THE BEST MODE OF DEFENCE IS ATTACK: SOCIOLOGY IN 21ST CENTURY UK
GRAHAM SCAMBLER
EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY, UCL
Introduction
The sociological project can and does take many different forms, but I will argue here that it remains crucially indebted to a ‘reconstructed’ version of its Enlightenment origins. I will start this contribution by clarifying what I mean by this nowadays somewhat controversial statement before considering the intimidating challenges currently facing many sociologists inside and outside of academia in the United Kingdom (UK) in the 2020s.
There is no question that the ‘unreconstructed’ Enlightenment was the product of an historically specific European, imperialist, white, masculine concatenation of ideologies and events, hence the urgent need for justifying a salvage operation. My contention is that sociology is, as its classical origins insisted, optimally seen and practiced as a social ‘science’, and one oriented to interventions promising a ‘better’, if no longer necessarily ‘the good’, society. Like all sciences, it is obliged to embrace fallibilism but, unlike the natural sciences, is part and parcel of an open society: that is, a dynamic formation in which nothing is predetermined. Moreover, it should in my view reach beyond Michael Buraway’s (2005) four types of sociology. My extension of Burawoy’s quartet can be represented as follows:
| Sociologies | Sociologists | Modes of engagement |
| Professional | Scholar | Cumulative |
| Policy | Reformer | Utilitarian |
| Critical | Radical | Meta-theoretical |
| Public | Democrat | Communicative |
| Foresight | Visionary | Speculative |
| Action | Activist | Strategic |
The additions here are the visionaries of ‘foresight’ and the activists of ‘action’ sociology. Foresight sociology is focused on alternate futures and so geared to principled- and evidence-based ways of improving or replacing UK institutions; and action sociology is geared to combatting only too predictable attempts to undermine or rubbish professional and policy sociology’s research and its ramifications for the governance, to coin a phrase, of ‘the many’ rather than ‘the few’. Sociology, it is my contention, must, logically as well as normatively, be oriented to what Jurgen Habermas calls ‘lifeworld rationalisation’ or ‘system decolonisation’. Under modern forms of capitalism, the subsystems of the economy and state have, via their respective steering media of money and power, penetrated and usurped or colonised a superfluity of day-to-day encounters and activities (Scambler, 1996). Sociology’s primary rationale here is to resist these intrusions in the name of lifeworld rationalisation/decolonisation by opening up to public deliberation evidence-based accounts of what is the case and why and what might be done to ease the way to a better organising of our affairs.
I have elsewhere made a case for a reinvigorated ‘class/command dynamic’ in the more predatory rentier or asset-manager capitalism of post-1970s UK (Scambler, 2018, 2024). The emergence of a potent globalised and ‘nomadic’ grouping of ‘capital monopolists’ who recognise no national allegiances has led to a scenario in which capital now buys even more power to make more policy in its interests. The obstacles in the way of doing and making sociology matter, manifested in the progressive neoliberalisation of our universities, are often the disguised concomitants of this reinvigoration of class relations. The nature of the contemporary sociological project and day-to-day sociological practice and engagement, I shall contend, have their tap roots in and are variously the intended or unintended effects of the class/command dynamic.
From Welfare State to Rentier Capitalism
I was a baby boomer sociologist who entered the academic UK job market in the mid-1970s at the tail end of post-WW2 welfare state capitalism. It was on the cusp of what was to become a deep and enduring transition from an historically atypical phase of capitalism characterised by a cross-party Keynesian or welfare-oriented consensus to a Thatcherite era of a far more predatory and divisive neoliberal financialised or rentier capitalism. Having served a three-year probationary period I was ‘automatically’ afforded a permanent contract, meaning that I was, baring a catastrophic self-destructive episode, guaranteed continuous employment until retirement aged 65. All now is different in the UK (and in many other kindred societies). Precarity rules. Academia is characterised by short-term contracts informed by a class/command or derivative and institutionally ratified and implemented metrics of accomplishment. Short-term contracts and uncertainty have become normalised. What are the mechanisms, their point of impact and their outcomes?
Writing of neoliberal universities in Australia, Christine Morley (2023: 1) notes that:
‘scholarship, education, students, academic staff, and practices are subordinated to managerial imperatives. University educators are denigrated and displaced by colonising neoliberal practices that systematically invalidate and invisibilise academic work.’
She too draws on Habermas to assert:
‘without radical reform, the uncoupling of the ethical and substantive dimensions of the (educational) lifeworld from systemic (neoliberal managerial) strategizing will leave higher education in a state of paralysis.’
It is important to note here that rentier capitalism’s ideology of neoliberalism is not just associated with lifeworld colonisation and more uncompromising forms of individualism. It is accompanied also by a wave of cultural relativisation represented in concepts like post-truth, cancel culture, gaslighting and the weaponised dichotomy of woke vs non-woke. All this has ushered in a novel and insinuating politics of identity and lifestyle. Drawing on Lyotard’s (1984) well-known dichotomy, grand narratives have been displaced by a multiplicity of petit narratives, lending themselves to the illusion that individuals can opt via a petit narrative of their choice to decide how they present to self and others. Indeed, evidence is accumulating that universities in the UK and across the western nations are no longer committed to a longstanding and largely consensual grand narrative premised on a definition of education as ‘intrinsically worthwhile’, but more explicitly than before to sidelining critical thought and preparing and fitting young people to meet national workforce requirements. In other words, the resurgent capitalist imperative to work trumps education, the more so the further outside of the UK’s Oxbridge and the elite institutions of the Russell Group.
A number of mechanisms forced upon UK universities as part of this multifaceted process of neoliberalisation in the post-Thatcher era, either directly by political diktat or indirectly via funding constraints, stand out, and I shall contend that all of them are associated with the taming of sociology as a discipline (see also Scambler et al, In Press).
- Precarity
As noted, job security in the university sector is largely historical. The sense of an assured career that I enjoyed is now a rarity. Short-term contracts have become the norm across many institutions, with many researchers having to ponder ‘what next’ a matter of months into their current employment. And they must be proactive whilst constantly demonstrating their immediate worth via high levels of productivity to fortify their CVs. The concept of ‘proactive manoeuvering’ has been used to capture this constant need for future planning (Scambler et al, In Press). Campbell (2019) contends that a division has opened-up between two types of academic: high-flying entrepreneurs and constantly stressed and anxious members of the academic precariat. If posts incorporate an option to study for a Ph.D they and their employers will be under institutional pressure both to deliver the thesis in a timely fashion (to tick institutional boxes), and to giver papers at conferences and publish papers in peer review journals prior to completion. This urgency to complete studies on time is in sharp contrast to my own experience in the 1970s and into the 1980s. Under neither pressure to complete nor to compete in a particularly competitive job market, I took eleven years to attain my Ph.D in sociology (1972-1983). I secured my first university lectureship prior to publishing anything.
- Time Compression
Giddens (1990) has written convincingly of the compression of place and time in modern societies. In relation to careers in sociology in and around academia, it is certainly the case that time is now more severely constrained, and this in a context of close supervision and management. ‘It is a function of the neoliberalisation of UK universities and their concomitant imposition of job precarity that the past elides with the present and that alternate and unpredictable futures must proactively fuel present plans’ (Scambler et al, In Press). There is an urgency now to disseminate early, often prematurely, and preferably via publications in peer review journals with high impact factors. As a rider, some journal editors are now dismissive of older references, meaning that wheels are constantly being reinvented.
In my main academic field, that of the sociology of health and healthcare, I was once approached by an early-career academic based overseas wanting me to help her ‘get something into the Lancet’ (a notably high impact UK medical journal with a strong international reputation and a high impact factor). As an interesting footnote, two of my own four most cited papers have been in the Lancet, which is at one and the same time revealing (as we shall see, metrics matter) and disconcerting (the sociological content of both articles is minimal). But perhaps most importantly around the issue of time, time to think, which I had in abundance in my early career, has been redefined as unproductive time, or time wasted.
- ‘De-parochialistion’ and Silo-isation
Growing specialisation under the rubrics and pressures of academic neoliberalisation have encouraged the development of academic silos. Those comprising fundable, commissioned and ‘useful’ policy-oriented research have typically nudged aside the less fundable, less useful, ‘classical’ sociologies of social order and social change. Sociological theory survives but in a more silo-ised form. But more than this, sociology theory and practice have alike undergone a degree of generalised contraction, and in this case understandably and deservedly so. Reacting to sociology’s imperial genesis in the unreconstructed European Enlightenment, women’s studies, racial and post-colonial studies, ageing studies, sexual studies, disability studies and so on have established their own extra-sociological or ‘rival’ academic and institutional bases and silos. ‘Together with the bathwater of the largely male, white, European sociological canon, featuring Marx, Durkheim, Weber and on and off a handful of select others, which did indeed require ‘deparochialising’ (Alatas, 2021), has gone the baby of a family of macro-social issues around social order and change’ (Scambler et al, In Press).
- The Metric University
The institutionalisation of targets was largely accomplished in the New Labour era, and the latest incarnation of this process has taken the form of ubiquitous academic metrics. Sets of metrics now permit – and by their existence, encourage – the ranking of academic institutions globally as well as nationally. By such metrics are vice-chancellors assessed. Metrics also enable a reward/punishment ethos in relation to university employees: pay rises and improved prospects for security and promotion for the measurably entrepreneurial, pay cuts or redundancy for laggers heading for the precariat. This is one aspect of what has been called the ‘metric society’ (Mau, 2019). I encountered this process personally when a three-tier system of ranking was instituted to decide the pay of professors at UCL. I was ranked at the highest point for the sole criterion that had been relevant for my career to that point (internationally recognised scholarship), but I fared less well on four ‘new’ criteria; and I ended up at tier three. It is no longer sufficient to be recognised for ‘internationally recognised scholarship’ via scores accumulated by multiple publications in specialist high impact journals, metrics for grant revenue banked, student evaluations of teaching, impact on social policy, meaningful presence in the public sphere and administrative service to one’s discipline and home institution count too. ‘Metrics in this context represent a crude Weberian ‘juridification’ or bureaucratisation of an academic field now infiltrated and ‘caged’ by neoliberal political agendas’ (Scambler et al, In Press).
- Framing the Normative
There has long existed within sociology a division between those who, following Weber, argue for excluding ‘value judgements’ from sociological research and practice while acknowledging the inevitable role of ‘value reference’, versus those favouring sociology as a value-led form of politically active agency. Ironically, there are those who would locate themselves in the first of these two camps who are nevertheless committed not only to documenting, understanding and explaining material and psycho-social inequality, but also to tackling it. A topical example is Reeves and Friedman’s study of the British elite, which concludes with a commended set of policies to equalise elite recruitment and redistribute some of the wealth accumulated by the wealth elite (Reeves & Friedman, 2024). Policy sociology, as defined earlier, and typically in the guise of piecemeal social engineering, is widely accepted, while action sociology, which can involve advocating more ambitious programmes of structural and cultural change as well as resisting and combatting attempts to undermine or dismiss professional as well as policy sociology, is causing increasing concern inside as well as outside of sociology. It has been argued that a strong case might be made in the twenty-first century for a resurrection of ‘muckraking sociology’, though this would predictably provoke an even stronger negative institutional reaction (Scambler, 2024; Scambler, et al, Forthcoming). It should be remembered, however, that normative sociology was once an intimate part of the classical sociological project, which was aimed via what might be called ‘utopian realism’ at the creation of the good society (Levitas, 2013).
Concluding Thoughts
The thesis briefly outlined here is that post-1970s rentier capitalism has via a neoliberal ideology with its distal genesis in capital monopolism delivered increasingly intense institutional constraints on universities in general and on the practice of sociology in Britain in particular. Arguably, this is associated with novels forms of cultural relativity and with the incremental displacement of expert knowledge from universities (Bauman’s ‘legislators’) by privately funded think tanks and even celebrities (Bauman’s ‘interpreters’) (Bauman, 1989). There remain exceptions of course, both individually and institutionally. It is surely time, however, to ‘fight back’. And one way of doing so is to draw on the banked pluses of Burawoy’s four sociologies to invest much more in the foresight and action sociologies represented here.
References
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