Ewa Morawska

English

Research Papers in Economics

Different Times, Different Places, Different Standpoints
by Ewa Morawska
University of Essex
Sociological Research Online, 16 (3) 18
<http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/3/18.html> 
10.5153/sro.2351
Received: 5 May 2011     Accepted: 2 Jun 2011    Published: 31 Aug 2011
I was born in communist Poland ﬁve years after the end of World War II and I grew up in a home with an
open-to-the-world, cosmopolitan orientation, untypical for the inward, ethno-particularist orientation
prevalent in Poland. My studies at Warsaw University specialized in sociology (history of social ideas,
staffed by teachers of the Weberian persuasion with a Durkheimian twist) and history (early modern East
European history, under a strong inﬂuence of the French Annales school). In particular, my participation in
the so-called Flying University or the informal seminars conducted in our professors' homes, taught me the
different traditions of Western social theory on the one hand and, on the other, an appreciation of the
inherent multi-dimensionality and Zusammenhang or interlocking of historical processes—approaches that
attractively contrasted with the ofﬁcial Marxist doctrine. For the same reason—I should mention here that I
was also actively involved in the student dissident movement which we saw as a ﬁght against the
intrinsically evil Marxism-Leninism and the oppressive system it created – I was particularly drawn to
Florian Znaniecki's view of the social world as "permeated with culture" and always "pulsating with
change".
In the mid-1970s I defected to the United States where I asked for and received political asylum. I did my
doctoral studies in Boston, specializing in the sociology of immigration and ethnicity and urban studies
and, on the side, American social history. In the few years that followed, supported by postdoctoral
fellowships, I read intensely in several disciplines at once- sociology, cultural anthropology, and social
history -American and European, especially French and British. Particularly important for my then (re-
)developing intellectual orientation and research agenda - I investigated modes of integration into the
receiver, American society of the immigrants who occupied the lowest echelons in its socio-economic and
civic-political systems—was the social theorizing of David Lockwood, appealingly eclectic and nicely
grounded in empirical evidence; John Goldthorpe's insightful analyses of class schema; and the brilliant
cultural-historical studies of E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams. Somewhat ironically considering where
I came from (but how we hated ofﬁcial Marxism!), the works of Western neo-Marxist and marxisant
thinkers have gradually turned me, a committed culturalist with an idealist bent upon arrival, into a resolute
structuralist-culturalist, with a keen eye on social structures.
In 1984, I obtained an academic position in Philadelphia - a cross-departmental appointment in Sociology
and History at the University of Pennsylvania—where I remained for the next twenty years . My teaching
and research focused primarily on comparative-historical sociology of international migration, ethnicity and
race in America, and to a lesser extent –a reﬂection, I guess, of my enduring if uneasy ties to my native
part of the world - on East European societies under and after Soviet-communist domination. My new
concern with the structural determinants of social life intertwined with two other developments. One of
them was my growing interest in social theory and, speciﬁcally in the structuration model as reformulated
by American sociologists such as William Sewell (1992) and Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mische (1998),
which despite its loopholes well accommodated my interest in both action and structure. The related
development was a growing recognition of the continued signiﬁcance of the important parts of Marx's
assessment of capitalism—an outcome of my research on the ethnically and racially "othered" working
class in America as well as my own experience in that country.
In 2004 I accepted a position in the Sociology Department at the University of Essex in the United
Kingdom. Although America was by then my home, I felt more and more alienated by the relentlessly
accelerating pace of life fuelled by the internet revolution and the unquestioned American principle that
anything newer and quicker must be better than the existing arrangements. My return to Europe was to be
a return to a slower-pace, more reﬂective, and, as I deﬁned it, more humane lifestyle. The Bush
administration's imperial adventures provided an additional incentive to leave. A move to Britain was
particularly tempting because of the English language, of course, and a broader cultural afﬁnity of that
country with its offspring the United States ; and also because of its reputation for a more effectively
working multiculturalism than in other European countries, and, in my two disciplines, its renown in the
ﬁelds of social and cultural history, and sociological theory.
http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/3/18.html 1 31/08/2011Life in Britain is certainly slower and so is the pace of its academe, and I enjoy this slower ﬂow. I now
receive about ﬁfty email messages per day instead of the hundred-odd that came in America. Calming, too,
is a breath-taking beauty of the East Anglian countryside and its villages I regularly travel through with their
well-preserved crooked old houses. (These sights, for that matter, challenged the taken-for-granted
premise I learned in my history studies at Warsaw University that "the measure of development" was the
cities: the appearance of the countryside, I now realize, is as important a standard of the civilizational
progress as are the urban centres. ) I also enjoy the intellectual climate of the Essex department and its
interdisciplinary composition.
My two early disappointments both involved the university. Unlike the University of Pennsylvania and
American campuses in general where multiculturalism "on the ground" is represented by a great diversity
of in-grown , American-born students and staff from different ethnic and racial groups, the University of
Essex I saw had many different faces, for sure, but most of them were foreign-born students or visiting
scholars—the native population was, to my surprise, solidly white. The other unpleasant surprise was what
from my American perspective I perceived as a suffocating bureaucratization-and-centralization of the
university: those endless meetings (no American academic would put up with three-hour-long departmental
gatherings), huge piles of paperwork to ﬁll out for every new course (in America it was enough to email the
HoD convincingly justifying a new seminar), instructions to overhaul, and overhaul again, our just-revised
degree programmes continuously trickling in from upstairs (the American departments, at private
universities such as Penn anyway, have the autonomy to decide what and how they teach). What at the
beginning I found equally surprising was the tacit acquiescence of my colleagues to such, as I saw it,
obvious violations of the departmental autonomy and the misuse of the academics' qualiﬁcations. For the
ﬁrst three or four years at Essex I was quite bothered by these annoyances, but I have since—yet another
unexpected development related to my relocation to Britain—resurrected my long-since buried homo
sovieticus coping strategy of beating-the-system by going around the rules, and I now more or less
manage the situation. (I have come to believe that my acquiescent colleagues, feeling overpowered by the
machine, are doing just the same, but we only occasionally exchange hints to this effect.)
With my transplantation to Britain, the focus of my research—I have continued to work on international
migration-related issues – has changed from across-time to across-space analyses as I now comparatively
assess theoretical and empirical research agendas in the study of international migration in Europe vs.
America and East vs. West Europe, as well as the forms and "contents" of glocalization effects of present-
day immigrants' presence on different sender and receiver countries. Inspired by my departmental
colleague Rob Stones and by the invitation to join the Oxford workshop devoted to elaborating the
mechanisms of international migration within the morphogenesis theoretical framework, I have also been
trying to ﬁll in the gaps in the structuration model that has informed my sociological thinking and empirical
research and, especially, to clarify what I believe are reconcilable differences between these two
approaches. My ﬁve-and-a-half-year-long engagement with British sociology outside of the Essex
department has by and large conﬁrmed what I ﬁnd rewarding about the latter: its plural-mindedness, multi-
disciplinarity, openness to different ideas (but without the American- or consumer capitalism-style nervous
readiness to discard the currently used things in exchange for new ones), and friendly tolerance of
intellectual idiosyncrasies. I also appreciate here a closer integration than in America of empirical research
with social theory; in the United States these two are pursued parallel to rather than in a relationship with
each other, and the label "theorist" commonly implies a superﬂuous addendum to the "real" sociology
focused on counting measurable aspects of social life.
All this is a genuine joy. And yet, there is something distinctly parochial, I ﬁnd, about the British
sociology's foci and debates that does not seem to agree with its above-noted features and has no parallel
in its American counterpart. I dutifully attended two consecutive BSA annual meetings after I settled in
Britain after which I gave them up because of what I felt both times was a self-absorbed complacency of
sorts permeating the presentations and discussions. In the exchanges about good and better conceptual
frameworks to account for speciﬁc problems related to international migration carried in British journals and
workshops, the relevant propositions formulated outside of the country are seldom or only superﬁcially
noted as if, not ours, they were by that token unworthy attention. The continued criticisms of the
structuration model by British theorists focus exclusively on Giddens's ancient formulations thereof as if
the more recent work in this ﬁeld by non-British, North American sociologists was either viewed as
irrelevant by or even unfamiliar to the debaters. Might it be – I am not sure how to explain what I see – a
reﬂection of some (post-)imperial mentality unselfconsciously shared by British sociologists most of whom,
their different class backgrounds and political views notwithstanding, are still solidly native-born and
predominantly white as compared with their American counterparts?
It is beginning to feel like home here and I will soon become a British citizen. Although I still have a long
road ahead learning the ropes of my new habitat, considering all the pros and cons as I see them now I
have not regretted either my decision to leave the United States or to settle in Britain.
References
EMIRBAYER, Mustafa and Ann Mische. 1998. "What Is Agency?" American Sociological Review 103(4):
962-1025. [doi:://dx.doi.org/10.1086/231294]
SEWELL, William, 1992. "A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation,"  American Journal of
Sociology 98(1): 1-29. [doi:://dx.doi.org/10.1086/229967]
http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/3/18.html 2 31/08/2011

What Is Agency?&quot; American Sociological Review 103(4): 962-1025. [doi:://dx.doi.org/10.1086/231294] SEWELL,

Different Times, Different Places, Different Standpoints

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Different Times, Different Places, Different Standpoints

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