Decorative sociology: towards a critique of the cultural turn

In this paper we outline a critique of ‘decorative sociology’ as a trend in contemporary sociology where ‘culture’ has eclipsed the ‘social’ and where literary interpretation has marginalized sociological methods. By the term ‘decorative sociology’ we mean a branch of modernist aesthetics which is devoted to a politicized, textual reading of society and culture. Although we acknowledge slippage between the textual and material levels of cultural analysis, notably in the output of the Birmingham School, we propose that the intellectual roots of cultural studies inevitably mean that the textual level is pre‐eminent. In emphasizing the aesthetic dimension we seek to challenge the political self‐image of decorative sociology as a contribution to political intervention. We argue that while the cultural turn has contributed to revising approaches to the relationships between identity and power, race and class, ideology and representation, it has done so chiefly at an aesthetic level. Following Davies (1993), we submit that the greatest achievement of the cultural turn has been to teach students to ‘read politically’. The effect of this upon concrete political action is an empirical question. Without wishing to minimize the political importance of cultural studies, our hypothesis is that, what might be called the ‘aestheticization of life’ has not translated fully into the politicization of culture. We argue that an adequate cultural sociology would have to be driven by an empirical research agenda, embrace an historical and comparative framework, and have a genuinely sociological focus, that is, a focus on the changing balance of power in Western capitalism. We reject the attempt to submerge the social in the cultural and outline the development of an alternative, integrated perspective on body, self and society. We conclude by briefly commenting on three sociological contributions to the comparative and historical study of cultural institutions which approximate this research agenda: Norbert Elias, Pierre Bourdieu and Richard Sennett.     

"Everyone with Eyes Can See the Problem": Moral Citizens and the Space of Irish Nationhood

This paper examines Ireland's 2004 Constitutional Amendment which removes birthright citizenship from any future Irish‐born children of immigrant parents. I argue that for particular historical reasons, the ability of the state to convince its citizens of the necessity for this Amendment was remarkable and I suggest that it was able to do so by constructing citizenship as a moral regime and foreign‐nationals and their foetuses as ‘suspect patriots.’ I describe how the notion of immorality is laminated upon black bodies — specifically black pregnant women — and how the presence of black migrant workers, refugees and asylees consequently comes to be experienced in Irish national space as transgressive, their political subjecthood constrained by the supposedly legible abjectivity of their bodies. The issue of race remains unenunciated, and yet, as the Minister for Justice stated during the referendum debate, ‘anyone with eyes can see the problem.’ The Irish government's privileging of moral rather than cultural incommensurability is strikingly similar to culturalist rhetorics of exclusion that are often invoked when race is at issue in European public debate on immigration. Configured upon, and therefore experienced as a type of body, immorality becomes an alibi for race and is naturalized as a form of exclusion and as a potential site of state intervention in the form of xenophobic legislation and policymaking. Reading this decision as merely racist however, fails to give voice to the experiences of Irish Citizens who voted for this Amendment. Their struggle to build a “New Ireland” and to accept a multiculturalist framework in the face of neo‐liberal restructuring policies and a European‐wide retreat from the welfare state must be considered as being in dialectical tension with the ideological smearing of immigrants if we are to fully grasp the complex interaction between relations of power and the privileging of difference.     

The Search for an Authentic Entrepreneurial Identity: Difference and Professionalism among Women Business Owners

This article contributes to the recent stream of research on enterprise and identity by exploring the authenticity‐driven identity work of a group of women business owners. While previous research has highlighted the effort some female business owners put into fitting in with the masculine identity of the entrepreneur, this article focuses on those women who self‐consciously adopt a feminized entrepreneurial identity as a means of being ‘who I really am’ in a business context. Nevertheless, despite their expressed commitment to a feminized identity, the article highlights their incorporation of a contrasting position or antagonism in this authenticity‐driven endeavour. Drawing on Charme's notion of existential authenticity, which places an emphasis on the cultural, historical, political, economic and physical limits to being ‘true to oneself’, the article shows how the situated nature of women's search for an authentically driven entrepreneurial identity means that they draw on a feminized discourse of difference and a contrasting masculine discourse of professionalism in their identity construction labours.     

Public sphere as assemblage: the cultural politics of roadside memorialization

This paper investigates contemporary academic accounts of the public sphere. In particular, it takes stock of post‐Habermasian public sphere scholarship, and acknowledges a lively and variegated debate concerning the multiple ways in which individuals engage in contemporary political affairs. A critical eye is cast over a range of key insights which have come to establish the parameters of what ‘counts’ as a/the public sphere, who can be involved, and where and how communicative networks are established. This opens up the conceptual space for re‐imagining a/the public sphere as an assemblage. Making use of recent developments in Deleuzian‐inspired assemblage theory – most especially drawn from DeLanda's (2006) ‘new philosophy of society’ – the paper sets out an alternative perspective on the notion of the public sphere, and regards it as a space of connectivity brought into being through a contingent and heterogeneous assemblage of discursive, visual and performative practices. This is mapped out with reference to the cultural politics of roadside memorialization. However, a/the public sphere as an assemblage is not simply a ‘social construction’ brought into being through a logic of connectivity, but is an emergent and ephemeral space which reflexively nurtures and assembles the cultural politics (and political cultures) of which it is an integral part. The discussion concludes, then, with a consideration of the contribution of assemblage theory to public sphere studies. (Also see Campbell 2009a)     

Re-inscribing gender binaries: Deconstructing the dominant discourse around women's equality in science, engineering, and technology

This paper tracks and attempts to unravel a persistently dominant discursive construction of the problem of women's under‐representation in science, engineering, and technology (SET) education and work: the idea that the interaction of gender stereotyping with the masculine image of SET disciplines and workplaces prevents girls and women from choosing SET subjects and going into SET careers. The discursive framework of ‘Women in SET’ will be examined at both macro and micro levels as it operates in the field of activist and pedagogic activity that has grown around the issue since the 1970s. A Foucauldian analysis will be applied in order to explore the kinds of subject positions this framework enables and excludes. It will be argued that the ‘Women in SET’ framework re‐inscribes the gendered binaries that have at a symbolic level defined girls/women and SET as mutually exclusive, and as a result practices based on this framework may be counter‐productive because their subjectivating effects on girls and women may undermine their broad political aims.     

Competing Sovereignties,Contested Processes: Insights from the Venezuelan Food Sovereignty Experiment

Abstract

This article explores how ‘competing sovereignties’ are shaping the political construction of food sovereignty—broadly defined as ‘the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems'. This study was motivated by a lack of clarity on the ‘sovereignty’ of food sovereignty, as noted by numerous scholars—sovereignty for whom, and how? As there is a growing consensus that there are in fact ‘multiple sovereignties’ of food sovereignty that cut across jurisdictions and scales, there is the question of how these sovereignties are competing with each other in the attempted construction of food sovereignty. This question is becoming ever more relevant as food sovereignty is increasingly adopted into state policy at various levels, calling for state and societal actors to redefine their terms of engagement. This article explores questions of ‘competing sovereignties’ by developing an analytical framework, using the lenses of scale, geography, and institutions, and applying it to Venezuela, where for the past 15 years a food sovereignty experiment has been underway in the context of a dynamic shift in state–society relations.     

‘Say no to the ATO’: the cultural politics of protest against the Australian Tax Office

Researching a broad array of protest forms offers valuable insights into social change. One such unusual form includes protests against tax law rulings made by the Australian Tax Office (ATO). Across Australia thousands of taxpayers invested in ‘tax effective schemes’ in the late 1990s. However, by 2000 each owed on average AUS$75,000 as a result of these schemes being ruled illegal. Rather than pay the money owed many have refused, publicly protesting through formal administrative and political mechanisms, and through public debate. At first glance, this appears an issue of individual economic self‐interest. However, qualitative research methods provide a more detailed and contextual picture of why protestors feel justified in their actions. Focusing on the hard‐hit Goldfields region of Western Australia, protests are argued as being about real and imagined identities; concerns over roles and status in Australian society; and the failings of institutional and political frameworks that should support, not penalize, citizens. The offence and ‘moral shock’ of being publicly labelled as ‘tax cheats’ facilitated protestors' view of themselves as workers trying to do the ‘right thing’ by their families and country. And as such, the normally private issue of individual tax affairs became a public debate and a site of cultural politics wherein the ATO's official discourse of rationality and regulation compliance is received by protestors as symbolic of their beleaguered position in Australian society. Here, citizenship struggles have not been eclipsed by post‐material or ‘new social movement’ concerns. Rather, sites of cultural politics, such as struggles over tax and identity, are constantly redrawn in light of new social practices and relations.     

LGBTQ Activist Organizations as ‘Respectably Queer’ in India: Contesting a Western View

This study contests the distinction of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) organizations suggested by earlier scholars as ‘respectable’ — i.e. normalizing, professionalizing and conforming to the dominant cultural and institutional patterns — and ‘queer’, meaning challenging the cultural and institutional forces that ‘normalize and commodify differences’. Using Bernstein's model of identity deployment, it is found problematic to distinguish LGBTQ organizations this way because when the actions of LGBTQ organizations are more complex to describe, it is not warranted to conflate identity goals with identity strategies — whether normalizing (respectable) or differentiating (queer). To examine these concerns, a qualitative inquiry was used to study five LGBTQ organizations in India where the intersections of post‐colonial ethnicity, gender, social class and sexuality offer an intriguing context through which to study queer activism. Based on the findings, it is argued from a post‐colonial perspective that when the socio‐cultural and historical existence of non‐homonormative queer communities and practices is strong, LGBTQ organizations challenge the heteronormative and/or other forms of domination to become ‘queer’. But they may simultaneously become ‘respectable′ by conforming to the diversity politics of non‐profit business, donors, and social movement organizations they seek support from, and turn out as ‘respectably queer’.     

Nationalities,pedagogies and media

ABSTRACT

This article examines the implications of the language of ‘cultural diversity’ and ‘difference’ for syllabi, curricula and educators in academic institutions. The author suggests an intellectual orientation which moves away from the social vocabulary of ‘inclusion’ to that of ‘multivocality’. Such an approach requires an interdisciplinary model whose departure point anticipates the need to teach students the skills of interrogating the relationship between power and knowledge and the political implications of this link.

It is argued that such a perspective would encourage a more careful consideration of bibliography and presentations which take into account the complex diversity in the backgrounds of students — the target audience. This would simultaneously diffuse the tendency to depoliticize and domesticate race relations under the labels of ‘culture’ and ‘multiculturalism’ and require educators to assume that more than a few have family histories which mirror heterogeneity and pluralism. The embodiment of difference, however, may not always be visible. As a pedagogical strategy, thinking explicitly about the assumptions behind who, what and how one teaches will further the epistemological and political objective of educating students to develop informed opinions as well as help to cultivate a heightened sense of personal accountability to their responsibilities in the multiple communities to which they belong.     

Cosmopolitics: towards a new articulation of politics,science and critique

This paper explores how Ulrich Beck's world‐risk‐society theory (WRST) and Bruno Latour's Actor‐Network Theory (ANT) can be combined to advance a theory of cosmopolitics. On the one hand, WRST helps to examine ‘cosmopolitan politics’, how actors try to inject cosmopolitanism into existing political practices and institutions anchored in the logic of nationalism. On the other hand, ANT sheds light on ‘cosmological politics’, how scientists participate in the construction of reality as a reference point for political struggles. By combining the WRST and ANT perspectives, it becomes possible to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of cosmopolitics that takes into account both political and ontological dimensions. The proposed synthesis of WRST and ANT also calls for a renewal of critical theory by making social scientists aware of their performative involvement in cosmopolitics. This renewal prompts social scientists to explore how they can pragmatically support certain ideals of cosmopolitics through continuous dialogues with their objects of study, actors who inhabit different nations and different cosmoses.     

Cultural production and the politics of identity: On the strategic use of ‘multiculturalism’ in two Austrian cities

This article is a résumé of the findings of an empirical study carried out by the ICCR Vienna between July 1993 and July 1994. The study investigated the images of ‘foreigners’ as members of immigrant minorities that emerge out of the interaction between the cultural administration, organizers of cultural events, cultural agents and ‘ethnic minority’ artists, and how these images and the discourse on ‘foreigners’ relates to practices of inclusion and exclusion. Specifically examined were artistic productions and initiatives of the low‐profit and non‐profit sector of theatrical and musical performances in Vienna and Graz. Qualitative interviews with the main actors were supported and enriched through non‐standardized participant observation, action research and a modest social experiment. The article argues that the Austrian variant of the discourse on ‘multiculturalism’ serves as a tool to formulate social order, whereby social inequality is transformed into cultural difference. The emancipatory dimension of culture as a way of life is used to construct homogeneous cultural ( = ’ethnic') collectives. In this construction immigrant artists serve as the representatives of the collective culture of the ‘others’.     

NARRATIVES AND THE CONSTITUTION OF A COMMON IDENTITY: THE KAREN IN BURMA

This research was conducted in an informal school located in Thailand at the border with Myanmar (Burma) and supervised by the Karen National Union (KNU). The KNU has claimed and fought for political autonomy and independence from the Burmese government for more than a half century. The authors examine how, in their narratives about what it means to be Karen, future Karen leaders try to deal with challenges to a sense of Karen unity and “groupness,” and to the legitimacy of the Karen struggle. One important challenge is the substantial cultural, religious, linguistic, and geographical internal diversity. Establishing a coherent Karen identity among the different subgroups is a continuing struggle for Karen leaders. Another is the negative labeling of the KNU as stubborn people and violent terrorists. These labels endanger the political project, the international reputation, and the local attractiveness of the KNU.     

‘Mafia Baroque’: post‐socialist architecture and urban planning in Bulgaria

This paper traces the reception of the architectural style known as ‘Mafia Baroque’ within the professions of architecture and urban planning in Bulgaria. The debate within these professions was strongly linked to the general decline of power among former intellectual elites and the specific decline of architects and planners, who were sidelined as arbiters of ‘good taste’ and disempowered as regulators of urban growth. The reaction to this style also highlights the rise in public concern over corruption and organized crime and dissatisfaction with post‐socialist urbanization. This paper chronicles the extent of changes in construction and regulation in Bulgaria during the 1990s and argues that planners and architects were challenged not only by their professional marginalization but also by a deeper embarrassment over cultural change. It then relates this debate to broader post‐socialist anxieties over insufficient regulation of urbanization and fear of failing to meet Western European goals for economic and political change.     

Indigenous Religion,Christianity and the State: Mobility and Nomadic Metaphysics in Siberut,Western Indonesia

Recent studies in the anthropology of mobility tend to privilege the cultural imaginaries in which human movements are embedded rather than the actual, physical movements of people through space. This article offers an ethnographic case study in which ‘imagined mobility’ is limited to people who are not mobile, who are immobile or sedentary and thus reflects a ‘sedentarist metaphysics’. The case comes from the island of Siberut, the largest of the Mentawai Islands off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, where government modernisation programs in the second half of the twentieth century focused on relocating clans from their ancestral lands to model, multi-clan villages and on converting people from the indigenous religion to Christianity. Recent changes in the national, regional and local political contexts have led many of the Christians in the villages to reclaim the indigenous religion by invoking the figure of the shaman, whose special skill is the mobility that village dwellers do not have—a mobility that produces and reproduces a spatial, social and cosmological continuity between home and forest. Many people who live on their ancestral land and practice only the indigenous religion argue that the Christians’ hybrid religious practice is not culturally ‘authentic’ because the indigenous religion requires a mobility that is not possible in the government villages. In this view, the shaman is a surrogate, and his ‘substitute mobility’ arises from a sedentarist metaphysics.     

INTRODUCING HISTORY (IN)TO CULTURAL STUDIES: SOME REMARKS ON THE GERMANSPEAKING CONTEXT

While ‘cultural studies is caught in a traffic jam’, at the same time the seemingly global crisis of cultural studies coincides with the late reception and high popularity of cultural studies in the German-speaking countries after the ‘cultural’ and the ‘linguistic turns’. Yet, the political and academic history and the contexts of the emergence of cultural studies and ‘Kulturwissenschaften’, as well as their by now established academic traditions and the manifold relations to current developments, are rarely defined and scrutinized. In this paper,we will relate some theoretical and historical perspectives concerning the relationship between cultural studies and the historical disciplines in the German-speaking context. We shall try to trace the potential of mutual benefits between cultural studies and history by foregrounding the political commitment of academic work that still seems to be one of the most important traits of CS as much as the necessity of a stronger notion of the contextualization that history and historiographical methodology provides.     

Toward a Decolonial Alternative to Development? The Emergence and Shortcomings of Vivir Bien as State Policy in Bolivia in the Era of Globalization

There is an urgent demand for the examination of the critical perceptions of new kinds of ‘development’ which are emerging in the Global South in response to—and often opposed to—the global capitalist political economy. This article discusses the case of contemporary Bolivia in which indigenous political alternatives have emerged as the resistance to economic globalization and the powers of capital accumulation, as well as to the cultural and epistemological commitments of the Western order. Through an ethnographic approach, it examines the emergence and shortcomings of the notion of vivir bien—a local, decolonial, indigenous concept of good life—as state policy. It argues that despite its transformative potential, the translation of vivir bien discourses into state practices has not been, to a large degree, achieved.     

Two Dads: Gay Male Parenting and its Politicisation — A Cooperative Inquiry Action Research Study

Australian gay men have only recently become parents through surrogacy arrangements. They have had to overcome a discriminatory legal, social, political, cultural and financial environment. A cooperative inquiry action research group was formed, with seven two‐father families conceived via surrogacy, to explore their journey to parenthood and their consequent politicisation as gay fathers. This article reveals how that experience of the cooperative inquiry process strengthened their resolve to be intentionally ‘out’ in their communities to overcome discriminatory and conservative social attitudes. They embraced the political reality of their parenting and were stimulated to create improved support structures for themselves and future parents. This transformed the legal, social, political and cultural environment for their families.     

Double disenchantment of politics: A systems theory approach to post‐socialist transformation

Many social scientists argue that the precarious future of post‐socialist societies is determined by cultural constraints to which the actors of transformation are exposed. In contrast to this approach, the paper focuses on those developmental obstacles which are inherent to the structure of post‐socialist societies. The analysis draws primarily on social systems theory, especially on the theory of functional differentiation. In the first part, the changing role of political actors is dealt with. The competitive nature of the democratic political process have forced the new and old political actors to adopt a pragmatic and professional attitude towards their activity. Not all of them, however, have been able to adapt to the new rules of the political game. Adaptation problems are mostly faced by those political actors who played a decisive role in the initial stages of democratization on the basis of their informal political influence. The second part of the paper focuses on the changes related to the societal functions of the democratic political system. Irrespective of the ambitions of political actors, democratic politics is inherently ‘unsuitable’ for the extensive regulation of society. A democratic political system presupposes a relatively high ability of other societal subsystems to rely on self‐regulation. The absence of this ability is an important source of systemic tensions in post‐socialist societies. These two sets of changes can be characterized as the double disenchantment of politics. Both on the systemic level and on the level of actors politics has lost many attributes of a ‘privileged’ societal activity. But the process of disenchantment can give rise to demands for a revival of the politics of ‘great deeds’.     

Good Governance as Managerialism: Rationalisation and International Donors in Vietnam's Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Sector

Donors’ appreciation of their relationship with Vietnam as a ‘mature development partnership’ requires explanation. Drawing on Rural Water Supply and Sanitation policy, the article argues that the success of donor collaboration with Vietnam is based on Vietnamese political culture coincidentally aligning with a managerialist ‘world culture’, presently extant in the form of neoliberal ‘good governance’ development orthodoxy. The article shows that Vietnam ‘delivers’ rationalised development policy to international donors through its system of state administration and planning, the implementation of target‐oriented planning and the role of statistics in the policy process. The strength of the ‘darling’ partnership is explained in relation to this cultural dimension of legitimacy creation through the performance of rational development planning and administration.     

Michael Thompson's contributions to making social science more social and scientific

Good social and political theory is parsimonious, cumulative, counter‐intuitive, and relevant to well‐intended efforts to solve gripping social problems. This introduction to the Festschrift shows that in developing ‘rubbish theory’ and ‘cultural theory’ the work of Michael Thompson meets all these criteria. Added is a ‘top 10’ of quotes from Thompson's work, an overview of his academic career, as well as a bibliography.