Studying power, studying the powerful

1. Studying power, studying the powerful David Whyte, Department of Sociology and Social Policy Wednesday 2nd March enagage@liverpool.ac.uk

2. Professionalisation and Power • Burawoy and the professionalization of a ‘public sociology’ ... proposes the introduction of a range of techniques that will: “recognize and validate” public sociology; developing systems of standards, awards and techniques of evaluation. • A key moment in public sociology and the tradition on which he draws: “the turbulence of the 1968 Annual Meeting in Boston, which included Martin Nicolaus’s famous and fearless attack on ‘fat-cat sociology,’ and forthright demands from the Caucus of Black Sociologists, the Radical Caucus, and the Caucus of Women Sociologists.” • Those movements generally uninterested in the institutional architecture of the discipline but favouredan engagement between sociology and popular struggles and movements. Nicolaus: sociology has to be liberated from its functionality and its dependency on government and corporate funding not by a process of professionalization, but by severing itself from the “branch of political power.”

3. Studying Up? Alvin Gouldner: not a moral question (why stand in the service of the state; or why not develop a revolutionary sociology?) but a purely practical one: why study down and not up? • In its formative years sociology did quite a lot of studying up (e.g. E.A. Ross Sin and Society; Thorstein Veblen’s work on elite behaviour). • This gathers pace throughout the 20th Century…(e.g. Bearleand MearnsThe Modern Corporation and Private Property; C Wright Mills The Power Elite, 1956) • A high point in key sociological studies of elites in the 1970s (Stanworth and Giddens’ Elites and Power in British Society; Pierre Bourdieu’sDistinction; andJohn Scott’s Corporations, Classes and Capitalism). … uncharted territory…..

4. Researching the Powerful Across Subjects Other disciplines have developed methodological systems (not matter how flawed) which do not differentiate the study of elites as a peripheral object of study. • Political science (“process tracing”) and (“elite interviewing”). • Anthropology: the study of elites has also been a more central concern ....The study of power in sociology has not been ‘mainstreamed’ as it has in other disciplines…a key consequence of this is that sociology is not ‘fit for purpose’

5. Back to Basics? The principles that underpin the discipline are at best irrelevant, and at worst, undermine the process of researching the powerful. • no distinction made between research subjects according to their relative power • common interest principle • “Public interest” principle assumes: • that social research, the generation of knowledge and so on, is generally in the public interest; and • that as it will be immediately obvious to any researcher when they come into conflict with a “public interest”.

6. The Contradiction of Autonomy Gouldner: The moral career of the sociologist is beset by the “contradiction of autonomy” “When sociologists stress the autonomy of sociology – that it should (and therefore that it can) be pursued entirely in terms of its own standards, free of the influences of the surrounding society - they are giving testimony of their loyalty to the rational credo of their profession. At the same time, however, they are also contradicting themselves as sociologists, for surely the strongest general claim of sociology is that men are shaped in countless ways by the press of their social surround. Looked at with bland innocence, then, the sociologists’ claim to autonomy entails a contradiction between the claims of sociology and the claims of reason and ‘profession.’” (1971: 53) (Contrast this position with the American Anthropological Association’s ethical statement)

7. Rules for Scrutinising Power? 1 4 textbook ethical principles (e.g. Diener and Crandall, 1978): 1 the harm principle • only refers to a very limited definition of individualized harm. • what does the harm principle mean when research subjects are in a position to generate or ameliorate social harms? • can corporate harm or institutional harm that arises from the research be a shield that protects the institutions that are research subjects? 2 informed consent “Covert research may be justified in certain circumstances, e.g. … where access to spheres of social life is closed by powerful or secretive interests and where it is impossible to use overt methods to obtain essential data.” (SLSA)

8. Rules for Scrutinising Power? 2 3 invasion of privacy .....justified in the public interest? 4 prevention of deception • key sources of information simply would not be obtained without deception. • can a researcher be anything other than be deceptive in this context? • can research, if it is deceptive, be a corrective to organisational deception? • …what about research subjects that systematically engage in deception? ....towards an ethically informed deception?

9. Ethically Informed Deception? 1 a “public interest” defence…… “Members must satisfy themselves that the potential benefits of any study, whether in terms of direct social or other benefits to any group, or to society as a whole, or in terms of the work’s contribution to the furtherance of knowledge, outweigh any social risks for the research participants, before embarking upon it.” (SLSA) “Although sociologists, like other researchers are committed to the advancement of knowledge, that goal does not, of itself, provide an entitlement to override the rights of others.” (BSA)

10. Ethically Informed Deception? 2 If professionally informed deception is inadequate, can an a reflexive, ‘individualised’ approach ever be a model for effective research praxis? • can only ever shed light on the things that the individual wants to shed light on. • doomed to be removed of professional credibility. Is there an ethically informed set of principles that we can use to research the powerful that both • eschews the role of researcher as God; and • is not merely driven by an individualized need to know?