Troubling Sociological Concepts: An Interrogation [1st ed.] 9783030516437, 9783030516444

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xi
Introduction (Martyn Hammersley)....Pages 1-16
Ideology (Martyn Hammersley)....Pages 17-39
Culture (Martyn Hammersley)....Pages 41-69
Society (Martyn Hammersley)....Pages 71-105
Social Class (Martyn Hammersley)....Pages 107-142
Sex and Gender (Martyn Hammersley)....Pages 143-160
Ethnicity, Race, and Racism (Martyn Hammersley)....Pages 161-199
Power (Martyn Hammersley)....Pages 201-217
Values, Interests, Goals, and Attitudes (Martyn Hammersley)....Pages 219-234
Back Matter ....Pages 235-239

Citation preview

Troubling Sociological Concepts An Interrogation Martyn Hammersley

Troubling Sociological Concepts

Martyn Hammersley

Troubling Sociological Concepts An Interrogation

Martyn Hammersley The Open University Milton Keynes, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-51643-7    ISBN 978-3-030-51644-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51644-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © agefotostock / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

The very first lesson that we have a right to demand that logic shall teach us is how to make our ideas clear; and a most important one it is, depreciated only by minds who stand in need of it. —Charles Sanders Peirce, How to Make Our Ideas Clear CP5: 393

Written in the time of pandemic, this book is dedicated to all those I love, and to those who have lost their loved ones

Acknowledgement

Thanks go to Roger Gomm, for his friendship, assistance, and support over many years, and especially during the writing of this book.

ix

Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 Ideology 17 3 Culture 41 4 Society 71 5 Social Class107 6 Sex and Gender143 7 Ethnicity, Race, and Racism161 8 Power201 9 Values, Interests, Goals, and Attitudes219 Index235

xi

1 Introduction

The most succinct rationale for this book is that, in an important sense, sociologists often do not know what they are talking about. This is because they give insufficient attention to the vague, and multiple, senses of key terms they employ, as well as to the serious conceptual problems these can involve. Any understanding of the world depends to a considerable extent on the concepts in which it is framed. A very long time ago, Max Weber (1904/1949: 92–93) complained that many of those used by social scientists and historians were ‘ambiguous constructs’ whose meaning ‘is only concretely felt but not clearly thought-out’ (p94). More than half a century later, Lachenmeyer (1971: 1) made a similar point: ‘sociologists use terms and theoretical statements that are imprecise because they abound in ambiguity, vagueness, opacity and contradiction’. Similar complaints have been made in other areas of social science, especially in the study of politics, where there have been several systematic attempts to understand the process of conceptualisation and to refine concepts accordingly (see, for instance, Sartori et  al. 1975; Oppenheim 1981; Sartori 1984; Goertz 2006; Collier and Gerring 2009; Schaffer 2016). The need for clarity should be obvious. If, for example, it is said that ‘inequality is increasing’, or ‘racism is widespread’, we need to know what © The Author(s) 2020 M. Hammersley, Troubling Sociological Concepts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51644-4_1

1

2 

M. Hammersley

is meant by ‘inequality’ and by ‘racism’, as well as in what respect the one is increasing and the other is widespread. If these phrases are used as rallying cries, vagueness may not matter; indeed, it could be an advantage. However, for the purposes of sociological analysis it is essential to know what is being claimed rather more precisely. Distinctions are required to trace out potentially significant similarities and differences among the phenomena being investigated, ones that will enable us to understand and explain those phenomena better. Furthermore, without more clarity, any assessment of the truth of sociological claims is likely to be fruitless. Indeed, where there is disagreement in the interpretation of terms, the different sides of the argument will often talk past one another. Many years ago, Sartori (1975) suggested that social science had become a ‘Tower of Babel’, and this description is even more true today than it was when he was writing. For example, if we consider the term ‘social structure’, which is frequently treated as central to sociology, we find that it has been given very different senses: a relatively stable pattern of social interaction; a hierarchical set of positions (for example, occupations) to which people are ‘allocated’; or a hidden, generative process (as, for instance, in the notion of ‘structural racism’). As Rubinstein (2001: 2) remarked: ‘there is a striking degree of obscurity and confusion over [the concept of social structure], a concept that is widely regarded as defining the sociological perspective’. The situation is hardly better with terms derived from everyday usage. For example, ‘work’ is the focus of a major subdiscipline of sociology, but it has multiple meanings, and the main sense of this term still adopted by sociologists—paid employment— excludes similar activities that are outside the monetary economy, ones which may be of equal significance in many respects. Furthermore, the other senses of the term—expenditure of energy, actions whose satisfactions are entirely indirect, or that are undertaken as a result of constraint—are often relied upon implicitly in sociological usage. In this book I explore the meanings that have been given to several key terms that are widely employed in sociological explanations, and in social science more generally. These include ‘ideology’; ‘culture’; ‘society’; ‘social class’; ‘sex’ and ‘gender’; ‘ethnicity’ and ‘race’; ‘power’; ‘values’ and ‘interests’. They by no means exhaust the corpus of sociological concepts, but the terms discussed have long been central to the discipline. I look at

1 Introduction 

3

some of the history of each one, the competing senses given to it, and the problems these involve. I do not claim to have resolved the problems, but I do make proposals about how the terms can best be defined and used; as well as occasionally about how they should not be used. However, these can be no more than suggestions, since the problems involved here, like many others faced by social scientists, are not ones that are open to immediate solution. Instead, solutions have to be worked towards, collectively. Of course, one conclusion could be that some of these terms ought to be abandoned. For example, Jenkins (2002: ch3, 2010) has proposed this as regards ‘society’, ‘culture’, and ‘social structure’; Latour (1986: 278) proposes abandoning ‘power’; and I reach a similar recommendation regarding ‘ideology’. However, there is no point in proposing that a term be abandoned unless we examine the meanings it has been given and the purposes these have served: only if it can be shown that it is not necessary for these purposes, or that the purposes fall outside the remit of sociology, can such a proposal be justified. In my view, one of the most disabling problems facing sociology, at present, is that (for a variety of reasons) it does not operate as a collective enterprise aimed at resolving problems through careful thought and investigation, but rather to a large extent simply houses competing approaches, these often asserting supposedly definitive accounts about highly complex matters. The aim of this book is to prompt a more deliberative approach to the problems surrounding major terms that sociologists employ.1

Some Assumptions and Principles My approach to this task necessarily relies on assumptions, both about sociology and about the use of language, ones that may not be widely shared. In fact, it is almost inevitable, given the fundamental divisions that now prevail within the discipline, that these assumptions will be contentious. Some colleagues may deny that there are significant  There have, of course, been other attempts to clarify the terms discussed in this book, and I have drawn on many of these. I will reference them where appropriate. 1

4 

M. Hammersley

problems with sociological concepts, or that dealing with them is a priority. And, among those who recognise the problems, there are likely to be differences in view, both about what is wrong and about what needs to be done. This situation is not new. In the mid-twentieth century, Talcott Parsons (1937: ch1, 1970) insisted that, given the requirements of analytical science, sociological concepts must form part of a properly systematic theory. Around the same time, other sociologists, equally unhappy with the state of the discipline, insisted on a much narrower conception of theory, as offering explanations for specific types of outcome; and they demanded that any theory be expressed in formal, perhaps even in axiomatic, terms (see, for instance, Hochberg 1959). Yet others placed primary emphasis on statistical analysis and the need for concepts to be operationally defined (Lundberg 1942; Lazarsfeld and Rosenberg 1955). Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, there were those suggesting that sociology is an ‘art form’, that it unavoidably has a discursive character that is similar to modes of writing in the humanities, or even to works of art and literature (Nisbet 1976; Stein 1963). From this perspective, a more ‘essayistic’ approach was recommended, with metaphor and other literary devices being regarded as essential, albeit requiring careful handling. These arguments continued in subsequent decades. Indeed, those who reject the models of natural science and mathematics have recently turned towards the humanities in much more radical ways, for example extolling the virtues of evocative and allusive forms of language (Tyler 1986), and/ or insisting on the need for sociologists to develop their own personal styles. One aspect of this is the emergence of ‘arts-based research’ (Leavy 2015). In light of this, some have questioned the very idea of, and need for, clarity of expression (Lather 1996; MacLure 2003). An older, prepostmodern, version of this idea was adopted by Adorno, for whom any writing that is easily understood involves complicity with, and reinforcement of, the dominant, oppressive culture, and the economic system underpinning it (see Jay 1984: 11–12). Meanwhile, others complain about sociological obscurity and ‘jargon’, calling for sociologists to write in a manner that lay audiences can understand (see, for instance, Toynbee 1999). Here, any difference between sociological and lay thinking, and their associated modes of expression, is downplayed or rejected.

1 Introduction 

5

Underlying these variations in view about sociological language are, of course, fundamental disagreements about the task and character of sociology itself. I cannot address these here in any detail, but I owe it to readers to outline my own views briefly, so that they can take these into account in approaching the discussion of key sociological terms in subsequent chapters. At the same time, I hope that the book will nevertheless be of use to those who hold different views from mine. Broadly speaking, I adopt a Weberian conception of social science: as aimed at producing explanations for particular patterns of events or outcomes, rather than generic theories about what causes what; as committed to objectivity, in the sense of being aimed solely at the production of value-relevant factual knowledge, and also to minimising bias; and as concerned with producing explanations that accurately represent both the meanings of actions for participants and their causation or consequences (see Hammersley 2014). From this point of view, sociological research is a specialised activity aimed solely at producing value-relevant knowledge of a particular kind, not with directly serving any other practical goal, such as improving policy or practice, challenging social inequalities, bringing about ‘social change’, troubling patriarchy, countering homophobia, or resisting racism—to mention various of the (undoubtedly desirable) goals that some sociologists take to be their task. I also assume that, like other disciplines, sociology is devoted to producing knowledge-claims that meet a relatively high threshold of likely validity compared to that which applies most of the time in everyday life (Hammersley 2011: ch5). Finally, I do not regard the discipline as adopting a completely different view of social phenomena from our mundane understandings of the social world. For me, sociological concepts are refinements of ones used by everybody, refinements designed to serve the specialised function of sociological analysis: namely, to produce explanations for important social processes and outcomes, explanations that are more likely to be true than those from other sources. In accord with this conception of sociology as an academic discipline, I take it that communication among researchers plays a crucial role in discovering the truth about what is being investigated, that this can only be achieved through a dialectical process (Hammersley 2011: ch7); in other words, through efforts aimed at achieving mutual understanding,

6 

M. Hammersley

as well as careful scrutiny of the arguments and evidence presented by others; all this against the background of what is taken to be already known, and the intellectual problems with which the discipline is preoccupied. My focus in this book is entirely on the role of sociological terminology in this process, not with the task of communicating research findings to lay audiences, since this raises yet further difficult problems (Hammersley 2002: chs. 2, 3, and 4; Hammersley 2013: 32–36). Given this conception of the sociological task, I suggest that the appropriate mode of expression, most of the time, should be arguments aimed at answering research questions, these providing sufficient evidence and background information about the research process to allow their validity to be assessed. Furthermore, sociological arguments need to have a clear structure, with any apparent inconsistencies dealt with, by either eliminating them or by explaining why they are only apparent, or are currently unresolved. While I do not accept that a formalisation of sociological argument is required that deploys explicit logical or mathematical terms, I do believe it is necessary to restrict usage of some resources available within natural language in order to facilitate clarity and precision for sociological purposes. What I mean by this is that not all of the rhetorical resources on which we often rely in other contexts in order to persuade others should be employed. For instance, ad hominem attacks are common in political debate, where there is an attempt to discredit views by questioning or challenging the character, intelligence, past record, and so on, of the speaker. Views are also sometimes dismissed on the grounds that they carry undesirable or deplorable political or ethical implications. And, as part of all this, terms may be used in a vague fashion that makes agreement more likely, or that is simply designed to win an argument. In my view, none of these strategies should be employed by sociologists, or academics more generally, though they frequently are. Specifically at the level of terminology, the general desideratum is that when a word is used in seeking to make sense of social phenomena, what it is intended to refer to—the type of object or property indicated—must be sufficiently clear either in sociological usage or through definition. In fields where terminology has been refined so that key words have a single, generally recognised meaning, writers do not need to spend much time clarifying most of their terms. But in a field such as sociology, where

1 Introduction 

7

central terms have multiple and often vague senses, where the types of object and property involved are rarely clearly understood, and where previously used distinctions are often forgotten or ignored, a great deal of effort is usually necessary on the part of a writer if both analysis and communication are to be effective.

Some Challenging Philosophical Complications There are difficult philosophical problems surrounding social science concepts that ought to be mentioned, though I can only deal with them briefly here. The first is perhaps the most fundamental of all: what is a concept? The starting point for answering this is to recognise that, in their behaviour, human beings (and other animals) rely on categories to which they assign phenomena as similar or different in relevant respects. Furthermore, not only are our categories comparative, in the sense that they relate to variation in phenomena, but also their meanings depend upon their relationships with one another. The most obvious relationship among categories is disjunction, where what belongs in category A cannot belong in category B, even though the phenomena being differentiated will share other features in common. This latter fact indicates a further type of relationship: subsumption. So, to take one of the most basic categorisations for animals of any kind, what I see in front of me could be either nutritious or poisonous (these are, in effect, disjunctive categories),2 but the items that belong to both these categories are eatable in the sense that it is possible for animals to eat them; unlike, for example, rocks or clouds. So, the categories ‘food’ and ‘poison’ are subsumed under the higher-level category of the ‘eatable’. In addition, there are, of course, many subtypes of food (and of poisons). Other types of relationship can involve assumptions about causality: faced with cooked fish as a food, there is a link to types of human activity— fishing and cooking—and these, of course, contrast with other sorts of  I am using the term ‘disjunction’ loosely here. As a logical term, strictly, it requires that the two categories exhaust the range of phenomena to which they apply, but there are of course things that we eat that are neither nutritious nor poisonous. 2

8 

M. Hammersley

activity that are not related to fish as a food. There may also be links to certain types of people who are assumed to have other sorts of characteristics besides the fact that they engage in the activity concerned: we may act on stereotypes about those who fish for a living and about those who cook for a living, for instance. It is necessary to think of categories simply as behavioural orientations that treat things as similar or different in how they should be responded to—they do not necessarily involve language. Nevertheless, the characteristics of members of a category can be formulated in thought and presented in statements to others, as can the relationships among categories. I will use the term concepts to refer to such verbal formulations of categories, whether they are presented in public or remain relatively private. It is important to remember that the existence and application of categories does not depend upon their having been linguistically formulated as concepts, even though such formulation may shape the subsequent nature of the category as it appears in behaviour: on reflection, we may find that our categorisations are inconsistent with one another, or not related very effectively to the purposes that they were designed to serve. Language enables us to control our behaviour more effectively. It is also important to note that both categories and concepts are different from the terms used to label them: the same term can refer to several categories, categories can be conceptualised in multiple ways, and different terms may be used to indicate more or less the same category not just in different languages but also even within the same language. Equally important, categories, concepts, and terms are different from the ‘objects’ that are ‘gathered together’ or ‘separated’ by categories. The distinctions among these four elements need to be borne in mind, since conflating them can sometimes be misleading. A second problem concerns whether the ‘objects’ that are assigned to categories exist, and have the characteristics assumed, independently of the process of categorisation. In other words, is the field to which we apply our categorisations already structured so that our categories must align with this structure, or are these categorisations constitutive, in the sense that they effectively bring the objects to which they refer into existence? This is sometimes formulated as an opposition between contrasting philosophical positions: realism versus constructionism, say. However,

1 Introduction 

9

I suggest that the answer to this question varies somewhat according to the nature of the phenomena we are concerned with. So, in the case of physical objects that have not been produced by human beings, it seems clear that the field to which we apply our categorisations is already structured. For instance, the distinctions between ‘igneous’, ‘sedimentary’, and ‘metamorphic’ rocks refer to differences that were present before any human beings came to make these distinctions, and they are not affected by the categorisation process. While these terms, and for that matter the word ‘rock’ itself, are linguistic labels, and while the conceptual distinctions involved are humanly produced, they nevertheless refer to objects that are pre-structured—these objects had the relevant similarities and differences prior to our categorisations. However, the question of the existence of differences in phenomena prior to categorisation becomes more complicated when we turn to social phenomena. If we think, first, of material artefacts that have been made or shaped by human beings, these will have physical features similar in character to those of rocks. However, we generally classify these artefacts according to what function they were intended to serve, or could serve. Nevertheless, even in this case there is a sense in which the field we are categorising is pre-structured. Objects like tables and chairs differ in relevant ways independently of, say, a young child’s categorising them this way. But in these instances, by contrast with rocks, the structuring derives from design features built into the objects reflecting the categorisations employed by those who made them. While in the case of tables and chairs we share the same categorisations as the designers, this may not be true with objects from the past—their functions can be hard to decipher, often a severe problem for archaeologists: the task is to conceptualise categories we do not share. In the case of human actions—as well as larger patterns of behaviour, groups, organisations, and institutions—there is a similar kind of pre-­ structuring. The categorisations underlying others’ actions may be similar to, or significantly different from, our own, but either way they exist independently of how we subsequently categorise those actions. In other words, like material artefacts, actions are characterised by design features that embody the decisions and assumptions of actors, but in this case these features are to be found in movements of the body, sounds emitted,

10 

M. Hammersley

and/or marks written on paper or on electronic screens. Here, the structuring of the world is not independent of the existence of human beings— if we were all annihilated, so too would be most social phenomena—but the existence and character of the categories underpinning those phenomena nevertheless exist independently of us as researchers seeking to make sense of them. If we are to understand the structure involved, we must discover the categories employed by the people who produced the actions. As we shall see later, this overlaps with another difficult issue, to do with the relationship between sociologists’ concepts and the categorisations and concepts employed by the people they study. The third problem I will mention specifically concerns the structure of concepts. One way of thinking about this, very influential in the past, is to treat the characteristics that indicate membership of one category rather than another as essential. On this basis, any object in a category must possess all of the defining features identified in the associated concept, and there must be no objects falling outside the category that share all of these features. However, it has long been recognised that most of the everyday categories people use, and indeed many that have been developed for specialist sociological purposes, do not have this essentialist character. Instead, objects are treated as belonging to a category when they have most of the features taken to be distinctive to that category to some necessary degree. One effect of this is that the boundaries around our categories are fuzzy, so that there will be some cases whose status is uncertain—they could belong to more than one, or to none. It has sometimes been argued that scientific categories must take an essentialist form if we are to be able to identify stable and general causal relations amongst types of phenomena.3 It is certainly true that this task would be easier with categories of that kind. However, producing such categories has proved to be extremely challenging. One reason is that, as we have seen, social scientific concepts must engage with a mode of structuring that derives from the categories employed by the people being studied, ones that are themselves fuzzy. The only solution to this problem, in my view, is to recognise that essentialist categories are not a  This was proposed by some positivists, but it is a view that has been adopted by others with very different philosophical orientations, see for instance Znaniecki (1934). 3

1 Introduction 

11

prerequisite for sociological inquiry (see Ragin 2000; Hammersley 2010); though this does not eliminate the need to make sociological concepts as clear as possible, in particular to indicate which features are being treated as definitive on particular occasions. The fourth problem is closely related to this. Human beings engage in categorisation by relying on indicators that are taken to predict membership of the category concerned. These indicators may or may not be among those features that are taken to be defining characteristics of the category: defining features are frequently not easily detectable in most (or perhaps any) circumstances. For example, the category ‘male’ is usually assigned to people on the basis of such features as type of clothes worn, presence of a beard, and so on, rather than (say) possession of a penis, except in the case of new-born babies where this feature will often be on display (and the others may not be). And a Y chromosome is even more difficult to observe. Furthermore, irrespective of whether an indicator is one of the defining characteristics, the link between indicator and membership of a category will be probabilistic: in other words, its presence does not guarantee that an object should be treated as belonging in the category, more evidence will often be required to come to reliable conclusions about this.4 It should be clear that reliance on probabilistic signs renders the validity of our categorisations somewhat uncertain (though not completely uncertain). In addition, there can be disagreement both about what are defining features and about what are good indicators, even in the case of sex/gender. The final problem I will discuss is one I mentioned earlier: the relationship between sociological concepts and the categorisations and concepts that the people being studied themselves use. While the social field is structured by those categorisations, sociologists need not be restricted to the concepts that correspond to them. So, for example, we may assign motives or causes that do not simply reflect the intentions of the actors or their awareness of what moved them to act or to avoid an action. Indeed, many sociologists have insisted that sociology must use different categories from those of participants (Becker 2003: 659) if it is to produce new

 It may be thought that possession of a penis automatically defines someone as male, while its absence denies membership, but sex/gender is more complicated than this. See Chap. 6. 4

12 

M. Hammersley

knowledge.5 Difficult questions can, of course, arise about the relationship between the concepts we use to make sense of people’s behaviour, and those that have informed that behaviour. However, we should note that this is not a problem that is unique to social scientists: they are not the only ones who use concepts that are different from those embedded in the actions they are describing and explaining. This is true of reports by journalists, police detectives, teachers, social workers, and others. Indeed, people may reconceptualise their own behaviour in subsequently describing and explaining it. And, as I indicated earlier, sociologists’ purposes are not radically distinct from those of other people, even though they are different. What this problem points to is a need for particular care when using concepts that do not correspond to the categorisations that underpin the social phenomena being investigated; and most major sociological concepts are of this kind.

Some Further Preliminary Points The meaning of key sociological concepts must be shaped to serve the task of answering the sorts of research question that sociologists address, capturing genuine distinctions that are relevant to these. While this does not usually require inventing entirely new concepts, or ones that have a character that is completely different from those that other people use, greater clarity is generally required. What I am calling for here is not absolute clarity—this is not attainable, and its pursuit in many cases would be undesirable. Rather, what is necessary is sufficient clarity about the meaning of key terms for sociological purposes. What this entails is determined by the demands of the particular descriptive or explanatory tasks being tackled, and by the nature of the phenomena concerned. While what is sufficient clarity is necessarily a matter of judgement, I believe that the discussion in subsequent chapters will show that we are a

 There are those who argue that the task should be restricted to explication of participant categories and that introducing distinctive sociological concepts amounts to distortion—this is the view of many ethnomethodologists, for example: see Hammersley (2018). 5

1 Introduction 

13

long way from achieving this level of clarity in relation to many central sociological concepts. Part of what is required is to understand what Oppenheim (1981) calls the ‘logical structure’ of concepts. As he points out, it makes a difference whether concepts relate to objects or to properties of objects. Equally important, terms like ‘inequality’ and ‘power’ are relational: they only make sense if we know who or what is being declared unequal or powerful, in what respect, and by what measure. There is no such thing as inequality in general or power in general. Unless we spell out the relations involved, the meaning of such terms will remain uncertain or vague. Yet, if we look at much sociological discussion, it is common to find ‘inequality’, ‘power’, and other terms, being used without adequate specification. As I indicated earlier, while this may serve the purposes of political sloganising, it does not facilitate sociological analysis. Another issue is that many of the terms used by sociologists carry not just factual meanings—referring to the occurrence and features of social phenomena—but also evaluative ones—presenting those phenomena or features as good or bad, right or wrong, and so on.6 In my view, these two aspects of the meaning of terms need to be clearly distinguished, and the very different roles that they play in sociological analysis recognised. As I have already mentioned, in my view, sociology should be solely concerned with producing factual conclusions, such as descriptions and explanations—not evaluations, recommendations, prescriptions, or injunctions; though this is a restriction that is rarely observed. Aside from this, there is a complication arising from the fact the factual matters which sociologists investigate are selected and framed by value assumptions that determine the likely relevance of any knowledge produced. This is what Weber meant by his insistence that social science concepts must be value-relevant (Hammersley 2014, 2017). And an important implication following from this is that the value-relevance framework within which sociological terms are being employed often needs to be specified. For example, where the focus is on inequalities of some kind,  The words ‘fact’ and ‘factual’ are good examples of ones with multiple meanings that can generate confusion. Sometimes ‘fact’ is taken to be almost a synonym of ‘true’. By contrast, I am using it here to refer to what exists and what causes what, as opposed to whether what exists is good or bad, right or wrong. In these terms, factual statements can be false. 6

14 

M. Hammersley

these will usually have been picked out because they are regarded as inequitable (by the sociologist and/or by others), but the concept of equity or justice being deployed needs to be made explicit since there are alternative interpretations of this and other relevant value principles (Foster et al. 1996: 44–50).

Conclusion My task in the following chapters, then, is to try to clarify the concepts associated with some central terms employed by sociologists. This will often require attention to the history of these concepts, and certainly close investigation of their character. I argue that there are serious problems with all of the concepts discussed, I explore these and suggest ways of overcoming them: through abandoning some senses and/or through reconceptualisation. However, as I emphasised earlier, these suggestions are necessarily tentative. Furthermore, I have not examined all of the major terms employed by sociologists, and those focused on here are not the only ones that are problematic: a similar approach could be applied to others. The task of improving the process of concept formation in sociological work is a long-term, collective project.

References Becker, H.  S. (2003). The Politics of Presentation: Goffman and Total Institutions. Symbolic Interaction, 26(4), 659–669. Collier, D., & Gerring, J. (Eds.). (2009). Concepts and Methods in Social Science: The Tradition of Giovanni Sartori. London: Routledge. Foster, P., Gomm, R., & Hammersley, M. (1996). Constructing Educational Inequality. London: Falmer Press. Goertz, G. (2006). Social Science Concepts: A User’s Guide. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hammersley, M. (2002). Educational Research, Policymaking and Practice. London: Paul Chapman and Sage.

1 Introduction 

15

Hammersley, M. (2010). Is Social Measurement Possible, and is It Necessary? In G.  Walford, E.  Tucker, & M.  Viswanathan (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Measurement. London: Sage. Hammersley, M. (2011). Methodology, Who Needs It? London: Sage. Hammersley, M. (2013). The Myth of Research-Based Policy and Practice. London: Sage. Hammersley, M. (2014). The Limits of Social Science. London: Sage. Hammersley, M. (2017). On the Role of Values in Social Research: Weber Vindicated? Sociological Research Online, 22(1), 7. Retrieved from http:// www.socresonline.org.uk/22/1/7.html. Hammersley, M. (2018). The Radicalism of Ethnomethodology. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hochberg, H. (1959). Axiomatic Systems, Formalization, and Scientific Theories. In L. Gross (Ed.), Symposium on Sociological Theory. Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson and Co. Jay, M. (1984). Adorno. London: Fontana. Jenkins, R. (2002). Foundations of Sociology. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Jenkins, R. (2010). Beyond Social Structure. In P. J. Martin & A. Dennis (Eds.), Human Agents and Social Structures. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lachenmeyer, C. (1971). The Language of Sociology. New  York: Columbia University Press. Lather, P. (1996). Troubling Clarity: The Politics of Accessible Language. Harvard Educational Review, 66(3), 525–554. Latour, B. (1986). The Powers of Association. In J. A. Law (Ed.), Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? (Sociological Review Monographs, 32) (pp. 264–280). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Lazarsfeld, P., & Rosenberg, M. (Eds.). (1955). The Language of Social Research. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Leavy, P. (2015). Method Meets Art: Arts-Based Research Practice. New  York: Guilford Press. Lundberg, G. (1942). Social Research: A Study in Methods of Gathering Data. New York: Longmans, Green and Co.. MacLure, M. (2003). Discourse in Educational and Social Research. Buckingham: Open University Press. Nisbet, R. (1976). Sociology as an Art Form. New York: Oxford University Press. Oppenheim, F. (1981). Political Concepts: A Reconstruction. Oxford: Blackwell. Parsons, T. (1937). The Structure of Social Action. New York: McGraw Hill.

16 

M. Hammersley

Parsons, T. (1970). On Building Social Systems Theory: A Personal History. Daedalus, 99(4), 826–881. Ragin, C. (2000). Fuzzy-Set Social Science. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Rubinstein, D. (2001). Culture, Structure and Agency. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Sartori, G. (1975). The Tower of Babel. In G. Sartori, F. Riggs, & H. Teune (Eds.), The Tower of Babel: On Definition and Analysis of Concepts in the Social Sciences. Pittsburgh, PA: International Studies. Sartori, G. (Ed.). (1984). Social Science Concepts: A Systematic Analysis. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Sartori, G., Riggs, F., & Teune, H. (Eds.). (1975). Tower of Babel: On the Definition and Analysis of Concepts in the Social Sciences. International Studies Association, Occasional Paper No. 6. University of Pittsburgh. Schaffer, C. (2016). Elucidating Social Science Concepts: An Interpretivist Guide. New York: Routledge. Stein, M. (1963). The Poetic Metaphors of Sociology. In M. Stein & A. Vidich (Eds.), Sociology on Trial. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Toynbee, P. (1999). Interview: Polly Toynbee. (Interviewed by Liam Murphy), Network, Newsletter of the British Sociological Association, vol. 72, pp. 20–23. Retrieved from https://www.britsoc.co.uk/files/NETWORK%20 NO72%20JAN1999.pdf Tyler, S. (1986). Post-modern Ethnography: From Document of the Occult to Occult Document. In J.  Clifford & G.  Marcus (Eds.), Writing Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weber, M. (1949). “Objectivity” in Social Science. In The Methodology of the Social Sciences. New York: Free Press. (First published in German in 1904). Znaniecki, F. (1934). The Method of Sociology. New York: Farrer and Rinehart.

2 Ideology

The term ‘ideology’ is widely used in sociology today and in other disciplines and areas as well. Yet, at best, its meaning is ambiguous. McLellan (1995: viii, 1) describes it as ‘slippery’ and as ‘the most elusive concept in social science’, while Gerring (1997: 957–959) has suggested that “Few concepts in the social science lexicon have occasioned so much discussion, so much disagreement, and so much self-conscious discussion of the disagreement […]’. As this indicates, what the term means can vary significantly; and, as we shall see, some of its main senses involve serious analytic problems. Furthermore, there are other terms whose meanings partially overlap, such as ‘worldview’ or ‘Weltanschauung’, ‘perspective’, ‘belief system’, ‘attitude’, ‘paradigm’, ‘frame’, ‘cognitive style’, and even ‘myth’, ‘hegemony’, ‘culture’, ‘imaginary’ (as deployed by Castoriadis or Taylor), ‘habitus’ (as employed by Bourdieu) or ‘discourse’ (in the way this word is sometimes employed in Cultural Studies). The conceptual terrain covered by the term ‘ideology’ therefore requires careful attention. At the most basic level, the different senses the word is given share in common the assumption that particular sets of beliefs, usually both factual and evaluative, are distinctive to particular groups or categories of person. Traditionally, it was social classes that were treated as having © The Author(s) 2020 M. Hammersley, Troubling Sociological Concepts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51644-4_2

17

18 

M. Hammersley

ideologies, but ideologies are now frequently also assigned to other groups or social categories, and to organisations and other entities (from generations to nations). Of course, this basic component of the concept is rarely the only one: it does not capture all of the meaning that the term ‘ideology’ usually carries. And, once we move beyond this core, we encounter significant variation in meaning between usages. These are generated by adopting one or more of the following additional features: 1. The set of beliefs is tightly organised, as against looser collections of ideas. 2. The beliefs involve a false representation of the world, this perhaps extending even to believers’ views about what is in their own interests. And there is further variation among senses of ‘ideology’ as regards why these beliefs are false: a. The beliefs are false because they have been designed by others to manipulate people’s behaviour to serve some external purpose. b. The beliefs take how things appear as how they are, rather than employing a method that grasps the very different underlying reality. Often there is also the assumption here that the misleading character of appearances is no accident, that the true nature of the social world is disguised. c. The beliefs are formed through processes that, by their nature, are unlikely to discover the truth: beliefs are adopted because they serve psychological needs and/or social functions; or they are produced by a mode of thinking which amounts to closed-mindedness or dogmatism—in other words, one characterised by a strong tendency to assimilate all new experience to existing categories, or even to fabricate what would fit with existing views when evidence is not available (and perhaps even when counter-evidence is).1

 These different mechanisms are sometimes formulated as a contrast between viewing ideological commitment as rational or as irrational: see Boudon (1989). 1

2 Ideology 

19

3. The beliefs, or some of them, are unjustifiable in epistemic terms: there is little or no convincing evidence available for or against them, and perhaps never can be. Here, the beliefs are not so much judged false as simply speculative—in the sense that the analyst believes that it is uncertain whether or not they are true, perhaps because they belong to a realm about which we can never have knowledge. Here, again, psychological and/or social mechanisms may be treated by the analyst as promoting or sustaining these beliefs; 4. Commitment to the beliefs has undesirable consequences from at least some point of view, as judged by the analyst—undesirable for the believers themselves and/or more widely. Usage of the term ‘ideology’, over the past hundred years or so, typically corresponds to one or other of four main senses, each combining several of the components listed above:2 1. Other-directed ideology. A coherent set of beliefs that are largely false and/or unjustifiable, but which are presented as true. This may be done to ensure that people conform to a demand or requirement beneficial to the proponents of the ideology, and/or one that is judged to be in the common interest; it may even be based on the assumption that adopting these beliefs will be in the target audience’s own best interests, for example saving them from damnation or bringing about their emancipation. Note that the promulgators of the beliefs may believe them, have doubts about their truth, or regard them as false or unjustifiable. However, at the very least they do believe in the desirability (in some sense) of others’ believing they are true. By contrast, the analyst regards these beliefs as false or unjustifiable, and/or as having negative consequences. 2. Endogenous ideology. A set of largely false and/or unjustifiable beliefs or assumptions that are held because the effects of believing them reinforce their acceptance; usually without the believer being aware of it. This is sometimes referred to as false consciousness. The beliefs making up this type of ideology can result from taking appearances as  I have given these four senses labels to highlight the distinctions involved, but these are not in common use. 2

20 

M. Hammersley

reality, or from some psychological or social mechanism that hampers recognition of the truth or of what is cognitively justifiable. And, once again, the beliefs concerned are frequently held by the analyst not only to be untrue but to have undesirable consequences for believers, and probably more generally. Very often the set of beliefs is assumed to be internally coherent, perhaps even tightly organised. However, this need not be the case: within the Marxist tradition, for instance, it is a commonplace that there are contradictions within ideological formations; and some non-Marxist writers on discourse and rhetoric, such as Billig et al. (1988), adopt a similar view. 3. Programmatic ideology. A systematic set of beliefs explicitly constructed and promulgated to represent the position of some group about topics important to them, and to provide a guide for action. Here, whether the beliefs are judged by the analyst to be true or false, justifiable or unjustifiable, is not relevant to identifying them as an ideology (whereas this is an essential criterion for senses 1 and 2). Nor is it assumed, as part of this definition of ‘ideology’, that the beliefs have negative consequences. This third concept can be found in the writings of Lenin, for instance. 4 . Perspectival ideology. A broad worldview shared by some category or group of people that goes beyond what is well-established fact, filling in gaps with speculations, and involving a strain towards creating overall coherence in the form of a comprehensive evaluative framework. This worldview is largely taken-for-granted by believers. Very often such worldviews are treated by analysts as ‘beyond truth or falsity’ because they can only be judged in their own terms—on the grounds that there is no external standpoint available. Hence, once again, the beliefs do not have to be regarded as false by the analyst in order for them to be labelled ideological; nor are they required to have negative consequences.3  There are some additional senses of the term ‘ideology’ that should be mentioned. For example, Aron (1962: xv) defines it at one point as ‘the synthesis of an interpretation of history and of a program of action toward a future predicted or hoped for’. However, this is a much narrower sense than most usage, one very much aimed at Marxism. Boudon’s (1989) conception of ideology as based on false scientific ideas is also quite narrow. By contrast, sometimes ‘ideological’ is employed simply to indicate that a viewpoint is normative rather than concerned solely with matters of fact. 3

2 Ideology 

21

All of these senses may serve practical and intellectual functions: there is no single already-identified phenomenon called ‘ideology’ which it is simply our task to characterise accurately. Our categories are tools for making sense of phenomena for particular purposes; so, to some extent, which sense of the term is adopted will depend upon those purposes. The most important division amongst these senses is between the first and second, on the one hand, and the third and fourth, on the other. The first two meanings both rely upon a conceptual contrast with some notion of sound thinking, whether this is labelled reason/rationality or more narrowly as scientific method, or for that matter as practical common sense. And, as indicated, they also frequently assume that the beliefs concerned have negative consequences. By contrast, defining ‘ideology’ in the third and fourth senses does not carry implications for the truth of the ideas or about the consequences of belief. Furthermore, ideologies in these latter two senses are often viewed positively by analysts, perhaps even regarded as essential to life;4 whereas ideology in the first two senses is usually judged undesirable. Having identified the main components and senses of the term ‘ideology’, I will now briefly examine the history of its usage, and then look at some of the problems surrounding this.5

History of the Term The term ‘Idéologie’ was coined in France at the end of the eighteenth century by Destutt de Tracy, one of an influential group of thinkers that came to be referred to as the Idéologues. De Tracy conceived of Idéologie ‘Evaluative framework’ or ‘evaluative stance’ would probably be a better term for this, given the considerable additional conceptual baggage that the term ‘ideology’ brings with it. 4  This attitude is to be found, for example, in the work of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1964) and that of the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre (1971). Geertz sees ideologies as secular religions, and views their role as potentially positive, by contrast with others who have used this notion, such as Aron (1962). A much more alarming version of the same idea is to be found in the writings of the sociologist Hans Freyer, who became a Nazi apologist (see Muller 1987: 86). MacIntyre contrasts modern ideologies negatively with Western Christianity in the time of Aquinas and the role it played then in providing a coherent framework for people’s lives. 5  For more detailed discussions of this history, see Barth (1976), Larrain (1979), Lichtheim (1967).

22 

M. Hammersley

as a branch of inquiry concerned with the psychological and sociological study of ideas. So the Idéologues were interested in the sources of ideas, and particularly in how they could be distorted by various kinds of prejudice, such as those that had been identified much earlier by Francis Bacon in his discussion of the ‘idols’ (Bacon 1620).6 They believed that ‘only the reduction of ideas to their underlying sensations guaranteed the certainty indispensable for constructing a knowledge of nature and man. Only success in avoiding false ideas could assure scientific progress’ (Barth 1976: 2). Thus, Ideology—the study of ideas along these lines—was held to provide an essential and solid foundation for the other sciences, and for a social and political philosophy that would guide progressive government: the Idéologues were republican and liberal in attitude. Napoleon Bonaparte is usually credited with transforming ‘idéologie’ into a word that refers to a set of ideas rather than to a field of inquiry, and moreover to ideas regarded as speculative, impractical, false, and/or self-serving. In the process, he also turned ‘idéologue’ into a pejorative term, through his political attack on the Idéologues. This was part of his shift away from reliance on Enlightenment principles towards a rapprochement with the Catholic Church, using Christianity as a civil religion that could legitimise the new social hierarchy he had established, with himself at the top (Barth 1976: 12–13). These revised usages of the terms ‘idéologie’ and ‘idéologue’ were subsequently translated into English and became the standard meanings. However, this sense of the term ‘ideology’—referring to false or misleading beliefs—related to an important theme that had been central to eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought, one that was inherited by the Idéologues themselves, notably from the writings of Helvetius and d’Holbach. This is the idea that, in the past, people had been living in ignorance and mystification, largely as a result of the role of superstition and religion, but were now coming to be governed by Reason. In these terms, religion could be regarded as the archetypal case of ideology. By contrast, Napoleon’s usage of the term was tied to a conservative interpretation of Rousseau’s critique of the Enlightenment, where ideology  The Idéologues also relied heavily on the empiricist psychology of Condillac. On the Idéologues, see Kennedy (1978), Head (1980, 1985), Staum (1980a, b). 6

2 Ideology 

23

consists of abstract theory, and contrasts with practical common sense. Underlying Napoleon’s disagreement with the Idéologues, and foreshadowing the history of French positivism, is the question of whether Reason or Science is sufficient to ensure socio-political order, or whether ideology and myth are essential for this. In its subsequent history, ‘ideology’ acquired a range of further meanings. At least two of these are to be found in the literature of Marxism, where ideology came to be treated as playing a central role in the process of social development, the reproduction of capitalism, and the rise of the proletarian movement.7 In the dominant meaning, this term was used to refer to ideas that, while generated by the material conditions of production, misrepresent the nature of society in such a way as to legitimate those conditions and the position of the social class they empower— notably by presenting current conditions as universal and unchangeable. Sometimes what seems to be implied is what I referred to as other-directed ideology, while in other places it is endogenous ideology. In The German Ideology, Marx (1970: 47) uses the analogy of a camera obscura—people and their relationships appearing ‘upside down’. Thus, ideology conceals social contradictions, and the conflicts of interest between social classes that these generate, for example presenting employment relations as contracts agreed between legally equal partners. In line with this, Marxists have often viewed intellectuals associated with the dominant class as engaging in the refinement and dissemination of the ruling ideology. Marx comments that they make ‘perfecting the illusions of the class about itself their chief source of livelihood’ (Marx 1970: 65). Here there is an implied contrast between ideology, on the one hand, and the genuine knowledge produced by Marxism as a science, on the other.8 At the same  For a useful outline of the meanings of ‘ideology’ in the context of Marxism, see the entry on this topic in Williams (1983). For more detailed discussions, see Mepham (1972), Barth (1976: chIII) and Larrain (1979: ch2). 8  A similar sense of the term came to be adopted more broadly within the social sciences, but, of course, here what was taken to be ideological and scientific was conceptualised somewhat differently (see, for example, Parsons 1959). Indeed, as Mannheim (1936: 67) points out: ‘The analysis of thought and ideas in terms of ideologies is much too wide in its application and much too important a weapon to become the permanent monopoly of any one party. Nothing was to prevent the opponents of Marxism from availing themselves of the weapon and applying it to Marxism itself ’. 7

24 

M. Hammersley

time, Marx argues that ideology can only be overcome by revolutionary change, not by intellectual persuasion alone, precisely because it derives from the appearances generated by the process of socio-historical development itself, and bolsters entrenched interests: it is not simply a matter of error, or a figment of imagination (see Larrain 1979: 47). The other main sense of ‘ideology’ to be found within Marxism is very different: it takes the form of what I called programmatic ideology. So, it is used to refer to a coherent and tightly organised set of ideas without any defining assumption that these are false or regressive. For example, Lenin uses the term ‘proletarian ideology’ as well as ‘bourgeois ideology’, the former true and progressive, the latter false and regressive (Larrain 1979: 76). This second usage perhaps arises from Marx’s dialectical conception of societal development, in terms of which ideas and institutions that at one time serve a progressive function may later become regressive in effect. More specifically, it is argued that the interests of a rising class allow it to perceive the real nature of current society in a way that the dominant class cannot, thereby enabling it to take power and to push the process of historical development forward. But, once a rising class becomes dominant, its viewpoint ceases to be progressive, and may be distorted by regressive interests.9 By the time Karl Mannheim came to write his hugely influential book Ideology and Utopia, in 1929, the term ‘ideology’ was in common currency well beyond Marxism. However, Mannheim uses it in several senses. In one formulation he treats both ideologies and utopias as sets of ideas that do not correspond to current reality, by contrast with scientific understanding. The difference between them is that ideologies do not lead to any pressure for change, quite the reverse, whereas utopias are sets of ideas that when acted on destroy the status quo. He argues that rising social classes tend to adopt utopian perspectives, whereas dominant classes are committed to ideologies. Elsewhere in the book, Mannheim distinguishes between ‘partial’ and ‘total’ conceptions of ideology. The first refers to specific misrepresentations designed, consciously or unconsciously, to serve certain interests. The second is concerned with the perspectival nature of whole worldviews, manifesting the ‘thought styles’  This view was elaborated by Lukács 1971, for example.

9

2 Ideology 

25

characteristic of particular social classes or other groups. Mannheim argues that total ideologies as likely to contain truth as well as error, with belief in them potentially having desirable as well as undesirable consequences. They amount to what I called ‘perspectival ideology’. Mannheim regarded ‘total’ forms of ideology as a historical product of the rise of capitalism and democracy, and of the resulting conflicts among groups, particularly that between bourgeoisie and proletariat. Ideological debate of this kind creates a situation of great disagreement and uncertainty, and he concluded that absolute knowledge—what later came to be called ‘the view from nowhere’—is not possible, that all thought is socially located and determined.10 This prompted the emergence of the sociology of knowledge, and Mannheim regarded this discipline as offering the prospect of human beings gaining some control over their own thinking and thereby directing social events rationally, where previously they had been largely at the mercy of social and cultural forces. So, whereas Marx argued that scientific understanding of capitalism must be based on a working-class perspective, with ideology disappearing once the final stage of societal development is reached (see Cohen 1972), Mannheim suggested that ideology would never disappear but that an intelligentsia—at least partially detached from particular social classes, and employing the sociology of knowledge—could draw on forms of understanding available in competing ideologies to provide a sounder basis for politics. And he saw this as underpinning a liberal, social democratic form of governance (see Kettler et al. 1984). However, at the core of most subsequent usage of ‘ideology’ in the twentieth century has been the idea of systematic error or bias, albeit with considerable variation in views about the character of the error, the mechanisms producing it, and its consequences. In some forms, the mechanism is taken to be psychological (though it is usually seen as open to social explanation, e.g., in terms of differences between classes or communities in the early socialisation of children), while in others the mechanism is treated as an integral feature of some social process or structure, whether this is capitalism, in the case of Marxism, patriarchy for  Or, at least, all economic, political, and social thought: Mannheim excludes natural science from this process of social determination. 10

26 

M. Hammersley

feminists, or structural strain of one sort or another, as with some kinds of functionalism (see, for instance, Eisenstadt 1968). It also came to be generally assumed that ideology has regressive or otherwise undesirable consequences; and that it could be dispelled or overcome by social science. In the 1950s a number of sociologists, in the United States and Europe, argued that there were signs of ‘the end of ideology’, though they conceptualised this very differently from Marxists (see Shils 1955; Aron 1962: Conclusion; Dittberner 1979; Bell 2000).11 They argued that, in the West after the Second World War, there seemed to have been a decline in commitment to ‘totalitarian’ ideologies: not just the fascism and national socialism that the War had largely extinguished, but also the communism promoted by the Soviet Union, one of the victorious allies. In some respects they regarded this socio-cultural change as paralleling a decline in religious belief, or at least in sectarian forms of religion. What they meant by ‘ideology’ here was a closed belief system, one that was resistant to change by reason and evidence, and that was utopian in the sense that it sought a total (and impossible) transformation of human life. In fact, of course, communism did not disappear in the 1950s, and there was a resurgence of commitment to Marxism among Western intellectuals in the next two decades.12 An important influence at this time was Gramsci’s earlier development of the concept of hegemony. This term had initially been associated with the idea that the working class must create alliances with other groups so as to lead them in opposing the political forces of capitalism (see Anderson 1976/1977, 2016; Boothman 2011). Later, Gramsci started to use the term to refer to the ways in which the ideas of the dominant class in a society engage with and shape those of subordinate groups, thereby sustaining the power of that class.

 A similar idea appeared elsewhere, for example in the work of Alexandre Kojève and Arnold Gehlen (see Muller 1987: 397). This was echoed later in the century by Fukuyama (1992). 12  Subsequent events have thrown further doubt on any notion of an ‘end of ideology’, notably the growth of fundamentalist forms of religion, and the increasing political role of these—whether Right-wing Christian groups in the United States or the various forms of political Islam, from the Iranian regime to the Taliban and other Jihadist groups (see Baehr 2011). One intellectual consequence of this has been the rise of ‘post-secularism’, on which see McLennan (2010). 11

2 Ideology 

27

What this points to is the need for anti-capitalist struggle in the sphere of ideas if a transformation of the mode of production is to be achieved.13 Another major influence during this period was Althusser (1971), who also argued that ideas and political institutions play a role that is relatively autonomous from the material base (the forces and relations of production) in shaping social formations. He distinguishes what he calls ideological state apparatuses (for instance, schools and universities, the mass media) from the central repressive state apparatus (the police and the army). He argues that ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) do this by constituting people as subjects whose experience of the world is ‘imaginary’, in the sense that it misrecognises the real relations through which capitalism operates and is reproduced. Althusser treats ideology as embedded in practices operating within ISAs, and as thereby having material effects: sustaining the conditions necessary to reproduce the social relations of production.14 Despite some similarities in their accounts, he differed from Gramsci in important ways. One of these was that he drew a sharp distinction between science and ideology, yet he did not believe that the former could replace the latter—he saw ideology as ‘eternal’, as always performing a crucial social function, even after the establishment of communism. The influence of these writers led to highly complex interpretations of the concept of ideology, such as that of Hall (1985), in which ideas are treated as ‘articulated’ with, rather than determined by, the mode of production, and are conceptualised in semiotic terms that blur the distinction between ideology, on one side, and culture or discourse, on the other (see Hammersley 2019: ch3). More recently, there may have been a tendency within the social sciences for the terms ‘ideology’ and ‘ideological’ to decline somewhat in frequency of use. One reason for this is the ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy and the social sciences, which has encouraged  This is a subtle version of what came to be called the ‘dominant ideology thesis’: see Abercrombie et al. (1980). 14  What seems to be involved here is a rejection of the idea that ideologies are representations of the world; instead, they are seen as producing both subjects and their worlds of experience. They are generated by the real processes of production and reproduction that can only be identified via scientific analysis. While this is the central thrust of Althusser’s argument, he does not pursue it consistently (Hirst 1976). 13

28 

M. Hammersley

a shift in terminology away from words that involve reference to cognition (‘beliefs’, ‘ideas’, ‘ideologies’, etc.) towards those with a more lingual reference, such as ‘discourses’, ‘language games’, ‘textual practices’, and so on. An associated, and probably even more important, reason for a decline in usage of ‘ideology’ is that its most commonly used senses imply a contrast with ‘true beliefs’, ‘rational modes of thought’, ‘scientific method’, and so on, and require the assumption that the analyst has access to these. During the second half of the twentieth century, and into the twenty-­ first, there was increasing scepticism, in many quarters, about the very possibility of knowledge and rationality, so that words like ‘truth’, ‘fact’, and ‘rational’ either came to be avoided altogether or were placed within inverted commas to indicate epistemic doubt or rejection on the part of the analyst. In effect, many sociologists have adopted the view that modern societies are characterised by multiple perspectives or cultures—these corresponding, more or less, with Mannheim’s ‘total ideologies’—which vary in their influence across time and place. However, instead of taking over Mannheim’s notion of semi-detached intellectuals able through deploying the sociology of knowledge to determine what is true and what is false (or functional) in them, it is frequently assumed that these perspectives are incommensurable: that they cannot be rationally compared. Particularly influential in stimulating this trend was Kuhn’s (1970) account of the development of natural science, or at least misinterpretations of his account.15 Whereas Mannheim had excluded natural science from his discussion of ideology, Kuhn’s work has often been taken to show that the history of science displays a sequence of ideological perspectives, rather than the progressive development of knowledge. This has frequently been assumed to undercut any claim that science can ­provide a true perspective on the world. And this undermines the dominant conceptions of ideology. Yet, even when terms like ‘discourse’ replace ‘ideology’, the same underlying assumptions, along with ambiguity and vagueness, can remain  Kuhn does not deny that there has been scientific progress, but he does reject the idea of truth as correspondence. For somewhat different interpretations of Kuhn’s position, see Bird (2000) and Sharrock and Read (2002). 15

2 Ideology 

29

(Purvis and Hunt 1993; Larrain 1994).16 In some contexts, explicit ideology critique has been more or less replaced by discourse analysis, albeit with the terms ‘discourse’ and ‘ideology’ occasionally being used side-by-­ side. Indeed, some approaches to discourse analysis are explicitly committed to ‘critique’ (Blommaert et al. 2001; Wodak and Chilton 2005), with various discourses being treated as ideological, in one or other of the first two senses I identified. This is true, for example, of Levitas’s (1998) and Fairclough’s (2000) analyses of the language of ‘New Labour’ politicians in the UK. It also applies to Wetherell and Potter’s (1992) discussion of the modes of discourse employed by white New Zealanders in talking about Māoris; they label these as ideological and portray them as sustaining racism and reproducing ethnic inequalities.

Problems with the Concept of Ideology The most obvious difficulty with the term ‘ideology’ is that, as we have seen, it has been given fundamentally different meanings, and social scientists frequently use it without clarifying the sense intended, or apparently without being fully aware of the different meanings it can have. Aside from this, though, there are also severe substantive and methodological problems with the two most common meanings of the term, the first two that I listed earlier: ‘other-directed ideology’ and ‘endogenous ideology’. The first of these is that, if we use the term ‘ideology’ to refer to false beliefs, then before it can be applied we must be able to show that the ideas concerned are indeed false. And, should we come later to revise our judgment about this, we will have to withdraw the label ‘ideology’: what was previously judged to be ideological will no longer be, even if there has been no change in the people holding the beliefs, or in how those beliefs function in the world. This is a problem because the truth or falsity of a set of ideas is often not a clear-cut matter. Not only are all our judgments about the validity of ideas fallible, but these ideas can be judged true or  In many respects, this repeats what happened to an earlier proposed replacement for ‘ideology’: ‘belief system’. See Gerring (1997): 961. 16

30 

M. Hammersley

false to varying degrees, and to be true in some respects but not in others. Furthermore, the different ideas making up a belief system may vary amongst themselves in both of these ways, and systems of beliefs can also be misleading because they omit important considerations. It is necessary to note, too, that the beliefs concerned may relate to matters about which sociologists do not have expertise, so that there are questions about how the analyst is to decide on their truth. All of this introduces considerable instability, and scope for disagreement, into the very application of the term ‘ideology’. This problem is exacerbated by the perspectival character of all knowledge: there can be no exhaustive representation of social reality ‘in its own terms’ that will serve all purposes. Rather than assuming that social science is capable of representing social reality ‘as it is’, we need to recognise that it addresses reality from the point of view of specific sets of concerns framed as questions. And assumptions are always built into these. Thus, any discrepancy between social science findings and the beliefs of actors may represent a difference in the perspective from which reality is being approached, rather than a simple contrast between what is true and what is false, or ideological. Furthermore, there are legitimate differences between academic work and other practices in terms of what is taken to be sufficient evidence for treating ideas as true (Hammersley 2011: ch5).17 Very similar problems arise with another component of the first two senses of ‘ideology’: the assumption that the beliefs function in undesirable or politically regressive ways, or work against the interests of believers. Here, once again, before the label can be applied, the analyst must be able to establish with sufficient certainty that the beliefs concerned do have the consequences attributed to them. And should he or she revise this judgment at a later point, or should the beliefs begin to have different consequences, once again the label would have to be withdrawn. Furthermore, we must note that what is generally involved is not just the  The points made in this and the previous paragraph do not imply that the concept of truth must be abandoned or that knowledge is unavailable, which was the conclusion sometimes drawn from Kuhn’s work; a tendency later reinforced by the range of ideas frequently included under the heading of ‘postmodernism’. My point is simply that all our knowledge is fallible: because there is no method of demonstrating empirical validity beyond all possible doubt, reliance must be placed on judgments about degrees of reasonable doubt. Any conflation of this sort of fallibilism with scepticism or relativism is a fallacy. 17

2 Ideology 

31

claim that some set of beliefs had particular consequences on a particular occasion, but that there is a systematic relationship between the beliefs and such consequences. And lying behind this is the idea that there is a mechanism which generates this systematic relationship. Yet this greatly increases the evidential requirements the analyst must satisfy before the term ‘ideology’ can be used: it must be shown that the beliefs concerned tend to cause the consequences claimed on all or most occasions when certain conditions hold; in other words, when the mechanism is present and is triggered.18 Very little sociological work, to date, has achieved this task of identifying causal mechanisms very successfully. A further problem in using the first two senses of ‘ideology’ is that they require judgments about what are good or bad, progressive or regressive, consequences; and perhaps also about what are the objective interests of particular groups of people that an ideology obscures. In other words, the very application of the term ‘ideology’, in these senses, depends upon evaluation of the desirability or undesirability of the consequences resulting from the beliefs being adopted. Not only does this assume that a set of beliefs either has predominantly positive or mainly negative consequences in most circumstances, but there is also the question of how evaluative judgments are to be validated and why it is believed that social scientists can claim distinctive authority in doing this—a belief that is, in my view, clearly unjustified (Hammersley 2014, 2017). Furthermore, if the evaluation changes, a set of beliefs may no longer warrant the label ‘ideological’, even though there has been no change in the beliefs themselves or in how they function in the world. These are formidable problems, and they render application of the term ‘ideology’ in either of its first two senses questionable. Yet, when  Very often this has been glossed via some kind of functionalism. The problem with functionalism is not that it is unintelligible, or even that it is a false mode of argument, but rather that it can be very difficult to test functionalist accounts. Doing this is relatively straightforward, in principle, in the case of manifest functions: the conscious promotion of a set of beliefs to serve a purpose; for example to secure consent to commands or rules (though of course those seeking to do this may disguise their motives). However, most sociologically interesting uses of the concept of ideology rely on a functionalism which stresses latent functions, thereby assuming the operation of unconscious processes, structural features of people’s belief systems (such as dogmatism) of which they are unaware, and/or social processes that take place ‘behind people’s backs’. By their very nature these processes are much more challenging to document. 18

32 

M. Hammersley

social scientists use the term ‘ideology’ in these ways, they rarely make a sustained attempt to meet the requirements I have just outlined. To the contrary, it frequently seems to be assumed that ideologies can be easily recognised. If beliefs are false (in the eyes of the analyst), there is a tendency to conclude that they are believed by people because they serve some function: either a psychological function for particular individuals or a social function for a group, structure, or system. It is rare to find much effort put into establishing this, or into showing that the effects are undesirable. Similarly, if some set of beliefs is held by what the analyst takes to be a discredited group, or appears likely to serve the interests of those promoting it, then (unless their truth is already accepted by the analyst) he or she tends to assume that the beliefs are false: that they are mere rationalisations. Furthermore, it is unusual for there to be investigation of the actual consequences of people holding the beliefs concerned. Instead, it is often assumed that what are taken by the analyst to be the practical or political implications of the beliefs correspond to those that are likely to be significant for audiences, and that these generate corresponding consequences. In other words, there is often a confusion between semantic implications and causal relations, forgetting that beliefs can have unpredictable consequences: because any idea has multiple implications and because actions can have unintended consequences. In effect, the concept of ideology is treated as an inference ticket whereby conclusions about the validity and functions of beliefs can be reached simultaneously, and with relative ease. Yet this is clearly unjustifiable in methodological terms. What usually underpins this false move is the idea that there is a very close connection between how beliefs are acquired, whether or not they are true, and whether they have progressive or regressive, desirable or undesirable, consequences. As part of this, it may be assumed that false beliefs are generated or adopted as a result of psychological and/or social processes quite different from those involved in the adoption of true beliefs; these being regarded as the result of immediate perception of reality, or of some rational thought process. Yet there are good reasons to reject this view: the same sorts of psychological and social processes can underpin the adoption of both true and false beliefs (Barnes 1974; Bloor

2 Ideology 

33

1976; Bycroft 2016).19 Equally important, the connection between the truth of beliefs and the desirability of the consequences of holding, or acting on, them is also open to serious question. Indeed, it has been questioned since at least the nineteenth century, one influential challenge being found in the work of Nietzsche (see Hammersley 2000: ch1). Of course, this is not to deny that the first two senses of the term ‘ideology’ pick out important features of how ideas operate in society.20 It is surely true that people may misperceive the nature and consequences of particular practices or institutions, taking appearances for reality. Similarly, they do often believe what suits their purposes, what flatters them, and so on. It is also true that many of our beliefs are inherited from others, rather than being the product of independent inquiry on our part. And it is the case that we sometimes engage in actions that are misguided because they are based on false ideas that we hold dogmatically; in practical activities we are not concerned solely with the truth of ideas but also with what ‘works’ for us, what serves our purposes, what we find reassuring, and so on. Furthermore, people sometimes seek to disseminate falsehoods, in the sense of what they know to be false or recognise is not the whole truth, because they believe that others’ belief in these ideas will serve an important purpose. However, showing that and how these various factors operate in the case of particular beliefs held by particular groups of people at particular times is a challenging analytic task. Just how challenging does not seem to be widely recognised in much sociological work today, and part of the reason for this is reliance on unexplicated senses of the term ‘ideology’. The third and fourth senses of ‘ideology’—what I referred to as ‘programmatic ideology’ and ‘perspectival ideology’—are less problematic than the first two, though there are cautions surrounding their use that  It may be thought that this argument undermines any claim on the part of science to superior knowledge, but this is not true. Science draws on and refines methods and ideas that are used in other human activities, but does so in ways that are designed to secure the epistemic validity of conclusions, downplaying other considerations; in much the way that legal rules and practices are designed to produce conclusions that have legal validity. These forms of specialised activity reduce, though they cannot eliminate, the danger of the types of error that are most relevant to their distinctive goals. 20  For a defence of these from a non-Marxist perspective, see Boudon (1989). 19

34 

M. Hammersley

need to be observed. These relate, for example, to the problem of ascribing beliefs to particular groups or categories of people, or to communities or institutions. One issue here is that it should not be assumed that people operate on the basis of coherent sets of beliefs about all matters in which an analyst may be interested. As Converse (1964) showed a long time ago, while this may be the case with members of political (or cultural) elites, because they are regularly called upon to express their views in public, the beliefs of most people on many topics are usually much less well-defined and much less well-integrated, at least in areas that are not directly implicated in their practical activities. Equally important are problems to do with how the groups which are the carriers of particular beliefs are to be identified (in particular, whether this can be done independently of the beliefs they hold), what counts as holding some belief (for instance, must there be voiced commitment to it?), and how we can accommodate the fact that others not belonging to the group concerned may share these beliefs, while some members of the group do not hold them (Child 1941; Sharrock 1974). At the very least, the patterns involved will be probabilistic in character.21 Aside from these problems, there are risks of misunderstanding associated with use of the term ‘ideology’ in the third and fourth senses, given the considerable baggage that it carries from being used predominantly in the first two senses. It may therefore be better to employ synonyms, such as ‘belief system’ or ‘worldview’. My arguments here may be unlikely to dissuade social scientists from using the term ‘ideology’, but if it is to be employed much greater clarity is needed about the sense intended, and the methodological problems I have outlined must be addressed.

Conclusion As we have seen, confusion was sown soon after the very invention of the term ‘ideology’ about its meaning. Furthermore, it has come to be used as a weapon by those espousing many intellectual and political positions. The strand of Enlightenment thinking that Destutt de Tracy and the  These problems also apply to the first two senses of ‘ideology’.

21

2 Ideology 

35

Idéologues represented soon itself came to be treated as an ideology: it was attacked for its naturalistic approach to all thought and its emphasis on the power of reason. In much the same way, Marxism has deployed the concept but also been dismissed on the grounds that it is itself an ideology; and, as we saw, the anti-Marxist idea of the ‘end of ideology’ suffered the same fate. All this should serve as a warning about the problematic nature of the term. Its popularity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and continued use today, results from the fact that ‘in one way or another, [we] have come to think of ideas as weapons which serve the fulfillment of [our] desires or interests, rather than the discovery of truth’ (Bendix 1970: vii). Equally significant has been the resurgence of epistemological scepticism.22 There is particular irony in the fact that, when it first arose, the discipline of Idéologie was seen as a means by which humanity could be freed from ‘the yoke of prejudices’ (Barth 1976: 8) through science and education. Yet it ended up being a term that symbolised, for many, the view that there can be no reasoning or knowledge that does not operate under the influence of interests and preconceptions, in other words that all points of view are prejudiced or biased. I have shown that there are very serious methodological problems with the two dominant senses of the term ‘ideology’ employed by social scientists, referring to ideas that are taken both to be false or unjustified and to serve undesirable functions. The challenge involved in establishing that a set of ideas has these features, and the fallibility of any conclusion about this, render proper application of the term a difficult and very laborious process—at best. In my view the problems involved here are so serious that usage of the first two senses of the term should be abandoned by social scientists, even if they are acceptable for other purposes.23 By contrast, the third and fourth concepts of ideology I listed are analytically defensible; though there are cautions surrounding their use that need to be observed. And, even here, it may be advisable to avoid the term ‘ideology’ in labelling  On the recurrent rise and fall in influence of scepticism, see Popkin (2003).  I am not the first to suggest this, but there is very little sign of either the term or those first two concepts being given up (see Gerring 1997: 960–961). 22 23

36 

M. Hammersley

them. Finally, it must be reiterated that the problems I have identified do not automatically disappear when alternative formulations are used. Thus, terms like ‘discourse’, ‘hegemony’, and ‘habitus’ also need careful handling as regards their meaning and conditions of appropriate use; and this is missing just as frequently as when the term ‘ideology’ is employed. None of this implies, however, that the phenomena ‘ideology’ has been used to identify are spurious or unimportant—but they are probably better addressed without the evaluative baggage that this term carries.

References Abercrombie, N., Hill, R., & Turner, B. (1980). The Dominant Ideology Thesis. London: Allen and Unwin. Althusser, L. (1971). Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. In Lenin and Philosophy. London: Verso. Anderson, P. (1976/1977). The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci. New Left Review, 100(November), 5–78. Anderson, P. (2016). The Heirs of Gramsci. New Left Review, 100(July– August), 71–97. Aron, R. (1962). The Opium of the Intellectuals. New York: Norton and Co. (First published in French in 1955). Bacon, F. (1620/2004). Novum Organum, Volume XI of The Oxford Francis Bacon. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baehr, P. (2011). Marxism and Islamism: Intellectual Conformity in Aron’s Time and Ours. Journal of Classical Sociology, 11(2), 173–190. Barnes, S.  B. (1974). Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Barth, H. (1976). Truth and Ideology. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. (First published in French in 1945). Bell, D. (2000). The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. Cambridge, MS: Harvard University Press. (First edition published in 1960). Bendix, R. (1970). Embattled Reason. New York: Oxford University Press. Billig, M., Condor, S., Edwards, D., Gane, M., Middleton, D., & Radley, A. (1988). Ideological Dilemmas: A Social Psychology of Everyday Thinking. London: Sage.

2 Ideology 

37

Bird, A. (2000). Thomas Kuhn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Blommaert, J., Collins, J., Heller, M., Rampton, B., Slembrouck, S., & Verschueren, J. (2001). Introduction: Discourse and Critique. Critique of Anthropology, 21(1), 5–12. Bloor, D. (1976). Knowledge and Social Imagery. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Boothman, D. (2011). The Sources for Gramsci’s Concept of Hegemony. In M. Green (Ed.), Rethinking Gramsci. London: Routledge. Boudon, R. (1989). The Analysis of Ideology. Cambridge: Polity Press. (First published in French in 1986). Bycroft, M. (2016). How to Save the Symmetry Principle. In T.  Sauer & R. Scholl (Eds.), The Philosophy of Historical Case Studies (Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science) (Vol. 319). Cham: Springer. Child, A. (1941). The Problem of Imputation in the Sociology of Knowledge. Ethics, 51, 200–219. Cohen, G.  A. (1972). Karl Marx and the Withering Away of Social Science. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1(2), 182–203. Converse, P. (1964). The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics. In D. Apter (Ed.), Ideology and Discontent. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Dittberner, J. (1979). The End of Ideology and American Social Thought 1930–60. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press. Eisenstadt, S.  N. (1968). Ideology and Social Change. In T.  Parsons (Ed.), American Sociology: Perspectives, Problems, Methods. New York: Basic Books. Fairclough, N. (2000). New Labour, New Language? London: Routledge. Fukuyama, F. (1992). The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press. Geertz, C. (1964). Religion as a Cultural System. In D. Apter (Ed.), Ideology and Discontent. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Gerring, J. (1997). Ideology: A Definitional Analysis. Political Research Quarterly, 50(4), 957–994. Hall, S. (1985). Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-­ Structuralist Debates. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 2(2), 91–114. Hammersley, M. (2000). Taking Sides in Social Research. London: Routledge. Hammersley, M. (2011). Methodology, Who Needs It? London: Sage. Hammersley, M. (2014). The Limits of Social Science. London: Sage. Hammersley, M. (2017). On the Role of Values in Social Research: Weber Vindicated? Sociological Research Online, 22(1), 1–12. Hammersley, M. (2019). The Concept of Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

38 

M. Hammersley

Head, B. (1980). The Origin of Idéologue and Idéologie. Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 183, 257–264. Head, B. (1985). Ideology and Social Science: Destutt de Tracy and French Liberalism. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff. Hirst, P.  Q. (1976). Althusser’s Theory of Ideology. Economy and Society, 5(4), 385–412. Kennedy, E. (1978). A Philosophe in the Age of Revolution: Destutt de Tracy and the Origins of ‘Ideology’. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society. Kettler, D., Meja, V., & Stehr, N. (1984). Karl Mannheim. London: Tavistock. Kuhn, T. (1970). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (2nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Larrain, J. (1979). The Concept of Ideology. London: Hutchinson. Larrain, J. (1994). The Postmodern Critique of Ideology. The Sociological Review, 42(2), 289–314. Levitas, R. (1998). The Inclusive Society? Social Exclusion and New Labour. London: Macmillan. Lichtheim, G. (1967). The Concept of Ideology and Other Essays. New  York: Random House. Lukács, G. (1971). History and Class Consciousness. London: Merlin Press. (First published in German in 1923). MacIntyre, A. (1971). Against the Self Images of the Age: Essays on Ideology and Philosophy. London: Duckworth. Mannheim, K. (1936). Ideology and Utopia. London: Routledge Kegan and Paul. (Earlier edition published in German in 1929). Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1970). The German Ideology. London: Lawrence and Wishart. (First published in German, 1932, written in 1845). McLellan, D. (1995). Ideology (2nd ed.). Buckingham: Open University Press. McLennan, G. (2010). The Postsecular Turn. Theory, Culture and Society, 27(4), 3–20. Mepham, J. (1972). The Theory of Ideology in Capital. Radical Philosophy, 2, 12–19. Muller, J. (1987). The Other God That Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Parsons, T. (1959). An Approach to the Sociology of Knowledge. In Transactions of the Fourth World Congress of Sociology (Vol. IV). Louvain: International Sociological Association. Popkin, R. (2003). The History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle (3rd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2 Ideology 

39

Purvis, T., & Hunt, A. (1993). Discourse, Ideology, Discourse, Ideology, Discourse, Ideology…. British Journal of Sociology, 44(3), 473–499. Sharrock, W. (1974). On Owning Knowledge. In R.  Turner (Ed.), Ethnomethodology. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Sharrock, W., & Read, R. (2002). Kuhn. Cambridge: Polity. Shils, E. (1955). The End of Ideology? Encounters, 5(November), 52–58. Staum, M. (1980a). The Class of Moral and Political Sciences, 1795–1803. French Historical Studies, 11(3), 371–397. Staum, M. (1980b). Cabanis: Enlightenment and Medical Philosophy in the French Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wetherell, M., & Potter, J. (1992). Mapping the Language of Racism: Discourse and the Legitimation of Exploitation. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Williams, R. (1983). Keywords (2nd ed.). London: Fontana. Wodak, R., & Chilton, P. (Eds.). (2005). A New Agenda for (Critical) Discourse Analysis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

3 Culture

The word ‘culture’ and its variants (‘subculture’ and ‘counter-culture’, along with ‘cultural’, ‘subcultural’, and ‘countercultural’) are widely used in the social sciences. However, the intended meaning of these terms is often insufficiently clear, as are their relations with cognate terms, such as ‘civilisation’, ‘tradition’, ‘perspective’, ‘ideology’, ‘discourse’, and ‘imaginary’. Some of the reasons for this lack of clarity become obvious if we examine the history of the word ‘culture’. In this chapter, that history is briefly sketched, since the nineteenth century. Four interpretations of the term are identified, and there is then a discussion of the various theoretical contrasts within which it has played a role, all of which shape its current meanings. Finally, a strategy for reconstructing the concept for the purposes of social science is outlined.1

 An earlier, more detailed, discussion of the history of this term can be found in Hammersley (2019). This chapter is based on that book. 1

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Hammersley, Troubling Sociological Concepts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51644-4_3

41

42 

M. Hammersley

 Brief History of the Term A and Four Definitions Raymond Williams (1983: 87) traces the origins of ‘culture’ to the Latin words ‘colere’ and ‘cultura’, a core sense of which was ‘the tending of natural growth’; and, by metaphorical extension, this came to refer to the intellectual and moral development of human beings—with an ambiguity about the extent to which this needed to be actively encouraged. This was the foundation on which later usage of ‘culture’ initially built. In the nineteenth century, ‘culture’ was usually treated as a singular term, though there were two very different meanings given to it. One, exemplified in the writings of Matthew Arnold (1993), focused on what might be called aesthetic cultivation, and served as a basis for his criticism of the attitudes prevalent across the three main social classes in mid-­ nineteenth-­century Britain. He famously defined ‘Culture’ as ‘the best that has been known and said in the world’ (Arnold 1873: Preface). His concern was the extent to which individuals are cultured, in the sense that their characters have been formed by the tradition of Western ideas, literature, and art—the classical humanist tradition that developed in Europe after the Middle Ages, drawing on the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome as well as Christianity, all this suffused through the influence of German and English Romanticism, and the classicism of Goethe. Arnold took this tradition to embody universal human values, treating culture as a source of knowledge and understanding that is essential to living well: it embodies an ideal of the good life (on Arnold, see Trilling 1939; Collini 1988). The other main nineteenth-century meaning of the term arose in the field of anthropology (see Kuper 2015). The British anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor provided an influential definition of ‘Culture’ as referring to ‘that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society’ (Tylor 1871: 1). Here, the term covered all aspects of human life that were not determined by biological heredity, technology as much as religion. And the beliefs, attitudes, practices, and institutions to be found in Western Europe were usually taken by

3 Culture 

43

nineteenth-century anthropologists to represent the end-point, or at least the most advanced stage, of cultural development. So, the task was to trace this process of development, with the study of contemporary ‘primitive’ societies providing an insight into past stages of development in the West. However, the early twentieth century witnessed a significant change in social and cultural anthropology towards studying multiple ‘other cultures’, rather than charting the evolutionary development of ‘Culture’ in the singular. This marked a widespread abandonment of evolutionary assumptions in favour of an emphasis on investigating diversity in forms of human social life, and on the need to understand these in their own terms, rather than treating them as precursors to ‘Western civilisation’. One influence here was the work of the eighteenth-century German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder (see Wells 1959; Forster 2010). His ideas had been taken up in the Romantic Movement, sometimes encouraging an emphasis on the value of ‘folk culture’ and of distinctive national cultures. Other important inheritors of Herder’s ideas were writers in the tradition of nineteenth-century German historicism (Iggers 1968; Beiser 2011) and the ‘Völkerpsychologie’ of Steinthal and Lazarus, subsequently developed by Wundt into a form of cultural psychology (Kalmar 1987; Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952: 10–11). These ideas shaped German anthropology in the nineteenth century and this pluralistic conception of culture became widely accepted across social and cultural anthropology in the twentieth century (Stocking 1995; Penny and Bunzl 2003). It was also taken up in Anglo-American sociology. Here, it stood opposed to the narrow concept of ‘rational action’ that had become central to economics, the main discipline with which sociology had to vie in establishing its place in US universities. It was pointed out that culture played a crucial role in determining the ends of action, where economics simply took these for granted. However, culture was sometimes also seen as holding back technological and economic development (Ogburn 1922/1966). In addition, the concept came to be used in developing sociological explanations for delinquency and crime (Cohen 1955; Miller 1958; Cloward and Ohlin 1960), these replacing previously dominant biological and psychological theories. And there was recognition of ethnic and other kinds of diversity within large

44 

M. Hammersley

complex societies. Equally important, there was attention to the role of organizational and occupational cultures: the ways in which people develop distinctive perspectives and patterns of action in dealing with the problems they face in performing roles within organizations, or in practising particular professions. The concept of culture was also included in Talcott Parsons’s ambitious attempt to conceptualise the field of social science and the relations among its disciplines. He treated culture as a separate system from that of the social, shaping human behaviour in terms of both its goals and what are taken to be legitimate means for achieving them (see Schmid 1993). Partly under the influence of Parsons, in political science there was a growth of interest in what was referred to as ‘civic culture’ or ‘political culture’, this being treated as a key variable in explaining the stability of governments (see Almond and Verba 1963; Inglehart 1988). Later, in the 1990s, a form of cultural sociology emerged drawing on, but also reacting against, Parsons’s approach (see Alexander and Seidman 1990; Alexander 2003; Vaisey 2010; Griswold 2013; Inglis and Almila 2016). Another crucial development, from the 1960s onwards, was the emergence of a whole new trans-disciplinary field—cultural studies—which overlapped with, and rivalled, the other social sciences, particularly sociology (see Tudor 1999; Turner 2003). This began in the work of Hoggart (1957) and Williams (1958) who were literary scholars trained under the influence of Frank Leavis, whose conception of culture was similar to that of Arnold. However, from the start, Hoggart and Williams reacted against Leavis’s tendency to assume that Culture is the product of an elite, and emphasised the value of working-class culture. As cultural studies developed, notably at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies under the influence of Stuart Hall, it came to focus on culture as a field in which there is conflict between the tendency for dominant social groups to promote an ideology that serves to maintain the status quo, and the creative, cultural resistance of subordinated groups. Also of significance was the influence of structuralism: the idea that, drawing on the model of language, the particular meanings given to phenomena are a product of underlying generative structures or rules, whether universal in character or specific to particular cultural or ideological systems, or types of society. From this point of view, the analytic task became to

3 Culture 

45

identify these structures and rules and to document how they function in cultural production. In both cultural sociology and cultural studies, we can identify a rather different conception of culture from those already mentioned: as referring to the processes by which human beings make sense of and find significance in social phenomena, including their own actions and identities. This has been conceptualised in a variety of ways. Sometimes it has involved a focus on the role that influential categories of people, organisations, or institutions play in shaping the sense that others make of the world—for example, investigating the role of film, television programmes, or adverts—but, often, the interest has been in how ordinary people in ordinary situations construct meanings for themselves, for example via narratives. There has also been variation in whether meaning-making is treated as going on alongside other sorts of processes, particularly those of a more ‘material’ kind, such as technological and economic developments, or the exercise of political power; or, alternatively, whether it is viewed as effectively constituting all social phenomena, so that there can be nothing independent of the cultural process. In summary, out of this complex history we can identify four, very different, meanings of the word ‘culture’: 1. Aesthetic cultivation. In its earliest formulation, this treats culture as singular, as relating to universal human ideals, and as referring primarily to ideas, literature, drama, art, and music that are judged to be especially valuable. Frequently, the value of these is seen as arising from a capacity to facilitate the harmonious development of intellectual and moral virtues; as contrasted with those ideas, types of literature and art regarded as worthless, or even as detrimental to moral and intellectual development. This sense of the term emerged in the context of what might be called cultural criticism, notably the writings of Arnold, Eliot, and Leavis. However, building on the similar German tradition of Bildung, a version of this was adopted by influential German sociologists around the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century, for example Max and Alfred Weber and Georg Simmel. By contrast, later sociological work using this first sense has tended to focus on the role of ‘high culture’ in reproducing and maintaining

46 

M. Hammersley

social class divisions, and/or Western global dominance; so that, here, the positive value previously assigned to aesthetic culture often becomes negative. There has also been some work in cultural studies that has inverted the evaluative gradient between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture, celebrating the latter. Finally, there is a variant of this first sense of the term that refers simply to ‘the arts and literature’, or even to ‘the creative industries’, with little distinction being made between ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ types of cultural product, and therefore little reference to aesthetic judgment. 2. Developmental. The second influential meaning of ‘culture’ also treats what it refers to as singular, as varying in degree, and as of positive value. However, in this usage, the term covers all aspects of human social life that are a product of learning and adaptation rather than of biological inheritance. Different societies, historical and contemporary, or different segments of a society, are viewed as representing different stages of cultural development, and can be ranked in these terms: either in general or in specific respects, such as in some aspect of technology, in the spread of literacy, and so on. So, from this perspective, societies, and social groups more generally, vary in their cultural level, but in each case this is, at least potentially, subject to change over time, rather than being permanently fixed. Nevertheless, generally, progress is conceived in terms of a single ladder of development. As already noted, one version is to be found in the work of nineteenth-century anthropologists, but another arises in the writings of Hegel and Marx—both drawing on the Scottish Enlightenment, notably the work of Ferguson. For Marx, in his early writings, drawing on Hegel, cultures which existed at different times in Europe formed part of a historical process of human development reflecting successive modes of production, each one representing a deformed version of human nature, but at the same time containing elements of its true form, with each being necessary for the eventual full ‘realization’ of this. 3. Cultures as distinct ways of life. The third meaning of ‘culture’ is that which became central in the discipline of anthropology and influential more widely  across social science, during the twentieth century and up to the present. Here, culture is treated not as singular but as plural. And, as with the second meaning, its reference is not restricted

3 Culture 

47

to art, literature, and music, but extends to all aspects of life, along with the values and ideas that shape these. On this view, there are diverse cultures, each having internal coherence, their differences perhaps resulting from variation in environment (climate, resources, etc.), or from the fact that they are uniquely created forms expressing distinctive identities. At face value at least, this third usage of the term is descriptive rather than evaluative—by contrast with most versions of the previous two meanings. Nevertheless, sometimes cultural pluralism is turned into a form of relativism whereby each culture is treated as of value in itself, with no overarching standard available by which they can be judged (Herskovits 1972).2 Proponents of this third conception of culture have specifically opposed the values built into both of the previously mentioned conceptions, either on the grounds that evaluations must be suspended for scientific work, or on the basis of cultural relativism—though a clear distinction between these two sources of objection has not always been maintained. 4. Culture as meaning-making. In this final sense of the term, culture is treated as a process, rather than as an object. The focus is on the means by which, or ways in which, people make sense of, and assign significance to, what they experience; with these meanings being viewed as producing, or at least structuring, social actions, and institutions. Here, language and other kinds of signification are treated as central to the analysis, with particular attention given to the character of texts, signs and symbols, discourses, or rhetorical forms. These are sometimes treated as forming systems, and often as generating distinctive experiential worlds. Today this notion of culture can be found across anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies; though in each locale it competes, and has sometimes been blended, with other conceptions. One influential source was French structuralism; others were symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology in US sociology, as well as cognitive and ­interpretive forms of anthropology. Like the other definitions of ‘culture’, this fourth one is subject to divergent interpretations, along sev The more recent ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology seems to have resulted in an even more radical version of this argument (Heywood 2017). In some respects this echoes Winch (1964). 2

48 

M. Hammersley

eral dimensions: whether the focus is on key meaning-makers or on all meaning-making in the context of everyday life; whether the process is conceptualized as consciously directed or as operating below or beyond people’s awareness; and whether it is seen as entirely constituting the social world or as going on alongside other forms of structuration, of a more ‘material’ kind. The differences among (and within) these four senses of the term ‘culture’ highlight many of the complexities and uncertainties surrounding usage of this word in social science today. However, as I noted at the beginning, these are rarely explicitly addressed, the result being vagueness, uncertainty, and sometimes confusion; along with debates in which the parties talk past one another.

 roblematic Contrasts in Which the Term P ‘Culture’ Is Implicated Looking more analytically at its history, what we find is that the term ‘culture’ is implicated in a number of significant theoretical contrasts: Culture Versus What Is Worthless or Morally Damaging  This contrast was, of course, central to the aesthetic cultivation sense of the term. While it sometimes hovered behind nineteenth-century anthropological accounts, the emphasis on evolution ran counter to it, in the sense that earlier forms were regarded as necessary preconditions for later ones. There was also sometimes a reversal of the evaluation involved here, with the ‘naturalness’ of ‘primitive’ society being held to highlight the artificiality or decadence of modern ‘civilisation’. As we saw, twentieth-century anthropology largely rejected this first contrast, in favour of recognising multiple cultures, with no evaluation of their relative value. While, within each culture, there were evaluations of attitudes, behaviour, artefacts, products, and so on, in aesthetic and other terms, these were treated by anthropologists as entirely dependent upon the particular values that prevailed in the society or culture concerned.

3 Culture 

49

Meanwhile, as noted earlier, in cultural studies, there was sometimes an inversion of the ‘high culture’/’lower culture’ hierarchy, with greater value being placed on working-class than on middle-class culture, and on non-­ Western than on Western cultures. Here again, then, we have discrimination between what is more and what is less valuable, albeit in very different terms from Arnold, Eliot, and Leavis—and, in fact, also from Hoggart and Williams (Hammersley 2019). Culture Versus Biology This contrast underpinned the nineteenth-­ century anthropological sense of ‘culture’. It was built into the very definition of the term offered by Tylor, and it remained an essential distinction for anthropologists even after they had shifted from a singular to a plural conception. To some extent, this contrast also lay behind the aesthetic cultivation sense of the term, in that such cultivation required a suppression of natural (egoistic or sexual) desires; though, in the work of Leavis, with his championing of the novels and criticism of D.  H. Lawrence, there was a reaction against this in favour of a notion of the natural as representing what is genuine in life (Jacobson 1967; Black 1995). In the twentieth century, the implications of biology, and especially of ‘race’, for human behaviour were downplayed by most anthropologists, and attempts to explain human behaviour in terms of genetic inheritance were strongly resisted (see, for example, Sahlins 1976). As a result, there were conflicts between anthropologists and proponents of socio-biology and evolutionary psychology, but also within the discipline between mainstream anthropologists and a minority who sought to combine biological with cultural explanations (see, for instance, Chagnon 2013: ch14). Few sociologists have been tempted into this. All these very different views have retained the distinction between culture and biology, albeit differing in their attitudes towards it. However, in some nineteenth-century discussion there had been a blurring of the boundary between culture and biology, as a result of non-Darwinian views of evolution, according to which cultural attributes could be biologically inherited; and also because strong parallels were frequently drawn between biological and cultural inheritance (see Burrow 2000). Furthermore, in recent times there has been some questioning of the distinction, as a result of biological work on epigenetics: the way in which

50 

M. Hammersley

genes may be turned ‘on’ or ‘off’ by environmental factors. Partly inspired by this, some versions of ‘new materialisms’ have put forward a vitalistic conception of nature that undercuts any sharp distinction from culture (see Fraser et al. 2006; Coole and Frost 2010; Meloni 2017). Culture Versus Materiality  There are several versions of this contrast. As already noted, under the aesthetic cultivation sense of ‘culture’, what was of most value in human life was contrasted with mere material concerns: a preoccupation with money and everyday practical matters; or, more broadly, with lower rather than higher needs and desires. Another version juxtaposes culture—as relating to human feeling, spiritual matters, or ultimate goals—with an emphasis on technique— seen as concerned with mere means. By contrast, as we saw, nineteenth-­ century anthropology treated all of culture as responding to human needs, so that technology was as much a part of it as religion or art. A third version of this contrast—one which came to be influential within anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies—focused on whether patterns of behaviour are to be explained as the product of values, beliefs, and modes of thinking, on the one hand, or as a result of ecology, technology, and/or economic interests, on the other. Within both anthropology and sociology, some argued that cultures are adaptations to diverse environments, physical and socio-cultural, and that cultural forms could hold back technological or economic development. The parallel with Marxism is obvious here. By contrast, some strands of American anthropology tended to treat cultures as if they were free creations through which groups, communities, or societies expressed themselves. The question of the proper balance between emphasis on material or cultural factors in social explanations has been subject to longstanding debate, with criticisms of idealism on one side and of reductionism on the other (see, for instance, Williams 1981). Culture Versus Society When culture is viewed as plural, comprising whole ways of life, it often seems to swallow up much if not all of what normally comes under the heading of ‘society’. At other times, culture is treated as a part or subsystem of society, with its own distinctive

3 Culture 

51

functions. Aside from casual use of ‘culture’ and ‘society’ as partial synonyms, there is uncertainty about the meanings entailed even when attention is paid to the relationship between the two, as with Eliot’s (1948: 37) declaration that a culture is the creation of a society while also being ‘that which makes it a society’. The anthropologist Raymond Firth (1951: 27) provides a slightly clearer distinction, claiming that the terms ‘represent different facets or components in basic human situations’: if, for instance, society is taken to be an organized set of individuals with a given way of life, culture is that way of life. If society is taken to be an aggregate of social relations, then culture is the content of those relations. Society emphasises the human component, the aggregate of people, and the relations between them. Culture emphasises the component of accumulated resources, immaterial as well as material, which the people inherit, employ, transmute, add to, and transmit.

However, a little reflection on this formulation soon reveals that, in practice, distinguishing empirically between what is cultural and what societal is likely to be challenging.3 Similar uncertainty arises with the concept of ‘subculture’ and its relationship to the notion of ‘group’, ‘subgroup’, or social categories that are treated as bearers of subcultures. At the core of this problem is the relationship between beliefs, attitudes, preferences, and so on, on the one hand, and behaviour, on the other. The two are not easily distinguished: it has sometimes been argued that there is an internal, rather than external or causal, relationship between them; and, methodologically, inference often has to be made back from appearance and behaviour to beliefs, attitudes, and preferences, because we have no direct access to the latter. Diverse Cultures Versus the Humanly Universal Most nineteenth-­ century usage of the term ‘culture’, whether in cultural criticism or in anthropology, assumed its universal character. The word referred either to what were taken to be ideals about the good life, and the virtuous person,  The problem of the relationship between ‘culture’ and ‘society’ stems not just from the way that the first term has been used but also from vagueness in the meanings given to the second of these terms (see Chap. 4). 3

52 

M. Hammersley

that applied to all human beings, or to a universal process of socio-­cultural development. However, in the twentieth century, when the idea of a plurality of cultures became dominant, opposition arose between culture and universality. This contrast surfaced in disputes about the extent to which human behaviour is shaped by underlying cultural universals, of one kind or another (Murdock 1945; Lévi-Strauss 1966) and about the implications of cultural pluralism for notions of rationality (see Wilson 1974; Hollis and Lukes 1982). There was also much discussion of cultural relativism and its moral implications (Moody-Adams 1997). For instance, there have been heated debates about whether there are universal rights (of human beings, of children) that apply across all cultures; and, if there are, whether they should be applied in standard ways, or interpreted in a manner that takes account of cultural differences (Ignatieff 2001; Freeman 2011). Another example of this conflict relates to the universalistic claims made by feminists about equality for women, on the one side, and, on the other, arguments defending cultural practices at odds with Western interpretations of that principle—whether this is the wearing of the hijab or female genital cutting (Alvarez 2009). Defences of these practices have drawn, explicitly or implicitly, on anthropological arguments, and some anthropologists have defended them on grounds of cultural difference (see Shweder 2000). Cultural Holism Versus Internal Heterogeneity and Situational Variability  Anthropological study of ‘other cultures’ has been criticised for tending to assume that there are isolated communities, each with its own distinctive character, in terms of beliefs, values, attitudes, and behaviour.4 There was a tendency towards this as a result of the shift in focus, at the start of the twentieth century, from evolutionary and diffusionist perspectives towards a functionalist or particularist concern with societies or cultures as systems or wholes. And this did sometimes lead to a neglect of the extent to which cultural features are shared across communities, as well as of internal cultural differentiation—though, interestingly, the  For a corrective to this and other misrepresentations of anthropology along similar lines, see Lewis (1998). 4

3 Culture 

53

concept of subculture was originally developed within anthropology (see Linton 1936: 275). Of course, internal differentiation is especially obvious in the case of large, complex societies, and sociologists have given considerable attention to this—as it relates, for example, to age or generation, as well as to ethnicity, gender, and social class. Sometimes this focus on subgroups within larger societies has been motivated by a belief that these must display coherent and distinct cultures, even if this is not true of whole societies. Yet, very often, on further investigation, significant differentiation has been found within them. A radical response to this has been to re-conceptualise culture as constituted on an on-going basis within processes of social interaction (Zimmerman and Pollner 1970) or as involving the circulation of multiple discourses or variation in ‘interpretive repertoires’ (see Wetherell and Potter 1988, 1992; Montgomery and Allan 1992; McKenzie 2005). This issue also relates to a longstanding problem in the sociology of knowledge, concerned with how cultural features can be rigorously attributed to particular groups (see Child 1941), especially when attention is paid to the contextually variable practices that people employ when attributing cultural features to themselves and to others (Moerman 1968; Sharrock 1974; Jayyusi 1984). There are a couple of other contrasts that should also be given attention. Unlike most of those I have mentioned up to now, these have often been used to depict culture as undesirable. Both arise from elements in Enlightenment thought and have been associated with key features in the development of Western societies during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (perhaps for this reason, there is considerable overlap between them, but they do also have distinct elements): Culture Versus Rationality  This contrast often involves a rejection of custom, myth, or culture, in favour of forms of rationality modelled on economic calculation and/or on scientific thinking. These latter are seen as involving the exercise of reason by individuals without restraint or restriction by conventional attitudes, and there is an emphasis on the power of this to generate productive innovations, to capitalise on opportunities, or to produce new knowledge. Here, culture is viewed as a potential barrier to be overcome (see, for instance, Banfield 1958), and is

54 

M. Hammersley

used as an explanation for differences between societies in their levels of development. This conception of rationality is central to much modern economics, but a similar idea has also informed a great deal of philosophy, for example Kant’s conception of Enlightenment as the freedom and courage to think rationally for oneself. This critique of culture, and celebration of individualism and science, was opposed by nineteenth-century critics of rationalism and industrialism, and also by many twentieth-century anthropologists, who emphasised what they claimed were the distinctive inner logics of other cultures, and the rationality of action in terms of these. Similarly, some working in the field of development studies pointed to the ways in which local cultures could offer protection against the depredations of capitalism and/or could actually facilitate economic development (Geertz 1963; Hirschman 1970). In broader terms, cultural critics on the Left, from Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno onwards, have challenged Enlightenment conceptions of rationality, treating them as oppressive reflections of bourgeois and/or Western culture. Nevertheless, these conceptions still have considerable currency. Culture Versus Agency  In this final contrast, as with the previous one, ‘culture’ is treated as synonymous with ‘custom’ or ‘tradition’, and the opposing value is the exercise of agency on the part of individuals or groups. Once again, what is implied is the exercise of choice, rather than simply following the course indicated by habit or tradition. However, the contrast employed is not with rationality but with a much more open conception of what agency involves, one where the model is art rather than science or economic behaviour. This is exemplified, for instance, in some conceptions of modernity as requiring people continually to reflect on and reconstruct their identities and life projects (see, for instance, Giddens 1990), even to turn their lives into art works (see Nehamas 1986). Here, creativity, novelty, and change are counterposed to culture: the latter often being portrayed as a barrier to personal and social development, one that must be overcome if authenticity is to be achieved. This contrast gives rise to some significant tensions. For instance, like the concept of rationality, as well as the notion of aesthetic cultivation

3 Culture 

55

and developmentalist conceptions of culture, it can clash with a multiculturalist commitment to respect cultures that do not place a high value on autonomy; and it can come into conflict with the desire to avoid ‘blaming the victim’, the latter tension arising from the fact that the inevitable accompaniment to autonomy is responsibility (see Gomm 2001). As I have indicated, each of the eight contrasts is open to different interpretations. In combination, they generate a wealth of confusing and sometimes conflicting connotations around the term ‘culture’ and its associates, as well as fundamental problems that are difficult to resolve.

A Reformulated Concept of Culture In this section I will suggest a reformulation of the concept of culture. It is a version of the last of the four senses of the term I identified earlier, though one that is also designed to serve most of the functions for which the third is usually employed—this  still probably the most common sense today. It should be clear, however, that it is not possible to have a single concept that will satisfy all of the purposes for which the word ‘culture’ has been used. So, while what I propose here avoids many of the problems I have identified, it is specifically designed to suit the needs of sociological analysis. Of course, what such analysis entails is far from a matter of consensus, so I will begin by indicating two contentious assumptions on which I am relying. A first requirement, in my view, is that the evaluative purposes which have driven much use of the term ‘culture’, even in the social sciences, are suspended, so that the task is restricted to documenting socio-cultural processes and patterns, and explaining them and their consequences. In my judgment, this is essential if academic sociology is to flourish (See Ch. 1; Hammersley 2014, 2017), but it is by no means a widely accepted view. A second requirement, I suggest, is to recognise the perspectival character of all social inquiry: it cannot comprehend reality ‘as a whole’ or ‘as it is in itself ’. Research necessarily involves selection and abstraction: it is guided by the particular questions that are being addressed, and these foreground some phenomena and background others. There has been a

56 

M. Hammersley

tendency to treat cultures and subcultures as if they were objects that occur naturally in the world, and are therefore immediately available for description and explanation. But, as Wagner (1981) pointed out in the context of anthropology, the notion of culture is a Western one, formulated to meet particular intellectual purposes—it is not simply a name for a pre-existing phenomenon. This is not to adopt an extreme form of constructionism, whereby social science simply invents the world that it purports to study. But it is to reject the idea that it is possible to document the nature of ‘things-in-themselves’ in a manner that captures their essences. Thus, what counts as culture depends, to some degree, upon the questions that are addressed.5 The analytic function I am taking as primary, then, is the role of culture in explaining individual actions or collective patterns of behaviour. In this context, I suggest that the term is best treated as referring to the generative, learnt capabilities, attitudes, habits, and acquired technologies that shape, and are drawn on by, human behaviour. As should become clear, this does not require a separation to be made between cultural and biological factors, and it certainly does not rule out the role of the latter; it also marks off the reference of ‘culture’ from most senses of ‘society’; and it eliminates any need to assume the existence of distinct, free-­ standing cultures. Under this conceptualization, then, the term refers to all the predispositions and resources that belong, or are available, to a particular agent (individual or collective) at the point of action; these being similar to or different from (to varying degrees and in various respects) those of specific other agents. More selectively, it relates to those predispositions and resources that are relevant in explaining some particular action or outcome. In these terms, culture is one of two primary factors that may be used to explain any action, any institutionalised pattern of behaviour, or any social outcome. The other factor is the situation faced by the agent on the occasion, or over the period, concerned. It is important to emphasise that the distinction between culture and situation is an analytic or relational one: what is treated as cultural and what as situational in any analysis will depend on the focus of inquiry  Others have taken Wagner’s argument in a quite different direction, one that attempts to abandon the concept of culture: see Heywood (2017). 5

3 Culture 

57

and, in particular, upon the agent whose behaviour is to be explained. After all, other people will almost always represent the most important elements of the situation an agent faces, and they will carry cultural features with them that shape their behaviour and thereby that situation. What this highlights is the need for the focus of any analysis to be made quite clear, since this will determine what counts as culture for its purposes. As a convenient illustration of this reconceptualization of ‘culture’, I will focus on the task of explaining the riots that took place in London, and in a few other British cities, in August 2011 (Lewis and Newburn 2011; Morrell et al. 2011; Reicher and Stott 2011). There is an initial issue here, as in other cases, of exactly what is to be explained: even in London the riots were not a single homogeneous event, they began in one area as reaction against a police shooting, but spread to other areas, and increasingly took the form of shoplifting, looting, and property destruction. We must also ask: are we trying to explain why they occurred where they did or when they did, or why some people were involved while others were not? These are somewhat different research questions, requiring different explanations. For present purposes, I will focus on the last of them: what prompted some people to participate in the riots? This was the central concern of most commentary at the time, and a range of explanations were put forward, some of which could be labelled as ‘cultural’ in the sense outlined above. For example, the serving UK Prime Minister (Cameron 2011) opined that ‘there are pockets of our society that are not just broken but frankly sick […]. It is a complete lack of responsibility in parts of our society, people allowed to feel the world owes them something, that their rights outweigh their responsibilities and their actions do not have consequences’. We can reformulate this explanation in a non-evaluative form as follows: ‘participation in the riots is to be explained by a difference in attitude on the part of those involved from other people in British society—they feel they have been unfairly treated and that their rights are not respected’. What is meant by ‘attitude’ here is a predisposition to classify situations and people in particular ways, both descriptive and evaluative, which potentially motivates, or allows, a particular course of action, or a range of actions—in this case, ‘rioting’. This is clearly a cultural explanation.

58 

M. Hammersley

Other explanations for the riots put forward at the time emphasised situational factors. For example, another Conservative politician (and future UK Prime Minister), Boris Johnson (2012) suggested that ‘there were people who joined in out of a sheer sense of collective intoxification—a kind of madness that gripped a lot of people’. So, here it is not a difference in cultural factors, in distinctive features of the people involved in the riots, that is held to be the explanation, but rather what happened in the situation in which these people found themselves: ‘they got caught up in the events’.6 There is the potential implication here that anyone would, or at least could, have responded in the same way. I have noted elsewhere (Hammersley 2014: ch6) that both these types of explanation have a history in social science—they were not the inventions of these politicians, nor simply a product of their political ideology. Of course, these two sets of factors—cultural background and immediate social situation—do not exhaust what must be taken into account in the task of sociological explanation. Each is itself open to further investigation: why is the cultural background of the agent, or agents, as it is? And why is the situation how it is? Thus, quite a lot of explanations for the riots appealed to more remote factors. Those that focused on cultural factors sought to account for why the people involved in the riot had the distinctive attitudes they did. For example, Cameron identified the source of the problem as ‘the slow-motion moral collapse that has taken place in parts of our country these past few generations’, by which he meant an increased tolerance for ‘irresponsibility’, ‘selfishness’, and lack of ‘discipline’. He claimed that ‘some of the worst aspects of human nature’ had been ‘tolerated, indulged—sometimes even incentivised—by a state and its agencies that in parts have become literally de-moralised’, and he also refers to ‘communities without control’. Shorn of its evaluative components, this amounts to what, in the context of sociological studies of delinquency, has long been referred to as control theory, whose lineage can be traced back to Durkheim (Hirschi 2002: 16). By contrast, most commentaries by sociologists at the time tended to emphasise situational factors, and at least hinted at why the situation of those involved in the riots took the form it did. However, there was by no  However Johnson also went on to appeal to the kind of cultural explanation offered by Cameron.

6

3 Culture 

59

means entire agreement about the nature of the situation or its causes. Some pointed to the immediate circumstances that had prompted the rioting in North London: the police shooting and the behaviour of the police towards the local community where the victim lived. But this was very often generalised to an account that placed this community in a broader category: a substantial section of the British population that are disadvantaged by the economic and political system. Here the situation that is taken to explain the rioting is extended to this group’s position in society generally (not just in relation to the police) and as a longstanding feature (not restricted to the specific events that prompted rioting). Furthermore, there is at least a hint that the cause lies in the operation of a particular economic system—capitalism—or in the widespread operation of racism. This was not always spelt out, though one online commentator referred to ‘the horrors imposed on the world economy by the IMF, neo-liberalism, the crimes of the international bankers and support for criminal wars against civilian populations’.7 And, once again, it is not hard to trace the sociological genealogy of this type of explanation. It is worth adding that explanations in terms of immediate cultural factors may nevertheless appeal to more remote situational factors. This was the case, for example, with Oscar Lewis’s (1959) well-known concept of the ‘culture of poverty’. He argued that poverty can lead to the development of a characteristic type of local culture that reinforces people’s disadvantaged situation by preventing them from capitalizing on opportunities available to improve it. However, he traces the sources of poverty back to the capitalist system. A parallel argument could be developed to explain the riots. From the examples I have used here, there may be a temptation to assume that cultural explanations are ‘conservative’, or are more likely to be used by the political Right, while situational explanations, especially those that trace causes back to the social system, are ‘of the Left’. However, this is not the case. As I noted earlier, one Conservative politician (Boris Johnson) used a situational explanation, of a kind that echoes nineteenth-­ century crowd psychology (see Borch 2012). On the other side, one  This post seems to be no longer available. Previously, it was to be found at: http://letters.mobile. salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2011/08/10/victor_david_hanson/view/index3.html. 7

60 

M. Hammersley

possible cultural explanation for the riots is that they were a sign of growing class-consciousness on the part of the working class; in Marx’s terms indicating a shift from its being a ‘class-in-itself ’ to a ‘class-for-itself ’. To my knowledge, this explanation was not used explicitly by any of the commentators, but it was specifically disavowed by one writer on the Left: ‘it is difficult to conceive of the UK rioters in Marxist terms, as an instance of the emergence of the revolutionary subject; they fit much better the Hegelian notion of the “rabble”, those outside organized social space, who can express their discontent only through “irrational” outbursts of destructive violence’ (Žižek 2011). It is also important to emphasise that explanations appealing to factors more remote from the specific attitudes of, or situation faced by, people involved in the riots nevertheless assume that these more remote factors operate through those specific attitudes and/or situations. Furthermore, as I have argued elsewhere, which factors are picked out as the main ones in an explanation is not simply a matter of the causal processes involved but also of the value-relevance frame within which the explanation is produced. To a large extent, the difference between the explanations for the riots put forward by Conservative politicians and sociologists stemmed from a difference in value-framework (Hammersley 2014: ch6). Furthermore, we should note that this does not necessarily imply a conflict in fundamental values: the differences could stem from variation in how the same broad values, such as notions of fairness, are interpreted and applied—for example, whether very large differences in wealth and income are judged to be just or unjust. A further point is that there can be interplay between culture and situation. For example, attitudes may be adjusted as a result of the situation faced, through what Rodman (1963) calls ‘value-stretch’, where a value is redefined so as to allow its realisation even in the unpropitious circumstances faced; or via what Matza (1964) referred to as ‘techniques of neutralisation’, which suspend application of the value to particular people, organisations, or situations, thereby allowing different treatment of them compared to others. Moreover, this interplay can vary in the degree to which it is ‘active’. Much human behaviour has the character of relatively routine action in which there is little deliberation, and very often this action forms part of institutionalised patterns in which others play

3 Culture 

61

similarly habitual roles, these mutually supporting one another (see Berger and Luckmann 1967). Here there is minimal active interplay between culture and situation, though of course situations still have to be made sense of as belonging to one type or another, and thereby as requiring one sort of response rather than another. While habit is rarely a matter of simple or literal repetition—it always involves at least some variation and drift over time—such institutionalised patterns can nevertheless be contrasted with those where a habitual pattern of action is disrupted, or where no established culturally given course of action is prompted, so that perhaps even the goals being pursued are uncertain. In such situations, reflection and deliberation necessarily take place—at least where scope for this is available—involving considerations of strategy and tactics. As a result, the outcome will be less predictable from, and explainable in terms of, knowledge about culture and situation, since elements of both may be open to reassessment, and thereby adaptation, in the process of action. It needs to be underlined that the interplay of culture and situation involved here is a matter of degree, so that there is a considerable middle-ground between these two poles. Some explanations for the riots assumed interplay between culture and situation. For example, Bauman (2011) used an analogy between a minefield and social inequality, suggesting that in both cases explosions are always going to occur, but with little scope for predicting with certainty when or where this will happen. However, he goes on to argue that the looting and destruction of property that happened in the riots stemmed, on the one hand, from a cultural disposition generated within British society that gives priority to the acquisition of the latest consumer goods, and, on the other, from the opportunity that the rioting offered to people who could not normally afford those goods to obtain them. In this explanation, a type of cultural attitude to be found across a whole population—desire to possess the latest products—is a background factor, and so too is a general situational difference between groups in their opportunity normally to be able to satisfy this desire. Meanwhile, the rioting served as a specific situational factor, offering some a chance to gain satisfaction that was not normally available; and perhaps also to engage in destruction of the shops that display the goods but demand prices which cannot be afforded. Here we have a complex explanation combining both

62 

M. Hammersley

cultural and situational factors and proposing an interaction between some of them. We should also note the way in which what we might call the threads—similar cultural tendencies, for example, as they operate within particular families, households, peer groups or local communities—may be drawn together more tightly, materially as well as symbolically, through processes of mutual identification, this leading to a sense of belonging. This can result directly from an alignment of interests, facing shared problems, and/or the mobilization of support under the banner of some distinctive ethnic, religious, or national identity. This process of drawing together—creating stronger parallels in attitude and behaviour among members than existed previously—at the same time involves the loosening of links or ties outside the network—and, in addition, the marking of boundaries and identification of out-groups, again both symbolically and materially. It is this that creates a sense of coherent and separate cultures, in the twentieth-century anthropological meaning of the term. However, such a process does not completely eliminate the spread of cultural features across boundaries, or the emergence of internal differentiation; nor does it prevent change resulting from external factors. So, boundaries are often fuzzy, and their significance frequently treated as contextually variable. This kind of communal process was also appealed to in some explanations for the 2011 riots, where it was argued that a substantial section of the population feels a sense of alienation, and that this generates and reinforces attitudes and lines of action among their number that would not be regarded as legitimate by other members of society. For example, while everybody has some notion of property rights—in the sense of accepting and respecting the idea of ownership—there are variations in how this value principle is interpreted, perhaps in terms of what are taken as exemplars. Despite sharing this value, some may come to see certain objects, such as those belonging to the police or to department stores, as legitimate targets for theft or attack. As this makes clear, a sense of belonging underpins recognition of property rights, and a sense of not belonging may motivate infringement of those rights, but this can also be reinforced by joining with others who feel they have been excluded.

3 Culture 

63

As I indicated, the reconstruction I have put forward here is by no means original: it shares much in common with the fourth conception of ‘culture’ I identified.8 However, it is at odds with a great deal of conventional usage, for instance where the word is treated as virtually synonymous with ‘community’ or ‘society’; or where, conversely, its reference is restricted to values and norms, or to ‘symbol systems’. It seems to me that these other approaches either render the term superfluous (given the availability of alternative terminology) or restrict its meaning too narrowly to be of much use for sociological purposes. Furthermore, while the approach I have recommended allows for shared culture as well as for cultural variability, it does not require there to be distinct and internally homogeneous cultures. Instead, we can recognise that any actor carries within her or himself a range of cultural tendencies and resources that are differentially shared with others. Nor is there any need to assume that the cultural tendencies and resources characteristic of any individual agent at a particular time form a coherent whole. While there may well be a strain to consistency, it seems likely that, as Schutz (1962) argued, this operates only sporadically—emerging when inconsistencies give rise to problems or puzzles—so that there are always likely to be tensions in the cultural background of any actor; and such tensions may have explanatory significance, just as may tensions within the situation faced, for example because they generate conflicting perceived interests. It is important to reiterate the analytic or functional character of the concept of culture put forward here. In the manner of Max Weber, it is a way of making sense of what in concrete terms is extremely complex, variable, and changing. So, for example, on this interpretation it would make no sense to think of culture, or of a culture, as a stable object existing in the world—on analogy with physical objects or even with social organizations. Indeed, as I have indicated, what counts as culture, and what belongs to a situation, is specific to the focus on a particular agent (individual, group, organization, or set of such) in relation to some particular decision, pattern of action, or outcome. This is because previous situations will have shaped what cultural features an individual or group  It also has some similarities with Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital, but I believe the metaphor of capital is misleading. 8

64 

M. Hammersley

brings to a situation, and that situation will also be constituted by the cultural resources that other participants in the situation carry with them at the time. In other words, from this point of view, culture is agent-, location-, and time-relational. It is also relative to the set of questions a researcher is investigating.

Conclusion In this chapter I have explored the very different meanings that have been given to the term ‘culture’, and also sketched some of their history. It is important to recognise these different senses of the term, and the ways in which evaluative considerations shape their use. I also examined the range of contrasts in which ‘culture’ has been implicated. These are the main source of the ambiguities that plague its use for sociological purposes. In response, I outlined a conception of culture that, I believe, avoids these problems and serves those purposes. This involves a functional contrast with situation, as the other main factor employed in sociological explanations. While this will not solve all of the problems surrounding use of this term, I believe that it opens up a fruitful direction for development.

References Alexander, J. (2003). The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press. Alexander, J., & Seidman, S. (Eds.). (1990). Culture and Society: Contemporary Debates. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Almond, G., & Verba, S. (1963). The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Alvarez, S. (2009). Pluralism and the Interpretation of Women’s Human Rights. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 16(2), 125–141. Arnold, M. (1873). Literature and Dogma. London: Smith, Elder and Co. Arnold, M. (1993). Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (First published 1867–1868). Banfield, E. (1958). The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. New York: Free Press.

3 Culture 

65

Bauman, Z. (2011). The London Riots—On Consumerism Coming Home to Roost. Social Europe Journal. Retrieved from https://www.socialeurope.eu/ the-london-riots-on-consumerism-coming-home-to-roost. Beiser, F. (2011). The German Historicist Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Berger, P., & Luckmann, T. (1967). The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Black, M. (1995). Leavis on Lawrence. In I.  MacKillop & R.  Storer (Eds.), F. R. Leavis: Essays and Documents. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Borch, C. (2012). The Politics of Crowds: An Alternative History of Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burrow, J. (2000). The Crisis of Reason: European thought 1848–1914. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Cameron, D. (2011). UK Riots: David Cameron’s Statement in Full. The Daily Telegraph, 10 August. Retrieved from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ uknews/crime/8693134/UK-riots-David-Camerons-statement-in-full.html. Chagnon, N. (2013). Noble Savages. New York: Simon and Schuster. Child, A. (1941). The Problem of Imputation in the Sociology of Knowledge. Ethics, 51(2), 200–219. Cloward, R., & Ohlin, L. (1960). Delinquency and Opportunity: A Theory of Delinquent Gangs. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Cohen, A. (1955). Delinquent Boys. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Collini, S. (1988). Arnold. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coole, D., & Frost, S. (Eds.). (2010). New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Eliot, T.  S. (1948). Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. London: Faber and Faber. Firth, R. (1951). Elements of Social Organisation. London: Dent. (Edition used: London, Routledge 2004). Forster, M. (2010). After Herder. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fraser, M., Kember, S., & Lury, C. (2006). Inventive Life: Approaches to the New Vitalism. London: Sage. Freeman, M. (2011). Culture, Childhood and Rights. The Family in Law, 5(15), 15–33. Retrieved from http://din-online.info/pdf/fam5-2.pdf. Geertz, C. (1963). Peddlers and Princes: Social Development and Economic Change in Two Indonesian Towns. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Giddens, A. (1990). The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

66 

M. Hammersley

Gomm, R. (2001). Unblaming Victims and Creating Heroes: Reputational Management in Sociological Writing. Discourse Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 22(2), 227–247. Griswold, W. (2013). Cultures and Societies in a Changing World (4th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Hammersley, M. (2014). The Limits of Social Science. London: Sage. Hammersley, M. (2017). On the Role of Values in Social Research: Weber Vindicated? Sociological Research Online, 22(1), 1–12. Hammersley, M. (2019). The Concept of Culture: A History and Reappraisal. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Herskovits, M. (1972). Cultural Relativism. New York: Random House. Heywood, P. (2017). The Ontological Turn. In F. Stein, S. Lazar, M. Candea, H. Diemberger, J. Robbins, A. Sanchez, & R. Stasch (Eds.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology. University of Cambridge. Retrieved from http://www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/ontological-turn. Hirschi, T. (2002). Causes of Delinquency. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Hirschman, A. (1970). Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hoggart, R. (1957). The Uses of Literacy. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hollis, M., & Lukes, S. (Eds.). (1982). Rationality and Relativism. Oxford: Blackwell. Iggers, G. (1968). The German Conception of History. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Ignatieff, M. (2001). The Attack on Human Rights. Foreign Affairs, 80(6), 102–116. Inglehart, R. (1988). The Renaissance of Political Culture. American Political Science Review, 82(4), 1203–1230. Inglis, D., & Almila, A.-M. (Eds.). (2016). The Sage Handbook of Cultural Sociology. London: Sage. Jacobson, D. (1967). D.  H. Lawrence and Modern Society. Journal of Contemporary History, 2(2), 81–92. Jayyusi, L. (1984). Categorization and the Moral Order. London: Routledge. Johnson, B. (2012, 23 March). Boris Johnson Says Poor Schools Helped Cause Riots. The Guardian. Retrieved June 20, 2012, from http://www.guardian. co.uk/politics/2012/mar/23/boris-johnson-bad-schools-london-riots. Kalmar, I. (1987). The Völkerpsychologie of Lazarus and Steinthal and the Modern Concept of Culture. Journal of the History of Ideas, 48(4), 671–690.

3 Culture 

67

Kroeber, A., & Kluckhohn, C. (1952). Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. Cambridge, MS: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University. Kuper, A. (2015). Anthropology and Anthropologists (4th ed.). London: Routledge. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1966). The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [First published in French in 1962]. Lewis, O. (1959). Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty. New York: Basic Books. Lewis, H. (1998). The Misrepresentation of Anthropology and Its Consequences. American Anthropologist, 100(3), 716–731. Lewis, P., & Newburn, T. (2011). Reading the Riots: Investigating England’s Summer of Disorder. London: Guardian Books. Linton, R. (1936). The Study of Man. New York: D. Appleton and Co. Matza, D. (1964). Delinquency and Drift. New York: Wiley. McKenzie, P.  J. (2005). Interpretative Repertoires. FIMS Publications, 45. Retrieved from https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fimspub/45. Meloni, M. (2017). Race in an Epigenetic Time; Thinking Biology in the Plural. British Journal of Sociology, 68(3), 389–409. Miller, W. (1958). Lower Class Culture as a Generating Milieu of Gang Delinquency. Journal of Social Issues, 14(3), 5–19. Moerman, M. (1968). Being Lue: Uses and Abuses of Ethnic Identification. In J.  Helm (Ed.), Essays on the Problem of Tribe. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Montgomery, M., & Allan, S. (1992). Ideology, Discourse, and Cultural Studies: The Contribution of Michel Pêcheux. Canadian Journal of Communication, 17, 2. Retrieved from https://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/ view/661/567. Moody-Adams, M. (1997). Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture, and Philosophy. Cambridge, MS: Harvard University Press. Morrell, G., Scott, S., McNeish, D., & Webster, S. (2011). The August Riots in England: Understanding the Involvement of Young People. London: NatCen. Murdock, G. P. (1945). The Common Denominator of Culture. In R. Linton (Ed.), The Science of Man in the World Crisis. New  York: Columbia University Press. Nehamas, A. (1986). Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ogburn, W. (1922/1966). Social Change: With Respect to Cultural and Original Nature. New York: Dell.

68 

M. Hammersley

Penny, H. G., & Bunzl, M. (2003). Introduction. In H. G. Penny & M. Bunzl (Eds.), Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Reicher, S., & Stott, C. (2011). Mad Mobs and Englishmen? Myths and Realities of the 2011 Riots. London: Constable and Robinson. Rodman, H. (1963). The Lower-Class Value Stretch. Social Forces, 42(2), 205–215. Sahlins, M. (1976). The Use and Abuse of Biology: An Anthropological Critique of Sociobiology. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Schmid, M. (1993). The Concept of Culture and Its Place within a Theory of Social Action: A Critique of Talcott Parsons’s Theory of Culture. In R. Münch & N.  J. Smelser (Eds.), Theory of Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Schutz, A. (1962). Collected Papers, Volume 1. The Hague: Martin Nijhoff. Sharrock, W. (1974). On Owning Knowledge. In R.  Turner (Ed.), Ethnomethodology. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Shweder, R. (2000). What About “Female Genital Mutilation”? And Why Understanding Culture Matters in the First Place. Daedalus, 129(4), 209–232. Stocking, G. (1995). After Tylor: British Social Anthropology 1888–1951. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Trilling, L. (1939). Matthew Arnold. New York: W. W. Norton. Tudor, A. (1999). Decoding Culture. London: Sage. Turner, G. (2003). British Cultural Studies: An Introduction (3rd ed.). London: Routledge. Tylor, E.  B. (1871). Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom. New York: Gordon Press. Vaisey, S. (2010). What People Want: Rethinking Poverty, Culture, and Educational Attainment. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 629, 75–101. Wagner, R. (1981). The Invention of Culture (2nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wells, G. (1959). Herder and After. The Hague: Mouton. Wetherell, M., & Potter, J. (1988). Discourse Analysis and the Identification of Interpretative Repertoires. In C. Antaki (Ed.), Analysing Everyday Explanation. London: Sage. Wetherell, M., & Potter, J. (1992). Mapping the Language of Racism. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester. Williams, R. (1958). Culture and Society. London: Chatto and Windus.

3 Culture 

69

Williams, R. (1981). Culture. London: Fontana. Williams, R. (1983). Keywords (2nd ed.). London: Fontana. Wilson, B. (Ed.). (1974). Rationality. Oxford: Blackwell. Winch, P. (1964). Understanding a Primitive Society. American Philosophical Quarterly, 1(4), 307–324. Zimmerman, D., & Pollner, M. (1970). The Everyday World as a Phenomenon. In J. Douglas (Ed.), Understanding Everyday Life. Chicago: Aldine. Žižek, S. (2011). Shoplifters of the World Unite. London Review of Books, 19 August. Retrieved from https://www.lrb.co.uk/2011/08/19/slavoj-zizek/ shoplifters-of-the-world-unite.

4 Society

‘Society’ is surely among the most fundamental terms used in sociology, and in social anthropology too (Kuper 1992). Indeed, it might be taken to refer to the central phenomenon these disciplines study. This is not to deny that thinking about the nature of society long predates their emergence (Frisby and Sayer 1986: ch1). This can be found, for example, in Aristotle’s writings about politics and ethics, and in the preoccupation of early modern thought with the relationship between the individual and society, as evidenced in Hobbes’s Leviathan; though these earlier discussions often did not draw much of a distinction between ‘society’ and ‘state’. Given its centrality to sociology and anthropology, one might expect that the term ‘society’ would be used today in a relatively clear and standard fashion, but this is not the case (Elliott and Turner 2013: vii–ix; Ingold 1996: 57). Furthermore, its various meanings overlap with those of other terms which are sometimes used as near-synonyms but on other occasions are employed to mark significant contrasts. Examples include ‘community’, ‘culture’, ‘social system’, ‘social formation’, and ‘social totality’.1

 Williams (1983) provides useful background about the history of the term, with its origins in a notion of companionship. For a complementary discussion of the various meanings of ‘community’, 1

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Hammersley, Troubling Sociological Concepts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51644-4_4

71

72 

M. Hammersley

In large part, the different meanings given to the term ‘society’ derive from the fact that it has been caught up in some fundamental philosophical debates. These have included whether human behaviour is a product of external forces of which actors are unaware, or is action that is under people’s own control. One position here is ‘methodological individualism’: the view that all explanations must ultimately refer to the actions of individuals, not to abstractions such as ‘social structures’ or ‘society’; though this does not imply that actions and outcomes are always simply a product of intentions. An advocate of this view was Max Weber (see Swedberg 2005: 254); and in this respect he differed sharply from another ‘founder’ of sociology, Emile Durkheim, who insisted on the independent existence of social facts and their role in determining the attitudes and actions of individuals. Another issue in which conceptions of society are implicated is whether people’s relationships with one another are based on commitment to shared values, habits, traditions, or emotional identifications, on the one hand, or, on the other, are primarily instrumental in character, taking the form of strategies—including persuasion, negotiation, threat or coercion—designed to serve individual interests. Furthermore, in epistemological terms, there are questions about whether human actions can be understood objectively, in other words in scientific terms; or, alternatively, whether it is only possible for an observer to understand people’s actions in the terms in which they themselves view them. There is also the issue of the unobservability of macro-level social phenomena, and the implications of this for what kind of scientific evidence there can be about them. Also significant is the fact that these ontological and epistemological issues have been taken to have political and ethical implications. One of these concerns whether people are agents who can bring about social change, or whether social processes are largely beyond their control, so that no efforts at changing society are worthwhile—they are not only see Gusfield (1975). Of course, in ordinary usage the word ‘society’ carries an even broader range of meanings than those within social science, but I will put on one side those senses that are rare in sociological writings, such as the idea of ‘high society’ (members of an upper class and their network of relations) or where the term stands for an ‘association’ of some kind (for instance, the British Psychological Society). For an example of the first of these usages, in the context of historical analysis, see Annan (1990).

4 Society 

73

doomed to failure but generally have undesirable consequences. Thus, the concept of society as an entity existing independently of the actions of people is sometimes denounced as reification, as serving an ideological function in persuading people to accept the status quo as natural and unchangeable.2 There is also the ethical issue of whether individuals are responsible for their actions, or must be viewed as victims of social circumstances. It is perhaps worth pointing out that in none of these debates do positions map on to a simple Left-Right continuum: there are those at both ends of the political spectrum who stress the scope for human agency, of various kinds, and the same is true of an emphasis on the role of collectivities and social forces in determining people’s actions. These conflicting views, crudely formulated as between individualism and collectivism, were generated by political and economic developments within Western societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; ones that also prompted the emergence of sociology as a discipline. At that time, societal development was widely experienced as an inexorable process, while yet (paradoxically) as producing growing individualisation and therefore increased individual agency, if not licence. This came to a head in ideological and political conflict prompted by the effects of commercialisation, urbanisation, and industrialisation, as well as by the French Revolution. Views ranged across the political spectrum, from those who sought to reconstitute the ‘ancien régime’ in some form, or at least to preserve key features of it, to commentators who embraced the new social and political conditions, along with those who regarded them as merely pointing to a new form of society that could be achieved in the near future. So, we have the writings of Bonald and de Maistre, Saint-­ Simon and Comte, Fourier and Owen, not to mention Marx. The issue of the individual’s relationship to society was also central to the reaction of German historians and social scientists to the laissez-faire philosophy they took to be dominant in England, exemplified by utilitarianism and,  Probably the most influential source for the notion of reification is Lukács (1971). Some writers distinguish between objectivation and reification: the first refers to the way in which human actions and their products come to exist as objects identifiable within a shared world, while the second is concerned with how these objects can become regarded as natural rather than human, and exert power over human beings as a result. See Berger and Luckmann (1966: 106–107) and passim. 2

74 

M. Hammersley

later, by the sociology of Spencer (see Turner 1985; Francis 2007). And the individual-society relationship continued to be a central theme within much Anglo-American sociology throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. For example, a significant shift occurred in the 1960s, away from a focus on forms of social organisation at the macro-­ level, and how these determine social behaviour, to a growing emphasis on the role of individual agency, both as a matter of fact but also sometimes as a political and ethical principle to be championed. We find similar tensions within the history of Marxism. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a contrast between Marxists who viewed the development and eventual demise of capitalism as a process governed by social laws operating for the most part independently of political and ideological struggle, and those who, like Lenin, insisted on the essential role of such struggle in bringing about revolutionary change and securing the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. At the other end of the political spectrum, very influential within the UK, was Margaret Thatcher’s declaration that ‘there is no such thing as society’, only ‘individual men and women and families’.3 This came to be seen as a central theme of ‘neoliberalism’, which called for dismantling the welfare state and the adoption of economic policies designed to enhance the role of ‘private enterprise’, along with an ethics that emphasised individual responsibility. At the same time, one strand of neoliberal ideology involved a downgrading of ethical constraints: it was argued that, if individuals were free to pursue their own interests, the common good would be served (purportedly as a result of Adam Smith’s ‘hidden hand’), even if it produced severe social inequalities.4

 Thatcher’s statement occurred in an interview with Woman’s Own magazine, October 31, 1987. In fact, her argument was about the role of the state, rather than about the existence of society: she recognised not only familial obligations but also those to neighbours, and it is almost certain that she would also have insisted on some obligations to the nation as well. Even more significantly, it is clear that she recognised some responsibilities on the part of the state (society) to citizens, for example to those members of the armed forces who had been injured during service. Her challenge was specific to the notion of a ‘welfare state’. 4  As has frequently been pointed out, in the case of Smith this relied upon a rather benign conception of human nature: he believed that sympathy for others could never be eliminated, and as a result he did not foresee the depredations of rampant capitalism. 3

4 Society 

75

Later, under the influence of those diverse ideas often labelled ‘postmodernism’, some on the Left came to conclude that the spread of neoliberalism reflected a broader change: ‘the death of the social’ (Rose 1996). The most radical, and obscure, move in this direction was provided by Baudrillard. As Bogard (1990: 2) informs us, he ‘nominalizes the adjectival form of the word [‘society’] as a convenient gloss for an entire range of key terms in the social scientific lexicon—social structure, social relation, social class, social institution, social exchange, social interaction, social theory, etc.—which taken together with related concepts comprise the master discourse on society that has structured Western thought for nearly two hundred years’. So, what was involved for Baudrillard was not just the death of society but also of sociology itself (Bogard 1987). In these various debates, the term ‘society’ and its associates were given a variety of meanings. Of course, it is not unusual for the basic terms of a discipline to be vague and ambiguous—and there is certainly no blanket requirement that they should be ‘fully clarified’, even were this to be possible (see Kaplan 1964: chs. 8 and 9). But vagueness, ambiguity, and (especially) inconsistency in usage of key terms can be a major source of problems. Indeed, a lack of clarity about the meaning of the term ‘society’ may render the very focus and boundaries of sociology uncertain. So, in this chapter I will outline the main ways in which the term has been used, and conclude by considering what may be required if its meaning is to be clarified sufficiently for analytic purposes. There seem to be five main meanings associated with the term ‘society’ when it is employed by sociologists: 1. As referring, explicitly or implicitly, to social relations and institutions among the population of a particular nation-state, or similar territorially defined collective unit. In these terms, ‘societies’ is, effectively, a synonym for ‘countries’; 2. As relating to an abstract type to which societies in the first sense of the term belong. Thus, much sociological theorising refers to the characteristics of ‘society’, in singular but universal form—for example, claiming that it displays social order, shared values, and/or fundamental divisions and conflicts of particular kinds; or necessarily possesses institutions concerned with economic production, political decision-­

76 

M. Hammersley

making, socialisation, the control of deviance; and so on. Referred to here, then, are the typical, perhaps even essential, features of any national society, or of any territorially based human group (these features sometimes, but not always, being differentiated from those usually labelled as ‘culture’—see Chap. 3). There can also be distinctions among different types of society (for instance, feudal, capitalist, post-­ industrial, post-capitalist, post-modern), these subtypes themselves having distinctive characteristics, while also sharing some general features; 3. As referring to a specific type of social relationship, thin and superficial rather than deep and communal: Gesellschaft is here opposed to Gemeinschaft. The major source is, of course, the work of Tönnies; 4. To refer to a specific segment or aspect of a national society, one which is distinct from the state, from the domestic realm, and perhaps also from the economy. This sense is often marked by the phrase ‘civil society’; 5. As denoting, instead, diffuse processes of social interaction, and the patterning of human relationships of various kinds that these generate. Such processes are ubiquitous, rather than being contained within particular boundaries. This is sometimes also referred to as ‘sociation’ I will explore each of these five senses, putting together those that are closely related, and consider how they function in sociological analysis.

 ociety as Social Relations Within S a Territorially Defined Entity, Whether in Specific or in More Abstract Terms As I noted, the first sense of ‘society’ is close in meaning to ‘country’ or ‘nation-state’, referring to a geographical entity—whose boundaries are largely fixed by international political, legal, or conventional agreement—along with its internal features and social processes. And this largely corresponds with much everyday and sociological usage. So, for

4 Society 

77

example, a common sociology course in UK universities has been: ‘Contemporary British Society’ or ‘The Social Structure of Modern Britain’.5 While this first meaning of the term will serve the purpose of identifying instances, much of the time, sociological analysis has usually  been taken to require a more abstract framework, indicating the significant aspects of any such society. In this way, the first sense of the term merges into the second, where ‘society’ refers to a general type. Indeed, the singular and plural forms of the term are often used in ways that carry the same meaning. To take an influential example from the past, while some of Talcott Parsons’s books have titles that use the plural form (Structure and Process in Modern Societies and The System of Modern Societies), the focus of these books is not dissimilar to those with titles that use the singular form (Theories of Society, Sociological Theory and Modern Society). As Barth (1992: 21) notes, this general type treats certain social phenomena as endogenous, and therefore as to be understood in terms of processes internal to a society, while other phenomena are exogenous, produced by external factors. He also points out the extent to which this type tends to be modelled on the European nation-state. While by no means all sociological approaches have taken societies or society as their focus, many have done so, from Comte and Spencer to Parsons, Luhmann, Giddens, and beyond. Moreover, much sociological work has focused on specific sorts of society, whether this is ‘traditional’, ‘modern’, ‘postmodern’, ‘capitalist’, ‘post-capitalist’, ‘post-communist’, or ‘risk’ society. And these have often been treated as displaying essential features that differentiate them from one another. However, in recent times especially, the justification for focusing on individual societies has come to be questioned as a form of ‘methodological nationalism’ (see Martins 1974: 276–277; Beck 2007). This reflects increased concern with processes of globalisation (Urry 2000), as well as a broader challenge to what is seen as the reification involved in use of  Many years ago, a whole series of books were published by Longman on the ‘Social Structure of Modern Britain’. Rather more recently, The New Sociology of Scotland has appeared (McCrone 2017). Similar courses and books apply to other countries. In a rather different form, Talcott Parsons’s last book American Society (2011), involves an application and development of his abstract theory of society to a particular case. 5

78 

M. Hammersley

‘society’ as an abstraction, this contrasting with the equally pernicious abstraction of ‘the asocial individual’ (see Strathern 1996). Rose (1996: 329) writes that: ‘[…] the object “society”, in the sense that began to be accorded to it in the nineteenth century (the sum of bonds and relations between individuals and events—economic, moral, political—within a more or less bounded territory governed by its own laws) has also begun to lose its self-evidence, and “sociology”, as the field of knowledge which ratified the existence of this territory, is undergoing something of a crisis of identity’. Strathern makes much the same point about anthropology. In the strongest version of the abstract theory of society as territorial unit it is taken to be a system, in the sense that its parts function to maintain the whole. It is also sometimes assumed that the whole acts on the parts, in seeking to ensure that they function properly or adapt to the environment. A common metaphor employed here is the human body as a functioning system. This analogy is to be found in Comte and Spencer, and also appeared in the structural-functionalism that became influential in both anthropology and sociology in the first half of the twentieth century. Functionalist accounts often sought to identify the preconditions for the survival of a society, or indeed of ‘society’ itself, in terms of what essential functions must be served, such as replenishment of the population over time, normative regulation of behaviour, and so on (see, for instance, Aberle et al. 1950). Later elaborations drew on open systems theory, so that the concern was with the interactions between societies and their environments (see, for example, Buckley 1967); more recently, complexity theory has sometimes been used in similar sorts of argument (Anzola et  al. 2017). Adopting a critical attitude towards this whole approach, Barth (1992: 21) refers to societies as ‘disordered open systems’, suggesting that their character means that they can play little role in explaining human behaviour. With both the first and second senses of the term ‘society’, two problems arise. These concern: how clearly and strongly the entities referred to are bounded; and how internally coherent or integrated they are. Interestingly, the first of these problems was pointed out many years ago by Radcliffe-Brown (1940: 4), one of the founders of structural-­ functionalism in anthropology:

4 Society 

79

It is rarely that we find a community that is absolutely isolated, having no outside contact. At the present moment of history, the network of social relations spreads over the whole world, without any absolute solution of continuity anywhere. This gives rise to a difficulty which I do not think that sociologists have really faced, the difficulty of defining what is meant by the term ‘a society’. They do commonly talk of societies as if they were distinguishable, discrete entities, as, for example, when we are told that a society is an organism. Is the British Empire a society, or a collection of societies? Is a Chinese village a society, or is it merely a fragment of the Republic of China?

So, even before the emergence of neoliberal globalisation, which as we have seen led to questions about the value of the concept of society (Urry 2007; Elliott and Turner 2013), the reference of the term was already recognised to be problematic in assuming a clearly distinct entity (Jenkins 2010). As Radcliffe-Brown indicates, it is not obvious which collectivities should and should not be counted as societies, or be taken as representative of ‘society’, because boundaries are uncertain. And we must ask not just about empires and villages but also about stateless communities (for instance, the Kurds), federal states, or unions of various kinds (can we speak of the United States as a single society, or are the various states societies in themselves? Is Europe a society—see Outhwaite 2006: ch8), indigenous societies (given that these have been swallowed up within countries), and so on. This first problem is significant not just in practical terms for identifying societies, but also for what internal structure we can expect any society to have. Indeed it is possible that significant structures may transcend whatever societal boundaries exist. This is true not just of the various types of supranational organisation that now operate, from the United Nations to the International Monetary Fund, but also of globalised communication networks, such as television channels and social media platforms. Aside from this, it has been suggested—in the writings of Sorokin, Eisenstadt, Huntingdon, and others—that ‘civilisations’ may be a more appropriate unit than ‘societies’ for macro-sociological analysis (see Tiryakian 2017); though it seems likely that similar problems could arise at that level of analysis too.

80 

M. Hammersley

The second problem—concerned with the internal coherence or integration of societies—is also highlighted by the case of federal states, as well as by societies characterised by fundamental ethnic or religious cleavages (Belgium or Israel, for instance). Furthermore, most large-scale societies have internal divisions of various kinds, including social stratification in terms of wealth and status. At what point do these become so great that viewing these entities as single societies no longer makes sense? In short, there are questions about how much, and what type of, coherence a society must have. A distinction is sometimes made (see Lockwood 1992: Appendix) between system integration (the coordination of institutional sectors) and social integration (shared values and attitudes). Furthermore, social integration can have various preconditions or bases, from a shared language or religion to collective opposition to some external threat or enemy. Parsons states that ‘a society is a type of social system, in any universe of social systems, which attains the highest level of self-sufficiency as a system in relation to its environments’ (Parsons 1966: 9). While this definition is a relativistic one, we could nevertheless take it as implying that there are fewer societies today than there were in the past, or at least that countries have become less systemic because they are increasingly dependent upon their environments. This may encourage us to treat them as open rather than closed systems (in other words, as not self-sufficient in relation to their environments), or as part of a world system (the whole set of geographically-distributed human societies and their interrelations: see Wallerstein 2004). But, then, the problem of distinguishing amongst them and of identifying the boundaries around any particular society becomes hard to resolve even in analytic terms, as also does that of determining any standard internal structure that all societies must display. There are also questions about how societies as functioning wholes emerge and are sustained, and under what conditions the parts serve the whole (Demerath and Peterson 1967). While it makes sense to talk of the survival of a human body, and the preconditions for this, it is less clear what a failure to survive means in the case of societies. Is it the death of its members (see Turnbull 1972), being conquered by another society, the rise of disorder within it, or disintegration in some other sense? Questions also emerge about by what mechanisms the needs of a society or its

4 Society 

81

members are met. It is not difficult to recognise that a small randomly selected set of people forced to live together in an isolated environment would try to develop some internal organisation within the group in order to ensure their physical survival and to improve their circumstances. Food and other necessities would have to be gathered and/or produced or prepared, which is likely to require a division of labour. There would also have to be some sort of decision-making procedure established, any rules decided on would need to be applied, as well as disputes and deviance dealt with. Given this, further internal role differentiation would probably emerge. This is, of course, an artificial situation, but it is the sort of thought-­experiment that underlies the idea of a social system, and it is obvious that we find a division of labour of this kind, dealing with these basic functions and others, within most national societies. But whereas in this thought experiment methods for meeting needs will have often been invented for the purpose, it is less clear that this is what happens in large-­ scale societies. Instead, appeal has typically been made to the role of unintended consequences, and to some teleological mechanism, whether it is Adam Smith’s ‘hidden hand’, the notion of equilibrating processes, or the assumption that societies are open systems with adaptive capacities. There are, then, many unresolved questions that are difficult to deal with surrounding the first two senses of ‘society’; and these threaten their analytic viability, yet it is not clear that we could do without them. The theme of societal disintegration was prominent in some discussions of economic and political changes in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most notably in reactions against the French Revolution. Some commentators, however, argued that these developments signalled the emergence of a new type of society, and there were various efforts to identify the character of this, most notably those of Ferguson, Comte, Spencer, Durkheim, and Tönnies. This leads us to the third and fourth senses of ‘society’: as a particular type of social relation, contrasted with ‘community’; or as a distinctive component of national societies commonly referred to as ‘civil society’.

82 

M. Hammersley

Society as Gesellschaft and Civil Society A central theme in Tönnies’s (1955) account of Gesellschaft is of modern social relations as individualistic; and, as already noted, there were social scientists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who saw this, not as a process of disintegration, but as a desirable development, whether in economic or political terms. In Britain, this was true of Benthamite utilitarians and of much political economy, of Spencer’s sociology, as well as of advocates of individual rights. However, as the nineteenth century went on, there was growing concern even amongst liberals about these developments, and towards the end of that century this culminated in arguments for pluralism—the independence and balance of power among the elements of society—and in a ‘new liberalism’ that called for greater state intervention to remedy the effects of the economic changes that had occurred. For Tönnies, ‘Gesellschaft’ referred to a particular type of relationship among people, one that takes a contractual or semi-contractual form and is governed by an impersonal mode of rationality focused on individual self-interest and efficiency. He contrasted this with ‘Gemeinschaft’, usually translated as ‘community’, which refers to social relations that are personal, spontaneously in accord, and governed by ties of sentiment, shared memory, and local tradition. Gesellschaft is characterised by a ‘rational will’, which is aimed at finding the most effective means to achieve narrowly-defined ends, irrespective of personal commitments, such as those relating to kin or friendship links, and not directly concerned with any notion of the common good. In its purest form, the preoccupation is with maximising monetary returns. By contrast, Gemeinschaft is governed by what Tönnies refers to as ‘natural will’, in which the actor expresses her or his whole personality, so that what is done takes note of the full range of relationships in which he or she is involved, thereby involving a concern with the common good of the community. Tönnies’s argument was that in modern Western nations, more and more relationships have come to approximate the model of Gesellschaft, where previously Gemeinschaft relations had been dominant. As this

4 Society 

83

indicates, these contrasting terms refer to ideal types: Tönnies did not argue that in modern societies social relations are entirely of the Gesellschaft kind, what he describes is a shift in the balance between the two. Nor did he argue that one form was bad and the other good; though there are places in his discussion where negative evaluation of Gesellschaft seems to be implied, especially in the first edition of his book. In many respects, his account matches Marx’s characterisation of capitalist society; and Tönnies had drawn on this, along with many other sources, including Hobbes’s notion of the contractual character of political obligation. In some subsequent sociological discussion, however, Tönnies’s concept of Gesellschaft was treated as wholly characterising modern society, and often as identifying features to be deplored, by contrast with those of Gemeinschaft: the superficiality of human relationships involved, the neglect of the common good, the levelling down of cultural differences, and the susceptibility of the ‘masses’ and ‘crowds’ produced by this type of society to demagogic manipulation (Giner 1976). At the same time, there were a number of attempts to identify emerging features of European societies that offered some protection against these threats, notably Tocqueville’s discussion of local forms of governance and of the wide range of associations to be found in the United States, and Durkheim’s conception of the ‘organic solidarity’ of modern societies, comprising both interdependence among those performing diverse social functions, reflecting the division of labour, and an abstract morality (‘conscience collective’) embodying universal rights and responsibilities (see Lukes 1973). Both of these underpinned later discussions of the notion of ‘civil society’. Thus, civil society has sometimes been seen as a remedy for the growth of egoism and the erosion of any notion of the common good, this seen as resulting in division and conflict. However, civil society has also been put forward as an essential requirement if democratic participation is to flourish in opposition to tyrannical or totalitarian states; or as a necessary development in states that fail to provide, or stop providing, the services that their populations need. While in the eighteenth century it was often used as the label for a particular stage in the development of Western society, later it came to refer to a specific segment or aspect of national societies, or of equivalent geographically defined entities, where the

84 

M. Hammersley

contrast was with the ‘polity’, but also sometimes with the family and household or with the ‘economy’.6 It is also sometimes identified as the distinctive field for sociology as a discipline. Thus, in an article entitled ‘Sociology as a Vocation’, Michael Burawoy (2016: 380) writes that: Irreducible to economy and polity, civil society is the institutional birthplace and support for diverse values. It is the standpoint from which sociology evaluates the world, just as the market is the standpoint of economics and the state the standpoint of political science. Sociology arises with civil society and dissolves when civil society recedes.

Yet, clearly, the meanings assigned to the term ‘civil society’ have varied sharply. As already noted, in the earliest discussions it referred not to a particular segment of a national society but rather to the type of society emerging in modern Europe in the eighteenth century. This was seen as ‘civilised’, in the sense of involving civility—social relations amongst acquaintances and strangers being governed by mutual regard, by convention and law, and even by some shared conception of the common good. This usage was characteristic of the writings of Hume and Smith. But the most extensive discussion is provided by Ferguson’s (1767/1995) Essay on the History of Civil Society (see Allan 2006: 145–146), and this has often been appealed to in later discussions of civil society. It is significant that these three authors were writing at a time when, in Britain, the role of private commerce had greatly increased: it had largely broken free from feudal and guild ties, and one result was the creation of urban middle class groups who were opening up new spheres of activity independent both of the state and of traditional forms of authority within local communities (whether political or religious). Not only did these often promote the idea of civility—conceived as courtesy, mutual respect, or at least tolerance, as against the traditional hierarchical relationships holding between those from different ‘estates’—they also created a ‘public

 We should also note that it is closely related to cultural conceptions like ‘civility’, ‘civic virtue’, ‘civic culture’, and ‘civic spirit’. 6

4 Society 

85

sphere’ in which issues were discussed and public opinion could be formed.7 Along with other members of the Scottish Enlightenment, Ferguson outlines a stage model of the development of societies: from savagery, through barbarity, to civilisation. However, he did not assume this to be always a smooth and continuous process, or an irreversible one. Nor, for that matter, did he regard civilisation as an unalloyed good. While he saw the increased division of labour, the growth of towns, and an associated rise in the material standard of living, as beneficial, he believed that the economic inequalities this produced threatened social order. He also feared that people would become preoccupied with their own pleasures and fail to play an active role as citizens—here there is a premonition of Tönnies’s notion of Gesellschaft. In this respect he differed from other members of the Scottish Enlightenment, who were generally more sanguine about the value of commercial civilisation. The work of a range of other writers has been also appealed to in late twentieth century and twenty-first century debates about civil society. A key one was Hegel. He treated civil society as lying between the family and the state, with a dialectical relationship operating among these three spheres. For him civil society was a field of relatively anonymous social relations, centred on the market, in which people compete to pursue their own interests. Where families are united because of what they share in common, civil society brings people together as a result of their differences—in terms of what they can offer one another. As a result, Hegel argued, mere acquaintances and strangers become dependent on one another, and must adjust their behaviour accordingly. So, within civil society, despite the pursuit of private or selfish ends in relatively unrestricted social and economic activity, universality is implicit in the fact that the welfare of each individual is intrinsically bound up with that of others. There is, then, at least mutual recognition in practical terms, even if there is no conscious concern for others’ interests. Hegel suggests that, as a result, individuals are educated informally towards what he regards as a higher universal consciousness. At the same time, he insists that, because   For a history of ‘civilisation’ and civility, see Elias (2000). On the public sphere, see Habermas (1974). 7

86 

M. Hammersley

this system of interdependence within civil society is not self-conscious but exists only in abstraction from the individual pursuit of interest, particularity and universality are only externally related. Given this, he argues, there is the complementary need for a State to render commitment to the common good more explicit, and to sustain the civil sphere: both through the enactment of laws and their enforcement, and through engendering conscious commitment to the wider national society. Indeed, for Hegel the State is not to be seen as a mere association or product of contract, but rather as an object that transcends and incorporates the rest of society.8 Hegel’s account of civil society was as much prescription as description, and one component of it was the idea of ‘corporations’: associations among people who perceive themselves to have common interests within civil society, such as those practising the same trade. Hegel appears to have regarded these corporations as similar in character to medieval guilds (see Stedman-Jones 2001), but a broader conception of intermediate groups or associations later came to be central to discussions of ‘civil society’. The most influential source for this has been Tocqueville who, in his analysis of the United States, reflected on the question of how such a new, yet relatively orderly, society could have emerged without the strong state, social hierarchy, and traditional culture characteristic of the ancien régime in continental Europe. He concluded that a vibrant social order arose from the many associations in which Americans were involved in their localities, these pursuing a wide variety of purposes, commercial and civic as well as political; though he placed particular emphasis on participation in local government or township politics. His argument was that these associations both engendered wider commitments than mere self-­interest, and developed the skills required if political involvement was to be sustained. He also viewed this plurality of groups as balancing one another, preventing a tyranny of the majority.9  For accounts of Hegel’s conception of civil society, see Stillman (1980), Seligman (1992: 46–51), and Stedman-Jones (2001). 9  For late twentieth century discussion of civil society building on Tocqueville, see Edwards et al. (2001). There had been a parallel discussion around the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century about the need for pluralism as a defence against the new democratic state, for example in the work of Acton and Maitland: see Burrow (1988: ch6). 8

4 Society 

87

These ideas were later picked up by Durkheim who was particularly concerned with the question of how the disintegrative tendencies built into the expanding division of labour within European societies could be countered; especially those generated by the unprecedented scale of industrialisation and urbanisation in the nineteenth century. Like Hegel, Durkheim initially argued that mutual dependence was an inevitable feature of an increased division of labour, and that this would ensure that modern society retained coherence, albeit in a different form from that characteristic of traditional society. However, he later concluded that this would not be sufficient, that occupational associations were needed as bearers of shared values that emphasise collective duties as well as rights (both those distinctive to particular professions and those applying to all citizens). He believed that in France, at the time he was writing, these associations were too localised in character, and rarely involved the sort of professional code and level of organisation required if they were to fulfil this function. Durkheim argued that they must be developed into a corporate system that, along with the state, and the kind of organic solidarity characteristic of modern societies, would constrain the egoistic and anomic effects of economic individualism (Turner 1999: ch5). So, in his diagnosis, the key problem troubling the transitional condition of contemporary European societies, in their progress from traditional to modern forms, was the weakness of intermediary institutions between the individual and the state; in short, the weakness of civil society. As I have noted, alongside this thinking about civil society as a solution to problems caused by economic development, there was also a political strand of argument involved. One early nineteenth-century source of this was Tom Paine, who extolled civil society as a natural and self-regulating mode of association that could challenge and overturn tyranny (Keane 1998). However, Paine also claims, in The Rights of Man (Keane 1995: pp. 302–303), that there is a need for governments actively to civilise and cultivate a people emerging from despotism, as for example in the case of revolutionary France. Another influential source for ideas about the political role of civil society emerged within Marxism, in the work of Antonio Gramsci (see Joll 1977). In his fragmentary, and in places unavoidably obscure, prison writings, Gramsci was concerned with the contemporary state of Italian society, with the rise of Mussolini

88 

M. Hammersley

and fascism, and how this could be understood in Marxist terms, with a view to developing an oppositional political strategy. Even prior to his imprisonment, Gramsci had reflected on how the gaining of state power required a class or a political party to make alliances with others, and how this necessitated ideological engagement with their ideas and values. He used the term ‘hegemony’ to refer to this process, but later extended it to include the cultural processes by which dominant groups seek to secure power, alongside the use of force (Anderson 2017). Thus, he saw the battle for power as achieved, in part, outside of the political system— within civil society. This is the terrain that stands between the state and the economy, and is made up of associations and institutions of various kinds, not just political parties but also interest groups, as well as newspapers, magazines, literature, and the arts (Hall et al. 1978). Others, from a very different political perspective, have seen civil society as a counter to the modern threat of a ‘mass society’: a population of individuals whose weak ties make them prey to the influence of crowds and mobs, as well as to the populism of demagogues (Giner 1976; Swingewood 1977). It was argued that ‘civil society’ can bring individuals together and provide social relations that will serve as a substitute for the weakened ties of kinship and family, and thereby overcome social fragmentation. Thus, Shils (1997) contrasted civility with forms of interest politics, where people are solely concerned with maximising their own benefits, and with ideological politics geared to some remote vision of a perfect society that requires huge sacrifices in the present.10 A parallel argument, centred on the notion of social capital and building especially on the ideas of Tocqueville, has suggested that participation in civil society serves to facilitate the learning of democratic skills, and perhaps also commits citizens to pursuit of the common good (Putnam 1995, 2000). In the late twentieth century, the term ‘civil society’ was also used in discussions about democracy in Eastern Europe prior to and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, as well as in Latin America in the context of dictatorial regimes (see Bozoki and Sükösd 1993; Leiva and Pagden 2001). For influential dissidents in Eastern European countries under  In many respects, Shils’s objection to an ideological orientation echoes Hume’s criticism of religious ‘enthusiasm’. 10

4 Society 

89

Soviet control, such as Solidarity activists in Poland and Vaclav Havel and his colleagues in Czechoslovakia, the aim was to rebuild civil society. This was seen as representing an alternative to the state: in a totalitarian society, people meeting together, discussing matters of interest and making plans, offered an alternative form of life to that which was officially sanctioned. This was true even when the meetings and discussions were not directly political—and, to avoid state repression, participants usually had to avoid any such appearance. Involved here is the idea of spontaneous relations arising from many centres (plurality) as opposed to organised ones directed by the state.11 As this brief outline of its history makes clear, ‘civil society’ is not a term restricted to social scientists: its senses have been shaped by the various political debates and struggles in which it has been deployed, from the eighteenth through to the twenty-first century. Furthermore, it takes on different meanings according to the contexts in which it has been used; whether as a means by which social order can be restored in societies that have become fragmented and individualised by market relations, as a device for revitalising democracy, or as a form of resistance to totalitarian states. The concept of civil society has also sometimes been applied to situations where there has been a withdrawal of the state from the provision of welfare services, leaving these to be supplied by kin, friends, and neighbours, as well as by third sector enterprises, and/or private companies. This was the predominant focus in Latin America, but it extends to other countries as well, including the UK. Given its history and the fact that it has been closely related to political concerns and conflicts, it is perhaps not surprising that there is little agreement about exactly what belongs in the category of ‘civil society’: Does it encompass all social groupings above the level of the individual, apart from the state? Or does it exclude the family and the household? Are market relations—or, at least, organisations concerned with economic issues, such as trade associations and unions—to be treated as belonging under this heading? What about political parties? Are only those associations covered that serve to increase social cohesion, to  New questions arose after the fall of the Soviet Union about exactly what kind of civil society is required to nurture a democratic state. See Bozoki and Sükösd (1993). 11

90 

M. Hammersley

counter political tyranny, to facilitate political participation, or to provide services? Must they practice civility to be included? As implied in the quote from Burawoy earlier, civil society is sometimes treated, along with the economy and the polity, as one of three key parts of a ‘national society’, these representing the domains of three main social sciences. And, indeed, this more or less corresponds to the history of the emergence of sociology in the United States, where it had to find a territory distinct from that of two older disciplines: politics and, especially, economics. But even if the reference of ‘civil’ society is defined very narrowly—as excluding the family, the economy, and the state—the range of associations and organisations involved is highly variegated. It would appear to include, for instance, local community associations, golf clubs, youth peer groups, churches, railway modelling clubs, newspapers, and trade associations. Moreover, neither the economy nor the polity is as clearly defined and differentiated as might be imagined. We can ask, for example: is the sale of stolen goods or  financial fraud part of the economy? Do unpaid domestic labour and charity work belong within it? Furthermore, the economy cannot be easily separated, even in analytical terms, from much that might normally fall under the heading of ‘society’. For example, trade unions may be viewed as organisations that restrict competition and therefore distort market relations, which surely makes them part of the economy, but they have often been treated as central to civil society. Similar problems arise with ‘polity’: political scientists study parties and pressure groups, the voting intentions of citizens, their political attitudes, and all the various factors that might shape these. And this overlaps considerably with what is referred to by the word ‘society’. Furthermore, the meaning of the term ‘state’ or ‘polity’ also often expands to swallow up society. An influential example is Althusser’s (1971) concept of ideological state apparatuses, which include the education system and the mass media. And, if the domain of political science is broadened to incorporate micro-politics, then this leaves no area of social life  untouched—the personal becomes political—and any distinction between political and civil society is threatened. The fuzzy boundaries around economy and polity are illustrated by the fact that the work of political sociologists overlaps considerably with that of political scientists, while there is also a substantial overlap between economic sociology and

4 Society 

91

economics. We might even wonder whether economy, polity, and society are not simply constructs invented by the three main social sciences, rather than these corresponding to any genuine structure in the world. As all this makes clear, it is uncertain what should and should not be included under the heading of ‘civil society’. Misztal (2001: 73) suggests  that ‘the notion of civil society, presented as a panacea for all the problems of modern societies and used to identify a wide range of diverse cases, has been inflated to the point of losing much of its meaning.’ In some interpretations it is a type of society, whether similar to or very different from what Tönnies referred to as Gesellschaft, but in others it is an aspect or segment of national societies, perhaps one that serves as a substitute for the decline of Gemeinschaft. The term does not refer to a single object, then, and this reflects the fact that multiple political views have operated on its use, and that conceptualisations of it have been shaped to deal with varying social circumstances over a period of nearly two centuries, across different parts of the world. Furthermore, there has been a failure to maintain any distinction between applying a particular political view to produce evaluations, and using it to set a value-relevance framework within which social scientific investigations can take place. As a result, value and factual matters have been conflated in the very ways in which the term ‘civil society’ has been defined and deployed. Thus, disagreements and debates that appear to be about factual matters also reflect different value judgments concerning what is beneficial or detrimental, as well as how benefits can be achieved, dangers avoided, or problems solved.12

Society as Sociation The final conception of ‘society’ does not claim to  refer to any sort of entity, whether country or social system, type of social relation, or component of a national society. Instead, the term is taken to mean the diverse processes of social interaction in which human beings engage everywhere, and the patterning of human relationships of various kinds thereby  This problem is evident, for example, both in the book by Edwards (2019) and in the collection edited by Hall (1995), despite their very different approaches to the topic. 12

92 

M. Hammersley

generated and sustained. These processes occur wherever human beings are gathered together, and are not hemmed in by national or other territorial boundaries. Quite the reverse, they produce and sustain any such boundaries. A synonym for this concept of society is ‘sociation’, while other commentators have used the term ‘sociality’ (see Strathern 1996). This sense of the term has often been adopted to counter the idea that human behaviour is entirely a product of individual biological or psychological characteristics, or that it results from decisions made solely on an individual, rational, or instrumental basis. But it also stands opposed to the assumption that there are social structures or forces that are entirely independent of the actions of individual human beings which determine their actions. Most sociological accounts of society are at least two-­ dimensional, involving a vertical as well as a horizontal plane, with entities at the top of the hierarchy (whether social structures, institutions, culture, or whatever) playing a determinate role in shaping the behaviour of individual actors on particular occasions. However, the notion of sociation largely restricts itself to a horizontal dimension, with any higher-­ level structures being treated simply as products of what happens on the baseline, sometimes with the conclusion that they display a shifting if not fragile character. Versions of this conception of society are to be found in the work of Simmel, Mead, Blumer, Garfinkel, Goffman, and others. For example, Simmel writes that: The large systems and the super-individual organizations that customarily come to mind when we think of society, are nothing but immediate interactions that occur among men constantly, every minute, but that have become crystallized as permanent fields, as autonomous phenomena. As they crystallize, they attain their own existence and their own laws, and may even confront or oppose spontaneous interaction itself. At the same time, society, as its life is constantly being realized, always signifies that individuals are connected by mutual influence and determination […] To be true to this fundamental character of it, one should properly speak, not of society, but of sociation. “Society” is merely the name for a number of individuals, connected by interaction. It is because of their interaction that they are a unit […]. (Wolff 1950: 10)

4 Society 

93

However, the notion of sociation has been formulated in diverse ways. Thus, for Blumer it comprises lines of action directed towards, and ongoingly adapted to, those of other actors, these forming part of larger patterns of collective behaviour, which sometimes generate relatively stable, albeit never unchanging, social institutions. The focus here is on the substantive contents of actions and relationships. By contrast, many others who have adopted this concept of society have been concerned with forms of sociation, rather than with the substantive goals and adaptive courses of action associated with them. This is true of Simmel, for instance, with his interest in the nature of authority and subordination, of sociability, secrecy, spatial and quantitative aspects of social relations, and so on. Much the same applies to Goffman, although the forms in which he was interested were rather different; notably, modes of politeness in face-to-­ face interaction. Meanwhile, Garfinkel treats sociation as a ubiquitous process in which the very nature of social (and perhaps also of physical) phenomena is constituted, with actors simultaneously displaying who they are and what they are doing while reading the displays of others, and in this manner exemplifying rationality in terms of rules that are reflexively tied to their contexts of application (see Hammersley 2018). This final conception of society is clearly very different in character from the others—with much more of an emphasis on process than on structure. Furthermore, ideas about the relationship between sociation and other notions of society have also varied. Goffman locates it as one level of sociological analysis, complementing the others, including the macro-level of national societies. Whereas ethnomethodology adopts an entirely processual conception of sociation, so that it constitutes the only level of rigorous analysis. As this indicates, while sociation is sometimes treated as incompatible with other concepts of society, this is not always the case. A focus on it may be seen as complementary to recognition of territorially defined units of one sort or another. And while there is clear incompatibility between most views of sociation and the idea of society as a system that operates entirely independently of the actors involved in it, and determines their actions, we saw that Simmel recognised that the products of sociation could gain some independence from it, and constrain it, even if

94 

M. Hammersley

not permanently. Something like the same idea is to be found in conceptualisations of the relationship between structure and agency, though these have been criticised by some advocates of the notion of sociation (see, for instance, Martin and Dennis 2010). Meanwhile, in several of its versions, the notion of civil society is quite close to that of sociation; though many advocates of the latter notion would insist that the economy and the polity must also be treated as dynamic patterns produced and sustained in and through social interaction.

Interim Conclusion Reviewing the various senses of the term ‘society’, the first one is routinely used by lay people as well as social scientists, and does not usually raise fundamental problems where it is employed simply to identify loosely defined geo-political entities. However, as we saw, it frequently merges into the second, abstract, conception of society, and this can entail problems—especially where an attempt is made to specify essential functions or features of any society, and/or to show how its characteristics are endogenous products of a social system. Here it becomes necessary to delineate the boundaries around any empirically existing instance of ‘society’, and to conceptualise the relationship between what is inside and outside. Yet those boundaries are not simply physical borders (and even these are by no means always determinate or impermeable), since there are citizens who live beyond the borders, belonging to diasporas of one sort or another, as well as people living inside who are citizens of other societies, formally or informally. Furthermore, communication networks often cross physical borders, and so too does the provision of some services, notably financial ones. In addition, there are various kinds of trans-­ national organisation. For instance, the UK has been part of the European Union and continues to be part of NATO; it is supposed to have a ‘special relationship’ with the United States, and distinctive relations, of varying kinds, with those countries that belong to the Commonwealth. Much the same can be said of some non-state institutions within a society. For instance, the Catholic Church within the UK is subordinate to Rome, just as the British Communist Party once took orders from Moscow.

4 Society 

95

Much of the production of goods and services within the UK occurs under the auspices of international companies whose headquarters are elsewhere, and many of the goods and services consumed come from such companies. Given all this, it is doubtful that any modern society could approximate self-sufficiency, in the manner that Parsons requires for it to be a single social system. A second problem is that, applied to almost any territorially defined unit, the notion of social system is liable to imply that everything which occurs within it is tightly integrated. Yet this is rarely the case: often it would be more sensible to think of multiple systems operating within the boundaries of large nation-states. For instance, it has been recognised that one or more modes of production may operate within the same society, even if one of them is dominant. Furthermore, the most common sociological interpretation of the Marxist distinction between ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ treats the relationship as one of ‘relative autonomy’. The concept of civil society also recognises that varying sorts of systemic processes can be operating within different parts of national societies: as we saw, civil society is often treated as marked off from the economy, the state, and/or the family in precisely these terms. A similar point can be made by means of the Gemeinschaft/Geselleschaft distinction: as noted earlier, Tönnies saw approximations to these two types of relationship as existing side-by-side within modern societies. Of course, these problems regarding boundaries and internal integration do not arise with the fourth sense of the term—as sociation. However, it tends to imply a very different approach to sociological analysis from those associated with the other conceptions of society. As this indicates, the different senses that have been given to ‘society’ are frequently implicated in different conceptions of sociology as a discipline. This was illustrated early on by the sharp contrast between Durkheim’s and Simmel’s views (Durkheim 1902), and much the same is true of Parsons and Garfinkel, or Luhmann and Giddens. In short, the lack of agreement about the meaning of ‘society’ reflects deep divisions among sociologists about the nature of the enterprise in which they are engaged. On top of this, as I noted earlier, there are those who have argued that the very notion of ‘society’, or of ‘the social’, has lost its reference because the world we live in has changed. Various significant developments have

96 

M. Hammersley

been identified here. One is the effects of globalisation, which some believe have rendered misleading any treatment of nations as distinct societies. Thus, Beck (2007) describes ‘society’ as a zombie term, stalking the world without any home. Arising from this, some have proposed that these changes indicate the existence of a global society or a global system (Luhmann 1997; Keane 2003). Another argument to the same conclusion is that digital technologies, and the virtual realities they have generated, make territorial relations and boundaries irrelevant. A third proposal insists that we live in a world of simulations and that this amounts to the death of the social, as in the writings of Baudrillard. And this, too, has implications for the discipline. Bogard (1990: 3) summarises Baudrillard’s view about this as follows: ‘Sociology has become at best superfluous and at worst irrelevant for understanding the contemporary fragmentation of the social field, a fragmentation which absorbs any sociological attempt to recapture or restore the meaning it once might have had’. However, there has been a tendency to push each of these arguments too far (see Outhwaite 2006). Despite global market relations and communication networks, there are still nation-states, and they defend their boundaries against infringement by other states as well as, for example, by people they define as illegal migrants. Furthermore, there continue to be elements of ‘civil society’, in most senses of that term, within these national societies. The fact that societal relations have a global dimension—including non-governmental organisations that are international in character or are based elsewhere, or social media run by organisations located in another country—does not necessarily eliminate the local. It has been suggested that ‘glocalisation’ is a more accurate description of the trend than ‘globalisation’ (Robertson 2012).

An Attempt at Reformulation In my view, in thinking about the concept of society, it is essential to begin from the notion of sociation, and to try to distinguish various social forms that emerge out of this. These can be ranged along a dimension from those that are very weakly organised, being endogenously

4 Society 

97

emergent—such as crowds, queues, publics and audiences—through to what are referred to as formal organisations or institutions, including governments or states. At the most basic level, then, there are such modes of sociation as people gathering in or traversing some public place, for example in the foyer of a theatre, walking along street pavements, crossing roads, queuing for a bus or train, at an ATM, or in a store. Closely associated would be what Le Bon, Tarde, and others in the nineteenth century labelled as crowds, by which they usually meant political crowds: groups of people marching or ‘rioting’. The key point is that, towards this end of the dimension, any coordination of activity tends to arise from the relatively independent activities of multiple individuals: there is little or no overall coordination. People will continually monitor and adjust their behaviour to that of others, but usually in relatively trivial terms, for example in order to avoid collisions when walking down the street. They may also note what others do with a view to imitating it, or licensing their own behaviour by appeal to it, as in James Thurber’s famous story ‘The Day the Dam Broke’. In Goffman’s (1963) terms, the interaction here is largely unfocused, in the sense that the attention of participants is distributed across a range of objects. However, there is a move away from this in the case of a political demonstration, for example. Here, focused interaction starts to emerge, and much the same is true in the case of industrial picketing. People in crowds may, of course, accompany others they already know: and, given this, they may talk as they walk down the street or as they wait for a speaker or concert to begin. Indeed, if one meets someone whom one knows, there is an obligation, generally, to acknowledge them, and perhaps to engage in focused interaction, however fleeting. For both these reasons, there may be islands of focused interaction in the midst of relatively unorganised crowds. By contrast, strangers in crowds are generally under no obligation to engage in focused interaction—in fact, they are frequently required to adopt a mode of ‘civil inattention’ (Goffman 1972: 385–386), unless specifically addressed. Goffman has also elaborated on the delicate and subtle organisation that is involved in focused encounters, whether these take place amongst strangers or among friends and family.

98 

M. Hammersley

Further levels of social organisation involve pre-arrangement of one sort or another, as with meetings, whether for purposes of leisure or work. While the rules of etiquette characteristic of all ‘encounters’ operate here too, we must recognise that in this case there will be internal coordination of some additional kinds, and particular encounters may belong to sequences. The form of organisation may be relatively rudimentary, for instance regular meetings for coffee or dinner between kin or friends may alternate as regards who organises them, in whose home they take place, or, if they take place in a café, restaurant, or bar, who pays. Furthermore, the content of the interactions will draw on background knowledge that is not just known in common but whose shared nature must often be acknowledged: there are costs associated with forgetting important information about one’s consociates, or with failing to pass on news about people or matters that would be of interest to them. Moreover, meetings of these kinds are often instantiations of ‘networks’, ‘groups’, or even ‘formal organisations’, which represent more extended forms of social ordering, in both time and social space. They are likely to run alongside other kinds of communication amongst their members—by letter, email, phone, social media, and so on—sometimes directed towards coordinating action in various respects. Furthermore, maintaining contact, exchanging information, and providing support are felt and held to be obligations on the part of members. Social networks have been given a great deal of attention by some anthropologists and sociologists (see, for instance, Hannerz 1992). At the same time, there has not been much agreement about exactly what does and does not constitute a network: what level of recognition there needs to be amongst members, whether the relations (e.g., the flows of information) must approximate to being symmetrical, and what kinds of link amongst people are to be included. One question here is whether friendship ties are to be treated alongside role relationships, including those between superordinate and subordinate, or whether the latter should be excluded, or differentiated as representing a distinctive kind of network. The term ‘group’ is obviously somewhat different in its reference from that of ‘network’, though it involves its own uncertainties of meaning. One problem here is a tendency to use ‘groups’ as a synonym for categories of actor, as for example in references to women or those sharing a

4 Society 

99

particular ethnicity. This is probably best avoided. While there is some continuity between network and group, I suggest that the latter implies not just regular contacts and some degree of felt solidarity, but also a degree of internal organisation in the form of role differentiation, even if in an informal and flexible manner. While groups need to be distinguished from categories of actor, the frequent fluidity of the former must be recognised as well as how their membership may draw on one or more broader categories that provide some of the motives and resources for group formation. It is important to recognise that networks and groups rely on the looser patterns of relation discussed earlier, such as those surrounding face-to-­ face focused interaction, phone and video contacts, and so on. Where the latter are vehicles for network and group relations, they are shaped and linked to serve this purpose. So, the dimension I am tracking here—from social interactions that are only loosely organised overall to more strongly organised forms—runs from unfocused and focused forms of interaction that are not involved with networks and groups, through those that are, and on to those in formal organisations. Where a network or group is engaged in pursuit of a common, specific task, rather than simply mutual conviviality or a diffuse range of tasks, the degree of overall organisation is likely to be greater. And here, especially, there will be a tendency for particular members to take leadership roles, in seeking to ensure maintenance and coordination of activity, effective pursuit of shared goals, this perhaps even extending to reflection on or revision of that goal. Here, in informal ways, a division of labour starts to become institutionalised, as it is in families. However there is a difference between even relatively well-established and institutionalised groups and what are referred to as formal organisations, even if it is only a matter of degree, with roles and relationships becoming more explicitly specified. Furthermore, these tend to involve arrangements whereby new members are selected and socialised (thereby establishing the boundaries of the organisation, in defining who belongs and who does not), as well as operational rules of various kinds, and above all formal mechanisms to deal with deviance from these. Within formal organisations, an executive will usually arise that determines policy for the organisation as a whole, deals with threats or crises, whether these are external or internal.

100 

M. Hammersley

Of course, formal organisations can vary greatly in size and complexity, and large ones often involve nested structures. For example, organisation at departmental level will be embedded—relatively weakly or more strongly—within the institutionalised structures of the wider unit. Furthermore, formally distinct organisations can nevertheless be involved in coordinated arrangements or networks; indeed, they almost certainly will be, even if these are relatively loosely structured. Governments are, I suggest, formal organisations of a peculiar kind. However, they are by no means necessarily the largest or the most powerful: there are international companies that out-rank many governments in size and power. What is distinctive about governments is that they usually operate in relatively large territorial domains which they formally control: fields of authority that are backed up with the potential use of coercive measures, as well as the deployment of incentives and penalties.13 When fully functioning, they produce legal rules with which all individuals, groups, and organisations must comply when operating within the relevant jurisdiction. There are, of course, questions about exactly what belongs under the heading of government, or under that even more vague term ‘state’. Within most western societies there is some division between executive, legislature, and judiciary; indeed, often, there is an insistence on a separation of these powers. But governments will also, of course, oversee intelligence and military organisations, police forces, and perhaps even education, health, and other sorts of provision. There is usually also a difference between central and regional or local government. And the balance of power amongst these can vary, as can their relationships over time. There can be significant variation too both in the degree to which organisational power is concentrated and centralised, and also in the scope of behaviour—on the part of individuals, networks, groups, and organisations—that a formal organisation seeks to control, with totalitarian states at the end of this spectrum. A key dimension differentiating the various social forms I have discussed is degree of institutionalisation. What this refers to is variation in the extent, explicitness, and fixity of rules about what should and should  However, we should note that they are by no means the only social entity that involves territorial claims: see Lyman and Scott (1970: ch2). 13

4 Society 

101

not be done, and who is free or obliged to do what under various conditions. These rules do not determine behaviour in some mechanical fashion. While compliance with many of them is habitual, even then a determination of what is required in each unique situation is necessary. However, in some circumstances there may be difficulties or dilemmas in complying that generate interpretation and reinterpretation, or even the bending or suspension of rules. Generally speaking, though, there will be expectations of compliance, and sanctions applied if this is held not to have occurred; albeit with some discretion on the part of those in a position to apply sanctions. Of course, the sanctions may be challenged, and could lead to retaliation; and this points to the fact that the various levels of organisation involve differential control over resources of various kinds, alongside differences in role. An important feature of formal organisations, by contrast with many networks and groups, is that there is often continuity in operation despite changes in personnel, even among those making up an executive. This reflects the fact that individuals are playing roles that are not uniquely tied to them. New people can and will be regularly recruited, and existing ones will leave, retire or die off. The organisation appears to have a life of its own, though of course it remains dependent upon the actions of those who play the various roles that make it up. And there may be change in those roles over time, as well as in who performs them. Unless we can develop a clearer understanding of these different forms of social organisation, it seems to me that sociologists are in a weak position to tackle the problems surrounding the various conceptions of ‘society’ I have outlined in this chapter. I am not suggesting that the account of these forms I have provided here is entirely novel, satisfactory, or complete. The intention has been simply to indicate what is required if we are to gain a better sense of the range of phenomena to which the word ‘society’ has been used to refer, in a manner that would enable us to build sociological knowledge more securely.

102 

M. Hammersley

References Aberle, D., Cohen, A. K., Davis, A. K., Levy, M. J., & Sutton, F. X. (1950). The Functional Prerequisites of a Society. Ethics, 60(2), 100–111. Allan, D. (2006). Adam Ferguson. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Althusser, L. (1971). Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. In Lenin and Philosophy. London: New Left Books. Anderson, P. (2017). The H-Word: The Peripeteia of Hegemony. London: Verso. Annan, N. (1990). The Death of “Society”. New York Review of Books, December 6. Anzola, D., Barbrook-Johnson, P., & Cano, J. (2017). Self-organization and Social Science. Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory, 23(2), 221–257. Barth, F. (1992). Towards Greater Naturalism in Conceptualizing Societies. In A. Kuper (Ed.), Conceptualizing Society. London: Routledge. Beck, U. (2007). The Cosmopolitan Condition: Why Methodological Nationalism Fails. Theory, Culture and Society, 24(7–8), 286–290. Berger, P., & Luckmann, T. (1966). The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Bogard, W. (1987). Sociology in the Absence of the Social: The Significance of Baudrillard for Contemporary Thought.  Philosophy and Social Criticism, 13(3), 227–242. Bogard, W. (1990). Closing Down the Social: Baudrillard’s Challenge to Contemporary Sociology. Sociological Theory, 8(1), 1–15. Bozoki, A., & Sükösd, M. (1993). Civil Society and Populism in the Eastern European Democratic Transitions. Praxis International, 13(3), 224–241. Buckley, W. (1967). Sociology and Modern Systems Theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Burawoy, M. (2016). Sociology as a Vocation. Contemporary Sociology, 45(4), 379–393. Burrow, J. (1988). Whigs and Liberals: Continuity and Change in English Political Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Demerath, N. J., & Peterson, R. A. (Eds.). (1967). System, Change, and Conflict. New York: Free Press. Durkheim, É. (1902). Simmel, Georg, Philosophie des Geldes. Année Sociologique, 5, 140–145. English translation by Peter Baehr. Social Research, 46(2), 321–328, Summer 1979.

4 Society 

103

Edwards, B., Foley, M., & Diani, M. (Eds.). (2001). Beyond Tocqueville: Civil Society and the Social Capital Debate in Comparative Perspective. Hanover, NH: Tufts University and University Press of New England. Edwards, M. (2019). Civil Society (4th ed.). Cambridge: Polity. Elias, N. (2000). The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners. Oxford: Blackwell. Elliott, A., & Turner, B. (2013). On Society. Cambridge: Polity. Ferguson, A. (1767/1995). An Essay on the History of Civil Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Francis, M. (2007). Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life. Stocksfield: Acumen. Frisby, D., & Sayer, D. (1986). Society. London: Tavistock. Giner, S. (1976). Mass Society. Oxford: Blackwell. Goffman, E. (1963). Behavior in Public Places. New York: Free Press. Goffman, E. (1972). Relations in Public. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gusfield, J. (1975). Community: A Critical Response. Oxford: Blackwell. Habermas, J. (1974). The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964). New German Critique, 3, 49–55. Hall, J. (Ed.). (1995). Civil Society: Theory, History, Comparison. Cambridge: Polity. Hall, S., Lumley, B., & Maclennan, G. (1978). Politics and Ideology: Gramsci. In Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies on Ideology. London: Hutchinson. Hammersley, M. (2018). The Radicalism of Ethnomethodology. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hannerz, U. (1992). The Global Ecumene as a Network of Networks. In A. Kuper (Ed.), Conceptualizing Society. London: Routledge. Ingold, T. (Ed.). (1996). Key Debates in Anthropology. London: Routledge. Jenkins, R. (2010). Beyond Social Structure. In P. J. Martin & A. Dennis (Eds.), Human Agents and Social Structures. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Joll, J. (1977). Gramsci. London: Fontana. Kaplan, A. (1964). The Conduct of Inquiry. San Francisco: Chandler. Keane, J. (1995). Tom Paine: A Political Life. London: Bloomsbury. Keane, J. (1998). Civil Society: Old Images, New Visions. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Keane, J. (2003). Global Civil Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kuper, A. (Ed.). (1992). Conceptualizing Society. London: Routledge. Leiva, L. C., & Pagden, A. (2001). Civil Society and the Fate of the Modern Republics of Latin America. In S. Kaviraj & S. Khilnani (Eds.), Civil Society: History and Possibilities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

104 

M. Hammersley

Lockwood, D. (1992). Solidarity and Schism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Luhmann, N. (1997). Globalization or World Society: How to Conceive of Modern Society? International Review of Sociology, 7(1), 67–79. Lukács, G. (1971). Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat. In History and Class Consciousness (R.  Livingstone, Trans.) (pp.  83–222). London: Merlin Press. (First published in German in 1923). Lukes, S. (1973). Émile Durkheim. London: Allen Lane. Lyman, S., & Scott, M. (1970). A Sociology of the Absurd. New  York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Martin, P. J., & Dennis, A. (Eds.). (2010). Human Agents and Social Structures. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Martins, H. (1974). Time and Theory in Sociology. In J. Rex (Ed.), Approaches to Sociology: An Introduction to Major Trends in British Sociology (pp. 246–294). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. McCrone, D. (2017). The New Sociology of Scotland. London: Sage. Misztal, B. (2001). Civil Society: A Signifier of Plurality and a Sense of Wholeness. In J. Blau (Ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Sociology. Oxford: Blackwell. Outhwaite, W. (2006). The Future of Society. Oxford: Blackwell. Parsons, T. (1966). Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Parsons, T. (2011). American Society: A Theory of the Societal Community. London: Routledge. Putnam, R. (1995). Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital. Journal of Democracy, 6(1), 65–78. Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling Alone. The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster. Radcliffe-Brown, A.  R. (1940). On Social Structure. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 70(1), 1–12. Robertson, R. (2012). Globalisation or Glocalisation? The Journal of International Communication, 18(2), 191–208. Rose, N. (1996). The Death of the Social: Refiguring the Territory of Government. Economy and Society, 25(3), 327–356. Seligman, A.  B. (1992). The Idea of Civil Society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Shils, E. (1997). Civility and Civil Society. In S.  Grosby (Ed.), The Virtue of Civility. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

4 Society 

105

Stedman-Jones, G. (2001). Hegel and the Economics of Civil Society. In S.  Kaviraj & S.  Khilnani (Eds.), Civil Society:  History and Possibilities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stillman, P.  G. (1980). Hegel’s Civil Society: A Locus of Freedom. Polity, 12(4), 622–646. Strathern, M. (1996). ‘For the Motion (1): The Concept of Society is Theoretically Obsolete. In T.  Ingold (Ed.), Key Debates in Anthropology. London: Routledge. Swedberg, R. (2005). The Max Weber Dictionary. Standford, CA: Stanford University Press. Swingewood, A. (1977). The Myth of Mass Culture. London: Macmillan. Tiryakian, E. (2017). Introduction. In E. Tiryakian (Ed.), Sociological Theory, Values, and Sociocultural Change (2nd ed.). London: Routledge. Tönnies, F. (1955). Community and Association (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (First published in German in 1887). Turnbull, C. M. (1972). The Mountain People. New York: Simon & Schuster. Turner, B. S. (1999). Classical Sociology. SAGE Publications. Turner, J.  H. (1985). Herbert Spencer: A Renewed Appreciation. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Urry, J. (2000). Sociology Beyond Societies. London: Routledge. Urry, J. (2007). Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity. Wallerstein, I. (2004). World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Williams, R. (1983). Keywords (2nd ed.). London: Fontana. Wolff, K. (Ed.). (1950). The Sociology of Georg Simmel. New York: Free Press.

5 Social Class

Social class terminology is widely used by social scientists, but the meanings given to these terms vary considerably. Furthermore, their usage is closely interrelated, and sometimes conflated, with other, equally troublesome terms, relating to differences in ‘social status’ and ‘power’. Thus, a range of criteria have been deployed to identify social classes, not just differences in income and wealth but also those involving these other dimensions. At the same time, there are sociologists who have argued that class should be treated exclusively as an economic category, concerned with differences in financial resources and property, and/or in the nature of the employment contract. The argument has been that, unless there is differentiation between economic and other criteria, we will be unable to investigate historical and cross-national variation in the relations between economic conditions, social status, and political power (see, for instance, Mills 1942). As will become clear, though, maintaining the distinctions among these three bases for social differentiation can be difficult. And, to complicate matters further, some writers have treated social class as referring to subjective differences in ‘modes of experience’, in other words in culture. For instance, Stuart Hall (1967: 93) writes that ‘Class is a kind of patterning—it usefully describes how social distinctions, expectations

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Hammersley, Troubling Sociological Concepts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51644-4_5

107

108 

M. Hammersley

and goals, habits and conflicts, structures of feeling cluster together in our society’. Skeggs (1997) took a similar line in focusing on the classed and gendered experience of the young women she studied. Significant variation also occurs in the meanings given to particular social class categories. For example, the term ‘working class’ may be taken to mean that portion of a population engaged in manual work (or living in a household headed by someone in that type of occupation); all those in a population who must sell their labour power in order to cover their costs of living (along with those of their dependents); that section of a population whose work is directed by others, rather than being under their own control; that portion of a population engaged in productive, as against unproductive, activities; those who identify themselves as ‘working class’; or people belonging to organisations aimed at protecting or promoting the interests of ‘the working class’ (here, the sense is what Marx meant by a ‘class-for-itself ’, rather than a mere ‘class-in-itself ’). Furthermore, it should be clear that the denotation of ‘working class’ depends to some extent on what other social class(es) it is being contrasted with, implicitly or explicitly. And the meaning of the term that serves as the most common contrast to ‘working class’, ‘middle class’, is just as equivocal—it covers a range of groupings with significantly different characteristics, and it indicates the presence of an ‘upper class’ that is often absent from sociological analyses. Moreover, distinctions have often been drawn among different fractions of both the working and the middle classes, some perhaps being treated as more representative of each class as a whole than others. Despite this considerable variation in the meaning of ‘social class’ and its associated terms, they are frequently used as if they had obvious, clear, and standard meanings. Indeed, this is true even when the central focus of the research concerns social class differences, their causes or consequences. But, as already indicated, even when attention is given to these important semantic issues, we are immediately faced with a variety of interpretations of the meaning of the terminology, these partly reflecting conflicting assumptions about the nature of modern societies, as well as different value positions (Marsh 1986). I can do little more in this chapter than to explore some of the problems and examine attempts to deal with them.

5  Social Class 

109

I will begin by sketching the background to the emergence of concepts of social class, before going on to investigate in more detail variation in the meaning of this terminology as used in sociology, and the issues of conceptualisation and operationalisation involved.

Social Class as a Socio-Historical Category Concepts of social class are grounded in four common, albeit interrelated, facts about national societies. The first is that people vary in their opportunities and capacities to satisfy basic and higher-level needs, and/ or to improve their situation in relation to such needs. The second is that people differ in the extent to which they are in a position to exercise power over others, whether to serve their own or other purposes. The third is that people differentiate among one another in terms of a range of criteria, including the perceived level of resources available to them and the degree to which they exercise power, but also according to judgments about their social status—in other words, the honour, respect, or deference generally due to them. Finally, how each person is positioned in terms of these three kinds of ranking is dependent on their relationships with others, whether familial ones or other types of social connection. Underpinning all four of these facts, though by no means determining them, is what can be broadly referred to as the social division of labour: that people within any group, organisation, or society play different roles, and that these give differential access to resources available for pursuing personal goals, as well as often being valued differently in terms of social status. Such role differentiation is already to be found within households or family groups, but extends out into local communities and beyond. For example, even in relatively small-scale and simple societies, there is usually internal differentiation in terms of leadership, this perhaps itself differentiated according to domains, notably those of politics and religion. But within larger-scale societies, the division of labour is much more complex, and this is especially true where a money economy has developed, since this greatly facilitates specialisation. There is, of course, a difference between differentiation and stratification, but growth in the first tends to produce the second, in that

110 

M. Hammersley

members of some roles come to be regarded as belonging to a particular stratum that not only possesses more or less the same level of valued resources but also usually carries similar social status, in the sense of honour and respect demanded and/or given.1 Needless to say, the strata are not always very well-defined, and multiple criteria of stratification may operate at the same time, producing discrepancies. This was even true, for example, in the case of ancient Roman society where a key distinction was between patricians and plebeians, largely based on the ownership of property, since there were also important distinctions between ‘free-born’ and ‘slaves’, and between eminent and powerful families and those that were less so. Strata mark significant variations in possession of property and other resources, as well as in power, and in generally accepted status, and these may lead to social division and conflict. At the same time, the nature of the resources and status involved varies sharply both over time within the same society and across different contemporary types of society. Most large-scale societies are stratified, with broad categories of people varying in terms of income and wealth, power, and social status, frequently with membership of these categories being to a considerable extent inherited. Moreover, this stratification is not just a matter of social scientific observation, but also a feature of these societies that most members are aware of and which shapes their behaviour, consciously as well as unconsciously. And, for most purposes, such awareness by people of their own and others’ positions must be factored into sociological analysis. While the term ‘social class’ is sometimes used to refer to all forms of social stratification or division—as with Marx and Engels’s (1848) famous statement in the opening section of The Communist Manifesto that ‘the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle’— generally speaking, this term refers to the particular form(s) of stratification characteristic of modern Western societies.2 So, social class  It is important to bear in mind the implications of the metaphors that we rely on in thinking about social class, whether a notion of structure derived from architecture or that of stratification drawn from geology (see Ossowski 1963). Clearly, the idea of social stratification carries somewhat different implications from, say, that of social division. 2  Marx recognised that there had been other types of stratification system in earlier types of society: under ancient society, the main axis was between slaves and those who are free; under feudalism 1

5  Social Class 

111

is typically seen as contrasting with the estate system that preceded it, and with caste systems to be found in other countries, notably India. An estate system differentiates according to possession and inheritance of property, mainly land, as well as variation in closeness to the monarch and/or to powerful families. While the number of estates or ‘orders’ varied across European countries, the most basic division was between aristocracy and gentry, on the one hand, and the bulk of the population who owned no land and were often tied to working for particular landowners, on the other. It was this estate system that the rise of capitalism—or what was often referred to at the time as ‘civil society’ or ‘commercial society’— undermined in Britain, and later elsewhere, even though many of those near the top of the hierarchy managed to pass on their positions to descendants in the new form of society. The sort of caste system to be found in India is the other main contrast that is frequently used to highlight features of the social class system in Western societies.3 As with estates, position in this system is largely inherited, but the character and relationships amongst the castes are determined not just by the division of labour but also by Hindu religious ideas and rituals. In both estate and caste systems, there is relatively little scope for social mobility, at least in principle. Thus, they involve a significantly greater degree of closure compared to class systems; though, of course, the latter can and do themselves vary in this respect. It has also sometimes been argued that class and caste systems can operate within the same society. Thus, Warner (1936) argued that the relationship between blacks and whites in the United States amounted to a caste distinction, but that there were also class differences within each of these castes. He suggested that upper-class blacks were in the uncomfortable position of being social division centred on the ownership of land. He also recognised that classes from previous types of society survived into the nineteenth century, even in a country like England that was in the forefront of capitalist development. These included not just landowners living off rents but also people practising pre-industrial skills. Moreover, the wealth of England arose in part from trade in slaves. And in many parts of Europe, there were still forms of agricultural organization that were closer to the feudal model. 3  A caste system is sometimes treated as a variation on an estate system, members of particular castes being formally assigned different occupational tasks, with severe restrictions even on intergenerational movement or intermarriage. However, Dumont (1970) has argued that this is an ethnocentric perspective that does not grasp the fundamentally different principles that underpin Indian society from those in the West.

112 

M. Hammersley

regarded as superior to lower-class whites in class terms, but as subordinated to them within the caste system.4 Not only are social class systems a product of historical development, but some commentators have argued that they no longer operate in Western societies today. In the case of the United States, there have been debates about whether social classes were ever present. Some years ago, Goldschmidt (1950: 483) claimed that ‘American society presents the enigma that despite great differentials in wealth, prestige and power, there are no clearly marked social classes’. As he points out, this idea was first suggested by Tocqueville, and it has been frequently repeated. By contrast, around the same time that Goldschmidt was writing, Nisbet (1959: 11–12) argued that: ‘Despite the ideology of democratic equalitarianism, despite what Tocqueville and Bryce had written about the tenuous character of class lines in the United States, social class, even as recently as 1910, was an understood reality’. But he goes on to say: ‘How very different is our situation today’. He lists a variety of changes that have eliminated social classes. These include: increased social mobility, the altered relationship between ownership of property and economic power, the rise of powerful trade unions, and the pluralistic character of the political system. Yet, only a few years earlier, Brooks (1946: 209) had argued that a social class system was only then starting to emerge in the United States. A similar debate arose subsequently in other countries as well, with some writers emphasising the multiple bases on which groups are formed today within Western societies. One version of this was the argument that class structures are becoming fragmented (Roberts et al. 1977), while other sociologists insisted that: ‘class as a concept is ceasing to do any useful work’ or is indeed ‘dead’ (Pahl 1989: 710; Lee and Turner 1996). Thus, Pakulski and Waters (1996: 667–668) write: We argue that in advanced societies there has been a radical dissolution of class in two senses: a de-centering of economic relationships, especially property- and production-based relationships as determinants of membership, identity, and conflict, and a shift in patterns of group formation and lines of sociopolitical cleavage. We are arguing not merely for the demise of  His argument was subject to considerable criticism; see, for example, Cox (1945).

4

5  Social Class 

113

the old industrial classes and an associated rise of new class cleavages and conflicts, but for the radical dissolution of what might be called the ‘class mechanism’. While this mechanism was operational in the early and mature stages of Western capitalism, it is now so attenuated as to be unimportant. This calls into question not only the validity and utility of Marxist class theory and political eschatology, but also of more general class-­ analytical frameworks, including what Holton and Turner (1989) call “weak” or gesellschaftlich versions of class theory and analysis.

Coming from a rather different theoretical angle, Baudrillard’s announcement of ‘the death of the social’ also denied that the term ‘social class’ has any referent today (see Bogard 1987).5 These claims about the ‘death of class’ have been subject to vigorous rebuttal, not just by Marxists but also by many other sociologists (see, for instance, Goldthorpe and Marshall 1992). However, in large part, this debate derives from the adoption of different conceptions of social class.6

The Varying Purposes of Class Analysis In part, variation in the meaning of ‘social class’ reflects the wide range of analytic purposes for which the term, and its associates, have been employed. As we have seen, it was involved in characterising the nature of modern Western societies, by contrast with earlier ones or with those outside the West. Another use of the term has been in the investigation of social mobility within particular societies, documenting change in this respect over time, or comparing rates of mobility internationally (see, for instance, Erikson and Goldthorpe 1992). There has also been a concern with how class position shapes people’s experiences, cultural perspectives, and life chances, and how their self-images as members of particular classes are framed by the mass media (see Lewis 1959; Klein 1965; Skeggs 1997). Sometimes, in addition, the focus has been on how these effects  In many respects this debate echoes an earlier one about whether classes existed in the Soviet Union (see Bottomore 1965: ch3). 6  Of course, Marx believed social classes, and indeed all forms of stratification, would disappear with the demise of capitalism. 5

114 

M. Hammersley

serve to reproduce and sustain wider social structures. Closely related to this has been an interest in how culture, for example the distinction between ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ forms of this, legitimates class differences (Bourdieu 1984; Bennett et al. 2009). This approach is sometimes associated with the argument that people’s life circumstances are now defined by their role as consumers, as much as by the sources of their income, their wealth, or their positions within the processes by which goods and services are produced. Differences in analytic focus have also been motivated by adherence to contrasting value-relevance frameworks. For example, analyses of change within Western societies have frequently been formulated in terms of some notion of societal evolution or of ‘modernisation’, with certain ideals—notably, political and economic freedoms—taken to define the ‘good society’ towards which societal development is assumed to be directed. Equally, a notion of meritocracy has underpinned much of the research on social mobility. Other sociologists have assumed that all class inequalities are inequitable—in other words, that people are unfairly advantaged or disadvantaged by their social class positions, irrespective of the prospects for mobility among these. There has also been a concern with how higher social classes are able to control society so as to serve their own interests and perpetuate the class system, or alternatively to bring about stability and social order.7 It is also important to recognise that social class is regarded today as only one of several kinds of inequitable inequality, others relating to gender, ‘race’/ethnicity, sexual orientation, and disability. Given this, there have been attempts to explore how these different kinds of inequality are related to social class in particular contexts, what is sometimes referred to as ‘intersectionality’ (Cooper 2016). This is an area of significant debate, with some commentators insisting that social class inequalities are the most fundamental kind—in line with Marx’s theory of capitalism—while others emphasise the independence of these other sorts of inequality, or even assert their priority in political terms.

 There is an intersection here with use of the term ‘elite’, which in some interpretations comes close to the idea of a ruling class. See, for instance, Mills (1956). 7

5  Social Class 

115

In light of different purposes and value-relevance frameworks, the question arises of whether a single, standardised conception of social class is feasible. But there are other problems too.

Problems in Conceptualising Social Class The conceptual and other difficulties surrounding the term ‘social class’ have long been noted, even though they seem to be widely neglected. For instance, more than 50 years ago, G. D. H. Cole provided a lucid discussion of many of them. He declares that: no […] single criterion exists and […] the very notion of class, as distinguished from that of caste or legally recognised estate, is imprecise. Classes, at any rate as they exist in Western countries to-day and as they have existed in the West for a long time past, are not sharply definable groups whose precise numbers can be determined by gathering in enough information about every individual. They are, rather, aggregations of persons round a number of central nuclei, in such a way that it can be said with confidence of those nearer each centre that they are members of a particular class, but that those further from a centre can be assigned to the class it represents only with increasing uncertainty. Moreover, an individual can be within the sphere of more than one class at the same moment, so that he [or she] cannot be assigned wholly to one class; and there exist individuals who can hardly be assigned to any class, even in the most tentative way. […] Nor does it follow, though it is often assumed, that the classes which exist in any given society can be realistically arranged in a simple hierarchy of superior and inferior. (Cole 1955: 1–2)

Cole goes on to emphasise the need to clarify the meaning of ‘social class’, but also the difficulties in doing this and the methodological complexities in operationalising its meaning. Unfortunately, this excellent discussion has not been given the attention it deserves by subsequent sociologists.8 There is also, frequently, a failure to respect the distinctions between the  Surprisingly, for example, it is not referred to even in Bottomore’s (1965) influential Classes in Modern Society, published in the next decade. 8

116 

M. Hammersley

term ‘social class’, particular analytic conceptions to which it may refer, and the phenomenon or phenomena to which these conceptions relate. Confusion often results if these distinctions are neglected. A further complication is that, as already noted, the people whom sociologists study may also employ social class terminology, including slang terms such as ‘posh’, ‘snob’, ‘chav’, and ‘peasant’; and the conceptions associated with these can shape their behaviour in ways that are relevant to sociological analysis. Indeed, those conceptions can themselves be a main focus of inquiry (see, for instance, Bulmer 1975; Roberts et al. 1977). We must begin by recognising that ‘social class’ is a term with a long history outside of sociology. Raymond Williams (1958: xv) has sketched this history for the English language (see also the entry on class in Williams 1983). He writes that: class, can be dated, in its most important modern sense, from about 1772. Before this, the ordinary use of class, in English, was to refer to a division or group in schools and colleges: ‘the usual Classes in Logick and Philosophy’. It is only at the end of the eighteenth century that the modern structure of class, in its social sense, begins to be built up. First comes lower classes, to join lower orders, which appears earlier in the eighteenth century. Then, in the 1790s, we get higher classes; middle classes and middling classes follow at once; working classes in about 1815; upper classes in the 1820s. […] The upper middle classes are first heard of in the 1890s; the lower middle class in [the twentieth century].

This three-rank hierarchy, with the potential for further differentiation within strata, is still widely used today; though, in sociological work as well as more widely, it is often reduced to a two-class division between a ‘middle’ or ‘dominant’ class and a ‘working class’. The crudity of this as a basis for sociological analysis should be obvious. Of course, some sociologists have produced more elaborate typologies; and various other classes have been recognised, such as Veblen’s (1899/1994) ‘leisure class’, an ‘underclass’ (Myrdal 1963: 10; Wilson 1987), as well as (more recently) a ‘precariat’—the class of people whose mode of economic existence is precarious, because any employment they have is uncertain, insecure, and poorly paid (Standing 2011).

5  Social Class 

117

As noted earlier, while there is widespread acceptance that social class is an important factor shaping people’s lives, there is great variety in what the term (and its associates) are taken to mean. The following list identifies the main sorts of variation: 1. In some discussions, categories like ‘working’, ‘middle’, and ‘upper’ class are treated simply as useful benchmarks: they indicate positions on a dimension or set of dimensions. These dimensions may focus on differences in:

a. Income b. Property or other kinds of wealth c. Level of education d. Quality of working conditions, such as the degree of security of employment, of autonomy in the workplace e. Prestige or status of an occupation and its members f. The power those members exercise over others; Often, a combination of these dimensions is employed, sometimes without much clarity about the relations being assumed amongst them. 2. Other interpretations treat classes as distinct clusterings on one or more of these dimensions. From this point of view, sheer variation in income, wealth, status, and so on, does not indicate class differences; the term is only applied where people tend to be clustered at several points on a dimension or dimensions. 3. Stronger interpretations of ‘social class’ require even more than such clustering—various additional criteria must be satisfied. For example, it may be required that:

a. Class membership is marked by recognised differences in mode of dress, speech, and so on, and protected by exclusionary practices. b. There is substantial inheritance of class position between generations: in these terms, classes must be largely self-recruiting, and their characteristics must persist over time despite changing personnel. Inheritance may take the form of passing on titles that signify membership of a particular social class, intergenerational

118 

M. Hammersley

transfer of wealth or of sources of income, and/or the use of wealth to provide children with knowledge and skills (cultural capital) that will enable them to keep or improve on their parents’ social position. c. There is little chance of upward mobility from one class to another within a person’s lifetime. d. There are relatively low levels of intermarriage, or equivalent relationships, among people belonging to different classes. What we have here are variations in the degree to which class membership is publicly marked and/or closed to entry. 4. Finally, some commentators view classes as corporate agents that seek to dominate, exploit, or challenge, one another. Here, classes are very often treated as central characters in a socio-historical narrative about the rise and fall of particular types of society, such as feudalism, capitalism, or communism. All of the criteria mentioned above are ‘objective’, in the sense that they are ones that sociological analysts have themselves used to determine whether classes exist, what character they have, and who belongs to which class. However, since social class categories are also used by lay people, class analysis can be based instead on ‘subjective’ perceptions of class membership: whether this is self-identification; or what classes, if any, people in a society recognise, and whom they assign to which classes. Indeed, with some dimensions of variation, notably prestige or status, it is difficult to keep ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ aspects apart. Marx’s analysis also combines this concern with objective and subjective aspects, in the form of his distinction between a class-in-itself (objectively defined) and a class-for-itself (to some extent, subjectively defined). And much the same is true of many other sociological discussions of classes as agents in socio-historical processes, and in other kinds of investigation as well. It should also be noted that the various conceptions of social class often attribute different kinds of ontological status to the phenomenon. For instance, if social classes are analytically defined ranges on income or status dimensions, then they are not objects existing in the world independently of sociological analysis: they are constituted as phenomena

5  Social Class 

119

solely through it; only variation in income or status exists independently of the analysis. After all, the boundaries of each class will be determined according to what best serves particular analytic purposes. Much the same is perhaps true if we operationalise social classes as clusters of occupations sharing certain features in common: the classes would be analytically constituted, even though the occupational positions themselves and how they cluster on the dimensions are objects that are independent of sociological analysis. By contrast, to take the opposite extreme, if classes are treated as corporate agents, then they are very much assumed to be objects existing independently of the analysis, ones which the sociologist must seek to characterise accurately.9 Ontological status is rather more uncertain where ‘social class’ refers to categories that people use to differentiate amongst themselves, in terms of material circumstances, social status, and so on. The Thomases’ maxim (Thomas and Thomas 1928)—‘what people define as real is real in its consequences’—is careful not to say that what is defined as real by people is by definition real. And this distinction needs to be borne in mind in this case. At the same time, not only may people’s categories accurately reflect independently existing groupings in their society, but it is also possible that the use of social class designations can create groups of people who see themselves as belonging together and as different from those who belong to other groups, and act accordingly. Either way, such classes would be objects in the world existing independently of sociological analysis. However, as Cole recognised, categories are likely to be fuzzily defined, such that potential members can vary in the degree to which they possess the relevant identifying characteristics, and as a result, they could even belong to more than one class. At the very least, there will be many borderline cases. There is, then, considerable variation in how social class is conceptualised, and there are some difficult issues involved. Much the same is true  There are some questions here, though: do members of a social class category whose members are innumerable actually constitute a group that could act together? For this to happen there would need to be some organisers—parties or interest groups—that mobilise members of the category to act in one way rather than another (and, of course, there may be more than one mobilising organisation, these perhaps pulling in different directions). In short, parties or other organisations that claim to act on behalf of social classes may exist and operate as agents, but it is less clear that the same ontological status can be assigned to social classes themselves. 9

120 

M. Hammersley

of the indicators that are used to ground these concepts. In the next section I will examine three major, sustained attempts that sociologists have made to produce rigorous and systematic conceptions of social class on the basis of empirical investigation.

Problems in Operationalising Social Class Sociologists have varied considerably in the degree to which they have sought explicitly to operationalise their social class categories. Many have more or less assumed that they can accurately assign the people they are studying to one or other of the social class categories they are employing, usually on the basis of occupational titles reported by those people or by others who know them. Whether this assumption is correct depends partly on the nature of the categories being employed. The problems of operationalisation are relatively minor when some social class schemes are used. This was probably true in the nineteenth century of Marx’s broad distinction between proletariat and bourgeoisie, distinguished according to whether people must sell their labour-power to provide for their own and their dependents’ subsistence or whether they own and control capital from which they can derive an income—in short, according to their relationship to the mode of production.10 Certainly, at the time he was writing, in most cases it would not have been difficult to obtain the information necessary to assign people to one or other of these categories. However, even then, there would have been a few people who fell into both categories, and the number of such people increased during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, contrary to Marx’s expectation that British society would solidify into these two great classes. One reason for this was that firms came largely to be controlled by salaried managers, albeit ones who usually had a stake in the company (and perhaps in other companies too) in the form of stocks and shares. Also important has been the spread within the population of direct, and  I am ignoring here the distinction between income from ownership of capital and that  from ownership of land. It is also important to note that, in some of his writings, Marx made more subtle distinctions among social classes. 10

5  Social Class 

121

especially of indirect, ownership of shares (notably through membership of pension funds). Equally significant for conceptualising social class has been increasing variation within the working class, as defined by Marx, in terms of income, security of employment, and economic power. Attempts by Marxists to take account of these changes (see, for instance, Carchedi 1977; Wright 2005) make the task of relating class divisions to empirical data much more difficult than it was with Marx’s basic scheme: more detailed information is required, and there are difficulties in ensuring the accuracy of this. Another approach that minimises the problems of operationalisation, in principle at least, is to define social classes in terms of ranges on the distribution of income within a society. We may be able to get information about people’s incomes (by asking them, or even by gaining access to their tax returns if these are publicly available), or we could perhaps get information about the average level of remuneration associated with various types of jobs.11 Of course, in neither case would the task be problem-­ free: people may not provide accurate information about their income; their tax returns may be misleading; there may be significant variation in remuneration for people doing ‘the same’ job; some people receive free or discounted goods and services from their occupation, and we would need to ask whether or how these should be included. Nevertheless, assuming that accurate information could be obtained about income, it would then be relatively straightforward to allocate people to a set of classes corresponding to specific income ranges. However, defining ‘social class’ in this way will not serve most sociological purposes, and few sociologists have employed this approach or Marx’s two-class scheme. In the remainder of this section I will look at three examples where more subtle social class category systems were developed and used.

 In their study of Yankee City, the researchers gained information about people’s household budgets (Warner 1988: 87). 11

122 

M. Hammersley

 arner’s Yankee City Study W and Associated Investigations In the 1930s and 1940s, Lloyd Warner, along with various colleagues and students, carried out a number of studies of communities in the United States, aimed at documenting their social class structures. These communities included: ‘Yankee City’, a town of about 17,000 population; ‘Old City’, a Southern town of some 10,000 people; and ‘Jonesville’, a Midwestern town of around 6000. They believed that these investigations would provide an accurate picture of the structure of social class in the United States, and they focused in particular on what they took to be the role of social class in producing social stability. Their work was very influential in the years immediately after it was carried out, though it has become rather neglected today.12 While Warner was an anthropologist, as were some of his co-­researchers, the boundary with sociology was weak at the time, as was that with applied fields like business studies: Warner was involved in Mayo’s Hawthorne Project of industrial production, and his study of social class in communities grew out of this (see Gillespie 1991). Indeed, he saw himself as a comparative sociologist and behavioural scientist as well as an anthropologist (Warner 1988: vii; Kornhauser 1953). Furthermore, while the central motivation of Warner’s work was to apply an anthropological approach to studying US society (Warner 1988: 41), so that ethnography remained his central method, quantitative data of various kinds were also used in these community studies. Each study involved a sizeable team, largely consisting of postgraduate students at Harvard. As already indicated, they used what today would probably be referred to as a ‘mixed methods’ approach. Some of the researchers lived in the communities and engaged in participant observation and open-ended interviewing, with relevant documents also being collected; but, in addition, more structured methods were employed (see Kornhauser 1953: 227–230). Warner labelled one of these ‘evaluated participation’: informants were asked about the local social class structure  For background information about Warner, see Kimball 1979; Baba 2009.

12

5  Social Class 

123

and encouraged to indicate to which class individuals belonged. Fieldworkers were also required to rate particular members of the community ‘symbolically’ in terms of how informants associated them with groups, organisations, or areas that were viewed as high or low status. In addition, individuals were assigned by the researchers to particular social classes on the basis of their reputations for having traits or engaging in behaviour deemed in the community to have high or low status, as well as their membership of particular community organisations. Also, an ‘index of status characteristics’ was used to locate individuals in particular social classes, the characteristics used as indicators here being: occupation, source of income, house type, and dwelling area (see Warner et al. 1949/1960). It should be clear from this that Warner employed a conception of social class that is primarily concerned with people’s differential treatment of one another in terms of social status, though this was taken to be associated with differences in living conditions, income, and wealth. Initially, he had focused primarily on material factors (Baba 2009) but had concluded that these were not the only determinants of perceived social class position. He approached the study of society through the general theoretical idea that individuals have various social positions, relating for example to kinship or employment, and that these determine social relations. He argued that within each type of society one of these aspects of life is central and configures the others. He was operating here on the basis of the concepts of status and role (Linton 1936), and a conception of social structure derived from Radcliffe-Brown (1940). He argued that in large, complex societies, such as the United States, the central determinant of social relations is the social class structure: this is what produces the orderly patterns distinctive to that type of society. In the course of his research on different communities within the United States, Warner identified the following classes or strata (see Warner and Lunt 1941: 81–90):13

 For a more extended discussion of this class scheme, see Kornhauser 1953: 230–231. As with much other work on social class, the focus here was largely on men, families being assumed to have the same class/status as their (usually male) heads of household. 13

124 

M. Hammersley

1. Upper-Upper—the old aristocracy 2. Lower-Upper—the ‘new’ rich 3. Upper-Middle—professionals and business executives 4. Lower-Middle—skilled craftsmen; small business owners 5. Upper-Lower—clerical and semiskilled production workers 6. Lower-Lower—unskilled labourers; people on relief It is important to note that what Warner is providing here is not simply a ranking of people in the community on objective, or even on both objective and subjective, criteria: he also holds that each class is characterised by rather different goals and attitudes, and therefore has its own distinct style of life and mode of social participation (Kornhauser 1953: 230). One of the criticisms made of Warner’s work was that, while studying a number of, relatively small, communities, he sought to draw much broader conclusions about ‘Social Class in America’ (Warner et  al. 1949/1960). Of course, in selecting ‘Yankee City’ (Newburyport, New England) as a relatively typical community, Warner and his colleagues recognised the differences to be found across the country, and these were reflected in their choices of other sites for investigation. There were theoretical criteria in operation—‘[…] Yankee City was chosen because it was a “well-integrated” community with a minimum of conflict relations’ (Kornhauser 1953: 228; Warner 1988: 50)—but the set of communities studied was also intended ‘to serve as a microcosmic whole, representing the total American community’ (Warner 1953: 32). However, as Pfautz and Duncan (1950) point out, this was a treacherous basis for drawing general conclusions about the social class structure of the United States. What were neglected, in particular, were the distinctive conditions of the big cities. Interestingly, as a result of his involvement in Mayo’s study of industrial production, Warner’s initial plan had been to study Cicero, the community surrounding the Hawthorne factory in Chicago—since he had reached the conclusion that social relations outside that factory were important in shaping behaviour within it. However, he concluded that studying a segment of a large city would not allow him to draw the holistic conclusions he was aiming at (Warner 1988: 47). Furthermore, he regarded this area as too disorganised to provide a basis for investigating

5  Social Class 

125

the role of social class in producing a stable society (see Warner and Lunt 1941: 4–5). Baba (2009: 33) writes that: Warner considered Cicero as a possible site for his community study, but rejected it as too “disintegrated” (e.g., the gangster Al Capone had established his headquarters in a hotel near the plant, and organized a “chain of speak-easies, honky-tonks and gambling houses” along the roads near the factory (Gillespie 1991: 156)). Warner was interested in studying a stable community with strong social traditions, more analogous to those that he believed anthropologists typically investigate.

Pfautz and Duncan (1950) also questioned the reliability of Warner’s findings, suggesting that they would inevitably reflect the personal characteristics of the researchers and the nature of their participation in the communities. Another criticism was that, having abandoned an economic conception of class, Warner and his associates had conflated class with status, and thereby undercut the possibility of exploring the relationship between the two (Mills 1942). In this respect Warner’s emphasis differed from that of the Lynds (1929, 1937) in their study of Middletown around the same time (see Baltzell 1953: 172–173). In fact, as noted earlier, he had begun with an economic conception of class, but changed his approach when he discovered that people in the community did not rely solely on economic criteria in assigning one another to classes (Kornhauser 1953: 225–226). This reflected his assumption that social classes were phenomena that existed beyond the perceptions of community members and the observations of researchers. Warner’s work was also criticised for failing to give sufficient attention to historical change, a criticism that was frequently made of anthropological work that relied on structural functionalist theory (Mills 1942: 268; Merton 1942: 438).14

Goldthorpe’s Social Class Scheme and Derivatives Other approaches to the development of social class schemes have generally relied not on community studies but on data from national samples, 14

 For detailed discussion of the criticisms of Warner’s work, see Kornhauser 1953: 243–255.

126 

M. Hammersley

often designed to be representative of a whole population. One field where much work of this kind has been carried out is social mobility studies. Here, the initial social origins and eventual destinations of individuals have sometimes been framed in terms of classes that have significant differences in market and/or work situations, though much research of this kind in the United States has been concerned with positions on the social status hierarchy prevailing in that society (see, for instance, Blau and Duncan 1967). In both cases, the indicator used has been occupation (that of the heads of individuals’ families of origin near the time of their birth, and that of the individuals themselves in later life, or that of the head of the household to which they belong). The data about occupational positions have often been self-reports consisting of interview or questionnaire responses from a large sample of the relevant population, with some effort being made to obtain precise and accurate details about occupational positions and types of work. The schemes used for allocating occupations to classes or strata for the purposes of mobility research have sometimes been ones developed for other purposes. One of the most commonly employed in the UK was the Registrar-General’s scheme, originally produced for carrying out the Census (see Szreter 1984). This grouped occupations in terms of the general level of social standing they were judged to have: I II III III IV V

Professional and other occupations Intermediate occupations (N) Skilled non-manual occupations (M) Skilled manual occupations Partly skilled occupations Unskilled occupations

This scheme underwent recurrent modifications, though its overall structure and character remained much the same. What are listed above are the categories used in the 1971 UK census. This scheme has been subjected to considerable criticism, for example that, like Warner’s approach, it conflates social class with the status or prestige which people assign to different occupations, and that there are no systematic theoretical

5  Social Class 

127

principles underpinning the distinctions drawn between different social classes (see Nichols 1979). More recently, research on social mobility has employed distinctive social class schemes tailored for that purpose. One of the most influential of these has been that developed by John Goldthorpe and various associates. This was initially produced for the Oxford Study of Social Mobility in the 1970s (Goldthorpe 1987), but it has been modified in various respects in subsequent usage, later providing the basis for a replacement of the Registrar-General’s scheme in the preparation of official statistics in the UK—the NS-SEC categories (Rose and Pevalin 2005)15—and for a similar scale developed for use in the European Union—the European Socio-Economic Classification (Rose and Harrison 2010). The Goldthorpe scheme was partly based on theoretical ideas drawn from Max Weber, as well as from Marx. The fundamental criterion of the Goldthorpe classification was variation in the market situation of people in different occupations, not just in the crude sense of whether they either sold their labour power or lived off income from land or capital, but also taking into account permanency of employment and level of income. In addition, some emphasis was given to variations in work situation, such as degree of autonomy in carrying out the work and the exercise of power over others. In its most recent formulations the scale is taken to focus on variations in the employment contract.16 In its most elaborated version, Goldthorpe’s scheme involves the following distinctions:

 For a more up-to-date account of these categories, see https://www.ons.gov.uk/methodology/ classificationsandstandards/otherclassifications/thenationalstatisticssocioeconomicclassificationn ssecrebasedonsoc2010. 16  Weber viewed the market situation as involving competition among people with different resources, of various kinds, resulting in different life chances. There is a parallel here with Bourdieu’s work, and with that of Savage et al. (2015) discussed below. For helpful accounts of the difference between a Marxist and a Weberian approach, and some discussion of other approaches as well, see Wright 2005. It has been argued that occupation-based schemes provide a better basis for determining class position than reliance on income alone (see Bourguignon 2006; Goldthorpe 2012). 15

128 

M. Hammersley

I

Higher-grade professionals, administrators, and officials; managers in large industrial establishments; large proprietors II Lower-grade professionals, administrators, and officials, higher-grade technicians; managers in small industrial establishments; supervisors of non-manual employees IIIa Routine non-manual employees, higher grade (administration and commerce) IIIb Routine non-manual employees, lower grade (sales and services) IVa Small proprietors, artisans, and so on, with employees IVb Small proprietors, artisans, and so on, without employees IVc Farmers and smallholders; other self-employed workers in primary production V Lower-grade technicians; supervisors of manual workers VI Skilled manual workers VIIa Semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers (not in agriculture, etc.) VIIb Agricultural and other workers in primary production

However, for many purposes, a threefold division has been used, between: Service Class, Intermediate Class, and Working Class.17 There have been a variety of criticisms of Goldthorpe’s classification. Some of these have come from those adopting rather different conceptions of class analysis, such as Marxism (see, for instance, Gubbay 1997), or advocates of rival schemes, such as that developed by Blackburn, Prandy, and others at Cambridge (see Stewart et  al. 1980). Questions have been raised, for example, about the degree of homogeneity within each class, especially when the three-class system is used (Blackburn 1998; Prandy 1998; Bergman and Joye 2005). Also criticised was the fact that Goldthorpe’s original study, and therefore the scheme developed to serve it, classified households on the basis of data derived from male respondents and was restricted to male social mobility. Feminists pointed not just to the resulting neglect of women’s social mobility but also to how women’s social class origin and occupational positions affected the  There are detailed rules for assigning people to occupations and occupations to classes. Connelly et al. (2016) provide a very useful description of the complex process by which information about occupations is processed so as to apply schemes of this kind. Goldthorpe’s ‘service class’ is so named because he conceptualises its members as rendering a service for their employers, and as being recompensed for this in the form of a salary. This contrasts with non-service class workers who act under the supervision of the employer, or of an employer’s agents, in return for wages which are calculated on a piece-rate or time-rate basis. 17

5  Social Class 

129

material circumstances, experience, and orientations of members of their households, including (where relevant) male partners.18 This reflects a more general criticism of studies relying upon survey data coming from individual respondents: that they often lack the contextual information necessary to understand the social relations in which individual respondents are involved, even though these shape both their lives and their responses to survey questions. In this respect, there is a significant contrast with work like that of Warner and his colleagues, where there was a direct attempt to understand the community context of those being assigned to social class categories. Here, as elsewhere in social research methodology, advantages in one respect are traded off against disadvantages in others.

The Great British Class Survey Like the other two approaches I have discussed, the third one, the ‘Great British Class Survey’, aimed to produce a national picture of class structure. And, as with Goldthorpe’s initial investigation, reliance was placed on a sample from the UK population. However, Savage and his colleagues (2013, 2015) adopted a very different approach, in both theoretical and methodological terms, resulting in rather different categories. The initial data arose from an online questionnaire developed in collaboration with the BBC and publicised by them. It was billed as a piece of public sociology, and one that employed innovative digital tools. In addition, there was a further face-to-face survey relying on a quota sample (see Devine and Snee 2015). And this body of data was supplemented by 50 qualitative interviews that collected similar data to the surveys but also life history and contextual information about the people interviewed. The authors claim to have adopted ‘an inductive approach to class analysis’, by contrast with what they describe as the ‘deductive’ approach employed by Goldthorpe and his colleagues, which they argue ‘does not effectively capture the role of social and cultural processes in generating  For a review of the debate about this and references, see Marshall et  al. 1988: ch4. See also Crompton (2008). 18

130 

M. Hammersley

class divisions’ (Savage et al. 2013: 220). However, they also report that they ‘took a “capital, assets, resources” approach’ (Savage et  al. 2005), influenced by the work of Bourdieu (1984), rather than ‘an “employment aggregate” approach’ (Devine and Snee 2015: 242). In other words, rather than using occupations as indicators of social class position, these researchers sought to measure differential possession of the resources (financial, social, and cultural) that Bourdieu had argued were critical determinants of social class location. For this purpose, they relied on information drawn from respondents about their household incomes and savings, the property values of their homes (if owned), the number of their social contacts and the occupations of those contacts, and respondents’ extent of engagement with ‘highbrow culture’ (e.g., visiting art galleries or listening to classical music) versus various forms of popular, or emerging, culture. Here, then, classes are defined partly in economic terms, taking account of both income and property, but also in cultural terms. And there was an attempt to gather and analyse relevant contextual information on a subset of the sample. This study produced the following social class categories: 1. Elite (very high economic capital [especially savings], high social capital, very high highbrow cultural capital) 2. Established middle class (high economic capital, high social status of contacts, high highbrow and emerging cultural capital) 3. Technical middle class (high economic capital, limited social capital, moderate cultural capital) 4. New affluent workers (moderately good economic capital, moderately poor average score for social contacts, though high range; moderate highbrow but good emerging cultural capital) 5. Traditional working class (moderately poor economic capital, though with reasonable house price, few social contacts, low highbrow and emerging cultural capital) 6. Emergent service sector (moderately poor economic capital, though with reasonable household income, moderate social contacts, high emerging [but low highbrow] cultural capital) 7. Precariat (poor economic capital, and the lowest scores on every other criterion). (Adapted from Table 5 in Savage et al. 2013: 230)

5  Social Class 

131

There has been considerable criticism of this research, and of the new social class scheme it produced (Bradley 2014; Lambert and Griffiths 2013; Mills 2013, 2014, 2015; Payne 2013; Rose and Harrison 2013). Critics raise questions about both the theoretical and the methodological approach adopted. In theoretical terms, they question the role it gives to social and cultural capital in defining social classes. As with Mills’s (1942) criticism of Warner’s study, the concern here is that class and status have been conflated. There were also methodological criticisms about likely biases in the sample, and the accuracy of information as regards possession of various forms of capital. It has also been argued that the connection between the data and the particular classes identified is weak, and that quite different class categories could have been developed from the same data (see Rose and Harrison 2013; Mills 2013; for a response see Savage et  al. 2015). Here, again, we can see the trade-offs involved in choosing strategies for operationalising social class.

 ddressing Problems of Conceptualisation A and Operationalisation The researchers whose work I have discussed in the previous section all gave serious attention to the issues of how to clarify the meaning of ‘social class’, how to differentiate social classes, and how to assign individuals or households to classes in a way that captures relevant similarities and differences between their positions and those of other people. At the same time, as we have seen, their ways of dealing with these issues were very different, and commentary on their work has identified quite fundamental problems with each approach. All of which indicates the difficulty of the task they faced. One way in which these three approaches differ, and an issue that is frequently highlighted in discussions of social class, is whether the focus is on ‘objective’ differences, on ‘subjective’ differences, or on some combination of the two. It might be said that Goldthorpe (like Marx) focused on objective differences, while Warner and Savage et al. included both objective and subjective aspects. However, care needs to be exercised in

132 

M. Hammersley

handling these terms because they have a range of meanings (Hammersley 2011). One contrast is between analytically identifying differences in social position that are of causal significance for inequalities in social outcomes, irrespective of whether those differences are recognised or prioritised by the people concerned; or, alternatively, focusing on the (‘subjective’) social differentiations that these people make themselves, and investigating their causes and/or consequences. A second interpretation of the objective/subjective distinction concerns whether the focus is on ‘material’ differences—such as income and wealth, housing conditions—or on differences in how people view themselves and are viewed by others—notably whether they feel inferior or superior. These two contrasts are not isomorphic, but they overlap and are easily confused.19 Furthermore, in some respects, it is impossible to treat these aspects as entirely separate. For example, what occupation a person can gain access to will sometimes be determined by others’ attributions of social status— rather than just by, say, that person’s cultural or financial capital. Access to other sorts of resources can be affected in the same way: whether credit can be obtained, how much, and at what cost; what sort of accommodation can be rented or bought, including in what places or parts of town one can live (or could comfortably or even safely live); and so on. Equally important, levels of pay are undoubtedly affected by views within society about the ‘social standing’ of occupations. More fundamentally, any ‘objective’ classification relies on assumptions about what people value in occupations. For example, studies of social mobility typically assume that people all aspire, or should aspire, to the highest level of occupations (in terms of financial and other rewards) that is within reach (see Hammersley 2014: ch5). Equally, on the ‘subjective’ side, classifications of other people frequently depend on what is known about their material circumstances, their occupational positions, and so on. The fact that the work I have examined has produced somewhat different pictures of the social classes existing in modern Western societies highlights an even more fundamental problem. One answer to the question of why this has occurred is that the teams of researchers relied upon  ‘Subjective’ can also mean ‘false’, people’s own conceptions of social class being contrasted with the true picture provided by social science. 19

5  Social Class 

133

significantly different initial theoretical orientations. As we saw, Warner’s work was premised on a kind of anthropological functionalism, whereas Goldthorpe adopted a largely Weberian framework, and Savage et  al. relied heavily on Bourdieu’s social theory. This clearly raises questions about the status and role of such theoretical ideas in studying social class. I noted that Savage et al. had claimed to adopt an inductivist approach. While this seems to be at odds with their reliance on Bourdieu, it must be remembered that ‘deductivism’ versus ‘inductivism’ is not a dichotomy. There can be variation in how far the choices made in carrying out an investigation were pre-selected by theoretical assumptions. There is a contrast here, albeit one of degree, between a Marxist approach and that adopted by Goldthorpe (see Marshall et  al. 1997). At one end of the spectrum, a comprehensive and closed theoretical perspective would hamper research by forcing phenomena into its categories. But it is unlikely that any study could avoid relying on some assumptions about the nature of the phenomena being investigated and how these can best be accessed and understood. We should also note that it is a mistake to treat all prior ideas on the part of researchers as the product of mere fancy or ideology—or as damaging. These will be based, to one degree or another, on what is taken to be existing knowledge as well as on interpretations of personal experience. While both these can be a source of bias, they may also be fruitful guides for an investigation; and, to some degree, as already noted, they are unavoidable. Differences in the social classes identified by the studies examined earlier probably also arose from divergences in methodological ideas: researchers set about operationalising ‘social class’ rather differently as a result. Warner’s focus was on communities, and relied mainly on how people were assigned to classes by fellow community members. By contrast, the other two approaches used samples of individuals, with these (or households) treated as the unit of analysis; and the aim was to document respondents’ membership of social classes on the basis of features that they reported about themselves. This difference stemmed partly from the fact that, whereas for both Goldthorpe and Savage et  al. social classes were sets of people who shared particular features in common, ones that contrast with the characteristics of members of the other classes, for Warner classes were communally recognised groupings. However, the

134 

M. Hammersley

focus on national samples was motivated in large part by a concern with ensuring representativeness of the findings as regards a national population. As we saw, Warner’s approach had been heavily criticised on the grounds that documenting the social class structures of a few communities could not provide a sound basis for generalisations about the whole of the United States. A third, even more complicated, source of differences is that class schemes have been devised, and used, for investigating diverse topics. Warner and his associates were concerned with identifying the main social classes that existed in the United States because they believed that these represent a key element of social organisation, or social order, in large complex societies. By contrast, the Registrar-General’s scheme in the UK was originally produced in order to document social differences in mortality rates (see Szreter 1984). Goldthorpe’s classification was developed as a basis for measuring social mobility, while Savage et al.’s more recent study of social class structure in the UK was concerned with capturing changes in this structure resulting from contemporary economic and social developments. In their own words, their interest was in how ‘spiralling levels of inequality are remaking social classes today’. They were also concerned with whether it is possible ‘to identify distinctive social classes who share common lifestyles, identities, social networks and political orientations as well as levels of income and wealth’ (Savage et al. 2015: 3)—in light of the debate about ‘the death of social class’. Given these differences in purpose, it is perhaps not surprising that the three approaches discussed produced somewhat different social class categorisations (aside from the fact that Warner was concerned with the United States, whereas the others focused on the UK). This raises the question, once again, about whether a single schema of social classes can serve all sociological purposes well. A fundamental question prompted by these different purposes concerns the ontological status of social classes. In crude terms, we can contrast two stances. The first treats social classes as potential objects whose existence or non-existence in the social world is independent of any investigation, as also are their character and features. The other position insists that what count as social classes is relative to the purposes of an inquiry, rather than reflecting a pre-structured reality: this would be a

5  Social Class 

135

justification for the argument that different senses of the term ‘social class’ will be necessary depending on the focus of investigation. I believe the second of these positions is the more convincing, but it can also mislead: this position does not imply that what is discovered about social class differences and their effects is simply a fiction produced by a particular analysis. The argument, instead, is that reality is complex and that only some aspects of it can be grasped at any one time. The debate around ‘Wright classes’ (Wright 1989; Marshall et al. 1988: ch3) nicely captures the difficulties of finding the emanations of underlying structures in the messy, empirically observable world. There is no overall, absolute perspective available which encompasses the world as a whole, in such a way as to uniquely determine the identity and character of its parts; and this is because the term ‘the world as a whole’ does not refer to an object but only to a background against which other objects can be identified. In part, this argument also relies on a form of methodological individualism. So, I am rejecting the idea that social classes are agents acting in the world, but I do not deny that individuals may act, collectively as well as individually, to promote the interests of what they see as their own social class against those of other classes. The view I am adopting is made more complex by the fact that the questions that sociologists address are necessarily framed by some underlying value-relevance perspective, this indicating why those questions are worth asking, and what would constitute answers to them (Hammersley 2014). For example, among sociologists today, the concept of social class is frequently associated with the idea that class differences are inequitable, which can be traced back at least as far as Marx’s analysis of capitalist exploitation (even though he does not frame this in ethical terms). However, other sociologists have viewed class differences as reflecting an inevitable and necessary element of a modern social order. This seems to have been the position of Warner, for example, who viewed the social class system he documented in functionalist terms (see also Davis and Moore 1945). The key point is that an interest in how social classes may operate in modern societies in ways that are consequential for the maintenance of social order is likely to result in a different set of categories from a concern with class inequalities regarded as inequitable.

136 

M. Hammersley

However, even if we take account of the role of different value perspectives, this does not imply that divergent approaches to investigating social class actually produce different realities—it still makes sense to ask whether or not they accurately represent the phenomena with which they deal. Nor does it mean that the findings of studies aimed at serving different purposes cannot be related to one another, at least to some degree: this is likely to be possible because they address many of the same pre-existing phenomena, albeit from different angles. Nevertheless, the phenomena to which the term ‘social class’ relates are multiple, and their relations complex. Furthermore, their ontological status can vary. As I noted earlier, if we define social classes in terms of analytically defined positions on a dimension of income or status, whether as arbitrarily demarcated ranges or as actually occurring clusters, they are being taken to have a very different ontological status from if they are defined as relatively solidary groups, whether in the manner of Marx or of Warner. In the first case, there is no object presupposed as existing in the world corresponding to a social class—what exists is simply relevant variation in some characteristics on the part of individuals or households. By contrast, on the second interpretation, social classes are assumed to be objects existing in the world, in the form of large groups, recognised by their members, who may even engage in conscious attempts to promote the interests of their class. It is certainly the case that we can ask whether or not such solidary groups exist in a particular society at a particular time. But, even if we conclude that they do not, it does not follow that there are no significant differences in levels of income or status within the society; nor does it rule out low levels of intergenerational or intragenerational mobility between positions on these dimensions. It seems to me that the debate over ‘the death of social class’ has been obfuscated by a failure to recognise the complexity of the phenomena concerned and the different ways of approaching them. In light of this, one of the problems with how ‘social class’ is handled in the sociological literature is its use as an all-purpose category, a way of linking the study of a specific topic to a broader picture of the whole society. This tends to ignore the complexities outlined in this chapter, and the fact that we will need to focus on somewhat different phenomena, or different aspects of the same phenomena, in investigating different

5  Social Class 

137

topics. Of course, it would be convenient to be able to appeal to a generic concept of social class, and to use data produced on the basis of it for multiple purposes, but I fear that this is a mirage that leads us astray.

Conclusion ‘Social class’ is one of the most widely used terms in sociology, and it is employed in a range of different ways. Yet those who use it often give insufficient attention to exactly what it is being taken to mean, or how this relates to the evidence used to determine what social classes exist and to assign people to particular categories. This renders the conclusions of much research vague in meaning, and therefore of uncertain validity. In this chapter I have examined the work of three sets of researchers who paid careful attention to these issues. However, despite the virtues of their work, it also reveals severe problems. Not only are there theoretical issues that are difficult to resolve but formidable methodological problems too. As I noted, only if a relatively crude distinction is employed, such as that employed by Marx to distinguish between proletariat and bourgeoisie, or if classes are defined analytically in terms of income groups, is the identification of classes and the assignment of people to them relatively straightforward and likely to be reasonably accurate. Yet neither of these modes of conceptualisation and operationalisation is satisfactory for most purposes in the study of modern societies. This is not to say that the problems involved in more subtle approaches are completely intractable, but they do indicate that, in any successful sociological study in which social class is one of the central categories, careful attention must be given to the meaning of this term and how this can be operationalised effectively. I also suggested that different senses of the term may be required in investigating different topics, and that debates about the ‘real’ nature of social class or about whether social classes ‘really exist’ within a society are probably futile.

138 

M. Hammersley

References Baba, M. (2009). W. Lloyd Warner and the Anthropology of Institutions: An Approach to the Study of Work in Late Capitalism. Anthropology of Work Review, XXX(2), 29–49. Baltzell, E. D. (1953). “Who’s Who in America” and “The Social Register”: Elite and Upper Class Indexes in Metropolitan America. In R. Bendix & S. M. Lipset (Eds.), Class, Status and Power. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Bennett, T., Savage, M., Bortolaia, S., Warde, A., Gayo-Cal, M., & Wright, D. (2009). Culture, Class, Distinction. London: Routledge. Bergman, M., & Joye, D. (2005). Comparing Social Stratification Schemata: CAMSIS, CSP-CH, Goldthorpe, ISCO-88, Treiman, and Wright. Cambridge Studies in Social Research, No. 10, Social Science Research Group Publications, Social and Political Sciences, University of Cambridge. Retrieved from https://www.sociology.cam.ac.uk/system/files/documents/cs10.pdf Blackburn, R. M. (1998). Commentary: A New System of Classes: But What Are They and Do We Need Them? Work, Employment & Society, 12(4), 735–741. Blau, P., & Duncan, O.  D. (1967). The American Occupational Structure. New York: Wiley. Bogard, W. (1987). Sociology in the Absence of the Social: The Significance of Baudrillard for Contemporary Thought. Philosophy and Social Criticism, 13(3), 227–242. Bottomore, T. (1965). Classes in Modern Society. London: George Allen and Unwin. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. (First published in French in 1979). Bourguignon, F. (2006). From Income to Endowments: The Difficult Task of Expanding the Income Poverty Paradigm. In D.  B. Grusky & R.  Kanbur (Eds.), Poverty and Inequality (pp.  76–102). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bradley, H. (2014). Class Descriptors or Class Relations? Thoughts Towards a Critique of Savage et al. Sociology, 48(3), 429–436. Brooks, M. (1946). American Caste and Class: An appraisal. Social Forces, 25(1), 207–211. Bulmer, M. (1975). Working-Class Images of Society. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

5  Social Class 

139

Carchedi, G. (1977). On the Economic Identification of Social Classes. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Cole, G.  D. H. (1955). Studies in Class Structure. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Connelly, R., Gale, V., & Lambert, P. (2016). A Review of Occupation-based Social Classifications for Social Survey Research. Methodological Innovations, 9, 1–14. Cooper, B. (2016). Intersectionality. In L. Disch & M. Hawkesworth (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cox, O. C. (1945). Race and Caste: A Distinction. American Journal of Sociology, 50(5), 360–368. Crompton, R. (2008). Class and Stratification (3rd ed.). Cambridge: Polity. Davis, K., & Moore, W. (1945). Some Principles of Stratification. American Sociological Review, 10(2), 242–249. Devine, F., & Snee, H. (2015). Doing the Great British Class Survey. Sociological Review, 63(2), 240–258. Dumont, L. (1970). Homo Hierarchicu. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. (First published in French in 1966). Erikson, R., & Goldthorpe, J. H. (1992). The Constant Flux: A Study in Class Mobility in Industrial Societies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gillespie, R. (1991). Manufacturing Knowledge: A History of the Hawthorne Experiments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goldschmidt, W. (1950). Social Class in America—A Critical Review. American Anthropologist, New Series, 52(4), 483–498. Goldthorpe, J. H. (1987). Social Mobility and Class Structure in Modern Britain (2nd ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Goldthorpe, J.  H. (2012). Back to Class and Status: Or Why a Sociological View of Social Inequality Should be Reasserted. Revista Espanola de Investigaciones Sociologicas, 137, 201–216. Goldthorpe, J.  H., & Marshall, G. (1992). The Promising Future of Class Analysis: A Response to Recent Critiques. Sociology, 26(3), 381–400. Gubbay, J. (1997). A Marxist Critique of Weberian Class Analyses. Sociology, 31(3), 73–89. Hall, S. (1967). Class and the Mass Media. In R.  Mabey (Ed.), Class: A Symposium. London: Anthony Blond. Hammersley, M. (2011). Objectivity: A Reconceptualisation. In M. Williams & P. Vogt (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Methodological Innovation. London: Sage. Hammersley, M. (2014). The Limits of Social Science. London: Sage.

140 

M. Hammersley

Holton, R., & Turner, B. S. (1989). Max Weber on Economy and Society. London: Routledge. Kimball, S. (1979). W. Lloyd Warner. In D. Sills (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (Vol. 18 Biographical Supplement). New York: Free Press. Klein, R. (1965). Samples from English Culture (Vol. 1 and 2). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Kornhauser, R.  R. (1953). The Warner Approach to Social Stratification. In R.  Bendix & S.  M. Lipset (Eds.), Class, Status and Power. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Lambert, P.  S., & Griffiths, D. (2013). Seven New Social Classes? Retrieved March 15, 2020, from http://pullingapartproject.wordpress. com/2013/04/04/seven-new-social-classes/ Lee, D. J., & Turner, B. S. (1996). Conflicts about Class: Debating Inequality in Late Industrialism. London: Longman. Lewis, O. (1959). Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty. New York: Basic Books. Linton, R. (1936). The Study of Man. New York: Appleton-Century. Lynd, R., & Lynd, H. (1929). Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture. New York: Harcourt. Lynd, R., & Lynd, H. (1937). Middletown in Transition. New York: Harcourt. Marsh, C. (1986). Occupation and Social Class. In R.  Burgess (Ed.), Key Variables in Social Research. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Marshall, G., Rose, D., Newby, H., & Vogler, C. (1988). Social Class in Modern Britain. London: Unwin Hyman. Marshall, G., Swift, A., & Roberts, S. (1997). Against the Odds? Social Class and Social Justice in Industrial Societies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1848). Manifesto of the Communist Party. English translation in Selected Works, Vol. One. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969, pp. 98–137. Merton, R. K. (1942). Review of W. Lloyd Warner and Paul S. Lunt The Social Life of a Modern Community. Survey Graphic, XXXI, 438. Mills, C. (2014). The Great British Class Fiasco: A Comment on Savage et al. Sociology, 48(3), 437–444. Mills, C.  W. (1942). Review of The Social Life of a Modern Community by W.  Lloyd Warner and Paul S.  Lunt. American Sociological Review, 7(2), 263–271. Mills, C. W. (1956). The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press.

5  Social Class 

141

Myrdal, G. (1963). Challenge to Affluence. New York: Random House. Nichols, T. (1979). Social Class: Official, Sociological and Marxist. In J. Irvine, I. Miles, & J. Evans (Eds.), Demystifying Social Statistics. London: Pluto Press. Nisbet, R. (1959). The Decline and Fall of Social Class. Pacific Sociological Review, 2(1), 11–17. Ossowski, L. (1963). Class Structure in the Social Consciousness. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Pahl, R. (1989). Is the Emperor Naked? International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 13, 709–720. Pakulski, J., & Waters, M. (1996). The Reshaping and Dissolution of Social Class in Advanced Society. Theory and Society, 25(5), 667–691. Payne, G. (2013). Models of Contemporary Social Class: The Great British Class Survey. Methodological Innovations Online, 8(1), 3–17. Pfautz, H., & Duncan, O. D. (1950). A Critical Evaluation of Warner’s Work in Community Stratification. American Sociological Review, 15(2), 205–215. Prandy, K. (1998). Deconstructing Classes: Comments on the Revised Social Classification. Work, Employment & Society, 12(4), 743–753. Radcliffe-Brown, A.  R. (1940). On Social Structure. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 70(1), 1–12. Roberts, K., Cook, F., Clark, S., & Semeonoff, E. (1977). The Fragmentary Class Structure. London: Heinemann. Rose, D., & Harrison, E. (2010). Social Class in Europe: An Introduction to the European Socio-economic Classification. London: Routledge. Rose, D., & Harrison, E. (2013). Letter. The Guardian [online], 5 April. Retrieved August 2, 2019, from http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/ apr/05/solidarity-question-social-class Rose, D., & Pevalin, D. (2005). The National Statistics Socio-economic Classification: Origins, Development and Use. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Savage, M., Cunningham, N., Devine, F., Friedman, S., Laurison, D., McKenzie, L., Miles, A., Snee, H., & Taylor, M. (2015). Social Class in the 21st Century. London: Pelican. Savage, M., Devine, F., Cunningham, N., Friedman, S., Laurison, D., Miles, A., Snee, H., & Taylor, M. (2015). On Social Class, Anno 2014. Sociology, 49(6), 1011–1030. Savage, M., Devine, F., Cunningham, N., Taylor, M., Li, Y., Hjellbrekke, J., Le Roux, B., Friedman, S., & Miles, A. (2013). ‘A New Model of Social Class? Findings from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey Experiment. Sociology, 47(2), 219–250.

142 

M. Hammersley

Savage, M., Warde, A., & Devine, F. (2005). Capital, Assets and Resources: Some Critical Issues. British Journal of Sociology, 56(1), 31–47. Skeggs, B. (1997). Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable. London: Sage. Standing, G. (2011). The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Stewart, A., Prandy, K., & Blackburn, R. M. (1980). Social Stratification and Occupations. London: Macmillan. Szreter, S. R. S. (1984). The Genesis of the Registrar-General: Social Classification of Occupations. British Journal of Sociology, 35(4), 522–546. Thomas, W.  I., & Thomas, D.  S. (1928). The Child in America. New  York: Alfred Knopf. Veblen, T. (1899/1994). The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics. Introduction by Robert Lekachman. New York: Penguin Books. Warner, M. (1988). W. Lloyd Warner: Social Anthropologist. New York: Publishing Center for Cultural Resources. Warner, W. L. (1936). American Caste and Class. American Journal of Sociology, 42(2), 234–237. Warner, W. L. (1953). American Society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Warner, W. L., & Lunt, P. (1941). The Social Life of a Modern Community. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Warner, W.  L., with Meeker, M. and Eels, K. (1949/1960). Social Class in America. New York: Harper and Row. Williams, R. (1958). Culture and Society. London: Chatto and Windus. Williams, R. (1983). Keywords (2nd ed.). London: Fontana. Wilson, W. J. (1987). The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Wright, E. O. (1989). The Debate on Classes. London: Verso. Wright, E.  O. (2005). Approaches to Class Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

6 Sex and Gender

Most of the topics investigated today under the heading of ‘sex’ or ‘gender’ were not given much attention in sociology until the influence of second-wave feminism in the 1970s. It is not that gender differences, for example in the division of labour, had been completely ignored but rather that, for the most part, they were taken as given, rather than as in need of explanation. Moreover, this echoed the assumptions built into social and political thought generally, even that of a radical Leftist kind. Since then, there has, of course, been a huge amount of sociological (and other) research on these topics. A major concern has been with inequalities in a variety of social outcomes, such as pay, occupational mobility, access to health resources, and levels of educational achievement. There has also been work on sexual harassment and domestic abuse, as well as investigations to discover what role sex/gender plays in shaping attitudes and behaviour, across a range of contexts. Such research has relied on a variety of data sources: official statistics, surveys, in-depth interviews, and/or observation (online and offline). There have even been some experimental studies, for example concerned with whether readers’ reactions to pieces of writing vary according to whether they believe them to have been produced by females or males (see, for instance, Hayward 2003), or © The Author(s) 2020 M. Hammersley, Troubling Sociological Concepts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51644-4_6

143

144 

M. Hammersley

how people respond to conflicting information in attributing gender (Kessler and McKenna 1978: ch6). At face value, sex/gender is a relatively unproblematic category. We can quote de Beauvoir (1953: 14–15): It is enough to go for a walk with one’s eyes open to be sure that humanity is divided into two categories of individuals, whose clothes, faces, bodies, smiles, gaits, interests and occupations are manifestly different. Perhaps these differences are superficial; perhaps they are destined to disappear. But what is certain is that, for now, they do most obviously exist.

In line with this, much sociological research has assumed that there are just two genders; and that people can be assigned to one or the other category relatively easily and with a high level of reliability—on the basis of observation, self-accounts, reports by others, sometimes even just on the basis of given names. Moreover, official statistics often include data relating to sex/gender differences, which greatly facilitates research on some topics, but requires the assumptions about gender categories built into those statistics to be accepted. All this contrasts with the considerable difficulties faced in operationalising other key sociological categories such as social class and ‘race’/ethnicity (see Chaps. 5 and 7).

Conceptual Problems Yet, despite initial appearances, there are problems with sex/gender, as use of this compound phrase perhaps already indicates (Cealey Harrison 2001). While it may appear to many people, much of the time, that differences between females and males are obvious and fixed in character, feminists and others have shown that there is considerable cultural variation in what it is to be a human female or male. Accepting standard forms of gender relations as a ‘fact of life’ has also been challenged, in the West, by the ‘coming out’ of homosexuality, and by the rise of Queer Studies: what was previously subjected not only to moral opprobrium but also sometimes to legal prosecution is now accepted as part of human variation (albeit by no means universally), with the consequence that sexual

6  Sex and Gender 

145

orientation has been disentangled from sex/gender. More recently, the transgender movement has raised further questions, notably about exactly how membership of the categories ‘man’ and ‘woman’ is to be decided. Feminists initially challenged the apparent fixity of sex by distinguishing it from gender, with the latter often regarded as a cultural realm of potential freedom and diversity as against the previously taken-for-­ granted implications of biological determinism.1 Multiple dimensions of variation were identified, and the conclusion was reached that, as Friedman (2006: 1) notes, any treatment of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ as synonymous conflates ‘among other things, social roles, psychological dispositions, power differences, norms of grooming and comportment, sexual object choice, and reproductive anatomy’. It was also argued that the biological view of sex serves as one of the ideological devices that secure the subordination of women to men, since it treats the social arrangements in which this subordination is enshrined as if they were natural and inevitable, and therefore as not open to change. Given this, many feminists placed great emphasis on documenting cultural variation in gender roles, and how these were learned rather than simply inherited, thereby illustrating that gender is socio-culturally constructed; the contribution of biological sex being thereby downgraded. However, while the sex/gender distinction served an important intellectual and political function for feminists, it retained the possibility of a residual element of biological determinism, and left open the question of what the relationship is between biological sex and cultural gender (Cealey Harrison and Hood-Williams 2002). One result was that the distinction itself increasingly came to be challenged. A major stimulus for this was the influence, in the 1980s and 1990s, of ideas that in the Anglo-­ American intellectual world got listed under the heading of ‘post-­ structuralism’ or ‘postmodernism’, such as the work of Foucault. A key theme here was the discursive production of reality, and the scope for resistance to this.  This distinction is often attributed to de Beauvoir, but Sandford (2011) argues that this is a misinterpretation of her position, which denies that we can detach bodies from the socio-cultural contexts in which they exist. The distinction seems to have been first made explicitly within psychopathology, see Germon (2009). 1

146 

M. Hammersley

One of the most influential critics of the sex/gender distinction was Judith Butler (1990, 1993).2 She came to argue for a conception of sex and sexuality as performative, claiming that, in our everyday behaviour, we are condemned to present ourselves as belonging to either one sex or the other; and, along with this, to adopt a particular sexual orientation. She treated the pressure to ‘perform’ in this manner as an effect of the dominant discourse, a form of knowledge/power which is not only regulative but also constitutive of social relations: it frames the very sense we give to our lives, and is the basis on which we act; and in this way it enforces restrictions on desire and identity (one of the main restrictions being what she refers to as ‘heteronormativity’; in effect, compulsory heterosexuality). Furthermore, it does this in ways that most people, much of the time, are simply unaware of: they experience sexual difference as a biological fact, not recognising its discursively constituted nature. She suggests that this indicates just how deeply its performative character is entrenched, and thereby obscured. As this makes clear, Butler does not see the performance of sexual difference as a matter of moment-to-­ moment free choice, even though it occurs in and through processes of continual repetition by self and others in the course of social interaction, and necessarily involves contextual adaptation. It is a ritualised production that is guarded by normative requirements, these taking the form of prescriptions, prohibitions, and taboos, backed up by the threat of ostracism, or worse, for those who deviate. A more recent starting point for reconceptualising the relationship between sex and gender has been the rise of ‘new materialisms’ and ‘post-­ humanism’, drawing on and at the same time transforming post-­ structuralism, as well appealing to other philosophical ideas, from Spinoza to Whitehead, Deleuze to Latour. On this basis, Butler and others have been criticised for treating sex as an entirely discursively produced phenomenon, neglecting its material, bodily aspects. There are different versions of this approach, but in general it is argued that the discursive and the material are entangled in producing our experience of sexual  We should note the earlier work of Kessler and McKenna (1978), which drew on the very different tradition of ethnomethodology (Garfinkel 1967: ch5) but reached conclusions that were somewhat similar. See also Kessler (1998). 2

6  Sex and Gender 

147

difference. Furthermore, there is an insistence on the active and vital character of biological processes, implying that these share features conventionally ascribed exclusively to human beings and to cultural processes, such as agency. In effect, this undercuts the nature/culture distinction, the two sides of it being treated as aspects of a single process of becoming, or of many diverse processes of becoming (see, for instance, Davis 2009). Along with this, it dismisses any notion of biological determinism. A somewhat different approach, albeit drawing on some of the same sources, is provided by Cealey Harrison and Hood-Williams (2002). They focus in particular on the problems and unintended consequences of the sex/gender distinction as an analytic tool. In a more recent article, Cealey Harrison (2012) uses, as a starting point, the account of sexual difference in life forms provided by evolutionary theory. She argues that it is an accidental product rather than a process of teleological development, one that has only been sustained because, in particular environments, it confers advantages on species having this feature. In other words, it is not a fundamental given in biological terms: there are many species that do not rely on sexual reproduction, or that combine it with other mechanisms. She argues for ‘the idea of gender as an integral and crucial component of sexual differentiation in human beings’ (p.  69). Rather than biological factors being regarded as deterministic, and therefore as fixing the role of women (and men) in society permanently (within relatively narrow limits, all variation outside of this being treated as pathological), we can recognise that culture is itself a result of biological evolution, since the latter produced what she calls ‘a creature with a large pre-frontal cortex, with the capacity for symbolic representation, language use and complex learning, which means that a whole range of aspects of behaviour that would be more pre–determined in other species are not so in human beings’ (p. 68).3 Cealey Harrison’s key point, then, is that there is no sharp distinction between biological and cultural processes: the latter are made possible by the former, and there are reciprocal effects whereby technology, social  There is an interesting parallel here with the philosophical anthropology of Gehlen and others, see Berger and Luckmann (1967).

3

148 

M. Hammersley

arrangements, and cultural trends affect biological processes. Furthermore, biological processes are not what they have often been taken to be—ones that simply determine the fundamental character of human beings, including whether they are female or male. There is scope for, and indeed in fact there is, considerable variation even in physical characteristics, and the less-determined character of a human being, compared to other species, means that there is room for greater diversity as regards behaviour. She also places emphasis on the socio-cultural construction of our knowledge about ourselves, noting that this is shaped by background assumptions, preferences, and desires, as well as by specific circumstances. In this light, we might see the distinction between sex and gender as, in large part, a product of the constructed disciplinary distinction between biology and the socio-cultural sciences. At the same time, Cealey Harrison insists that recognising the social construction of our understanding and knowledge of the world does not imply that there is no difference between true and false constructions. Nor does it suggest that the things to which our interpretations relate do not exist, or do not have specific effects in particular contexts independently of our preferences and understandings. Reflecting on these discussions, we can perhaps conclude that there is a danger in underplaying just as much as in overplaying the physical differences between human males and females—in an understandable effort to counter misleading stereotypes and unjust discrimination. In social terms, we can think of sex-gender as a matter of inference from proximal to more distal characteristics. What are taken to be signs of someone being female or male can vary, and the inference will not always be confirmed when further evidence becomes available (Kessler and McKenna 1978)—though generally it will be. The most important question at issue is the status of the categories to which the signs are taken to refer. One aspect of this is whether they are natural kinds or are matters of convention. But, even if we treat them as conventional, we should not conclude that sex/gender categories can be changed at will, or distinctions between the sexes easily erased, since they are entrenched in forms of life. More than this, if we say that these distinctions are characteristic of a particular form of society, or of a particular stage of societal development, this does not automatically imply that there is an alternative viable social world

6  Sex and Gender 

149

that would avoid these distinctions. We know from historical and anthropological studies that there is some scope for variation and change in the modes of presentation, behaviour, and social roles associated with sex/ gender categories, and indeed there is much variation even within Western societies, but there are also restrictions on what change is possible at any point in time; indeed, there will be resistance to it. This conventionalist view contrasts with what feminists have denounced as essentialism: the temptation to appeal to intrinsic and universal differences between the sexes. Even those few characteristics that approximate to this status do not fully achieve it, such as ones that have implications for playing a distinctive role in sexual reproduction—the capacity to impregnate and the capacity to bear children; what Kessler and McKenna (1978: 165) formulate as the distinction between sperm carriers and egg carriers. For most purposes, people who do not have the relevant capacities in this respect would not be treated as any less male or female. What should be taken as defining features of female or male is by no means a simple matter, then, even at the level of biology.4 However, while it is true that it is not accurate or useful to define maleness and femaleness in terms of possession of a set of necessary and jointly sufficient features, it remains that they are routinely defined by appeal to a relatively standard cluster of physical and other characteristics. And, even without essentialism, we find that the human population is still very largely divided into two classes on this basis: it has a sharply bimodal distribution, rather than displaying a flatter landscape of more continuous variation (see Stock 2019). Furthermore, given the links between some of these differentiating physical features to a central aspect of human life, sexual reproduction, it would not be too surprising if there were some attitudinal and intellectual features typically associated with each sex in a relatively stable fashion, though the distribution of these is likely to be more continuous than in the case of key physical characteristics. Furthermore, while in abstract terms it is possible to distinguish to some degree between what is biologically given and what is culturally acquired, this does not mean that the two processes are separate: it is certainly  See Alcoff (1988), Spelman (1988), Moi (1999). For a useful discussion of these complexities in the context of research methodology, see Morgan (1986). 4

150 

M. Hammersley

correct to say that they are intertwined in complex ways, each affecting the other. The various versions of femininity and masculinity found across and within societies operate in relation to physical and other differences taken to be characteristic of the two sexes. So, it may be that there are some (at present) relatively fixed differences in preferences and in capabilities between the sexes, albeit probabilistic in character, that are relevant to such matters as differential educational achievement in various school subjects, recruitment to various types of occupation, and so on. Acknowledging the role of these does not imply that the differential outcomes concerned are equitable—that is a separate issue. But, even if they are inequitable, any attempt to eliminate them would require a sound understanding of how they have been produced. Gender differences in occupational aspiration, for example, should not be dismissed as the product of false consciousness: careful investigation is required, albeit taking into account the role of cultural preconceptions and how these may be taken over by girls and women, as well as by boys and men. It is necessary to recognise, also, that most people continue to self-­ identify with one of two sexes; indeed, they actively present themselves— through the clothing they wear, how they arrange their hair, and so on—as male or female; and they also often assume that there are sex differences in attitude and behaviour. This persists despite the fact that there have been significant shifts over the past 50 years or so in what is regarded as appropriate behaviour on the part of each sex, greatly narrowing the differences. In this context we should note the implications of the transgender movement: while this challenges conventional notions of sex/gender in some significant respects, an insistence on the right of those who transition to have their new sex/gender recognised actually reinforces the distinction between the two sexes rather than weakening it. If there were no distinction, there would be no need for transition (Kessler and McKenna 1978: 120). Of course, there are also arguments promoting the idea of a third sex or gender (Herdt 1993), building on research suggesting that the idea of two sexes was a socio-historical product (Laqueur 1992), but as yet these are a long way from undermining the two-sex model within societies generally.

6  Sex and Gender 

151

Not only do some of the positions discussed earlier in this section challenge the standard assumption of two sexes/genders, even in the conventionalist terms I have outlined, they also raise questions about the relationship between the disciplines that have customarily operated on each side of the natural/social line. ‘New materialist’ views, for example, seem to imply the erasure of any boundary between biology and sociology, in line with its promotion of a ‘flat ontology’ rather than a hierarchically-structured one. In fact, more than this is involved, since there is also the question of the relationship between both of these disciplines and the sort of philosophical thinking that has been deployed in these revisionist versions of materialism, as well as the issue of their relationship to the intellectual and political project(s) of feminism.5 Certainly, the terms in which sex/gender is addressed in some of those views are very much philosophical ones, in that the concern is with uncovering and interrogating the fundamental assumptions involved in any distinction between male and female. At the same time, what is being put forward under the ‘new materialisms’ banner would not be widely accepted within the philosophical community. And, as a sociologist, it is hard to know how to engage with such a challenge to conventional categories in a manner that is neither dismissive nor uncritical. A similar problem in formal terms, albeit different in character, concerns what note should be taken of the work of biologists in exploring the complexities of sexual differentiation in humans and other species. Here, again, significant limits to the technical expertise one possesses makes engagement beyond the most superficial level difficult. And, while the depth of any disagreements among biologists may, for the most part, be much less than those to be found amongst philosophers and sociologists, these certainly do exist; and some of the challenges to the sex/gender distinction I have outlined touch on controversial areas within that discipline, such as epigenetics (the study of variation as regards which genes are expressed, ‘switched on’, in particular organisms, and the role of environmental factors in this).

 Not all advocates of new materialisms apparently regard it as having such fundamental implications as regards disciplines (see, for instance, Fox and Alldred 2017). 5

152 

M. Hammersley

Clearly, we should not simply ignore developments in other fields that may have a bearing on our work. At the same time, I do not believe that it is desirable to try to blend sociology into a trans-disciplinary enterprise that also incorporates biology and philosophy.6 The sociological task is difficult enough as it is, and it would become impossible if this much broader context had to be taken fully into account. It seems to me that every discipline must necessarily make simplifying assumptions about the range of phenomena with which other disciplines deal that touch upon it (Gluckman 1964). The purpose of disciplines from this point of view is to mark out a set of research questions, and to provide the means that could enable us to answer them, allowing for reasonable confidence in the validity of our conclusions. They are pragmatic, albeit institutionalised, devices designed to help us to produce knowledge. Seeking some global totalisation in which we can take account of everything simultaneously, and thereby understand the whole (even if such existed), does not seem a productive strategy. However, this is not to suggest that adopting the more pragmatic position I am recommending solves all the problems.7

The Implications for Sociological Practice Clearly, many of the theoretical positions concerned with sex/gender categories I have outlined raise questions for sociological practice: how are we to take account of the uncertainties and debates surrounding those categories, while yet proceeding with empirical sociological research that employs them, for example to document and explain inequalities? There is a relatively easy answer to this question for some research purposes, but for others the problems are more challenging. If the focus is on documenting and explaining discrimination against women (or men), then the conceptualisation of sex/gender that is assumed relates to perceived differentiation of the sexes by those who make decisions that lead to the outcome concerned. Here, at most, what is required  On trans-disciplinarity, see Sandford (2011).  I am not suggesting that the current divisions among social science disciplines are the best ones; indeed, I suspect that this is far from being true. 6 7

6  Sex and Gender 

153

is that the basis of this differentiation be documented, along with its effects. No analytic assumptions are necessary about the actual nature of sex/gender differences. However, this is only true provided that the task is limited to documenting differential treatment, its causes, and/or consequences. If the sociologist wishes to argue that the inequality studied is inequitable, then reliance is inevitably placed not just on perceived differences but also on an assumed absence of actual differences between the sexes in relevant respects: since it will be because there are no actual differences that the differential treatment is judged to be inequitable. This underlines the importance of clarity on the part of sociologists about the nature of the claims they are making; though, as I explained in the Introduction, in my view conclusions about what is or is not inequitable are, like other value issues, outside the legitimate scope of sociology. By contrast, if, for example, the implicit or explicit causal narrative is that boys/men and girls/women have distinctive characteristics that produce a difference in some outcome, then reliance is inevitably being placed upon an analytic conceptualisation that distinguishes the characteristics of the sexes, and at least some of the issues raised in the previous section must be faced. Indeed, not only will the gender categories employed need to be non-essentialist, they may also need to vary somewhat depending on the purposes of the investigation.8 One aspect of this is that there is a sense in which masculine and feminine are achieved, rather than simply ascribed identifications. The point here is not just the extent to which they involve performance, in Butler’s sense, but also that there are different versions of both femininity and masculinity, some being hegemonic (Connell 1995) in particular contexts. This implies that what gender categories mean, in terms of the particular set of defining features adopted, and the relative priority given to each feature, may vary between studies, at least in part according to the social context investigated. Furthermore, when this variable is treated as a cause, there may be uncertainty about exactly which features of the cluster defining the relevant gender category are being treated as having causative force. Essentialist definitions distinguish sharply between those  Stock (2019) identifies five (or perhaps even six) different senses of ‘gender’, varying in legitimacy and usefulness. 8

154 

M. Hammersley

criteria that define membership of the category and others that are only probabilistically associated with such membership. This means that the causal factor is a well-defined set of features that are assumed to be mutually implicative. However, once we adopt a non-essentialist conception of sex/gender categories, it is no longer quite so clear either which distinctive features of males and females should be included within the causal factor, nor are the relationships among the features that could be included entirely determinate, so that we cannot know whether their presence or absence in particular cases will make a causal difference. I am not suggesting that this is a completely intractable problem: the stronger the clustering together of what are taken to be gender characteristics—the more bimodal the distribution—the less of a problem there will be; but the more the relationships among those characteristics are weakened, the more challenging it will become. Take, for example, the hypothesis that sex/gender differences in promotion amongst employees in large organisations arise partly from the fact that, on average, men are more willing to put themselves forward for promotion and to argue their case arrogantly or boldly. Here it must be asked: is this to be treated as a feature of being male, under present social circumstances, or is it a separate variable that is associated, contingently and only to some degree, with gender? After all, some men are unwilling to do this, while at least a few women are. But, if it is not being treated as a defining feature, then the causal factor producing differential promotion prospects should presumably be ‘personal arrogance/boldness’ rather than sex/gender. At the same time, variation in this factor will itself be caused by other factors, so perhaps these are the real cause instead? The fundamental point is that, by adopting a non-essentialist conception of gender categories, a degree of indeterminacy is built into them, and a result is that rather different conclusions may be reached about what causes the relevant outcome depending on how we resolve such definitional issues. While I suggest that any search for an ultimate cause of anything is a wild goose chase, the issue arises of on what grounds we should decide what to treat as a cause, aside from a plausible causal narrative being available, and a correlation existing between it and what is to be explained after allowing for other factors. The answer to this for social scientists, I

6  Sex and Gender 

155

suggest, is that the research questions they address involve value-relevance frameworks, and that these determine what would and would not be relevant causal variables (though not whether these variables actually have causative effect). On this basis we may decide that gender is the relevant causal variable even though the outcome is not a product of some intrinsic, and therefore universal, feature of one gender contrasted with another. The unavoidability of reliance on value-relevance frameworks ought to be obvious where the focus of inquiry is inequalities, since these are identified as worth investigating, precisely because (from some point of view) they are taken to be unjust. Yet, in the case of research on gender, as with that on other types of social inequality, there has been a tendency to treat inequities as features of the world, rather than as factual inequalities that are open to evaluation as inequitable; the result of this being that the value assumptions that pick out the inequalities concerned as unjust are left implicit. Furthermore, it is rarely taken into account that there are conflicting ways of determining what is and is not fair treatment.9 A closely related problem is that, of course, raw correlations between sex/gender categories (however defined) and some outcome variable may be spurious, rather than capturing a causal relationship. It is not unusual, especially in the media but also in some academic work, for such correlations to be reported as if they automatically indicated a causal relationship. Moreover, there can be problems in non-experimental research, quantitative or qualitative, both in selecting what other variables to control and in actually controlling for them. But, at the very least, we ought to remain aware that there are alternative explanations. Many years ago, Measor (1999) noted that while previous sociological explanations for disruptive behaviour in the classroom had relied almost entirely on evidence about boys, the predominant argument had been that such disruption was evidence of working-class resistance to schooling and/or of the effects of differentiation (streaming, banding, setting, or tracking) in schools. Not unreasonably, she argued that disruptive behaviour by boys could also be seen as resulting from prevailing conceptions of  This is true of reviews of the field of research concerned with gender, for example Woodward’s (2011) in other ways excellent Short Guide to Gender. 9

156 

M. Hammersley

masculinity. Here, then, we are faced with competing interpretations of more or less the same data.10 Of course, several causal processes may well be operating in the same context, but some means is required of suspending or ruling out the effects of other relevant factors so as to determine their role. And, generally speaking, the hypothetical causal relations are probabilistic, so that controlling for other variables would need to operate over a relatively large number of cases in order to detect the hypothesised tendencies. There may be other ways of approaching such causal analysis—such as case-based analysis, including process-­tracing (Bennett and Checkel 2015)—but if sound conclusions are to be reached we cannot avoid addressing the problem of multiple factors and probabilistic relationships. This problem is highlighted by feminist debates about intersectionality: the relationship between sex/gender and other social identities, such as ‘race’/ethnicity, sexual orientation, social class, age, and ability/disability status (Hill Collins and Bilge 2016). Early feminist accounts of the oppression of women came to be challenged by black and lesbian feminists on the grounds that they failed to take account of the very different circumstances of many women compared with those of white, heterosexual, middle-class feminists. Indeed, it was noted that women were sometimes implicated in the exploitation of other women when acting in terms of these other social categories. The conclusion reached was that it is misleading to treat ‘woman’, or for that matter ‘man’, as if it were a homogeneous category, all of whose members are socially located in the same way, so that they experience the same circumstances and fortunes. For the purposes of sociological analysis, this could simply be treated as an illustration of the need to avoid spurious correlations—to make sure that any apparent relationship between some social identity, such as female, and some type or level of outcome, is not a product of an underlying cause unrelated to sex/gender. However, much discussion of intersectionality has suggested that what are involved are not separate contributions to outcome inequalities ascribable to particular identity variables, but rather more complex interrelationships, whereby one  See Hammersley (2001). Cealey Harrison and Hood-Williams (1998: 3.6–3.7) make a similar point in discussing Mac an Ghaill’s (1994) work. 10

6  Sex and Gender 

157

identity shapes another in ways that significantly affect outcomes. This may be a more accurate account of how identity variables like sex/gender operate, but it makes the methodological problems involved in documenting their effects on outcomes of various kinds even more challenging. In conventional statistical terms, it means taking account of interaction effects. Yet the severity of these difficulties is rarely acknowledged, and at present, we do not have very effective ways of dealing with them in the context of either qualitative or quantitative research. In methodological terms, as well as in other respects, then, ‘intersectionality’ is the name of a problem, not of a solution (Cealey Harrison and Hood-­ Williams 1998).

Conclusion I have noted in this chapter how conceptualising and operationalising ‘sex’ or ‘gender’ may appear to be relatively unproblematic compared with other sociological variables, but that this is misleading. While, in much sociological research it has been assumed that there are just two categories, male and female, and that it is relatively easy to assign people reliably to one or the other, feminists have highlighted serious conceptual problems in this area. Not only have they shown that there is considerable cultural variation as regards gender roles, but also that there are fundamental difficulties with the sex/gender distinction. Moreover, even if we put ‘philosophical’ problems on one side, we do not entirely escape the difficulties. I have argued for a pragmatic approach, recognising that how sex/ gender categories are formulated should vary depending upon the nature and context of the investigation. For example, it makes a difference whether the causal variable is perceived sex/gender differences or actual sex/gender differences. The first is less problematic than is the second. Where actual sex/gender differences are treated as a causal variable, we must find ways of dealing with the implications of adopting a non-­ essentialist conception of sex/gender. In this connection, I emphasised the significance of the fact that sociological analyses operate within value-­ relevance frameworks and that it is essential to make the assumptions

158 

M. Hammersley

these involve explicit, and to recognise that there is no single correct framework. Also relevant is the problem of controlling for other, potentially confounding, variables; and this is exacerbated once we recognise the implications of intersectionality. All of these problems occur with the use of other concepts, but they are perhaps more easily forgotten in the case of something so apparently obvious as sex/gender differences.

References Alcoff, L. (1988). Cultural Feminism Versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory. Signs, 13(3), 405–436. Bennett, A., & Checkel, J. (Eds.). (2015). Process Tracing: From Metaphor to Analytic Tool. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berger, P., & Luckmann, T. (1967). The Social Construction of Reality. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. London: Routledge. Cealey Harrison, W. (2001). Truth is Slippery Stuff. In B. Francis & C. Skelton (Eds.), Investigating Gender: Contemporary Perspectives in Education. Buckingham: Open University Press. Cealey Harrison, W. (2012). Why Gender? Towards an Integrated Conceptualisation of Sexual Differentiation in Humans. Open Insight, 3(4), 59–91. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/ 277266564_Why_gender_towards_an_integrated_model_of_sexual_differentiation_in_human_beings. Cealey Harrison, W., & Hood-Williams, J. (1998). More Varieties than Heinz: Social Categories and Sociality in Humphries, Hammersley and Beyond. Sociological Research Online, 3(1) Retrieved from http://www.socresonline. org.uk/3/1/8.html. Cealey Harrison, W., & Hood-Williams, J. (2002). Beyond Sex and Gender. London: Sage Publications. Collins, P. H., & Bilge, S. (2016). Intersectionality. Cambridge: Polity. Connell, R. W. (1995). Masculinities. Allen and Unwin: Sydney. Davis, N. (2009). New Materialism and Feminism’s Anti-Biologism: A Response to Sara Ahmed. European Journal of Women's Studies, 16(1), 67–80.

6  Sex and Gender 

159

de Beauvoir, S. (1953). The Second Sex. New York: Knopf. (First published in French in 1949). Fox, N.  J., & Alldred, P. (2017). Sociology and the New Materialism: Theory, Research, Action. London: Sage. Friedman, A. (2006). Unintended Consequences of the Feminist Sex/Gender Distinction. Genders, 43. Retrieved from https://www.colorado.edu/gendersarchive1998-2013/2006/01/02/unintended-consequences-feministsexgender-distinction. Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Germon, J. (2009). Gender: A Genealogy of an Idea. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gluckman, M. (Ed.). (1964). Closed Systems and Open Minds: The Limits of Naivety in Social Anthropology. Chicago: Aldine. Hammersley, M. (2001). Obvious, All Too Obvious? Methodological Issues in Using Sex/Gender as a Variable in Educational Research. In B.  Francis & C. Skelton (Eds.), Perspectives on Gender and Education. Buckingham: Open University Press. Hayward, M. (2003). Are Texts Recognizably Gendered? An Experiment and Analysis. Poetics, 31(2), 87–101. Herdt, G. (Ed.). (1993). Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History. New York: Zone Books. Kessler, S. (1998). Lessons from the Intersexed. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Kessler, S., & McKenna, W. (1978). Gender: An Ethnomethodological Perspective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Laqueur, T. (1992). Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MS: Harvard University Press. Mac an Ghaill, M. (1994). The Making of Men: Masculinities, Sexualities and Schooling. Buckingham: Open University Press. Measor, L. (1999). “Looking Back at the Boys”: Reflections on Issues of Gender in Classroom Data. In M. Hammersley (Ed.), Researching School Experience. London: Falmer/Routledge. Moi, T. (1999). What is a Woman? And Other Essays. New  York: Oxford University Press. Morgan, D. H. J. (1986). Gender. In R. G. Burgess (Ed.), Key Variables in Social Investigation. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

160 

M. Hammersley

Sandford, S. (2011). Sex: A Transdisciplinary Concept. Radical Philosophy, 165(Jan/Feb) Retrieved from https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/ sex-a-transdisciplinary-concept. Spelman, E.  V. (1988). Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought. Boston: Beacon Press. Stock, K. (2019). Can You Change Your Gender? The Philosopher, 107(3), 19–23. Woodward, K. (2011). The Short Guide to Gender. Bristol: Policy Press.

7 Ethnicity, Race, and Racism

The terminologies associated with ‘ethnicity’ and ‘race’ are widely recognised to raise political and ethical issues. The problems surrounding usage of the word ‘race’, as well as more specific terms like ‘mixed race’ (Small 2004), have been given much attention. And the names employed to identify particular ethnic groups can also be contentious, a well-known example being ‘Gypsy’ versus ‘Traveller’, ‘Romani’ or ‘Roma’.1 For somewhat different reasons, questions have been raised, too, about the term ‘black’—and, more recently, ‘people of colour’ and ‘black, asian and minority ethnic’ (BAME)—where these incorporate members of a wide range of ‘racial’ and ethnic groups on the grounds that they suffer from unfair discrimination within Western societies. While these terms have frequently been adopted by sociologists, there has also been resistance to them—because they obscure significant differences in the identities, circumstances, and experiences of diverse ethnic groups (Mason 1990; Modood 1994; Bhatt 2004). There have also been disputes about the term ‘racism’, with the promotion and rejection of various interpretations of it. Banton (1997: 40) declared that it is used in a ‘bewildering variety  For an excellent discussion of the issues surrounding the naming of groups, see Banton (1997: ch2).

1

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Hammersley, Troubling Sociological Concepts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51644-4_7

161

162 

M. Hammersley

of senses’, and Cashmore (1988: 249) has suggested that ‘the word has been used in so many ways that there is a danger of its losing any value as a concept’. In short, there is not much stability or unanimity of meaning about key terms in this field. There have, of course, been some efforts at conceptual clarification (see, for example, McKay and Lewins 1978; Jenkins 2008), but much usage neglects this problem. My aim here is to clarify the terminology associated with ‘ethnicity’, ‘race’, and ‘racism’ specifically for the purposes of sociological analysis. One of the central problems with ‘race’ parallels that arising with ‘sex/ gender’: that it is often taken to refer to a biological phenomenon. Over the course of the twentieth century, the idea that there are biologically based races came to be widely rejected in academic discussion, and was replaced by social constructionist conceptions that treat race as an ideological fiction which functions to justify colonialism and neocolonialism, prejudice and discrimination. However, there have also been proposals that the term should be abandoned completely (Gilroy 1998, 2001), as well as ‘new materialist’ attempts to reconceptualise a biological conception of race in a vitalist manner, overcoming the ‘dualism’ of nature/culture (Saldanha 2006; Dixon-Román 2017). In addition, with both race and ethnicity there is the difficult question of what the relationship should be between the analytic perspective of the sociologist and the perspectives and experiences of the people being studied, who may well use racial or ethnic terms themselves. Indeed, should ethnicity and race be matters of self-identification? Yet, there have been disputes about some people’s claims to be ‘white’ or ‘black’, or to belong to particular ethnic groups. Or should the question of whether particular ethnic or racial groups exist, and who belongs to which, be decided by sociologists according to the requirements of their research? There are no simple, easily accepted, answers to these questions. There is also the issue of what stance the sociologist ought to take towards social injustices associated with race and ethnicity. The position I adopt here, as in the rest of the book, is that, in thinking about how these terms should be defined and handled, it is important to draw a clear line between sociological analysis, on the one hand, and other legitimate forms of engagement—such as social and political commentary, legal adjudication, or political activism—on the other. These involve different

7  Ethnicity, Race, and Racism 

163

tasks, and therefore place different requirements on those who would pursue them, and on the terminology to be employed. As I explained in the Introduction, for me the sole operational task of sociological analysis is to produce value-relevant factual knowledge, not to evaluate the forms of action, institutional arrangements, social trends, and so on, being studied, or to try to change them. Indeed, I do not believe that social scientists have any distinctive authority, or much power, to do this. So, analysis should only deploy factual not evaluative senses of terms, even though these will nevertheless rely upon some value-relevance framework (Hammersley 2014, 2017, see Chap. 1). This position is at odds with most approaches in the field of research on ethnicity and race today, but I hope that even those who disagree with my views about this issue will still find the discussion here of value. Given that the meaning of neither ‘race’ nor ‘ethnicity’ is unequivocal, it is hardly surprising that it can be difficult to distinguish clearly between the phenomena to which each refers, or to indicate how these are related. However, I suggest that, in order to clarify their meaning, we must recognise that the use of these terms in social life relies on forms of inference from some set of signs or indicators to the existence, and membership, of categories that gather together people who are assumed to share relevant characteristics that are not directly observable. This general process of inference from signs is ubiquitous in human social relations, involving allocation of people to a wide range of categories. It is, of course, against the background of diverse processes of categorisation that those relating to ethnicity and race operate. Along relatively conventional lines, I suggest that what differentiates racial and ethnic categories is the nature of the signs taken to mark social identities, and the implications that this is assumed to have for the characteristics inferred. So, in the case of ‘race’, the signs observed are not usually voluntarily adopted and cannot be easily changed, for example skin colour, facial bone structure, and so on.2 By contrast, indicators of  It is important to recognise that variation in these ‘racial’ characteristics is continuous rather than categorical. Furthermore, characteristics may, of course, be changed to some degree by physical means, whether this is to ‘pass for white’ or to ‘pass for black’. Sometimes this has been done for research purposes, see Sprigle (1949) and Griffin (1961). See also the case of Rachel Dolezal: https://psmag.com/social-justice/expert-weighs-in-on-rachel-dolezal. 2

164 

M. Hammersley

ethnic identity are generally forms of clothing, bodily ornamentation, and social practices of various kinds, that are adopted, albeit often habitually or through cultural inheritance, and that are (in principle, but not always in practice) more easily open to change, for instance for the purposes of disguise. Of course this difference is a matter of degree. Furthermore, what I am referring to as ethnic signs may sometimes be used to assign people to ‘racial’ categories; and the characteristics that are inferred can be relatively similar in the two cases, relating to overlapping capabilities, habits, propensities, attitudes, and so on. What is distinctive to ‘racial’ categorisation is a tendency to treat not only the signs but also the inferred features of people as biologically fixed. It is perhaps necessary to emphasise that, while it is certainly true that some features of people’s appearance are more immediately obvious by sight, notably skin colour, it remains necessary to explain both the fact that these are taken to be inferentially significant and what significance they are given. Explanations may appeal to relatively universal tendencies to distinguish in-group from out-group members; to socio-historically specific processes, such as capitalism and imperialism; as well as to more local context-specific factors. And these forms of explanation are not mutually exclusive. The distinction between ethnic and racial categories is often particularly blurred in public discussion, one aspect of this being what has come to be referred to as ‘racialisation’—the treatment of ethnic inferences as identifying characteristics that are biologically fixed—though this is a term that is employed in a variety of ways (see Barot and Bird 2001; Murji and Solomos 2005). Its analytic  use is widely seen as a way of avoiding reliance on the concept of ‘race’, so as to shift the focus towards racism. We should also note that the administrative categories employed in producing government statistics often conflate racial, ethnic, and national identifications. For example, the UK census in 2011 asked people to choose from among a range of options organised under four main headings—Asian, Black, Mixed, and White—with subdivisions of each. The options under the heading of Asian were: Bangladeshi, Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, Asian Other. And, of course, much sociological work necessarily relies on statistics that adopt these categories, and in doing so unavoidably conflates ethnic and racial (as well as national) differentiation. Nevertheless, recognising the differences between these forms of categorisation is important.

7  Ethnicity, Race, and Racism 

165

Ethnicity While the term ‘ethnicity’ is a relatively recent invention, dating from the 1950s, ‘ethnic’ is much older: it has its roots in the ancient Greek term ‘ethnos’, which roughly translates as ‘a people’, and whose adjective was ‘ethnikos’. Both ethnic and racial categories have their origins in distinctions made by particular peoples between themselves and their neighbours. An illuminating example is the ethnic label ‘Phoenicians’, which was invented and applied by the ancient Greeks to people originating in the area that is now Lebanon, but who also had settlements elsewhere on Mediterranean coasts. There is little evidence about what the ‘Phoenicians’ called themselves, and what there is suggests that their attachments were more specific—to particular cities, such as Tyre, Sidon, or Carthage (Quinn 2019). Of course, distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’ usually involved not just descriptive features—such as the attribution of particular cultural practices—but also evaluations regarding intellect, particular skills, and/or morality.

Ethnicity as Cultural Similarity and Cohesion It is out of such practices of self- and other-identification that anthropologists and sociologists developed the notion of an ethnic group as involving solidary relations, a high degree of cultural homogeneity, and claims to common descent that are based on, but extend beyond, close relations of kinship and affinity.3 Other defining criteria are frequently a sense of mutual belonging and of shared history. There is also, generally, a connection with some territory, which may or may not currently be occupied by the group. Shared religion, too, can be a central feature of ethnic identity, as can speaking the same language or language variety. This is, in many contexts, the prevalent interpretation of ‘ethnicity’, and at one time it was dominant in sociological and anthropological accounts. We should note its connection with Tönnies’s (1955)

 A few draw on sociobiology to argue that there are biological factors leading to the establishment of ethnic groups and the sense of identity and solidarity involved (see, for instance, van den Berghe 1978, 1981). 3

166 

M. Hammersley

distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft as forms of social relation (Rex 2002). Ethnic groups typically have, or are believed to have, a Gemeinschaft-like or communal character. This is characteristic of Weber’s (Roth 1968: lxxv) idea of ethnic groups: ‘consciousness of kind due to common customs, common language and common historical experiences’ (see Stone 1995), as well as of approaches that emphasise primordiality—an intrinsic tendency to identify with those who belong to one’s close community and to be suspicious of, or antagonistic towards, outsiders (see Geertz 1973: ch10; van den Berghe 1978; Fenton 2010: ch4). As a result of this Gemeinschaft-like character, ethnic groups may be regarded as unusual or anachronistic within modern societies since these are held to be characterised, overall, by relations closer in nature to the weaker and more superficial ties typical of Gesellschaft. At the same time, we must remember that particular ethnic groups can dominate societies—they are not always relatively powerless minorities (see Jenkins 2008: ch7). Indeed, they may seek to define a nation-state in their own image (Smith 1989). Also, ethnic difference is sometimes institutionalised within a society via some form of apartheid or political pluralism. This indicates the importance of analysing ethnicity in ways that take account of the distinctive features of the contexts involved (see Fenton 1999). In terms of this first conception of ethnicity, it can be a feature of ethnic groups that they not only have distinctive beliefs, attitudes, and practices but also tend to treat their own culture as superior to that of others. In other words, there is a potential for ethnocentricity built into ethnic identification, though it can be counterbalanced by commitments to hospitality or toleration. Moreover, such attitudes are not just a matter of intellectual judgment but of visceral feeling. For instance, some practices of other groups will prompt disgust. At the core of ethnic groups of this kind, occasionally, is a notion of the sacred, often embodied in practices around, for example, choice and handling of foods, notions of cleanliness, the dressing and adornment of bodies, the organisation of dwelling-­ spaces, as well as in specific religious rituals. Of course, the character of ethnic groups varies according to the contexts in which they have arisen or are located, which may be

7  Ethnicity, Race, and Racism 

167

characterised, for example, by migration, conflict, and/or colonialism (see Fenton 1999). They also differ in their size and degree of solidarity.4 Many are quite large, so that relations within them take the form of networks rather than of face-to-face contact among all members. Thus, groups can vary in the extent to which, and ways in which, they are integrated: relationships amongst their members may be dense and comprehensive, or looser and more limited. We can contrast a village in which people live and work, where there is little in- or out-migration over people’s lifetimes, with social groups made up of a much larger number of people whose relationships are more extended and fluid, living and working in different places, and with considerable physical mobility. Furthermore, the boundaries of an ethnic community can be fuzzy, and/ or disputed; and there can be differentiation within an ethnic category; or, conversely, a category may be subsumed, on some occasions, under a larger ethnic grouping.5 The level of solidarity can also vary over time, depending upon external as well as internal circumstances: external threats or challenges may bring members of a group together, but there can also be internal splits resulting from such external factors, and there may be divisions for other reasons as well—for example relating to conflicting material interests, or rival claims to authority within the group (Banton 1997: ch5). This reflects, in part, the fact that, despite a relatively solidary nature, there will be internal differentiation in terms of role, gender, age, and other factors. For these reasons, questions have been raised about whether people operate on the basis of stable, trans-contextual ethnic identities (Moerman 1968; Barth 1969; Wallman 1979; Jenkins 2008). We should also note that, very often, what is of interest for analytic purposes is how people are categorised by others, and whether they are treated differently on the basis of those categorisations.  McKay and Lewins (1978) distinguish two dimensions here: between ‘ethnic structuration’, the nature of contacts among member of an ethnic category, and the level of identification of individuals with the ethnic category concerned. In some respects this seems to correspond with Lockwood’s (1964) broader distinction between system integration and social integration. Ethnic groups differ in other ways too, of course: following Eriksen (1993), Fenton (1999) distinguishes between ‘urban minorities’, ‘proto-nations’, ‘minority groups in plural societies’, ‘indigenous minorities’, and ‘post-­ slavery minorities’. 5  For an example, see Fenton’s (2010: 4–6) of ethnic groups in Malaysia. 4

168 

M. Hammersley

Ethnicity as Symbolic Identification Given these complexities, some sociologists and anthropologists have viewed ethnic identity not in terms of membership in solidary groups but, rather, as a symbolic resource that people invoke on particular occasions in pursuit of interests of various kinds, for instance to secure economic resources or to advance political purposes. Here the focus is on how people categorise themselves and others, on particular occasions, and how this shapes their actions in drawing boundaries that include some but exclude others, policing these boundaries in various ways (Brubaker 2004). This allows for disagreement about where the boundaries lie, for contextual variation in processes of inclusion and exclusion, as well as for shifts over time in boundaries between what are taken to be distinct ethnic groups. In one respect, this perspective downgrades the role of ethnic identity as an explanatory factor in understanding human behaviour, emphasising instead the active adoption or attribution of one or another identity in particular contexts. The main focus may become simply the manipulation of ethnic symbols and how this shapes social relations.6 In these terms, ethnic communities are sometimes treated by analysts as ‘imagined’ rather than actual: as constructed and reconstructed in on-going social interaction (see, for example, Cohen 1985). People display their ethnic identities through various signs; though they may also be treated as belonging to particular ethnic groups on the basis of signs that were not intentionally adopted. Signs can range from ones that are relatively subtle, such as a particular sort of necklace or ring, to those that are very obvious, for instance facial tattoos or full veils. The latter involve a similar level of visibility to some signs taken to indicate membership of ‘racial’ categories. There is considerable scope for variation in this second approach to ethnicity, with its focus on contextual attribution. There is a position that is not fundamentally different from the first one, except for an emphasis on how the degree of solidarity of any ethnic group is a product of the on-going activities of people within the group and of those outside, along  This is what Hutchinson and Smith (1996) refer to as instrumentalism.

6

7  Ethnicity, Race, and Racism 

169

with recognition of some fluidity of boundaries and of the frequency with which they are crossed. Some have argued that this fluidity of ethnic identifications is generic, others that it is a distinctive feature of late modernity, leading to so-called ‘new ethnicities’ (see Hall 1993; Mac an Ghaill 1999; Back 1996). At the other end of the spectrum would be the view that ethnic categories are simply labels that are used in a situationally variable manner: they are non-representational, in the sense that they do not refer to some reality beyond the discourse. Instead, they are constitutive, creating a continually varying perceptual and emotional landscape of ethnicities. There is middle space between these contrasting approaches, and particular studies may be less than fully clear about the exact nature of the approach being taken (see Van den Berg et al. 2003; Hammersley 2006). This second approach, in its various forms, often reflects the influence of social constructionism. Here there is a suspension of any assumption, characteristic of lay people using ethnic terminology, as well as of many anthropologists and sociologists in the past, that there are distinct ethnic groups. It may be argued that ethnic identity is treated as important in some situations but not in others, or that people switch among different ethnic identities according to context (see Fenton 2010: 82). As I have noted, in its most extreme form, the analytic focus shifts to how ethnic identities are formulated and attributed by people on varying occasions (including assigning these to themselves), and the functions this serves or the effects it has. It is these formulations and attributions that are investigated rather than the existence, and degree of cultural coherence and solidarity, of ethnic groups. While this constructionist approach certainly recognises important features of ethnicity that can easily be forgotten when this term is assumed to refer to solidary groups, at the same time, it can make some areas of investigation difficult, if not impossible. For example, the study of ethnic inequalities requires us to treat people as belonging to stable ethnic categories, at least as attributed by others; but if the process of attribution is contingent and contextually-variable—as regards who attributes what identity to whom on what occasions—the existence of such inequalities can become difficult to investigate. There may also be a tendency to treat this process of categorisation as free-floating rather than as grounded in

170 

M. Hammersley

the social structural properties of particular societies: indeed, the very existence of the latter may be questioned, or treated as themselves discursively constructed.

Ethnicity as Self-identification In both the approaches to ethnicity outlined above, people’s self-­ identifications play some role, but in neither case is ethnic identity defined in this way. In the first, the researcher must make some judgment about whether or not a declared ethnic identity refers to a sufficiently solidary community for it to be treated as referring to an ethnic group for sociological purposes. In the second case, at least in its more radical versions, while self-identifications are studied, they are not treated as referring to membership of groups, but rather as the product of discursive strategies that construct the social world rather than reflecting it. In contrast to both of these positions, it is sometimes argued that people’s self-­ identifications should be used to allocate them to ethnic categories. This is characteristic of censuses and much survey work, though here of course, people must choose from predetermined categories (see Bulmer 1986). In part, adoption of this approach results from practical difficulties involved in identifying indicators of ethnic group membership as well as gathering and validating information about these for every individual in a sample or population. But it may also stem from the idea that people’s ethnic self-identifications should be respected as reflecting their experiential worlds, rather than overridden by sociological categorisation.

Evaluating the Three Approaches There are problems with all three of the ways of conceptualising ethnic identity I have discussed: as reflecting the existence of a solidary and culturally homogeneous group; as displayed in situated social definitions; or as a matter of self-identification. The difficulties with the first are indicated, in large part, by the arguments in favour of the other two. Some are ontological and methodological in character. One issue is that it requires a sociological distinction to be drawn between genuine (in other words, sufficiently coherent and solidary) ethnic groups and any ethnic

7  Ethnicity, Race, and Racism 

171

identities that the people being studied refer to that do not pick out a group which meets this threshold. But how is this to be done in a theoretically sound way, rather than arbitrarily? A second problem is that, if we examine people’s identifications of themselves or of others as belonging to particular ethnic groups, we do indeed often find that these are situationally variable—at the very least indicating that people have overlapping memberships: as noted earlier, specific ethnic identities that are contrasted on some occasions are often merged together on others in opposition to an ethnic allegiance that stands against both of them. A third problem is that treating people’s references to ethnic identity as functioning simply as descriptions of their social world relies upon a defective conception of language use, one that ignores the many purposes that such references can serve: justifying or excusing actions, creating alliances, claiming resources or status, and so on. The second approach avoids these problems, to a large extent, especially in its more extreme form; but this can be at considerable sociological cost. As already noted, it becomes much more difficult, if not impossible, to produce an account of the ethnic structure of a society, and also to document and explain ethnic inequalities in social outcomes. There is also the problem that any account which seeks to show how discursive strategies are used to promote or defend particular group interests necessarily relies upon some identification of the groups having those interests; and, if this is done in ethnic terms, the analyst is simultaneously relying on something like the first conception of ethnicity, and may be forced to deal with the problems it involves (see Jenkins 2008: ch2). While this can be avoided by focusing entirely on ethnic identifications as rhetorical devices, and studying their forms rather than their functions, this clearly involves a very severe narrowing in sociological focus. Used in the context of survey research, the third approach relies on prior sociological judgments, either about what are the main ethnic (‘racial’, and national) groups within a society, or about the key categories that are used within a society, thereby incurring some of the problems associated with the first approach. And it ignores the situationally variable character of ethnic identifications. Furthermore, if people’s ethnic identifications are elicited in terms of prior categories, this violates the ethical principle that sometimes underpins this third approach: the idea that people’s own identifications should be respected. Yet, if a more

172 

M. Hammersley

radical phenomenological approach were to be used, relying solely upon self-­identifications, this would lead to sociological accounts that portray the social world as comprising myriad perspectives on ethnic identity that are potentially incompatible with one another. What attitude should be adopted towards these different approaches? They are often presented as competing alternatives, with proponents of each rejecting the others; though some have argued that they are complementary (Handelman 1977). I suggest that, as far as ontological and epistemological differences between them are concerned, we ought to adopt a more pragmatic attitude, treating them as varying in value according to the issue being studied and the nature of the situation(s) being investigated. This could also be justified on the grounds that, by exploring what each approach is able to offer, we can make a better assessment of it, perhaps with a view to combining several elements from them all to develop a new position that avoids more of the problems (see Jenkins 2008). However, a pragmatic stance could equally be underpinned by the idea that to promote any one of these approaches as the only correct one is to assume, falsely, that the task of sociological analysis is to capture the essential character of phenomena, in this case those relating to ethnicity. Instead, it may be argued, reality is a complex terrain that can only be understood from particular perspectives, these reflecting the particular questions we are addressing. All of these arguments suggest recognising the value of these different approaches rather than treating them as competitors. Finally, it should be noted that, to one degree or another, ethnicity cannot be investigated effectively without taking account of how other sorts of social category and division affect people, notably social class, gender, age/generation, sexual orientation, and ability/disability.7 It certainly cannot be assumed that those who are treated as belonging to the same ethnic category will share exactly the same experiences or life  The interrelations among social categories as they affect individuals are often given the label ‘intersectionality’, although attention was given to these interrelations before the invention of this term, and it is itself contentious: see Hancock 2016. It has sometimes been argued that one or other of these social divisions—notably social class—is the more fundamental one (see, for instance, Cox 1948; Wilson 1978; Miles 1993). But it has also been suggested that racism may disguise itself as social class or ethnic difference. On the danger of misperceiving social class differences as ethnic differences, see Steinberg (1981/2001). 7

7  Ethnicity, Race, and Racism 

173

chances. There is also the interesting question of whether everyone must be assumed to belong to an ethnic category or group. Not doing so is a possibility in terms of all three of the approaches to studying ethnicity I have outlined. In the case of the first, many people may not belong to an ethnic category that involves a community that is sufficiently solidary or culturally homogeneous to count sociologically. The second approach potentially dissolves all ethnic groups, so that there is a sense in which no-one belongs to one—all that exist are claims about and attributions of ethnic identity. And the third approach may well discover that there are some people who do not identify themselves in ethnic terms. As all this makes clear, ethnicity is far from a simple matter. There is a whole range of ethnic (as well as other) categories that can be used to identify people, so that researchers have to make decisions about which ones to use, and for what purposes. The problem here is similar to that arising in the case of social class (see Chap. 5). I have suggested that a pragmatic approach is advisable, attuned to the purposes of the research concerned. However, challenging issues may still arise about the relationship between research, ethics, and politics. And this relationship becomes even more highly charged, of course, when we turn to ‘racial’ categorisations.

Race For a long time, sociologists have had an understandably ambivalent attitude towards appealing to racial differences as a factor explaining social actions and institutional patterns (Nayak 2006; Bhatt 2010; Banton 2015a: 1–2). On the one hand, they almost always deny the existence of racial differences of a biological kind that affect people’s behaviour. On the other hand, they insist that racism—actions and institutional practices shaped by the assumption that such racial differences exist—has had, and still has, a major impact on people’s lives in Western societies, and elsewhere.8 Indeed, they frequently argue that the idea that there are  For an exploration of the philosophical issues surrounding this tension, see Glasgow (2009).

8

174 

M. Hammersley

racial differences in cognition, attitude, and behaviour was central to the spread of Western imperialism across vast swathes of the globe, from the seventeenth century onwards. And they suggest that, even today, it still underpins the policies of Western governments and international companies towards the majority world, as well as attitudes towards those members of Western societies who have been migrants from that world (voluntarily or by compulsion) or who are descendants of such migrants. In other words they treat ‘race’ as an ideological term: it is a fiction that serves to reproduce social divisions and to sustain existing power relationships (see Chap. 2; Guillaumin 1980: 59). In light of this, some have suggested that the word be dropped completely (see Gilroy 1998, 2001; Body-Gendrot 2004); while Banton (2015b: 160) argues that it is of no value for sociological analysis, but can continue to be useful in the context of policy and practice. However, it is difficult to see how sociologists can avoid the term altogether, given that it refers to a concept that may guide people’s behaviour, and underpins the notions of racialisation and racism. In the nineteenth century and earlier, the term ‘race’ was often employed in quite a broad sense to refer to differences between nations, for example in the writings of Taine and Renan (see Todorov 1994: 153–157). Nations were assumed to have characteristic personalities, determined by environmental conditions, and also by patterns of descent (Banton 1980, 1998). Frequently, no sharp distinction was drawn between biological and cultural factors shaping attitudes and behaviour: both were seen as leading to relatively stable differences, perhaps because it was believed that environment could affect biological inheritance, in line with Lamarck’s theory of evolution. It seems that the increasing tendency to restrict the term ‘race’ to ‘colour’ differences—especially between ‘white’ and ‘black’—arose largely as a result of the ways that imperialism brought Western whites into contact with non-Europeans, in particular the Atlantic slave trade (see Bernasconi 2001). Miles (2000: 195) even claims that ‘it was only after Africans were enslaved that African people were represented in negative terms as an Other and that certain of their phenotypical characteristics were signified as expressive of their being a different (and inferior) type of human being’. The imperialist relationship of domination became ingrained in the notion of race, though this

7  Ethnicity, Race, and Racism 

175

took on a variety of forms. Racist ideology sometimes had a religious character—drawing on Christianity, inferior races were occasionally viewed as the descendents of Cain or Ham—but, later, it increasingly adopted a ‘scientific’ guise, different races purportedly being distinguished on the basis of biology.9 And these ideas reflected a deeper process in which the notion of the black Other was sedimented in emotional reactions, from disgust to fear; ones that could then be internalised, as Fanon (1986) argued, by those who were the victims of white racism. However, it is important to emphasise that the assumption that there are racial differences among human beings, in some sense of that term, is by no means restricted to those who believe in the superiority of a ‘white race’. This was also true, for example, of some proponents of Négritude, which Sartre (1976: 59) controversially identified as a form of ‘anti-racist racism’, of the Black Power movement, of the notion of Black Pride, and of Afrocentrism.10 There are also those who believe there are different races, but do not regard any as superior or inferior in all respects (Bliss 2012). For instance, W. E. B. Du Bois (1897) distinguished ‘racialism’, the idea that races exist (as socially and ‘spiritually’, rather than biologically, defined), from ‘racism’, the belief that some races are inferior; and many African-Americans probably adopt a similar view today. Indeed, it is likely that denial by social scientists of the existence of racial differences is felt by many lay people to fly in the face of their experience. As Saldanha (2006: 13) writes: ‘Faced with the repeated assertion that race is a political fiction, some folks might get exasperated: but there are physical differences, aren’t there?’ (see also Glasgow 2009: 4). So, people often rightly insist that there is observable physical variation among human beings that correlates with descent from groups originally living on different parts of the earth’s surface. In this, frequently, they do not draw any clear distinction between race and ethnicity. For their part, social scientists generally regard these beliefs as based on

 An interesting inversion of the religious version is held by those African-Americans, sometimes referred to as ‘Black Hebrew Israelites’, who believe themselves to be the true biological descendents of the ancient Israelites. 10  Of course Fanon (1963: 212–213) is correct that these racialised conceptions were a reaction against European racism. 9

176 

M. Hammersley

stereotypes, this term referring to exaggerated, one-sided, or otherwise distorted conceptions of a typical member of some ‘racial’ or ethnic category. However, while stereotyping certainly occurs, it is important to recognise that there is a sense in which we all necessarily operate on the basis of typifications, perhaps even including ones that take ‘racial’ differences into account (see van den Berghe 1997); and these typifications are, inevitably, simplifications. Given this, it would be a mistake for social scientists simply to deny the existence of racial differences that are largely socially constituted. That there are phenotypical differences in appearance which broadly correspond to various racial classifications is obvious. But this does not mean that there are races in the sense assumed by ‘religious’ or ‘scientific’ racism: distinct groupings of human beings which can be arranged in a hierarchy as regards virtue and/or intelligence; or even ones that can be regarded as separate and distinctively homogeneous in their characteristics. All human beings share the same genes almost entirely. Furthermore, even in genotypical terms, variability among members of what are conventionally taken to be races is as great as any differences between them.11 And, while shared similarities in physical characteristics may derive from gene pools that were sharply differentiated in the past, as a result of geographical segregation and barriers to intermarriage, both these factors have been of declining significance for some time; even if they have not entirely disappeared (Mayr 2002: 91). Furthermore, as already indicated, genotypical differences are probabilistic not absolute; and the relationship between these and phenotypical characteristics (themselves probabilistically distributed) is complex, since inheritance and environmental factors interact, at multiple levels, over the life course (Montagu 1964). For this reason, while there are variations in the physical appearance of human beings, including those that are commonly labelled ‘racial’, they do not correspond to a small number of distinct types. Furthermore, biological differences have no direct, or very determinate, relationship with variation in psychological characteristics or in social behaviour, since these are strongly mediated by socio-cultural factors.  Furthermore, some of the differences may be epigenetic rather than genetic.

11

7  Ethnicity, Race, and Racism 

177

In my view it is best to conceptualise ‘race’ as referring to a set of folk categories—most notably ‘black’ and ‘white’, but not restricted to these— membership of which is inferred, primarily, on the basis of a set of largely given bodily features that are treated as linked together, especially skin colour and facial bone structure.12 As noted earlier, there can be a tendency to treat the largely biologically given nature of ‘racial’ appearances as also extending to the personal characteristics they are taken to signal— examples of which have included relative strength, intelligence, emotionality, virility, musicality, and verbal dexterity—so that these too are treated as biologically fixed (see Miles 1989: 75; Meer and Anip 2015: NP9). And it is important to note that ‘racial’ signs may not only affect what people expect from others, and what respect they believe they deserve, but can also licence exploitation or mistreatment. This is one aspect of what has come to be referred to as the process of racialisation (Barot and Bird 2001). And while, as van den Berghe (1978, 1981) has pointed out, there may be universal processes that encourage this, there are also temporally variable socio-historical processes that shape the production and maintenance of ‘racial’ distinctions and divisions, whether  promoting these or resisting them. A key example is the claim that there are racial differences in intelligence, as measured by intelligence tests. As with other kinds of ability, the development and exercise of the capacities required to score well on these tests must depend on biological as well as on environmental conditions. But the question of what relative contribution each makes to the scores is meaningless, since the conditions on each side are multiple and they interact over time. Furthermore, it seems unlikely that there is a general property of intelligence that underpins all of the various capabilities that approximate to what is referred to as ‘intelligence’ within Western societies today, even less across different types of society. This is recognised informally by the use of such words as ‘streetwise’, ‘canny’, and ‘crafty’, and more formally by psychological theories concerned with multiple  Usually the signs used to determine racial identity are relatively observable ones, but this is not always the case, as with the procedures used for determining Jewish identity in Nazi Germany, or the ‘one drop of blood’ doctrine in the United States. See https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-nuremberg-race-laws and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule. 12

178 

M. Hammersley

forms of intelligence (Gardner 1973). As a result, claims regarding racial differences of this, and other, kinds are highly questionable. It is important to recognise that the picking out of a cluster of features that are taken to signal membership of a particular socially-defined race takes place against the background of a great deal of ‘noise’: even as regards physical features, there is all manner of variation in the shapes of heads, noses, and mouths, in skin tone, in the colour and texture of hair, and so on. And we should note that just as gender is, to a degree, performative so too is ‘race’: there are constructed features, both those designed to heighten identification with a particular ‘race’, for example, Afro hairstyles, as well as those intended to reduce difference, such as skin whitening and hair straightening. Implicated here also are culturally variable notions of health and beauty, that are gendered and built into differences in social status and power. Many of these attributed capabilities and characteristics are similar in general character, and sometimes even in specifics, to those assigned on the basis of ‘ethnic’ signs. Furthermore, while, in the case of ‘race’, the features that serve as signs are often ‘physical’, in the sense that they were inherited rather than culturally adopted, the boundary between the two is fuzzy: they are often mixed or blended together. As Anthias (1992) and Jenkins (2008) argue, racial categorisation needs to be viewed in the larger context of ethnic categorisation; indeed, in some ways it is one variant of this, in which given features of appearance serve as the main signs used for allocating people to different categories. It is also important to note that there are interactive processes involved here: ‘racial’ features are of no sociological, or social, significance if they are not used to infer distinctive rights or characteristics belonging to those who have those features; at the same time, the existence of distinctive features can operate as a prompt to give them significance, even though this will often not be taken up. So, even very visible ‘racial’ differences may play little role in some circumstances, while subtle differences can be assigned great significance in others. In some contexts ‘racial’ features are treated as omni-relevant—always relevant, and relevant to all aspects of a person (see Handelman 1977: 192–193). This often implies very limited ‘legitimate’ forms of contact between ‘races’, with these being highly ritualised, and strong

7  Ethnicity, Race, and Racism 

179

proscription and punishment for deviance.13 However, more common in most parts of the West today is that ‘racial’ inferences only become relevant on particular occasions or in particular contexts; though we should note that this does not rule out their having significant consequences, or that they may be present in latent form all the time. So, the fact that there are not biological races with distinctive personal and social characteristics by no means rules out recognition that race can nevertheless be all-too-real in its consequences, in the form of racism. And, of course, racism has been a central focus for sociological inquiry.

Racism ‘Racism’ belongs to a set of terms that usually refer to negative attitudes towards, and/or treatment of, an out-group whose members are categorised as significantly different from oneself in terms of ‘racial’ or ethnic features, and other characteristics inferred on the basis of these. Not all out-groups will be viewed in this way, but the distinction between ‘the civilised’ and ‘the barbarians’, sometimes with the latter treated as barely human, is quite old. Associated terms are ‘xenophobia’, ‘ethnocentrism’, ‘anti-semitism’, and ‘Islamophobia’, with none of these having clear and standardised usage either. While, at face value, the term ‘racism’ is restricted to treatment of those perceived to belong to a different race, in recent times it has come to be applied to forms of prejudice and discrimination, as well as to inequitable outcomes, that relate to ethnic or national groups as well.14 Indeed, some have argued that racial prejudice and discrimination are often disguised in ethnic terms (see Barker 1981; Taguieff 1990; Balibar and Wallerstein 1991), hence the notion of ‘cultural racism’ (Rattansi 2007: 8, 104–105). So, in this section of the chapter, the terms ‘racial’ and ‘ethnic’ will tend to accompany one another, and not be  For example, in the ethnographic investigations on which Deep South (Davis et al. 1941) was based the black and white researchers had to meet in secret. 14  This has led to disputes, for example about whether English discrimination against the Irish is a form of racism, whether Zionism is racist, whether the conflict between Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda was a racial conflict, and so on. See Rattansi (2007), Jenkins (2008), and on the last of these cases, see Banton (1997: 71–77). 13

180 

M. Hammersley

distinguished. At the same time, Miles (1989) has warned about the danger of conceptual inflation, of overextending the reference of the term ‘racism’; and it is therefore important to distinguish the various meanings given to this word. Before doing this, though, a fundamental conceptual problem needs to be addressed. This is that nearly all the senses given to ‘racism’ are predominantly evaluative in character, so that application of the term amounts to condemnation. This means that what is placed under this heading is largely determined by what are judged to be false and derogatory beliefs and/or unacceptable attitudes and behaviour towards other social groups. And it tends to be assumed that all the phenomena evaluated in this way share distinctive factual characteristics relevant to explaining their causes and consequences. Yet, this is an assumption that is almost never provided with much justification, and there are good reasons to doubt it. Many years ago, in the study of scientific knowledge, Barnes (1974) and Bloor (1976) argued convincingly that true and false beliefs do not involve distinctive types of causation (see Bycroft 2016). So, the fact that racist beliefs are false does not carry any implications for their causes or consequences. And the same is true as regards good and bad actions or outcomes: we cannot assume that the causes and consequences of behaviour condemned as racist are always the same, or that they are wholly different in character from those involved in behaviour of which we approve. Instead, for sociological purposes, our concepts need to be attuned to the range of causal processes actually involved, irrespective of how we evaluate the beliefs or behaviour concerned. This problem is by no means entirely avoided when the focus is shifted to ‘racisms’ rather than racism as a singular phenomena (see Bethencourt 2014; Garner 2017). This allows differentiation between very different social forms that racism can take, but, as Banton (2005) points out, it leaves open the difficult issue of exactly what is and is not to count as an example of racism. And there is still primary reliance on evaluative criteria to determine this. Generally speaking, ‘racism’ is used to refer to a type of inequality, prejudice, and/or discrimination, and it is important to recognise that these words too have evaluative and descriptive senses that are frequently conflated. It tends to be assumed that inequalities are always inequitable,

7  Ethnicity, Race, and Racism 

181

and that prejudices and discrimination are always undesirable, but this is not the case. Inequalities in the distribution of resources are not inequitable when they are attuned to differences in need, so further argument is required to establish that inequalities are unfair by making explicit the principle of justice being assumed. The word ‘prejudice’ means ‘prejudgment’, and it is impossible for us to avoid making prejudgments of some kinds—we cannot assess all of our starting assumptions, and their grounds, simultaneously; and, fortunately, many of them will be correct, even though others will be false.15 Similarly, discrimination is not necessarily unjust. In the context of aesthetics, the word refers to distinguishing what is superior from what is inferior (whether in terms of beauty or craft skill, say). In the social realm we can recognise that discrimination in favour of those who are suffering, or are disadvantaged in some other respect, may be desirable. What all this indicates is the need to make explicit the value-relevance framework in terms of which particular inequalities, prejudices, and forms of discrimination—including those labelled as racist—are being treated as worthy of study; and the means by which they are identified. And this must be followed by more specific conceptualisations that differentiate these phenomena in terms of their causes or consequences. The fundamental point is that it is a mistake to assume that goodness/ badness—of any kind—is a property existing in the world, and one that is caused and that has effects; in the same sense as is true, say, of variations in power, social class, or ethnicity. Rather, we assign evaluative words on the basis of value assumptions to which we are committed, and it is only in terms of some set of commitments that things, events, actions, or outcomes are good or bad, right or wrong. Given this, the predominantly evaluative character of ‘racism’ leads to questions about whether the term can play any justifiable role in academic investigations concerned solely with factual matters (Banton 1997: 45). Nevertheless, at least three coherent factual senses of the term ‘racism’ can be identified in sociological work.16 While these are ideal types, so  For usage of ‘prejudice’ in this sense, see Gadamer (1989: Part II).  These correspond to types of explanation used to account for prejudice and discrimination against people assigned to other social categories, such as gender, age, or ability/disability. 15 16

182 

M. Hammersley

that particular versions may lie on their borders, they are significantly different in character from one another, as well as in their analytic implications and methodological requirements.

Racism as Prejudice-Based Discrimination This first sense refers to the differential treatment of members of explicitly identified ‘racial’ or ethnic groups on the basis of a set of beliefs that is held to justify this. So, first of all, these beliefs treat people as belonging to two or more distinct racial or ethnic categories. Secondly, members of these are taken to have different psychological and social characteristics— for instance, levels of intelligence, temperaments, or moral qualities—as well as differences in appearance. Thirdly, the categories are ranked as superior or inferior to one another. Some elaborate typologies of ‘races’ were developed in Western thought, from the eighteenth century onwards. One of the earliest was that of the German physician and anthropologist Blumenbach in 1795, distinguishing between: Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American-Indian, and Malayan races.17 As noted earlier, there was also much discussion of the origins of these ‘races’, drawing on religious and scientific ideas (see Banton 1997: ch3). Early nineteenth-century anthropologists were divided between monogenists, who insisted on a single origin for all humankind, with different ‘races’ being divergent products of processes of natural development, and polygenists, who believed that the various ‘races’ had distinct origins (see Banton 1977, 1980; Stocking 1987). While some writers claimed to identify a fixed set of races, others reformulated the idea of ‘race’ in evolutionist terms, with non-Europeans representing more primitive forms of human life that were yet to evolve into the ‘higher’ form(s) represented by the West; and this was later reinforced by Social Darwinism. All these beliefs tended to produce attitudes that led to differential treatment of those deemed to be inferior, these attitudes often being  Blumenbach cautioned against treating this typology as picking out entirely distinct groups that are hierarchically differentiated, as did Herder, who drew on his work (Montagu 1964: 2–3). However, the concept of race, and racial typologies, came to be ingrained in physical anthropology in the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century. 17

7  Ethnicity, Race, and Racism 

183

institutionalised in legal and moral rules as well as in forms of action. For instance, racist beliefs of this sort were used to justify the appalling Atlantic trade in  Africans, and  their enslavement in the United States, and the establishment of the apartheid system in South Africa (Walton and Caliendo 2010). In some versions there is an additional element: malign power is ascribed to the ‘inferior’ racial or ethnic group, its members being seen as engaged in a world-wide conspiracy against ‘superior’ groups.18 The most obvious example of this is anti-semitism, but it is also sometimes a component of Islamophobia. It is perhaps necessary to note that differential treatment according to ‘racial’ membership can range from the punitive or exploitative, through a toleration of differences, to condescending efforts to ‘improve’ ‘inferior’ ‘races’.

Racism as Unconscious Discrimination The second conception of racism explains differential treatment of members of racial or ethnic categories as the product of largely subconscious attitudes, rather than explicitly held beliefs. One result is that perpetrators will frequently seek to justify or excuse their actions (to themselves and others) in terms that do not relate to racial or ethnic distinctions. While this is often referred to as ‘rationalisation’, we should remember that in Freud’s use of this term people are not aware that this is what they are doing. While I am not suggesting a Freudian perspective, and this second conception of racism does not depend upon it, we do need to recognise that people’s awareness of the grounds of their own behaviour can vary all the way from relatively clear and accurate understanding, through fleeting and/or distorted awareness, to virtually complete insensibility. We should also note that this kind of bias may take direct and/or indirect forms. The direct form involves subconscious reactions to others on the basis of their perceived race or ethnic identity. In its indirect form differential treatment is mediated through relatively unconscious 18

 This is the sense of the term used by Mosse (1985) in his ‘history of European racism’.

184 

M. Hammersley

attitudes towards particular personal and social characteristics that are differentially distributed across racial or ethnic categories. For example, physical attractiveness has considerable significance in shaping the way we behave towards other people, and if our evaluations of attractiveness are tied to models that are more easily approximated by those with some sorts of ‘racial’ feature than others, then discrimination may well result. Much the same applies to attractiveness in a broader sense, relating to people’s modes of interactional engagement, in terms of both verbal and non-verbal behaviour. Often these direct and indirect forms are interrelated. For example, in selecting people for jobs, subconscious racial or ethnic bias can enter through judgements about what qualities are relevant, as well as through assessments of whether candidates possess those qualities: there may be an unconscious tendency to assume, without evidence about the individuals concerned, that applicants from particular minority ‘racial’ groups lack the necessary qualities. The processes involved here can be complex, and may go in different directions. For instance, areas whose inhabitants belong predominantly to one or more ethnic minorities can be over-policed or under-policed, both tendencies potentially exacerbating inequalities. Similarly, it has been argued that teachers in UK schools may be more likely to discipline African-Caribbean students than others for the same offences. But it has also been suggested that, in some circumstances, teachers are less likely to discipline these students because they regard their behaviour as at least partly a response to past discrimination, because they fear being accused of racism, and/or because doing so will escalate indiscipline and conflict. The point is that in both cases differential treatment by race/ethnicity is involved, and both sorts of treatment could result in differential outcomes, for example as regards the achievement of educational qualifications. This kind of unconscious racism is usually regarded as even more pervasive in Western societies today than the first overt kind. By the second half of the twentieth century, the expression of racist beliefs had become proscribed in many public contexts (though it has resurfaced recently, particularly online), but many sociological commentators have argued that unconscious bias remains widespread. In practice, of course, this second form of racism can be difficult to distinguish from the first,

7  Ethnicity, Race, and Racism 

185

because those who consciously hold racist beliefs and attitudes may hide them by appealing to other motives for their actions, being aware that otherwise they would suffer moral condemnation and/or be subject to legal prosecution. Nevertheless, these first two conceptions of racism must be kept analytically distinct because they assume somewhat different causal mechanisms and involve different evidential requirements.

Institutional or Structural Racism The third sense of the term ‘racism’ does not treat it as dependent on beliefs or attitudes, conscious or unconscious, on the part of individual actors but rather as arising from institutional arrangements or structural features of a society (Carmichael and Hamilton 1967; Bonilla-Silva 1997).19 It is argued that these arrangements or structures have the effect of disadvantaging members of particular racial or ethnic categories, irrespective of formal commitments to non-discriminatory or ‘colour-blind’ policies on the part of governments, organisations, or individual people. For example, it may be claimed that a health service divided between publicly funded and privately funded sectors that differ sharply in the quality of care they provide, of the kind that exists in the United States, disproportionately disadvantages ‘black’ people because more of them live at or below the poverty line. Or it could be argued that currently influential conceptions of ability and appropriate behaviour within schools are such that members of some racial or ethnic groups are more likely to succeed educationally than others; or it may be that what is included in the school curriculum, this forming the basis for tests and examinations, is much more appealing, or much better known, to members of some groups than to those of others. More than this, it could be that the curriculum, for example in its coverage of history, systematically demotivates members of some categories because the contributions of  Note that some discussion of ‘institutional racism’, and perhaps also of ‘structural racism’, conflates them with what I have referred to here as ‘unconscious discrimination’. It is perhaps also necessary to emphasise that neither the first nor the second type of explanation is necessarily psychological, in the sense of treating racism solely as a characteristic of individuals. Both racist beliefs and unconscious bias will often be produced by features of the societies in which people live. 19

186 

M. Hammersley

their ancestors are ignored, downgraded, or obscured. A slightly different version is where someone makes decisions, for example in selecting people for occupational positions, that are influenced by the assumption that others—fellow workers, customers, or clientele—are prejudiced and that appointing someone from a particular ethnic or racial group would cause problems. While people who do this could be prejudiced themselves, this is not necessarily the case, in which case structural racism is involved. In these various ways, racial or ethnic differences in outcomes may be produced. Arrangements and structural features can operate in such a way as to produce inequalities even if people in the society no longer have racist beliefs or assumptions: all that is necessary is that they comply with institutional requirements or others’ expectations—in doing this they will perpetuate those inequalities. Also part of this would be a failure to take account of the unintended consequences of particular policies or arrangements, or to remedy those consequences that have differential effects on racial or ethnic groups. It is on this basis that ‘colour-blind’ policies are criticised because they fail to eliminate, or at least reduce, differences in outcome.

Discussion As already indicated, these three senses of ‘racism’ vary in the causal mechanisms they assume; and they also differ sharply in their evidential demands. The first offers a clearly defined factor to explain differential treatment or outcomes: commitment on the part of individuals, organisations, or governments to a distinctive set of beliefs leads to differential treatment on racial or ethnic grounds. To establish the operation of racism in this sense, evidence is required that the relevant agents are committed to racist beliefs, and that these agents engage in differential treatment of members of racial or ethnic groups in the manner predicted. It may also need to be shown that this produces outcome inequality—for a variety of reasons, this connection cannot automatically be assumed, much depends on people’s responses to discrimination, and on other factors that mediate between acts of differential treatment and outcomes (see Gomm 2012). This first view of racism does not rule out the likelihood

7  Ethnicity, Race, and Racism 

187

that the prevalence of racist beliefs and attitudes will have social structural sources, but if this is included as part of the theory then evidence also needs to be provided to show that these sources are the key causal factor. When we turn to the second conception of racism, the mechanism involved is parallel, but significantly different: this time it is subconscious assumptions that lead to differential treatment. There is strong evidence for the role of such assumptions in many aspects of human behaviour, and it seems very likely that they are important in relation to ethnicity and race. However, by their very nature, such assumptions are more hidden than beliefs, and the task of providing evidence therefore becomes more demanding. Identifying an unconscious bias on the part of actors relies on detecting inadvertent signs, and above all on documenting consistent patterns of behaviour that belie the justifications or excuses that actors provide for them; patterns that are in line with the hypothetical bias. That such biases operate is very likely to be true in societies with a history of colonialism or imperialism, but identifying their operation and providing evidence of this in particular cases is nevertheless a challenging task. One of the problems that has to be dealt with here is the contextual variability of all action, which may obscure a bias but can also give the appearance that bias is operating when it is not. Delgado and Stefancic (2001: 1) indirectly illustrate this in outlining some of the areas in which everyday racism operates: A child raises her hand repeatedly in a fourth-grade class; the teacher either recognizes her or does not. […] A woman goes to a new car lot ready to buy; salespeople stand about talking to each other or all converge trying to help her. A jogger in a park gives a brief acknowledgment to an approaching walker; the walker returns the greeting or walks by silently.

In each of these instances, on particular occasions ‘race’ may or may not make a difference—and, even where it does, there are multiple causes of differential action, so that detecting the role of unconscious racist assumptions is by no means straightforward. There is also the danger of simply dismissing the reasons people give for their actions—as rationalisations unconsciously designed to disguise those assumptions—rather than

188 

M. Hammersley

examining them more carefully. Finally, here again, it is necessary to show that differential treatment in line with the inferred bias does actually cause the aggregate or outcome inequality concerned. The third conception of ‘racism’, which focuses on institutional arrangements or structural factors rather than on the characteristics of individuals, poses problems even more severe than the second. What is required is not just to document that the specified institutional arrangements or structural factors exist, but also to show that they operate in the manner claimed, and that they cause the differential racial or ethnic outcome to be explained. It is often argued, for example, that the fact that the UK was an imperialist power, or that the United States was founded on slavery, means that racial bias is built into the political, economic, and social structures of these societies. This is certainly very plausible, but evidence is required to establish in what precise ways this bias operates, and to show that these structures produce the outcomes to be explained.20 Without this evidence, what is being put forward is only a fruitful hypothesis at best. Perhaps it needs to be added that, even where the evidential requirements are met successfully, this does not establish that a particular institutional arrangement or structure is wrong. Many considerations must go into evaluating institutional arrangements—interracial or interethnic fairness is not the only one—and these considerations will often conflict, requiring some judgment to be made about their relative priority. In much sociological research, whichever of these three interpretations of ‘racism’ is adopted, there is frequently a failure to provide the necessary evidence to show that the presumed cause is operating, and that it has the effect claimed. For example, in the case of the first two, it is not uncommon to find researchers identifying signs of what they take to be discriminatory attitudes or behaviour without investigating the intentions, motives, or causes behind these. Instead, it is assumed that discrimination can be easily identified. For example, on the basis of research on everyday racism in The Netherlands, Essed (2004: 132 ) remarks that:  Furthermore, within Europe, a broader understanding of migration patterns and their effects (see, for instance, Garrell 2019) would almost certainly be relevant, and the same may be true elsewhere. 20

7  Ethnicity, Race, and Racism 

189

‘There is no way not to recognise racial and other injustices once you have learned how to see them’. But injustices cannot be ‘seen’ in any straightforward sense; even though there are visual and other clues to the existence of what is being evaluated as unjust, and expertise in ‘reading’ these may be learned. While the reports of those who believe they have been subjected to discrimination constitute important evidence that must not be ignored, sociologists ought not to accept anyone’s account of a complex matter of fact at face value: they must assess its likely validity, and where they conclude that this is high, they have a responsibility to put forward convincing evidence in support of their conclusions. Another problem is that, where discriminatory behaviour is documented, it is often concluded, on inadequate evidence, that this is frequent and widespread, and that this behaviour is the crucial factor in producing the unequal outcome to be explained (for illustrations, see Foster et al. 1996). In the case of the third concept of racism, very often it seems to be assumed that the operation of institutional or structural factors that disadvantage minority ethnic groups can simply be inferred from the existence of an outcome inequality. This is exactly the reverse of the process that is required in order to establish the validity of such an explanation. Indeed, it is sometimes left rather unclear exactly what arrangements or structures are being assumed to cause the disadvantage. Frequently, the term ‘institutional’ or ‘structural’ racism appears to be used primarily as a way of insisting that racism can operate in the absence of people displaying evidently racist beliefs. It is, of course, certainly plausible that the values, norms, and institutionalised practices within a society reflect the interests of some categories of people more than those of others. It also seems likely that the social structures to be found in a country like the United States—whose economy and society was, to a large extent, founded on black slavery—or one like the UK—that operated a large empire that traded in slaves—will have been, and will continue to be, shaped by these factors. However, the processes involved will be complex, and may include countervailing tendencies. If an adequate sociological explanation is to be produced, these processes must be documented; yet this is by no means always done in a sustained fashion, and inadequate

190 

M. Hammersley

conceptualisation is one of the reasons for this.21 Singh (2000: 37) has argued that the meaning of the term ‘institutional racism’ has been ‘stretched and inflated’ and is also ‘remarkably hollow’: ‘through asserting that racism can be unintentional and covert, it avoids the task of empirically identifying causal relations. Indeed, the term has often been used simply as a slogan’. One reason for this failure to provide sufficient evidence is that, frequently, institutional or structural racism is reified: it is an abstract noun that, in effect, is taken to refer to an evil agent at large in the world. An example is Back’s claim that ‘racism is a scavenger ideology’ (quoted in Meer and Nayak 2015: NP15). Similarly, Saldanha (2006: 20) reports that: ‘race is devious in inventing new ways of chaining bodies. Race is creative, constantly morphing, now disguised as sexual desire, now as la mission civilatrice, all the while weaving new elements in its wake’. There is a parallel here with the concept of evil as it has been used in some forms of Christianity: this was often personified as Satan, or the devil, who is capable of precisely the kind of deception and manipulation that Saldanha attributes to racism. Disease analogies are also sometimes employed. One effect of this reification is that racism becomes both explanans and explanandum—racism causes racism—which is useless for any form of sociological explanation. So, all three of these types of explanation for differential treatment or outcomes are plausible. However, establishing whether they are operating in particular cases is a demanding task. If we take the example of police use of stop-and-search, we can note that, since the policy is usually applied in areas of high crime, that these tend to be poorer areas of big cities, and that some racial or ethnic minorities are over-represented in those areas, and have a younger age-profile, their members are more likely to be to be stopped and searched than the average member of the national population. Is this a case of structural racism? Without further clarification of the term this is difficult to say. Of course, it could also be true that a significant proportion of the police force display subconscious or  There are particular problems with appeals to structures: while widely used in social science, the term ‘social structure’ carries several possible meanings, and these are frequently vague (See Chap. 1). 21

7  Ethnicity, Race, and Racism 

191

explicit bias against racial or ethnic minorities, and that this affects who is stopped and searched. At the same time, in some areas, members of particular ethnic minorities may be more heavily involved in particular kinds of crime, more likely to use knives or guns, or more likely to be selling drugs, so that police stereotypes are not wholly inaccurate. Yet poverty, and even the tendency for some ethnic groups to be more involved in crime, can themselves be a product of racism or of other structural factors. There are complexities here that must be disentangled. In summary, it is important to be clear about which conception of racism is being employed, to spell out the value-framework in terms of which inequalities and/or discrimination are being identified, to indicate the causal mechanisms assumed, and to document these and their effects, dealing with the evidential demands that this involves. Yet, very often, these requirements are neglected. Beyond this, though, as already mentioned, we can ask whether the term ‘racism’ can play any useful role in sociology, given its evaluative character and the resulting conflation of factual and evaluative considerations. Much of the failure to handle the concept effectively for sociological purposes stems from the (wholly appropriate) condemnatory force that the term carries with it. Perhaps what it refers to can be better handled, for social scientific purposes, under the headings of ‘inequalities’, ‘prejudice’, and ‘discrimination’, with these terms used in value-relevant factual senses? This is certainly not to deny the role of the attitudes, practices, and outcomes that the term ‘racism’ has been used identify, but that term can obstruct effective sociological analysis because the negative evaluation it carries tends to discourage sufficiently careful identification of the mechanisms involved and examination of the evidence.

Conclusion In this chapter I have explored some of the complexities surrounding the terms ‘ethnicity’, ‘race’, and ‘racism’. None of them has a single standard meaning, and all are frequently used in ways that leave their senses rather vague. Furthermore, while the different conceptions involved can be

192 

M. Hammersley

distinguished, it is not always clear which is the most appropriate. This is especially obvious in the case of ‘ethnicity’, and I suggested that a pragmatic attitude ought to be adopted here, varying the sense given to the term according to the purposes of the investigation. ‘Race’ is even more challenging. Most sociologists have sought to distance themselves from the term, whether by putting it within inverted commas or by speaking of ‘racialisation’.While it is clear that there are not separate biological races of humans with distinctive mental and behavioural characteristics, sociologists must take account of the fact that variations in appearance that broadly correspond to ‘racial’ categorisations do exist, and that these variations are often treated as socially significant; there are many people who believe or assume that there are separate races, and this is not restricted to white supremacists. And, of course, such categorisations are likely to lead to differential treatment of others, whether consciously or unconsciously, which may well lead over time to cultural differences emerging between ‘racial’ groups. At the same time, differential treatment can  serve a variety of functions: as a vehicle for oppression or as a defence against it, as a means of dividing people or bringing them together.22 How phenotypical differences of the kind associated with racial categorisation are interpreted is shaped by a variety of factors: universal or historical, global or local. So, while it is true that there is no biological evidence for the existence of separate races having distinctive physical and mental characteristics, in many societies racial categories are institutionalised and shape people’s dealings with one another. This is often summarised by saying that race is a social construction, an ideological fiction. However, this implies that only biological features are real, which is an odd stance for sociologists to adopt. It is certainly not the way they treat other social phenomena, such as social class divisions or the economic mode of production. This points to a serious need for clarification of exactly what is meant by the argument that races are social constructions, relating this to problems with social constructionism more generally. Of course, the motive for sociologists denying the reality of racial differences is that they wish to counter  For instance, Štrkalj (2007) has suggested that in China racial categorisation has been a factor generating social cohesion among an ethnically diverse population. 22

7  Ethnicity, Race, and Racism 

193

racism. However, in my view this is to allow political commitments (albeit laudable ones) to distort the process of sociological inquiry, and it results in paradoxical ontological assumptions about racial divisions. I outlined three conceptions of racism, these differing in the causal processes they assume, in the kinds of evidence required to show that they are in operation, and in what is needed to demonstrate that they lead to the outcomes they are claimed to produce. However, I noted the problems for sociological analysis caused by the term’s evaluative character. Furthermore, the value judgments assumed—about injustice, prejudice, and discrimination—are rarely made explicit; they are simply taken for granted. This becomes clearer once we move from some generic notion of ‘inequality’ towards specifying what equity would require  in particular cases. I also argued that there is frequently a failure to provide the level of evidence necessary when racism is used as an explanatory factor. This is especially common where what is appealed to is unconscious bias or institutional/structural racism. In the case of the latter, there is a tendency to reify racism as an evil agent operating in the world that brings about unjust outcomes. However, this idea is of no value for explanatory purposes. It also exacerbates neglect of the distinction between evaluative and factual issues. All this reflects the politicised character of this field of inquiry. Indeed, the political goals of researchers are often made explicit. This is true, for example, of Critical Race Theory, which Rollock and Gillborn (2011: 1) describe as: ‘a radical lens through which to make sense of, deconstruct and challenge racial inequality in society’. Van den Berghe (1995: 358) argues that, as a result of this politicisation, ‘invective, self-censorship, moralism, indignation, bias, and plain intellectual dishonesty [have] frequently contaminated scholarly discourse, and continue to do so’. There is incompatibility between the requirements that must be met in formulating concepts for the purposes of academic investigation and what will best serve political purposes. And, in my view, there is an urgent need for detachment from evaluation in dealing with these issues sociologically. We require a realistic understanding of the sources of ethnic and racial identifications or divisions, and of the effects they have; and gaining this is not aided by conflating sociological research with political struggle,

194 

M. Hammersley

however appealing that may seem. That there has been, and continues to be, deplorable prejudice and discrimination against ethnic and racial minorities is undoubtedly true, but problems in conceptualising the processes involved seriously hinder effective sociological investigation.

References Anthias, F. (1992). Connecting “Race” and Ethnic Phenomena. Sociology, 26(3), 421–438. Back, L. (1996). New Ethnicities and Urban Culture: Racism and Multiculture in Young People’s Lives. London: UCL Press. Balibar, E., & Wallerstein, I. (1991). Race, Class, Nation: Ambiguous Identities. London: Verso. Banton, M. (1977). The Idea of Race. London: Tavistock. Banton, M. (1980). The Idiom of Race. Research in Race and Ethnic Relations, 2, 21–42. Banton, M. (1997). Ethnic and Racial Consciousness (2nd ed.). London: Longman. Banton, M. (1998). Racial Theories (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Banton, M. (2005). Three Current Issues in Ethnic and Racial Studies. British Journal of Sociology, 56(4), 621–633. Banton, M. (2015a). What We Now Know About Race and Ethnicity. New York: Berghahn. Banton, M. (2015b). Superseding Race in Sociology: The Perspective of Critical Rationalism. In K. Murji & J. Solomos (Eds.), Theories of Race and Ethnicity: Contemporary Debates and Perspectives. Cambridge University Press. Barker, M. (1981). The New Racism. London: Junction Books. Barnes, B. (1974). Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Barot, R., & Bird, J. (2001). Racialization: The Genealogy and Critique of a Concept. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 24(4), 601–618. Barth, F. (Ed.). (1969). Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Bernasconi, R. (2001). Who Invented the Concept of Race. In R. Bernasconi (Ed.), Race. Oxford: Blackwell. Bethencourt, F. (2014). Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

7  Ethnicity, Race, and Racism 

195

Bhatt, C. (2004). Contemporary Geopolitics and “Alterity” Research. In M.  Bulmer & J.  Solomos (Eds.), Researching Race and Racism. London: Routledge. Bhatt, C. (2010). The Spirit Lives On: Races and Disciplines. In P. H. Collins & J.  Solomos (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Race and Ethnic Studies. London: Sage. Bliss, C. (2012). Race Decoded: The Genomic Fight for Social Justice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bloor, D. (1976). Knowledge and Social Imagery. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Body-Gendrot, S. (2004). Race a Word Too Much? In J. Solomos & M. Bulmer (Eds.), Race and Racism. London: Routledge. Bonilla-Silva, E. (1997). Rethinking Racism: Toward a Structural Interpretation. American Sociological Review, 62(3), 465–480. Brubaker, R. (2004). Ethnicity without Groups. Cambridge, MS: Harvard University Press. Bulmer, M. (1986). Race and Ethnicity. In R. G. Burgess (Ed.), Key Variables in Social Investigation. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Bycroft, M. (2016). How to Save the Symmetry Principle. In T.  Sauer & R. Scholl (Eds.), The Philosophy of Historical Case Studies (Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science) (Vol. 319). Cham: Springer. Carmichael, S., & Hamilton, A. (1967). Black Power: The Politics of Liberation. New York: Random House. Cashmore, E. (1988). Dictionary of Race and Ethnic Relations (2nd ed.). London: Routledge. Cohen, A. (1985). The Symbolic Construction of Community. London: Tavistock. Cox, O. (1948). Race, Caste and Class. New York: Monthly Review Press. Davis, A., Gardner, B., & Gardner, M. (1941). Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Delgado, R., & Stefancic, J. (2001). Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. New York: New York University Press. Dixon-Román, E. (2017). Inheriting Possibility: Social Reproduction and Quantification in Education. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1897). The Conservation of Races. Occasional Papers, No.2, The American Negro Academy, Washington DC. Eriksen, T. (1993). Ethnicity and Nationalism. London: Pluto Press.

196 

M. Hammersley

Essed, P. (2004). Naming the Unnameable: Sense and Sensibilities in Researching Racism. In M.  Bulmer & J.  Solomos (Eds.), Researching Race and Racism. London: Routledge. Fanon, F. (1963). The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press. Fanon, F. (1986). Black Skin, White Mask. London: Pluto Press. Fenton, S. (1999). Ethnicity: Racism, Class and Culture. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Fenton, S. (2010). Ethnicity (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Polity. Foster, P., Gomm, R., & Hammersley, M. (1996). Constructing Educational Inequality. London: Falmer. Gadamer, H.-G. (1989). Truth and Method. London: Bloomsbury. (First published in German in 1960). Gardner, H. (1973). Frames of Mind. New York: Basic Books. Garner, S. (2017). Racisms: An Introduction. London: Sage. Garrell, P. (2019). The Unsettling of Europe. London: Allen Lane. Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Gilroy, P. (1998). Race Ends Here. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 21(5), 838–847. Gilroy, P. (2001). Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Colour Line. Cambridge, MS: Harvard University Press. Glasgow, J. (2009). A Theory of Race. New York: Routledge. Gomm, R. (2012). Qualitative Causal Analysis and the Fallacies of Composition and Division: The Example of Ethnic Inequalities in Educational Achievement. In B.  Cooper, J.  Glaesser, R.  Gomm, & M.  Hammersley (Eds.), Challenging the Qualitative-Quantitative Divide. London: Continuum/ Bloomsbury. Griffin, J. (1961). Black Like Me. Boston MS: Houghton Mifflin. Guillaumin, C. (1980). The Idea of Race and Its Elevation to Autonomous, Scientific and Legal Status. In UNESCO (Ed.), Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (pp. 37–68). Paris: UNESCO. Hall, S. (1993). New Ethnicities. In J. Donald & A. Rattansi (Eds.), Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. London: Sage/Open University Press. Hammersley, M. (2006). Review of Analyzing Race Talk, by van den Berg et al. Qualitative Research, 6(1), 121–124. Hammersley, M. (2014). The Limits of Social Science. London: Sage. Hammersley, M. (2017). On the Role of Values in Social Research: Weber Vindicated? Sociological Research Online, 22(1), 7. Retrieved from http:// www.socresonline.org.uk/22/1/7.html.

7  Ethnicity, Race, and Racism 

197

Hancock, A.-M. (2016). Intersectionality: An Intellectual History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Handelman, D. (1977). The Organization of Ethnicity. Ethnic Groups, 1(3), 187–200. Hutchinson, J., & Smith, A.  D. (1996). Introduction. In J.  Hutchinson & A. D. Smith (Eds.), Ethnicity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jenkins, R. (2008). Rethinking Ethnicity (2nd ed.). London: Sage. Lockwood, D. (1964). Social Integration and System Integration. In G.  Zollschan & H.  Hirsch (Eds.), Explorations in Social Change. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin. Mac an Ghaill, M. (1999). Contemporary Racisms and Ethnicities. Buckingham: Open University Press. Mason, D. (1990). A Rose by Any Other Name…? Categorisation, Identity, and Social Science. New Community, 17, 123–133. Mayr, E. (2002). The Biology of Race and the Concept of Equality. Daedalus, 131(1), 89–94. McKay, J., & Lewins, F. (1978). Ethnicity and the Ethnic Group: A Conceptual Analysis and Reformulation. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 4(1), 412–427. Meer, N., & Nayak, A. (2015). Race Ends Where? Race, Racism and ContemporarySociology. Sociology, 49(6), NP3–N20. Miles, R. (1989). Racism. London: Routledge. Miles, R. (1993). Racism After ‘Race Relations’. London: Routledge. Miles, R. (2000). Appropos the Idea of “Race”… Again. In L. Back & J. Solomos (Eds.), Theories of Race and Racism. London: Routledge. Modood, T. (1994). Political Blackness and British Asians. Sociology, 28(4), 859–876. Moerman, M. (1968). Being Lue: Uses and Abuses of Ethnic Identification. In J. Helm (Ed.), Essays on the Problem of Tribe, Proceedings of the 1967 Annual Spring Meeting of the American Ethnological Society (pp.  153–169). Seattle: University of Washington Press. Montagu, A. (Ed.). (1964). The Concept of Race. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Mosse, G. (1985). Toward the Final Solution: A history of European racism (2nd ed.). Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Murji, K., & Solomos, J. (Eds.). (2005). Racialization: Studies in Theory and Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nayak, A. (2006). After Race: Ethnography, Race and Post-Race Theory. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 29(3), 411–430.

198 

M. Hammersley

Quinn, J. (2019). In Search of the Phoenicians. Princeton, MS: Princeton University Press. Rattansi, A. (2007). Racism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rex, J. (2002). The Fundamentals of the Theory of Ethnicity. In S. Malesevic & M. Haugaard (Eds.), Making Sense of Collectivity: Ethnicity, Nationalism and Globalisation. London: Pluto Press. Rollock, N., & Gillborn, D. (2011). Critical Race Theory (CRT), British Educational Research Association Online Resource. Retrieved August 4, 2019, from https://www.bera.ac.uk/publication/critical-race-theory-crt. Roth, G. (1968). Introduction. In M.  Weber (Ed.), Economy and Society. New York: Bedminster Press. Saldanha, A. (2006). Reontologising Race: The Machinic Geography of Phenotype. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24, 9–24. Sartre, J.-P. 1976. Black Orpheus (S. W. Allen, trans.). Paris: Présence Africaine. Singh, G. (2000). The Concept and Context of Institutional Racism. In A. Marlow & B. Loveday (Eds.), After Macpherson: Policing after the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry. Russell House: Lyme Regis. Small, S. (2004). Researching “Mixed-Race” Experience Under Slavery: Concepts, Methods and Data. In M. Bulmer & J. Solomos (Eds.), Researching Race and Racism. London: Routledge. Smith, A. (1989). The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: Blackwell. Sprigle, R. (1949). In the Land of Jim Crow. New York: Simon and Schuster. Steinberg, S. (1981/2001). The Ethnic Myth. Boston, MS: Beacon Books. Stocking, G. (1987). Victorian Anthropology. New York: Free Press. Stone, J. (1995). Race, Ethnicity and the Weberian Legacy. American Behavioral Scientist, 38(3), 391–401. Štrkalj, G. (2007). The Status of the Race Concept in Contemporary Biological Anthropology: A Review. Anthropologist, 9(1), 73–78. Retrieved from http:// www.krepublishers.com/02-Journals/T-Anth/Anth-09-0-000-000-2007Web/Anth-09-1-000-000-2007-Abst-PDF/Anth-09-1-073-078-2007422-%20%8Atrkalj-G/Anth-09-1-073-078-2007-422-%20%8AtrkaljG-Tt.pdf. Taguieff, P. (1990). The New Cultural Racism in France. Telos, 83, 109–122. Todorov, T. (1994). On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought. Cambridge, MS: Harvard University Press. Tönnies, F. (1955). Community and Association (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (First published in German in 1887).

7  Ethnicity, Race, and Racism 

199

Van den Berg, H., Wetherell, M., & Houtkoop-Steenstra, H. (Eds.). (2003). Analyzing Race Talk. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Van den Berghe, P. (1978). Race and Ethnicity: Sociobiological Perspective. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 1(4), 401–411. Van den Berghe, P. (1981). The Ethnic Phenomenon. Westport, CT: Praeger. Van den Berghe, P. (1995). Does Race Matter? Nations and Nationalism, 1(3), 357–368. Van den Berghe, P. (1997). Rehabilitating Stereotypes. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 20(1), 1–16. Wallman, S. (1979). Introduction: The Scope for Ethnicity. In S.  Wallman (Ed.), Ethnicity at Work. London: Macmillan. Walton, F., & Caliendo, S. (2010). Origins of the Concept of Race. In S.  Caliendo & C.  McIlwain (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Race and Ethnicity. London: Routledge. Wilson, W. J. (1978). The Declining Significance of Race. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

8 Power

At one time, sociologists, and other social scientists, engaged in considerable efforts to define the term ‘power’.1 Furthermore, it was common to try to clarify its relationship with associated terms, such as ‘authority’ and ‘influence’; and to identify different types of power, for instance by distinguishing physical coercion from economic control. By contrast, in many quarters today the term ‘power’ is used in ways that are vague or ambiguous, with little attention given to how it relates to associated terms, or to distinctions among the various forms that power can take. And yet, probably even more than previously, power is now treated by social scientists as central to social life. Indeed, some assume that their task is to challenge, resist, or erode it.2 In this chapter I begin by exploring variation in the meaning given to ‘power’, and some of the debates that have taken place about it. I then consider how the term can best be defined, drawing a distinction between two rather different senses—both of which are central to sociological  See Lukes (1978), Wrong (1979), Lane and Stenlund (1984), and references in these sources. Many relevant articles are collected in Scott (1994). 2  For instance, many writers influenced by Foucault view science as itself implicated in modern forms of power, and believe that its role in this respect must be subverted. 1

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Hammersley, Troubling Sociological Concepts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51644-4_8

201

202 

M. Hammersley

concerns. I argue that the meaning of the term must be detached from attitudes towards what it refers to, whether negative or positive; and, in the course of the discussion, I try to counter some of the assumptions deriving from these attitudes that have shaped the treatment of power.

Debates About Power There is considerable variation in how the term ‘power’ has been defined, as Lukes (2005: 61) notes: We speak and write about power, in innumerable situations, and we usually know, or think we know, perfectly well what we mean. In daily life and in scholarly works, we discuss its location and its extent, who has more and who less, how to gain, resist, seize, harness, secure, tame, share, spread, distribute, equalize or maximize it, how to render it more effective and how to limit or avoid its effects. And yet, among those who have reflected on the matter, there is no agreement about how to define it, how to conceive it, how to study it and, if it can be measured, how to measure it. There are endless debates about such questions, which show no sign of imminent resolution, and there is not even agreement about whether all this disagreement matters.

One area of disagreement is that some commentators define ‘power’ as ‘power to’ carry out some type of action (Morriss 2006), whereas it is more usually treated as ‘power over’ others. The first is the broader sense. It would include, for example, power over the physical environment—such as control over deployable energy (see Adams 1975)—as well as, more mundanely, the power to speak (in the sense of to use a language), perhaps even the power to walk. By contrast, most sociological usage restricts the meaning to ‘power over’. This was also true, for example, of Dahl’s (1957) very influential definition in political science: ‘A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do’.

8 Power 

203

And it was true of Lukes’s (1978) equally influential critique of this definition.3 In my view, the definition of ‘power’ as ‘power to’ is too wide for sociological purposes. However, ‘power over’ is not entirely satisfactory either, since this phrasing carries the implication, one that is explicit in much usage, that power is always a matter of preventing others from acting in a way they otherwise would, or inducing them to act in a way they do not (or should not) want to. As I will suggest later, this does not take sufficient account of the enabling character of power, which can operate even when it involves an agent directing the behaviour of others. A second area of dispute concerns what we might call the domain of power. On the one hand, there have been those who wish to restrict the focus to efforts directed at achieving governmental control within a state and/or the exercise of such control—a narrowly political interpretation. On the other hand, more commonly today, ‘power’ has been used to refer to processes that can occur in any social field or type of relationship. On this interpretation, power may be exercised in everyday household interactions, in peer group relations, in employment situations, and so on, as well as in the realm of politics and government. One implication of this is that most people exercise at least some kind of power (as well as being subject to its exercise). This broader definition seems to me to be the more useful, but it is of course necessary to recognise that how power is exercised, and for what purposes, will vary systematically across contexts; and that political power in the narrow sense is still of great importance. Other issues about the nature of power touch on more challenging matters. Most conceptions of power have treated it as knowingly exercised by one party over others, as in the case of Dahl’s definition. However, there are influential writers who have rejected this idea, notably Lukes (2005) and Foucault (1980). Building on the work of Bachrach and Baratz (1962), Lukes argues that the exercise of power should be treated as including processes by which certain issues are kept off a political agenda or at least are placed at the bottom of it. And he goes on to suggest that, beyond this, it includes the shaping of people’s perceptions, beliefs,  In the second edition of his book, Lukes (2005) acknowledged the idea of ‘power to’ and even suggested that it was primary, but his main focus remained ‘power over’. Dahl’s definition of power is similar to that of Weber (1947: 152). 3

204 

M. Hammersley

or desires in ways that lead to their compliance. He also argues that those exercising power in this way may not even be aware that they are doing this (Lukes 1974: 39). Meanwhile, Foucault appears to treat power as exercised by structures or systems, and sometimes even as operating as an agent in its own right. In other words, like many sociologists today, he occasionally uses ‘Power’ to refer to a force that operates in the world, albeit one that may be met with ‘Resistance’. As with Lukes, his conception of ‘power’ does not require that there is any intention on the part of particular agents to affect others’ behaviour in some direction.4 Lukes’s argument that power includes the ability to set agendas and to keep some issues off those agendas, and to secure compliance through shaping the perceptions, beliefs, and desires of others, is certainly important. So, too, is Foucault’s recognition that power does not come from a single centre but is diffused throughout a society, and that it can be enabling as well as constraining.5 However, I will suggest that one of the most significant senses of ‘power’ for sociological purposes restricts it to cases where control of other people’s behaviour is exercised with intent. There is often a tendency, encouraged by the work of Lukes and Foucault, to attribute power to anything that causes constraint on, or shapes, people’s actions in a manner that is taken to be against their real interests, or that is thought to undermine their autonomy. In my view, this robs the term of its distinctive meaning and of much of its value for sociological analysis. Some of the motivation behind excluding intent from the meaning of ‘power’ stems from a concern to extend the scope for attributions of responsibility to include institutionalised structural relationships which, it is assumed, dominant groups could change. The concept of ‘institutional’ or ‘structural’ racism is an example of this wider interpretation of the term (see Chap. 7). However, for me the attribution of responsibility is not relevant to sociological analysis (though empirical facts about  Characterising Foucault’s view of power is fraught with difficulty since what he writes is rarely very precise, and varies in ways that do not always seem to be consistent. For a useful attempt to clarify his views, see Hindess (1996). 5  Though these are not new ideas: pluralism in American political science emphasised the first point, while Parsons (1963) stressed the second. 4

8 Power 

205

people’s attributions of responsibility are). It is certainly necessary to recognise that, on the basis of one or another value-relevance framework, institutionalised structures can be identified as carrying benefits, costs, dangers, and afflictions, differentially distributed across categories of person. And the fact that dominant groups may resist institutional change, perhaps because it would damage their perceived interests, certainly must be recognised. But these matters do not need to be, and should not be, built into the concept of power. Closely related to this treatment of power as independent of intent are notions of ‘structural’, ‘symbolic’, or ‘cultural’ violence. Thus, Galtung introduced the term ‘structural violence’ as follows: We shall refer to the type of violence where there is an actor that commits the violence as personal or direct, and to violence where there is no such actor as structural or indirect. In both cases individuals may be killed or mutilated, hit or hurt in both senses of these words, and manipulated by means of stick or carrot strategies. But whereas in the first case these consequences can be traced back to concrete persons as actors, in the second case this is no longer meaningful. There may not be any person who directly harms another person in the structure. The violence is built into the structure and shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances. (Galtung 1990: 170–171)

Later, Galtung added the phrase ‘cultural violence’ as referring to ‘those aspects of culture, the symbolic sphere of our existence—exemplified by religion and ideology, language and art, empirical science and formal science (logic, mathematics)—that can be used to justify or legitimize direct or structural violence’ (Galtung 1990: 291). Meanwhile, along similar lines, Bourdieu employs the term ‘symbolic violence’ to refer to ‘the violence which is exercised upon a social agent with his or her complicity’ (Bourdieu and Waquant 1992: 167). In these terms, it would seem that even constraints with which agents willingly comply can be counted as the exercise of violence or power. We can get a sense of how broad the reference of the term ‘symbolic violence’ is in Bourdieu’s usage from the following summary:

206 

M. Hammersley

Categorizations make up and order the world and, hence, constitute and order people within it. Political struggle is found in efforts to legitimize those systems of classification and categorization, and violence results when we misrecognize as natural those systems of classification that are actually culturally arbitrary and historical. Symbolic violence is thus a generally unperceived form of violence and, in contrast to systems in which force is needed to maintain social hierarchy, is an effective and efficient form of domination in that members of the dominant classes need exert little energy to maintain their dominance. (Schubert 2014: 180)

There is, of course, a point behind arguments that the exercise of power can operate through laws or contracts, institutional arrangements, groups or organisations, the promotion of ideas and images, and established social categories. But acknowledging this does not require that intention or design is eliminated from, or downplayed in, the concept of power. And I can see little sociological justification for doing this. These authors wish to treat cultural forms and institutional arrangements as exercising power whether or not these were designed to do this, and whether or not they are supported because they fulfil that function; but this is to rob ‘power’ of most of its meaning other than a negative valuation. The cost of including such a wide range of phenomena under this heading is that it leads to a considerable blurring in the meaning of the term: what needs to be distinguished for sociological purposes is conflated. The heavy negative evaluative cargo of this conception of power is especially evident where ‘violence’ is used as a close synonym for it. This highlights the fact that, in the work of many of these authors, and in much contemporary social science, the exercise of power tends to be treated as intrinsically undesirable. This may stem from a commitment to the value of individual autonomy, which any exercise of power is taken to infringe, and/or to an ideal of equality, with power seen (correctly) as necessarily involving inequality in some respect. A further variation is Lukes’s definition of the exercise of power as the situation where people are induced to do what is not in their real interests, or not to do what is in line with those interests. He contrasts this with ‘influence’: ‘co-operative activity, where individuals or groups significantly affect one another in the absence of a conflict of interests between them’ (Lukes 2005: 35). Interestingly, there are, by contrast, one or two writers, for example

8 Power 

207

Arendt (1951) and Parsons (1963), who define ‘power’ as beneficial; they explicitly exclude what is not beneficial that might otherwise be included under this heading, with  Arendt labelling this as ‘violence’. However, power is a ubiquitous feature of human societies, and whether we judge its possession or exercise as desirable or undesirable must surely be a matter of evaluation in particular cases; there is little point in seeking to judge it in general terms. Aside from this, as I explained in the Introduction to this book, in my view it is not the business of social science to evaluate the phenomena being investigated: its task, in this connection, is solely to document and explain differences among people, roles, groups, or organisations in their capacity to exercise power, in relation to different domains and other agents, to report how it is exercised, its sources and the consequences of its exercise, people’s responses to it, and so on. Evaluations, whether negative or positive, risk distorting this analysis. Indeed, particular distortion is introduced when the very conceptualisation of power is guided by assumptions about what is and is not desirable, rather than by how the term can best be defined so as to serve sociological work. An example is the assumption that what is called power is different in character from what is called violence (Arendt) or from what is called resistance (Foucault), when many of the same processes and resources are involved in both. This is aside from the fact that there can be considerable disagreement about what is and is not a legitimate exercise of power.6 Another way in which evaluative concern can distort the sociological analysis of power is that it may result in insufficient care being given to identifying when power is and is not being exercised, its limits, and its consequences. Even when all constraint is not assigned to the exercise of power, it is common to find the discovery of some form of constraint regarded as illegitimate being automatically ascribed to the exercise of power on the part of some agency. Attributions of power to particular agents are thus often made on a largely speculative basis; insufficient attention being given to whether power could have been or was actually exercised, to who had what discretion to act differently in the relevant respect, to what were the perceived consequences of alternative courses of action, and so on.  Hindess (1996) argues that Foucault recognises this.

6

208 

M. Hammersley

An Attempt at Clarification One of the problems with the term ‘power’ is that it is used for a variety of purposes that have different requirements.7 As already noted, deployment and discussion of it is caught up with important evaluative ideas, whether these concern inequity and suffering, responsibility, accountability and democracy, or social order. For example, Lukes (2005: 58) declares that the point of locating power ‘is to fix responsibility for consequences held to flow from the action, or inaction, of certain specifiable agents’. While such value concerns can frame sociological investigations, I have argued that there must be detachment of descriptions and explanations from any concern with making practical evaluations about what is wrong and what should be done. And this has implications for how ‘power’ needs to be conceptualised. In other words, we must suspend any concern with what could be the normative implications of conceptualising ‘power’ in one way rather than another, in favour of what is likely to be most productive for factual investigation of the sorts of research questions that are central to sociology. What this requires is necessarily somewhat uncertain, not least because of the currently divided and inchoate nature of the discipline, but it does provide a more restricted context than that in which many discussions of the nature of power have operated. For sociological purposes, I believe that we need to distinguish between at least two concepts of power, though they are not mutually exclusive empirically. The first, and I suspect most important, is what I will refer to as ‘directive power’: ‘the capacity to direct others’ behaviour, by issuing commands or laying down rules and policies’. The second concept, corresponding to Lukes’s central concern, might be called ‘consequential power’, by which I mean ‘the capacity to make decisions that could have significant consequences for others’. In both cases agents who exercise power may be individual people, groups, organisations, or governments;

 There are also various other terms that are often used as partial synonyms for ‘power’. Key examples are ‘domination’ and ‘hegemony’. ‘Domination’ implies an imposition of will by one party on another, but this is not always involved in the exercise of power more broadly conceived. And it seems pointless to use ‘hegemony’ as a substitute for ‘power’, since in Gramsci’s usage it carries a more subtle range of meanings (see Anderson 1976/1977; Boothman 2011). 7

8 Power 

209

though, in my view, these other entities only operate through the actions of human beings.8

Directive Power What is involved here, then, is the ability to direct others’ behaviour. It is important to emphasise that this is a capacity. ‘Power’ has sometimes been treated as an achievement word, to be applied only when the goal of modifying others’ behaviour in the intended direction has been successful (Lukes 2005: 69–70). When it is defined in this way, a failed attempt would not count as exercising power; indeed, it would be taken to indicate an absence or weakness of power. However, there are good reasons for not adopting this approach, since there can be many reasons why any particular exercise of directive power is not successful. For example, it could be interrupted by other events that divert the course of action or demand attention. Furthermore, successful exercise of power is a matter of degree, so that often an agent will shape others’ behaviour in the required manner to some extent, but not entirely in the manner intended. In other words, the exercise of directive power is contingent upon various conditions that can vary across situations, and can change over time. The fact that an agent was unsuccessful in shaping another party’s behaviour in a particular direction on one occasion does not mean that this will not be achieved on a different occasion, even one that is substantially similar. We should note, too, that while the successful exercise of power is a good indicator that an agent had the power necessary, it is not a perfect indicator—a successful outcome may have occurred as a result of other factors that would not be present on other occasions. As this indicates, establishing that some agent has directive power is by no means easy. While the exercise of directive power will often meet reluctance or resistance, compliance with commands, orders, rules, and so on, can occur more or less automatically, without enforcement by the  Sociologists sometimes extend the capacity to exercise power to animals, plants, and physical objects, notably those who are influenced by Actor Network Theory. However, I am excluding this possibility for much the same reason that I have applied other restrictions: that it erases distinctions that are important. 8

210 

M. Hammersley

power-holder. This may be because people view the directive as in their interests, as desirable in other terms, as right in principle, or as authoritative. Much usage of ‘power’ seems to presuppose that domination is always involved, so that it is to be expected that there will be resistance, and that people must usually be forced, induced, manipulated, or persuaded to comply. So, even where compliance occurs without any overt enforcement by the power-holder, it is often assumed that this must be because the situation or people’s attitudes have been manipulated. As noted earlier, underpinning this assumption, often, is the idea that the exercise of power necessarily goes against people’s genuine interests, that it is intrinsically inequitable, or that people are only genuinely free when they act on their own behalf without being influenced by any other agent. However, this is to allow value assumptions, and questionable ones at that, to guide sociological analysis. Nevertheless, directive power will often require enforcement, and a range of resources can be drawn on: physical coercion, economic inducement, or the threat of these; manipulation of the situations people face; appeals to authority; as well as calls for support from other power-­holders. Furthermore, those who have the capacity for directive power, or wish to acquire it, may well engage in actions aimed at building up such resources and/or improving their effectiveness, for example by seeking to shape the attitudes of those who are subject to direction. At the same time, we should note that such resources can become available in other ways, for instance they may be conferred by other directive power-holders, and even by those over whom directive power is to be exercised. So, while this kind of power may be exercised directly, in the sense that a command is issued or a rule or policy is laid down, it can also be exercised indirectly, through manipulation and/or influence. For example, people may be presented with a fait accompli, or the situation that they face can be modified so as to make it less likely that they will act in a way that is not wanted, or so as to make it more likely that they will do what is required. A mild example of such manipulation would be policies designed to ‘nudge’ people into behaving in some manner or into avoiding a particular course of action (Thaler and Sunstein 2008). Power may also be exercised through communications designed to motivate people to act or not to act in some particular way through connecting courses of

8 Power 

211

action with valued or disvalued identities or life-styles, or with other sorts of reward (the advertising of commercial products routinely relies on this, as do the publicity efforts of interest groups and charities).9 As this indicates, exercising directive power often requires skill and strategy. In other words, its exercise may depend upon the distinctive personal qualities of the power-holder, or of those acting in the name of a power-holder, as well as on the resources available. The qualities required can be quite diverse—including both boldness and restraint, as well as physical, rhetorical and social skills. Indeed, in some situations, a combination of these may be necessary if the exercise of power is to have much chance of success. This is true, for example, of a minority government seeking to counter opposition inside or outside parliament, of an office manager instituting a new policy, or a teacher maintaining discipline in a classroom. Authority is a particularly important type of resource for holders of directive power. What this term means here is ‘acceptance by others that an agent is entitled to exercise a particular sort of directive power, in other words has a right to give commands, enforce rules, etc of the relevant kind, and to be obeyed’. It is important to note that authority is not restricted to the operation of the state. There is authority invested in most if not all of the roles that people play in societies. This is obviously true of roles like parent,  police officer, teacher, lawyer, nurse, and doctor. To some degree, playing a role means being authorised to do particular things that those not playing this role are not usually authorised to do. And, very often, this will involve directing the behaviour of others in relevant respects. Besides being treated as having the appropriate authority, incumbents of roles are also frequently assigned distinctive resources for exercising powers of the kind covered by this authority, should non-­ compliance or resistance occur. It is important to emphasise that the exercise of directive power is not necessarily motivated by self-interest; indeed, it can be generated by felt obligations. It may be exercised on behalf of others, nominally or  In these terms, I am treating influence, when it is specifically directed at shaping people’s behaviour, as a means by which power is exercised. People may, of course, exercise influence without intending to do this. 9

212 

M. Hammersley

substantially, as in the case of officials of democratically-elected governments. Furthermore, people will sometimes judge the exercise of power to be in the interests of those subjected to it, as for example when a parent prevents a small child from running into a busy road. Equally, it should not be assumed that agents exercising power always benefit personally from its exercise. They may do so, but often they are simply performing their duties. And there can even be occasions where the exercise of power is in some respect against their own perceived best interests, for example it may open them up to criticism or retaliation. For this reason, power can sometimes be exercised reluctantly or with distaste. It also must not be assumed that those with directive power are entirely autonomous agents—they too can be subject to directive (as well as consequential) power by others. Directive power is often exercised in contexts where there are multiple semi-autonomous agents operating within a web of shared and opposing goals and interests, obligations and requirements, and having varying resources available for enforcing these. This is frequently true even of those who are at the top of ‘the pyramid of power’, within an organisation, community, or society. Furthermore, directive power is always restricted: it is the capacity to direct others’ behaviour in particular respects. In other words, such power is not a generalised capacity in the sense that it enables agents to do anything at all, or anything they might wish to do. Even in the unusual cases of an absolute monarch or a political dictator, there will be at least some limits. This is reflected in the fact that incumbents of all roles have the authority to do some things but no authority (and therefore no power from this source) to do a great many others. And any attempt to use the role to exercise power outside the remit may be treated as an abuse, perhaps even leading to dismissal from the position, and there may be widespread refusal to recognise the authority claimed. Of course, there is often a fuzzy boundary around what is and is not included in the remit and the authority associated with it, and this may be subject to claim and counter-­ claim, and may change over time. The restricted character of directive power has implications for a central sociological issue: the existence of a dominant class or power elite. Power relating to different domains and aspects of behaviour will usually

8 Power 

213

be distributed across a wide range of agents within a society. Of course, some resources can provide power over many domains, such as the capacity for physical coercion or possession of financial capital. In the case of money, its provision or removal can motivate compliance directly, but it can also be used to buy other types of power resources, including physical coercion. However, there are still restrictions operating here, and not just legal ones; for instance, power of these kinds is rarely concentrated entirely in the hands of one agent. Similarly, the capacity for coercion is a matter of degree, and it changes over time. This is one of the reasons Hobbes argued that it was in everyone’s interests to give up the right to coerce others—a right he thought they had in the ‘State of Nature’—and to assign it to a sovereign. Moreover, the exercise of physical coercion in gaining compliance is as much a matter of skill as of having that capacity in the first place. Nevertheless, where several agents possess more of these general resources than do others, this broadens the scope of the power they can exercise, especially when they act jointly. Conversely, some categories of people may find that many aspects of their lives are controlled by someone-­else—whether by one power-holder or by several. This can be because they are at the bottom of one or more authority hierarchies, or lack property or money. In these terms, it is often possible to identify strata, classes, or groups within a society that differ sharply in the degree to which they possess power across a range of domains. However, while individuals, groups, networks, and organisations may come to constitute a dominant class or a power elite, it is nevertheless true that in many societies, much of the time, they will operate more independently, and sometimes as competing elites or factions. Another key sociological issue concerns whether power is zero-sum; in other words, that the more power one agent has, the less power is available to others. This will often be true in specific respects: the correlate of power is compliance and the more successful the exercise of power the greater the compliance; though, as I have emphasised, compliance can occur without enforcement. But, given the restricted character of power, some agents will have power over some matters, while those they direct may have power in other areas. Also, those without the power to

214 

M. Hammersley

command may have a right to veto, or at least a capacity to obstruct, the exercise of power. There is no single ‘sum’ of power across the board, even less is it always distributed in an all-or-nothing way. Nevertheless, as I have noted, there can be very sharp differences in its distribution.

Consequential Power As explained earlier, ‘consequential power’ means ‘the capacity to make decisions that could have significant consequences for others’. Of course, this kind of power can be a result of directive power. For example, a government minister may give a directive to implement a new policy, or to change or enforce an existing one, so that those working in the relevant department must, as a result, change their priorities and actions, perhaps work overtime, face difficult decisions, and so on. Here officials are not simply being directed to act in particular ways (directive power), but doing this also has costs for them (they are subject to consequential power). And the same can be true of those people who are the targets of a policy. Their behaviour may also be directed as part of the policy, but in addition the policy could involve their being denied benefits that were previously available, being faced with increased costs, and so on. It is perhaps necessary to emphasise, however, that consequential power does not necessarily lead to negative consequences: the new directive could make the lives of officials easier, and it might provide new benefits or increased opportunities for those on the receiving end of the policy. So, it must not be assumed that consequential power is always undesirable, any more than is directive power. Consequential power can also stem from decisions that are not directly implicated in directive power. If a company that is a major employer in a community decides to move elsewhere, this will have consequences for all those who live in that community, and for those living in the place to which it moves. Similarly, if large numbers of people increasingly decide to buy goods online rather than in the high street, this has consequences both for online providers and for high street shops. Such purchasing power is an aggregate phenomenon, but is no less consequential because

8 Power 

215

of that. However, it should be obvious that there can be major concentrations of consequential power within a society. This is true, for instance, in the case of economies whose markets are dominated by a small number of conglomerate firms. It is perhaps worth emphasising, once again, that it is the capacity to make such decisions, not actually making them, that constitutes what I am calling consequential power. This carries the implication that not engaging in some significant action that falls within this capacity also constitutes power. For example, it might be argued that certain power-­ holders would be able to change an institutional arrangement that has negative consequences for some set of people, such as a housing market that works against those with low financial resources (see Lukes 2005: 67; Hayward 2006). From this point of view, not intervening may be regarded as the exercise of consequential power. Exploring what could be, or could have been, done can be a useful analytic device as part of counter-factual thinking designed to explain what happened in particular situations. However, it must not be forgotten that doing this involves assumptions about the extent and effectiveness of the power concerned, given that the pursuit of any goal may be only contingently successful, and that its exercise can have a range of other consequences that are not always predictable. These are considerations that are easily forgotten when an analysis is governed by a strong (even if warranted) conviction that something should be, or should have been, done to remedy a situation, or that a decision ought not to have been taken given its actual or likely consequences. It is also important to stress that an analyst identifying what is ‘consequential’ necessarily depends upon some value-relevance framework to pick this out from the results of decisions that are not consequential, or are less consequential. And it must be acknowledged by sociologists that different evaluations could be made of those various likely or actual results, so that diverse value-relevance frameworks can be used for such analysis. Given this, researchers must make explicit the framework they are employing, and recognise the sociological legitimacy of alternatives.

216 

M. Hammersley

Conclusion In this chapter I have examined some of the various ways in which ‘power’ has been defined, along with key debates surrounding it. I suggested that there were problems with the common distinction between ‘power to’ and ‘power over’, as well as with any restriction of power to the political sphere. I argued that power is a capacity, but at the same time questioned those accounts that downplay intentionality on the part of power-holders or attribute agency to structures, along with the tendency to define ‘power’ in evaluative terms. Needless to say, identifying the intentions of power-holders is not straightforward: this can only be done by employing ideal types, and comparing the evidence with what such analytic models predict. I distinguished between directive and consequential power. The first of these seems likely to be most important for sociological purposes, but the second has been the focus of more attention in the literature. Of course the two frequently go together. In relation to directive power, I emphasised that compliance is sometimes automatic, rather than requiring enforcement. And I stressed that the enforcement of power relies upon diverse capabilities, resources, and processes, including authority. While these may be concentrated in the hands of a power elite or dominant class, this is certainly not always the case. Furthermore, by its very nature, power involves restrictions: it is always the power to carry out particular types of action. My main message is that the common tendency to use ‘power’ to refer to an evil force or abstract agent operating in the world is misconceived. Instead, it should be viewed as referring to specific capacities attached to particular agents in particular contexts; and its possession and exercise are by no means always undesirable.

8 Power 

217

References Adams, R. (1975). Energy and Structure: A Theory of Social Power. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Anderson, P. (1976/1977). The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci. New Left Review, 100, 5–78. Arendt, H. (1951). The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. Bachrach, P., & Baratz, M. (1962). Two Faces of Power. American Political Science Review, 56(4), 947–952. Boothman, D. (2011). The Sources for Gramsci’s Concept of Hegemony. In M. Green (Ed.), Rethinking Gramsci. London: Routledge. Bourdieu, P., & Waquant, L. (1992). An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Dahl, R. (1957). The Concept of Power. Behavioral Science, 2, 201–205. Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge (C. Gordon, Ed.). Brighton: Harvester. Galtung, J. (1990). Cultural Violence. Journal of Peace Research, 27(3), 291–305. Hayward, C. R. (2006). On Power and Responsibility. Political Studies Review, 4, 156–163. Hindess, B. (1996). Discourses of Power. Oxford: Blackwell. Lane, J.-E., & Stenlund, H. (1984). Power. In G. Sartori (Ed.), Social Science Concepts. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Lukes, S. (1974). Power: A Radical View (1st ed.). London: Macmillan. Lukes, S. (1978). Power and Authority. In T. Bottomore & R. Nisbet (Eds.), A History of Sociological Analysis. London: Heinemann. Lukes, S. (2005). Power: A Radical View (2nd ed.). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Morriss, P. (2006). Steven Lukes on the Concept of Power. Political Studies Review, 4, 124–135. Parsons, T. (1963). On the Concept of Political Power. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 107(3), 232–262. Schubert, J.  D. (2014). Suffering/Symbolic Violence. In M.  Grenfell (Ed.), Pierre Bourdieu: Key Concepts. London: Routledge. Scott, J. (Ed.). (1994). Power: Critical Concepts (Vol. 1 and 2). London: Routledge. Thaler, R., & Sunstein, C. (2008). Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Weber, M. (1947). The Theory of Economic and Social Organization. New York: Oxford University Press. Wrong, D. (1979). Power: Its Forms, Bases, and Uses. Oxford: Blackwell.

9 Values, Interests, Goals, and Attitudes

The terms ‘values’, ‘interests’, ‘goals’, and ‘attitudes’ refer to closely related aspects of human action that play a key role in sociological explanations. Indeed, I suggest that one or more of these four terms, or at least what they typically refer to, appear in almost all such explanations. They are also building blocks involved in many of the other concepts discussed in this book. For example, culture involves values and attitudes, and social classes are often identified as having different interests. Furthermore, they all concern the issue of motivation: of why people engage in the activities they do; and do not engage in other kinds of action. In this respect, they are closely related to the topics of power and ideology. However, the terms addressed here are rarely subjected to much conceptual scrutiny in the course of their use: their meanings are frequently taken-for-granted. All four terms are usually treated as referring to relatively stable commitments on the part of people. This is especially true of values and interests, which may have an effect across several, perhaps even all, areas of a person’s life, and are assumed to stay the same over fairly long periods of time. Goals and attitudes can be somewhat more variable, perhaps being tied to different roles that the same person plays, and they are more likely to change according to circumstances, to one degree or another. It is

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Hammersley, Troubling Sociological Concepts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51644-4_9

219

220 

M. Hammersley

usually assumed, though, that even goals and attitudes do not change moment to moment. Goals may be long or short term, may relate to just one context or apply to a substantial range of activities. The term ‘attitudes’ generally forms part of explanations for actions that are judged to be less deliberative than the pursuit of a goal, though the difference is one of degree rather than being hard and fast. But attitudes are nevertheless normally conceived as routinised, and therefore as involving some consistency in expression or action over time and across situations. What all four terms refer to are typically treated as the product of social conditions, and also as shaping such conditions through their effects on actions and institutional arrangements. Thus, particular types of value or interest, and to a lesser degree of goals and attitudes, are assumed to predominate in particular historical periods, types of society, cultures, or groups within a society. Values or interests are often taken to be the fundamental sources of goals and attitudes, though not necessarily the sole determinant of them. The concept of goal raises the issue of what means are to be employed, highlighting the fact that what is done will also depend upon assumptions about the situation faced, what courses of action are possible, justifiable, and/or excusable. Here issues arise about the rationality and ethics of action, notably as regards the selection of means but perhaps also the choice of goals (for example, some goals may be treated as ‘utopian’— unachievable in present, or perhaps in any likely, circumstances). One of the analytic problems here is that goals frequently form part of goal complexes, with one goal being a means for achieving another. Both values and interests can generate attitudes, in the sense of behavioural propensities to react to particular types of a situation in particular ways. Explanations appealing to values often assume that these generate attitudes that produce types of action more or less immediately, whereas those appealing to interests may treat these as leading to goals which can only be pursued by careful consideration, or even calculation, of what are the best means for achieving them, so that the actual course of action adopted is less predictable. So, in the case of values and attitudes, the processes involved can be largely subconscious, whereas interest explanations often assume a conscious effort to find the best way to protect or promote a particular interest; though sometimes the resulting action may

9  Values, Interests, Goals, and Attitudes 

221

be seen as affected by subconscious bias. It is also worth noting that values and interests can be viewed as restricting the range of means from which a course of action is selected in pursuit of a goal, through ethical and/or prudential considerations. While the phenomena that all these words refer to have much in common, and are assumed to be related to one another in various ways, they differ not only in their specific reference but also frequently by serving in what are viewed as competing forms of sociological explanation. Indeed, the terms ‘values’ and ‘interests’ have been at the centre of much dispute amongst sociologists. Typically, the contrast here is between, on the one hand, explanations of human behaviour as the product of socialisation into a set of values (along with associated norms or rules) shared by members of a particular national society, ethnic community, social category, network, or group, and, on the other, explanations that treat people as acting to serve or protect interests that arise from social divisions or inequalities, for instance those relating to social class, gender, or ethnicity. Various labels have been given to this contrast in type of explanation— ‘idealist’ versus ‘materialist’, and ‘functionalism’ versus ‘conflict theory’, are two of them—but use of such labels can be misleading. Furthermore, these types of explanation are sometimes combined or used alongside one another, and there is no reason (in principle) why this should be treated as illegitimate. A related dispute has taken place between sociologists and economists, with the former assumed to emphasise socialisation into values and the role of attitudes, while the latter adopt the rational choice model, in which interests and goals are emphasised. However, this involves caricatures of the two disciplines: the rational choice model, in various forms, has been explicitly employed by some sociologists (see Swedberg 2005); while institutional economics takes account of values and attitudes (see Kapp 2011). As should be clear from this introductory discussion, the set of terms that are the focus of this chapter need careful attention if they are to be used effectively. I will look at each in turn, though the discussion will focus primarily on the first two, since these refer to what are in many respects the most fundamental differences in the motivational process.

222 

M. Hammersley

What Are Values? The term ‘value’ has various senses, not all of which fit with the meaning I took for granted in the previous section. One interpretation treats values as universal principles that any person ought to adopt, these deriving from a transcendent source, whether supernatural, as in the case of some religions and philosophies, including Kantianism, or immanent in the world, as for instance with Confucianism or the ideas of Spinoza, Hegel, and Marx. Here there is often a very sharp contrast drawn between values and interests; indeed, they may be regarded as permanently in conflict. However, in the case of those thinkers adopting an immanentist orientation, the conflict is normally viewed as resolvable, through rational reflection (Spinoza), through prudence (Confucius), or through a process of socio-historical development (Hegel and Marx). Indeed, for Marx, even before the end of history (which in his early writings he treats as the ultimate realisation of genuine human ideals) some interests—those of progressive classes, and especially of the proletariat—are to a considerable extent in line with the values intrinsic to human nature. In this first sense of the term, ‘values’ is sometimes taken to refer to what ought to be treated as more important than what is found immediately satisfying, than what is in one’s own or one’s group’s interest, or even what is judged to be in the general interest. The focus, instead, is on standards concerning how people ought to behave in principle, irrespective of the consequences. This ‘deontological’ conception of values creates the sharpest contrast with the concept of interest, the latter being generally taken to be not only thoroughly earthly in character, but also (as already noted) a matter of calculating the costs and benefits of likely consequences. From this point of view, values are relatively abstract in character, but they generate more specific norms or rules about what ought to be done, or not done, in particular types of circumstances. There is, however, a very different, economic, concept of value, concerned with the value of particular goods and services. An early form of this can also be found in the work of Marx, involving a distinction between use-value and exchange-value. While that distinction generally came to be abandoned by economists, the reference to what is valued, in

9  Values, Interests, Goals, and Attitudes 

223

relatively mundane terms, was retained: and ‘value’ increasingly began to refer to consumers’ relative preferences amongst different goods and services, as revealed in the prices they are willing to pay for these on the market. A broader version of this second sense—exemplified in ‘rational choice’ theory and cost-benefit analysis, and deriving from utilitarianism—concerns the calculation of benefits against costs associated with various potential courses of action—whether for a particular agent or more generally. It should be clear that this second sense of ‘value’ is much closer to what is referred to as ‘interest’ than is the first. However, it has not been the predominant usage in sociology and so I will leave it on one side here. So, the first of these two senses of ‘values’, what I referred to as the deontological interpretation, has been the dominant one in sociological explanations, but in the process of adoption it has usually been ‘naturalised’, with value principles treated as factual matters—cultural phenomena that vary between societies and perhaps also within them—rather than as having any transcendent or immanent metaphysical validity. Values are still treated as abstract principles concerned with what is taken by people to be good or right, but the question of whether particular values are valid has been largely ignored by sociologists (quite rightly). Or, instead, they have argued, or assumed, that there can be no universal framework in terms of which conflicting cultural values could be judged. In this sociological conception of values, their moral force derives solely from the fact that people have been socialised into a culture that champions them, and/or that these values are embedded in institutional norms and practices. It is implied, therefore, that actors may be guided by varying sets of values, reflecting their differing cultural backgrounds or institutional locales. So the focus of sociologists (and perhaps even more obviously of anthropologists) is generally on how values vary across cultures or social contexts, how members of societies come to accept particular values, as well as the norms or rules that are taken to follow from them; how these lead to particular forms of action; how people are evaluated differentially according to those values and norms, leading to status differentiation within a society or group; and how any deviance is identified and dealt with. It has often been assumed, or asserted, that only if there is effective

224 

M. Hammersley

socialisation, status differentiation, and treatment of deviance can any group or society retain coherence and survive as a recognisable or distinct entity. In these terms, much like in religious and philosophical accounts of values, interests are frequently regarded as a threat: as sowing the seeds of division within groups and societies, and thereby potentially leading to their disintegration. However, this does not automatically follow, and has sometimes been challenged. As this indicates, much of this line of thought was generated by a concern with the need to create or maintain social order, minimising conflict and violence, and ensuring the continued functioning of society, given the dependence of people on one another, not least for the supply of a wide variety of goods and services. This was central to the emergence of sociology in the aftermath of the French Revolution (see Nisbet 1952). But, confusingly, the same idea has also sometimes been formulated as the need for social control, perhaps exercised by the state and its institutions but also by subgroups within societies, including families and local communities, to deal with threats to the social order, such as those from deviance and conflict. In early twentieth-century United States, this sense of the need for social control was specifically prompted by concern about the consequences of capitalism—the tendency for the powerful interests it generates to exploit and oppress, and to cause social division and dislocation—and, more broadly, about the effects of industrialisation, urbanisation, and immigration. So, we find this sort of view about the role of values not only among nineteenth-century European theorists of social order but also within US sociology at the end of the nineteenth century and in the first few decades of the twentieth, as well as in functionalist anthropology, and in the work of Parsons and others in sociology around the middle of that century.1 A key concept in some explanations appealing to values and norms is ‘social role’. It is argued that most if not all of the time people’s behaviour is governed by the particular roles they are playing, whether these are actively pursued or have been forced on them by others. Roles are treated as defined by norms, deriving from institutionalised values. A key point  There were, however, differences in view as regards who it was that was in need of restraint by norms. 1

9  Values, Interests, Goals, and Attitudes 

225

here, though, is that people play many roles, sometimes even more than one simultaneously, and what is expected of them in different roles will vary. Furthermore, there can be conflicting expectations about the same role, as well as expectations that cannot be met because the resources needed for this are unavailable. Hence a considerable amount of research was done in the mid-­ twentieth century on notions of role conflict and role strain, of various kinds (see Biddle and Thomas 1966). This introduces complexity into explanations for actions that rely on an appeal to actors’ value-­ commitments; and, indeed, opens up some scope for rapprochement with those approaches that appeal to interests. For example, where norms are institutionalised, people conform not just because they have been socialised into acceptance of these but also because of the costs of deviance. In other words, role behaviour does not derive solely from socialisation into values, but also from mutual expectations that can be both enabling and constraining; and there are various forms of commitment that may effectively lock people into particular patterns of behaviour because of the consequences of acting differently (see Becker 1960; Stebbins 1970). Aside from this, it can also be recognised that, despite their value commitments, people may also use their role positions to serve various external interests, personal or collective. So, for example, doctors in private practice may be motivated by pecuniary interests to recommend more treatment than is required; departments within an organisation can act on their own interests in ways that damage the organisation’s pursuit of its goals; and employees may restrict their production levels, damage machinery, or go on strike in order to pursue or to protect their interests. In the second half of the twentieth century, there was a switch on the part of many Anglo-American sociologists to an emphasis on the endemic character of conflict deriving from fundamental divisions of interest. This was partly as a result of a resurgence in the influence of Marxism. Here, conflict was not viewed as leading to social disintegration but rather to social development. Some even argued that it could generate social integration (see Coser 1956). Later still, building on this ‘conflict sociology’ (Collins 1975), there came to be an emphasis on the role of autonomy and agency on the part of individual people and groups. This involved a

226 

M. Hammersley

reaction against the earlier emphasis on social order and social control. It was argued that values and norms do not determine action, both because they cannot indicate exactly what should be done in particular circumstances, and/or because most people deviate (much of the time) from them in practice, to one degree or another. In other words, deciding on the implications of values and norms in particular situations always requires interpretation, which may or may not be a matter of conscious deliberation.2 More than this, there was rejection of the image of the human being that appeared to be built into earlier views of commitment to values and norms as creating social order, or even interests as generating conflict and societal development. It was objected that this image treats people as conformists or ‘cultural dopes’. Rejection of this was prompted not just by recognition that people by no means always acted in the ways that theories based on socialisation into values or on the pursuit of interests assumed, but also sometimes by a belief in the value of creativity. For example, there were those who stressed the need for technological and other kinds of innovation, whether as essential for market capitalism to operate or so as to abolish the inequalities to which it leads; and there were those who emphasised the value of free self-expression, in both intellectual and artistic terms. Furthermore, some sociologists extended application of the notion of agency beyond human beings potentially to any kind of object in the world, as exemplified by Actor Network Theory.

What Are Interests? The word ‘interest’ has several meanings in English (and the same is probably true of its equivalents in other languages). One that we can rule out as irrelevant here is the idea of interest on a loan, though this is not entirely unconnected to the senses I will be discussing (see Hirschman 1986). Even after eliminating this sense, however, referring to someone as ‘having an interest’ remains ambiguous: it could mean that the person is fascinated by something, or that it would be better for a person if some

 A radical version of this is central to ethnomethodology, according to which values and norms do not exist independently of their actualisation in practice: see Hammersley (2018). 2

9  Values, Interests, Goals, and Attitudes 

227

course of action was pursued or not pursued, or some state of affairs continued to exist or did not exist. It is the latter sense that is most relevant to sociological explanations.3 While, often, it is individuals who are taken to have interests, these can also be attributed to groups, organisations, or whole categories of actors. And there are sometimes appeals to the notion of common or collective interest, though this usually relates to a specific community or a nation rather than to humanity as a whole. Furthermore, someone may have responsibility for the interests of another person, for example a child or an elderly relative. As all this makes clear, there is considerable scope for conflicts of interest, and these have been a central preoccupation of sociologists. What may be in the interests of an agent, of whatever kind, is the carrying out of some course of action, or its avoidance; the establishment, preservation, or abandonment of particular institutional arrangements; or the occurrence or non-occurrence of particular outcomes or events. Furthermore, to attribute an interest is not just to attribute a need, want, preference, or desire but also to assign the highest priority to it, such that it is assumed to outweigh any other need, want, preference or desire the agent might have; at least in the situation being analysed. Several features are often treated as forming part of the meaning of the term. Typically, interests are: 1. Concerned with benefits and costs, and so what is involved is a consequentialist rather than a deontological mode of evaluation; 2. Particularistic—an interest relates to a particular individual, group or category of person, rather than applying universally to humans; 3. Concerned with ‘material’ rather than to ‘spiritual’ concerns—relating to basic needs, luxury consumption, or money rather than to ‘higher’ cultural preferences, such as the enjoyment of art or music.4

 These two senses are frequently conflated in discussions of ‘the public interest’, for example as regards what the media are justified in investigating and reporting. 4  Max Weber referred to ‘ideal’ as well as material interests. While there has been much controversy about what he meant by that term (see Eastwood 2005; Lizardo and Stoltz 2018), and about the viability of the distinction, it seems likely that he was referring to such interests as those relating to 3

228 

M. Hammersley

There is a sharp contrast here with the characteristics of values.5 However, the term ‘interests’ is often restricted to longer-term and indirect benefits or costs, rather than to more immediate forms of satisfaction, dissatisfaction, discomfort, and so on. In other words, to promote or protect one’s interests, or those of some group with which one is affiliated, may require foregoing immediate pleasures or even suffering some negative consequences at the present time. For instance, it may be in my interest to undergo a painful medical operation in order to preserve my life or to improve my future quality of life. There is also an important difference in epistemological status between values and interests. While both can be treated as factual matters—in terms of who has what values, who has what perceived interests—there is a sense in which interests have a distinctive factual component that is absent in the case of values, conceived deontologically. If someone is committed to a particular value then this indicates, via norms derived from it, what he or she should do, and therefore can be expected to do (other things being equal) in relevant types of situation. However, this is not true in the case of interests: what is or is not in people’s interests depends not just on what is to be protected or promoted but also on the situation they are in. If someone threatens me on the street, demanding money, whether or not it is in my interests to resist or comply will depend on what the consequences of each line of action are likely to be given the particular circumstances (is there one robber or many, do they have knives, will they be satisfied with the money I have on me, etc). Central to sociological use of the concept of interests is that these are assumed to derive from particular social arrangements, and to lead to people in different social categories having different, perhaps even conflicting, interests—albeit ones which they may or may not recognise. At the same time, it must also be acknowledged that people themselves use the concept of interests, assigning these to themselves and to others. relative social status as well as to ‘spiritual’ standing as defined by some religions. This gives us a sense of the range of different considerations that could come under the heading of ‘interests’. 5  We should note, though, that judgements about what would be best for a person, and therefore what is in her or his interests, depend upon value assumptions, for example on some conception of what is a desirable human life, or even just on the principle that people best know what is in their own interests.

9  Values, Interests, Goals, and Attitudes 

229

This has sometimes given rise to a distinction between objective or genuine interests, on the one hand, and perceived or subjective interests, on the other. In other words, it is recognised that people can be mistaken about their own interests—indeed, ideologies are often taken to mislead people about these (see Chap. 2). This arises because people may not be aware of relevant facts or may have misunderstood those facts, so that their judgment about what would be in their interests is misguided. Furthermore, the notion of interest relies on assumptions about what someone would find satisfying or painful, acceptable or unacceptable, and it is possible for people to be wrong about this too: ‘you may think you would rather live alone than with your current partner, but you may find that you are less happy doing so than you expect, and perhaps even less happy than you are now’. Furthermore, people’s expressed interests may not always conform to the interests that shape their behaviour: the latter may be only subconsciously recognised or may be forced on people by their situations. It is also necessary to point out that a person may have conflicting interests, given that we all occupy multiple social positions. The complexities involved in the concept of interests require careful handling in sociological analysis. Some sociologists assume that their expertise allows them to identify what are the objective interests of some person or set of people, as against their perceived interests. Marx and Durkheim provide two influential examples. Drawing on Hegel, in his early writings Marx treats interests as determined by a socio-historical process through which the ‘species-being’ of humanity comes to be realised, with members of different social classes having distinct interests. While he portrays this as a matter of scientific analysis, it clearly depends upon a philosophical argument about the nature of the human being as well as a philosophy of history that purports to show its progressive, albeit dialectical, realisation. Much of this has been abandoned even by Marxists today. Instead, sociologists often seem to rely upon their own values to determine what people’s genuine interests are, for example that members of the working class should support socialist parties; that women ought to support feminism; and so on; any deviation from this reflecting the effects of ideology. In my view, this is illegitimate (see Chap. 2). Durkheim’s argument is less easy to discern, but seems to rely upon a Comtean analogy between societies and animal bodies, whereby there is predetermined development over time, but also the potential for pathology. He claims that sociology

230 

M. Hammersley

can identify both the normal course of development for societies—from mechanical to organic forms of solidarity—and the pathologies to which this transition can sometimes lead, which are at odds with people’s genuine interests. There are questions, however, about whether this kind of normative orientation can be sustained even in relation to human bodies, and the parallel between bodies and societies is very difficult to defend. The third figure in the usually recognised sociological triumvirate of disciplinary founders, Max Weber, offers a resolution to this problem. From his point of view, interests can be ascribed for the purposes of sociological analysis via ideal types, this perhaps based on evidence about people’s perceived interests, but also relying on sociological analysis of the role particular groups, categories of person, organisations, and so on, play in society. However, there is no claim here that these are people’s true interests: the ideal type is a model devised solely for the purposes of sociological explanation. People’s behaviour can be analysed according to how far it corresponds to or deviates from a set of interests plausibly attributed to them on the basis of their social role or membership of a particular group or category. Where the expected behaviour occurs, these interests may be taken to be the explanatory factor, subject to the provision of further evidence. Where it does not, other factors will need to be investigated. These might be found to have counteracted the role of the assumed interests, or they may throw doubt on the original attribution of ideal typical interests. On this view, the attribution of interests in any sociological explanation involves abstraction and therefore simplification: it relies upon ideal types whose relationship to the actual motivation of any set of individuals on particular occasions is always approximate, at best.

Goals and Attitudes Earlier, I argued that, while both goals and attitudes can derive from values or interests, goals are more likely to be a matter of deliberation, perhaps even involving calculation of what would be the best means of achieving them. This explains the appeal of rational choice theory. However, the term ‘rational’ is subject to various interpretations—it is by no means restricted to that dominant in economics. Indeed, we must

9  Values, Interests, Goals, and Attitudes 

231

recognise that it is an evaluative term, where the value criterion employed is some notion of effectiveness or efficiency. Furthermore, by contrast with those approaches that treat social science as capable of determining what are and are not rational means for the pursuit of some goal (for example, Parsons 1937), it is important to recognise that what is rational for actors is relative to their goals and to the information they have, or can obtain, and the assumptions they make about what is and is not possible in the circumstances. The task of the sociologist is not to evaluate the rationality of people’s actions, the concept of rationality ought to be used simply as a means of understanding what they do and do not do, and why. Assumptions about what would be rational for those performing some role, or belonging to some category or group, are built into ideal types, but as I emphasised earlier these should not be treated as valid or invalid, only as more or less accurate models of particular patterns of social behaviour.6 Work relying on the notion of rationality has focused, for example, on why people have aspirations that are different from what would be expected on theoretical or practical grounds; for instance, why those from families that are relatively poor often do not aspire to occupations carrying high financial rewards. Other sociological work concerned with goals has concentrated on situations where the means adopted need to be strategic rather than straightforward. There has been much investigation of strategies that various types of people and groups employ (Lofland 1978; Crow 1989; see also Knights and Morgan 1990). A classic illustration is Goffman’s (1952) account of ‘cooling the mark out’: how conartists dissuade those who have been conned from complaining. Here, often, the goals involved and the ways in which they came to be adopted are taken for granted, the focus is on how people go about trying to achieve them.  Incidentally, this may assist in resolving debates over the economic version of the rational choice model, which is often dismissed as unrealistic. The sort of economic rationality which this model assumes is reasonable in some circumstances, notably in relation to much  market behaviour. However, even here it will only be an approximate fit, and should only be used as a way of trying to identify the causes of people’s behaviour. In many other contexts, this notion of economic rationality will not be a plausible model to employ. It is perhaps worth adding that there can be many situations where more than one ideal type is a potential explanatory model, and it is important that all of them are explored for their implications. 6

232 

M. Hammersley

Turning to the term ‘attitude’, this can be interpreted in a variety of ways. However, generally speaking, it is taken to refer to a predisposition to express particular sorts of view, and/or to act in particular ways, in particular types of situation. This concept has been central to much social psychology, but sociological explanations also often attribute attitudes, explicitly or implicitly, for example in accounting for distributions of, and changes in, voting choices in elections. Another area of particular sociological interest has been in attitudes that can be defined, in value-­ relevant terms, as ‘discriminatory’, in other words as violating a norm that requires people or situations to be treated in the same way. Here, the attitudes concerned may be explained as arising from interests, whether those relating to individuals, groups, communities, or whole societies. However, as should be clear from the earlier discussion, interests are often entwined with values. Explanations in terms of culture or ideology usually involve the attribution of attitudes. Furthermore, while, in the past few decades, many sociologists and social psychologists switched away from the terminology of attitudes towards that of discourses, the machinery of explanation involved has often been much the same. For example, while in Mapping the Language of Racism Wetherell and Potter (1992) focus on the discursive resources and strategies that white New Zealanders deploy, they present this deployment as largely subconscious or taken-for-granted. Indeed, they treat it as reflecting racist ideology. Much the same is often true where a Foucauldian conception of discourse is employed, rather than one modelled on conversation analysis or linguistic discourse analysis. Here, again, what are appealed to are dispositions on the part of individuals generated by discourses and/or interests. And there is therefore a strong parallel with explanation in terms of attitudes. As with explanations that appeal to goals and means, those assigning attitudes usually depend upon ideal-typical models that indicate what attitudes someone playing a particular role, or belonging to a given social category or group, is likely to have. Once again, expressions of attitude may be used as evidence, but with the  recognition that these will not necessarily accurately indicate the attitude that is embodied in actions. As elsewhere, great care must be taken in applying an ideal type: acknowledging that categories and groups are unlikely to be entirely homogeneous

9  Values, Interests, Goals, and Attitudes 

233

in relevant respects; and that a type of attitude initially assumed to be the most plausible model for explaining people’s behaviour may turn out to be a poor representation of their motivation.

Conclusion In this chapter I have explored the meanings given to the terms ‘values’, ‘interests’, ‘goals’, and ‘attitudes’ in the sociological literature. As I noted, these underpin much sociological explanation. I have explored some of the key differences between these meanings, and the problems associated with them. I argued that while there has been a tendency to assume incompatibility between sociological explanation in terms of values and norms, on the one hand, and interests, on the other, both approaches are legitimate; and indeed they can often be, and sometimes are, combined. Much the same is true of the difference between explanations in terms of the pursuit of goals and those that appeal to people’s attitudes. What is important, however, is that careful attention is given to the models of social action that these concepts imply, and their implications for framing sociological explanations.

References Becker, H. S. (1960). Notes on the Concept of Commitment. American Journal of Sociology, 66, 32–40. Biddle, B. J., & Thomas, E. (Eds.). (1966). Role Theory: Concepts and Research. New York: John Wiley. Collins, R. (1975). Conflict Sociology. New York: Academic Press. Coser, L. (1956). The Functions of Social Conflict. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Crow, G. (1989). The Use of the Concept of “Strategy” in Recent Sociological Literature. Sociology, 23(1), 1–24. Eastwood, J. (2005). The Role of Ideas in Weber’s Theory of Interests. Critical Review, 17(1–2), 89–100. Goffman, E. (1952). On Cooling the Mark Out. Psychiatry, 15(4), 451–463.

234 

M. Hammersley

Hammersley, M. (2018). The Radicalism of Ethnomethodology. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hirschman, A. (1986). Rival Views of Market Society. New York: Viking. Kapp, K. W. (2011). The Foundations of Institutional Economics (R. Steppacher & S. Berger, Eds.). New York: Routledge. Knights, D., & Morgan, G. (1990). The Concept of Strategy in Sociology: A Note of Dissent. Sociology, 24(3), 475–483. Lizardo, O., & Stoltz, D. (2018). Max Weber’s Ideal versus Material Interest Distinction Revisited. European Journal of Social Theory, 21(1), 3–21. Lofland, J. (1978). Interaction in Everyday Life: Social Strategies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Nisbet, R. (1952). Conservatism and Sociology. American Journal of Sociology, 58, 167–175. Parsons, T. (1937). The Structure of Social Action. New York: McGraw Hill. Stebbins, R. (1970). On Misunderstanding the Concept of Commitment: A Theoretical Clarification. Social Forces, 48(4), 526–529. Swedberg, R. (2005). Interest. New York: Open University Press. Wetherell, M., & Potter, J. (1992). Mapping the Language of Racism. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester-Wheatsheaf.

Index1

A

Actor Network Theory, 209 Adorno, Theodor W., 4 Agency, 73 Althusser, Louis, 27, 90 Arendt, Hannah, 206, 207 Arnold, Matthew, 42, 49 Authority, 210–212 B

Bacon, Francis, 22 Barth, Fredrik, 77 Baudrillard, Jean, 75, 96, 113 Bauman Zygmunt, 61 Beck, Ulrich, 96 Bogard, William, 75, 96

Bourdieu, Pierre, 127, 130, 205 Brooks, Maxwell, 112 Burawoy, Michael, 84, 90 Butler, Judith, 146 C

Cameron, David, 57, 58 Cashmore, Ellis, 164 Caste, 111–112 Categories, 7–8 clarity, dispute about, 4 as constitutive, 8 Cealey Harrison, Wendy, 147, 148 Civilisations, 79 Civil society, 90 Cole, G. D. H., 115

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Hammersley, Troubling Sociological Concepts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51644-4

235

236 Index

Complexity theory, 78 Concepts character of, 6–8 essentialist conception of, 10–11 probabilistic nature of, 11 relationship between social scientific concepts and those of people studied, 11–12 structure of, 10–11, 13 vagueness and ambiguity, 1, 2 Conceptualisation, conflicting views about, 4 Conflict sociology, 225 Converse, Philip, 34 Cultural holism, 52–53 Cultural relativism, 47–49, 52 Cultural sociology, 44, 45 Cultural studies, 44, 45 Cultural universals, 52 Culture aesthetic cultivation concept of, 42, 45–46, 48–50 vs. agency, 54–55 anthropological concept of, 42–44, 47–50 vs. biology, 49–50 contrasts with, 48–55 culture as a distinct way of life, 44, 46–47 culture as meaning-­ making, 47–48 developmental concept of, 46 four concepts of, 45–48 history of, 42–45 vs. materiality, 50 vs. rationality, 53–54 vs. society, 50–51

D

Dahl, Robert A., 202, 203 de Beauvoir, Simone, 144 Discourse, 27–29 Duncan, Otis Dudley, 124–126 Durkheim, Emile, 58, 87, 229–230 E

Eliot, T. S., 49, 51 Endogenous ideology, 19–20, 29–33 Estate system, 111 Evolutionary psychology, 49 F

Facts and values, 13–14 Fairclough, Norman, 29 Ferguson, Adam, 46, 81–84 Firth, Raymond, 50–51 Foucault, Michel, 203, 204 Friedman, Asia, 145 G

Galtung, Johan, 205 Garfinkel, Harold, 92, 93 Gemeinschaft, 76, 82, 83 Gerring, John, 17 Gesellschaft, 82–83 Globalisation, 77, 79 Goffman, Erving, 92, 93, 97, 231 Goldschmidt, Walter, 112 Goldthorpe, John, H., 113, 125–129, 131, 133, 134 Gramsci, Antonio, 26, 27, 87, 88, 208 Great British Class Survey, 129–131

 Index  H

K

Habit, 60–61 Hall, Stuart, 27, 44, 107 Hammersley, Martyn, 5–6 Hawthorne Project, 122, 124–125 Hegel, Georg, Wilhelm, Friedrich, 46, 85–87, 222, 229 Hegemony, 26, 208 Hindess, Barry, 206n4, 209n6 Hobbes, Thomas, 212–213 Hochberg, Herbert, 4 Hoggart, Richard, 44, 49

Kessler, Suzanne, 148, 149 Kuhn, Thomas, 28

I

Idéologie, 21, 22, 35 Idéologues, 21–23, 35 Ideology as beliefs with undesirable consequences, 30–33 components of the meaning of, 17–19 ‘end of,’ 26–27 as false beliefs, 18–20, 29–30 four definitions of, 19–20 history of the term, 21–29 problems with the concept of, 29–34 Individualism and collectivism, 73 Inequality, 1, 2 Interests, 226–230 Intersectionality, 114

L

Lachenmeyer, Charles, 1 Lather, Patti, 4 Latour, Bruno, 3 Lazarsfeld, Paul, 4 Leavis, Frank R., 44, 45, 49 Leavy, Patricia, 4 Levitas, Ruth, 29 Lewis, Oscar, 59 Lukes, Steven, 202–204, 206, 208 Lundberg, George, 4 M

MacLure, Maggie, 4 Mannheim, Karl, 24–25, 28 Marx, Karl, 23, 24, 46, 108, 113, 118, 120, 121, 131, 135, 224, 225, 229 Marxism, 23–27, 74, 95, 121, 133, 225 Mass society, 83, 88, 90 Matza, David, 60 Mayo, Elton, 122 Mckenna, Wendy, 148, 149 McLellan, David, 17 Measor, Lynda, 155 Methodological individualism, 135 Mills, Charles Wright, 131

J

Jay, Martin, 4 Jenkins, Richard, 3 Johnson, Boris, 58, 59

237

N

Napoleon Bonaparte, 22, 23 Neoliberalism, 74, 75, 79

238 Index

New materialism, 49–50, 146 Nisbet, Robert, 4, 112 O

Objectivity, 5 Other-directed ideology, 19, 29–33 P

Paine, Tom, 87 Pakulski, Jan, 112 Parsons, Talcott, 4, 44, 77, 80, 206n5, 209 Perspectival character of inquiry and knowledge, 30, 55–56 Perspectival ideology, 20, 33–34 Pfautz, Harold, 124, 125 Potter, Jonathan, 29, 232 Power consequential power, 214–216 debates about, 202–207 directive power, 208–214 Precariat, 116 Programmatic ideology, 20, 24, 33–34 R

Racism, 1, 2 Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred, 78, 79, 123 Rational choice theory, 230–231 Reification, 73, 77 Riots in August 2011, 57–62 Rodman, Hyman, 60 Rose, Nikolas, 78 Rosenberg, Morris, 4 Rubinstein, David, 2

S

Sartori, Giovanni, 1, 2 Savage, Mike, 127, 129–131, 133, 134 Schubert, Dan, 206 Sex/gender conceptual problems, 144–152 essentialism, 153 operationalising, 144, 152–157 third sex or gender, 150 Shils, Edward, 88 Simmel, Georg, 92, 93 Skeggs, Beverly, 108 Smith, Adam, 74, 81 Social class death of, 112–113 history of, 107, 108, 116 main forms of, 117–118 NS-SEC Scheme 88, 127 ontological status of, 118–119, 134–136 operationalising, 120–137 Registrar-General’s scheme of, 127, 134–135 Social, death of, 96 Social integration, 80 Social organisation, degrees of, 94–101 Social structure, concept of, 2 Society 5 meanings of the term, 75–76 global, 96 as sociation, 91–94 Socio-biology, 49 Strathern, Marilyn, 78 System integration, 80 Systems theory, 78

 Index 

239

T

V

Terms, as opposed to categories and concepts, 8 Thatcher, Margaret, 74 Thomas, Dorothy Swaine, 119 Thomas, William I., 119 Tocqueville, Alexis, 83, 86, 88, 112 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 76, 81–83, 91, 95 Toynbee, Polly, 4 Transdisciplinarity, 152 Tyler, Stephen, 4 Tylor, Edward Burnett, 42, 49

Value-relevant knowledge, 5, 155 Values, 222–226 Veblen, Thorstein, 116 Von Herder, Johann Gottfried, 43 W

Warner, W. Lloyd, 111, 122–125, 129, 131–136 Waters, Malcolm, 112 Weber, Max, 1, 127, 227, 230 Wetherell, Margaret, 29, 232 Williams, Raymond, 42, 44, 49, 116 Work, concept of, 2 Wright, Erik Olin, 135

U

Underclass, 116 Utopian goals, 220

Z

Žižek, Slavoj, 60