Pete Seeger RIP

Difficult to think of anything to say that hasn't already been said and won't be said over and over in the next few days. We are all diminished by Pete Seeger's death. Though we've lost one, despite appearances to the contrary, there are still great Americans. Here's PS singing Guantanamera - the girl from Guantanamo and Joe Hill. And just for additional inspiration Woody singing This Land is Your Land. Unfortunately this verse seems to have been airbrushed from most recordings:

In the squares of the city, In the shadow of a steeple; 

By the relief office, I'd seen my people. 

As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking, 

Is this land made for you and me?

Another of Woody's songs  has the right message for our children - here performed by Syd Shaw. RIP Pete.

Booze, Cars and Wetherspoon's

So, Wetherspoon's think it is a great idea to open a pub on  the M40 service station near Beaconsfield. No doubt it is for them and their shareholders. A spokesman for the company commented: "But we are not naive. We know that giving drivers the chance to have a pint off the motorway is an unusual offer. But equally we do not live in a nanny state. We expect drivers to act responsibly." 

I hope the Chairman of this despicable company, Timothy Randall Martin, will be given the opportunity to repeat the "we do not live in a nanny state" line to the parents of the first child killed by one of his less responsible clients. I'm sure it will be a great comfort to them.

I can think of some interesting variants that might be put into the mouth of his hireling. How about: "But we are not naive. We know that giving drivers the chance to buy an automatic rifle off the motorway is an unusual offer. But equally we do not live in a nanny state. We expect drivers to act responsibly."

A reasonable response from a government that had even a shred of decency would be: "We do not live in a nanny state. But we do expect companies to act responsibly." But I'm not holding my breath, because, let's face it, they don't.

2.9013...bullshit

Andrew Gelman is running with a wonderful story today about the credulousness of some (note I didn't say all) academic psychologists. The tale is nicely told by Vinnie Rotondaro here. It's got all the ingredients I love: outrageous bullshit, unhelpful metaphors, non-linear dynamics as obfuscation, unrepentant quackery, journal editors that need to be prodded with a poker before they will concede that they have published something that makes no sense and authors that confess that they don't understand parts of the articles they put their names to. The icing on the cake is that the splendid Alan Sokal played a key role in the exposure of yet another "intellectual imposture". You can read the American Psychologist article here.

Meanwhile well known British social science orientated universities carry on appointing notorious  imposteurs to positions of honour and esteem. It's as if some of the social sciences, for instance sociology, are regarded as so unimportant that intellectual integrity is well worth sacrificing to "impact". 

Sometimes I pause and look askance at the intellectual landscape of my discipline and wonder: how did we get here? Part of the answer is that  in the upper echelons there are too many gutless time-servers who know the truth but don't want to rock the boat. Quite often I extract confessions from some of them to the effect that they know that X or Y is bullshit, but they don't want to come out in public and say so. They are reinforced by at least as many who are so intellectually feeble that they can't spot duds when they stare them in the face. 

This is the toxic mixture that has made British sociology to all intents and purposes  ignorable.  We've created a situation where senior figures can BS for England about the concept of "public sociology" but are incapable of contributing anything of value on matters of substance.

Allington on Mills on Cultural Capital

One of my good readers tipped me off that Daniel Allington has a post on his blog discussing some of my posts about the concept of cultural capital. His blog looks interesting, thoughtful and worth checking out. You'll be able to make your own minds up about the cogency of what he says about my views, but you probably also know me well enough to realize that I'd have a few things to say.

I think what he says is a travesty of what I wrote mainly because he seems to believe, or at least strongly imply, that my objection is to the use of metaphors per se. No, that isn't it at all and anyone that reads closely what I wrote should be able to see that. In as far as metaphors are representations of something we want to understand it is difficult to see how we could do without them. This is Toulmin's point, together with the idea that representations have a purpose. When somebody studying optics draws a ray diagram and talks about light rays "traveling" this is a useful metaphor. It helps us to understand a phenomenon like the length of a shadow cast by a wall on a sunny day. Of course the metaphor has its limits; it makes no sense to ask what kind of car is it traveling in? For the purpose of understanding the "propagation" of light it is a better metaphor than that of the eye "sweeping" the horizon, with or without a broom. The metaphor is a representation with a delimited domain of applicability.

He also seems to believe that my objective is to "invalidate" the cultural capital metaphor and thus "refute" the "theory of cultural capital", at least that is what I understand by the lines:

"Pointing out that social and cultural resources do not behave exactly like economic capital does not, therefore, invalidate the ‘cultural capital’ metaphor, much less refute the theory of cultural capital."

If it were true that this was my aim, then I would be an idiot and fully deserve a bit of a pasting, but I'm afraid Dr Allington has rather firmly got hold of the wrong end of the stick. Firstly I've no idea what it would mean to invalidate a metaphor. Metaphors can be  obscure, enlightening, even fruitful, but invalid...? I have a dim recollection of one of my I. A. Richards inspired english teachers inviting us to consider whether some of Milton's metaphors in Samson Agonistes were good or bad, but never whether they were invalid. Likewise I would be a bit of a klutz if I were to believe that quibbling about the usefulness of a concept would be sufficient to refute  a theory. I don't really know what would refute the "theory of cultural capital" because I don't know what the theory is and strongly suspect there is no coherent theory beyond some banal essentially empirical generalizations  that have been the commonplace in educational sociology for 50 odd years.

So we are left then with a bit of an impasse. Dr Allington believes that the concept of cultural capital has been fruitful and cites as his evidence Bourdieu's Distinction (and a 2008 article by some Danish social scientists). I've not read the latter, but we'll just have to agree to disagree about the former. I know it is lauded as one of the great pieces of social science of the 20th Century, but I wonder how many of those chanting the panegyrics have actually read it from cover to cover? All I can say is that even by the standards of its time the empirical work  it contains is of extremely poor quality and much of the prose is so excruciatingly obscure that it is impossible to figure out what is being claimed. Moreover the bits that it is possible to understand usually turn out to be completely banal. Chacun à son goût.

Still several positive thing seem to come out of all this.  Firstly I have finally found a Bourdieusian who is willing to accept that "cultural capital" = "cultural resources", or at least that is what I take the import of Dr Allington's final paragraph to be. If I'm wrong then please fill in the blank space: "cultural capital" = "cultural resources" +  ______ . And secondly I find myself in the company of another unlikely ally. It seems that Geoffrey Hodgson has been voicing rather similar thoughts about Bourdieu's use of the C word.

First Richard Jenkins and now Geoffrey Hodgson, the internet is a wonder for drawing your attention to what you share with all sorts of people you thought you would have little in common with. And that must be a good thing.

 

Pointing out that social and cultural resources do not behave exactly like economic capital does not, therefore, invalidate the ‘cultural capital’ metaphor, much less refute the theory of cultural capital. - See more at: http://www.danielallington.net/2013/12/capital-as-metaphor/#sthash.QnnnVGiq.dpuf

Pointing out that social and cultural resources do not behave exactly like economic capital does not, therefore, invalidate the ‘cultural capital’ metaphor, much less refute the theory of cultural capital. - See more at: http://www.danielallington.net/2013/12/capital-as-metaphor/#sthash.QnnnVGiq.dpuf

Pointing out that social and cultural resources do not behave exactly like economic capital does not, therefore, invalidate the ‘cultural capital’ metaphor, much less refute the theory of cultural capital - See more at: http://www.danielallington.net/2013/12/capital-as-metaphor/#sthash.QnnnVGiq.dpuf

Let's celebrate Swedish sociology!

The December edition of the BJS has two rather good articles from Sweden on social stratification themes. So let's celebrate with Lisa Ekdahl's utterly charming Jag tror han är en ängel  (English translation below) and, of course, Ulf Lundell's Öppna Landskap.

Musical Interlude

No time at the moment to post much, so instead a bit of musical self-indulgence. 

Seeing Neil Finn in today's Guardian reminded me of going to see Split Enz at the now demolished Hammersmith Palais in 1980 with a bunch of mates from Coventry. So here's I See Red followed by White Man in Hammersmith Palais:

White youth, black youth
Better find another solution
Why not phone up Robin Hood
And ask him for some wealth distribution

The only book I managed to read over Christmas was Oliver Twist. The indignation barely concealed behind the withering sarcasm of Dickens' characterization of the operation of the Poor Law in the opening chapters should be an object lesson for anyone writing about social injustice today. So how about some Black Coffee with the Artful Dodger?

And finally Lisa Ekdahl's Vem Vet just because I like it.

Chakrabortty on high street gambling

I've been a bit negative about the Guardian columnist Aditya Chakrabortty's views on sociology and economics. But credit where credit is due; he has a good piece in today's edition on high street gambling. OK, it's a bit in the Guardian's let me tell you a human interest story style, but none the worse for that. 

There are some things that I don't feel very liberal about and one of these is the state conniving in the ruthless exploitation of human weakness of will for private profit, made all the worse by the deliberate fostering of self-destructive addiction. The high street betting shops, tobacco companies and purveyors of cheap booze are all in the same moral boat as far as I'm concerned. A failure of imagination means I simply can't understand how the owners of these industries can sleep at night. 

If you are unlucky enough to have witnessed the misery caused by addiction to gambling, tobacco or alcohol visited on the family and friends of the addict then you'll understand where I'm coming from.