51 research outputs found

    British sociology, the bourgeois media-sociology hybrid and the problem of social class

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    This article advances the scandalous argument that we live in a post-social class modernity, and that the perpetual reinvention of class as the key concept for understanding social inequality is untenable. Class is not only a zombie concept but also an ideology that reflects a set of normative attitudes, beliefs and values that pervade sociology. Its starting point is that, sociology, once adept at imagining new ways to interpret the world, has become a subject field that wants to claim a radical space for itself while simultaneously relying on outworn theoretical frameworks and denying the work radicals do. The article begins by suggesting that the problem of class has its roots in the deep structure of sociology. Taking its cue from Jacques Rancière’s classic study The Philosopher and His Poor it develops the argument that if class was once upon a time the fundamental issue in the study of social inequality, today sociology urgently needs an alternative cognitive framework for thinking outside this paradigm which it uses to open up a critical space for its own intellectual claims rather than reflecting society in the round. After arguing that we a living at the ‘end of Class’, the critique explores the limits of the work of Pierre Bourdieu, who has replaced Marx and Weber as sociology’s key theoretician of class. It is argued that in Bourdieu’s sociology, contentment is permanently closed to ‘the working class’ that thumps about like a dinosaur that survived extinction, anachronistic proof of the power and privilege of the theorist and his sociology rather than proof of the usefulness of his ideas. The key to understanding the limits of this interpretation, it is argued, is that it assumes a ‘working class’ that has little or no agency. It is subsequently argued that sociology and the bourgeois media are coextensive. The specific function of the bourgeois media-sociology hybrid is to provide ideological legitimation of class inequality and of integrating individuals into sociology’s interpretation of social and cultural life. Focusing on the work of two self-identified ‘working class’journalists who have successfully made the transition into the bourgeoisie and who seek solid validation of their new found status in the bourgeois media it is demonstrated that social inequality is neither expressed nor examined in a convincing way. Framing ‘working class’ worlds even more ‘working class’ than ‘working class’, the bourgeois media, at best, lay them bare for clichéd interpretation. Here the article argues vis-à-vis Quentin Skinner that words are not so much mere ‘reflections’ of the world, but ‘engines’ which actively play a role in moulding the worlds to which they refer. Drawing on Rancière’s idea of the partage du sensible (distribution of the sensible) it is argued thereafter that here thinking ends up as the very thought of inequality because by posing social inequality as the primary fact that needs to be explained the bourgeois media-sociology hybrid ends up explaining its necessity. The final part of the article offers some suggestions about how to rethink social inequality after class, and it concludes with the observation that the predicament facing sociology derives not just from its theoretical limits but also from its failure to give social inequality human meaning and the people who suffer it the proper respect by acknowledging their own interpretations of their own lives

    Decentring leisure : rethinking leisure theory (Book review)

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    Review of "Decentring leisure : rethinking leisure theory" by Chris Rojek, London, SAGE Publications Ltd, 1995, 215 pp. (paperback), ISBN 0-8039-8113-

    British Sociology, the Bourgeois Media-Sociology Hybrid and the Problem of Social Class

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    This article advances the scandalous argument that we live in a post-social class modernity, and that the perpetual reinvention of class as the key concept for understanding social inequality is untenable. Class is not only a zombie concept but also an ideology that reflects a set of normative attitudes, beliefs and values that pervade sociology. Its starting point is that, sociology, once adept at imagining new ways to interpret the world, has become a subject field that wants to claim a radical space for itself while simultaneously relying on outworn theoretical frameworks and denying the work radicals do. The article begins by suggesting that the problem of class has its roots in the deep structure of sociology. Taking its cue from Jacques Rancière’s classic study The Philosopher and His Poor it develops the argument that if class was once upon a time the fundamental issue in the study of social inequality, today sociology urgently needs an alternative cognitive framework for thinking outside this paradigm which it uses to open up a critical space for its own intellectual claims rather than reflecting society in the round. After arguing that we a living at the ‘end of Class’, the critique explores the limits of the work of Pierre Bourdieu, who has replaced Marx and Weber as sociology’s key theoretician of class. It is argued that in Bourdieu’s sociology, contentment is permanently closed to ‘the working class’ that thumps about like a dinosaur that survived extinction, anachronistic proof of the power and privilege of the theorist and his sociology rather than proof of the usefulness of his ideas. The key to understanding the limits of this interpretation, it is argued, is that it assumes a ‘working class’ that has little or no agency. It is subsequently argued that sociology and the bourgeois media are coextensive. The specific function of the bourgeois media-sociology hybrid is to provide ideological legitimation of class inequality and of integrating individuals into sociology’s interpretation of social and cultural life. Focusing on the work of two self-identified ‘working class’ journalists who have successfully made the transition into the bourgeoisie and who seek solid validation of their new found status in the bourgeois media it is demonstrated that social inequality is neither expressed nor examined in a convincing way. Framing ‘working class’ worlds even more ‘working class’ than ‘working class’, the bourgeois media, at best, lay them bare for clichéd interpretation. Here the article argues vis-à-vis Quentin Skinner that words are not so much mere ‘reflections’ of the world, but ‘engines’ which actively play a role in moulding the worlds to which they refer. Drawing on Rancière’s idea of the partage du sensible (distribution of the sensible) it is argued thereafter that here thinking ends up as the very thought of inequality because by posing social inequality as the primary fact that needs to be explained the bourgeois media-sociology hybrid ends up explaining its necessity. The final part of the article offers some suggestions about how to rethink social inequality after class, and it concludes with the observation that the predicament facing sociology derives not just from its theoretical limits but also from its failure to give social inequality human meaning and the people who suffer it the proper respect by acknowledging their own interpretations of their own lives

    90-letni Zygmunt Bauman: Schöpferkraft i jego dwoistości

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    W listopadzie 2015 roku Zygmunt Bauman obchodził 90. urodziny, będąc przy tym jak zwykle żywotnym, produktywnym i inteligentnym. Po ponad 70 opublikowanych książkach, z których każda analizuje jeden temat i otwiera drzwi na wszystkie strony, jego praca pozostaje istotnym punktem odniesienia w socjologii. Bauman nadal jest jednym z najbardziej elektryzujących socjologów, jednym z najbłyskotliwszych i najbardziej elastycznych myślicieli w swym pokoleniu. Wyjaśnia to, dlaczego niektórzy komentatorzy uznali go za jednego z najważniejszych żyjących socjologów. Gwoli ścisłości, jego prace poddane zostały również zdecydowanej krytyce. Po zarysowaniu rozumowania umniejszających jego dokonania w niniejszym artykule rozwija się myśl, że więcej ona mówi o stanie obecnej kultury w socjologii niż jakości pracy Baumana. Sposób praktykowania swego rzemiosła przez Baumana można uznać za osobliwy, nie jest on jednak w socjologii niczym nowym. Inni ważni socjologowie – Marks, Simmel, Weber – byli również nonkonformistami, lecz we współczesnym świecie Bauman jest wyjątkiem. Bauman, jak i inni ważni nonkonformiści, jest wytworem własnej niezwykłej biografii. Podobnie jak niektórzy z nich potrafił on wykorzystać podwójną wizję emigranta, która wyostrzyła jego osobistą świadomość wieloznaczności nowoczesności. W tekście ukazuje się, że socjologia w rękach Baumana tworzy odmienną mapę kognitywną tego, co zwykli ludzi uznają za rzeczywistość, zaś my wszyscy bierzemy za oczywistość. Punktem wyjścia jego pracy jest hermeneutyczne zrozumienie przygodności i wieloznaczności strumienia życia. Baumanowskie metafory opisujące tę nowoczesność są mesjanistyczne i ekologiczne: ratują pewną odmianę socjologii, która jest zagrożonym gatunkiem. Ostatnia część artykułu rzuca wyzwanie tendencji krytyków Baumana, wedle których ostateczną ochroną socjologii jako dyscypliny akademickiej leży poza władzą społeczną, znajdując się we władzy tego, co obiektywne. Bauman zajmuje odmienne stanowisko, jego socjologia bowiem rozpościera się między dwiema „rzeczywistościami” – hermeneutyczną socjologią i socjologiczną hermeneutyką. Wskutek nieustannego procesu wymiany między nimi, potrafi on „odkryć to, co istnieje”. Oto poczucie wolności, które promieniuje z dialektyki, która cechuje jego dzieło. Słowa kluczowe: wieloznaczność, efekt Baumana, polityka kulturalna, hermeneutyczna socjologia i socjologiczna hermeneutyka, wyobraźnia, wiedza, płynna nowoczesność, metafora, Schöpfung. Zygmunt Bauman turned 90 years of age in November 2015, as vital, productive, and intelligently alive as ever. After more than seventy books written over five decades, each one taking a single subject and finding doors to open in all directions, his work remains an essential reference point in sociology. Bauman continues to be one of most electrifying writers in sociology, among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of his generation. This explains why some commentators have described him as the most important living sociologist. Yet his work has also come in for some severe critique. After outlining what his detractors have had to say, the view developed in this article is that generally speaking this criticism says more about present culture in sociology than it does about the quality of the work as such. The way in which Bauman practices his craft may have the appearance of idiosyncrasy, yet nothing about it is unusual; it has had a previous life in sociology. Other important sociologists have played the same nonconformist game that Bauman plays – Marx, Simmel, Weber – but none in the contemporary period. It is explained that in common with other important nonconformists Bauman is a product of his own unusual biography. And like some of them he has also been able to take the advantage of an émigré’s double vision which has sharpened his personal awareness of the ambivalence of modernity. It is subsequently demonstrated that in Bauman’s hands sociology is compelled into a different cognitive mapping of what we ordinarily understand as reality, the one we all experience and take for granted. What we find in his work is the demand that sociology begin with a hermeneutic understanding of the contingency and ambivalence of life’s flux. It is argued thereafter that the metaphors Bauman uses to describe this modernity are messianic and ecological: they are saving a certain kind of sociology, an endangered species. The final part of the article challenges the tendency of Bauman’s critics to assume that the ultimate defence of sociology as an academic discipline lies in an authority beyond that of society – the authority of the objective is. It is argued that Bauman leaves no room for such an authority since his sociology is established between two ‘realities’ – hermeneutic sociology and sociological hermeneutics. As a result of a continuous reciprocal process between the two, he is able to ‘disclose that which exists’. And it is the sense of freedom emanating from this dialectic that he communicates in his work. Keywords: ambivalence, Bauman Effect, cultural politics, hermeneutic sociology and sociological hermeneutics, imagination, knowledge, liquid modernity, metaphor, Schöpfung

    Re-Imagining ‘Event Management’: on Governmentality and its ‘Afterlife’

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    Abstract: In an important collection of publications Chris Rojek (2013a, 2013b and 2014) raises some apposite questions pertaining to ‘Event Management’ as a source of ideological power that surrounds both the staging of Mega Events and ‘Events’ as a subject field. The present article begins by elaborating on the key themes emerging from Rojek’s unconventional understanding of ‘Event Management’ which provides the backdrop against which it advances its own arguments. The rest of the discussion develops a novel framework of analysis which suggests that we should substitute ‘governmentality’ for ‘ideology’. It is argued that ‘performative governmentality’ achieves the rule of the ‘knowledgeable’ and ‘knowledge’ as the ruling force in a new way, through ‘efficiency’. The article provides a familiar theoretical framework and equips it with some new conceptual tools. Performative governmentality emerges as the ‘afterlife’ of Foucauldian governmentality, demonstrating that its capability is released only when the context in which it originally existed has disappeared, when it lingers precariously on the verge of disappearance. The article posits a mutual ‘fit’ between sport and the ‘social gradient’ in health and the tasks these pose to individuals under the dramaturgical conditions of the ‘performativity criterion’: to produce for themselves in their leisure the knowledge and the techniques of ‘fitness’ or ‘well-being’. Thereafter it explores how control operates with the societal shift from ‘hierarchy’ and ‘normalization’ to ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’, arguing that existential insecurity and ontological uncertainty – the products of the fear of invisibility – have become functional to performative governmentality, which appears capable of conjuring conformity through impulses we conventionally associate with empowerment

    The crisis in sociological leisure studies and what to do about it

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    In recent years, social philosophers such as Zygmunt Bauman, Agnes Heller, Jacques Rancière, Richard Rorty and Peter Sloterdijk have generated tremendous excitement by offering some revolutionary and radical ways of thinking about human life in the twenty-first century that present some fundamental challenges to sociology as it is normally conducted. Responding to this trend, this article argues that we need to not only fundamentally re-think what we mean by theory in the sociology of leisure but also how we carry out research in leisure studies. The first part of the article argues that orthodox sociological 'Theory' is dead and it offers some good reasons why this is so. It is subsequently argued that there is a crisis in leisure theory which has its roots in the central tenets of sociology. Taking its cue from Jacques Rancière's classic study The Philosopher and His Poor, the article develops the argument that if social inequality was once upon a time the fundamental issue in the discursive formation known as the sociology of leisure, today it urgently needs an alternative cognitive framework for thinking outside this paradigm. In order to substantiate this critique the discussion considers two leading theoretical perspectives in leisure studies: the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and feminist sociology, and in particular, the emphasis currently placed on the idea of intersectionality. It is argued thereafter that sociologists of leisure, and others who carry out research in leisure studies, generally have a particular activity in view: methodological uniformity of both the employment of research methods and the philosophical study of how, in practice, researchers go about their business. But there are some different 'rules of method' when we engage in thinking sociologically after 'Theory'. As will be demonstrated in the final part of the article, analysis of this second kind of activity does not rely on the tools, epistemological frameworks and ontological assumptions generally used to make sense of leisure. Instead it develops its own new 'rules of method' which turn out to be radical, because they are not 'rules of method' at all

    90-letni Zygmunt Bauman: Schopferkraft i jego dwoistości

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    Zygmunt Bauman turned 90 years of age in November 2015, as vital, productive, and intelligently alive as ever. After more than seventy books written over five decades, each one taking a single subject and finding doors to open in all directions, his work remains an essential reference point in sociology. Bauman continues to be one of most electrifying writers in sociology, among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of his generation. This explains why some commentators have described him as the most important living sociologist. Yet his work has also come in for some severe critique. After outlining what his detractors have had to say, the view developed in this article is that generally speaking this criticism says more about present culture in sociology than it does about the quality of the work as such. The way in which Bauman practices his craft may have the appearance of idiosyncrasy, yet nothing about it is unusual; it has had a previous life in sociology. Other important sociologists have played the same nonconformist game that Bauman plays – Marx, Simmel, Weber – but none in the contemporary period. It is explained that in common with other important nonconformists Bauman is a product of his own unusual biography. And like some of them he has also been able to take the advantage of an émigré’s double vision which has sharpened his personal awareness of the ambivalence of modernity. It is subsequently demonstrated that in Bauman’s hands sociology is compelled into a different cognitive mapping of what we ordinarily understand as reality, the one we all experience and take for granted. What we find in his work is the demand that sociology begin with a hermeneutic understanding of the contingency and ambivalence of life’s flux. It is argued thereafter that the metaphors Bauman uses to describe this modernity are messianic and ecological: they are saving a certain kind of sociology, an endangered species. The final part of the article challenges the tendency of Bauman’s critics to assume that the ultimate defence of sociology as an academic discipline lies in an authority beyond that of society – the authority of the objective is. It is argued that Bauman leaves no room for such an authority since his sociology is established between two ‘realities’ – hermeneutic sociology and sociological hermeneutics. As a result of a continuous reciprocal process between the two, he is able to ‘disclose that which exists’. And it is the sense of freedom emanating from this dialectic that he communicates in his work.W listopadzie 2015 roku Zygmunt Bauman obchodził 90. urodziny, będąc przy tym jak zwykle żywotnym, produktywnym i inteligentnym. Po ponad 70 opublikowanych książkach, z których każda analizuje jeden temat i otwiera drzwi na wszystkie strony, jego praca pozostaje istotnym punktem odniesienia w socjologii. Bauman nadal jest jednym z najbardziej elektryzujących socjologów, jednym z najbłyskotliwszych i najbardziej elastycznych myślicieli w swym pokoleniu. Wyjaśnia to, dlaczego niektórzy komentatorzy uznali go za jednego z najważniejszych żyjących socjologów. Gwoli ścisłości, jego prace poddane zostały również zdecydowanej krytyce. Po zarysowaniu rozumowania umniejszających jego dokonania w niniejszym artykule rozwija się myśl, że więcej ona mówi o stanie obecnej kultury w socjologii niż jakości pracy Baumana. Sposób praktykowania swego rzemiosła przez Baumana można uznać za osobliwy, nie jest on jednak w socjologii niczym nowym. Inni ważni socjologowie – Marks, Simmel, Weber – byli również nonkonformistami, lecz we współczesnym świecie Bauman jest wyjątkiem. Bauman, jak i inni ważni nonkonformiści, jest wytworem własnej niezwykłej biografii. Podobnie jak niektórzy z nich potrafił on wykorzystać podwójną wizję emigranta, która wyostrzyła jego osobistąświadomość wieloznaczności nowoczesności. W tekście ukazuje się, że socjologia w rękach Baumana tworzy odmienną mapę kognitywną tego, co zwykli ludzi uznają za rzeczywistość, zaś my wszyscy bierzemy za oczywistość. Punktem wyjścia jego pracy jest hermeneutyczne zrozumienie przygodności i wieloznaczności strumienia życia. Baumanowskie metafory opisujące tę nowoczesność są mesjanistyczne i ekologiczne: ratują pewną odmianę socjologii, która jest zagrożonym gatunkiem. Ostatnia część artykułu rzuca wyzwanie tendencji krytyków Baumana, wedle których ostateczną ochroną socjologii jako dyscypliny akademickiej leży poza władzą społeczną, znajdując się we władzy tego, co obiektywne. Bauman zajmuje odmienne stanowisko, jego socjologia bowiem rozpościera się między dwiema „rzeczywistościami” – hermeneutyczną socjologią i socjologiczną hermeneutyką. Wskutek nieustannego procesu wymiany między nimi, potrafi on „odkryć to, co istnieje”. Oto poczucie wolności, które promieniuje z dialektyki, która cechuje jego dzieło

    Getting to know you: Engagement and relationship building: First interim national positive futures case study research report

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    This report represents the culmination of the first phase of the Positive Futures (PF) Case Studies Research Project rather than a definitive set of findings as such. Rather like the PF programme itself it is very much a work in progress which is evolving all the time in the context of the action research approach we have adopted. This approach involves a cycle of action and reflection, with both the projects and research adapting in relation to the themes that emerge from the study as it progresses. Nevertheless whilst this element of the research has been concerned as much with the establishment of relations with projects and participants as investigating the relationships between them, we have begun to identify a number of tentative themes and findings. These themes are presented in a fashion which is intended to guide the future direction of projects every bit as much as to gain abstract theoretical insight. Yet this recognition of the importance of practicality and direction should not distract from the importance of gaining a wider contextual feel for the programme. For whilst this summary is intended to highlight the key themes emerging from the research and the policy and practice issues associated with them, it is in the detail of the main report that a full appreciation of the PF approach emerges. It is from the more narrative accounts in these subsequent parts that we have drawn the conclusions and recommendations presented here and which will provide the baselines against which we assess future progress. Indeed these accounts are themselves drawn from three regional reports focused on the seven case studies that constitute the overall national research project
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