Today my co-authors and I have withdrawn a manuscript under consideration in a well-regarded international journal. We were invited to make a second set of revisions to a paper on ‘muckraking sociology, the NHS and COVID’, but felt that to agree to yet more revisions/compromises would be a step too far, not least in a paper constructed to engender resistance to the governmental status quo. We will later make the paper available online. This brief blog raises a related matter: are we as a community of sociologists making too many sacrifices?
This is not an attack on journal editors or referees, who we entirely accept are acting in good faith in appraising submissions, but it is to suggest that ‘we’ are being tamed, as it were against our better judgement. We have allowed ourselves to become too submissive when confronted with the neoliberalisation of the academic community, and most notably of the universities. We feel we cannot avoid playing the neoliberal games – and indeed often cannot, without being penalised – that have become a feature of life in post-1970s financialised or rentier capitalism.
It is Habermas’ concept of ‘systematically distorted communication’ that comes most readily to mind. This recognises that a broad and diverse range of academics, including apprentice practitioners as well as senior managers and journal editors, act in good faith while at the same time, as it were unawares (though this verdict is on occasions overly generous), facilitating and/or enacting the systemic colonisation of their domain. Bourdieu reminds us that all fields, including academia, are infiltrated by political capital.
I have written often of the ‘taming’ of sociology and of the discipline’s continuing neglect or sidelining of what I’ve termed ‘foresight’ and ‘action sociology’ (respectively, the spelling out and appraisal of alternate futures for our societal and institutional arrangements and a reflexive engagement with transformative ‘movements for change’). My thesis here is not novel: it is that we – I am not pointing the finger at others and excluding myself – are collectively falling foul of unconscious deception (systematically distorted communication). We are at one with what is being done to us.
It is no great hardship for a retired babyboomer like me to make this argument: the salience of my CV for my material and social wellbeing is dissipated. But I make the argument nevertheless. The sociology project is pointless if it is no longer oriented to a (‘reconstructed’) Enlightenment impetus towards the creation of a good, or at least better, society. And here’s a ready-made test for us: do we, or do we not, contest the current Tory predilection for the for-profit disassembling of ‘our’ NHS, latterly under cover of COVID? It seems apparent to me that it represents an unambiguously – evidence-based – regressive ‘reform’.
Benny Goodman, Miranda Scambler and I will asap make our paper available on social media in the hope of a wider readership. We have no illusions that it is anything special, but we do suggest that its message should be disseminated. We welcome informed responses.