Oxford Sociology

What is a good idea depends on what the feasible alternatives are

2012-02-15T08:31:00.000-08:00

Kind of obvious really, but apparently not to Martin Taylor (Eton and Balliol) currently chairman of Syngenta and a former chief executive of Barclays. In his weekend FT op piece he makes a comparison between the current standoff in Euroland and the Treaty of Versailles. The strap line sums it up:

Reparations were essential to secure French support at Versailles in 1919. This did not make them a good idea.

Said with the unshakable confidence that Eton and Balliol selects for, but nonetheless balls. My point is not deep. In hindsight reparations after WW1 appear a bad idea, but at the time there was no serious support for the alternatives. Keynes lunched out on his (correct) prediction of some of the consequences but his was not a mainstream opinion. At the time no French support meant no Treaty and no Treaty was not a politically acceptable outcome. It's a strange mentality - maybe it's common among bankers (I wouldn't know) - that leads you to find fault in not choosing an alternative that is not available to you. If you are on top of a hill and a clever (perhaps Eton and Balliol) banker exhorts you with Olympian detachment to reach the summit of a distant mountain without descending into the valley, then feel free to take their advice with a pinch of salt.

Misguided Journal Editors

2012-02-03T10:21:00.000-08:00

I and a coauthor have an article under consideration at a leading British sociology journal. To her surprise she received an email from the editor of the journal asking her to take down the copy of the paper hosted on the work in progress section of my website before the journal would send the paper out to referees. There is nothing sinister about this and it is, no doubt, done with the best of intentions, but in my opinion it is quite obtuse.

Research enters the public domain in all sorts of ways, as conference papers, press releases, working-papers and so forth. Grant awarders want early dissemination and the only way to do that - given the length of time journals take to publish - is to write working papers and disseminate them as widely as possible, which usually means electronically. To try and enforce a double-blind refereeing procedure is to stand Canute like before the waves.

The only potential victim, if they choose to reveal their identity by putting a paper in the public domain, is the author themselves. If they, in effect, wave their right to anonymity what business is it of the journal to try and retrospectively impose it on them? This is doubly true when this 'policy' (along with others I've brought attention to in the past) is not mentioned in the journal's guidance to authors. Personally I'm willing to trade the scientific benefits of early dissemination against the small probability of a prejudiced reviewer - and I really believe that probability is small. Referees can be many things: careless, yes; ill informed, yes; incompetent, yes. But I've rarely read a referee's report that seems to be motivated by pure malice.

I rarely referee an article nowadays without knowing who has written it. I don't need to Google. Academic niches are small. If you only referee work in your own field - as you should - then you know who the players are and what they are up to. You probably refereed their last grant application. You certainly saw their presentation at the last conference. If you can't recognize the author then you don't know what is going on and you aren't fit to referee.

Some months ago I discussed this very issue with an economics colleague. He told me that nobody reads the articles in economics journals. By the time they are published they are old news. Publication is just the kite mark, but everybody has read the working paper and formed their own opinion long before that. That's how things are in a serious discipline.

Reaction to latest UCAS application figures

2012-01-30T10:25:00.000-08:00

Here is my first take on the UCAS figures released today for the 2012 round of university applications. I've done some quick and dirty work on the numbers supplied by the Guardian. This is nothing more than a first pass, it takes the data at face value and it says nothing whatsoever about whether increased fees have differentially put off different types of potential applicants. It also does nothing to control for the size of the 18 year old birth cohort - which is obviously important. If we look at applications to all universities, on the basis of the Guardian figures alone, it looks like the average change in the 2012 figures compared to the 2010 base is -0.72% ie a decline of less than 1%. It's important to use the 2010 base because in 2011 students obviously anticipated fee rises and were less likely to take a 'gap year'. Using the Guardian data we can also see if the magnitude of the percentage change across universities is related to average fee levels. Data on the latter are missing for quite a few cases so all the usual cautions apply. However, on the basis of what data there are, it looks like the answer, at the institutional level, is no and this is true whether or not you adjust for bursary provision and fee waivers. Here is a very rough and ready graph of the relationship. The regression slope is essentially flat and the slope coefficient is non significant (but actually positive!).

I've broken all the rules about making nice graphs, but I'm pushed for time at the moment. It will be interesting to see if a rather different story emerges when somebody is able to look at these data more carefully.

Forpseud!

2012-01-30T03:32:00.000-08:00

I notice that several of our 'leading' departments now have slick advertising videos on their web pages. Nothing surprising about that. As I've observed before, once blowing one's own trumpet gets a foothold then the Devil take the hindmost. What is perhaps a bit more surprising is how easily sociologists adopt the locutions of management speak. For instance here is a gem from one of the promos:

"...students gain a wide variety of employability skills and one of these can be exampled by the research project..."

Excuse me, but since when has to use or make an example become a verb? I example, you example, she examples.... If we translate this into English it is obvious that the first part is banal while the second part (even if you add in what follows the ellipsis) is meaningless:

...students learn things that may be useful in the workplace (I would hope so); an example of this is the research project... (what about it? In what way is this an example of a skill that students have learned?).

OK, I'm being a tad pedantic, but this sort of thing is insidious. Consider, for example, how to make, create or state a theory became a verb in sociologyspeak. Now all you have to do to dismiss any inconevnient empirical fact is to utter the magical incantation: "Your article/paper/sentence (tick whichever is applicable) is undertheorized." This phrase absolves the utterer from ever clearly stating what the actual deficiency is. It is in most cases the equivalent of shouting bugaboo!

Forpseud!

2012-01-19T06:14:00.000-08:00

Anyone care to have a go at translating this sociological gem into something resembling the English language?

"There is much to unpick here about how particular classed, racialised and gendered (young) bodies come to be (re)positioned and (re)inscribed within regenerated city-scapes. Urban ‘disadvantaged’ youth become objects of a particular luminosity, encoded as future-oriented, agentic subjects who stand for the city’s pride, hope, diversity and multiculturalism."

There is indeed much to unpick here... among the more minor, why the scare marks around 'disadvantaged'? Is this meant to be ironic? Is the author saying the youths are not disadvantaged?

I'll spare the author's blushes unless they insist on attribution.

Why journals do not contain a record of continuous scientific progress

2012-01-17T02:29:00.000-08:00

The inimitable Ben Goldacre has ferreted out a useful early example of a discussion of publication bias. Fifty years on and my impression is that things are not greatly improved in some disciplines. Add publication bias to the belief on the part of some editors of sociology journals that their organs are part of the entertainment business and you have the perfect recipe for the reproduction of blah blah.

AIG

2012-01-09T09:13:00.000-08:00

I've been too busy to post for a while and the horizon doesn't look much clearer but hope springs eternal. For the moment here is a link to a comment on the economic crisis which is as insightful as any I've read and a good deal more succinct.

Doctoral Funding Available at Oxford

2011-11-23T04:48:00.000-08:00

My department admits between 10 and 15 doctoral students each year. There is likely to be funding to support at least 3-4 students. You can get generic information here and here. I'm keen to build up a group of research students working in areas I have an interest in. You can get some idea of what I am looking for by reading this. If you think you might like to work with me, get in touch. I'm happy to help you with your application - as long as you give me sufficient time ie don't approach me a week before the application deadline and expect to get a response!

Music - times and places

2011-11-21T11:05:00.000-08:00

I'm sure it is a banal observation - but I'm going to make it anyway: there are particular songs or pieces of music that always in my mind conjure up particular times and places. Take Joan Osborne's One of Us. For me this is a particularly melancholic stretch of the South Circular between Clapham and Dulwich that I once had occasion to drive along from time to time. Oasis' Don't Look Back in Anger is indelibly associated with 1996 and the interminable tube ride out to the faceless suburbs of Ruislip and getting home just in time to watch the latest episode of Our Friends From the North. Pilot's Magic is the 13 year old me on the way to the local chippie after the church youth club hoping against hope to meet or at least get a glimpse of the unattainable beauty that lived just across the road and no clue what to say to her if I did. Be Bop Deluxe's Maid in Heaven is me two years on gradually realizing that there is intelligent pop music. Me and Baby Brother has me in the fifth-form disco dancing with the the friend of one of the girls in my class and enjoying a raffish notoriety because none of the cool kids had thought I had it in me. John Martyn's Sweet Little Mystery has me living under the shadow of the Post Office Tower with a depressed Yorkshireman and a cricket mad Pakistani for flat-mates. The depressed Yorkshireman introduced me to John Martyn so I'm eternally grateful to you Bob wherever you are now. The Bach Double Violin Concerto in D Minor places me in a tiny room in King's Cross, and walking in Regent's Park while falling in and out of love with girls from the music schools who were, quite literally, out of my class when I should have been studying for my finals. And weirdest of all Wichita Lineman has me wandering slightly tipsy through the bright streets of Soho at 3 o'clock in the morning thinking: Ah, so this is freedom, this is the life of a student!

Political crisis

2011-11-18T07:20:00.000-08:00

The Romans had a way of solving political crises. They would appoint a dictator (magistratus extraordinarius) for a limited time rei gerundae causa or seditionis sedandae causa ie to get things done or to put down rebellion. He was the technocrat of the day: "Trust me, I'm above politics".

Today I read and agreed with a comment piece in the Financial Times by Michael Ignatieff (which surprised me). He makes the completely obvious points that nobody else seems to be making. Why should the Italian or Greek citizens trust the unelected technocrats? (By the way isn't there a delicious irony in the name of the new Greek Prime Minister - Papademos?). Government by technocrats perpetuates the myth that the crisis is just a technical one, something that a sufficiently clever economist can, given time, sort out. It isn't. As Ignatieff rightly says it is also a political crisis and above all a legitimation crisis. The technocrats may have the (temporary) support of the political classes, but what happens when the people don't like the medicine they prescribe and react by saying: hang on a minute, who elected you? Technocrats like to pretend that there is only one choice or one best way of doing things and that their criteria of "best" is the only one a reasonable person could choose. They are not good at understanding that the Greeks, Italians and probably the rest of us before long have political choices to make. And those are about the kind of country we want to live in and how we want to govern ourselves.

More of this (usually) means less of that

2011-11-08T02:14:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I sat in a meeting in which student representatives are invited to raise issues about their courses and departmental life in general. I think these occasions are very valuable. Students have a big stake in university departments and it does us all good to hear what they think. The world can look very different depending on where you sit in the organizational hierarchy and it does those nearer the top a power of good to hear what those on the receiving end think about the experience. I've often thought though that decision making at university meetings - not just ones involving students - would be improved immeasurably if all participants agreed to a simple convention. Every time a proposal is made that implies an increase in the amount of resources devoted to one activity - say extra classes in X - the proposer should be obliged to pair it with a recommendation to devote less resources to Y. Of course if we are not near the production frontier we could decide to have more X and the same amount (or more) of Y. But it would be good discipline for everybody if we didn't begin by simply assuming that we live in a world where we can, or want, to do more of everything. University departments, in my experience, are subject to a large amount of drift. New courses accumulate faster than old courses are pensioned off and demands on students grow without adjustment to the goals that they are supposed to reach. And all this goes on in a fantasy world in which we all connive to pretend that we can have or do more of everything without affecting the quality of the output. Sometimes we can, but, more often than not we can't and then more really does mean worse.

Sociology and Social Anthropology: what's the difference?

2011-11-07T02:47:00.000-08:00

The Royal Anthropological Institute has started an interesting website to promote the discipline. I was struck by what it had to say about social and cultural anthropology. I can't detect any serious intellectual differences between the story it tells about what anthropology is and the story that a sociologist would tell about what sociology is about. Of course the division of the intellectual landscape is to some degree arbitrary, but I can't help thinking that from time to time we should do some spring cleaning and tidy things up a bit. I know this sounds ultra rationalist as well as a tad dirigiste but one of the consequences of not doing this is firstly that people ostensibly doing the same things do not talk to each other and secondly that ecological niches evolve which - to the detriment of good science - insulate tribal members from cross-border criticism.

Here is a wild speculation: it could be the case that qualitative work in sociology would be more rigorous if it was routinely subject to the scrutiny of colleagues trained in the anthropological tradition. It could likewise be the case that much of what passes for the anthroplogical study of industrialised or post-industrialised societies would benefit from the the scrutiny of people with a more quantitative turn of mind. Just a thought (and I am, of course, aware that some universities already follow the path of enlightenment by having joint sociology and anthropology departments).

UCAS and University application

2011-10-31T09:13:00.000-07:00

It seems to me that there is an obvious way to organize admission to English universities so that potential students can apply after they know their results: start the university year in January. There would be a lot of advantages and, as far as I can see, few disadvantages. There is no need to change the timing of A level examinations. The existing university terms could be kept with teaching in the existing Spring and Summer Terms followed by the Summer vacation and examinations in the Winter Term. Educationally I can only see benefit - students would have the Summer vacation to revise and think about the material and they would start the next academic year with it fresh in their minds. It would also give students who gain places at university an opportunity to spend an extra term at school perhaps following a pre-university preparation course. There would, of course, be a slightly painful transition period, but it shouldn't be beyond the wit of any institution worthy of the name 'university' to be able to cope with that. Now tell me all the reasons why it can't be done.

St Paul's

2011-10-28T02:39:00.000-07:00

Hats off to Canon Giles Fraser for having the courage of his convictions. If only a few of our political leaders could act with such straightforward honesty and dignity... but then again they wouldn't last very long in our political system if they did. I'm curious though how one can be guided in one's moral life by a belief system that asserts both:

"...it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."

and

"...render unto Caesar what is his and unto God what is His."

That's the problem with revealed religion, self-evidently something got garbled during the process of revelation.

Categorization

2011-10-25T09:12:00.000-07:00

For some reason I'm a person who finds thinking in terms of categories easier than thinking in terms of continuous measures. Maybe it's just an effect of getting into quantitative social science without studying proper math in school - if you didn't take calculus in upper secondary school and had to mug it up yourself later thinking about continuous smooth change or differences sits uneasily on top of my instinct to chop the world up into discrete bits with distinctive labels. Maybe that piece of cod psychology is just nonsense. Anyway I'm always slightly disturbed or amused when people chop the world up differently from the way I would do it. Most of the time I come round and admit that my way is just as arbitrary as the next person's, but sometimes I just wonder what goes through people's minds.

At the weekend I was browsing the shelves of my local Waterstones (whiling away the time while partner and daughter had their hair cut) and found that they had put Philip Kerr in the general fiction section. I like Philip Kerr, but he is a genre writer and should be in the crime section! If I'd wanted to buy one of his excellent Bernie Gunther novels, which as it happened I didn't, I wouldn't have been able to find it. I know it is trivial, but worse was to come. Upstairs in the philosophy section they had put George Polya's How to Solve it next to Karl Popper's Open Society and its Enemies. What's the matter with these guys don't they know the difference between mathematics and philosophy?

Still, there was one encouraging sign. My blood pressure always used to rise when I saw what was on the shelves in the sociology section. Problem solved. There is no longer a sociology section.

What is a university?

2011-10-25T02:22:00.000-07:00

The Guardian today gives space in its education section to what is, in effect, an advertisement for BPP University College masquerading as a comment piece by BPP principal Carl Lygo. BPP is a private, for profit, college with degree awarding powers. Personally I've nothing against such colleges entering the market and I can see the attraction of the no frills, low cost model. What they should not be allowed to do is pretend that they are something they are not. Lyco can scarcely be accused of that. In fact I'm amazed by his candour. He writes:

"So how can we do all this and still charge only around half the fees the other charge? The answer is by cutting back on costs in areas that do not directly affect the student experience. Having underutilised real estate (classrooms, libraries, lecture theatres, breakout space) that students do not use is just a drain on cost."

Classrooms, libraries, lecture theatres and breakout space do not directly affect the student experience? Did I read that right or have I just entered a parallel universe in which the English language no longer means what I thought it meant. Or is this just standard corporate speak which, silly old me, nobody is meant to take seriously and is "qualified" in the small print?

Rhythm of the year

2011-10-17T03:12:00.000-07:00

One of the things that every parent notices once their children start school is that the year becomes much more obviously structured by the traditional festivals that for most of us long ago lost any deep significance. In a way I quite like it and for small children it is probably psychologically important to have the year marked by a succession of regular and familiar events. It's interesting though how these events can take on very different shades of meaning.

Last year my daughter took part in her Kindergarten Harvest Festival service. It was held in one of Bamberg's Lutheran Churches - a rather splendid building that was completely reconstructed after the war. Inside a small group of parents huddled - German churches never seem to be heated - to watch the kids perform a harvest themed play. We sang a few hymns said a few prayers and the female priest - dressed in black with a splendid white ruff - preached a short sermon. One shouldn't overestimate the piety of the event; most of the parents, judging from an apparent lack of familiarity about how to behave in church, looked as though they were far from stalwarts of the predominantly working class parish and were primarily interested in taking photographs and videos of their offspring. On the other hand the event was recognizably about thankfulness for the fruits of the earth.

This year we were back in England and the school Harvest Festival was in an enormous Edwardian North Oxford barn of a church. Turning up five minutes before kick-off we were lucky to squeeze into the back row and those that came after us had to stand. I wonder if the church had ever been so full. We were then entertained for an hour by quite amazing orchestral and choral performances by the children. As one of the parents said to me afterward: "You had to keep reminding yourself that they are just junior school kids". Audience participation was limited to one quick verse of We Plough the Fields and Scatter which I think was quite enough for most of the parents.

At one level what we saw was a spectacular achievement. The children had obviously been practicing hard and the performance standard was truly outstanding. In a sense, of course, this is what the parents wanted to see - the children - or in some cases their child - at centre stage. It would be wrong to be cynical or disapproving of that, but I can't escape the feeling that even for this non-believer something important about the meaning and significance of the festival had become obscured.

Defending Public Libraries

2011-10-14T04:35:00.000-07:00

Public libraries that are free at the point of delivery - at least if you want to borrow books - are an important part of the sort of community I want to live in. It wouldn't be much of an exaggeration to say that up to the age of 18 I got a large amount of my education from and in Coventry's Central Library. If you came from a home like mine where there was no culture of books or reading one of the few ways you could get any sense of the sheer range of what there was to know and enjoy was by visiting the library, standing in front of the shelves, and surveying their content. I was very lucky in that my father, no great reader himself, thought it was a good idea when I was round about the age of 7 to take me one day after school to our local branch library (an old two room Carnegie building) to get me a library ticket. I can still remember the first book I chose for myself - a large illustrated volume about Carter's excavation of the Tutankhamun tomb. I think the text was too difficult for me, but I enjoyed looking at the pictures.

My own daughter has had her own library card from the age of 3 and every other week we make a Saturday afternoon trip to get story books and DVDs. We often see the same families in the children's section of the library and, as far as I can judge, they are not just drawn from the middle classes - though inevitably quite a few are.

I've got reasons then to feel instinctive hostility towards plans to cut library provision - my own County has quite extensive plans to make "efficiency savings" and has just concluded a "public consultation". I've personally benefited enormously from the system and I hope my daughter will too. But, I feel uneasy. Looking at the evidence rationally rather than emotionally I can see that some of the resources devoted to the public library system are probably misallocated. Consider a county like Oxfordshire with a large rural and small town population. Library buildings last a long time and locations that made perfect sense 50 years ago may not make as much sense now. But public feeling tends to get very firmly attached to what was relevant in the distant past rather than what is sensible today. Public policy always involves making choices: more of this (or in the current climate the same of this) means less of that. If you look at spending priorities one by one in isolation it is impossible to decide which services deserve support. They all deserve support, but that is not a choice within the politically feasible set.

Forpseud!

2011-10-13T02:07:00.000-07:00

An occasional posting inspired by the delicious column Forsooth! in RSS News.

Which Professor of Sociology describes his understanding of our discipline in the following way?

"Sociology is for me in essence the ironic depiction of the ironies of human existence, that is, an ironic take on historical irony".

Forsooth!

Possibly useful methods site

2011-10-06T04:46:00.000-07:00

By chance I came across the Methodspace website which might be useful to know about (assuming you don't know about it already). I've only briefly looked at it and will be interested to hear informed opinion about its utility. Two caveats. Firstly you have to scroll to the bottom of the page to find out that it appears to be sponsored by Sage. Nothing intrinsically wrong with that, they produce some useful books, but on the whole I prefer not to link to commercial sites and you will find quite a lot of plugging of Sage content. Secondly my very brief look at the site content suggested to me that surrounding the more serious questions and discussions there is quite a lot of artlessly disguised "can you help me with my methods 101 homework" type of fishing. Still I keep an open mind and if I hear a lot of positive feedback I'll add it to my blog list (and if not I won't).

Incidentally my own attempt a few years ago to create a very crude version of this sort of thing in the department was a complete and utter failure. I was always hearing from students that they were frustrated by lack of easy access to all the methods expertise (or enthusiasm) that is widely diffused amongst us. So I set up a mail list to which any member could send out quantitative methods questions that were troubling them in the hope that somebody in the community could give them some advice.

The problem was not in recruiting members - plenty signed up. The problem was in soliciting questions. Literally not a single question was ever submitted. I saw no evidence to suggest that the need for advice disappeared, it just seemed to be that when push came to shove nobody was brave enough to admit in public that there was something they didn't know or couldn't figure out.

And they say education is a dialogue...

Academic biographies

2011-10-05T08:24:00.000-07:00

The trouble with writing the biography of an academic is that by and large they don't have very interesting lives. All the action is, so to speak, inside their heads and if the thought is less than riveting in the first place then the biographer really has a tough job, one that it would be wiser not to take on. Still, some make a success of it. I enjoyed and felt I learned something, for example, from Ben Rogers' biography of Freddie Ayer and Michael Ignatieff's life of Isaiah Berlin. Two less successful exemplars of the genre I've read recently are Fred Inglis' History Man: The Life of R.G. Collingwood and Dai Smith's Raymond Williams: A Warrior's Tale.

Collingwood is a thinker I suspect is oft cited but little read. One of the reasons for this is that his thought is difficult to pigeon-hole within conventional intellectual categories: he was an archaeologists, an historian and a philosopher. Personally I find his philosophical writing an acquired taste, in fact a taste that I have never managed to acquire. He's usually regarded as one of the last of the Oxford Idealists picking up the baton from wherever the likes of T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley and a host of obscure and now long forgotten Oxford philosophy dons dropped it in the first couple of decades of the Twentieth Century. How much there is to this view I can't really say mainly because I have a profound distaste for the writing of the Oxford Idealists based on the fact that for the most part I can't understand what their metaphysics is actually about. One mention of the Absolute and I reach for my conceptual revolver. I imagine it was an infinitely subtler version of that reaction that got Oxford ordinary language philosophy off to a flying start. (Of course in my own day we had versions of the same kind of thing. As an undergraduate I had great fun learning the arcane vocabulary of Althusserian Marxism and could 'interpellate' with the best of them, uttering long and apparently grammatically correct, but essentially meaningless, sentences at will. The members of the sacred circle nodded their heads in sage agreement. Nobody challenged it. I might as well have been making farm-yard noises: in fact I was making farm-yard noises).

Anyway I turned to Inglis' book hoping to learn something about the man and a lot about his thought. I'm sorry to say that I learned little of either. Essentially Inglis has little to say and he says it at great length. The reasons for this are rather plain, firstly he doesn't seem to have much to work with apart from Collingwood's books themselves. It quickly becomes apparent that the family refused him access to personal papers in their possession and therefore one of the key sources for an illuminating biography is missing. Secondly, Inglis doesn't appear to have the sort of philosophical insight that made Rogers' and Ignatieff's books illuminating (at least to me). Beyond the few windy generalities that I already possessed I'm not much the wiser as to the significance of Collingwood's thought. What I do sense is a biographer who is out of his depth and would have been wise not to have got into the pool in the first place. What is particularly irritating are the vast number of pages devoted, not to Collingwood's, but to Inglis' opinions about this, that and the other, none of which are particularly interesting (tip - in a biography it is the subject not the writer who should be at the front of the stage). So Collingwood still awaits a serious biographer. Whether the wait will be worthwhile I can't say, but you may feel that life is too short to fill in the time with Inglis' effort.
Raymond Williams is one of those iconic figures who for my generation of left leaning undergraduates sat at the right hand of Marx (or was it Lukacs or Goldmann?). Anyway, he was one of those figures like Edward Thompson, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawn and Rodney Hilton who were supposed to be, as far as we were concerned, beyond reproach or criticism. Of course I made the appropriate reverential noises, but actually, a lot of the time I felt guilty because although I believed that ideas about a "common culture" and "structures of feeling" should have some analytical value, I could never quite put my finger on what that value was, other than as emotional rallying calls for a particular English intellectual generation, that even by the time I was an undergraduate, had had its day. I can't say anything about his works on drama, which I've never read, but I do recall the first bewildering time I read Culture and Society. I couldn't make head nor tail of it. What did all these little essays add up to? Williams clearly believed there was a thread, there probably is a thread of some vague sort, but where did it lead? I was dammed if I knew. Later I read the book again. I got more out of the individual essays, but I still wasn't really able to understand why it had such a big impact when it was first published in 1958. I was similarly disappointed by The Long Revolution. Cultural studies types seemed to regard it as a source of endless insights but to me it just seemed to be a lot of cod sociology much of it at a level of generality which meant it was never precise enough ever to be wrong. People whose views I respect tell me that Williams' fiction is worth reading: I'll save that pleasure for a rainy day.
Dai Smith's problem is the opposite of Inglis'. Whereas the latter had too little material to work with, Smith has too much and he never misses an opportunity to present it to the reader. On the whole Williams didn't lead an especially interesting life, unless you find drafts of syllabuses for WEA courses fascinating. An unfair, but not entirely inaccurate synopsis might be: school, Cambridge, active service in WWII (start a short lived literary magazine), Cambridge (start another short lived literary magazine), Extra-mural tutor (start various short-lived literary magazines), write a lot of novels that are never published...

Smith pads out the bare bones of the story with pages and pages and pages of verbatim quotations from Williams' largely unpublished and endlessly recycled fiction. Some of this stuff can reasonably be regarded as subliminary evidence of biographical value, but we really don't need so much. The story could have been told in 200 rather than 500 pages and that story, at least up to 1961 which is where the biography ends, is really that of a man very much caught up in trying to understand his own roots, and his own place in the world to pretty much the exclusion of everything and everybody else. Friends and comrades appear on the scene, some are around for years only to be suddenly dropped for the flimsiest of reasons (Wolf Mankowitz, Clifford Collins) or no reasons at all (Michael Orrom) and all the while the abiding image is of a man sitting at home in Hastings surrounded by notebooks and work in progress (which is never finished) almost oblivious to the existence of his wife and three small children. There are intriguing references to depression, apparently keeping him in bed for days, but this does not seem to have kept him from his main occupation: scribble, scribble scribble Mr Williams (and why not start another literary magazine?). As a political actor on the left he was involved, yet not really, or only reluctantly, at the centre. Perhaps he was just too much of his own man to be straightforwardly committed to any political cause and in fact his grounds for refusing military service in the Korean War contain strong hints of this (his case was essentially that he objected to the subordination of the individual to the dictates of military authority). Williams was clearly a complex man and I suspect one with many inner demons that he could only exorcise through his writing. Whether that exorcism leaves us a legacy that is of anything but historical interest is something that I'm not sure of.

The history of sociology - as told in the UK

2011-09-30T06:01:00.000-07:00

I'm an intermittent reader of Herb Gintis' Amazon book reviews which are interesting because he ranges right across the social sciences and beyond. I'm not in a position to make terribly informed judgments about his take on a number of subjects - economics, evolutionary psychology, physics - but in areas closer to my heart he is sometimes spot on and sometimes infuriatingly perverse. On the general state of sociological theory he can be pretty sharp - ie most of it is waffle little of which can genuinely be called sociological theory - and that some fashionable attempts to remedy that situation, for example agent-based modelling, can't fill the gap (the proponents of it more often than not stand accused of mistaking a methodology - which is undoubtedly useful - for a theory).

His admiration for Talcott Parsons, at least the early Parsons, is something I find difficult to understand. The Structure of Social Action, led nowhere theoretically - in fact Parsons went off in another direction and into an equally fruitless blind alley - and treated as an account of the genesis of theoretical thinking in sociology - as it often is (though this is as much the fault of Parsons' readers as of Parsons himself) - it is extremely misleading. The version of Durkheim, Weber, Pareto and Marshall we get from Parsons are really accounts of what they should have written if they had been able to foresee his grand synthesis.

One common way in university departments of dealing with the lack of genuine sociological theory but the need to have a course with the title "sociological theory" is to get somebody to give a course of lectures on the "classics" which in the British context tends to be interpreted as Marx, Weber and Durkheim with perhaps a nod in the direction of demi-gods like Simmel, Tocqueville, Pareto and so forth. It's easy for this sort of thing to become a sort of ersatz history of social thought and when it does it is often tempting to present it as a series of "debates" between the leading protagonists. In as far as these are understood as setting out the actual course of intellectual history - as opposed to a highly selective and post-hoc reconstruction - they are cloth eared misrepresentations.

Marx and Weber did not think of themselves as sociologists and Weber had far more corporeal partners to debate with than das grosse Gespenst. Weber and Durkheim appear to have had little cognizance or at least little serious interest in each other's work (cf their very different understandings of the sociology of religion). Marx may have been important for the history of social thought in some continental European countries, especially Germany, but his impact on British academic sociological thought - until he was taken up by sixties radicals - was minor. What is especially interesting in the British case is what has been written out of the indigenous tradition. When I took my undergraduate course in "sociological theory" the first lecture was about Nineteenth Century evolutionism (my eternal thanks go to Anthony Smith for giving one of the best set of lectures I ever attended) but who now reads Spencer, Tyler and Maine? Not many sociologists to be sure - and probably quite rightly - but you can't understand the intellectual origins of sociology in Britain without understanding that some of the roots lie in that relatively stony soil rather than in the apparently richer earth of the Continent on the other side of La Manche.

Stefan Collini does a brilliant job of making this point in his Liberalism and Sociology: L.T. Hobhouse and Political Argument in England. That Hobhouse should have held the first British endowed chair in sociology could be considered a bit of a puzzle - though being related by marriage to Beatrice Webb probably did his cause no harm. But Collini makes it clear that in the political context of the time a connection between the New Liberalism espoused, amongst others, by Hobhouse and the type of Fabian "progressive" social thought being explored at the London School of Economics seemed entirely natural. Of course this was, to some degree a marriage of convenience, and didn't last, but nobody in 1906 could foresee that after one more great flourishing Liberalism in its English sense would be dead.
There is a sense in which the first world war destroyed the intellectual foundations of Hobhouse's world - never glad confident morning again. But his influence lived on through his disciple Morris Ginsberg who was still active and influential right up to the early sixties. And their sociological ideas, now long neglected - perhaps the last influence was on Leslie Sklair whose doctoral thesis was published as The Sociology of Progress - are not inherently silly. The question of whether systems of normative ideas have an inherent tendency to develop over time along certain lines and according to a certain logic is capable of empirical investigation. As is the question of whether the normative systems of different societies tend to converge. That the process of investigation was and is hard - not least because of the Galton problem of cultural diffusion - should not lead us to tell stories about the national origins of our discipline that are little more than the myths of the ignorant.

Humour

2011-09-29T04:27:00.000-07:00

I was thinking the other day about the last time I read a book that made me laugh out loud (I should perhaps add the qualification that only books that are meant to be funny count). I don't mean raised a wry smile, or a gentle chuckle, I mean a loud uncontrolled belly laugh. Too long ago I fear, but that led me on to think about the books that have ever made me laugh out loud. It is a distressingly short list but the reason for that may be my increasingly defective memory more than anything else. Be that as it may, here they are (in no particular order): 1) Spike Milligan's Puckoon; 2) Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman; 3) Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall; 4) Waugh's Scoop. Two Irishmen (sort of) and an English reactionary. Odd bedfellows to be sure (to be sure). What was the last book that made you laugh out loud?

White paper on higher education

2011-09-27T08:46:00.000-07:00

I think we can all agree that the government's white paper on higher education is a disaster. In its current form it will solve none of the (real) problems that it is meant to deal with. Nick Barr's evidence to the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee sets out clearly why the proposed policy can't work and points to how it needs to be changed so that it can work. Meanwhile, trumpeted in the Guardian today is the "alternative white paper" In Defence of Public Higher Education (there is a link from the Guardian article) signed by some of the great and good of British universities (it is interesting to notice which disciplines are represented).

What strikes me is that it is possible to agree broadly with all nine of the "propositions about the value of public higher education" and still believe that it is a very silly document that contributes precisely nothing constructive to the public debate - and, I think, provides wonderful evidence of much that is wrong headed in some of the social sciences in Britain.

Nowhere does this document address or even hint at answers to the relevant issues (unless you take it as implicit that the signatories believe that general taxation is a viable source of funding for current levels of enrollment and future expansion). It would have advanced the debate if they had come up with concrete proposals as to: 1) How are you going to put money in the hands of universities now?; 2) How are you going to remove the cap on student numbers imposed by fiscal constraint?; 3) how are you going to reform the current absurd situation in which members of a cohort that gain no direct private gain from publicly funded higher education nevertheless are taxed to pay for it?

The status quo implies redistribution away from the types of people that train (often at their own expense to be chefs, plumbers, carpenters, mechanics etc in favour of the types of people that go to university to study classics, art history, english literature, theology, film studies and so forth. And people who say that they are in favour of social mobility are in favour of that?

Culturally off centre

2011-09-26T08:54:00.000-07:00

One of the great things that happens to you when you spend time living in another country is that you get exposed to bits of popular culture, some perhaps even stemming from your own cultural zone, that you never noticed before. So while in Germany I watched and enjoyed quite a few German films, but also quite a few international films that I had somehow missed. A good example of the latter is the completely charming Irish musical film Once. You'd have to be cynical not to enjoy this modern day Brief Encounter. I also enjoyed a lot Train of Life which, believe it or not, is a comedy about a jewish village deciding to deport itself to the East before the Nazi's do the job. It sounds an unlikely subject for comedy and in dubious taste to boot, but it is extremely funny and you have to watch right to the end to get the point. Of the German productions the highlights were: Das Wunder von Bern - a sort of German Chariots of Fire but much better; Schwabenkinder a shocking costume drama about the exploitation of child labour in Southern Germany and Die Manns a "docu-drama" about the lives of the Mann family.

Balls

2011-09-26T02:49:00.000-07:00

Listening to Radio 4 this morning while brushing my teeth I heard somebody who sounded like a sixth-former being interviewed about the economy. Couldn't they find somebody more authoritative than that? I thought to myself as I did my usual gargle and spit. It was only after a few minutes that I realized that the person they were speaking to was the Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls. I imagine I will have the same reaction tomorrow if I happen to catch the Leader of Her Majesty's Official Opposition during my dental hygiene routine.

The problem is not so much with what they are saying, or failing to say - though the lack of any meaningful parliamentary opposition to the current Government makes the shambles on the opposition benches between 1979 and 1983 look like a golden era of statesmanship. It is all about how they say it. Miliband and Balls are not stupid, they are exactly the sort of people that a serious minister or shadow cabinet member should want to have in their team. But, regrettable as it is, they are the wrong people to front the show. So far the media have been reasonably kind to them, but that is not going to last.

Noises off

2011-09-23T06:39:00.000-07:00

My guess is that it is a common experience to feel a bit like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard's play. You know, you are centre stage in the spot-light, but all the really important or interesting stuff is taking place behind you, just off stage, just finishes before you enter or only kicks off immediately after you have exited. One of my Rosencrantz and Guildenstern moments relates to Satoshi Kanazawa who was appointed to replace me at the LSE when I moved to Oxford. I remember at the time thinking it was an "interesting" appointment: let's say that already in 2002 the man had something of a reputation. I subsequently met him a couple of times at social functions and he seemed to be perfectly pleasant (to me at least) not that this is evidence for or against anything in particular. Since then his talent for provocation seems to have become unbounded culminating last week in a very public wrap over the knuckles from his employer.

Before I get to my main point let me make my position very clear. Personally I'm convinced by the scientific critics of Kanazawa's more controversial papers and pronouncements that the claims he makes are false and that the intellectual craftsmanship is poor. In my view he is reckless in a way that suggests that his principal aim is to court publicity rather than contribute to understanding. If this is true, he would, of course, not be unique, either at the LSE or in academe in general. I can also understand that what he writes may well genuinely offend and distress people. Personally I find some of what he has written distasteful not least because it seems to show little respect for the rules and procedures of serious science.

Now comes the however. I find the outcome of the LSE's disciplinary hearing a little odd, in fact, I find it worryingly authoritarian and quite against the spirit of a university as a community of scholars in which people engage in discussion to prove (in the old fashion sense) the worth of ideas without anyone telling them what they may or may not think. The principal findings of the hearing appear to be that: a) "...a number of people had been greatly offended by the blog"; b) "...some of the assertions put forward in the blog post were flawed and would have benefited from more rigorous academic scrutiny"; c) "...the author ignored the basic responsibility of a scientific communicator to qualify claims made in proportion to the certainty of the evidence"; d) "...the article had brought the School into disrepute".

I wouldn't for one moment want to dispute that any of these findings are true, what I would question however is whether they are reasonable grounds for taking disciplinary action against an academic. a) giving offence is not a crime. It may be bad manners, but if we are going to discipline people for that then to be consistent we would have to cast the net much wider; b) amounts to saying that he was wrong, OK, so let those who can say that they have never written anything that was later shown to be wrong cast the first stone; c) if this is grounds for disciplinary action then I would respectfully submit that to avoid hypocrisy the LSE needs to construct a much bigger dock, one that will contain most of the members of some "disciplines"; d) seems to me to be a very dangerous argument to play with and in fact is little more than a fig leaf for those who are ultimately to blame. As I mentioned above, Kanazawa's reputation was well known before he was appointed. Why was this ignored by the selection committee? I have it on good authority that the relevant people were well informed.

Universities are places in which all sorts of intellectual conversations are conducted constrained only by the law and by the conventions of reason. As far as I can see Kanazawa has broken no law, nor infringed any clause of his employment contract. Some of his writing does, in my view, not adhere to the conventions of reason, but the appropriate responses to that are: 1) scientific criticism; 2) ridicule; 3) not bothering to read his stuff. Apart from amongst a collection of rather unsavory characters on the fringes of respectable academic opinion - you probably all know to whom I'm alluding - Kanazawa's reputation is now zero, his academic capital has gone down the pan. He may get a few gigs at events put on by crazies but he is now persona non grata as far as mainstream academia is concerned. In other words he is already reaping what he has sown and no reasonable person can have any sympathy for him on that account. But it is not the business of universities to dictate what, where and when their employees write and the LSE's witless requirement that he refrain from writing anything for a one year period except in refereed journals seems to me to be an infringement of his human rights. It would certainly be interesting to see whether such a ban would withstand a legal challenge. Regardless of the outcome of such a hypothetical the "senior academics" who made up Kanazawa's disciplinary hearing need to ask themselves whether they really understand the idea of a university.

Academic malpractice

2011-09-13T02:54:00.000-07:00

Allegations of scientific fraud have been made against Diederik Stapel a Professor of Psychology at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. Science covers the story, but I think gets one detail wrong, he hasn't yet been fired, just suspended pending an investigation by the university. Andrew Gelman has been blogging about some recent cases. What is odd in a way is that Stapel is an experimentalist. Making up data from experiments is in one sense easy, but extremely high risk. In any reputable discipline you have to specify the experimental protocols well in advance, do the power analysis, recruit people and run the experiment. If you turn up with some data but nobody recalls you ever running the experiment then suspicions are immediately aroused.

For what it is worth, in my own neck of the woods I don't believe there is much downright fraud going on. But intellectual dishonesty takes a number of forms. The pressure to publish and to produce startling findings is just too great for many to resist and when you see the pressure that people are under you can understand why they do it. Being selective about the evidence you consider; ignoring inconvenient results; making claims which aren't in any way justified by the meager empirical evidence; making a fuss about statistically "significant" differences without noticing that the "effect sizes" are of no practical interest; projecting trends on the basis of poor measurements taken at two time-points; allowing the press to run away with a sexy story that you know in your heart of hearts probably isn't true - but justifying it by saying: "well it's the best evidence we have at the moment".

All of this goes on all the time. The reason is simple. Coming up with some genuinely novel findings in the social sciences is hard. A lot of the time the world really is just as it appears to be or is resistant to having the truth extracted from it - especially if all you have to go on are observational data. So if you do find some data that gives you a quirky result you have to be quite saintly not to rush into print with it. So "obesity is contagious" is news and "fat people seek each other out" is not. One can understand that the press is interested in the former. What is less understandable is that some reputable academic journals apparently are extremely reluctant to publish critiques of headline papers whose claims turn out, on close examination, to have less substance than the authors would have us believe. Let's not forget, that at the end of the day one of the central institutions of science - academic journals - is a profit making business and that nobody has succeeded in making the Journal of Unrejected Null Hypotheses look attractive to a publisher.

Blah blah sociology

2011-09-12T12:14:00.000-07:00

Taking a look at the videos on the British Sociological Associations web site of its last conference I found one nice thing - richly deserved life-time achievement awards for Michael Banton and Chelly Halsey. Otherwise I found the rest of the content utterly depressing. If this is the best that British sociology can do then we are doomed. As far as I could see the usual waffle merchants were pumping out the same old empty generalities decked out as profundities - what the Dutch sociologist Wout Ultee calls "Blah blah" sociology - while firmly slapping each other on the back and telling each other how wonderful they are. Frankly I hadn't a clue what most of them were talking about or what their point was. None of the talks seemed to have much truck with carefully articulated questions addressed with appropriate empirical evidence. That would be too boring wouldn't it? Or perhaps too difficult. My alienation from the mainstream of British sociology began a long time ago and I found nothing here that is likely to reverse it. I wonder what Michael Banton and Chelly Halsey made of it all?

More like the movies

2011-09-12T05:11:00.000-07:00

A propos of nothing in particular, I've been watching a fair number of movies recently, catching up on stuff I somehow missed when first released. I try to follow the spirit of the advice an old friend once gave me to the effect that every now and again one should go to see a play that the critics have rubbished simply because the critics aren't always right. Of course this works both ways and sometimes they rave about the most appalling old tosh. Joaana Hogg's Archipelago is a case in point. I thought it was tedious and pointless. Why would anyone want to watch what looked like home movies of the banal mumblings of a bunch of toffs on holiday? I certainly didn't and, having lost the will to live, I couldn't watch it to the end.

I had to take Bela Tarr's The Man from London over two nights and after barely surviving the first hour it was touch and go whether I would go back to it. On the whole I'm glad I did because for a movie in which very little is happening in front of your eyes - sometimes literally nothing - it kind of grows on you. The action is mainly psychological and after a while you succumb to the mesmeric way in which the film is shot.

The Bill Douglas Trilogy won't be to everybody's taste, but I thought it was superb. Douglas has the reputation of being a bit of a miserablist and he certainly had a lot to be miserable about. Even by the standards of the time his upbringing was harsh and at times brutal. You can't go through that sort of childhood without being damaged in some way. To turn those experiences into an autobiographical work of cinematic poetry is little short of redemptive. I'm lost in admiration for the man even though he could be, by all accounts, an awkward cussed bugger. Great artists are allowed to be intolerant of things and people that get in the way of achieving their vision. I also enjoyed his feature film Comrades about the Tolpuddle Martyrs. It's a simple story, simply told from complex material and succeeds in narrating the human tragedy without the political preaching that comes from hindsight.

Other things I've enjoyed recently: Capote (brilliant performance by Phillip Seymour Hoffman); Of Time and the City (Terence Davies' love song to Liverpool); The Cement Garden (a very creepy rendition of Ian McKewan's early novel); Black Cat, White Cat (a hilarious Serbian gypsy comedy); 4 Months, 3 weeks, 2 days (grim but exceptionally well made Romanian film about illegal abortion); The Visitor (a tale about illegal immigrants in New York with superb ensemble acting from the 4 principal players).

Economists and empirical evidence

2011-09-08T03:24:00.000-07:00

I don't suppose that economists are less likely than any of the rest of us to make daft pronouncements about empirical issues without appearing to bother about the empirical evidence. So the letter to yesterday's FT signed by a gang of 20 "leading economists" arguing (I use the word loosely) that the 50 pence top tax rate should be abolished isn't a particularly surprising event. The replies in today's FT from Alan Manning and Andrew Oswald (also leading economists) seem to me so reasonable - let's look at the existing evidence and wait for the new evidence that will shortly be available - that clearly there is some flaw in their reasoning that is so subtle that I haven't spotted it.

One member of the gang of 20 is the Cambridge economist Bob Rowthorn. This is the man who said in a 2008 interview with Alan Macfarlane: "...I wouldn't regard myself as left-wing any more. I regard myself as left-wing in the sense that, saying there are a lot of poor people in the world that deserve a better deal and that those that are better off maybe could make some sacrifice." What kind of sacrifice would that be then? Obviously not one of a financial nature. In the course of the interview he confirms the essential soundness of his judgments by confessing that he supported the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

All arguments have to be considered on their merits, but perhaps Professor Rowthorn and his colleagues should take some advice from Oliver Cromwell: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken."

Blind to art

2011-09-07T08:36:00.000-07:00

I'm an occasional visitor to Modern Art Oxford, mainly, it has to be said, because the promise of a cup of hot chocolate in the cafe is a guaranteed way to get the young Ms Mills out of the house and out from under her mother's feet on a rainy Saturday afternoon. A couple of weeks ago we visited Haegue Yang 's "Teacher of Dance" exhibition. OK, I'm going to have a boorish Brian Sewell moment and I'm sorry if I offend anyone, but really it was pretentious crap. A room full of venetian blinds hung from the ceiling, a "sculpture" made from discarded light bulb packaging... To quote the gallery blurb: "Predominantly using domestic materials, Yang discloses narratives, individual portraits and her own sentiments, reflecting the balance of research and intuitive enquiry that underlies her practice." Really? Well, she didn't disclose them to me and I'd be interested to hear what exactly she "disclosed" to anyone else. And no I don't think that art has to be representational, and yes I do like abstraction in painting and sculpture (how dreadfully middle-brow) but surely whatever art is it has to communicate something to the spectator's gaze. Isn't that the difference these days between talent and bullshit?

Intelligence, Libya and LSE

2011-09-06T08:14:00.000-07:00

It was really just a throw-away line but this Guardian story makes my original intuition about the Libya, Intelligence, LSE nexus look a whole lot more plausible.

Taking the rough with the smooth - plugging colleagues and flakes

2011-09-06T07:45:00.000-07:00

In the same issue of Sociological Research Online I also noted an interesting review article on economic sociology by an esteemed colleague. The article looks like a useful resource and is very catholic in its definition of what is to count as economic sociology, which must be a virtue. Not catholic enough though to mention Market, Class and Employment. What lies behind that omission one can only speculate about. Honestly, what do you have to do these days to get a decent puff from your workmates?

Clearly not much in some institutions. I noticed that the single (five star!) review on Amazon of Mike Savage's Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940: The Politics of Method is by ... Roger Burrows his sometime coauthor and current Head of Department at York. Way to go boys, keep blowing, it needs a lot of hot air to keep the RAE balloon inflated.

And before I leave off SRO I also noticed in it an extraordinary whinge by Peter Saunders about extreme left-wing, feminist and anti-quantitative bias in British sociology. Not everything that Saunders says is completely bonkers. Let's face it when even a former President of the BSA is indiscreet enough to write that one of the problems in British sociology is that some of our colleagues "are flakes" you might allow that there may be something for Saunders to whinge about. On the other hand he doesn't seem to entertain for one minute that his difficulties during the late 90s in getting research grants or in getting his work published might have had something to do with scientific quality.

I don't regard myself as a man of the extreme left or as a feminist (to be honest I'm not sure what it is I would have to believe to be the latter) and I'm not generally known for my hostility to quantitative work but even I have noticed one or two things in Saunders' published oeuvre that are, shall we say, questionable, on technical rather than ideological grounds.

Taking the rough with the smooth - social mobility

2011-09-06T06:46:00.000-07:00

My attention has been drawn to the latest issue of Sociological Research Online (apologies if you can't penetrate the pay wall). It contains amongst other things an article by Professors Li and Devine about social mobility in Britain. I was sent an early draft of the paper late in 2009 by Professor Devine and invited to comment, which I did. In brief I didn't like the paper much. They took some data that John Goldthorpe and I had already analyzed, estimated more or less the same models, obtained more or less the same results as we did but, to my mind, miraculously drew quite different conclusions - some of which were flatly contradicted by their own numbers. The published version has been improved cosmetically and a couple of the crasser errors have been expunged but otherwise most of my original criticisms still seem to hold water. Still, I should complain? At least it is a citation. For anyone with the remotest interest in the issue I reproduce below my comments on the original version of the paper (I've corrected a couple of minor typos):

Dear Fiona

Thanks for letting me see the paper. I'm a bit pushed for time right now so I have just glanced at it very quickly. If I get an opportunity before Christmas I'll try to read it more carefully. My immediate reaction is along the following lines:

In terms of relative rates - your results don't appear to differ from those that John and I get in our 2008 paper. We find a small and marginally (statistically) significant - as judged by the conditional likelihood ratio test - increase in fluidity for men. As judged by the approximate confidence interval around the "unidiff" parameter the difference isn't significant. We prefer to be cautious about how one should interpret such results in a two point comparison - indeed part of the point of our paper is to urge caution when drawing conclusions about long term trends based on just two data points. What our longer series shows quite clearly is that there are year on year fluctuations in the estimates of the unidiff parameter which are probably due to non sampling sources - ie differences in the way data are collected by different survey agencies using different instruments, different data processing conventions etc. Add to this the measurement error introduced by the various approximations that have to be made to produce similar occupational codings and an allowance for the fact that the data are not collected by SRS and you have to concede that all our (and your) significance tests err on the side of finding differences and all confidence intervals are too short. Incidentally what you say on page 25 in interpretation of the unidiff parameter isn't quite right: ", indicating a slight but significant increase in fluidity (the odds ratio for this would be e-.03 = .97)". This isn't an odds-ratio it is the amount by which all the log-linear interaction parameters are multiplied by in t2 compared to t1.

Contrary to your footnote 9 it is not the case that "...even the upper bounds of the 95% confidence intervals for the estimates are mostly below the 1972 benchmark (Goldthorpe and Mills 2008: Figure 7)". For the 72-92 series there are 12-1=11 relevant confidence intervals and of these by my visual inspection 9 intersect the 1972 baseline - the exceptions are 1979 and 1985. Your final sentence in footnote 9 must also be based on a misunderstanding. You say: "If the starting point of the 1991-2005 series were placed at the estimate point for GHS 1991, then the 2005 estimate and the upper bound would both fall well below the 1972 mark." But you fail to notice that our 1991 BHPS 7 class estimate has already been recalibrated so that the unidiff parameter for that year equals 0 and that is the only comparison with 2005 that is logically possible. It would be absurd to place the 7 class BHPS point at the same level as the 1991 GHS point and make a comparison with any points in the prior 1972-92 series. The point is, as I thought we went to some trouble to explain, the two series are not comparable with respect to level.

Of course, as you know, the unidiff model is a very global test of differences between tables in that it considers all odds-ratios. I've looked in a little more detail at specific sets of odds-ratios and it is possible to find some slight evidence of a weakening in Erikson and Goldthorpe's so called "hierarchy" parameters though not in other parts of the CASMIN core model. If one really wanted to find evidence for more fluidity that is where I would look, but one still has to be mindful of the fact that one only has 2 data points. One also needs to be mindful of what the magnitude of change implies in terms of % changes in observed mobility rates. At the end of the day finding statistically significant differences just tells you about how much data you happen to have available. What you really want to know is how important substantively are changes/differences implied by the model. That is what we do in footnote 25 of our 2008 paper and we conclude that such changes as can be attributed to an increase in social fluidity per se are of trivial magnitude when converted into percentage differences in the proportions making various transitions.

Moving on to "absolute" rates of mobility the differences in levels between your paper and our 2008 paper are generated as far as I can see by your different way of defining upward and downward mobility. I find it odd that in your conclusions you say: "Crucially, contrary to Goldthorpe and his colleagues, we have argued that focusing on total rates of absolute mobility is misleading because it conceals upward and downward mobility." Nowhere in our 2008 paper do we focus only on total mobility rates - as is clear we also look at upward and downward mobility and you really musn't imply that we do not. We do however use a rather conservative way of doing it - so for example moving from from NS-SEC 1 to NS-SEC 2 would not count as downward mobility in the 2008 paper (see our Table 1). There is obviously no "correct" way to do it and both ways have their merits.

Basically we seem to be in agreement though as far as women are concerned. You however believe that you find something different for men. Broadly speaking our way of doing absolute upward and downward mobility doesn't produce any remarkable differences for men between 1991 and 2005. You find no significant difference in upward mobility (which bizarrely you contradict in your conclusions: "When unchanging total rates are disaggregated, the results show that men’s upward mobility is changing and on the decline.") , a 4.7% difference in downward mobility and a -1.6% difference in horizontal mobility. Leaving aside how much variability we might see in these numbers if we were able to observe year on year change - these don't strike me as large differences.

However, let's assume that they are real and substantively important. I would then interpret them not, as you appear to do as evidence in favour of a Machin and Blanden -things are getting more unequal - story but as evidence of the contrary. Look at your Table IV. The mobility chances of men from 6 and 7 origins of getting into 1 and 2 destinations all improved (albeit slightly). The chances of men from 1 and 2 origins ending up in destinations 6 and 7 also increased. In other words this is consistent with the slight, but substantively trivial, increase in fluidity result that we both find when we examine relative rates. Given that the origin and destination marginal distributions don't change that much over the two periods you would expect somewhat similar patterns in absolute and relative rates. So if there is any change over time it is in the direction of more - not less mobility. In short if you understand your own numbers in Table IV correctly I find it very difficult to understand how you can conclude that: "To repeat, these findings are similar to Blanden et al.’s research on social mobility focusing on income mobility." They most assuredly are not. They are entirely consistent with a hypothetical situation in which bright working class kids from the bottom of the class structure increased their chances of getting managerial and professional jobs whilst thick kids from the professional and managerial classes were unable to get the same types of jobs as their parents. Whilst it may be inconvenient politically for New Labour to approve of something along these lines, it is indeed one of the things that wanting to increase social fluidity might imply. It is also worthwhile pointing out that Machin and Blanden's analysis of quintile tables implies a relative view of mobility rates - which we point out in our footnote 9 (2008) so the evidence of your analysis of absolute rates has little if any direct bearing on their results.

In short then I don't really see that your paper adds very much to what we did in our 2008 paper. Most of the results are very similar. You cetainly interpret your results in a different way, but I believe that your numbers don't support that interpretation. For what it is worth I also think that in one respect our own work is not inconsistent with that of Machin and Blanden. That is that neither they nor we believe that there is terribly strong and convincing evidence that over the period from the early 1970s onward the social fluidity/mobility regime in GB has become substantially more open. Our analysis and your analysis of class mobility show that for men (and incidently households - see our figure 9) there might be a very slight tendency in that direction - but that quantitatively it doesn't amount to much and could easily be the result of poorer quality measurement, lower response rates etc in the more recent period. What clearly is not the case in either your or our analysis is that there is any evidence of an increase of the association between class background and class destination between 1991 and 2005. Though this is not irreconcilable with Machin and Blanden's account of social mobility, they are after all taking about two specific cohorts and different destination periods, it seems just perverse to say that such a result strengthens their claim about long term trends. In short then, at the moment, in my opinion your contribution doesn't really throw any more light on the important issues and if anything, to mix my metaphors, significantly muddies the waters.

Hope this is helpful

all best

Colin

More fictional sociologists

2011-09-04T02:54:00.000-07:00

Janne suggests Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom. Wiki calls it a "non fiction novel' so you could argue that it doesn't really qualify (and on those grounds you'd also have to exclude Imaginary Friends), but since I have adopted a pretty generous definition of 'sociologist' let's not quibble about minor details.

German humour

2011-08-25T02:30:00.000-07:00

The Guardian is running a story today about the death of Loriot (Vicco von Bülow) one of Germany's best known popular comedians. As far as I can see the German sense of humour is not that different from the English, though there is a difference about when people think humour, especially irony, is appropriate - not during working hours for instance. Loriot has something of the flavour of Monty Python crossed with some of the observational humour of Not the Nine O'Clock News. My favourite sketch is the delightfully silly Weihnachten bei Hoppenstedts in which the paterfamilias spends part of Christmas assembling the son's model nuclear power station (with predictable results). I couldn't find a version with a good english translation, but the Guardian links to another classic with english subtitles, The German Yodelling School.

Sociologists in fiction

2011-08-25T02:01:00.000-07:00

On holiday I read Eric Ambler's Send No More Roses, a psychological thriller which I can heartily recommend. Written in the 1970s, it's quite different from his classic interwar adventures which usually feature a little man who stumbles into international political intrigues that put him in imminent danger. I won't give you any plot spoilers except to say that three of the main characters are sociologists (broadly speaking). That set me wondering how many other novels I could think of that feature sociologists. Alison Lurie's Imaginary Friends is one, the grotesque Howard Kirk in The History Man is another. The principal character in Frank Parkin's Krippendorfs Tribe is a social anthropologist (I'm broad minded). There must be a sociologist somewhere in David Lodge's university novels but I'm too lazy to check. Can you think of any others?

I predict a riot

2011-08-16T11:55:00.000-07:00

By the time we reach London half the city is apparently in flames and the asinine media post mortem has begun. Not much action around our way: four hoodies battered down the door of a 24 hour petrol station on the Sheen Road and somebody tried to burn down Homebase. Pretty much business as usual rather than evidence of mob rule in leafy Richmond. About the only sensible commentary I've heard was from a man called Tony Thompson who apparently writes books about gangs and was himself a London gang member in the 1970s. He pointed out that when he was growing up there were lots of adolescent gangs, but that unless you were a complete nutter it was obvious that gang membership was not a viable adult life-style. Involvement with the drug trade was negligible and people didn't carry or wear enough valuable stuff to make systematic mugging worthwhile. To put it simply you couldn't make a living at it and therefore it was something that kids grew out of. Nowadays it is different. There are lots of money making opportunities for gangs to take advantage of which will sustain the consumer wants of their members well into early adulthood. Compared to the legitimate employment opportunities that gang members could possibly aspire to, drug dealing, mugging and the occasional bit of looting look pretty attractive.

One thing he didn't but might have mentioned is that a bit of rioting can be fun, as long as you are careful not to get caught walking home with a 32" flatscreen. All of the rent a mouths appearing on our screens windbagging about reasons and causes might do well to remember a comment of Isaiah Berlin's: "...there is no a priori reason for supposing that the truth, when it is discovered, will prove interesting". Personal experience tells me that it frequently isn't.

In the 1970s there was a "riot" at my school, the vague casus belli being that somebody had, allegedly, been hospitalized by a boy from another school. A pitched battle to defend the school's honour was to be staged, at lunchtime, on the playing fields. A few of the notorious psychos and sadists came equipped with bicycle chains and rice-flails but all that happened was that 700 children ran around the school all afternoon refusing to go to lessons. The foe failed to turn up and my abiding memory is of the headmaster driving across the playing fields in his 3 litre Rover urging us, through the megaphone stuck out of the driver's window, to go back to our classrooms. The only attention paid to his pleadings was a few two fingered salutes.
Why did we do it? Two main reasons I think: because we could and because it was fun. Eighty teachers could not control so many childen determined not to do as they were told and so many miscreants could not credibly be threatened with punishment. We knew they couldn't keep the whole school in detention or cane everybody. There was, in fact, nothing they could or would do and for an afternoon, we exploited that fact mercilessly. Next day we went back to our lessons - permanent anarchy is not fun - and smirked behind our hands as the Head rolled out all his tired cliches in morning assembly about the rotten apples rising to the top of the barrel, the moral enervation associated with growing your hair below the collar line etc.
I think the usual suspects - the psychos, and those incautious enough not to hide themselves in the mass - were rounded up and got six of the best. But I imagine they thought it was worth it. And at the age of 12 I learned a practical lesson. Order depends, even in an autocracy, on the consent of the ruled and sometimes they just don't feel like cooperating..

Tales of two classes

2011-08-16T04:17:00.000-07:00

I spent last week in London after returning from an idyllic week on the North Norfolk coast. In Norfolk we stayed, more by chance than planning, in one of the villages of choice for the four wheel drive brigade. The vast majority of the village consists of second homes and holiday lets and prices in the local restaurants and hostelries reflect this. I'm scarcely in a position to rail against large cars and second homes but I was given pause for thought on Saturday morning as we packed up by the sight of the infra structure that sustains civilized life in this sort of place. At 10 am the white vans arrived and out of the back popped the minimum wage workers that clean, strip beds and tidy up. Even if you didn't see them disembark you couldn't help but notice them in the street: 30 years younger than the residents and holiday makers, different class, and in some cases different ethnicity. They must spend their days squeezed in among the mops and buckets hopping along the coast in the back of Ford Transits. I wonder where they live? Certainly for most of the week out of sight and I suspect for most residents of Chelsea-by-the-sea, also out of mind.

Back in London more examples of how the middle classes do well out of the welfare state. On Tuesday morning I drop my daughter off at the local gallery for an art workshop. The cost, presumably subsidized, is absurdly cheap - you can't get childcare at that price let alone the attention of an artist and a handful of adult helpers. The clientele is as you might expect - I count 5 Chelsea tractors and a similar number of estate cars in the tiny car park - exclusively white and middle class. The only minorities there are myself and another dad swamped by the army of mums.

Killing time I visit the local library - a 1906 gift from Andrew Carnegie. If you want to borrow art-house DVDs this is the place to go: Terence Davies, no problem, Bela Tarr by the sackful. While browsing I listen in to a conversation going on behind me. A short stocky man in his mid fifties is talking to a member of staff. He wants to know if he can use one of the computers. He has been sent by the Job Centre to an interview in the afternoon and needs to prepare a CV. The Job Centre told him that the library might be able to help him. But no joy. He isn't a resident of the Borough and though the sympathetic librarian is willing to wave the regulations nobody has time to help him with what he really needs - somebody to show him how to use the computer. The job he is interviewing for is straightforward labouring - as the job seeker explains, he's a "shovel and hammer man". It is a bone headed system (let's give the staff at the Job Centre the benefit of the doubt) that requires somebody to produce a CV before they can pick up a shovel. I feel slightly ashamed that I've no time to help him myself. Before I go to collect the little artist I've just a few minutes to check out my choice of European high brow cinema.

Happy shiny people

2011-07-28T05:07:00.000-07:00

This article in the Guardian about the cult of measuring "happiness" reminded me of something that Karl Popper wrote in 1948:

"Do not aim at establishing happiness by political means. Rather aim at the elimination of concrete miseries. Or, in more practical terms: fight for the elimination of poverty by direct means - for example, by making sure that everybody has a minimum income. Or fight against epidemics and disease by erecting hospitals and schools of medicine. Fight illiteracy as you fight criminality. But do all this by direct means."

The intuition is simple and straightforward. The things that make the members of a political community happy are diverse, so whose happiness are we going to prioritize? The things that create misery tend to be common to everyone. There is an asymmetry, ergo public policy is unlikely to have much impact if it aims at promoting happiness. It might be more successful and generate political support if it tackles miseries that everyone has some risk of experiencing.

The writers of the US Declaration of Independence seem to have spotted this: life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Strange that neither New Labour nor the Tory/LibDems seem to have noticed. Or maybe they have. Vague policy goals like social mobility and happiness are perfect if you want to do nothing or despair of doing anything about real human misery.

Criminal Injustice System: Joe Paraskeva

2011-06-24T04:38:00.000-07:00

I wonder if you are as appalled as I am by this story of the way our great justice system has treated a young vulnerable man called Joe Paraskeva who voluntarily sought help for his bi-polar affective disorder. He has been imprisoned in a young offenders institution; his only crime was, in his paranoia, to damage the door of the hospital room he was detained in. The judge, on the basis of a risk assessment carried out by an "expert" who had never actually met Paraskeva, sentenced him to serve a minimum of two years with no maximum - ie he can be held in prison indefinitely. What kind of "justice system" imprisons people who need and seek medical help for their mental health problems? If you want to do your small bit to hold the authorities to account there is a petition you can sign.

Mike Waterson RIP

2011-06-23T03:54:00.000-07:00

Anyone who thinks it is important to keep alive a space in our culture for music from the people, by the people and for the people will be mourning the death, yesterday, of Mike Waterson. There is a a nice obituary in the Guardian. Here is a link to The Watersons singing The Good Old Way, a hymn some date to the Civil War (though more likely it's from the 18th Century, but who knows...?). A sweet hope of Glory in my Soul!"

Quiz

2011-06-21T08:03:00.000-07:00

Imagine the following situation. You are sitting in a meeting trying to reach a collective decision. You make an innocuous contribution to the discussion which nobody, apart from the Chair of the meeting, disagrees with. The reaction of the Chair is to call you and/or your comment "inane". Recall the dictionary definition of the word: "silly; stupid; not significant". It's not very nice. Should you:

a) Lie on your back with your legs in the air and bare your throat;

b) Give them both barrels and just say what is on your mind (and everyone else's);

c) Offer them the Glasgow handshake.

Where I was brought up c) was the normal sanction for breaches of social decorum - recall the NRA's "An armed society is a polite society" - especially if discreet bulges in the jacket are allowed: think signaling. But let's rule it out as a viable option in a professional context.

Experience teaches me that the meek do not inherit the earth - or anything else for that matter. There is no pie in the sky when you die so no virtue in indulging megalomaniac, egotistical, bullies. Bullies thrive on lack of resistance and the less resistance they encounter the more audacious their sense of entitlement becomes. They really do only understand one language, though of course under threat they resort to the stock response: "Please Sir, I didn't do anything. He did it to me first!". Anyway a) is a non starter if you want anything except a one way ticket to Palookaville.

That leaves us with b). It's a bit ugly and you come out looking like the awkward, cussed, bad guy who told an off colour joke in front of the maiden Auntie. It's a no win situation, but really what else can you do? There are times when either you have to concede all the best tunes to the Devil or you have to say: "Hier stehe ich und kann nicht anders".

Trumpity Trump

2011-06-21T07:12:00.000-07:00

I received the following from Andy Wightman who read my previous post. Looks to me like he is doing good work in rooting out the facts of the matter. You can read about it yourself from his website.

Colin,

Saw your blog on Trump film. This story is rich with possibilities for study. I've written a brief report (which includes a section on the arrest of the film-makers) at

http://www.andywightman.com/trump/index.htm

Of particular interest are these clips which taken together form an episode in a US Golf Channel programme on Trump's golfing adventures

http://www.twitvid.com/videos/menieconcerns

best wishes

Andy

You've been Trumped (by Grampian Police)

2011-06-09T04:07:00.000-07:00

If you want to get upset about something I suggest you might turn your attention to this. The back story is of a British and a Canadian journalist being arrested and charged with breach of the peace by Grampian Police for, in essence, asking awkward questions. They apparently interviewed members of Donald Trump's organization about the treatment of locals who do not want to sell land they legally own. Apparently the patrons of Trump's luxury golfing resort mustn't be offended while they sip their martinis by the sight of the great unwashed squatting just outside the barbed wire. Clearly the organization later thought better of it and in the hope of covering over the traces had a word with Inspector Knacker who sent the boys round. You think this only happens in China, Russia, Belarus? No, it happens here in as little time as it takes to put a Masonic apron on. In theme park Britain we mustn't upset rich investors must we? Anyone read Julian Barnes' England, England?

New College

2011-06-09T03:28:00.000-07:00

The Guardian is today still printing comments repeating the false plagiarism allegations about the courses that will be offered by A. C. Grayling's New College of the Humanities. This despite yesterday publishing a letter from the Dean of the University of London's International Programme which confirms in its essentials the points I made in my last blog entry. The capacity of apparently intelligent people to shout their mouths off without the slightest attempt to understand the facts of the matter is something that never ceases to amaze me. Yes, we all have knee-jerk reactions to some things and I can see that in the present political context the funding of higher education is a controversial subject, but the English chattering class habit of proffering strong opinions without bothering with the inconvenience of facts can get a bit tedious. No wonder that in international comparison most of our so called "public intellectuals" are a bit, well, second rate. It would perhaps be unduly provocative to suggest that the establishment's uncritical worship of "PPE flash" might have something to do with it.

Staying on an Oxford theme, I'm a bit surprised that the Warden of New College (the Oxford one that is) has entered the fray and condemned Grayling's choice of name for his outfit. All a bit unseemly. And come on, nobody that matters is going to confuse New College, Oxford with the New College of the Humanities. The argument that there will be reputational spillover seems pretty far fetched. Has Regent's Park College (Oxford) suffered in any material way from having to put up with the existence of Regents College (which actually is in Regent's Park) or Regent's Park Community College in Southampton? Undoubtedly the punters at all three of these institutions differ enormously (not least in the size of their own or their daddy's bank balance) but is there any serious evidence that the name similarity has confused anybody?

New College of the Humanities: what's the fuss about?

2011-06-07T02:57:00.000-07:00

The press is full of nasty stuff about Anthony Grayling and his associates, see here and here for some examples. Their crime is that they have set up the so called New College of the Humanities (NCH) which will tutor students for what used to be called the University of London External Degree and is now called the University of London International Programmes (ULIP). The external degree is, in a sense, the original University of London degree. At its origin the university was little more than an examining institution with people preparing for its degrees by themselves or at crammers. Today there are a vast number of institutions throughout the world, many of them quality controlled by the University of London, that offer teaching to prepare students for the ULIP. So why the fuss about one more?

First there is a red herring about plagiarism. A number of academics have made asses of themselves by making public accusations of plagiarism. What actually happened is that they wrote so called "subject guides" for ULIP courses - I wrote one myself almost 20 years ago, now thankfully long superceded! These subject guides define the syllabus that will be examined by ULIP. NCH has published these syllabuses so that its students will know what they will study. All reputable institutions that tutor for the ULIP do the same thing. How else should students know what the course content is? The accusations of plagiarism are nonsense on stilts. It would make as much sense to accuse Open University tutors of plagiarism because they follow a course of instruction defined by OU Course Units or Oxford University PPE tutors of plagiarism because they teach to a syllabus and reading list written by somebody else.

Secondly, there is the issue of fees. NCH will charge £18,000 a year, twice what it will cost to take roughly equivalent courses at regular University of London colleges. But what is the problem with that? Presumably anyone who can get into UCL, LSE, Kings or SOAS and pay £9,000 will do so - assuming that they are indifferent to the charm of an occasional tutorial with Richard Dawkins. Ah, you say, so the less able but better heeled can buy a degree. Yes, exactly, provided they meet the not too exacting minimum entrance requirements of the University of London - which are by the way little different from the minimum entry requirements of most UK universities. But they can do that already whether or not NCH exists. Anyone, on the payment of a fee, who satisfies the minimum entrance requirements can register for the ULIP - in that sense it is much more democratically open than most conventional UK universities. There is then nothing to stop them paying as much as they like for private tuition to prepare themselves for the end of year examinations. If they have the means they could enter into private bi-lateral contracts with Dawkins, Dworkin, Cannadine, Uncle Tom Cobley and all to provide them with weekly instruction which at University and College Union recommended consultancy rates would no doubt costs quite a bit more than £18,000 per annum.

Whether 2 tutorials a week, most of which will presumably not be provided by the headline professoriate, is actually worth £18,000 a year is an open question which the market will eventually pronounce on. If it turns out though that NCH have settled at somewhere near the right price it clearly implies that the Oxford students who were so quick to get on their moral high horses are, even under the new fee regime, getting a bargain, though probably not one that is sustainable for very long. It also, of course, confirms my skepticism about the pedagogical efficiency of tutorials. Two "tutes" a week and you still can't reason your way out of a paper bag let alone establish the basic facts of the matter? It's scarcely an advertisement for the system.

Liber Niger Procuratorum

2011-05-18T08:32:00.000-07:00

I've been involved in the last couple of years, to a greater or lesser extent, in three investigations of student misconduct. All had one thing in common: use of the internet either as the medium of the crime or to produce the evidence that nailed the worthless wretch.

Case 1. Towards the end of the Summer I received an email from a student saying that they would be unable to submit their dissertation because they were having emergency surgery for what by common consent would be described as a very distressing condition. Usually in these cases there is little to worry about academically. You provide medical evidence - normally certification of some sort from your surgeon - and the Proctors decide what should happen. Nobody is ever disadvantaged if they have a genuine (certified) medical problem. In this case the medical evidence was slow to appear. Weeks and then months went by, emails were exchanged, letters were said to have been sent but never arrived. It all began to look odd. Eventually a letter did arrive, purporting to come from the student's surgeon. As soon as I saw it I smelt a rat. Together with one of our departmental assistants I started to take a closer look at the document. A trivial internet search showed that the logo on the letterhead was real but the address of the clinic though real didn't seem to be the address of a medical facility. Google maps and streetview allowed us to establish that the address was in fact an apartment block. It was also easy to establish that the phone number of the "clinic" was registered to a cell phone - somewhat unlikely for a medical facility. And there was more. We were able to check online if the "surgeon" was licensed by the appropriate medical authority - no person of that name was registered. Finally, and hilariously, the student's Facebook wall recorded them arranging to play tennis a day after they came out from under the knife - which, given the nature of the surgery - seemed, to say the least, physically unlikely. The Proctorial investigation found the accused guilty of misconduct and slung them out of the university.

Case 2. One day I was copied into an email from an aggrieved journal referee complaining that a student had more than once submitted articles for publication that were little more than crude cut and paste jobs from other people's work. On close examination there was little doubt about it. The student had an apparently impressive CV full of published pieces in relatively obscure internet journals that were blatantly plagiarized. The way that it was done was so artless that it was difficult to imagine how they had thought they would get away with it. To cap it all off it turned out that papers turned in as part of their doctoral research had been plagiarized in the same fashion. At no point did the student admit their guilt, even when presented with the evidence. Instead they concocted a fantastical story of coincidences that collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. Eventually they withdrew from their studies on "medical grounds" and thus preempted the inevitable expulsion.

Case 3. I received an email from an academic in another university who has a research interest in academic fraud. As part of a research project they monitor "essay mill" websites and he had noticed that somebody was touting a contract to write a paper on a subject and using materials that derived from a course I used to teach which this year was being taught by a colleague. Signing up for the site I got access to the bidding process and learned something about the monetary worth of my exercises. The range seemed to be from £60 for an effort promised by somebody who clearly couldn't write English through to about £160 for one written by somebody who had a few recommendations from satisfied customers. I gather the Proctorial investigation into this is ongoing, but the outcome so far has been a lot of inconvenience for the vast majority of honest students who had to rip up the work they had already done and sit a new assessment. I hope if the culprit is ever discovered they are named and shamed and their infamy follows them ever after.

The Libyan School of Economics

2011-03-06T07:13:00.000-08:00

Spokespersons for the LSE just can't help making the institution seem more and more absurd. The Independent is running a story today quoting Erik Ringmar who was a few years ago more or less forced out of the School for whistle blowing. I knew him slightly and I can't say we shared a vision of social science, but his only crime was to tell the truth in an organisation that explicitly guaranteed his right to do so, and then decided that allowing its staff free speech was bad for business. Personally I think he was unwise to do what he did, but he was honest and nobody ever disputed the facts that he drew attention to - which I know, in their essentials, to be true. If universities want second hand car salesmen they should employ them rather than expect academics to prostitute themselves. His experience of the admissions process was not mine, but I have no reason to disbelieve him and the LSE's attempt to discredit him by suggesting that his motivation is disgruntlement is, in my view, simply shameful.

Howard Davies

2011-03-05T05:51:00.000-08:00

If I had had more intelligence I should have titled my last post Howard Davies: my part in his downfall. It's a conjecture, but intelligence is something there may have been a surfeit of in this affair. You should continue to monitor events as they unfold.

Saif al-Gaddafi: My part in his downfall

2011-03-01T03:42:00.000-08:00

In my last couple of years at the London School of Economics I coordinated admissions into the PhD programme of what at the time was called the Interdisciplinary Institute of Management (IIM). One day I received a phone call telling me that I was about to receive an admissions file containing information that should be treated in confidence. I don't now recall from whom or from where the call came, probably from someone in the admissions bureaucracy. As it happened I could already guess what was in the file. A rumour had been circulating for several weeks in Houghton Street that one of Gaddafi's sons had applied to do a doctorate.

When I opened the file the decision was a no-brainer. Gaddafi Jnr had no relevant qualifications for our programme, no viable research project and there was nobody in the Institute with an interest in supervising him. I ticked the reject box and returned the file to the admissions office. I remember seeing a note to the effect that the next destination of the file was to be the Department of International Relations. There is nothing suspicious about that, it being routine for students to apply to several departments before they find the right home for their project. Nobody at any time tried to twist my arm or suggest that it was in the LSE's (or the IIM 's) financial interest to accept Gaddafi. It was all very low key, routine , banal.

It seems to me that the exercise of power in universities is like that. You rarely have to exert it explicitly. You just set the ball rolling and somebody somewhere will probably follow the line of least resistance without being told to do so. This is very convenient because it makes plausible deniability a piece of cake.

Still Alive

2011-02-14T05:14:00.000-08:00

I haven't posted for a while, mainly because I'm busy writing - trying to finish three papers before we pack up to come home at the end of March. So blog entries are backing up. The last couple of weeks have been good (or bad depending on your point of view) for sociology mediawise. I hope to post something soon about Peter Saunders on BBC2's Who Gets the Best Jobs, the BBC's Great British Class Survey and the oh so predictably feeble efforts of the great and good of the British Sociological Association to say something halfway intelligent about what is going on in British Higher Education.

Censoring science

2011-01-11T06:54:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate. It was puffed by George Steiner amongst others as the greatest Russian novel of Twentieth Century. To be honest I found it a bit of a drag. There were a few bits of very good writing and a lot of melodramatic stuff. In the end I didn't really care very much about any of the War and Peace size cast of characters. But yet again serendipity strikes.

One of the plot lines involves a Jewish theoretical physicist who makes a revolutionary new discovery. Initially he is recommended for a Stalin Prize, but his scientific and political enemies decide that a bit of anti-semitism may be expedient, turn against him and attempt to have his scientific work condemned as anti-Soviet and not in accordance with the principles of Marxist-Leninism. All very plausible for the 1940s, but I thought that most totalitarian dictatorships had by now learned that science is just science. Apparently not, as I saw today from one of Andrew Gelman's posts. The publication of the Chinese version of his text Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models has been cancelled because of its "politically sensitive" content.

Paying for Higher Education II

2011-01-11T06:20:00.000-08:00

So what will be the consequences of the new fees regime? If it is carried out in good faith - which is a big if - it's not obvious to me that it will have much of an impact on inequalities in access. Of course nobody actually knows - but the evidence from the last 10 or so years, scanty as it is, seems to suggest: 1) total enrolments in higher education have increased not decreased 2) that enrolment differentials between those coming from the top and the bottom of the social class hierarchy haven't changed much and if anything may have moved in the direction of equalization. It has even been claimed that the latter is true (once A level grades are controlled) with respect to choices about which type of university to attend. The latter, if it is true, certainly surprised me as I had assumed along with a lot of other people that an expansion of the higher education sector would lead to more internal differentiation with people from less affluent backgrounds "expanding" into the more, shall we say, marginal "universities".

Turning away from questions of access, a lot of the commentary has been about about the consequences of removing core teaching funding from most arts, humanities and social science subjects. Some of this has been, in my view, silly - for example John Sutherland in the Guardian. Among the more serious pieces is Stefan Collini's in the London Review of Books. Much is made of the predicted corrosive effects of "marketization" on the teaching on non vocational subjects. The fears are real and the argument is not absurd , but it may be a little exaggerated. In short two effects are predicted: 1) students will desert the traditional arts and humanities in favour of more "applied" subjects and universities will react by closing down classics, philosophy, english or whatever it is that the market doesn't favour; 2) those that survive will be corroded from the inside as the remaining punters make increasingly consumeristic demands on their teachers culminating in pressure on standards, nobody fails, nobody gets a 2.2 etc. Both of these outcomes are possible, however they are not inevitable and in some cases not necessarily undesirable.
Students seem remarkably resistant to being told what they should study. Attempts to incentivise students to go in for science and engineering when they really want to do history or psychology have not met with great success. In fact, at least in England and Wales the die is effectively cast at age 16 when people choose their A level subjects. If you have chosen arts and humanities at this stage no amount of incentivisation is going to make you choose physics when it comes to going to university. And of course what actually matters is whether English or Beatles Studies at North Rutland Academy of Higher Learning (PLC) still gives you an advantage in the labour market over your peers who declined the opportunity in favour of direct entrance into Macdonald's. Subjects come and subjects go and while it's important that somebody somewhere offers Old Norse, Hebrew, Classical Philology or whatever it is not necessary for all universities to offer everything.
The corrosion from the inside argument possibly has an element of truth. Increased fees probably will mean that students will feel entitled to more and some of that "more" may be channelled into grade inflation. It may also be channelled into paying more attention to student "satisfaction" surveys. The short-termism, raised to a virtue in this, is definitely to be deplored. As Collini quite rightly says:

"It may be that the most appropriate way to decide whether the atmosphere in the student bar is right is by what students say when asked in a questionnaire whether they ‘like’ it or not. But this is obviously not the best way to decide whether a philosophy degree should have a compulsory course on Kant. The philosophy department might hope that, some time after graduation, most of its former students would come to see the wisdom of this requirement, but ‘student satisfaction’ is not what is at issue here. That this recognition is retrospective tells us something important about education: individuals often need to be told by someone who knows that a particular line of study is worth pursuing whether at the time they want to or not."

On the other hand Sutherland gives the game away a bit in his observation:

"Grade inflation? Think Weimar. And think lawsuits – particularly in subjects (eg history of art) where marking is impressionistic, dependent on the subjective judgment of the marker."

If there are subjects where judgements about achievement are subjective (arbitrary?) then I would have thought that students would be quite right to be pushy and I would wonder why, exactly, grades were being awarded at all. If there are rules as to what counts as a good performance, no matter how arbitrary, (cultural?) then they should be publicly articulated, after all the rules of all games are arbitrary but that doesn't prevent us from knowing who won and who lost. If however being a winner or loser depends on a whim then perhaps we should ask ourselves whether cultural games without rules really belong inside the academy?

One final thought. An important element of the Browne strategy is that price should signal something about quality. My intuition is that in practice there will be little price differentiation across the sector. All will jump to 6K and the rate of claw back for going over that figure will discourage most universities from doing so. Browne actually assumes that 6K is not the real cost of an u/g education in the UK (to leave room for "efficiency savings"). Of course nobody knows what it is, but we can make a guess based on the fees charged to non-EU students. These are considerably higher, as, by the way, are the tuition fees at a good private secondary day-school. Setting the ceiling too low will actually destroy important information about quality. The rhetoric of encouraging students to act as rational consumers may be just that: rhetoric.

Paying for Higher Education

2011-01-07T04:19:00.000-08:00

I figure it's about time that I tried to set out my reaction to the Browne Report and the likely direction of future government policy on higher education. It is, obviously, important to distinguish these from each other, not least because some of the good (in my view) intentions that lie behind Browne's recommendations could be undermined by cack-handed implementation that fails to realise that policies work best when they are part of a mutually reinforcing package. So what you make of Browne partly depends on whether you trust the Coalition to avoid taking short cuts that will undermine the achievement of some of the policy objectives. On this count I must say that the current proposal to abolish the Educational Maintenance Allowance is stupid and it would be entirely reasonable on the basis of this to doubt that the Coalition is acting in good faith. If the major driver of tertiary level participation is school grades at 18/19 and we are worried that children from poorer households drop out of school too early, then removing financial support that helps to keep them in school seems not only obtuse but actually smacks of kicking the weakest section of society. A lot of the hand wringing of the Liberal Democrats would be better directed at protesting against this rather than beating themselves up about their policy U turn on tuition fees.

This is a big topic so I'm not going to discuss all the issues in one post. Here I'm going to stick just to the question of fees and how to pay for higher education.

Now to Browne itself. To make sense of the report you have to accept the following diagnosis of what is wrong with the way that we currently finance our universities. There are a number of elements of this which I'll just list: 1) Universities need more money than the current system will provide and they need it now; 2) It is highly unlikely for political reasons that any government will fill the funding gap from general taxation - ie in a fight with the Treasury over public spending, education will always be trumped by other departments; 3) The current funding arrangements restrict supply - ie limit the number of university places available and distort the preferences of universities in favour of high fee paying overseas students; 4) The current fees cap in effect means that students pay the same regardless of whether they eat caviare or baked beans; 5) The current zero real rate of interest that graduates pay on their loans is needlessly expensive (for the tax-payer) and quite perverse ie there is an incentive for students from affluent backgrounds to borrow money (they don't need to finance their studies) cheaply, invest it and make a profit; 6) Paying for higher education out of general taxation is distributionally regressive.

There is no such thing as a free education. Somebody has to pay. I got my university education without paying anything up front. Of course I've subsequently paid for some of it through general taxation but so have my mates who left school at 16, got jobs in the car factories and as engineering apprentices and never entered a university classroom. It's not obvious to me what positive externality they gained from subsidizing my taste for contemplating the finer points of Althusser's interpretation of Marx. They didn't expect me to subsidize out of general taxation their Friday night exercises in the appreciation of M&B ("a pint of the Midlands") or Watney's "Red Barrel". Yes, there is positive spill over to everybody from having educated people around. But there are also large private benefits that, for whatever reason, generate higher salaries. And there is also a pure consumption aspect of higher education - its fun to read poetry, master mathematics, figure out how the world works. It's also fun to watch football and go to rock-concerts but generally we don't expect the tax payer to subsidize it.

We could argue about the details of my points 1) though 6) but my guess is that there is a reasonable degree of agreement about the scope of the current problem. If that is the case then the only question is how to design a funding system that is politically feasible and delivers other objectives ie produces the cash when the universities need it, is equitable (between all members of society) etc.

As far as I can see there are only 3 basic strategies available: 1) Public funding of everything (including maintenance) through general taxation; 2) A graduate tax ie payroll deduction 3) A fee and loan system (such as proposed by Browne). As far as I'm aware no major political parties advocate going back to 1). 2) has some support but I'm persuaded that it cannot deliver what is required. Firstly a graduate tax will not deliver money to the universities now. Secondly it will go into the general Treasury pot and be distributed through the usual rough and tumble of the budget negotiations. You would have to be an optimist to believe that higher education would be able to fight off the predations of other government departments. Thirdly it would uncouple what students pay from the actual cost of what they receive. 3) as formulated in the Browne proposals could be re-described (it might be politically helpful) as a hypothecated graduate-tax with a fixed term (debts are forgiven after 30 years), allowance for payment holidays (you don't pay back anything if your income drops below a threshold) and, crucially, no up front payments. As Nick Barr quite rightly points out, under Browne students pay nothing, it is the graduates who pay and only when they are earning above the threshold. Like him, I'm completely baffled as to why commentators believe that potential students (especially those from poorer backgrounds) will be deterred from higher education because of fears about debt. There seems to be scant evidence that graduates from poorer backgrounds are loath to take out mortgages or rack up credit card debt both of which are much more scary. If you lose your job or get sick you still have to pay your mortgage and your VISA bill, your student loan repayment however will be suspended. The impact of student debt on your credit rating is also likely to be negligible. If you think about student loan repayments in relation to the total burden of taxation throughout the individual's lifetime it amounts to a trivial proportion.

So, as you by now can probably guess, I believe that something like the Browne proposal are the way to go. Student protests are, of course, entirely understandable. Students have been sitting at a heavily subsidized lunch table and as graduates they will have to pick up a lot more of the tab. It's not nice to have goodies taken away from you. You get used to them. You feel you are entitled to them. It feels unfair. That doesn't however mean that it is sensible or is in fact fair to continue to pretend that the lunch was and should always be free. The anguish of the Lib Dem backbenchers should be seen for what it is - not as a concern for the genuinely needy but a concern about the electoral support of the middle two-thirds whose sons and daughters have traditionally gone to university on the cheap (and by the way have had no qualms about forking out the fees for the private secondary education or takng on an expensive mortgatge for a house near a good state school that has got them into Oxford, Cambridge, UCL, Bristol etc etc.).

More to follow on other aspects of Browne...

How to run a department

2010-12-13T05:51:00.000-08:00

Actually the only way to learn how to do it is to... well...do it. I made a few mistakes myself in my brief sojourns as well as managing to do a few things that I felt were worthwhile. Hindsight is always 20/20 but I find these bullet points by Mark Harrison on the business of running a department to be the nearest one can get to wisdom on the matter.

Of beads and bad eggs

2010-12-07T04:08:00.000-08:00

The Glass Bead Game is one of the books I bought at the end of my first year at university. The long hot Summer stretched ahead, I read the first few pages, couldn't get into it and picked up The Tin Drum instead. And ever since, Hesse's magnum opus has followed me around, cover fading, pages turning slightly brown waiting to be rediscovered. This September I packed it along with a small selection of other long novels that have for years sat on my bookshelves and brought them to Germany.

My plan was a simple one. First, only bring very long novels. Second, bring novels that I wouldn't normally have time to read or have in the past failed to get through. Third, by failing to bring any short, tempting, lightweight fiction force myself to read my neglected classics. By and large this has worked. If I want to read any fiction at all the only options I have to hand are Mann, Dostoyevsky, Thackeray, Grossman etc or take to reading German Krimis. Much as I like detective fiction, the conscious effort required to read it in another language would take away a lot of the pleasure, so I'm forced back to my classics.

So far my strategy is working. I found I actually enjoyed The Glass Bead Game. It's true that not much happens in it but the story of Knecht's struggle to reconcile the life of the mind with the impulse to act in the world meant something to me at nearly 50 which it couldn't possibly have done to me at 18. Maybe books should come with recommendations as to the right phase in life to read them in. I remember reading On the Road in my late 20s and thinking that I was already too old to be wasting my time with that sort of stuff. Even worse was a brief moment of enthusiasm for John Buchan in my early 30s!

After finishing Hesse I then picked up Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men. Serendipity, for this is also a tale about idealistic compromise leading to tragedy. The book isn't flawless, but it is very very good. The blurb on the back claims that it is the greatest American political novel. It may well be that, but it is also one of the best novels I've read in any category. Warren belongs up there in the American Pantheon with Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Steinbeck and Hemingway. The strange thing is that until a couple of years ago I had never heard of him. And one calls oneself educated...

Instrumental voodoo

2010-12-02T02:41:00.000-08:00

Instrumental variables can, on the relatively rare occasions when they are compelling, be a powerful trick to keep up your sleeve. What I find strange though is how often undeniably clever people lose their grip on common sense when they decide to instrument.

Here is a link to a short article reporting a cross-national macro-level study which purports to show that private schooling produces better academic results not only for those that buy it but for those left in the state system. Of course private schooling is highly selective and all sorts of unmeasured and possibly unmeasurable traits are correlated with it. Light-bulb moment, let's instrument.

The instrument chosen by the authors is the % of Catholics in the state's population in 1900. The argument is that the Catholic church was/is the main provider of non-state education. So following the standard instrumenting story we are invited to believe that % Catholics in 1900 (interacted with an indicator of whether Catholicism was the state religion) is related to average PISA test marks round about now, through and only through its effect on the proportion enrolled in private schools.

I have no idea whether this makes sense for most of the countries included in the study, but it strikes me as absurd in the case of Great Britain. Since at least 1902 most Catholic schools (at least those that were of relevance to the majority of the population) were to a large degree maintained by the state and subject to the same regulatory regime. In other words they were not in any very meaningful sense private schools. Maybe the main results still come out if you drop GB, but there are times when I have a lot of sympathy for the generalized scepticism of the institutional comparativists about the wide and shallow approach.

It's never bad to invest a little time learning something about the cases you chuck into your regressions. Of course that might mean publishing less (and knowing more) and we wouldn't want that would we?

Yesterday's Bamberg talk

2010-12-01T01:28:00.000-08:00

I gave a talk yesterday to the Diplomanden und Doktorandenkolloqium run by Hans-Peter Blossfeld. It was partly about what I have been doing since I arrived in Bamberg in September. For anyone who is interested in the slides, here they are.

A social policy that worked? Learning lessons from the past.

2010-11-22T05:29:00.000-08:00

It's easy to get cynical about social policy interventions that are meant to level the social playing field or temper the worst extremes of the raw market outcome. Too often we are told that what trickles down to the truly disadvantaged is a small fraction of what was actually intended and that the savvy middle-classes scoop up the lion's share of the benefits. More university places? Great say the not so bright scions of the stockbroker belt who, despite an expensive private school education, only manage a mediocre set of A level grades. Let the 3 year party begin! Well, maybe. But not all the advantages of reform are necessarily captured by the middle-classes. It depends on how the reforms are implemented.

Consider the case of England and Wales in the early Twentieth Century. Then the field of battle was not access to tertiary education but access to secondary education. Secondary education was almost entirely in private (though mostly not for profit) hands and supply was severely limited. Secondary schools were not however averse to making a deal with the State and many agreed in return for significant grants from the public purse to make 25% or more of their places free to children who had attended state elementary schools. Of course some of these free places were captured by the canny middle classes who sent their kids to good local elementary schools and then crammed them for the scholarship tests. But not all, and here is the evidence (click on the image for a larger picture):

Figure 1. Trends in odds-ratios and relative-risks under three models for the proportion with „secondary“ education. Men with father’s occupational score ± 1 standard deviation from the mean. England and Wales, 1949.

The key to interpreting this graph is that each line involves a contrast between men from different social backgrounds. I've chosen to display this by comparing men whose fathers had "occupational status" scores +/- 1 standard deviation around the mean. Purists will complain that I have broken one of my own golden rules by not giving any indication on the graph of the absolute level of "risk" (in this case the probability of achieving a secondary school education) but it suffices to know that roughly 80% of the population had no secondary schooling.

Whether one looks at relative risk or odds ratios it is clear that inequality of access with regard to father's status declined. What is really telling is the comparison of the dotted and dashed counterfactual relative-risk line and the solid black "trend in free places" relative risk line. The first of these shows what would have happened if the odds ratios describing the association between social background and secondary schooling would have remained at the the same levels as those observed for the birth-cohort 1880-89 ie men whose schooling mostly took place in the last decades of the Nineteenth Century. Inequality (as measured by relative risk) would still have declined but it declined even more than it otherwise would have because the association between social background and schooling also declined.

A nice feature of the data I'm using here (David Glass's 1949 Social Mobility Survey) is that it allows you to have two views of the same time period. The men who appear in the data as sons in Figure 1 appear as fathers in Figure 2 which displays the trends for their children (in this case boys though the pattern for girls is essentially identical).

Figure 2. Trends in proportions (with 95% confidence intervals), odds-ratios and relative-risks for the proportion with „secondary“ education. Men with father’s occupational score ± 1 standard deviation from the mean. England and Wales, 1949.

Figure 2 tells essentially the same story as Figure 1 with the sole difference being that the level of the estimated proportions differs slightly because father's "occupational status" is measured in a slightly different way in the two graphs.

So what is new? Actually not much. I can't claim to be the first to notice this, in fact Anthony Heath and Peter Clifford pointed it out quite a long time ago in one of their JRSS articles. All I can claim is that after digging around there is some evidence that favours an interpretation of the trend towards greater social equality in terms of the operation of the free-places scheme. Firstly the differences in the odds-ratios between birth cohorts are more or less linear in the proportion of the cohort getting a free place. In itself this isn't terribly strong evidence as lots of other things may well have been changing in the same direction. More convincing is that if you break secondary schooling down into free-places and non-free places, then the trend completely disappears. In other words the trend is only there when you aggregate over paying or not paying for your education and is in fact a compositional effect. The proportion of people who got a secondary education increased and this was mainly driven by an increase in the proportion with free places. People with free places tended to come disproportionately from the less well-off sectors of society.

So here is one social reform that, at least partly, worked as it was intended to work. I wonder if there are any lessons here for current policies about access to higher education? If you want to avoid the middle-classes grabbing the benefits of reform you have to put the extra resources into places they are unlikely to find appealing (the equivalent of the state elementary schools). So, how about reserving 90% of places in universities for children who attended state secondary schools. Smacks too much of social engineering? OK, if we are going to have higher tuition fees why not take a levy on all those who enter state subsidized higher education after attending a private secondary school. We already charge non-EU students higher tuition fees. Why not charge the privately educated more than the cost of their tuition and use the surplus to make sure that talented kids from poor backgrounds are not excluded from the best universities? That would pose an interesting decision problem for middle-class parents. They realised a long time ago what, under the present system configuration, an incredible bargain private-schooling can be when compared to the cost of buying a house in the catchment area of a good state comprehensive.

Liu Xiaobo, Mordechai Vanunu and Carl von Ossietzky

2010-11-19T06:22:00.000-08:00

This may be the first year since 1936 that neither the receiver or a representative of the receiver of the Nobel Peace Prize will be able to go to Oslo to collect the medal and the cheque. The Chinese Foreign Ministry has issued a statement saying that: "Liu Xiaobo is a criminal who has been sentenced by Chinese judicial departments for violating Chinese law", to which the only answer is that it is about time the Chinese changed their laws so that they accorded with elementary principles of human decency. I'm sure there are many ordinary Chinese citizens that would, if they were given a chance, agree with that sentiment.

The last odious regime that succeeded in preventing a laureate or their representative attending the prize ceremony was Nazi Germany. In 1936 the winner was Carl von Ossietzky a pacifist journalist who was convicted of treason by the Weimar government for revealing that Germany, in direct contravention of the Versailles Peace Treaty, was both rearming and training its air force in Soviet Russia. Mordechai Vanunu imprisoned for revealing the existence of the Israeli nuclear weapons programme and since his release denied by the State of Israel his constitutional rights including the right to leave Israel is the winner of the 2010 Carl-von-Ossietzky-Medal. He was, of course, unable to attend the award ceremony in Berlin.

The last lines of Oswald Andrae's song about Ossietzky - Dat Leed van den Häftling Nr. 562 - are:

Den Nobelpries för den Freeden kreeg de Häftling, den ik meen
Gegen Unrecht harr he streeden. Mien Kind, verget dat nich
Waak ween, hanneln för den Freeden, denn dat Woort alleen helpt nich

It's low German which taxes my linguistic abilities a bit, but a rough translation is something like:

The prisoner I'm talking about got the Nobel Prize for Peace/ he fought against injustice. Don't forget my child/ always remember that in the struggle for peace words alone are not enough.

The shortest way with university fees (with apologies to Defoe)

2010-10-25T07:14:00.000-07:00

Dear Sir

In the light of the Browne report and the CSR it is clear that universities are going to be asking their customers to hand over more of the paper stuff before they are allowed to step through the hallowed portals. Of course this is only fair. However I concede that some tyro scholars will be inconvenienced and will not have the ready cash available nor possess a convenient stash of family silver that can be pawned to tide them over. Of course universities must do all they can to help those in this position even if the root cause of their distressing state is the improvidence of their parents who instead of becoming teachers, social workers and care-assistants should have known that investment banking and stockbroking was a securer career choice.

Be that as it may the solution is obvious. At our elite universities there are many fine upstanding young men and women from good families and schools who are used to having things done for them and have the wherewithal to pay for it. Likewise there is a pool of impoverished tykes clamouring at the door but without the obvious means to pay for anything. In the spirit of enterprise (so sadly lacking in our institutions of higher learning) we should let the market produce the solution. Universities should immediately create employment agencies through which more affluent students can hire the services of their less fortunate colleagues. There is no shortage of honest and useful work that can be done, beds to be made, houses to be cleaned, letters to be delivered, meals to be cooked and no suggestion that such arrangements should be put to immoral purposes. If the term was not already appropriated I would suggest that FAGS might be a good name for the new "servant" class. Charges for services rendered could be added automatically to termly battels and offset against the servant's university fees. This would have the added advantage that no actual cash would change hands thus removing all temptation of the servant spending it on frivolity and frippery.

I remain Sir your most obedient servant,

Major-General Bufton-Tufton (rtrd.)

Smear tactics and guilt by association

2010-10-20T02:50:00.000-07:00

A good rhetorical tactic if you want to cast doubt on the credibility of someone without directly calling them a liar is to associate their name with the name of someone else who has a reputation for dishonesty. All the better if both parties are dead and can't defend themselves. I came across something like this in Peter Saunders' old 1996 pamphlet Unequal but Fair: A Study of Class Barriers in Britain. To make my point I have to invoke the doctrine of fair use and quote Saunders at length:

It is a sad reflection on the rigour, vitality and integrity of much mainstream post-war British sociology that the Glass findings were so readily endorsed by so many leading sociologists for so long. The evidence was hopelessly dated (more than two-thirds of the fathers in the study had first entered the labour market when Queen Victoria was still on the British throne), yet these findings were accepted as a valid guide to British social structure well into the 1970s, thirty years into the long post-war economic boom and long after the first wave of post-war social and educational reforms should have had some sort of impact. Even worse, the research was seriously flawed. Geoff Payne has meticulously demonstrated that the data are unreliable, for taking account of the twentieth century expansion in white-collar and contraction in blue-collar jobs, and of the higher fertility rates in working-class than in middle-class families, the Glass data could only have been valid if the number of white collar jobs had declined by 18 per cent in the course of a generation. In reality, however, the number of such jobs had increased over this period by 17 percent. The findings, in other words, were quite simply impossible given the occupational changes documented by censuses through the first fifty years of this century.

Payne likens David Glass’s standing within social mobility research to that of Charles Darwin in evolutionary theory. A more appropriate parallel might be with the infamous Cyril Burt and his influence upon psychological thinking about intelligence. Like Burt, Glass’s work went uncriticised for many years despite clear evidence that the data were fallacious. There is no suggestion that Glass manufactured his data, but Payne does note with some frustration the apparent unwillingness within the discipline of sociology to cast doubt upon Glass’s study. This may have had something to do with Glass’s standing within British sociology, for in the early 1950s he was a major figure with considerable influence, but it also probably reflects the reluctance of left-wing sociologists to question findings which were consistent with their own prejudices.

The substance of these paragraphs are repeated, though without the reference to Burt, in Saunders' 2010 book Social Mobility Myths also published by Civitas. The association, in this context, of David Glass' name with Cyril Burt's seems to me, to say the least, distasteful. Why would you invoke the two names in the same sentence unless you wanted to connect them with the one thing that most people remember Burt for - the allegation that he fabricated some of his data. The caveat to the contrary looks to me quite jesuitical.

So fashionable half-truths and non-truths quickly become the conventional wisdom. The dead don't defend themselves and history is rewritten. Look, all those seventies lefties made it all up. It's a fact.

Well, sometimes the facts bite back. The political ideologists have cloth ears, but maybe there are are still a few people, even some sociologists, who care enough about the truth to listen .

1) The evidence that Burt deliberately falsified his data is far from conclusive. I don't know whether he did or or he didn't but the evidence can be read in a number of ways. It appears to be the case that a number of things he was accused of - for example making up the names of non-existent research assistants - were false. He may have done a number of things, especially as a journal editor, that would not now be regarded as entirely ethical, but as far as deliberate falsification of data goes, what a dispassionate review of the evidence reveals - for example Gillian Sutherland's Ability, merit and measurement: Mental testing and English education, 1880-1940 - is best expressed in the Scottish legal formula: not proven.

2) Geoff Payne et al.'s 1977 article does not show that the distribution of father's jobs in Glass' 1949 survey was "simply impossible". (1) They certainly claim something like this is the case (though to be fair, don't put it quite as strongly) but that is not what their evidence shows. The Census data they use to calibrate the Glass data are in fact largely irrelevant to the question of interest, which is how to estimate the distribution of fathers' occupations (social origins) conditioning on the occupations of the sons (social destinations). In a standard mobility table the observations on the fathers do not give a snapshot of the father's occupations at any particular point in time. Career mobility (of the fathers), differential fecundity and variation in the timing of marriages and births are all confounded in ways which make it impossible to draw clear cut conclusions by comparing the marginal distribution of the fathers' occupations in the 1949 survey with Census distributions. Moreover, even if we could learn something from the Census distributions there is a serious gap in the evidence: there was no Census between 1931 and 1951. Serious students of social mobility know all of this; they learned it from Glass himself and if not from Glass from O. D. Duncan who in 1966 published a classic exposition of the problems involved in trying to make inferences of the sort Payne et al. attempt. (2) Duncan's paper is not cited by them, which is, to the say the least, peculiar. Maybe they were unaware of it.

3) Rather than engaging in the hopeless task of trying to infer something about the expected social origin distribution in a mobility table from Census data, a more direct way of evaluating the plausibility of the Glass data is to compare it to other survey data collected around the same time and, crucially, coded in a similar way. In 1959, Social Surveys (Gallup Poll) Ltd conducted the Marriage Survey on behalf of the Population Investigation Committee. All copies of the original data were thought to be lost. However thanks to the generosity of Professor David Coleman who still possesses printouts and coding sheets for parts of the original data matrix, I, along with a colleague from the LSE , with the assistance of one of my doctoral students, have managed to piece together an important part of it. The figure below presents some evidence of relevance to the Payne/Saunders story about the plausibility of 1949 data. In it I plot the proportion (with 95% confidence intervals) of fathers of survey respondents in 1949 and 1959 in each of the 7 Hall-Jones (H-J) occupational status categories. The samples refer to men who were 25-55 in 1949 and 35-65 in 1959 ie the second survey pertains to roughly the same population of men ten years further on in their life-course - reporting on about roughly the same population of fathers. Because the extant data from 1959 refer to the population of ever married men I've selected the 1949 sample using the same criterion.

It is important to note that the confidence intervals surrounding the estimated proportions are "optimistic". They take no account of the complex sample design used in each survey and, of course, do not reflect "nuisance" sources of variation introduced by the fact that the data were collected by two different organizations which inevitably would have had different interviewing procedures, coding procedures etc. We also have to accept that protocols for coding occupational information were not at that time as standardized as they are today. The surviving records on how to code occupations to the Hall-Jones scale suggest that the protocols were far from complete and the procedures were in fact probably never completely codified. It is likely that some reliance was made of tacit knowledge - which is of course now lost.

The main plank of the Saunders/Payne criticism of the 1949 data is that the origin distribution contains an implausible proportion of men with father's from white-collar backgrounds (roughly H-J values 1-4). My impression from looking at the graph is that there is a fair measure of agreement between the two surveys with regard to these proportions. Certainly the differences are minor and could easily be accounted for by the considerations I mentioned above. Where there is divergence is in the proportions allocated to categories 5 and 6 - very roughly skilled manual and semi-skilled manual workers. This is scarcely puzzling. Without a carefully standardized set of protocols the allocation of occupations to these two categories must have been difficult. They had 10 more years of experience and no intention of comparing the 1949 and 1959 surveys and therefore no compelling reasons for coding occupations in exactly the same way. Nevertheless, roughly speaking, the two sources agree about the manual/ non-manual split as a whole, at least with regard to the non routine non manual grades. The latter qualification prompts a further caveat which is that H-J category 5 (in the 7 group version of the scheme) is actually "skilled manual and routine grades of non-manuals". This further vitiates the kind of Census comparison attempted by Payne et al.

Data collected in the middle of the Twentieth Century inevitably looks imperfect if we apply the standards of today. We have to accept that in the past they did things differently. This does not imply, as Saunders and Payne appear to believe, that the 1949 data is fatally flawed and thus gives an unreliable portrait of origin to destination social mobility for the period it was intended to cover. Before you draw such sweeping conclusions you have to do the hard work of looking, not just at the data, but at the right data. That is an important part of what real scholarship involves. Cheap shots and smears we should leave to the tabloid pundits. They are the professionals.

(1) Payne, G. G. Ford and C. Robertson (1977) 'A Reappraisal of Social Mobility in Britain', Sociology, 11, pp. 289-310.

(2) Duncan, O. D. Methodological issues in the study of social mobility."pp. 51-97 in Neil J. Smelser and Seymour M. Lipset (eds.), Social Structure and Mobility in Economic Development. Chicago: Aldine.

Why we should pay the price of accountability

2010-10-12T01:21:00.000-07:00

Sir Paul Stephenson, commissioner of the Metropolitan police, is lobbying to make it more difficult for citizens to pursue a complaint against the police through the courts. Here is an account of how the police behave in one West European democracy that should lead you to doubt the wisdom of weakening citizens' rights to hold power to account.

Dos Passos

2010-09-24T06:01:00.000-07:00

Coventry, in the 1970s, was not a great place to live if you liked books. In the city centre there were three bookshops - 2 branches of a long defunct chain called, I believe, Hudsons and a tiny, but hip, cafe cum bookshop called The Wedge. The latter was great if you wanted to buy a volume of the collected works of Lenin or the latest issue of Socialist Worker but space restrictions put severe limits on the stock they carried as well as on room in which to stand and browse. Hudson's in Hertford Street was little more than a glorified W. H. Smith, all right if you wanted a bestseller, cookbook or kid's Christmas annual but unlikely to alert you to the glories of world literature. The other branch was next to the Lanchester Poly and specialised in course textbooks. And that, until I left home, was the sum total of my experience of what bookshops looked like.

Then I went to London. It's difficult after all these years to remember exactly what my feelings were when I walked into Dillon's University Bookshop in Gower Street for the first time, but it must have seemed like an Aladdin's cave. My favourite part was the mezzanine balcony directly in front of the main entrance for - circa 1979 - this was where they kept the Penguin Modern Classics, shelves and shelves of them. Here were authors I had never heard of, calling out to me, taunting me about how little I had read and inviting me to pick up the lovely green paperbacks each with a colourful piece of artwork on the cover.

Of course, my means being limited, most of my visits were strictly browsing only: but certain books beckoned insistently. One of these was John Dos Passos' USA trilogy. What stood out was the size of the volume, almost 1200 pages in the Modern Classics edition, but I also had a sense that this was an important book. Where or how I formed that impression I can't really say, perhaps I got it from my student drinking buddies as we worked our way from the LSE's Three Tuns bar through various pubs in Camden Town. Anyway I knew that Dos Passos was some kind of American socialist and at the time that seemed like a good enough recommendation. The only problem was finding the time to read such a monster. Twelve hundred pages always seemed like a Herculean labour even if the cause was good.

A few years ago I finally got round to buying a cheap second-hand copy and that seemed like a good first step and there it has sat, accusingly. But not any more. Recently I made a few long train journeys and, being on sabbatical, had no pressing deadlines. Finally I would start the Marathon and now I've reached the finishing line, on the whole I'm glad I did it.
The blurb on the back of my copy says something to the effect that Dos Passos was once spoken of in the same breath as Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck, but that his reputation has since faded. I can see why. I enjoyed the first book, found the second so-so and began to flag a bit towards the end of the third. Essentially you are told part of the story of a bunch of characters who from time to time, occasionally rather improbably, cross each other's paths. They have dreams and ambitions and stuff happens to them - basically 30 years of American history from around 1895 to 1925. Interspersed at regular intervals are sections of snippets from newspapers and popular songs and a kind of authorial stream of consciousness commentary. I rather liked those bits. I also liked the pen-portraits of various historical characters and events - Henry Ford, Teddy Roosevelt, Joe Hill, Eugene Debs and - of interest to a sociologist - Thorsten Veblen. The narrating of the lives of the socialist activist characters is done rather well, but I lost interest in the lives of some of the aspiring middle-class females. It just seemed like one damn thing after another for all of them. Another lover spurned another abortion, more drink another party, an improbable death in an air accident telegraphed from 10 pages before. In the end I couldn't tell one from the other and gave up caring - not a good sign in a novel where the sense of forward momentum is meant to be produced by the intersecting life-courses of the characters. Maybe it hit the buttons of contemporaries in a way that it is difficult for us now to recapture. Maybe you had to be there. What will readers of Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities make of his characters in 2060?

More on statistical significance

2010-09-06T04:33:00.000-07:00

Back in 2008 I posted something on statistical significance. In his blog Andrew Gelman draws attention to a sloppy piece of writing on the subject which appears to have the imprimatur of the British Psychological Society. As we all know the proper interpretation of a significance test is conditional on what is assumed ie most often p. is the probability that (T is at least as large as the observed value|H0=True): where T is some function of the observed data ie a "test statistic" and crucially, for the condition in which we assume that the null hypothesis is true.

This is basically what I had drummed into me in Stats for Social Science 101. Like riding a bicycle, once you get it you don't forget it. However, we shouldn't pretend that it is a "natural" way to think about inference and so it's not surprising to see all sorts of odd (and wrong) interpretations of p. values are purveyed by those who should know better. A lot of the time it's probably just a matter of not writing very clearly, but if you appoint yourself an authority figure on something then you do have a responsibility to write precisely and get the content right. It is more than a little tedious to hear a student complain when I correct them: "...but that is what it says in the book."

Funnily enough a few years ago I read a short article in a British sociology journal in which a self appointed guru waxed lyrical about the wonders of statistical significance tests. Only in the land of statistical ignorance (ie British sociology) would this pass muster as a serious contribution to sociological knowledge, but to make matters worse our "expert" managed to make exactly the same mistake that Gelman draws attention to. I wrote a short note pointing out the error and suggested that perhaps prophets should get the message straight before they start to preach.

The reaction from the journal was interesting. First my note was rejected without being sent to referees. I insisted that it should be sent to referees. With a certain amount of bad grace it was. It was then rejected again on the grounds that, though I might possibly be technically correct, it was jolly bad form to point out the errors in the original piece and I was obviously motivated by personal malice towards the author. One referee even accused me of gross professional misconduct, presumably for airing the dirty linen. Actually I didn't know the author from Adam and was only motivated to prevent a silly error receiving reinforcement from publication in a professional journal. Trivial as it was I found the whole episode revealed at lot both about intellectual standards and about the attitudes of the scientific gatekeepers in British sociology.

On the subject of scientific communication Ben Goldacre links to this hilarious YouTube post. Enjoy!

The BJS and Public Domain Data

2010-08-03T06:31:00.000-07:00

It is desirable that data used to generate evidence in scholarly publications should be available for scrutiny by other interested scientists. We can all agree about the principle. How this can best be achieved is less clear, especially once one starts to consider other desiderata - such as safeguarding the right to privacy of subjects who in some cases may never have given explicit consent for their personal data to be used for the purposes of social research.

Consider the situation in the UK for somebody publishing an empirical article in an academic journal. Anyone acquiring data from the the UK Data Archive at the University of Essex, for instance, is required to sign an End User Licence which prohibits the distribution of Archive data to a third party that has not him/herself entered into an End User agreement with the Archive. In practice this is not very restrictive as any member of a UK higher education institution can register as an End User and, without paying a fee, acquire the original data. Once you think about it this minimal level of restriction is sensible. Data in free circulation has a tendency to 'mutate' and it is sensible from the point of view of scientific integrity to encourage users to go back to the original source.

Access to some data is much more restricted. Take for instance the ONS Longitudinal Study (LS). This has been created from linked census records, birth and death registrations and cancer records. Use of it is free to UK academics but there is an involved and rigorous process of project approval and the data can only be accessed from secure servers. User are prohibited from distributing LS data to third parties. The LS is a very important source of information about social demographic and epidemiological topics. However, the "subjects" have not given explicit permission for their personal information to be used for the purposes of research. They have given information about themselves to the state either because they by law have to or because such information is collected as part of the state's routine administrative processes. In the circumstances it doesn't seem unreasonable to be careful about how and for what purposes these data are used.

Now consider another important source of social scientific data in the UK - the National Study of Health and Development (NSHD) popularly known as the 1946 Birth Cohort Study. Though paid for out of the public purse, latterly by the Medical Research Council, this study is not yet fully in the public domain. There are a large number, myself included, who think that it should be. But there are legitimate concerns that completely unrestricted access to data of this sort - containing for instance very detailed medical information - compromises the guarantee of anonymity given to subjects and jeopardises their continued participation in the study. Clearly a case can be made, based on scientific interest and the ethical treatment of subjects, for having some controls on access to the raw data and for prohibiting unauthorized data dissemination.

So, what seems like a good idea, free and unrestricted access to data, is not as straightforward or desirable as you might think once you start to take seriously the rights of data providers and the unintended consequences of data mutation.

So why am I preaching this sermon? Because it has been drawn to my attention that one of the major British sociology journals - the British Journal of Sociology - appears to have refused to publish an article because the data used in it are not freely available to all researchers.

The data in question are derived from the population registers that are maintained, for instance, in all of the Nordic countries. These typically allow linkage- through a unique person number - of a vast amount of information about citizens. As a social scientific and epidemiological resource these data are of enormous importance and results from them are routinely published in leading disciplinary journals throughout the world. These data though are not collected for the purpose of carrying out social or medical research and there are serious concerns about the threats posed by the linkage of administrative records to the ordinary citizen's right to privacy. For these reasons it is normally prohibited to export register data beyond the territorial boundaries of the state and access is granted only after a specific project proposal has been vetted. Data users are normally not permitted to make or keep copies of the data and are, of course, forbidden to disseminate it to third parties. With differences of detail the constraints that researchers work under are similar to those imposed on UK users of the LS.

Three things concern me. Firstly, if consistently applied, the BJS policy will exclude leading researchers and cutting edge work from its pages. To me this seems perverse and very bad for British sociology. Secondly, the BJS's data dissemination policy is not itself in the public domain. You can find the current guidance for authors here. As of 03/08/2010 there is no mention of a data availability policy or of any specific requirement to deposit or disseminate data. In the case I have been told about the issue of data availability was only raised with the author, by an editor, after the refereeing process was completed. If I were the author I think I would feel that I had had my time wasted and that I were being treated less than fairly. Thirdly, the issues at stake were raised with the editorial team by a member of the Editorial Board more than six weeks ago together with a request that a clear statement of the BJS's data dissemination requirements be added to the notes of guidance for authors. I can't understand why this, as yet, hasn't been done. Those who provide the BJS's copy (for free) and, incidentally, generate enormous profits for the London School of Economics, deserve better treatment.

My Cultural Capital I

2010-07-06T06:23:00.000-07:00

Referring to the first half of the Nineteenth Century, David Vincent in his Literacy and Popular Culture makes the observation that though book ownership amongst ordinary people was: "...surprisingly widespread, literature was more often inherited than bought, and more often neglected than read." More than 100 years after the period he was writing about, the same thought rather nicely characterizes my own childhood relationship with the the physical artifacts of the word. The few grown-up books that found a resting place in our house were not things that you put on bookshelves, which is just as well, because we didn't have any bookshelves. My mother's opinion was that books were a species of clutter, sure to "collect dust" and therefore had to be consigned to a drawer or, even better, to the cupboard my father had built into one of the bedroom chimney breasts. There they were rendered almost inaccessible by the large ottoman containing spare bed linen that was positioned in front of it.

If one succeeded in moving the obstruction one was confronted with a patrimoine without much discernible survival logic other than natural selection. Of course the origin of much of the stuff was quite clear - improving books awarded as Sunday school prizes being the largest category. Thus in addition to the several small black Bibles one could find: Charles Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth (1861) - the uncut pages of which confirmed Orwell's observation that "...it is unusual to meet anyone who has voluntarily read him" and Charles Kingsley's The Heroes (1856) - a children's version of the more popular Greek myths which the 11 year old CM rather enjoyed. The sole concession to the literature of the modern period was Wells' The First Men in the Moon (1901) - awarded as a Boy's Brigade attendance prize to my father in the 1940s. It showed no signs of ever having been read.

Moving onto the non-fiction list there was: Alfred E. Lomax's Sir Samuel Baker: Hunter, Explorer, Administrator (1894); John Hunt's The Ascent of Everest (1953); A. Walker's The Big Walk (1961); Sir Ernest Gower's The Complete Plain Words and J. A. C. Brown's The Social Psychology of Industry. The latter two were probably purchased when my father took a night school class in office administration but judging by the the unmarked pages and unbroken spines - they now sit on a shelf in my own office - they haven't been referred to in the last 50 years. In addition to these there was the odd ready reckoner, a couple of ancient engineering books acquired by my father from the second engineer of one of the ships he sailed on and a small, well thumbed paperback, long lost, on the writing of business letters. Last, but by no means least, was the self-improving The Awful Mathematician's Book, 56 pages of formulae and rules which helped me pass O level mathematics. I certainly wouldn't have passed if I had had to rely solely on what was laughingly called mathematics teaching at my school.
In a separate category I should list two books that had been lent to my parents by friends or acquaintances. For reasons that remain obscure to me these were kept in a small cupboard that was built into the combined telephone table/stool that sat by the front door. Perhaps the idea was that it would be handy to have them there for when their respective owners returned to collect. One of the temporary accretions to our cultural capital was Amos Oz's Catch the Water Catch the Wind, the other a paperback called, if I remember correctly, The Cross and the Switchblade. Of course neither was read by my parents and the former was in fact never returned to its rightful owner and I have become its custodian.
The only book I have any positive memory of my father reading was Mario Puzo's The Godfather. Parts of it had been serialized in the newspaper and he probably wanted to know how it ended. Whether he ever finished it I don't recall. Until I was in my late 20s I don't think my mother read anything apart from newspapers - The Daily Mail, Coventry Evening Telegraph, The Sunday Post - and the DC Thompson staple The People's Friend. Later in life she acquired a taste for Jacquie Collins and Catherine Cookson and, mellowing with age, took to displaying a row of paperbacks on her living room dresser. Once she surprised me by reading and enjoying Angela Carter's Heroes and Villains which I had absently mindedly left behind after a visit. Here, at least, she was at one with advanced opinion: though, alas, an opinion I didn't share.

The London Nobody Knows 2

2010-07-06T01:25:00.000-07:00

A follow up to my earlier piece on The London Nobody Knows. Dan Cruickshank is doing a two part Radio 4 programme searching for some of the sights in Fletcher's book fifty years on. The first part airs tomorrow, details here.

A lunch time conversation with a colleague confirmed my hunch about the street performer I mentioned in my first post. He added the intriguing detail that he frequently travelled on the same commuter train between London and Oxford as the gentleman in question.

Field of Dreams

2010-06-29T06:44:00.000-07:00

One of my father's great talents was his ability to rub along with all sorts of people. I'm sure part of it was his accent - West of Scotland - which in England, in a Farfraesque sort of way, made him difficult to place socially. Not that he was a pushover. Shortly after arriving in Coventry with his heavily pregnant wife he was insulted on a bus by a boor moaning about Jocks coming down South and taking the locals' jobs. Like his son never one to suffer fools gladly, he told the idiot that he'd have had no need to be in England if the English were up to the mark themselves and menacingly invited him to reconsider his opinions!

Part of his job involved managing the city's retail market. It brought him into contact with all sorts of interesting people and he numbered amongst his work pals a Jewish market trader who had been in military intelligence during the war and a East African Sikh who arrived in the UK with just the shirt on his back after losing everything in the Ugandan expulsions. For Coventry this was pretty cosmopolitan!

Perhaps the most interesting of his acquaintances though were the travelling showmen who came to the Whitsun and Summer Fairs on Coventry's Hearsall Common. These guys led a tough and independent life. Travelling around the country with their families, stalls and attractions, their livelihoods entirely dependent on the vagaries of the weather. I remember one of them, a young and rather charming man called James Mellors coming over to our house when I was about 8 or 9. What impressed me the most was that he had a sports car - if I remember correctly a maroon Triumph Spitfire. What's more he took me in it on a trip to buy cigarettes at the local off-licence and even bought me a bottle of pop!

The Mellors family are a Nottingham fairground dynasty and it was James Mellors that risked his shirt in the 1970s to buy one of the first really big elevating Paratrooper rides. Because my dad ran the Whit fair for the city I always managed to get a ride on one of his big machines for free! I was just a child and I'd really forgotten about him until the other day I came across this story. James Mellors now heads a substantial entertainments business and has plans to build a 100 meter Robin Hood statue with viewing platform and restaurant somewhere on the outskirts of Nottingham. I imagine the recession, not to mention the planning authorities, will have put a brake on the scheme but, still, it is a kind of crazy magnificent dream. I hope he eventually manages to build it.

Provocation

2010-06-25T06:57:00.000-07:00

I gather my old LSE colleague Catherine Hakim is raising a few hackles with her latest European Sociological Review article 'Erotic Capital'. There is a nice Times interview here with Kate Spicer. My take is that she has written a brilliant example of what the French would call a provocation. In plain English she is yanking the chains of the gullible, cocking a snook at a part of the British sociological establishment and reaping a windfall of publicity. If I'm right, then good luck to her.

Consider the evidence. The main claim of her article is that sexual attractiveness is a resource that women (and men) can and do use to their advantage. If Ladbrokes were offering odds on that I'd have a flutter. Consider an employer that had to choose between two job applicants who were equivalent on all characteristics that could predict productivity. Why would they not choose the more attractive? It won't be better for their business but it might make work marginally more pleasant. What better way to make fools of your adversaries than get them all hot and bothered over a statement of the blindingly obvious. Masterly (or mistressly(?)).

Of course in reality it is rare in job hire situations to find that the ceteris paribus clause is satisfied and that, taken with significant heterogeneity in taste, leads me to believe that the premium to eroticism will be relatively small. But of course it is an empirical issue, so get writing those research grant applications. I should think a within subject design might be a good place to start with each subject being their own pre botoxed and boob-jobbed control.

The real clue though that Hakim has her tongue firmly in her cheek is the use of the word "capital". It's a surefire giveaway of her satiric intention. Why else would she use this sociological pseuds corner way of referring to what you and I would simply call a resource that people can use to their advantage? It really hits the spot though and sucks in the intellectually insecure Francophone snobs of the British sociological world. Congratulations Catherine, you've hit the target again!

RIP Matthew Colton

2010-06-22T02:27:00.000-07:00

I was saddened to read Matthew Colton's obituary in today's Guardian. It's more than twenty years since I last saw him but I have fond memories of playing alongside him in midfield for Nuffield Red Stars in the 1980s. He was, as they say, a committed player, tough on the opposition and tough on his own team. He was also somebody for whom doing social science was about making a difference in the world. I remember him telling me that what was most important about his doctoral work, was not the work in itself, the career it might initiate or the glory it might bring but the consequences it would have for the kids in care that he was studying. RIP mate.

Adjusting for disadvantage - college admissions

2010-06-17T07:38:00.000-07:00

Andrew Gelman has a couple of thoughtful posts - here and here - on the tricky problem of levelling the playing field for college admissions. It's been quite a while since I was involved in undergraduate admissions but when I did it at another place I felt the pressure to admit students that were, relatively speaking, not academically well qualified, because they possessed, from the point of view of administrative "targets", other qualities. I also seem to remember that the institution on several occasions publicly denied that such targets existed which I found curious given the memos I would receive telling me that I had not admitted sufficient numbers of students from access courses or from certain postcode types. It was also striking that certain departments were singled out for the hard sell. Nobody would have dreamed of telling, for instance, the Economics department, who they should admit, but Sociology, Social Policy and other soft subjects were thought to be fair game.

What I always struggled with was the seemingly vacuous idea of "potential". I was always being told that I should see beyond the mediocre academic performance to the potential that in some, usually unspecified, way could compensate for actual achievement. I genuinely wished I could, but nobody ever took the time to explain to me how the trick worked. The more I looked at it the more "potential" seemed to me to be a softhearted and occasionally softbrained way of doing whatever you liked and feeling smug about it.

That's why I like the look of Andrew's suggestions much more than the shabby fudges I remember. What it amounts to is running a handicap race with weights for the sorts of things that give known advantages to those with deep pocket books. We do it in horse racing and golf so why not in college admissions? And nobody's freedom is infringed. You can still spend your money on private education, its just that your kids have to do even better in order to benefit. It's a neat reversal of the usual formula whereby kids from disadvantaged backgrounds typically have to show more merit than their advantaged peers in order to achieve equivalent results.

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil... 2

2010-06-17T04:42:00.000-07:00

To paraphrase Amos Oz: tragedy is what happens when right is in head on collision with right. Ben Goldacre again provides a great link (where does he find this stuff?) to Adam Curtis' blog where you can watch an excellent BBC documentary from 1973 on the Exodus incident. I think it does a good job of explaining the context and in allowing key participants to tell their stories. There is a marked lack of bitterness expressed on both sides and a lot of sympathetic insight. Perhaps this was possible at the time because in the end both sides got what they wanted - the refugees eventually got to Israel, albeit via Hamburg, and the British extricated themselves from a hopeless situation in which nothing could be done, or not done, without somebody somewhere painting them as the villains of the piece. I wonder though whether those who were interviewed would have been quite so phlegmatic if the final scene of this Act had ended as intended. The Haganah left a bomb on one British ship set to explode when it returned to sea after the debarkation of its refugee cargo. And of course just as it was broadcast in 1973 the curtain went up on the next Act of the tragedy.

Hard Problems in the Social Sciences

2010-06-14T02:28:00.000-07:00

Amongst others, MSc students who took my Research Design class this year and tore their hair out over the mid-term assignment - here and here - might be gratified to know that the Gordian knot I asked you to struggle with is discussed by Gary King at a recent Harvard symposium as one of the 12 'Hard Problems in the Social Sciences'. There is a nice video (requires Realplayer) and some useful slides. Whatever your complaint about Oxford sociology, you can't say that we don't take you to the 'cutting edge'.

BP and Negative Externalities

2010-06-11T05:03:00.000-07:00

When I was young and even more foolish than I am now I had a car accident that could easily have killed me. Driving rather fast in the outside lane of the the M40 one of my rear tyres blew out. The car turned through 180 degrees, crossed two lanes of traffic and slammed into the safety barrier. The car was a right-off and I walked away without a scratch. Just one of those forks in the road which in restrospect make you think about how very different your life - or lack of life - could have been.

A few weeks later I received a letter from the Highways Agency, or whatever it was in those days, containing an invoice for the several hundred pounds it would cost to repair the guard rail. I sent it to my insurer who paid the bill and that was the end of it.

The damage to the safety barrier was the result of a genuine accident, but that didn't mean that I should pass the cost of repairing it to the general tax-payer. My actions imposed a cost on other people - the guard rail was not fit for purpose until repaired - and it was entirely reasonable that I should foot the bill through my increased insurance premiums.

So now I ask why should anyone take seriously the emerging whinge about the treatment of BP by Obama? Why should the shareholders expect to benefit enormously from the upside of their ownership and be protected from the downside. Isn't it reasonable that the polluter should pay and that the price of the commodity they produce should reflect the full economic cost of its production? That full economic cost includes the cost of compensating those whose livelihoods and well-being have been negatively affected by BP's activities.

My pension fund stands to suffer just like many others from BPs misfortune. But that's not a good reason for allowing them to avoid paying for the massive negative externalities they have created. If it costs a year's profits so be it. The value of shares can go up or down.

In case you need some light relief this BP Spills Coffee skit is quite amusing.

On Teaching in a University

2010-06-10T05:09:00.000-07:00

While saying he doesn't want to pre-empt the conclusions of the Browne report on student fees, Universities minister David Willetts has...er...pre-empted the Browne report in an interview with the Guardian and given a clear indication of what government policy is likely to be. His choice of words is a little unfortunate; the costs of student's degree courses are, he is quoted as saying, a "burden on the taxpayer that had to be tackled" and will no doubt come back to haunt him. Though the formulation is poor he is basically right. If we want a mass system of higher education then somebody has to pay for it. That somebody will be Joe Public through general taxation and the people that accrue a private benefit from it - the students themselves. The only serious arguments are about the proportion of the price to be paid by each source, the most efficacious way of getting the money into the coffers of the universities who need the money today and the consequences of the price and payment mechanism for any social equity objectives we might value. Of course that still leaves us a lot to disagree about. For what it is worth Willetts is one of the few Conservatives that I have some time for. In my view he's hitched his wagon to the wrong party, but he is smart and unlike most politicians is genuinely interested in forming policy on the basis of evidence. Universities could be in much worse hands.

That however is not what I want to blog about. It is possible, even probable, that part of of the rhetoric of the new fees regime will be endless talk about the importance of teaching. After all if students are asked to pay more, what is more natural than to appear to offer them more in return. Now I am going to say something that will probably upset quite a few people: university lecturers are not teachers - at least not in the sense that secondary school teachers are teachers - and should not be treated as such.

Let me try to explain. I'm not saying that the student learning experience is unimportant or should be ignored. On the contrary student learning is a very important part of what universities are about and is in danger of being pushed to the sidelines by our research output fixated culture. However one can believe this without eliding the difference between a lecturer and a teacher. It's easy to make that sound like a quibble about words, but here I line up with the discourse analysts and want to maintain that the words you choose create an implicit frame for the conversation, a frame that legitimises some arguments and rules others out of court.

Students come to university to learn a subject. Periodically their knowledge of that subject is evaluated. It is their responsibility to prepare themselves for those evaluations, whether these be coursework, practicals, traditional examinations or whatever. Universities provide the resources that facilitate learning and preparation for evaluation. These resources come in different forms: libraries, software, reading lists, casual conversations with peers in the refrectory, intense debates in the dorms until 2.00 in the morning (does that happen any more?) and, yes, tutorials, seminars and lectures. My point is that the latter three are only part of the learning opportunities that a genuine university makes available. They are, if you like, the visible part of the iceberg, but if you think they are the whole thing then you don't understand what a university is, or how to get the most out of it.

It was clear to me before I went to university that the responsibility for learning and passing examinations was mine and mine alone. As long as I had a reading list and some past exam papers I could figure the rest out for myself. I didn't want to be told in detail what to do. I went to lectures and seminars that I found interesting and helpful and skipped those that I didn't get anything out of. I quickly realised that an hour of reading a text in the library could be of more value to me than an hour of somebody attempting to tell me what a text contained. Whether it was, depended on who that somebody was and what they had to say. Of course I made some mistakes. Spending a substantial part of my second year ignoring the syllabus and reading a large number of books either about Marxism or written from a Marxist perspective was, in retrospect, probably not so smart. But an important part of knowing now - in fact at the end of my second year - what I didn't know then - that Marxism is an intellectual dead-end for the social sciences - could only have come from having the freedom to do that. It meant my conclusion wasn't just a superficial opinion but something built on a large amount of study and reflection. Luckily I picked up enough incidental knowledge of the things that were actually on the syllabus so that I could pass the end of year examinations. Looking back, what is most striking is that I never, as a student, thought that lectures and seminars were especially important for my learning. They were just one more resource to be used if and when useful.

So Mr Willetts there is more to student learning than just teaching and please remember: I'm a lecturer, not a teacher.

Subfusc

2010-06-08T08:03:00.000-07:00

I'm just back from Examination Schools where I had to sit for the first 30 minutes of the Finals paper I'm responsible for. With nothing better to do I fell to wondering why we require our students to dress up in order to be examined? The get up itself is ridiculous and unflattering. The men look like a parody of a cut-price Victorian toff - white bow tie and dark lounge suit (surely not!) while the women wouldn't be out of place as waitresses in a down at heal provincial tea shop for distressed gentility. I could understand it if it were a tourist attraction but nobody as yet has suggested installing viewing galleries in Schools so that parties of Korean visitors can get a whiff of authentic Oxford at five quid a pop. The dress regulations are absurd and serve no practical purpose. Why don't we let students decide whether to keep them? Even better, why don't we make them entirely optional? I know it is no fun to go to a fancy dress party if nobody else bothers to dress up. But going to fancy dress parties isn't compulsory while attending Exam Schools in subfusc is if you want an Oxford degree. Frankly it is all bullshit and in a world increasing full of the brown smelly stuff, bullshit is the exact opposite of what universities should be about.

Thoughts about Status

2010-06-08T04:57:00.000-07:00

I mentioned in an earlier post that the first sociology book I ever read was Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy. The second was almost certainly Robert Roberts' The Classic Slum an account of working class life in Salford in the first quarter of the Twentieth Century. Of the two, I much preferred Roberts' lack of sentimentality and I was reminded of the excellence of his prose on reading his autobiography A Ragged Schooling.

He is particularly good on the status distinctions that patterned working class social life. From the outside the poor may have looked like a mass, but things looked very different from the inside. Many of the distinctions he alludes to were still lived realities when I was growing up more than 50 years later amongst Coventry's affluent workers. The primary distinction was still clearly between the rough and the respectable. This applied both to individuals and also to streets. By the age of eight or nine I had a good sense of the social geography of our area and what occupancy of different types of housing stock signified. Our street was divided in two by a more major road; the terraced houses on our half had neatly lawned front gardens (now I see from Google Street View mostly tarmacked over to accommodate cars). The other half had much smaller front gardens or had front doors that opened directly on to the street. Respectable people had proper front gardens.

Moving just a few streets further away and closer to the football stadium there were some very rough streets where kids would throw stones at you if you looked 'posh': 'posh' was a very relative thing. Rough people had too many kids, kids that roamed the streets til all hours, were unemployed or irregular workers, drank too much, got into debt, cursed and swore, beat their wives and generally made a nuisance of themselves. The respectable tended their gardens, cleaned their windows, limited the size of their families and wanting the best for their kids, went, albeit hesitant and deferential, to school open days.

After the rough/respectable division probably the next most prominent distinction was between those with and those without a trade. Time served craftsmen and those with a skill in some sense ranked higher than the unskilled or those whose skill - like driving an HGV - was not acquired through apprenticeship. Or at least that is how it felt, but I'm not sure that patterns of social interaction would necessarily reveal it.

Thinking of my parent's friends - those whom we exchanged visits with - the skilled/unskilled divide seems pretty unimportant. In one family the husband was a carpenter working in the building trade in another he worked on the line at one of the car factories just as some of our own relatives did. As my father ascended into the lower reaches of the middle classes our social network expanded but only a little, primarily sucking in people from the local church, a shopkeeper, a lab technician from Courtalds, the minister himself.

If I think about my own school friends I'm struck in retrospect by how little status distinctions, other than that of roughness/respectability, mattered in practice. My friends' fathers - and yes, as long as they were alive, it was the fathers that mattered - worked in a mixture of skilled and unskilled trades. Some worked on the line in the car factories, at GEC, Massey Ferguson and Rolls-Royce. Others had small businesses - a chip shop, a Hoover servicing franchise operated from a shed at the bottom of the garden. A couple had only widowed mothers to bring them up, one a lollipop lady the other delivering letters for the Royal Mail. What, if anything, connected us together was selection into the "grammar school" streams of the local comprehensives we all attended. The few kids in our area whose parents paid for them to go at 11 to one or other of the city's two main independent schools disappeared from our friendship network as surely as if they had been abducted by aliens. And in a number of cases the end result was such that they might as well have been.

What is most striking is the almost complete absence of the professional classes from our social world. The woodwork teacher from my school lived on our street, just a few houses down on the other side of the road, but other than a ritual exchange of pleasantries my parents had nothing to say to him. A few professional representatives of the state - the odd teacher, more rarely a doctor, lived, Ken Barlow like, amongst us. But they were not really part of our lives except when they were schooling or curing us.

It's not that there was any antipathy towards educated professional people, it was just that they made people like my parents feel uncomfortable. We didn't fit into their world, didn't know what to say, they had different tastes and conventions: they led different, often peculiar, lives. A local couple we knew as acquaintances through the church - both delightfully unsnobbish teachers - exemplified the eccentric otherness of this world: the husband complete with apron did all the cooking in the household. What more proof was needed of the strange ways in which the professional classes carried on!

Thinking back what impresses me most is how such distinctions of status as we made can only be understood as applying at a local level. The outside world saw a mass where the insiders perceived gradations. To some extent these gradations were correlated with money. The rough were poor by anybody's standards (but not all the poor were rough) and the respectable, though not necessarily affluent, by definition had steady incomes from which they saved to pay off respectable debts - like their mortgages. Status lay behind patterns of derogation, association and commensality in the adult world - less so in the child's world - but it was status in the local community that created the living texture of our day-to-day world. Weber in Economy and Society makes a few tantalizing remarks along these lines:

...in the so-called pure democracy, that is, one devoid of any expressly ordered status privileges for individuals, it may be that only the families coming under approximately the same tax class dance with one another. This example is reported of certain smaller Swiss cities. But status honor need not necessarily be linked with a class situation. On the contrary, it normally stands in sharp opposition to the pretensions of sheer property.

Status has a now you see it, now you don't quality. It's part of the taken for granted, part of the fine grain of social relations in your local social world.

The Paper University

2010-06-08T02:03:00.000-07:00

Ben Goldacre links to this article from Australia about the mountain of paper that falls on the academics at the coalface from the desks of our bureaucratic masters. We are indeed drowning in the stuff much of which is about the creation of arse covering paper trails. We are long past the stage where we just infantilise our students, the modern university is also, it seems to me, well into the process of infantilising its faculty too. It's easier to create a form and tick boxes than have a conversation with colleagues about the intellectual content of their courses. Perhaps that is why there is an intellectual vaccum at the heart of many of the social sciences.

Wikipedia and Prediction

2010-06-04T09:30:00.000-07:00

Andrew Gelman has an interesting piece on his blog about the politics of Wikipedia edits. The scientific point that is at stake here is that prediction before you have peeked at the data (fitted a model) is a completely different thing to prediction after you have fitted a model and it is...err...essentially dishonest to pretend that these are one and the same thing or are of equivalent scientific value. Think about it this way. Fit your favourite model for a binary outcome - discriminant function, logistic regression or whatever - to a sample of data and define a decision rule to calculate how many you got in the right box. Now apply that same model with the same parameter values to a new set of data. You won't do anywhere near as well because first time round you capitalised on chance. It's multivariate analysis 101, or at least it should be.

Peer Review

2010-06-04T03:41:00.000-07:00

Ben Goldacre links to this piece in the New Scientist on peer review. As he points out the process isn't and in fact can never be perfect. How peer review works differs across disciplines and even within disciplines across journals. I've refereed for journals that use a double blind method and also journals where the names of authors are revealed to the referees. In sociology I would estimate that the double blind or total anonymity model is the method most commonly used. Is this the best method to use? I'm coming round to the view that we can improve things at the margin by moving to a system of complete openness. Referees should know the names of authors and authors should know the names of referees. Moreover after the review process is finished everything - the original submission, the referees reports as well as the final version of the paper - should go into the public domain. To some eyes this will appear to be pretty radical, even lunatic, stuff. But I believe it will solve some (not all) of the problems that are chipping away at the credibility of peer review.

Firstly, as every editor knows, there is the problem of getting good referees to act and then of motivating them to do a good job. I'm told that in the US the idea of 'service' still leads the top scholars to play an active part in journal refereeing. From this side of the pond things look different. The RAE has changed the structure of incentives so that at the margin you will be better off spending an extra hour on your own work rather than writing a referee's report on somebody else's. Spending a lot of time helping your rivals - because that is what the RAE turns those you formerly called your colleagues into - produce better work is not much of a career enhancer.

A few years ago I was asked to referee a paper by a well known British journal. The paper was pretty hopeless, but, I felt, at least compared to much of what was published in that journal, the authors were making an honest attempt to do science. I wrote a five page report telling them how to rewrite the paper and how to fix the errors of technique, method and logic they had made and recommended R&R. Twelve months later the paper came back to me with a different title, restructured along the lines I had suggested. It still wasn't a great paper, but at least it was now much more professionally put together. I recommended publication. It duly came out and then, to my surprise, was nominated for a prize that is awarded annually to the best paper published in the journal. At this point the little red devil on my shoulder was whispering in my ear that I should be entitled to a share of that prize or at least a coauthorship!

If referees reports are in the public domain then that will incentivize people to do a good job and secondly the contribution of referees to the final published version will be open for all to see. This sort of openness will also help to solve what I perceived, when I was an editor, as an emerging problem - the growth of premature submission. Again the RAE is partly to blame. The publish or perish culture incentivizes people to submit articles that are in reality only seventy-five percent finished. The ends aren't tied up, the data analysis has holes in it the size of the Grand Canyon and the authors just haven't bothered to take the time to write it up properly. They know that nobody apart from the editor and the referees is going to see this version so given that almost all papers that are finally published get an R&R it makes sense to send in something that just scrapes over the R&R threshold and let the referees tell you what you have to do to achieve publication. This is not a fantasy. I've heard doctoral supervisors give their students exactly this advice. Don't 'waste time' making the article any good. Just make it credible enough to get an R&R. I suspect in many cases they apply the same principle to their own submissions. In a cut-throat world it can quickly become a race to the bottom and intellectual craftsmanship becomes a luxury that few can afford. If my diagnosis is correct then requiring the original submission to be in the public domain will provide - as long as people have any pride in their work - a modest incentive to make the first submission serious.

My final argument for openness is that it will help to reduce some of the more unpleasant aspects of anonymous refereeing. Sad to say, some referee's reports are blatantly unfair and self-seeking. You all know what I mean. 'The article should be rejected because it failed to mention the brilliant insights contained in a forthcoming paper by Blowtrumpet et al (currently only available as a pdf at an obscure website somewhere or other)'. You look up the paper and see that it is either irrelevant or nonsensical but the editor who is pressed for time or doesn't know any better requires that to get published you must blow Blowtrumpet's trumpet for him. There are, of course, worse things than that going on and openness won't solve them all. But requiring referees to put their names to what they write and letting everyone see what they claim seems to me to be an important part of making the refereeing process fairer. If you are going to say negative things about somebody's work you should not hide behind the veil of anonymity. I'm prepared to stand behind what I write and argue for it in the public domain. If you are not then you shouldn't be writing it in the first place.

On not being too professional

2010-06-02T09:13:00.000-07:00

I used to think that I was the first person in my paternal line (which is the only part of my ancestry I know much about) to go to university. It was a blow to my inverted snobbery when I discovered that it was not true. In fact my great times five grandfather John graduated from Trinity College Dublin in 1743. His father, described in the entry in Alumni Dublinense as generosus does not appear to have had that privilege but clearly felt that his eldest son's well born status could be embellished with a little learning. In fact he sent at least two sons to Trinity. Edward, the brother of my x5 grandfather, was also an undergraduate and while there appears to have been a drinking buddy and intimate of his second cousin Oliver Goldsmith. A number of rather charming letters from Goldsmith to Edward Mills survive, mostly pleas for money or patronage. Going to Trinity was not needed by the brothers Mills for professional advancement or consolidation. They both inherited estates and neither were destined to be impoverished country curates. Edward, it is true, entered the Middle Temple in 1756 but he does not appear to have completed his legal education. In fact in a rather amusing letter to his cousin, Goldsmith gently chides him for his apparent lack of ambition:

I have often, he says, let my fancy loose when you were the subject, and have imagined you gracing the bench, or thundering at the bar; while I have taken no small pride to myself, and whispered all that I could come near, that this was my cousin. Instead of this, it seems you are contented to be merely an happy man; to be esteemed only by your acquaintance to cultivate your paternal acres to take unmolested a nap under one of your own hawthorns, or in Mrs. Mills' bed-chamber, which, even a poet must confess, is rather the most [more] comfortable place of the two.

When one sees the pathological ruthlessness with which academics pursue professional advantage - for instance the Orlando Figes revelations - it's tempting to envy those born in a less driven age.

More by Amos Oz

2010-06-02T03:09:00.000-07:00

For anyone who is willing to listen and think there is more by Amos Oz in today's Guardian.

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil...

2010-06-01T12:53:00.000-07:00

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. The sentence is usually attributed to Burke though there is no evidence that he either said or wrote it. It isn't too wise to take the moral high ground about the actions of other states when you are a citizen of perfidious Albion. Brits above all others should beware of throwing stones in glass houses. However, at the risk of upsetting dear friends and colleagues, I want to share this link to Amos Oz's comment on yesterday's Israeli military action against civil shipping in international waters. I admire Oz as a man, as a writer and as someone who fearlessly speaks truth to power (if you get a chance read his beautiful autobiography). It used to be that when he spoke Israel listened. I don't know whether that is the case any more but I do know there are many others like him in Israel who are appalled by what the state does in their name. They deserve our understanding and support.

In Praise of Google Books

2010-05-24T07:17:00.000-07:00

In November of 1880 a 79 year old labourer died of lung congestion in Plymouth Township, Wayne County, Michigan. He was married, had entered the US from Canada two months earlier, and was known as St George William Dunlop Mills. He was my great great great grandfather. Why he had gone to the US from Canada is unknown. He emigrated from Co. Roscommon, Ireland to Canada some time before his second marriage in 1861 to Elizabeth Williamson, also an Irish immigrant. There are no surviving Irish birth, baptismal or marriage records, just a shadowy presence on the 1867 Glasgow marriage certificate of John Mills a son by his first marriage and on John's 1894 Coatbridge death certificate where St George is described as a railway clerk. We get fleeting glimpses of his Canadian life from the 1861 and 1871 censuses and from Toronto street directories where he is listed as at different times working for the Toronto Street Railway - shown in the photograph above - and the city's waterworks. From 1875 through to 1879 he is listed as a labourer and then the trail ends in Michigan.

This is most of what I know about my ancestor apart from one intriguing detail - he appears to have been born to a well-off and well connected county family. His father, Oliver Mills of Knockhall, was High Sheriff of Roscommon in 1798 - the year of the rebellion and the ill-fated French invasion. His mother Emma (Amy) Massy was the daughter of the 1st Baron Massy of Duntrileague, MP for Limerick County, raised to the Irish Peerage in 1776. Given this auspicious start why did he end his life a day labourer? Of course in the Nineteenth Century old-age often meant severely reduced circumstances even for the well-born. But now, thanks to the miracle of the internet, I know there was more to it than that.

Last week, while idly searching on Google Books, I came across a report of a court case in a volume with the title: Irish Equity Reports, of Cases Argued and Determined in the High Court of Chancery, the Roll Court and the Equity Exchequer During the Years 1846 and 1847. It details in five densely worded pages the judgment in the case of Mills v. Mills an intra family dispute that appears to have been initiated in 1811. Not being a lawyer some of the details of the case are rather obscure to me but in true Jarndyce versus Jarndyce fashion it revolves around the terms of a will and the rights to income from land. The parties to the dispute are Emma Mills (née Massy) my great great great great grandmother and George Mills her stepson, half brother of my great great great grandfather St George William Dunlop Mills. The case seems to end with the court appointing a receiver to sell the land which lies at the centre of the dispute. Dickens has one of his characters say of Chancery: "Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!". I wonder if the Mills fortune went the same way as the Jarndyce?

The moral of my story is not however to bemoan the hard times that subsequently befell the family but to celebrate Google Books. Without it I would never have known of the existence of Mills v Mills. In and of itself this is of no significance to anyone but me, however the ability to bring together and make available hitherto unrelated facts is potentially of tremendous importance for the growth of knowledge. Amongst other things books contain lots of discrete pieces of information - for want of a better word - facts. Google Books makes it much easier to link these together, to turn facts into knowledge and to increase the power of serendipity.

Evidence based policy

2010-05-24T03:35:00.000-07:00

As usual, an excellent post by Ben Goldacre on the need for evidence based social policy. We all know that RCTs are difficult to set up in many social policy contexts, but difficult is not the same as impossible. Often it just requires that politicians have the balls to say that unless you want to sit around waiting for an instrument to be provided by the Gods of Natural Experiments the choice is either ignorance or randomization. If you don't like the latter then you have to believe that the cost of ignorance is smaller than the cost of knowledge. It's a perfectly consistent position but I have no idea how anyone could claim to know that the status quo is superior to an alternative without ascertaining the facts of the matter.

It's a hard life

2010-05-17T03:17:00.000-07:00

On Saturday we watched Michael Haneke's Das weisse Band: Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte. I had already seen it once before but I was surprised at how much detail I'd missed first time round, for example the subtitle and its orthography are significant. The greatness of the film is actually in the detail and in the refusal to provide a neat explanation of the events that drive the plot. This is what prevents it just being a facile allegory of whatever aspects of later German history you want to project it onto. OK, it is a movie about Germany, but it is more than that. As the great Nanci Griffith puts it:

And if we poison our children with hatred

Then, the hard life is all that they'll know.

Election Special 3

2010-05-12T03:12:00.000-07:00

One of my daughter's favourite picture story books is the delightful Es klopft bei Wanja in der Nacht (roughly 'A knock on the door in the night at Wanja's').
Wanja lives alone in a cabin deep in the forest. One night there is a terrible snow storm and after he has gone to bed he hears a knock at the door. He gets up and on opening it is surprised to see a hare who begs to be let in out of the storm. Wanja is a good natured soul and lets the hare come into the warm; Der Wanja sagt: "Komm nur herein, ich heize gleich im Ofen ein". Not long afterwards there is another knock at the door. Again Wanja gets up and this time finds a poor fox with frozen toes begging to be let in. Naturally the hare is a bit nervous about this arrangement but the good hearted Wanja extracts from the fox a promise to behave himself and all three settle down for the night. Not long afterwards there is a third knock at the door and who should be there but a bear who is so cold that he can't stop his teeth from chattering. Now it is the fox who is reluctant to admit the new visitor - a fortnight earlier he stole some meat from the bear and is afraid that he has come to get even. The bear swears that he is harmless, Wanja lets him in and everyone settles down for the night in peace and harmony: Doch drinnen schlafen wohl geborgen Fuchs, Bär und Hase bis zum Morgen.

As morning breaks the hare is first to wake. The storm has blown itself out. His heart is hammering and he thinks to himself that perhaps the fox's stomach will get the better of his good intentions so he better get off. Next the fox wakes up and realising that the bear may still be angry with him also goes on his way. The bear is nice and warm in his corner but when he eventually wakes he sees, hanging on the wall, Wanja's rifle and realises that he is sleeping in a hunter's cabin and that it would be best if he also slipped away. The last to rise is Wanja:

Der Wanja - noch vom Schlaf umfangen -

begreift nicht, was hier vorgegangen.

Er blickt umher im leeren Raum.

War den das alles nur ein Traum?

Doch draußen sieht er von drei Tieren

die Spuren sich in Schnee verlieren.

Der Wanja schaut und nickt und lacht:

"Wir haben wirklich diese Nacht

gemeinsam friedlich zugebracht. -

Was so ein Schneesturm alles macht!"

Frazer strikes back, but Malinowski wins on a knockout

2010-05-11T02:53:00.000-07:00

Browsing the LSE's website to see what their political experts had to say about the election I had the misfortune to come across this blurb for the forthcoming Malinowski Memorial Lecture. It reminded me of why I chose to leave that place - too much completely hypocritical tolerance of this sort of thing. I was continually dismayed by the number of smart people who in private were prepared to say what they thought but in public kept their mouths shut and their noses clean. Before you start berating and flaming me I confess that all I know about the talk is what is written in the abstract so I haven't given the guy a fair shake, but let's face it, the signs aren't good. I quote:

"...is it a mistake to take our interest in an ethnographic phenomenon in the direction of an empirical investigation, when what is really needed with respect to its clarity is an imaginative contemplation of it? It is my overall argument that this is indeed the case and that the Malinowskian recourse to empirical evidence as the ultimate criterion for anthropological knowledge is misguided."

"...I take two classical topics - the ‘soul’ and ‘ritual blood sacrifice’. I will show how both are essentially metaphysical issues, not empirical ones. Understanding them, therefore, is not a question of advancement in the actual material practice of fieldwork, but of the power of the scholar's speculative imagination."

Souls are non empirical, in fact non existent, entities. The only way that anyone can say anything about them is via a process that involves imagination. Ditto for Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy. That doesn't make them material for the social scientist, it makes them material for novelists, poets, theologians and all the others whose business it is to attempt to express the inexpressible. Whether they succeed or not is a matter of individual opinion not science. Tony Harrison says something to me, he may do nothing for you and I certainly won't be advocating that he is given a chair in sociology. Ritual blood sacrifice is, at least for those involved in it I would imagine, an all too empirical experience. Of course you can try to tell me, perhaps on the basis of your imagination, what the soul or ritual blood sacrifice means to Siberia's indigenous people. I may or may not comprehend or "get a feeling" for it. It probably depends on how good your and my imagination is. I think, that through reading L. P. Hartley's The Go Between, I have an inkling of what it was like to be a child staying as a guest in an Edwardian upper-class country house during a long hot Summer and vicariously finding out about sex for the first time. Do I really understand what it was like? Almost certainly not. And even if I did I couldn't prove it to you. The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. That is the point of the novel. Social science has limits and it does nobody any good to try and pretend that it is the social scientist's business to stray outside the limits they are competent to speak about. If I have time I'm happy to read poems about mystical experiences or watch a film like Tarkovsky's Mirror which is undeniably 'spiritual' but when I'm doing that I'm not doing social science. Let the metaphysicians do the metaphysics and the social scientists the social science. As Frank Ramsey said in his succinct version of Wittgenstein. 'What we can't say, we can't say, and we can't whistle it either.'

Journey's End

2010-05-10T11:20:00.000-07:00

The Guardian's Michael White has written an excellent piece on Gordon Brown's career.

Election Special 2

2010-05-10T07:44:00.000-07:00

I'm still finding it difficult to understand the political logic of Clegg's negotiations with Cameron. OK he has to be seen to go through the motions but we are past the stage where he has satisfied the proprieties. The main thing that Clegg's followers want is electoral reform - the one thing he is not going to get from Cameron. That being so an arrangement - coalition or otherwise - with the Conservatives spells doom for the LibDems. If he settles for less - say an agreement to set up a body of worthies to look into it at some unspecified time in the future - he gets nothing apart from the opprobrium of being associated with an administration that once the cuts bite will be deeply unpopular. He will also be at the mercy of the Conservatives calling a snap election at a moment that is relatively favourable for their chances. My guess is that the LibDems would do badly in such an election. If he doesn't conclude a deal with either Cameron or Brown and allows the former to form a minority government then we will have an election very soon in which the LibDems will probably be severely squeezed. If people want a clear result they are not going to vote for a third party that can't, under the 1st past the post system, turn its apparent media popularity into seats. The least worst alternative for Clegg is a coalition with Labour. Such a government will be weak and it might not survive long enough to actually implement electoral reform. On the other hand the LiBDems will have a big incentive to make it work and it is the only chance they have to achieve their aim. My guess is that the Scots and Welsh nationalists can be offered some sweetners to play ball. It will all look pretty shabby, but hey it's politics, what do you expect?
An afterthought: if, as we are told, the parties should lay aside petty squabbles in the interest of dealing with economic doomsday, isn't it of some relevance that despite his overall unpopularity the public in the pre-election polls consistently rated Brown as the man they most trusted to deal with the economy?

The London Nobody Knows

2010-05-10T03:17:00.000-07:00

We watched a rather fascinating documentary on DVD at the weekend called 'The London Nobody Knows'. It was made in 1967 by Norman Cohen who went on to make, amongst other things, the film version of Dad's Army. The documentary, based on a book of the same title by Geoffrey Fletcher, is narrated by a rather phlegmatic James Mason and takes you on a tour of out of the way corners of London that were fast disappearing. I particularly liked the part on the East End - the kosher grocery store, the already closed Yiddish theatre, pie and mash, eels and liquor.

One section of it focuses on some street entertainers one of whom, the man on the left wearing the tricorn, looks remarkably like a rather broken down old gentleman who in the early 80s used to perform a pathetic soft shoe shuffle outside the entrance to the Westgate Centre on Queen Street. I wonder if they are one and the same person?

Election Special

2010-05-07T08:37:00.000-07:00

It's obvious that everything is still up for grabs. I find it difficult to imagine though why Clegg would do a deal with Cameron for anything less than a referendum on PR. If you are going to drop the main planks of your economic policy and shackle yourself to an inevitably unpopular government you want to make sure you get something tangible out of it. Cameron can't concede PR without alienating a large section of his party. You can see their point. Unless we see big changes in the ideological positions of the parties PR would probably have the effect of keeping the Conservatives, as we know them, almost permanently out of power. Of course sections of the party - perhaps the pro Europeans - may, under a PR system, splinter off into something like a mainsteam conservative christian democratic party. One could imagine the same sort of splintering forces might also operate on the other parties, for example an Old Left redistributive but socially conservative party allied with the trade-union movement might hive itself off from New Labour. Labour is the only party that is going to offer Clegg anything like what he really wants. Of course such a coalition will itself become massively unpopular after it does what it has to do to reduce the deficit, but it is better for the LibDems to be unpopular with electoral reform than without it. If electoral reform is implemented it will be a whole new ball game. My guess is that Clegg would acquiesce to a Brown premiership if he could achieve that sort of change.

The abuses of literacy

2010-05-04T07:40:00.000-07:00

One of the books I read over the Easter vacation was A Sort of Clowning: Life and Times 1940-1959 the second volume of Richard Hoggart's autobiography. One of the instructive stories it contains is about an incident of student plagiarism that occurred whilst he was teaching at Rochester in the late 1950s:

"I marked an essay on Yeats which was not only pathetic in its near-illiteracy but plainly full of plagiarisms. The man had been stupid enough to go to the library and copy in a still unformed hand whole paragraphs from different critics. The essay was like a dish made up of elements of haute cuisine embedded in a large inferior hamburger."

The student had no conception of what he had done wrong even after it was explained to him and this lack of insight, Hoggart observes, was not just a personal failing, but, he opines, a direct result of the culture he swam in:

"That young man was baffled not just because he was not very clever but because his culture had not introduced him to - had positively discouraged him from - the idea of intellectual discrimination, differences in intellectual grasp and ability. He could distinguish a cheap car from a better, and no doubt a good swimmer or runner from a mediocre. He had never been invited to understand that some minds may be better than others. He had been introduced not to the world of ideas but to that of opinions; and manifestly one man's opinions are as good as another's..."

Essentially Hoggart's student lived in a pick-and-mix world in which scholarship was about assembling various nuggets of fact and judgment in a heap. How much worse things have become in the age of cut-and-paste. The best and worst that has been thought can now be rapidly excerpted and arranged on the page by the most minimally literate with just the slightest matrix of discrimination.

Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy was the first sociology book I ever read. I remember as a sixth-former seeing it on a bookshelf and being puzzled by the title. Wasn't the use of literacy obvious? Apparently the original title was The Abuses of Literacy, but the publisher didn't like that. Nowadays to shift units a publisher would probably force him to call it something like: Why reading makes us all dummer or Why the media makes everything shite.

Rereading Uses I'm struck by how little I must have understood of it. First published in 1957 the world Hoggart is describing in the first part of the book is mainly the working class culture of the North of England in the 1920s. That was already half a century ago in the 1970s when I first read him yet I could still identify at least some elements in the attitudes and the pattern of feelings he described that were true of my family and our neighbours. It was the autobiographical parts that appealed to me the most; that and his description of the uprooted and anxious sensibility of the scholarship boy, an alien in some respects to his family but equally an outsider even in provincial intellectual middle-class circles.
The critique of what in retrospect was just the beginning of the mass communications revolution and its effects on the cultural life of ordinary people passed right over my head. Of course Uses contains just the merest hints of what was to come and rereading it reminds one of how much the cultural revolution of the sixties changed everything - some things for the better, some for the worse. Where he is spot on is in his delineation of the self-serving cultivation of a form of top down populism among cultural elites (especially when they own or work for TV stations and newspapers) that legitimates a 'give em what they want' form of cultural democracy and the simultaneous disparagement of any attempt at cultural discrimination as mandarin elitism. Well, when advertising revenues are at stake they would say that wouldn't they?

When Romeo met Juliet

2010-05-04T03:11:00.000-07:00

I caught Paul Roseby, artistic director of the National Youth Theatre, on Start the Week yesterday talking about about a forthcoming BBC documentary on a project he undertook with kids from two Coventry comprehensive schools to stage a production of Romeo and Juliet at the city's Belgrade Theatre. By any stretch of the imagination this was a tough assignment, particularly as he seems to have gone out of his way to include teenagers who have no special affection for Shakespeare. I used to play hockey at one of the schools - Sidney Stringer - and it was the epitome of inner city toughness. You kept your wits about you in the changing room and tried not to look anyone in the eye. That was more than 30 years ago but I would guess it is still a school that has to deal with special challenges. I'm a bit ambivalent about the media hooplah that tends to surround this sort of thing - there is a tendency for "parachutists" to divert attention from the grassroots arts in the community work that is going on. But if it reminds us that the arts can be a part of ordinary people's lives and change those lives then that has to be a good thing particularly in the forthcoming austerity when public support for the arts is going to be hard pressed.

Are we living in a simulation?

2010-05-03T11:49:00.000-07:00

Last week I was clearing up a pile of paper on my desk and came across this cartoon that I had clipped out of the Stockholm edition of Metro a few years ago. "'Do you want to see something cool? Stand in the light and bawl Booga-Booga!' Have you sometimes wondered how a new religion starts?" I don't remember now why I wanted to keep it. If Gods are rats then divine intervention might look like this and the humans in the maze would have good grounds for believing in rodent powers that are consequential for their lives. So no great social scientific insights here. But then I came across this - a set of philosophical conjectures by a colleague in the James Martin School that takes seriously the idea that there is a positive probability that we may all be participants in a giant computer simulation set up by post-humans ( and a bigger probability that we are not). Life is frequently much weirder than art.

Bigotgate

2010-04-29T07:39:00.000-07:00

The story of Gordon Brown's political career seems to have all the makings of Greek tragedy. From Midas touch to Nemesis via vaulting ambition that overleaps itself (OK, the last bit is Shakespeare but let's not get too fussy). It also evokes the classical ingredient of pity for the man raised up and capriciously cast down by the Gods (or the Media) with the course of events determined by a seemingly trivial event the effect of which is magnified out of all proportion by a fatal character weakness. The story even has the 'there but for the Grace of God go I' aspect which is pure Aristotle. Somebody will write it one day, but I'm not sure I'll want to see it.

So what did he do wrong yesterday? I think his biggest political mistake was that he didn't shrug off the gaffe and leave the Media to make what they could of it. It was always going to be a story but by going back he gave it more legs than it otherwise might have had. What were his advisers thinking of?

As for the substance - well, ordinary people often have poorly articulated, relatively shallow and occasionally distasteful views about political matters. No surprises there. It's difficult for the politically sophisticated to make much sense of those views or react to them in a serious way. Again no surprises. Brown was polite, if wooden, in the face-to-face and in a private conversation said quite calmly what most of the Mediaocracy were probably thinking. I'd be more worried if he had showed any signs of populist pandering on legal immigration. But the legitimacy of representative democracy partly depends on adherence to an asymmetrical code of conduct which permits the voters (and their self-appointed media tribunes) to heap scorn on politicians for any sign of human weakness whilst obliging the politicians to pretend to respect the opinions of the voters - no matter how incoherent, bizarre or indeed bigoted these might be. This is the Faustian bargain and woe betide anyone who betrays the illusions that sustain it. The sin is not that Brown insulted a harmless grandmother who may or may not be a supporter of his own party: it is that he exposed to public scrutiny one of the unpleasant truths about how democratic politics works.

Oxford Sociology

What is a good idea depends on what the feasible alternatives are

Misguided Journal Editors

Reaction to latest UCAS application figures

Forpseud!

Forpseud!

Why journals do not contain a record of continuous scientific progress

AIG

Doctoral Funding Available at Oxford

Music - times and places

Political crisis

More of this (usually) means less of that

Sociology and Social Anthropology: what's the difference?

UCAS and University application

St Paul's

Categorization

What is a university?

Rhythm of the year

Defending Public Libraries

Forpseud!

Possibly useful methods site

Academic biographies

The history of sociology - as told in the UK

Humour

White paper on higher education

Culturally off centre

Balls

Noises off

Academic malpractice

Blah blah sociology

More like the movies

Economists and empirical evidence

Blind to art

Intelligence, Libya and LSE

Taking the rough with the smooth - plugging colleagues and flakes

Taking the rough with the smooth - social mobility

More fictional sociologists

German humour

Sociologists in fiction

I predict a riot

Tales of two classes

Happy shiny people

Criminal Injustice System: Joe Paraskeva

Mike Waterson RIP

Quiz

Trumpity Trump

You've been Trumped (by Grampian Police)

New College

New College of the Humanities: what's the fuss about?

Liber Niger Procuratorum

The Libyan School of Economics

Howard Davies

Saif al-Gaddafi: My part in his downfall

Still Alive

Censoring science

Paying for Higher Education II

Paying for Higher Education

How to run a department

Of beads and bad eggs

Instrumental voodoo

Yesterday's Bamberg talk

A social policy that worked? Learning lessons from the past.

Liu Xiaobo, Mordechai Vanunu and Carl von Ossietzky

The shortest way with university fees (with apologies to Defoe)

Smear tactics and guilt by association

Why we should pay the price of accountability

Dos Passos

More on statistical significance

The BJS and Public Domain Data

My Cultural Capital I

The London Nobody Knows 2

Field of Dreams

Provocation

RIP Matthew Colton

Adjusting for disadvantage - college admissions

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil... 2

More Hard Problems

Hard Problems in the Social Sciences

BP and Negative Externalities

On Teaching in a University