Interview in BSA Network Magazine
Newsletter of the British Sociological Association
Number 99 Spring/Summer 2008 • ISSN 1742-1616
Gordon Brown,
Adam Smith
and an Opportunity for Sociology
See pages 9-10
INTERVIEW
PROFESSOR
LES BACK
See page 6
BSA NEWS
WES UPDATE
See page 13
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06 Interview - Professor Les Back
09 Feature: Gordon Brown, Adam Smith
and an Opportunity for Sociology
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CONTENTS 03
Newsletter of the British Sociological Association. Spring/Summer 2008.
Eds
Welcome to the spring edition of
VICTORIA GOSLING EDITOR
This issue is packed with articles highlighting the importance of communication and the art of
listening, with some excellent interviews and features to ignite your sociological imagination.
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 redirected 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.
04 EDS
Newsletter of the British Sociological Association. Spring/Summer 2008.
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
View from the Company Secretary
Say hello, wave goodbye
Difficult times have been
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office with the extended absence of
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smooth running of the office and
the association. I’m sure you will
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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.
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
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approaching!
Kerry Collins
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
Newsletter of the British Sociological Association. Spring/Summer 2008.
Interview
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.
Photographs © Max Farrar
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
©Max Farrar
06 INTERVIEW PROFESSOR LES BACK
Newsletter of the British Sociological Association. Spring/Summer 2008.
Professor Les Back
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.
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.
Why did you switch to sociology?
So you decided to study anthropology at Goldsmiths.
What was it like?
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.
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.
What kind of a sociologist did you become?
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
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?
I think we’re living through difficult times not just at Goldsmiths
but across the sector. But I am much more committed and clear
about the value of thinking and what sociology might be needed
for in our time than I have been before. Goldsmiths sociology
has always been a hospitable home for the things that I care
about and I have worked with some incredible people, some I’ve
already mentioned but especially people like Michael Keith, Paul
Gilroy, Chetan Bhatt, Vikki Bell, Celia Lury, Bev Skeggs and
Mariam Fraser. If we are to be of any use we have to find new
ways of animating sociology and invent new forms of sociological
expression that are closer to what it’s like to live life. I think there
are more opportunities than ever before to use multi-media to think
the craft of sociology differently but also to experiment with new
forms of sociological expression and argument. The irony of my
new book about listening is that it has more photographs in it than
any other I’ve been involved with and I’ve collaborated a lot with
photographers, particularly Paul Halliday. This is a vision of a vital
or live sociology that can represent and analyse social life without
assassinating it.
INTERVIEW PROFESSOR LES BACK 07
Newsletter of the British Sociological Association. Spring/Summer 2008.
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
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
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
Leeds Metropolitan University
08 INTERVIEW PROFESSOR LES BACK
Newsletter of the British Sociological Association. Spring/Summer 2008.
Feature
Gordon Brown, Adam Smith and
an Opportunity for Sociology
Gordon Brown’s becoming Prime Minister was scarcely calculated to raise the spirits of sociologists. The Third Way of the two
Tonys, Blair and Giddens, had at least given globalisation a social face, but Brown’s reputation was made as a hard-nosed
advocate of market economics and the need to adapt to a global economy.
His ten-year reign in the Treasury saw him go native in an institution
impervious 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’
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 preemptive 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 the Twenty-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 09
Newsletter of the British Sociological Association. Spring/Summer 2008.
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
10 FEATURE
Newsletter of the British Sociological Association. Spring/Summer 2008.
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.
Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life. Boston: Beacon. 4 Sennett, Richard.
2003. Respect: The Formation of Character in an Age of Inequality. London: Allen Lane.
‘A humanities for the
20th [and 21st ] century’:
sociology at York.
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
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’
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.
Professor Andrew Webster
Head of Department
FEATURE 11
Newsletter of the British Sociological Association. Spring/Summer 2008.
BSA News
John Scott Moves to Plymouth
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’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).
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.
In moving to Plymouth John hopes to develop some research into
class, power and community structure in the South West, investigating
Gayle Letherby
University of Plymouth
Improving the BSA
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
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.
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.
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
12 BSA NEWS
Newsletter of the British Sociological Association. Spring/Summer 2008.
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
[email protected]
The WES Team: Dora Scholarios,
Phil Taylor, Paul Thompson
and Chris Warhurst
Work, Employment and Society
Since assuming the stewardship of WES on 1 January 2008, the main priority of the
incoming Editorial Team has been to ensure the journal’s effective transition. Technically
and organisationally, we have been greatly assisted by Taylor Bowen, the journal’s Editorial
Manager, in meeting the challenges associated with Manuscript Central. Substantively,
it has involved frequent meetings between team members to ensure quality reviewing
standards are implemented and to consider proposals to take the journal forward. We have
also established effective communications with the BSA office in Durham.
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 q
Number 99 Spring/Summer 2008 • ISSN 1742-1616
Gordon Brown,
Adam Smith
and an Opportunity for Sociology
See pages 9-10
INTERVIEW
PROFESSOR
LES BACK
See page 6
BSA NEWS
WES UPDATE
See page 13
The British Sociological Association
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BSA PRESIDENT
Sue Scott
Keele University
BSA EXECUTIVE
COMMITTEE CHAIR
Gayle Letherby
University of Plymouth
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Patricia Allatt
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Membership Subscription
New Rates and Categories for 2008
04 Eds Box
05 View from the Company Secretary
The changes to your membership subscription categories and rates below relect
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06 Interview - Professor Les Back
09 Feature: Gordon Brown, Adam Smith
and an Opportunity for Sociology
11 Sociology at York
12 BSA News
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John Scott Move to Plymouth
Improving the BSA
WES Report
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16 Out of my... Zone
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The Forgotten Allegiance
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CONTENTS 03
Newsletter of the British Sociological Association. Spring/Summer 2008.
Eds
Welcome to the spring edition of
VICTORIA GOSLING EDITOR
This issue is packed with articles highlighting the importance of communication and the art of
listening, with some excellent interviews and features to ignite your sociological imagination.
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 redirected 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.
04 EDS
Newsletter of the British Sociological Association. Spring/Summer 2008.
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
View from the Company Secretary
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.
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
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
Newsletter of the British Sociological Association. Spring/Summer 2008.
Interview
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.
Photographs © Max Farrar
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
©Max Farrar
06 INTERVIEW PROFESSOR LES BACK
Newsletter of the British Sociological Association. Spring/Summer 2008.
Professor Les Back
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.
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.
Why did you switch to sociology?
So you decided to study anthropology at Goldsmiths.
What was it like?
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.
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.
What kind of a sociologist did you become?
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
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?
I think we’re living through difficult times not just at Goldsmiths
but across the sector. But I am much more committed and clear
about the value of thinking and what sociology might be needed
for in our time than I have been before. Goldsmiths sociology
has always been a hospitable home for the things that I care
about and I have worked with some incredible people, some I’ve
already mentioned but especially people like Michael Keith, Paul
Gilroy, Chetan Bhatt, Vikki Bell, Celia Lury, Bev Skeggs and
Mariam Fraser. If we are to be of any use we have to find new
ways of animating sociology and invent new forms of sociological
expression that are closer to what it’s like to live life. I think there
are more opportunities than ever before to use multi-media to think
the craft of sociology differently but also to experiment with new
forms of sociological expression and argument. The irony of my
new book about listening is that it has more photographs in it than
any other I’ve been involved with and I’ve collaborated a lot with
photographers, particularly Paul Halliday. This is a vision of a vital
or live sociology that can represent and analyse social life without
assassinating it.
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Newsletter of the British Sociological Association. Spring/Summer 2008.
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
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
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
Leeds Metropolitan University
08 INTERVIEW PROFESSOR LES BACK
Newsletter of the British Sociological Association. Spring/Summer 2008.
Feature
Gordon Brown, Adam Smith and
an Opportunity for Sociology
Gordon Brown’s becoming Prime Minister was scarcely calculated to raise the spirits of sociologists. The Third Way of the two
Tonys, Blair and Giddens, had at least given globalisation a social face, but Brown’s reputation was made as a hard-nosed
advocate of market economics and the need to adapt to a global economy.
His ten-year reign in the Treasury saw him go native in an institution
impervious 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’
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 preemptive 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 the Twenty-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 09
Newsletter of the British Sociological Association. Spring/Summer 2008.
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
10 FEATURE
Newsletter of the British Sociological Association. Spring/Summer 2008.
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.
Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life. Boston: Beacon. 4 Sennett, Richard.
2003. Respect: The Formation of Character in an Age of Inequality. London: Allen Lane.
‘A humanities for the
20th [and 21st ] century’:
sociology at York.
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
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’
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.
Professor Andrew Webster
Head of Department
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Newsletter of the British Sociological Association. Spring/Summer 2008.
BSA News
John Scott Moves to Plymouth
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’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).
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.
In moving to Plymouth John hopes to develop some research into
class, power and community structure in the South West, investigating
Gayle Letherby
University of Plymouth
Improving the BSA
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
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.
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.
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
12 BSA NEWS
Newsletter of the British Sociological Association. Spring/Summer 2008.
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
[email protected]
The WES Team: Dora Scholarios,
Phil Taylor, Paul Thompson
and Chris Warhurst
Work, Employment and Society
Since assuming the stewardship of WES on 1 January 2008, the main priority of the
incoming Editorial Team has been to ensure the journal’s effective transition. Technically
and organisationally, we have been greatly assisted by Taylor Bowen, the journal’s Editorial
Manager, in meeting the challenges associated with Manuscript Central. Substantively,
it has involved frequent meetings between team members to ensure quality reviewing
standards are implemented and to consider proposals to take the journal forward. We have
also established effective communications with the BSA office in Durham.
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 q