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The British Journal of Sociology in the 1990s: disintegration and disarray? 1

2010; Wiley; Volume: 61; Issue: s1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1468-4446.2009.01281.x

1468-4446

Claire Moon,

Social and Cultural Dynamics

Lacking any coherent definition of the field and blessed by a democratic attitude, our ark accepts animals, plants, rocks, bicycles, junked cars – you name it – which, in turn, makes it harder and harder to turn anything away. (Davis 1994: 189) When I announced to a colleague that I had been tasked with surveying the British Journal of Sociology in the 1990s, he grunted ‘rather you than me’. It was with huge trepidation that I approached a decade that I had been led to believe represented a discipline in crisis. That apprehension was compounded enormously by the impossible task of having to select two articles that represented ‘the best’ of the BJS in that decade.2 A crescendo of complaints about sociology in the 1990s sustained the truism that the sociological enterprise was at that time in a severe state of disintegration and disarray. Horowitz stated this boldly: sociology had fallen into a ‘dismal abyss’ (Horowitz in Good 1994). Whilst some sociologists disagreed with this diagnosis, a significant number believed that there were serious problems with both the intellectual coherence and professional organization of the discipline. Some of the loudest complaints came from those defending paradigms that had long held the discipline captive, but were now under attack. Predictably, sociologists were divided over what divided sociology. It is worth reprising some of these complaints here. The first, and most fundamental, complaint was that sociology had failed as a science. This was because it had failed both to predict and explain a host of critical socio-historic shifts: the ‘radicalization’ of the affluent middle class in major Western industrial societies in the late 60s and early 70s; the economic rise and modernization of Japan and other East Asian countries; the resurgence of religion in the USA and Iran in the late 1970s; and the collapse of communism as idea and practice (Berger 1992: 16–18; Hollander 1992). For Berger, this particular failure rendered sociology ‘obsolete’ and left it in a state of ‘cognitive anomie’. Sociology had also failed as a science because it had not made any theoretical ‘progress’. Rule attributes this to dissensus on the classics, its predilection for arcane reflexivity (he complains about Haraway here), and a slide into relativism (Rule 1994: 248–56). We fail, he argues, to deal with stuff that ‘matters’ or ‘that we need to know’, described elsewhere as a ‘terror of substance and worship of theory’ (Davis 1994: 196). We prefer, instead, to articulate ourselves in unfathomable jargon making our insights too obscure for consumption beyond the academy, and thus compound our own irrelevance (Molotch 1994: 229). A second complaint was that sociology suffered from parochialism. There are two aspects to this charge. First, sociology's blindness to the historical shifts in the social order(s) described above was due to a parochial ethnocentrism conditioning sociology's dominant paradigms (modernization, secularization and dependency theories); its methodologies (specifically the dominance of quantitative methods); and the ideological orientation of the discipline (Marxist) (Berger 1992; Hollander 1992). Second, disciplinary parochialism was an effect of sociology's bullheadedness and its consequent inability to embrace the insights of other disciplines. As Molotch notes, ‘our goal often becomes not to solve the problem, but rather to prove that only sociology can solve the problem’ (Molotch 1994: 225). Third, sociology was afflicted by a flourishing of self-sufficient specializations – demography, criminology and the family (amongst others) – which contributed to a disintegration of its core intellectual identity. Many of those working in these sub-fields consorted primarily with other disciplines working in the same field, and failed to draw on the classical sociological heritage for sustenance. The result was ‘a discipline in name only, whose members have fewer common ancestors than they did twenty years ago, fewer common concepts, less to talk about and less language to talk about it with’ (Becker and Rau 1992: 71). This fragmentation was compounded by institutional re-organization: boundary drawing around substantive specialities. This was in turn tied, ineluctably, to budgetary and administrative imperatives (Becker and Rau 1992: 70; Stinchcombe 1994: 283–4). These shifts in substance and organization left sociology bereft of any theoretical, methodological or institutional lynchpin. This was not, however, a disciplinary disorder symptomatic only of the times, but of the origins of a discipline which came ‘late to the academic table’ and hence ended up with ‘the scraps’ (Becker and Rau 1992: 70).3 I am compelled to note a fourth explanation for sociology's demise, because it is given some amusing rendering: the ‘natural disposition’ of sociologists (although sociologists disagree as to what that ‘natural disposition’ is). We are either ‘too nice’ (I want to linger on this, because we are not often on the receiving end of a compliment), a characteristic that has led to the decline of the discipline because it means we ‘let anyone in’: plants, rocks and bicycles. Alternatively, if Molotch and Lipset are to be believed, we are extraordinarily ‘ungenerous’ (Molotch 1994: 235), ‘quarrelsome’ and ‘backbiting’ (Lipset 1994: 216–17). Lipset attributes the cantankerousness of sociologists and the deep internal conflicts in the discipline to ‘the propensity of the field to attract social reformers and political activists’ (Lipset 1994: 199). It is our snitching on colleagues that has led to the disrepute of sociology departments within academic establishments, and hence to its endangered state at the institutional level. As Molotch puts it, ‘sociologists eat each other’ (Molotch 1994: 235). You do not have to be a historian to find it strange that many of commentaries purporting to reflect on the state of sociology in the 1990s were published as early in that decade as 1992 and 1994. It is stranger still that these criticisms are directed towards this decade in particular since some of these arguments had already been rehearsed in the 1980s (see for example Becker 1986), and in fact much earlier. Indeed, C. Wright Mills’ frustrations with the discipline in the 1950s are invoked with some regularity by these later faultfinders. Mills had damned sociology as the ‘odd job man’ of the social sciences, busily transforming a miscellany of concerns – or ‘academic leftovers’– into a coherent ‘style of thought’ in order, primarily, to justify the existence of the discipline as a discipline in and of itself (Mills 2000 [1959]: 23). This in turn served to provide jobs for the ‘cheerful robots’ who populated its departments. All this somewhat gives the lie to the idea that this was a distinctive disorder of the 90s. Looking back, the 90s seem to be a time, rather, when already existing neuroses and constraints – intellectual (including the intellectual endeavours that inaugurated sociology as a distinctive discipline in its own right), administrative, budgetary – coalesced with particular force to produce the disciplinary disintegration and disarray identified above. Many of the complaints that I have apprised here not only preceded the 90s but continue into this decade. Sociology (with a capital ‘S’) has not asserted anew its centripetal force. In fact, the fragmentation of the discipline has, arguably, accelerated in the interim with new fields of enquiry, research clusters, and institutional units underscoring already existing divisions. We cannot, then, breathe a collective sigh of relief and consign the 1990s to history. We have no option it seems, but to turn this state of affairs into a virtue, and instead regard it as a sign of rude health. My own promiscuous academic background makes me something of a foreign correspondent on sociology, and forces me to take a more sanguine view of a discipline that draws upon resources outside of the disciplinary canon in order to understand ever more complex social conditions (‘society’ is a rapidly moving target). A good reason for us to be optimistic is that sociological knowledge is currently reinvigorating the intellectual terrain of other disciplines. International relations (IR) in particular, a thriving discipline (especially since 9/11) has more recently called for an explicit engagement with sociology: with social theory and with empirical sociology's focus on practices. For example, the International Studies Association (ISA) recently launched an International Political Sociology section, which currently has one hundred and sixty two members. They make a very visible presence at the annual meet with scores of panels. Members of the group launched a new journal in 2007, International Political Sociology, which endeavours to unite the insights and approaches of the two disciplines. It was inaugurated by a conference addressed by a number of sociologists, amongst whom were Bruno Latour and Gary T. Marx. In addition, workshops on the city, citizenship, biopolitics and international sociology are now the regular stuff of the life of the British International Studies Association (BISA) working groups. Clearly, sociology is presenting itself with more coherence and authority to other disciplines than its neurotic self-image seems to suggest. We should not forget, also, that other disciplines undergo, periodically, their own existential crises (see Stinchcombe 1994). I was a student of literature in the late 1980s when Said'sOrientalism (1985) was impacting on literary theory, to the horror of those who objected fiercely to the politicization of the aesthetic that it implied, indeed begged. Whilst its impact was keenly felt, the book did not initiate this argument since Marxist and feminist literary theory had already found a (sometimes uncomfortable) place at the table, but it reinvigorated that particular disciplinary division in a new way. Later, as a student of IR in the 90s, I experienced this argument in reverse. At that time IR was feeling the effects (somewhat later than other disciplines) of the hermeneutic turn. Its detractors argued strongly that the political should not be aestheticized. So, sociology is not especially disordered in this regard. The latest casualty (and much more consequential than literary theory) – mathematical economics – is currently under fire for failing to predict the current global recession. Whilst it is now on the back foot and there is some ‘soul’ searching, I doubt that it is in a state of anomie, still less regards itself as obsolete. At least sociology does not have an embarrassment of recent Nobel Prize winners to excuse!4 I have suggested that the 1990s were not newly disordered, but suffering from the cumulative effects of a gradual unravelling, the seeds of which were perhaps sown by its progenitors. Certainly, methodological conflicts and topical clefts are written across the pages of the BJS in the 1990s, but if we are to judge the state of the discipline by the state of the BJS during that time, sociology in the 1990s seemed to be in a slightly more coherent state than I had been led to believe, albeit still sustaining its characteristic historic epistemological and methodological fissures. I am conscious, however, that this appearance might have had something to do with editorial management, or the ‘benefit’ of hindsight. From the vantage point of the present time, what was then viewed as disordered and fragmented has, in the meantime, become sedimented, stabilized, and institutionalized, and seems less disconcerting now than at the time. The appearance of disciplinary coherence is sustained by a significant number of articles dealing with the regular stuff of sociological enquiry: the state, class, gender, the family, education, race, citizenship, religion, culture, knowledge, modernity, the body, deviance and work. These broad themes conceal rich and diverse enquiries into education, social mobility, class formation, delinquency, suicide, social justice, recreational drug use, voting, discourse and ideology, citizenship, male sex work, gender and the state, gender relations, young parents, race relations, eugenics and social medicine, punishment and social control, policing, race and policing, childhood criminality, fear of crime, Islam, secularization and China (which receives considerable attention in a number of articles, presaging its current global importance). Canonical authors are far from dismissed: Durkheim, Weber, Halbwachs, Parsons, Habermas, Popper, and Marshall all receive acknowledgement, application and reworking here. Alongside these continuities with the past are the seeds of newer fields of enquiry and approaches that have since flourished: globalization, rights, disability, Aids, the environment, tourism and governmentality all jostle for space here. Strikingly absent, however, are thoroughgoing analyses of some of the constitutive (and mostly violent) historical events that marked the 1990s: the first Gulf War, South Africa's transition from apartheid,5 the wars of the former-Yugoslavia, genocide in Rwanda, Grozny, the Oslo Accords, and a Northern Irish peace agreement. An alien from outer space flicking through the pages of the journal would have little idea that any of these things were going on at the time. It is no accident that war is under-reported by sociologists (with notable exceptions in the work of Giddens, Mann, Tilly and Shaw). The topic is a casualty of the way in which disciplinary knowledge has, historically, been carved out. War has conventionally been understood to condition the anarchic international ‘society’ of states, and was, for this reason, a topic gifted to the discipline of IR at its inception. Whilst both IR and sociology have been constrained by a state-centric panoptic, IR was at least mandated to explain and understand relations between states, a constitutive feature of which is war. I can think of no better argument for an increased inter-disciplinarity than that presented by the subject of war, which demands (contrary to some of the complaints of the 90s) that we instead ‘avoid furthering the bureaucratization of reason and of discourse’ (Mills 2000 [1959]: 192, emphasis added).6 The BJS papers in the 90s harness a broad spectrum of qualitative and quantitative methodologies, some of which testify to conflicting trends, particularly around the question of class. Is it dead or in ascendance? A confused prognosis emerges in part out of a debate between rival schools: Bourdieu – inspired scholars (whose qualitative influence is heavily imprinted here) rub up against the long dominance of John Goldthorpe and the Nuffield School's rational actor model derived from statistical analysis of large scale datasets. Elsewhere, there is a persistence of Cohen's ‘moral panic’ as an explanatory device, signifying the persistence of social constructivism, and an emphasis on reflexive research, which was going through various adumbrations at the time. One of the most distinctive features of the BJS is its encouragement of debates, and the 1990s contained some notable ones. Most fiercely fought amongst these were pitched around two controversial articles: Goldthorpe on historical sociology (1991), whose animated interlocutors included Bryant, Hart, Mouzelis and Mann (BJS 1994: 45/1); and Hakim on women's employment (1995), vigorously opposed by Crompton and Harris (1998). Which brings me, finally, to my two nominations for that decade: Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller's‘Political Power Beyond the State: Problematics of Government’ (2010 [1992]),7 and John H. Goldthorpe's‘Class Analysis and the Reorientation of Class Theory: the case of persisting differentials in educational attainment (2010 [1996]). One of the first things I reached for in coming to this tough decision was ‘the citations crutch’. Certainly, the citations for each of these papers might justify their selection alone, in particular those for Rose and Miller.8 However, whilst citations tell us something superficial about the influence of an article, they tell us nothing about its subterranean intellectual imprint. The articles reflect on classically sociological concerns: the state, and class formation respectively. They share a profound, widely debated, and at times hotly contested, influence on sociological research. Both papers advance methods of enquiry that persist in being both constitutive of the discipline and simultaneously representative of its characteristic epistemological and methodological fissures – quantitative and positivistic on the one hand, interpretive and genealogical on the other – and as such, they encapsulate two very different facets of both the discipline and the BJS in the 1990s. In so far as both are harnessed to specific empirical problems, they exemplify what sociology does best. Rose and Miller's 1992 (2010) article is an explicit response to Foucault's call to ‘eschew the model of Leviathan in the study of power’ (Foucault 1980: 121). The article pitched itself against historical sociologies of the state (Giddens, Mann, Wallerstein, for example) and played a central role in the consecration of a new mode of enquiry into the social: ‘governmentality’. This approach was to be liberated from and critical of, dominant, state-centred, paradigms long governed by the set of oppositions naturalized by political philosophy: state and civil society, public and private, government and market. Rose and Miller's interdisciplinary approach has since reinvigorated not just sociology (both in Britain and internationally), but has refreshed and redirected the intellectual programmes of a range of disciplines such as politics, history, geography and international relations. Goldthorpe is a prolific presence in the pages of the BJS in the 1990s, contributing five (four single and one co-authored) articles, including one stimulating a fierce debate on historical sociology (Goldthorpe 1991, 1994, 1996, 1998; Breen and Goldthorpe 1999). His remarkable visibility in the BJS reflects the immense and long-standing importance of his work on social stratification to sociology in Britain and beyond (Goldthorpe's work has provide an intellectual lynchpin for a host of collaborative European research projects). His work, and in particular this important article, has been both profoundly influential to and divisive of the discipline, rivalling Marxist and liberal theories of class formation and decomposition respectively. My selection tells us something about the internecine struggles of the discipline at the time. Rose and Miller emphatically eschew causality, Goldthorpe positively promotes it. That these two papers are so different – from one the other – could be read as symptomatic of either a ‘crisis’ or ‘rich diversity’ of work going on in this decade. It is worth remembering, however, that this is an epistemological divide that (historically) conditions not just sociology, but is a fault-line running through the social sciences more generally. In evaluating their respective contributions to ‘the sociological project’, it is important not to isolate these essays but to situate them in the longer trajectory of debates and research methods that they have simultaneously spawned and been central to. Each of these contributions has been generative of, and are situated within, wider networks of thinkers and researchers dedicated to reproducing or refuting their arguments, either within the discipline, or beyond it (as is strongly the case with the Rose and Miller piece). I will leave it to the insightful commentaries of Patrick Joyce and John Scott to elaborate in more detail the sterling contributions of each of these papers to the various intellectual trajectories of the discipline in the 1990s and beyond.