It came out of the blue! It was an initiative taken from within the office of the UCL’s Vice-Provost for Research, David Price, and I was contacted as a likely lead for an exciting proposal, namely, the establishment within UCL of a Virtual Institute of Sociological Studies. It had long been a grievance of mine that while UCL was home to a significant number of first-rate sociologists, this disciplinary presence was all but unknown to UCL staff, let alone to people outside the institution. Here was a possible remedy, and one with sponsorship in high places. Contentedly at home in my office in Graham Hart’s Department of Infection and Population Health, I was visited by David’s super-efficient emissary Henrietta Bruhn. We collated what data we had on ‘sociology at UCL’ and pondered a strategy. Why not a Virtual Institute of Sociology, I asked? Internal politics, I was told. Meaning, I enquired? Objections from the Department of Anthropology I was informed. I’d like to report that I was surprised. We held a series of strategic meetings before holding a UCL-wide Town Meeting to test the waters more widely. This was well attended, went well and we were encouraged. Incidentally, I recall one UCL economist intervening with a plea for us to develop an institutional counterbalance to UCL’s orthodox neoliberal Department of Economics! I had chaired the Town meeting and it was agreed, with the support of David, Henrietta and Graham Hart, that I would be the inaugural Institute Director if the concept and associated bid for funding was approved.
A particular pleasure of this protracted episode was that I got to make the acquaintance of UCL sociologists whom I’d never met. The only colleagues I knew well were Paul Higgs, Mel Bartley and Fiona Stevenson, another excellent sociologist who had joined us in 2001 as a lecturer based in the Department of Primary Care (a department, incidentally, that she went on to lead). I met Brian Balmer and Alena Ledeneva and her colleagues from UCL’s celebrated School of Soviet and Eastern European Studies (SSEES). I was encouraged by David Price to put together a bid for a Virtual Institute for Sociological Studies under the auspices and guidance of Stephen Smith, Professor of Economics and at the time Executive Dean of the Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences (2007-2013). Stephen was sharp, friendly, supportive and, I felt, cautious. He and David provided seed funding for raising sociology’s profile in advance of submitting a bid to senior management. Enjoying a brief bout of autonomous reflexivity, I set up a seminar series that included several internal speakers and well-attended talks by Bob Jessop and Tony Giddens (the latter courtesy of his persuasive partner, Alena).
Reflecting back, I have several observations. The first is that I became aware of just how instrumental my colleagues in sociology had become. ‘What’s in it for me?’ ‘Might it even work to my disadvantage?’ I could almost hear them thinking. In fact, I proceeded with caution. While the future possibility of converting a Virtual Institute into an Actual Department was broached with David, Stephen and a handful of Goffman’s ‘wise’, nobody was in any way precipitous or cavalier. In fact, the last thing we wanted or intended to do was to end up leaning on sociologists throughout UCL, many of whom might well have been content where they were, to leave their current locations in favour of joining a new and unknown ‘actual’ institute/department. A second observation is that, for all the whole-hearted support of David, Stephen and their offices, UCL’s internal politics were predictably less than straightforward. I was frequently given contradictory advice, and it was clear that these contradictions reflected the strategic ‘positionings’ of rival senior managers: please one and you offended another. Bread and butter stuff for a sociologist of course, but no easier to navigate for all that. While I had good reason to trust David and Stephen, it was less easy to trust others, especially within the senior management team. Tensions within this team were disguised or underplayed when I was present but apparent nonetheless. More challenging were direct contradictions. Adviser A: ‘How are you going to bring in revenue in the medium-to-long term?’ ‘Like this.’ Adviser B: ‘You can’t do that, and if you do I’ll block the initiative!’ I remain unconvinced that the Provost of the day, Malcolm Grant, was ever fully on board, and there were rumours of resistance to sociology’s expansion from on high (one regret in retrospect is that I never pushed for a further private meeting with the Provost). My third observation is that decision-making up to Provost level, and certainly within the senior management team, had an element of randomness about it. Our bid undoubtedly suffered from internal wrangling, haggling and trading over ‘priorities’. At the end of the day, at one long-awaited meeting of the senior management team, time apparently ran out before our bid could be discussed and decided on.
While all this was unfolding, I had queried my own role, wondering out loud if this meta-reflexive was failing as an autonomous reflexive lead; but I was assured by both David and Stephen that this was not the case. So I remained in place and in limbo until my retirement eventually loomed, and it seemed foolish to remain as lead and the potential inaugural Director of a UCL Virtual Institute of Sociological Studies when my tenure in the event would be very short. I made discreet enquiries and canvassed for a successor, but with little success: too few colleagues, or in sone cases their heads of department, were willing to commit. So in the end the initiative came to nothing. There was to be no return of the bid to the senior management team after it had been ‘talked out’. I am including here the executive summary from the proposal we submitted to the senior management team, which I think catches the ethos of our bid. Bear in mind though that it was written well over a decade ago now.
UCL Virtual Institute for Sociological Studies: Executive Summary
Sociology’s presence in UCL is considerable and influential but largely invisible. Colleagues within UCL and local, national and global communities might alike be forgiven for concluding that the discipline is not represented in UCL. There are a number of important consequences of this lack of visibility:
- The perception at home and overseas of a disciplinary gap or deficit in a leading global university
- Wasted opportunities for research collaborations due to ignorance of actually-existing expertise
- The misperceptions of leading public, private and charitable funding bodies
- A failure of representation for sociology and sociologists
- The isolation or estrangement of postgraduate sociology students and early-career researchers
The Institute would make good these deficiencies and, more positively, act as a springboard for new initiatives. Specifically, the Institute would raise the profile of sociology internally and externally. It would do this not only by familiar devices – like a designated website, a regular seminar programme, topical symposia, special guest lectures, globally marketed short courses – but also by actively promoting the multi- and inter-disciplinary synergy now pivotal for ‘outcome measures’ for leading twenty-first century universities.
The Institute would build sensitively on in-post UCL sociologists’ ongoing research and teaching commitments and aspirations: it would consolidate, complement and develop existing resources of staffing and expertise. It would enhance sociology’s contributions to (1) external research income and (2) postgraduate teaching and training.
As the budget demonstrates, the Institute would require relatively modest but nonetheless significant investment in the current financial climate. While there would be no additional salary costs for the Director, there would for full-time administrative support and for running costs, initially for a two-year period.
The Institute would be answerable to two discrete bodies. An international Advisory Board would oversee sociology’s research and teaching initiatives; and Executive and Management Boards would monitor the return on its intellectual and financial investment.
It is appropriate that I provide an update on what has been achieved on the part of the discipline of sociology after my retirement. If our bid for a Virtual Institute of Sociological Studies withered and died during Malcolm Grant’s period of office, it did not die in David Price’s imagination. A turning point was UCL’s seemingly predestined absorption of the nearby Institute of Education (IOE) in December of 2014, the latter becoming a single faculty school of UCL called the UCL Institute of Education. The IOE was well served by some excellent sociologists. On my occasional visits to UCL post-2014 I sensed a natural anxiety about the UCL ‘takeover’ on the part of IOE staff, but the net effect of the move was an even larger and more impressive sociological presence (UCL now offers 34 Masters degrees in sociology). Moreover, UCL now offers several undergraduate programmes in sociology as well as multiple opportunities for postgraduate study. My long-term grouse about the discipline’s invisibility inside as well as outside of UCL has, it seems, been answered. In fact, UCL sociology, I notice, is now ranked, and highly, in the awful metrical comparisons of universities and departments that plague us these days (of which more in later sketches). I was particularly pleased to see that the ‘UCL Sociology Network’, which I founded in 2009 and chaired until my retirement in 2013 (after which Paul Higgs took over until 2021), has been resurrected and revitalised as ‘a creative space for sociological doctoral students and staff across UCL’. It has initiated a series of annual lectures, with BSA President Germinder Bhambra giving an excellent inaugural talk on ‘Contemporary Sociology and the Reconstruction of its Canons’ that I was invited to attend (and which was followed by an equally excellent meal). I retain an input into the Twitter account associated with the Sociology Network that I also started, though since 2021 I’ve been pleased to share this responsibility with others. I like to think I paved the way for some of what has happened since my departure.