In the radical version of social-constructivism-oriented qualitative sociology, there used to be a bold slogan: There are no facts, there is only interpretation. This slogan has since become (to some of us, at least) a painful memory of a happy, naive period during which the threat of war seemed (from a privileged, Western point of view) a very distant one, when environmental fears were focused on the hole in the ozone layer (to which in the event a relatively simple and painless solution could be found) and when political disputes were about which welfare benefit to establish first (to exaggerate and over-emphasise a Nordic perspective just a little). Sometimes, during this period, concentrating on interpretation probably caused failures to recognise social wrongs, even though social constructivism taught us priceless lessons in understanding individual perspectives and their significance to collective processes. Exclusive preoccupation with interpretation also gave much food for irony to those who see sociology not just as a dubiously non-positivist academic endeavour, but simply as outright politics.
Today, in a world of ‘wicked’ problems and desperate searches for resilience, solutions, and adaptation mechanisms, both facts and by-passing them are at the centre of attention. We’re not living in an era of post-truth or post-facts, more like one marked by an accelerating war on facts, and struggles for recognition, with significant consequences.
Within academia, this war is manifested in various ways. Firstly, it tends to result in arranging academic disciplines in order of preference in terms of public estimation – or whatever public estimation is taken to be at any particular time. In many societies and various public spheres, it is currently economists who have gained the status of neutral experts, while typically sociologists and perhaps even more so gender studies specialists are suspected of ‘politicking’ which they only market as expertise. Yet anyone well-informed about debates within and between different branches of economics is well aware that offering economic explanations, forecasts, and policy recommendations is but one perspective, and that emphases and political directions depend strongly on whichever paradigm happens to be in a dominant position in the field of economics at a given time. The claim of neutrality, however, serves certain political projects well, since the currently powerful branches of economics in many contexts decisively support policies such as austerity measures and the marketisation of health care and other public services, to mention only a few.
Secondly, the war on facts influences the position of academic knowledge altogether. What is academic knowledge for? Many science funders today require increasing stakeholder involvement, policy recommendations, and rapid reactivity to issues seen as important in day-to-day decision-making processes. ‘Knowledge-based decision-making’ is a new governmental mantra, but the take on facts, scientific knowledge, and truth-seeking lurking behind it is, increasingly often, very different from an understanding of these terms in most of the social-scientific or humanistic traditions characterising European universities. In its mild version, it means that a government wants a scientific justification for a political project it has already decided upon, and whoever offers to provide one, gets the job. The worst-case-scenario associated with this tendency is that the governing parties decide by themselves what they wish to count as knowledge, and implement a hostile overthrow even of entire academic fields if they are not included in this deliberate ad hoc understanding of research. The most grotesque example, of course, is the current Hungarian government’s attack on gender studies. In 2015, uproar was caused by the Japanese government’s apparent views in favour of closing social science and humanities departments altogether, on the grounds that they inadequately served ‘society’s needs’. While this policy was (rightly but not entirely successfully) resisted as detrimental to democracy itself, it casts a sobering light on today’s governments that such a position could even be contemplated. It is as if ‘knowledge-based decision-making’ can be seen as independent of the need to explore criteria for what ought to count as knowledge, and as if ‘society’s needs’ are straightforward, obvious and undisputed.
Academic research, seen from a sociological vantage-point, aims to discover the truth, with, in the best case, the aim of promoting a good life and helping human societies achieve it. Here academics can best, or perhaps only, help by being autonomous. Otherwise, academic fields become response-dispensers to a series of daily problems with short-term perspectives and only a vague idea of the big picture. If academic knowledge is harnessed simply to on-demand work, it will not use its full potential to what is most essential: finding out things that are entirely new, and answers that are not simply the easiest, but reach beyond the lowest-hanging fruit.
Academic exploration is difficult in many ways. Not abstruse, but hard to accomplish, and often slow. It is also the case that tackling hardship can result in new, surprising, epoch-making results – but you cannot order these online (or offline), and their delivery is not certain. Seeking knowledge is a risky business, but it is high risk–high gain, as the European Research Council defines its grant requirements. When successful, results carry far beyond the daily troubles of decision-making, while possibly also solving many practical problems on the way. Our ambition, however, must be higher. We should keep it that way, regardless of pressures to do otherwise. Here we should be united, solidary, and collectivistic. There is enough competition to indulge in on other fronts.
So what did you do about it when it was already clear the wicked problems would not go away on their own? Those of us who live long enough are not likely to avoid this question from younger generations. We should, at least, be able to answer that we sought for the truth, or rather, truths, that we promoted what we could support as reliable facts, and tried to help our societies get a grip on our age of wicked problems.
The articles in this issue take part in this endeavour in a great variety of ways. Tuukka Ylä-Anttila’s article calls for a more nuanced analysis of the relationship between knowledge and contemporary populism than the post-truth debate has hitherto produced. In his analysis of right-wing populist countermedia in Finland, he shows how right-wing populist debators advocate counterknowledge: they profess belief in truth achievable by inquiry, not on the parts of mainstream experts but alternative ones. His article shows evidence of a quite different take on knowledge than the ‘common sense’ orientation often attributed to populism. Ylä-Anttila argues that while some of the strongly conspiracy-oriented discussions and claims that his data contains may seem stereotypical and/or outright mad on the surface level, they should be considered seriously. They reflect the absolutist epistemology that he shows to be a generalised orientation to knowledge within this type of populist debate, and their supporters see them as helping to build an ‘objectivist’ technocracy based on radical scientism. This epistemology is followed by an equally absolutist orientation to power and politics, which has immense leverage in today’s political climate.
In the first of an occasional series curated by Beata Solokowska on the political and cultural roles of professional qualifications, Thomas Pfeffer and Isabella Skrivanek stress the necessity to better understand the role of professional qualifications and how they can be recognised across borders. At a time of heightened migration, it may seem appealing to simplify these forms of recognition, easing the suffering of individuals who count as qualified in one geographical setting yet find themselves deprived of their professional identities in another. Using the Austrian case as an example, Pfeffer and Skrivanek argue that if such a project were undertaken in a simplistic manner it would undermine its own aims. They explore competing and complementary theories of what professional qualifications are – what they signify and for whom, with what kinds of learning they can deal, how they are expected to relate to labour markets and whom they are intended to protect. Qualifications are social constructs conferring membership in particular (though swiftly-changing) epistemic communities, but they do not function identically in all settings, nor are they controlled by the same sorts of group everywhere. Pfeffer and Skrivanek, in sum, point to urgent questions that need to be mastered in order for us to make the kinds of progress that are needed in this field.
Laurie Hanquinet and Mike Savage scrutinise, in their equally timely piece, the possible relationships of populism and nationalism to Brexit. They use data from the EUCROSS survey in 2012 and 2013 to explore national, European and global self-identification in six European countries, connecting them with mobility histories, social networks, and practices associated with cultural consumption. Strong national identities are not, as this data shows, necessarily incompatible with wider transnational identities. But despite what is often inferred from the Brexit vote, the authors argue that the British are not clearly more nationalistic than other Europeans; but they do tend less often than do other Europeans to feel that they are parts of larger entities than their own country. When they do feel parts of larger entities, then they may be oriented to historic global connections, notably connections to (Anglophone elements of) empire. This can lead to a sort of cosmopolitanism, but one that can be anti-European. For Hanquinet and Savage, it is crucial to discern the mechanisms by which attachments do or do not form, and to take into account their symbolic components. Their exploration offers intriguing contentions, for instance that networks (such as partners from abroad) or consumption practices (such as musical taste) are more influential for identity formation, and concrete experience of living abroad is less influential, than might have been expected. In the end they are sceptical that Brexit was driven by a nationalist backlash, arguing against any straightforward division between ‘left-behind’ nationalists and the affluent who support Europe. For Hanquinet and Savage the real state of affairs is far more complex than images of political flows and currents might suggest, with interlaced patterns of mobility, network and lifestyle pointing to complex causes still to be explored. We might add that this discussion forms part of a long history of debate about who, and in particular what social classes, has been responsible for nationalist or right-wing developments after 1900; it is not always ‘the usual suspects’.
Finally, Melissa Sebrecht, Evelien Tonkens and Christian Bröer make use of Randall Collins’ theory of Interaction Ritual Chains in analysing both the interactional and institutional ‘rules’ of recognition practised in the context of sheltered workshops for young men with mild intellectual disabilities. The aim of the workshops – as is the case in so many empowerment projects today – is to provide recognition through work. The emphasis on work brings different kinds of labour-market policies to the stage together with, but at the same time partly in contradiction with, a more care-oriented ethos of recognition, let alone a holistic or collectivistic one. Sebrecht, Tonkens and Bröer display the contradictions among which the subjects of the workshops found themselves: they were supposed to achieve recognition through work, yet only very few could actually fulfil the productivity and competition demands of the labour-market. Mostly sheltered work was the only realistic long-term option for the young men in this study, and thus the aim of recognition through work had unintended consequences. The authors conclude that nuanced sociological analyses of recognition are necessary in order to deepen our understanding of what recognition may mean in practice, and to critically assess the plethora of projects aiming at ‘strengthening recognition’ without any realistic means, or at worst even any genuine will, to give the participants concrete tools to achieve the criteria for the recognition concerned.
In our book reviews, Peter Breiner offers a detailed and compelling exploration of Liisi Keedus’s work The Crises of German Historicism: The Early Political Thought of Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss. While these two thinkers are often seen as opposites, Keedus locates the early work of both in opposition to historicism, and the influence this opposition had on the development of these two authors during their later lives in America. ‘Historicism’ counted for them as the reduction of ideas to their contexts, the valorisation of collecting empirical data for its own sake, and relativism in ethics; a fascinating combination of ideas that are sometimes considered compelling today, though in different blends. Breiner shows how Keedus explores the different paths taken by Arendt and Strauss in opposition to this combination, and how they arrived at opposing ideas about what political thinking and political action should be like.
Miri Rozmarin reviews Victoria Browne’s Feminism, Time and Nonlinear History, which argues that time is lived and experiential, not unidirectional but multidirectional, encoded as a praxis. Browne distinguishes between traces of the past, narrative time, calendar time and generational time – in each case trying to provide a socio-cultural, experiential understanding of temporality. For Rozmarin, Browne’s philosophical exploration is impressive, but lays essential groundwork for, rather than providing, an outline of feminist temporalities. Robert Osburn reviews Bruce Collet’s Migration, Religion and Schooling in Liberal Democratic States, which aims to construct education policies allowing migrants to become ‘autonomous’ members of liberal democracies while still, if they so choose, practising their religions. Collet wants us to listen to and learn from migrants, and to make space for religious expression without establishing religions, and Osburn interrogates the theoretical means he selects to this end.
Lastly, Magnus Haavelsrud reviews Countering Extremism in British Schools: The Truth about the Trojan Horse Affair by John Holmwood and Therese O’Toole. The ‘affair’ began in 2013, when a photocopied letter was sent to Birmingham City Council in the UK, purporting to show that schools in the area which had large Muslim populations were to be targeted for instilling extreme ‘Islamist’ attitudes in pupils. While this letter is now regarded as a forgery, it impelled a draconian reaction from British authorities. One school in particular was singled out for panicked response, despite its excellent track record, and the careers and reputations of some of its staff permanently damaged. Holmwood and O’Toole show how this effort at ‘counter-extremism’ itself betrayed the values it saw as threatened, and Haavelsrud lists the lessons they feel should be learned from this tragic affair – which, we should note, is still widely misunderstood in the public sphere and, not least, on line.