Pictures

Opening my mail this morning I found a flyer puffing Sociology in Pictures by one Michael Haralambos. The series appears to have ringing endorsements from, amongst others,  the University of Leicester, Cardiff, the Open University, Xinjiang Univesity and the University of Karachi. In case you were wondering Wikipedia informs me that Xinjiang is "...one of the major universities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, People’s Republic of China". I didn't check what it had to say about Leicester, Cardiff etc. 

Strangely none of the endorsements were attributed. Prof Cardiff opines: "An incredibly exciting book..." Perhaps he/she should get out more, or at least try reading some books with words in. I'm told  that even the ones with just a few words on each page can be quite thrilling. 

Perhaps the best comment is from Richard Thompson who in Fast Food gives us the delicious line: "Pictures on the register in case you're a moron".

I'm looking forward to the next offering in the series. Rumour has it that it will be a sociology bath book.

I want to see the bright lights tonight

It's Friday afternoon & not long to knocking off time - no protestant work-ethic guilt here. So what better way to prepare than listening to Richard Thompson. I've always loved this song it expresses something really important about the lives of most of the people where I grew up. Get out of the factory gates on Friday and have two days of freedom. The blonde is his daughter Kami who, unsurprisingly, looks just like her mother.

Another tune with something of the same theme, though in a slightly melancholic mood is Tom Waits' The Heart of Saturday Night. I'm sorry,  I can't abide Waits' "singing", but he is a great songwriter and Shawn Colvin does a decent job here.

Nick Cohen on PPE

In this week's Spectator Nick Cohen manages to make a bit of an ass of himself in a misguided attack on Oxford's PPE degree.  I'm not a great fan of PPE myself but not because of its far ranging content, but because of the way it & most other Oxford humanities and social science degrees are taught ie via the ubiquitous tute. 

In the course of his diatribe Cohen manages to say  that St Anthony's is Oxford's postgraduate college for the study of politics rather than an Oxford college for the study of politics. I think Nuffield might have something to say about that.

More seriously he seems to have a rather tenuous grasp of political history. I quote: "Career politicians with no interests outside politics have always existed, as the lives of Pitt the Younger, Lloyd George and Asquith show." I know nothing about Pitt the Younger so I'll have to defer to his superior knowledge there, but he couldn't be more wrong about Lloyd George and Asquith both of whom, coming from relatively humble backgrounds, had to make their own way in the world.

Lloyd George made a career for himself outside of politics as a solicitor, a profession he pursued even when he was in Parliament, though to be fair his brother did more than his fair share of keeping the family business going. LG also, as is well known, was extremely active in other sorts of extra-parliamentry and indeed extra-marital affairs.

Asquith was a practicing barrister, a classical scholar with a 1st from Balliol (the only classics first Balliol produced in his year) and an intellectual snob of the first order. In fact the chief complaint of his adversaries and of his own party is that he often gave the impression, even when premier, of regarding politics as a hobby that interfered with the real business of enjoying life. Like LG he was also not averse to a little extra-parliamentary business.

Going to war again

Once when I was an undergraduate I heard Simon Jenkins' father preach a sermon. He was, apparently, a renowned theologian in the Reformed tradition. All I remember is that it was, as you might expect, dull. 

Dullness is not a word you would associate with Jenkins fils. Miserablist, contrarian, polemicist but not dull. Normally I don't pay much attention to what he writes and even find some of it a bit obnoxious. But his piece in today's Guardian about the rush to show-off our aerial prowess in Iraq is spot-on. 

What are our representatives thinking of? Aren't they capable of learning anything? What good has all our interventions in the Middle-East done? I'll let Joschka Fischer have the last word.

This paper is so bad it is not even wrong

For a long time I've been toying with the idea of  post publication review. It seems to me that, at least in British sociology, peer review is so badly broken that  though nuggets of gold undoubtedly exist, the dung heap of illogicality, nonsense and  muddleheadedness is so huge that they can be difficult to find. The consequence is that zombie research lives on, is among us, and frequently gets cited, often by people who should know better and probably would know better if they actually bothered to read and think about the things they cite.

But how to do it? One idea I have is from time to time to take an issue of a journal, read all the articles in it, and  for each  one post a  paragraph  precis in plain unadorned English somewhat in the spirit of Jim Crace's pomposity busting Digested Read. My intuition is that many, when treated in this way, will, sans bullshit,  turn out to be assertions  of the "bleeding obvious" or just incoherent.

Of course this won't cover all bases. It's possible to have a perfectly coherent question but  treat it in an inadequate or incompetent way and by doing so end up with the wrong answer. Dealing with that sort of thing requires more space  than a single paragraph. It also requires more patience from the reader. 

I'm convinced that the reason so much bad quantitative work is published in British sociology journals is that there are so few consumers whose critical faculties extend much beyond name checking  whether a particular recipe has been used. I usually call this the "That's not the way we learned to do it in grad school" syndrome. Reaching that sort of reader is hard, because it assumes the ability to follow a chain of reasoning which is a little more subtle than: it's a binary response so therefore a logistic regression is correct.

I'm still at the stage of wondering whether any of this is a good idea or a real dog. One thing is clear, it wouldn't make me many friends; well, I'm used to that, but even I recognize that there are psychological limits to how many battles can be fought simultaneously.

But if I do go ahead I'll have to think carefully about a catchy title for the series. At the moment I have three contenders,  all from  Wolfgang Pauli:

This paper is so bad it is not even wrong.

I don't mind you thinking slowly; I mind your publishing faster than you think.

The setup...as far as printing and paper are concerned is splendid.

James Ramsay Macdonald

Last week I had some business at the LSE and after lunch took the opportunity to satisfy my curiosity about something by taking a walk in Lincoln's Inn Fields. 

I've been reading David Marquand's excellent biography of Ramsay Macdonald from which I learned that Macdonald and his family lived at 3 & 4 Lincoln's Inn Fields from 1896 until at least 1915 which is the last trace I can find of him in the electoral register  at that address.  

Incidentally in the 1911 Census return which records him living in an apartment with 7 rooms (the Macdonalds had 6 children one of whom had recently died)  he states his occupation as "Secretary and Writer" under which a census official has written in red ink "This is the Leader of the Labour Party". Macdonald's apartment was also  the de facto  headquarters of the Labour Representation Committee and thus can reasonably be regarded as the birthplace of the British Labour Party.

The rather ugly 5 storey building is in the north western corner of the square, just a few doors  away from the Soane museum and is now occupied by lawyers. In 1896 the rear of it would have overlooked the back of what became the Holborn Empire. I must have walked past the address hundreds of times, strange that I've never noticed the ubiquitous blue plaque. Not so strange: there is no plaque and nothing at all on the building to indicate its  connection with British political history not to mention the history of the British working-class.

Macdonald became, of course,  the most despised  figure in the labour movement and is conventionally  branded a sell-out as well as a social climbing lackey. The truth is  more complex as was the man himself. 

If anyone organized the early Labour Party it was Macdonald.  He was the first Labour Prime Minister and came to power at a time when most observers supposed that his political career was finished. He was also someone of considerable political and personal courage. He endured vilification by the right-wing press for his illegitimacy, for his  stand against both the Boer War and the First World War and for the disastrous post-war reparations policy. His command of foreign policy issues was the equal of any British politician of the day and he built a parliamentary party out of the rough brick and straw that was to hand, supported in places by a few Liberal converts. Prior to the National Government the worst that can be said of him is that he was better at getting the Labour Party into a position where they could credibly wield power than at knowing what to do with it. Then again, it's not clear than anyone in the Labour Party during the 1920s knew what to do with power.

I find it incredible that Macdonald's contribution to British politics is not noted on the building where so much was achieved. Maybe the LSE can mount a campaign to have the site recognized. After all as a young man Macdonald aspired to be a lecturer at the new school of economics. Apparently the Webbs, being colossal intellectual snobs, were determined to keep him out.

Yes!

So, big changes in Scotland then with an overwhelming majority of Royal And Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews members voting to let in women. I gather things didn't quite go to plan for the Yes campaign in that other Scottish vote which is dissected by my colleague Stephen Fisher in his latest blog post. He must have been sitting up all night!

So it's Scotland the Brave  for the No campaign and  Floo'ers o' the Forest for the Yes campaign. Time in England for Roots and branch reform? Anyone for a written constitution?