The human paradox that is common sense by Duncan Watts, New Scientist 20 July 2011. This is an interesting article in the New Scientist in which Watts takes issue with the influential science writer John Gribbin who claims ’social science’ is an oxymoron and that “any physicist threatened by cuts in funding ought to consider a career in the social sciences, where it ought to be possible to solve the problems the social scientists are worked up about in a trice”. Watt’s rebuttal is based on a critique of common-sense and its ability to provide superficial explanations of even contradictory statements. Indeed, however sophisticated Gribbin’s knowledge of the physical sciences may be, he clearly thinks that common-sense, particularly his own and that of physical scientists, is all that is needed to understand the problems and issues that social scientists are concerned with. Presumably if physicists ran the government and formulated social and economic policy then we would have no social problems and the current financial crisis would never have occurred. It is ironic then that key amongst the unwitting  perpetrators of our woes are a generation of alpha mathematics and physicist graduates who were recruited by Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and other investment institutions including the Word Bank to produce sophisticated mathematical risk models of how finance markets work.  Sociology, at least, does attempt to get behind and problematise common-sense, including the common-sense that informs the dismissive and arrogant attitudes that inform Gribbin’s characterisation of the social sciences.

In response to the Government policy for higher education and universities, The British Sociological Association started a Sociology and the Cuts blog. The object of the blog is to provide a place for sociologists to post commentary and lodge documents on the implications for sociology and society of the proposed government policy changes. Sociology and Sociology departments are particularly affected as one aspect of the policy is the complete withdrawal of Government funding for teaching the subject along with the arts, humanities and social sciences generally. A sociological perspective on the policy that is designed to create a (partially privatised) market for degrees based on the notion of students as customers can illuminate a number of worrying and potentially policy defeating unintended consequences.  The blog has been running since December 2010 with the BSA President Professor John Brewer, Professor Les Back, Goldsmiths University of London and  John Holmwood,  Professor of Sociology at the University of Nottingham and currently Chair of the UK Council of Heads and Professors of Sociology. One of the early posts on the BSA blog was a short version of one posted here in November 2010 What is sociology worth?

Sadly Professor Ray Pahl, a ground breaking sociologist of urban life, has died a the age of 75.

Guardian obituary: Ray Pahl obituary Sociologist known for his influential studies of work and friendship

The recent protests by students in the UK will no doubt be provoking comparisons with the waves of protest of the late 1960s/early 1970s. Certainly in terms of the scale of mobilisation recent events do bear comparison. Indeed, in terms of the numbers involved, and especially the number of simultaneous occupations or sit-ins currently ongoing in several universities, the scale of action is probably without precedent. However, there are also significant differences from the 1960s.

The issues are now more focused narrowly on student finance issues, whereas in the late sixties and early seventies a variety of student and non-student issues were important. In the late 1960s some student protests were about issues of university policy on student representation, attempts at the moral regulation of student behaviour, etc. Also important were anti-Vietnam war protests and anti-Apartheid protests. Nevertheless, the current student protests in Britain are a sign of wider unease with the trajectory of the current coalition government and its moral compass. These range from the disenchantment with the Liberal Democrats’ ‘sell out’ of their ‘pledge’ to oppose fees to the overall subjugation of all public policy to the short-term desire to reduce the deficit as soon as possible regardless of the social costs. Students are in this sense a kind of ‘vanguard’. A sign of what may be to follow.

The international context is very different. The 1960s saw a variety of movements especially in the USA in which students played a central role. In the early 1960s the civil rights movement effectively shifted from protest based in the black community to student and campus protest. By the late 60s protest against the war in Vietnam reached a pitch and extent that quite simply exceeds anything comparable today in opposition to the presence of US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although for several years now there have been significant protests by students in France over education issues they have quite simply not been of the scale and impact of 1968 either in France or internationally.

The tactics being used are well tried and tested. Marches and demonstrations in the streets and occupations or sit-ins in university buildings predominate. Student sit-ins were apparently invented in the sixties by US students adapting the civil rights tactic of sitting in segregated lunch counters, who in turn adapted the tactic from Indian opposition to British colonial rule. At the moment then there is little evidence of tactical innovation that frequently marks a powerful new insurgent movement. As for the levels of violence, for students of protest and policing these are not unprecedented. The 2001 riot in Bradford, the Poll Tax riot, the policing of the miners’ strike in the 1980s and the various urban disorders in 1981 and 1985 might all be thought of as involving more intense violence by both police and some sections of those protesting. However, physically attacking the vehicle carrying the heir to the throne whilst shouting ‘off with their heads!’ is quite unprecedented in the UK. I can’t recall anything like this occurring during a protest in modern times.

Who is involved shows some continuity and innovation compared to the 1960s. There have been some fairly traditional looking displays of ‘masculine aggression’ at demonstrations and occupations. On the other hand three groups are playing a more obvious role than in the sixties for rather different reasons. From press reports (which should of course be treated with some caution) photographs and videos women, ethnic minority students and younger school students and sixth formers are much more obvious than in protests from the 1960s and early 70s. More women are involved firstly and quite simply most students are now women, whilst they were a minority forty years ago. But there lies open the questions of if their higher participation now is a reflection of women’s greater involvement in and preparedness to take action as well as their likelihood of being greater net losers under the new student finance arrangements. Similarly more ethnic minority students are involved because their participation rates in further and higher education are also much higher than previously. However, as ethnic minority students are much more likely to come from economically less well off backgrounds then this might also explain their prominent levels of interest in these protests. Finally, what has generated most public comment in the media are the levels of participation amongst school students. They are the ones most likely to be affected by the new regime of student support (if it deserves that name), so their participation might not be unexpected. But it does raise important questions about young people’s views about politics, legitimate political action and their sense of rights and entitlements as citizens.

How all this has been organised also raises interesting questions. The largely marginal role of the NUS and other long established organisations is notable, but not to be unexpected. During previous waves of student protest the NUS in particular has often been ‘behind the curve’, with less formally organised groups and networks of activists organising direct action. The role of new media is also noticeable, but on reflection to be expected. The by now standard tools of electronic communication have been used very effectively – email, websites, twitter, facebook, etc. have enabled a more rapid mobilisation of more people in a shorter period of time than was even imaginable in the late 1960s. But these tools are now part of the standard toolkit of protest. On the one hand this is to be expected as people routinely turn to whatever means of communication they have at their disposal when they are seeking to mobilise. On the other we should note how from environmental protest in the 1990s through anti-capitalist protest these tools are now standard. It should also be noted how ‘open’ and ‘public’ they are and hence easily monitored by the police, journalists and others. They are ‘virtual public squares’ and contributing to them is rather like making a ‘virtual public speech’. Thus remote monitoring of what is being planned is much easier. No need for spies and informants as in the past (no I’m not paranoid, there really were some), these days you just go on the web!

We can also see some continuities and discontinuities in repression and social control. Rather like the 1960s and 70s there has been widespread condemnation in the largely conservative print media. However, the current 24 hour instant news coverage enables everyone to view demonstrations ‘in real time’ (anyone for non-participant observation?). This is very unlike the 1960s and 70s, when visual images had to be processed and edited for some hours before appearing as ‘news’. The policing is also very different. The British police now have specialised equipment and training in crowd control that was simply not there in the sixties and seventies. Kettling was unheard of and the standard police tactics were push and shove, use truncheons, and if that failed send in the cavalry! That is, charge and try and disperse the crowd with mounted officers. In addition the Public Order Act of 1986 (itself developed in response to perceived failures to control political demonstrations in the 70s and early 80s) gives clear and unambiguous legal guidelines for the police to arrest demonstrators for little more than simply being there. Picking off the noisiest and most animated of demonstrators by arresting them under the 1986 Public Order Act, but then not pursuing the charges seems to have emerged as a new tactic of crowd control. One further development in the policing of demonstrations is the routine use of video surveillance of the crowd. If you are there the police will have an image of you. Altogether this means that if you are participating in the demonstrations the risks of arrest and conviction for a public order offence are much higher than they were in the past.

So does this constitute a ‘new student movement’? That is certainly one possible outcome of all this. A new generation some as young as 14 have had their first taste of traditional British street based protest, and the tactics of the police. Such intense and rapid mobilisations of those previously uninvolved in political action often have the effect of transforming people’s views about power, the police etc. Whether such changes will become consolidated into something more enduring is really up to those involved.

Following the Brown report on HE funding and Osborne’s announcement of cuts in the universities’ teaching budget it seems the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, including sociology, will have all government funding for teaching withdrawn. Currently the fees for a sociology degree are £7,237 per year made up of £3,947 from the government and a top-up fee of £3,290 paid by the student. Without the government contribution students will have to pay the full £7,237 per year just to maintain the existing level of funding. The current intelligence says that the government wants to limit fees to £6,000 but will allow up to £9,000 per year if a set of widening participation criteria are met, including reduced fees and bursaries for less well off applicants. So charging the current break-even fee, well over the £6,000 ‘penalty free’ limit, will incur significant extra costs. These additional costs can be calculated and recovered by increasing the fee, probably pushing the actual break-even fee beyond £8,000. As a result students will see their fees double or even treble, and will be even more inclined to see themselves as customers purchasing a commodity and a bundle of consumer rights. This, not unreasonably, will make them even more demanding of resources and services. Universities will need to increase fees by a further increment to cover the additional resources needed to satisfy this ever growing demand from students. Only each university’s calculation of demand will counterbalance the economic logic driving fees towards the top end of the range.

It is clear that the government is targeting their reduced funding at subjects and disciplines that in their view best serve the economy. The message, intentional or not, is that sociology is not worth investing in and serves no useful purpose to the economy or society generally. Or, if anyone thinks it does, then they will have to back their judgement by paying for it in full. An education in the arts, humanities and social sciences are seen as a self indulgent luxury to be paid for at the discretion of individuals. To help them come to a rational decision, universities are being asked to make available the facts and figures of their graduates’ career destinations and earnings. The assumption is that individuals will choose their subject on the basis of economic rationality. As it happens, sociology graduates tend to do very well as far as employment prospects and enhanced future earnings go. But is a free market based on consumer choices driven by self-interested economic calculation the best way to allocate resources to higher education?

In any case, is the government correct in its judgement of the lack of utility of social sciences in general and sociology in particular? This reminds me of when Keith Joseph, widely considered to be the ‘power behind the throne’ during Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, complained that we needed fewer sociologists and more people entering engineering and wondering why this wasn’t happening. A sociologist could have told him. He went on to found a right wing neoliberal think tank to supply him with answers to policy questions based on privatisation, commoditisation and marketisation. Arguably this approach does include a modicum of implicit naive sociology. And this is, of course, the problem.

It seems that sociology is misunderstood, underrated and underused in some key areas of strategy development and in policy and decision making. Sociology generally has a marginal position, even non-existent,  in many key policy issue discourses. For instance, Thomas Palley, a former chief economic advisor to the US government, attributed the failure to predict the economic crisis by the government’s and the banks’ economists to the inadequacy of the profession’s grasp of sociology. Their continuing inability to explain the crisis is “the economics profession’s complete inability to come to grips with its sociological failure which produced [a] massive intellectual failure with huge costs for society. This is a very serious social problem and we will all continue to pay the costs as long as it is unaddressed”. (http://www.thomaspalley.com/?p=148). Judging by the neoliberal policies currently favoured by the government to correct the financial ‘imbalances’, based as they are on the same unsociological models of the economy implicated in the crisis that Palley (and an increasing number of ‘respectable’ economists) are complaining about, no one is listening to him.

Mike Hulme, Professor of Climate Change at the UEA, advisor to the UK Government, the European Commission and the International Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), in his recent book Why We Disagree About Climate Change, identifies three areas of uncertainty in climate science and what the implications are for policy. The first two relate to the uncertainties of the science itself: the uncertainties due to our incomplete understanding of the physical systems involved (in principle these may be reduced or at least formally quantified) and due to the innate unpredictability of large, complex and chaotic systems. These combined mean we can never have the degree of certainty and predictability that politicians and the public seem to demand. The third source of uncertainty and unpredictability simply reinforces this.

A third category of uncertainty originates as a consequence of humans being part of the future being predicted. Individual and collective human choices five, twenty and fifty years into the future are not predictable in any scientific sense. Here the best that can be done is to work with a range of broad-scale scenarios, a range of possible futures.

He goes on to ask who identifies the experts needed to address climate change science and policy. Who determines the relevant research questions? Who evaluates the research results? In answering these questions Hulme observes that, in the selection of experts, “elite judgements are clearly made about inclusion and participation” and “social scientists in general are indeed poorly represented among the nominated experts”. Surely experts who work in the area of Hulme’s third category of uncertainty are absolutely crucial? If so the social sciences are not an optional extra to be serviced, if at all, by the self indulgent decisions of individuals shopping around for an interesting looking degree to take.

What is the nature of this ‘unpredictable future’ contingent upon “individual and collective choices” where all we can do is map out a “range of possible futures”. How do we theorise and model the complex social processes that terminate, briefly, in choices? What about the choices of omission? What about the de facto ‘choices’ that are embodied and enacted without recourse to anything that looks like a conscious or rational procedure? What about the constraints on the freedom of choice, both known and unknown to the chooser? And what about the unintended consequences of these choices, some immediate and local, some delayed and impacting in far flung locations and on future generations. All this is the core of sociology’s subject matter and the central focus of the sociological imagination. If, in the view of the present government, the study of sociology is merely a matter of individual indulgence and if the higher education system is being organised accordingly, then perhaps it’s time for sociology and sociologists to seek more energetically opportunities beyond the academy, within civil society and the public spaces where open discussion is possible.

M Hulme (2009) Why We Disagree About Climate Change Cambridge University Press