Unpicking sociology's misfortunes*

Unpicking sociology’s misfortunes*bjos_1333 659..665

Mike Savage

John Holmwood’s paper (2010) speaks to a sense of malaise that currentlyhovers over British sociology. What is this unease about? As he notes, it ispartly driven by institutional worries, such as the declining number of researchactive sociology Departments (according to RAE2008). No doubt Holm-wood’s darker thoughts were focused by his own experience of the closure ofthe Sociology Department at Birmingham, of which he had been Head. One ofthe virtues of Holmwood’s paper therefore is that he places such ‘political’concerns into an appropriately serious, thoughtful, and sociological analysis ofthe state of British sociology. He weaves important reflections about intellec-tual fragmentation, the nature of disciplinarity, and the neo-liberalization ofhigher education into a compelling account of how sociology’s distinctivequalities can be understood in terms of its existence as a non-coherentexporter discipline. In this response I want to largely echo his comments whilstalso suggesting further twists to his story.

Whilst welcoming Holmwood’s paper, I want to start by reflecting on his ownpoint that it conforms to a well established model of sociologists being fasci-nated by the weaknesses of their own discipline.Are there such thoughtful andreflexive autocritiques from neo-classical economists, social anthropologists, orpolitical scientists? I doubt it. This is actually a matter of some import: therelatively harsh marking meted out by sociologists in the RAE2008 comparedto neighbouring social science disciplines has significant implications for howthe discipline is perceived by other academics.And this point speaks to the heartof Holmwood’s concerns: what is the potential now for the kind of critical,counter-intuitive, interdisciplinary kind of intellectual enterprise that has in thepast been such an exciting and vital part of the appeal of British sociology, andyet which also bestows lavish introspective attention on its own deficiencies.

Holmwood nicely rebuts the view that sociology’s problem is that it hasnever developed a distinctive, widely shared, research paradigm. To be sure,the contrast with economics, where econometric research is dominant, anthro-pology with its commitment to ethnography, or philosophy, organized on

Savage (Department of Sociology, University of York) (Corresponding author email: [email protected])© London School of Economics and Political Science 2010 ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online.Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,MA 02148, USA on behalf of the LSE. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-4446.2010.01333.x

The British Journal of Sociology 2010 Volume 61 Issue 4

analytical principles, appears clear. Yet as Holmwood suggests (and as alsodiscussed by Scott 2005; Stanley 2005), it is precisely this lack of paradigmaticcoherence which has made sociology such a vital and energized discipline,including, I suggest in neo-liberal times.

The historical framing of British sociology is important here (see Savage2010 for further elaboration). When British sociology was institutionally new,in the 1960s and 1970s, it might be seen as perfectly reasonable for it tochampion new and eclectic approaches. Now that the discipline is institution-ally well established, with the British Sociological Association celebrating its60th anniversary, and the glamorous flagship departments at Essex, Lancaster,and the other ‘plateglass’ universities approaching their 50th anniversaries,perhaps the problem is that we have reached a state of pluralistic co-existencewithout schism. Where, now, are the conflicts between Marxists and eth-nomethodologists (which famously haunted my old Department at Manches-ter, for instance)? Where, when there are now so many feminist professors ofsociology, are the feminist critics of sociology (see the ruminations of Skeggs2008)? Where are the passions and intensities that excite and energize, anddefine the stakes of intellectual dispute?

It might be helpful to suggest three phases in of internal fragmentationwithin British sociology. From the 1950s to the early 1980s, there was clearfactionalism, yet at the same time a common recognition that the intellectualterrain of sociology was marked out by the canonical thinking of Marx, Weberand Durkheim. Thus, internecine conflict could yet go along with a sharedpassion for the discipline. Both Garfinkel and Marx (for instance) weresomehow concerned with the ‘problem of order’. From the early 1980s to theearly 2000s it was possible to detect a bifurcation between more orthodoxsociology, wedded to these classical concerns, and a sociology more influencedby the cultural turn including post-modern and post structuralist currents. TheBritish Journal of Sociology and Theory, Culture and Society can be seen asmarking out these two positions, or the very different visions of sociologybased at Oxford on the one hand, and Lancaster and Goldsmiths on the other.This too generated productive and exciting debate and passionate excitementabout the nature of sociology as a discipline. Yet since the later 1990s we seemto have entered a third, more worrying period, when such energies havedissipated as a more casual kind of co-existence is practiced. The cultural turnhas become domesticated into ‘cultural sociology’ (lauded both by theRAE2008 and by the ESRC International Benchmarking of Sociology in2010). Feminist sociology is now championed from the mainstream of thediscipline. Yet we have also seen a return to more traditional sociologicalinterests in class, inequality, and social differentiation (sometimes under thebanner of ‘cultural class analysis’ which fuses cultural and more structuralforms of sociology). Science and technology studies, which began as a critiqueof ‘orthodox’ sociology (see Law 2008) has now been incorporated into that

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© London School of Economics and Political Science 2010 British Journal of Sociology 61(4)

very mainstream, having also been identified as one of the two great successstories of the British discipline by both the RAE2008 panel and in the ESRCInternational Benchmarking report. Perhaps what sociology needs now is a bitless pluralism and a bit more infighting and internal disputation?

One perhaps telling indicator of this shift is the changing undergraduatedisciplinary culture. Certainly in my early teaching in the early 1980s at Keeleand into the later 1990s at Manchester, students were often committed to thediscipline as a critical kind of inquiry which questioned everyday conceptions.Arguments in seminars were rife. Although this orientation can still be foundamongst a minority of students, the dominant student culture today is a morepassive, consumerist orientation to different sociology modules which areoffered on a ‘smorgasbord’ basis.

I have deliberately sought to introduce these concerns with the stakes andintensities of British sociology to complement Holmwood’s own account,which for my taste is a little too reliant on the distinction he draws between‘exporter’ and ‘importer’ disciplines. He explores the problems of sociology interms of its distinctive nature as an ‘exporter’ discipline, like economics, whoseexpertise is then funnelled into more applied domains, such as businessschools, educational research units, social policy units, and medical schools.Holmwood worries that compared to other exporter subjects, sociology lackscoherence with the result that its export generating capacity might itself beseriously damaged. Although this framing very usefully draws attention to theneed to place sociology in the context of other, competing, disciplines, I have anumber of worries with it, some of which I have already alluded to.

Firstly, the assumption that other ‘exporter’ disciplines are in rude health canbe challenged. Economics forms Holmwood’s main foil to sociology. Yet as henotes, there has also been a disciplinary decline in returns to the RAE. In asignificant numbers of universities economics has been absorbed into businessschools. In addition, the effectiveness of economics as an exporter subject islimited due to the way that its highly formalized analytical methods can makeit difficult for other researchers to effectively borrow from them, with theresult that it is under represented in many interdisciplinary areas where onemight expect exporter subjects to do well (the contrast with sociology, which isconsiderably over-represented in large scale inter-disciplinary researchcentres, is worth noting). It has also generated significant critique from thosechampioning various kinds of heterodox (or as it is sometimes called, ‘non-autistic’) economics.

Holmwood also says little about how he sees politics as an exporter subject.But this discipline is also characterized by chronic factionalism, much moremarked in some respects than in sociology since it is more difficult to see howit has generated productive intellectual encounters and synergies. What doliberal political theorists, psephologists, and institutional political scientistshave in common? And one might also wonder who the importers are of much

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© London School of Economics and Political Science 2010British Journal of Sociology 61(4)

political science, if only because in the UK the field of social policy came tocommand the major interface between political concerns and policy domains.Sociology has surely been a much more successful exporter discipline thanpolitics has ever been.

It is therefore important to strip away the residual argument in Holmwood’spaper that sociology is somehow in a much worse state than other exporterdisciplines. Arguably all the exporter social sciences (by his definition) havetheir own particular travails and worries to attend to, and it is not self-evidentthat sociology’s are of a different order of magnitude. And indeed, sociology isperhaps better placed therefore to deal with the neo-liberalization of highereducation which Holmwood discusses, since it might be less concerned todefend its core, come what may, and might be more adaptable to hybridresearch opportunities. The striking success of sociologists in the variousNational Centre for Research Methods ‘nodes’, as well as in various sciencestudies initiatives (such as the genomics centres at Cardiff, Edinburgh, Exeter,and Lancaster) tells its own story.

I want to go a step further and question how useful it is to regard sociologyas an exporter subject at all. As Holmwood notes in passing (2010: fn 14),unlike economics, whose academics are universally trained as economists,British sociology has been remarkably open to ‘imports’ who have beentrained in other disciplines, such as economics, history, and the natural sciences.Its intellectual success has been as much about appealing to ‘dissidents’ fromother subjects as about training a cadre of ‘paradigm-following’ sociologists.Holmwood recognizes this ‘interdisciplinary’ quality whilst not fully acknowl-edging that this then problematizes his account of it as an exporter subject.

Ultimately I therefore think that the distinction between exporter andimporter disciplines is too crude (even though it is used in a very subtle way byHolmwood) to do the required analytical work. My suggestion is that we needinstead to adopt a version of Andrew Abbott’s arguments (1990) about howdisciplines are in constant search for intellectual jurisdiction, which involvescomplex processes of competition with rivals, and seeking particular kinds ofniche expertise. In sociology’s case, we can see its disciplinary politics as beinglinked to its resolution of a contradiction between its identity as unifying‘queen’ of the social sciences, (and hence subsuming other social scienceswithin its ambit) and that which sees it as a specialist subject, with a distinctdomain of inquiry compared to its neighbouring social sciences (see also Scott2005). This latter, more professionalized identity was stronger from the earlytwentieth century in the USA, leading to the early development of influentialgraduate schools, notably at Chicago. However, in the UK the idea of sociologyas a specialist subject was not seriously mooted until the early 1960s. Beforethis period, the only significant group of academic sociologists was at the LSE,where their role was part of this institution’s wider synthetic social scientificidentity. The ensuing difficulties of the LSE in retaining their intellectual

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dominance in sociology can in large part be attributed to their difficulty inre-inventing themselves as a specialist, rather than synthetic, sociology depart-ment (see further Savage 2010). My more general point here is that Holm-wood’s references to American exemplars might not necessarily apply in theUK, given the different character of sociology here.

In the UK, there was no easy transition from the synthetic vision of sociol-ogy, and the very meaning of the discipline had to be radically re-interpretedto allow this more specialist identity to be composed. I think the key step herewas the idea that sociology, unlike the more established social science disci-plines had a distinctive expertise in exploring the new and emergent, thedomains which anthropology, economics and politics had, by definition, notrack record to boast of (see Savage 2010). This concern with the new wasyoked also to the deployment of new research methods – the interview and thesample survey – which appeared to give bright new tools for an emergingdiscipline. In the British context too, specialist sociology received a massiveshot in the arm from the new 1960s ‘plateglass’ universities – Lancaster, Essex,Sussex, York, East Anglia, Warwick, Stirling and the Open University, all ofwhich saw it as vital to their ‘modern’ identities to have large numbers ofspecialist sociologists. This modern, critical, identity made sociology a magnetfor political radicals, especially Marxists and feminists, who were dispropor-tionately attracted to this anti-establishment stance from the mid 1960sonwards (to the chagrin of those few sociologists who preferred a more ‘estab-lishment’ view of their intellectual mission).

The jurisdiction of specialist sociology was hence bound up with a concernwith the new and emergent, leading, in the British case, to a fascination withthe nature of contemporary social change from the 1960s down to the presentday, with debates centring on the rise of post-industrialism, post-modernism,the risk society and so forth (I pursue this argument in Savage 2009).We mightnow see this, however, as an intellectual claim which has its own fraughtbaggage. Whilst it has undoubtedly meant that sociology is an unusuallyforward looking, expansive discipline, it has also encouraged a stand-offbetween more empirical forms of sociology and more speculative theoreticalconcerns, which finds it difficult to offer more sustained methodological elabo-ration or intellectual advance.This tension has especially been amplified by thechanging repertoire of research methods. During the 1960s, sociologists inter-ested in new and emerging phenomena could also use novel methods to elicitpopular accounts of the social: notably the interview and the sample survey.Through this means, sociologists could show not only that they were interestedin new social developments, but could themselves also deploy ‘cutting edge’methods to expose them. By the early 2000s, however, sociologists could nolonger claim to be champions of novel research methods. By this period, thedynamic innovators were computer and information scientists, the developersof Web 2.0, or the market researchers who use digital data sources in novel,



even if in problematic, ways. At best, sociologists are now confined to becommentators on these developments, rather than as themselves in the drivingseat.

Yet this exhaustion of a particular critical vision of British sociology has alsotaken place at the very same time that there has been an institutional strength-ening of British sociology. Here I have a different emphasis to Holmwood. Weshould not be too influenced by the anomalous case of Birmingham University,which despite its pioneering role in the 1960s and the worldwide reputation ofthe Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, has spectacularly mismanagedsociology for several decades. What is more noteworthy is that nearly all theother ‘research intensive universities’ have sought to invest in sociology, some-times heavily, in the past two decades. This is apparent even from the RAEreturns. Even though the number of sociology departments submitted hasdeclined, the actual number of sociologists increased to its highest evernumber in 2008 (Kelley and Burrows 2010). Until the mid 1990s, the institu-tional bastions of British sociology were the large departments founded in thenewer 1960s plateglass universities (especially Essex and Lancaster, but alsoEast Anglia, Kent, Sussex, Warwick, and York), and also those in the technicaluniversities (notably Lougborough, Salford and Surrey). These universitieshave largely retained their strengths, but in the last 15 years the centres ofsociological excellence have gravitated more towards some large civic, urbanuniversities which have sought to invest in sociology (notably at Cardiff,Edinburgh, and Manchester, all of which have seen a dramatic increase in thenumber of sociologists they have returned to the RAE in recent years). Wehave also seen sociology strengthening its (historically weak) position in the‘elite’ universities, with the formation of a Department of Sociology at Oxford,with Cambridge emphasizing its support for a vibrant sociology group in itsrecent review of social sciences in 2009, and with University College London(which has never had a sociology department) recently forming a large, 60strong, ‘sociology group’ from sociologists in its various constituentdepartments. Elsewhere, significant numbers of sociologists in interdisciplinaryschools who might have been returned to other panels at the 2008 RAE (e.g.at Leeds and Southampton) form strong and viable clusters.

There are actually rather few research intensive universities where sociologyhas obviously declined: apart from the case of Birmingham, perhaps onlyDurham or Liverpool might qualify. It is actually the less research intensiveuniversities where sociology seems disproportionately to have declined. It isworth noting too that sociologists remain remarkably successful in gainingresearch funding and in playing leading roles in inter-disciplinary researchcentres. The recent ESRC international benchmarking of sociology is surelycorrect, therefore, in noting the comparative institutional success of Britishsociology, which it reckons is second only to the USA in its intellectual densityand vibrancy.

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In my view, we might therefore understand the misfortunes of British sociol-ogy in terms of the tension between the institutional mainstreaming of sociologyin research intensive universities, and the enduring problems of generating anidentity as a specialist discipline. The main specialist identity which effectivelydrove the critical, interdisciplinary sociology from the 1960s to the later 1990s,that based on the new and emergent, is one which is increasingly difficult forsociologists to claim any special jurisdiction over, given the way that develop-ments in digital technology have allowed information scientists the opportunityto champion new kinds of devices for elaborating a different kind of socialworld. As I have argued elsewhere with Roger Burrows (Savage and Burrows2007), this challenge to the jurisdiction of sociology is a serious one to whichthere is no easy resolution.Perhaps one response is to return to a more syntheticrole, as sociology becomes a more general commentator on how variousmethods for eliciting the world – including from economics, politics, as well asnon academic agencies – operate, and to expose their limitations and biases.Tothis extent, we can surely expect the long term prospects for sociology to bemore positive than for other social science disciplines

(Date accepted: August 2010)

Acknowledgements

*I am grateful to Roger Burrows for additional information, and Dave Beerand John Scott for comments on earlier versions of this paper

Bibliography

Abbott, A. 1990 The System of Professions,Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Holmwood, J. 2010 ‘Sociology’s Mis-fortune: Problems of Achieving Our Disci-pline’, British Journal of Sociology 61(3):639–58.Kelley, A. and Burrows, R. 2010 ‘CountingPellets’, mimeo.Law, J. 2008 ‘On Sociology and STS’, Socio-logical Review 56(4): 623–49.Savage, M. 2009 ‘Against Epochalism:Numbers, Narrative and Socio-culturalChange’, Cultural Sociology 3(1): 217–38.Savage, M. 2010 Identities and SocialChange in Britain since 1940: The Politicsof Method, Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.

Savage, M. and Burrows, R. 2007 ‘TheComing Crisis of Empirical Sociology’, Soci-ology 41(5): 885–99.Scott, John 2005 ‘Sociology and its Others:Reflections on Disciplinary Specializationand Fragmentation’, Sociological ResearchOnline 10(1) http://www.socresonline.org.uk/10/1/scott.htmlSkeggs, B. 2008 ‘The Dirty History of Femi-nism and Sociology: Or the War of Concep-tual Attrition’, Sociological Review 56(4):670–90.Stanley, L. 2005 ‘A Child of Its Time:Hybridic Perspectives on Othering in Soci-ology’, Sociological Research Online 10(3)<http://www.socresonline.org.uk/10/3/stanley.html>



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Unpicking sociology's misfortunes*