Thoughts about Status

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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.