Who’s afraid of interpretivist sociologists?
Tuesday, 16 August 2005, 16:56
As part of this summer’s installment of the annual media ritual of bashing Britain’s system of secondary-school qualifications, the Guardian has sent 23-year-old journalist (and maths graduate) Tom Whipple undercover to take the AS-Level sociology exam. Next week, the paper will reveal how he did.
As someone with a postgraduate degree in this maligned discipline, I find this tale of what’s going on at the secondary-school level rather depressing.
The article does include some funny stuff I can relate to. In the process of taking the necessary secondary school courses, he discovered he was carrying out a covert participant observation of a discipline with lots of jargon.
And then there’s this:
Think of sociology as the slightly hairy offspring of politics and economics. Perhaps the best claim it has to legitimacy is that, like any decent humanities subject, it has a good, honest academic schism; positivists on one side and interpretivists on the other (actually, this is one of many schisms, but let’s keep it simple). Positivists are the sort of sensible chaps you’d go to a pub with. They think people should be studied using scientific methods. Take, for example, the use of official statistics in research. Positivists would say they are extremely useful, thank you very much.
Interpretivists are the sort of people you would abandon your pint in the pub to avoid. If you asked them about official statistics, they would look at you and say: “What is a statistic? Isn’t it just a social construct that reflects the questioner’s prejudices?”
And then, as your eyes glaze over, a barely pubescent guy in the corner of the pub puts down his Socialist Worker and, attracted by the controversy, comes over to explain that you’re both wrong. Actually, statistics are “an instrument of the ruling classes used to propagate and legitimise an exploitative capitalist system”. He’s a Marxist.
We can safely assume that our maths graduate is a positivist (or “naive empericist”, some might put it). But we interpretivists who want to study the social construction of statistics (see, eg Best 2002) aren’t so scary and boring.
We help empericists understand why there are limits to their claim to carrying out objective research modeled on the natural sciences — why people can’t be studied like electrons.
What you probably don&rquo;t get in A-Level sociology is the idea that analyses of “social construction” aren’t about uncovering bias or “prejudices”.
All accounts and narratives are selective and an effort by people to assign meaning to phenomena. This doesn’t mean they are lying, or telling un-truths. It just means that truth is arrived at in a selective social process that is necessarily partial. The best description I know of is that the sociology of knowledge is the emperical cousin of epistemology.
Rather than uncovering the logical rules for deriving knowledge, sociologists who worry about this sort of thing examine what people who create narratives — natural scientists, journalists or government statisticians — actually do, what social constraints condition them to behave in that particular way, and what the wider consequences are.
The debate about statistics in sociology is actually a very good example of why all this is important. Statistics are central to the functioning of modern state and corporate bureaucracies and therefore understanding how they work is essential to understanding how contemporary governance works.
OK, I probably just proved his point.
Private policing: some other concerns
Monday, 6 June 2005, 17:48
Eamonn Butler at the Adam Smith Institute’s blog says:
Naturally, the police, and academics at Britain’s state-funded universities, are fulminating against private security and say it doesn’t cut crime. But would residents fork out £1,000 a year if they thought there was no effect?
Perhaps. But the academic critique of private policing I’m aware of doesn’t focus at all on the instrumental question of its effectiveness. Quite the opposite, actually.
The major concern of some academic critics of private policing is that the authority of private security services is based entirely on enforcing property rights and that they are not accountable to anyone other than those who pay them.
As more and more previously public spaces are being sealed off and privately policed (think hoodie ban at Bluewater shopping centre), more and more public forums are subject to private law (ie “Do as I say or get off my land”) enforced by private police, rather than public law enforced by democratically-accountable authorities and limited by the sort of human rights legislation that civil libertarians ought to be interested in.
The dystopian scenario, expressed by Mike Davis in his study of Los Angeles, City of Quartz, would be a world in which the wealthy live in bubbles of secure, privately-policed gated communities while lobbying to reduce tax funding of the (less effective) public police services everyone else must still rely on.
Now, like every academic debate, there are many critics of this view, which is admittedly over the top. But that’s what theoretical ideal types are for: spotting the essential logic of a particular trend.
ID cards: why they matter
Thursday, 2 June 2005, 12:28
Thought the British blogosphere was as one in opposition to the introduction of national identity cards? Nope. Monjo provides some dissent by posting in defence of ID cards, interestingly by deploying the very slippery slope argument many use to reject the same policy:
…I wonder mostly what benefits the ID card could bring. I think there must be a lot of fake claims for social security, I think there must be a lot of banking fraud, identity theft crimes are one of the fastest-growing and economically most damaging areas or crimes we now face. I also see a lot of inconvenience in having to carry varying identity documents anyway: national insurance number, driving licence (well if I could drive), passport, documents to prove my address, etc. There is a lot of rigmarole in opening up bank accounts, applying for passports, and numerous other daily concerns for millions of Brits.
…
The important thing is to realise this is a mere first step. The scheme can (and will) be extended to become more encompassing over time. For instance, the cards could eventually contain digital signatures (for online purchasing), or be used, in combination with a thumb print scanner, to enter buildings, get into one’s own home, or start a car. Combined with GPS, car insurance, road taxes and car theft detection could be revolutionised.
There is the possibility for so much. And it doesn’t bother me. I don’t even care about the cost. If it is done over someone’s lifetime it may be £2500 per person in today’s money, but that’s only £30 a year. Even if we assume it may not have any direct financial savings, there will be indirect ones — things people haven’t imagined yet. The fact each card will be unique and will be linked to a centralised database should also secure the system against forgery. Though who guards the guards?
There is a lot to disagree with here. First, there is the issue of financing ID cards with a fee. Monjo may not, but I care about this cost. Paying for a compulsory ID card is the functional equivalent of a poll tax. If the Government wants to do this, they should at least pay for it out of general taxation.
More substantially, though, Monjo is right to criticise the vague Orwellian invocations used against the ID card scheme. In the age of the decentralised “surveillant assemblage”, as Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson called it, the notion of a monolithic Big Brother is outdated and unhelpful way to conceptualise contemporary surviellance. Far more agencies than just those of the state will make use of a centralised database.
It’s also a mistake to frame opposition to centralised databases of people around a liberal-individualist concern about privacy. The big problem with surviellance technologies today is that they facilitate “social sorting” — the use of databases to create classes of people for the purposes of precision marketing, selective electioneering, or all sorts of economic discrimination that undermine the equality of citizens. In other words, you don’t matter nearly as much as the database categories you will fall into.
A central database linked to biometric identity cards will create a definitive primary key linking individuals’ bodies to all manner of data about them. This will facilitate social sorting by making many existing databases interoperable.
David Lyon, a sociologist at Queen’s University in Canada is one of the leading academic researchers on the social consequences of surviellance technologies. Everybody should be reading his paper on ID cards and social sorting (PDF). Here’s the rub:
With the use of biometric ID cards, the codes that determine the status of those who hold (or do not hold) the cards are increasingly related to bodily and behavioural characteristics. This further abstracts from the narratives of ordinary life and struggle experienced by those who are most vulnerable. As Didier Bigo (2004) suggests, biometric ID cards produce not so much a panopticon as a banopticon. In other words, they are not meant to put all under scrutiny, but to single out the exceptions as quickly as possible. Profiling to discover differences, the banopticon channels flows of information in order to control at a distance any who deviate from the coded norms.
So Monjo is right: the ID card system will facilitate all sorts of things in the future. While some of those will be benefitial and convenient, however, some are likely to have negative social consequences. Enthusiasm about possible future applications of the centralised identity register can be an argument for ID cards, but worry about them is equally a good reason to oppose the plan.
The sociology of Deep Throat
Thursday, 2 June 2005, 00:06
Pub Sociology links to the 1992 Atlantic article that first named Mark Felt as Deep Throat, and points out that the sociological significance of the Deep Throat saga, particularly the way it illustrates bureaucratic politics:
… the story of Deep Throat is also interesting from a sociological perspective. Mark Felt’s motivations to aid the Watergate investigation were more than just personal. Felt, along with other senior FBI administrators, were caught in a battle with Nixon’s White House over institutional control. Deep Throat was a reflection of the bureaucratic politics of the era — the pitting of an agency that prided itself for its autonomy against a patrimonial administration that trusted no one and wanted to usurp whatever bureaucratic control over federal agencies they could.
Red states, blue states, and ecological fallacies
Tuesday, 12 April 2005, 17:59
Marginal Revolution sums up an excellent post from a fascinating blog called Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science about why some people were led to wrong conclusions by all those red and blue maps after the U.S. Presidental election:
We all know that in the recent election poorer states tended to vote Republican while richer states tended to vote Democrat. On the basis of the famous maps many people jumped to the conclusion that poorer individuals were voting Republican (Nascar Republicans) while richer individuals were voting Democrat (trust fund Democrats). But the inference is a fallacy, the ecological fallacy. In fact, high-income individuals, as opposed to high-income states, vote Republican with greater likelihood than low-income individuals (the effect is not huge and it may be declining but it is significant).
Multiple modernities
Saturday, 5 February 2005, 12:16
It’s framed as an attack on Bush’s State of the Union address and current American foreign policy generally, but Martin Jacques’s column in the Guardian today actually makes a more significant long-term point: as India and China grow, globalisation will change.
The currently fashionable teleological narrative of globalisation as the historical expansion of western-style modernity will have to be drastically re-thought as the practices and institutions of Indian and Chinese modernity will begin to affect global culture in the next few decades.
Jacques alludes to the great effort that has gone into explaining the subtle differences between the American and European experiences of modernity. But, he argues, a much bigger divergence in models of modernity is on the horizon, and it’s time to start thinking about it.
(more…)
Gecybercshaft?!
Sunday, 9 January 2005, 10:10
Mary Ann Allison has coined the term ”gecyberschaft“.
As a former sociologist, I’m intrigued by a concept extending Ferdinand Tönnies’ distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesllschaft. As a German speaker, I’m horrified by the hideous neologism and bemused that a PhD thesis that has such a linguistically silly device at its heart would be accepted by a major university. And I’m not the only German who feels this way.
Here’s what I wrote in the comments of Jeff Jarvis’ post about this.:
This is certainly extreme language torture.
You can’t just create German words in the form Ge-x-shaft. It has been used here for aestetic effect rather than to convey any meaning. Tönnies’ juxtaposition between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft only worked because there happened to be two perfect words begining with ge-.
The reason the German sociology jargon is so rich is that the obvious etymology of German words conveys the historical processes that Tönnies was hinting at.
Gemein means “common” and is the root of Gemeinde (which can mean “municipality”, “parish”, “congregation” or “audience”, depending on context). Hence Gemeinshaft. Geselle (journeyman), gesellen (to join), gesellig (sociable). Hence Gesellshaft (society).
By contrast “Gecyber” means, well, nothing. So all this good stuff gets lost. Neither, I’m afraid, does “Gememe”. A more effective German term for this nice idea is unlikely to provide a nice alliteration with Tönnies’s.
A better word for an mediated community where individual status derives from the meritocratic assessment of ideas came quickly, from commentor AST: Beachtungsgemeinschaft, (community of recognition).
But this raises problems of its own. The core Gemeinschaft is still in there, helpfully hinting at what I think is probably a more fundimental critique.
From what I can gather having not read the paper (is it available anywhere?), I suspect that the concept, whatever it is ultimately called, is a bit superfluous. After all, the whole point of the distinction is that large modern societies (Gesllschaft) are distinct from small traditional face-to-face communities (Gemeinschaft) because they employ more complex forms mediation. To specify a new word for a form of Gesellschaft that relies on a the internet is redundant. The change just isn’t revolutionary enough to warrent a new “normal type”. All modern societies are mediated in some way — the Internet merely creates new forms of this well-known phenomenon. If the stress is on the potential for this community to be global in scope, then this sounds like just another re-statement of the globlisation thesis, particularly the issue of “deterritorialised” societies.
The ideal of a society where intellectual meritocracy is divorced from other forms of status is also nothing new. It’s the heart of Habermas’s 30-year old notion of the ideal public sphere. The problems with that is, of course, that true meritocratic assessment is impossible because access to whatever media the society uses to create itself are inevitably unequal. The Internet and blogs do not solve this problem, as the much-discussed issue of power laws highlights.
Methological nationalism
Tuesday, 7 December 2004, 14:36
I’ve stumbled across this excellent paper on “methodological nationalism” (PDF by Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller, whcih neatly explains the tricky issue of how the social sciences have fallen into the ontological trap of taking the present nation-state system as a given, taking the national as natural. [ADDED 8.1.2006]
Who Fights? Redux
Saturday, 29 March 2003, 20:43
The New York Times has an excellent piece today about military demographics:
A survey of the American military’s endlessly compiled and analyzed demographics paints a picture of a fighting force that is anything but a cross section of America. With minorities overrepresented and the wealthy and the underclass essentially absent, with political conservatism ascendant in the officer corps and Northeasterners fading from the ranks, America’s 1.4 million-strong military seems to resemble the makeup of a two-year commuter or trade school outside Birmingham or Biloxi far more than that of a ghetto or barrio or four-year university in Boston.[...]
Confronted by images of the hardships of overseas deployment and by the stark reality of casualties in Iraq, some have raised questions about the composition of the fighting force and about requiring what is, in essence, a working-class military to fight and die for an affluent America.
“It’s just not fair that the people that we ask to fight our wars are people who join the military because of economic conditions, because they have fewer options,” said Representative Charles B. Rangel, a Democrat from Manhattan and a Korean War veteran who is calling for restorating the draft.
[...]
Charles C. Moskos, a professor of sociology at Northwestern University who has written extensively in support of a national draft for the armed services, domestic security and civilian service, argues that the military must represent every stratum of society.
“In World Wars I and II, the British nobility had a higher killed-in-action rate than the working class,” he said. “Our enlisted ranks resemble the British: they’re lower- to middle-class, working-class, intelligent people, who are joining for both the adventure and economic opportunity. But the officer corps today does not represent American nobility. These are not people who are going to be future congressmen or senators. The number of veterans in the Senate and the House is dropping every year. It shows you that our upper class no longer serves.”
Dr. Moskos said the pitfalls of having leaders who do not share in the casualties of war were common knowledge in Homeric times: “Agamemnon was willing to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia,” he said. Today’s military recruiters, he said, grasp what the ancient Greeks understood — “that nobody’ll accept casualties unless the elite are willing to put their own children’s lives on the line.”
“I once addressed a group of recruiters and asked them, would you prefer to have your advertising budget tripled or see Chelsea Clinton joining the Army — and they all said Chelsea Clinton joining the Army,” he said. “That would be the signal that America was serious about joining the military. Imagine Jenna Bush joining the military — that would be the signal thing saying, this is a cause worth dying for.”
Dr. Moskos says support for the Vietnam War ended when it became possible for the elite to win draft deferments. Other experts on military demographics dispute this.
James Burk, a professor of sociology at Texas A&M University, acknowledged that few wealthy citizens today choose military service. “But if you say, is the all-volunteer force not representative of the country as a whole, I’d say it’s more representative than the upper class,” he said.
It’s a good in-depth article, but I recall hearing about this some time ago.
Who fights?
Thursday, 13 March 2003, 01:26
On NPR’s “Talk of the Nation”, Northwestern University military sociologist Charles Moskos described the composition of the U.S. forces:
Well, the soldiers today in Kuwait and getting ready to perhaps go to war in Iraq are basically working-class and lower-middle-class young men and women. They are not the bottom of society by any means. They are likely to be higher minority than the general population, but not particularly heavily concentrated in the combat arms.The most notable thing is that America’s elite, our privileged youth, are not in the military today. A recent study was done on Congress. Out of 435 congressmen and a hundred senators, only four had children in the military and only one is an enlisted person.
… So it’s the absence of the elite. That’s probably what we’ve lost in the last 30 to 40 years.
[...]
… I graduated from Princeton in 1956. Out of 750 males, 450 served. Last year at Princeton, with a class of 1,000, male and female, only three served. So you can see the change in the class background.
Moskos has long been an advocate of a scheme to lure more graduates into the armed forces, and it has now been adopted.
Wasn’t that the rationale of Rep. Charles Rangel and the other congressmen who are calling for a return to conscription? Yup. The San Jose Mercury News reports:
Their proposal would exempt the disabled, but not college students. …Sponsors of the bill are reigniting an argument that has raged since the days of the Vietnam War, when critics complained that low-income blacks and Hispanics suffered a disproportionate share of casualties while the sons of more affluent families got deferments. Experts say that was true in the first years of the war, although casualty rates were more even by the war’s end.
