’ in sociology generally, and the analysis of social class in particular; new research units exploring anomalous human experience, the integration of conversation with feminist analyses, and the application of CA to a wide range of applied interactional settings, including medicine and the law. Social informatics has proved a fertile terrain as has new work on the sociology of health and bioscience, with three ESRC programmes hosted by the Department in e-society, innovative health technology and stem cells science.
These developments might be seen to herald a new ‘humanities for the 21st century’, where theory, technique and substantive analysis of biosociality and new technologies become of central concern in sociology. The Department now seeks to interrogate the empirical in and through theoretical critique, in many ways echoing the early ambitions for the discipline one finds in the university archive.
A major conference celebrating the contribution of the department over the past forty years and more is being held in July (www.york. ac.uk/sociology), to which all are welcome, with former and current members of the department giving papers reflecting on their work, and outlining ideas for the future work of the Department throughout the rest of the 21st century.
These developments
might be seen to herald
a new ‘humanities for
the 21st century’
Professor Andrew Webster
In October 2008 John Scott is moving to the
University of Plymouth. He is currently Professor of
Sociology at Essex University, in Colchester (since
1994) and before that he worked at the Universities
of Leicester and Strathclyde.
John Scott Moves to Plymouth
The BSA Executive is keen to continue to
improve its services to members. In addition
to Network, and the journals, conferences and study groups, we want to run some more
specialised free events across the country
through 2008/09. The plan is to hold events
for members and potential members at
different stage of the career ‘life-cycle’ – the
research student, the academic who wants
to play a wider role in the development of
scholarly activity in the discipline, and the
experienced researcher who needs the skills
to mange a large research project.
Sociologists at the start of their academic career may need support in addition to that offered by their departments, so we have planned four day-schools with a day each in Scotland and Wales and two events in London for PhD sociologists. One of the London events will be focussed on visual sociology and the Cardiff event is likely to focus on researching crime and justice.
More details of these will be distributed through the Postgraduate Forum newsletter and the BSA website. The events will be co-ordinated by Liz Jackson at BSA HQ in Durham ([email protected]). There is some concern across all disciplines about the skills needed for carrying out the important
work refereeing papers submitted to the journals.
We are exploring with Sage and experienced journal editors the potential for a couple of events aimed at members who want to become more effective reviewers. Finally, we are in touch with the ESRC and with CRAC, the career development organisation, to plan events aimed at more senior staff who have the challenging task of managing large scale research projects. If you have any ideas or suggestions about these or other membership events, please get in touch.
Rob Mears
12 BSA NEWS
BSA News
John’s primary research and teaching interests are in the areas of social stratification, business organisation and sociological theory. His publications include Corporations, Classes and Capitalism (1985), A Matter of Record: Documentary Sources in Social Research (1990), Who
Rules Britain? (1991), Social Network Analysis (Second Edition, 2000),
Poverty and Wealth (1994), Sociological Theory (1995), Stratification and Power (1996), Corporate Business and Capitalist Classes (1997), and
Power (2001). He is editor of the third edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Sociology (2005). His latest book is Social Theory: Central Issues in Sociology (2006), an overview of historical and contemporary debates. He is currently working on the early history of sociology in Britain.
John is Editor of European Societies, the journal of the European Sociological Association. He has been an active member of the British Sociological Association since 1970 and been Newsletter editor, Secretary, Treasurer, Chairperson, President and is currently an Honorary Vice-President. John is a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA), and an academician of the Academy of Learned Society in the Social Sciences (AcSS).
In moving to Plymouth John hopes to develop some research into class, power and community structure in the South West, investigating
the factors responsible for maintaining or undermining cohesive local societies. He will be fully involved in the core teaching of the sociology schemes and in addition to teaching on such topics as class and power he hopes to establish a new option course in the Sociology of Popular Music to complement existing teaching strengths within the sociology group. In the time available after work, John intends to take full advantage of the coast and countryside of the South West.
Gayle Letherby
University of Plymouth
BSA NEWS
13
The WES Team: Dora Scholarios, Phil Taylor, Paul Thompson
and Chris Warhurst
We report a well-attended and successful meeting of the Editorial Board in January. This was an important event for introducing the editors to the board, for clarifying our general approach and for giving new members an understanding of the requirements of serving on the WES board. We would highlight the very constructive discussion on refereeing which has enabled the editors to provide guidance for both new and serving members. We emphasised the importance of having a participative board who, in addition to delivering timely and quality reviews, could promote the journal at conferences and in the wider academic community. The board also agreed to develop the journal’s International Advisory Board and the new editorial team will be returning with proposals in the near future.
In accordance with the BSA’s new policy for the journal, Professor Stephen Ackroyd was elected Chair of the WES Editorial Board for a four-year term.
Reviews Editor
Dora Scholarios is a Reader in Organisational Behaviour at Strathclyde University. Her background lies in work psychology with research
interests spanning the areas of employee well-being, identity, and recruitment and selection. She has been involved in several large-scale research projects bringing together sociological and psychological perspectives of work. This includes a recent Economic and Social Research Council Future of Work project which explored the impact of new forms of work on issues such as work-life balance, well-being, and conceptions of skill in call centres and software work. Dora has published this work across a range of both management and psychology journals.
Research Notes and Controversies Editor
Paul Thompson is Professor of Organisational Analysis and Head of Department of Human Resource Management in the Business School at the University of Strathclyde. Trained as an industrial sociologist, he received his PhD from Liverpool University in 1981, and went on to write a number of well known works of labour process theory and organisation studies. He became a Professor in the Department of Organisation Studies at the University of Central Lancashire in 1988, and later went on to a Chair in Management at the University of Edinburgh before taking up his Strathclyde post in 1999.
Work, Employment and Society
I found it intruiguing to hear from the other
end of the age debate, and in reading
this article I adjusted several of my own
preconceptions on the issue of age in
academia. Particularly interesting was the
revelation that there is a marginalised group
in the older echelons of the academic
community that feel estranged from the wider
social science assembly.
I find that this is often a double-edged debate, and one that can spill the ‘can open, worms everywhere’ in many ways. A large portion of the difficulties described in this discussion appear related first and foremost to the changing nature of academia as a profession and secondly to the positionality of the individual in the labour market. Many practitioners as mature graduates find themselves frustratingly outside of the ‘research loop’ for the principal reason that, in today’s flooded job market, being an academic professionally means that you don’t treat the role as a mid-life career option, you treat it as a career. A large portion of PhD graduates in the
current job market have never worked in trade but have developed through HE, from undergraduate to masters to PhD, and attain their PhD by the age of 30 never having worked in the private sector. This changes the balance of the job market significantly. It isn’t an issue of discrimination, it simply means that older graduates from the private sector now have to compete with a new class of young hungry post-doctoral graduates for the entry level jobs in lecturing and research.
In this context a circuitous career path is precisely the kind of interdisciplinary knowledge base that is required to inspire quality research, and is an advantage when framed appropriately in a positive fashion. Whilst as a young ‘early career’ researcher I have some sympathy for the fact that the perception of ability in relation to age can be an issue, this mindset tends to be self-imputed rather than emanating from any external influence of discriminatory practice.
Associated issues like access to journal archives can be problematic for those outside academia, but with
Response to Ageism Soapbox
a good support network these are not issues that will be stultifying or create a stagnation in skills. Joining study groups in the BSA is one good way of making the connections that will keep you in access to information; skills only stagnate if you don’t keep abreast of mailing lists and exercise your abilities at conferences. And it is worth noting that the ‘in-crowd’ thematic cronyism of academia is not going to go away and it doesn’t just affect the older entrant; it affects all entrants into the profession.
Financially as well, we will all increasingly be funding our own research activities as more and more universities move towards devolved departmental and institutional budgets. The entrepreneurialism that runs through academic institutions is increasingly a driver of decision-making on employability of candidates for a range of posts and positions. The entrepreneurial university is changing the landscape of HE; increasing the turnover and revenue generated by the HE institutions is vital in a market place flooded with new universities. As a result new staff must be willing to engage in whats often accused of being ‘neo-liberalism’ or on occasion ‘third stream’ labour.
Early career academics are often schooled in this kind of actvity throughout the process of aquiring a PhD (many research councils are now requiring this element to be embedded in RT), a movement in best practice that challenges many traditional perspectives on the roles and relationships of academia – increasingly a language of customers and providing value in service delivery is the norm. In response to this universities are appointing a larger proportion of younger researchers, and not only is the employment market more competitive, there are harsher economic constraints on universities to deliver services on tight budgets in a competetive HE marketplace under a new salary scale.
I feel to focus on terms such as ‘young’ or ‘old’ researchers is not a particularly useful debate, as we are, many of us, ‘early career’ academics. Ageism is not an issue about discrimination against older PhD gradutes but an issue about how willing people are to apply themsleves to a changing academia. We aren’t sure, any of us, where these changes will lead the profession. The concerns raised here about the growth of contract research consultation practices, budgetary reform, entrepreneurialism in HE, are issues that we must all engage with, regardless of age, if we are to shape the future of HE as a unified community.
Peter Rogers
Macquarie University Australia
16
OUT OF MY...
But in seeing these posters more and more I had to doubt if this was the purpose; they seem not to be supporting a physical transfer from A-B, but rather seem to be endorsing a proper parental pathway, guided away from the pitfalls of parental ignorance urged on towards an all-knowing more interventionist practice – only the conscientious and responsible parent can answer ‘yes’ and confidentlyboard. Only their children can be recovered from the empty transitional space and be put back on the right route. But ‘good parents’ are probably driving land rovers, en-route to karate and ballet lessons, having monitored online their child’s school report, and don’t travel publicly anyway, actually.
A more useful, and inclusive, warning may ask ‘Do you know where your keys are?’ or even ‘Do you know what day it is?’ but such questions may also work to instil a social, even parental ‘paranoia’; good mums remember their children’s birthdays and never lock them out. The poster continues that most parents say they know whereabouts and whatnots but the sly emphasis suggests that someone, the bus driver perhaps, knows otherwise, knows that standards are slipping and can only be re-established by a public shaming. Shame those kids look bored, shame he’s wearing a hoodie, shame she’s smoking, shame they’re drinking. Named and shamed, pasted and postered.
This is not a new strategy. In Newcastle, the Metro system regularly features the
names and abbreviated addresses of those ‘losers’ who have dared to skip
their fare and who have not paid heed to transportation regulations.
Again, in an apparently inclusive gesture,
commuters are asked if they are ‘losers’: ‘Are you a loser?’ is posed as you descend the escalator. Perhaps ‘loser’ lists are just trick lists, where the shame is to be imagined and the ticket bought just-in-case, though there may also be some prestige in being a Metro loser, if only it’d be reclaimed … Upping the stakes, the TV licensing authority declared those who failed to pay for their license as fraudsters, rather than simply losers. Guilty postcodes were publicised on public transport, informing commuters that someone in their neighbourhood, in their street, or even next door (you just never know who your neighbours really are) had committed fraud. At what point did the license inspectors meet up with the bus drivers and Metro guards and share strategies and paste?
It seems that we are to receive caution as we commute and threats as we view; those, with a valid TV licence of course, may switch on to be told ‘no ifs, no buts’ to benefit fraud and watch, in fear or confidence, as a red beam encircles another guilty household, while an admonishing finger points ‘fraudster’, ‘loser’. On the bus, on the Metro and on the telly we see who these people are and where they live, we witness too the correspondence between locality and criminality. Not every area, for example, has or apparently deserves a ‘bendy’ bus, where the same message could appear with additions or subtractions based on local make-up, geographical distinctions and bends. ‘Do you know where your children are?’ could with the right bend and twist, become ‘Do you know where you are?, perhaps in a suburban outpost, or even ‘you know’, for the more sophisticated city inhabitant. Children, like the next bus, could appear and disappear at will, brought in and out of political agendas and transportation tactics. Either making the grade or missing the bus, in the end it seems the blame lies with the parents.
Yvette Taylor
Newcastle University
Out of my...
Posted on the number 31 bus, a
bus-length notice with a dark, void
backdrop, children huddled in a
group, asks ‘Do you know where
your children are?’ At first glance
this may well appear just a call to
get them, the kids, together and on
the bus (the number 31). ‘Look here
comes the bus!’, ‘Quick, do you
know where they are?’
Occupational Mobility
INDIVIDUAL
Helen Allan has been promoted to a Senior Research Fellow and Deputy Director of Centre for Research in Nursing and Midwifery Education, at University of Surrey.
Mark Cieslik has moved from University of Teesside to become Principal Lecturer in Sociology at Nottingham Trent University.
Jim Beckford has been appointed Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick.
Steve Fuller is the new President of the Sociology and Social Policy section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
Susan Halford has been promoted to Professor of Sociology in the Sociology and Social Policy Division, School of Social Sciences, University of Southampton.
Ian Rees Jones has left his post as Professor of Sociology of Health and Illness at St. George’s London to become Professor of Sociology of Health in the School of Social Science at Bangor University.
Miriam David has become Chair of the Academy of Social Sciences.
Tim Dant has moved from the Department of Political, Social and International Studies at the University of East Anglia to the Department of Sociology, Lancaster University.
Sin Yi Cheung has moved from Oxford Brookes University to take up a senior lectureship in Sociology at University of Birmingham
Karen Hassell has been appointed as Chair in Social Pharmacy at University of Manchester.
Ann Brooks has been appointed Professor and Head of the School of Social Sciences at the University of Adelaide. She will be Professor of Gender, Work and Cultural Studies and Head of School of Social Sciences.
Ralph Leighton has been promoted Principal Lecturer and Programme Director for 11-18 PGCE, Canterbury Christ Church University.
Dr Gill Clarke has been promoted to Reader in the School of Education at University of Southampton.
Peter Rogers has moved from Manchester Metropolitan University and is now lecturing in ‘Sociology of Law’ in the Division of Sociology, Culture, Media and Philosophy at Macquarie University, Sydney.
Natalie Armstrong has moved from the University of Warwick to become Lecturer in Social Science and Health at the University of Leicester.
Joyce Canaan is now the Sociology Co-ordinator of C-SAP.
DEPARTMENTAL NEWS
Criminology and Sociology at University of Teesside would like to welcome the following new staff:
Dr. Philip Whitehead
Senior Lecturer in Criminology
Dr. Louise Wattis
Lecturer in Criminology
Dr. Georgios Papadopoulos
Lecturer in Criminology
Dr. Paul Crawshaw
Senior Lecturer in Sociology
Claire Tupling
Lecturer in Sociology (temporary)
POSITION PAPERS
Mike Savage (University of Manchester) Nigel Thrift (University of Warwick)
followed by perspectives from Birkbeck:
Stephen Frosh Gordon Lynch Les Moran Sasha Roseneil Lynne Segal Karen Wells What are the possibilities for social research after “the cultural turn”? How have the epistemological and political contexts of social research changed?
Can we still define a distinct sphere of “the social” to research?
What, if anything, distinguishes social research from cultural studies and the humanities? What methodologies might a critical, post-cultural turn social research employ?
This Symposium will provide a space for debate and discussion about what we mean by social research in the contemporary world. The Birkbeck Institute for Social Research was established in 2007 to develop a space for critical, theoretically-informed, and theory-building social research. Bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines, the BISR seeks to contribute to new ways of thinking and
practising social research, from a range of perspectives – including global, feminist, post-colonial, psychoanalytic, and queer. Lunch and refreshments provided by Leon Lewis Gourmet Vegetarian Catering £25 – Standard £15 – Birkbeck Staff and all students
Registration will be available soon on BISR website http://www.bbk.ac.uk/bisr/ or contact Julia Eisner [email protected]
SOCIAL RESEARCH AFTER THE CULTURAL TURN: WILL IT SURVIVE?
Inaugural Symposium Thursday 19 June 2008 10am – 5pmRoom B01 Clore Management Centre, Torrington Sq.
Birkbeck Institute for Social Research
20
FEATURE
20
BOOKENDS
Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Migrant Workers
Nicole Constable
New York: Cornell University Press 2007 (2nd Edition)
£30.50 hbk, £9.95 pbk ISBN: 978-0-8014-7323-4 xxvi + 242pp
I was keen to read Constable’s ethnography, having lived in Hong Kong and frequently marvelled at the weekly takeover of the city centre’s public spaces en masse by its (primarily Filipina and almost exclusively female) foreign domestic helpers (FDHs) on their day off. This volume investigates the experience of these workers in terms of bodily discipline, docility and resistance. It presents an account of workers who are necessary but (for employers at least) preferably invisible; one reason why their collective visibility every Sunday proves quite uncomfortable for many.
Additional ethnographic material collected in 2006 complements that from the original 1997 edition (one of the first accounts of domestic workers in Asia), allowing for the inclusion of changes which have taken place due to Hong Kong’s return to Chinese rule, the Asian economic crisis of the late 1990s, and the SARS epidemic. Although the day-to-day experiences of FDHs are found to be much the same, significant change has been seen in the increased number of Indonesian (as opposed to Filipina)
workers, as well as increased activism amongst FDHs overall.
One criticism is that Constable doesn’t state whether material was gathered solely in English, or if interpreters were used. Since the topic involves speakers of Tagalog, Cantonese and Indonesian, I found this a curious omission. This aside, Constable provides an engaging analysis of the micropolitics of domestic work based on representations from a range of women – some victims of abuse, others continuously performing resistance and reframing their work to their own advantage – which will appeal to those – with an interest in body work, migration and Asian studies.
Carrie Purcell
University of Edinburgh
Bookends
Learning Religion:
Anthropological Approaches
David Berliner and Ramon Sarró (eds) New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books 2007
£42.00 hbk, no price stated pbk ISBN: 978-1-84545-374-9 240 pp
David Berliner and Ramon Sarró note in their introduction to this edited collection that no matter what definition of religion one might choose, religion does not arrive ‘out of the blue’. As they put it:
‘people live in society, and it is in society they are socialised and learn to be grown-ups – religious grown-grown-ups, sometimes’.
Their robust and comprehensive introduction provides a good overview of dominant theories and problems concerning religious learning. One recent trend has been to focus on cognition, which may have ‘refreshing’ contributions to make but not, the editors warn, if we neglect social context and complexity. Religion, they argue, is not ‘downloaded’ but constructed by active agents: it is not merely reproduced, but actively reconstructed. The theme is explored in detail by Carlo Severi, Michael Houseman, David Parkin, Michael Lambek, Tanya Luhrmann, Marcio Goldman, João Vasconcelos, Aurora Donzelli, Laurence Hérault, Charles Stafford and Michael Rowlands.
Readers hoping to acquire from this book a definitive statement of how religion is learned will be disappointed: the 11 essays draw on different traditions, periods, cultures and perspectives to provide a thought-provoking array of possibilities; many of them counter-intuitive. Goldman observes in his study of an Afro-Brazilian spirit possession religion that ‘what must be learnt is not conceptualised as a perfectly coherent and unified body of rules and knowledge: like a type of over-codified doctrine imposed from above’ but more a case of ‘gathering leaves’ over time.
There is nothing over-codified about this book, but a refreshing, diverse collection of accounts about how religion is learned. Its breadth, methodological implications and theoretical contributions make a positive contribution to the study of religion in society and many of our current concerns with youth, gender,
class, cognition, embodiment, memory and emotion.
Abby Day
BOOKENDS
21
Child Abuse, Gender and Society.
Jackie Turton
Basingstoke, Taylor & Francis 2008
£70.00 hbk, no price stated pbk ISBN: 978-0-415-36505-8 152pp
Child abuse is a controversial and emotive issue at the best of times but when the focus of enquiry is the sexual abuse of children by women, revulsion and outrage commonly turn to disbelief and denial. Turton tackles the disquieting silence surrounding female perpetrators of child sexual abuse head on, through consideration of how female perpetrators justify their crime and the experiences, meanings and consequences of being abused as a child by a woman. Drawing on data from interviews with female perpetrators of child sexual abuse, adult survivors of such abuse and child protection professionals, Turton moves away from traditional psychological perspectives of women who sexually abuse children and towards a sociological approach by placing their behaviour into social context.
Chapter 1 identifies the social construction of childhood, media discourses around male ‘stranger danger’ and gender stereotypes as contributing to the ‘unnaturalness’ of female child sexual abusers, while Chapter 2 highlights how dominant child protection discourse serves to disguise, minimise and deny women as perpetrators. Chapter 3 discusses the tensions confronting child protection professionals and
calls for radical feminist perspectives of child sexual abuse to be supplanted by accounts that mirror the reality of female perpetrators. The experiences and consequences of survivors form the basis of Chapter 4, which, unsurprisingly, makes for difficult reading, while female perpetrators’ rationales for their abuse constitute Chapter 5. It is here, in opening up a discursive space for considering female sexual offenders, that Turton is most successful in her attempt to demystify female child sexual abusers. Chapter 6 concludes by suggesting new approaches for understanding female child sexual abusers that would be of particular benefit to victims and child protection professionals.
In tackling an oft-ignored topic from a new perspective, this book represents a welcome addition to the child abuse studies literature and will be of particular use to postgraduates and practitioners.
Melanie Lang
Leeds Metropolitan University
A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book About Qualitative Research
David Silverman
London: SAGE Publication 2007
£50 hbk, £12.99pbk ISBN: 9-781412-945967 168pp
This book lives up to its title. Steering clear of the formulaic approach taken by textbooks, Silverman seeks to challenge some underlying assumptions about the
nature of qualitative research. From the outset he acknowledges his approach is ‘intentionally opinionated and partial’. He uses photographs and extracts from novels and plays to bring his argument to life. The reader is required to look for the unusual in the everyday, and to see how routine can be found in extraordinary things. Much of Silverman’s inspiration comes from American Sociologist Harvey Sacks, who he says ‘had the ability to turn the apparently trivial into the gripping and insightful’.
Silverman draws distinctions between ‘manufactured’ data, such as that gathered in focus groups and interviews, and data gathered in the ‘everyday world’. He argues that we have become an ‘Interview Society’ in which soundbites and opinions are reproduced without recourse to stringent data analysis. Furthermore, postmodern themes ‘of dislocation and decentring’ have resulted in research often lacking in evidence. Silverman rejects the consequent ‘bullshit’ produced and argues for a return to a more ‘traditional’ approach which separates ‘fact’ from ‘fancy’.
His ‘anti-bullshit agenda for qualitative research’ (139-142) is based on five ideals: Clarity, Reason, Economy, Beauty and Truth. Moreover, he calls for ‘research studies that are methodologically inventive, empirically rigorous, theoretically alive but with an eye to practical relevance’, requirements that could probably be found in most textbooks on the subject. His approach is less a ‘how to’ guide and more an encouragement to critical thinking. This book comes highly recommended, both for those interested in qualitative research, as well as students who like a challenge.
Carole Murphy
22
DESERT ISLAND DISCOURSE
Tell is a bit about what has informed your choices?
I tried to think of texts that I’d read and re-read and knew I’d want to keep going back to. I also wanted to choose books that had in some way changed or pushed my thinking or forced me to confront new issues. I realised when I’d chosen them that they are all about identity, but I didn’t plan that.
Your first choice is
Landscape for a Good Woman
by
Carolyn Steedman, what appeals to you about
this text?
This is the story of a very ordinary, not terrible, but slightly illegitimate, working-class girlhood. It’s Steedman’s
autobiography, embedded within the biographies of her parents (especially her mother), and within the historical contexts of her parents’ and grandparents’ worlds. It’s a complex political analysis which highlights the peculiar marginality and estrangement of the ‘clever’ working-class girl growing up in the mid twentieth century. Steedman doesn’t attempt to produce a heroic narrative for the working-class girl, but she does in important ways stake a claim for the significance – as sources of historical-sociological knowledge and understanding – of lives such as hers.
Another good read,
Presentation
by Goffman, can
you tell us more about why you’ve selected this?
As almost everyone agrees, Goffman is a really good read, although I think the fluency of his prose often obscures the complexity of his ideas. His analysis considers the minutiae of everyday life in the context of the wider social ‘rules’ – of games, of ritual or of drama. Nothing escapes his sociological gaze or is too trivial for him to consider sociologically – this,
