Diagramming the Social

Relational Method in Research

Russell Dudley-Smith, Natasha Whiteman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367494872
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429574764
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book challenges the hyper-production and proliferation of concepts in modern social research. It presents a distinctive methodological response to this tendency through an exploration of one of the most underappreciated yet widely deployed conventions for the analysis of social processes: the creation of diagrammatic relational spaces. Designed to capture social processes in a way that resists reductive and essentialist categories, such spaces have the capacity to produce powerful, systematic analyses that break the spell of concept proliferation and its resultant naively realist approach to explaining the world. Through an exploration of key examples and series of original case studies, the authors demonstrate the application of this approach across a variety of empirical settings and academic disciplines. They thus offer a relational and pragmatic approach to social research that resists current trends characterised by supposedly self-evident data and/or disconnected theory. As such, the book constitutes an important contribution to some of the central questions in current social research, and promises to unsettle and reinvigorate considerations of method across different fields of practice.

1 The sorcerer’s apprentice syndrome

Gone’s for once the old magician

With his countenance forbidding;

I’m now master,

I’m tactician,

All his ghosts must do my bidding.

Know his incantation,

Spell and gestures too;

By my mind’s creation

Wonders shall I do.

….

For the magic charm undoing

What I did,

I have forgotten.

Be a broom!

Be not renewing

Now your efforts, spell-begotten!

Still his work abhorrent

Does the wretch resume;

Where I look a torrent

Threatens me with doom.¹

Fantasia

As children we were each captivated by the sublime section of Walt Disney’s Fantasia where Mickey Mouse gets a little over-ambitious. The scene is we hope familiar. Condemned to the task of carrying heavy, leaking pails of water to fill a cauldron, Mickey catches sight of the sorcerer at work. Inspired, he borrows the sorcerer’s hat and spell-book. Much mischief follows: the apprentice’s broom becomes animated, enthusiastically taking over the carrying role. The task appears to become easier with new mastery apparently at hand. Yet all too soon, multiplying marching broomsticks, each relentlessly bringing in yet more pails of water, threaten to drown Mickey as he loses control of the power he has summoned. In the Disney version, at least, there is of course a happy if salutary ending for the apprentice as the spell is broken: only those able to handle magic should dare to unleash its powers.

Such stories tend to be taken as pure entertainment; yet part of their attraction is that they seem to catch at something. There must be a moral, but it is difficult to say just what that is. Since no one believes in sorcery anymore perhaps the tale is best left as just a children’s story. Yet we have found that it provided us with insights into some disturbing tendencies of modern academic life; ones that we have been wrestling with, and struggling to confront, for some time.

Dystopian setting

We wondered what it might look like if Disney were to make a cartoon about modern university life. We fear that an appropriate title for such a project could not be fantasia. The situation has been admirably critiqued both in terms of policy discourse (Readings, 1996) and academic writing (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1999). We begin by summarising these very briefly in turn to set the scene for our own work. They also help to frame the tendencies we critique in the body of this chapter and the numerous more recent publications concerned with this issue.

In recent decades, the autonomy of academic life has been increasingly eroded at the same time as the quantity of published writing increases. The mechanism that produces this academic heteronomy works, contrary to many of its critics, as an anti-ideology (Readings, 1996, p. 41). The content of academic work, in relation both to the apprenticeship of students and the communicative action that constitutes a specialised discipline, is rarely the regulative target.² This is not to say that there are not severe effects on that content. Rather, the focus is on productivity and the measurement of outputs. This is evidenced by the growing intrusion of bureaucratised standards of action into academic life (as of course elsewhere), an intrusion that is warranted by notions of best-practice, professionalism and the perceived need to make higher education a matter of contribution to success in the global economy.³

An anti-ideology works by making appeals to floating (i.e. content-less) signifiers that are accepted as self-evident and unchallengeable (the point where Mickey, having appropriated the Vice-Chancellor’s hat, chants “abracadabra”). In the UK system the currently hegemonic incantation is ‘excellence’ (see Readings, 1996: ch. 2 for a clairvoyant description of what would become a deluge of such usage). Part of the disciplinary effect of the resulting ‘frameworks’ of assessment of academic ‘professionalism’ is precisely the uncertainty caused by the absence of regulated content. But what is clear is that the surface coherence of the intended normalisation rests on quantified targets to justify who (and who has not) achieved the required ‘standard.’ This, among other things, demands measurable outputs – of which journal articles are now the central unit of account.

The incantation of a floating ‘excellence’ has all too easily led to the demand for its ‘world-leading’ instantiation. The best research – to be awarded the accolade of ‘global significance’ – is recognised by its having been published in journals whose prestige is based on the most dubious of metrics (see Hyland, 2015, for a detailed review of the incoherence of these calculations, and Turner, 2014, for a depressing analysis of how elite sociology journals in the USA have become self-serving clubs, a pattern certainly not exclusive to that country or discipline). This leads to a system of academic publishing in which ICI citation data “become a mirror of internationalism” (Paasi, 2005, p. 772). As Bourdieu and Wacquant (1999) argue so powerfully, such a state is only made possible by a de-historicisation and marketing of conceptual language that circulates with sufficient velocity to be caught by the metrics and thus be consecrated as internationally excellent.

The resulting heteronomy – characteristic of social research (Bourdieu, 2004, p. 87), the university now funded to a performative and semiotically empty standard – entails that those who would succeed must simulate expertise. Once of the elect, the magic wand of theory calls to the researcher: but its use must take the spell-binding form of an appeal to the imaginary. To paraphrase Bourdieu and Wacquant’s (1999, p. 42) elaboration of the mechanism by which this operates: connect intravenously to the globalised commonplace (preferably in the form of a dualism) but disguise this with a technical term or two to establish an ‘academic’ voice. Ensure that this ‘theory’ is cut out from the complex of activities and interest-committed-engagements in which the terms originated, or invent new ones de novo as long as these involve some catchy expression. Thus, your voice can be heard directly by policy-makers, publishers of ‘international’ standing, grant funding agencies, and – not least – the media.

The intellectual homogenisation that this results in – about which the anti-ideology remains blissfully unconcerned – is hidden by an apparent differentiation of content. At the empirical level, the expansion in the number of academic journal papers in recent decades⁴ presents an image of extraordinary progress. The tendency is of course for each academic field to shrink so that those writing within it can manage a proper engagement with the literature: there is, fractally,⁵ a cutting-out from established disciplinary traditions in search of what can be newly circulated.

There is a further aspect of this that deserves notice. Just as the sociodicy⁶ of those promoting this system may blind them to the sleight of hand involved in the search for excellence, it also generally involves the legitimation of its privilege. The collapse of content allows a canalisation of moral affect: with little difference marked-out between the academic voice and that which they describe, scholars can, in good conscience, announce what should be done for the good of mankind. Before the deluge, Mickey dreamt that he could conduct the stars: the avatars of an excellence appropriated through global-competitiveness-in-thought are no less ambitious.

For the scholar on the receiving end of this, the consequence is a form of symbolic violence. The natural rhythms of academic labour under conditions of relative autonomy (involving thinking-time that to the outsider may appear of very low productivity) give way to a forcing of what is now considered measurable ‘output.’ This is to be performed in a manufactured state of crisis: the threat of redundancies, a switch to teaching-only roles, substitution of zero-hour contracts. The inevitable consequence for the academic is an impossible work demand within a university now most aptly described as an “anxiety machine” (Hall and Bowles, 2016). The source of anxiety is not just the substitution of work-time for audit-time (time to report the shrinking possibilities of work) but the split subjectivity induced by the latter as it regards the (lost) opportunities of the former.

Magic hats

The tendencies of modern academic life – those that include acceleration, intensification, insecurity, the pursuit of excellence and domination by metrics – have been raised in numerous more recent critiques of the contemporary environment (Docherty, 2011; Collini, 2012; Vostal, 2016; Carrigan and Housley, 2017). Such accounts, in presenting a picture of current realities, work hard to avoid a nostalgic dualism regarding what the university was and could come to be. Writers such as Billig, whose work we return to later in the chapter, have also linked these conditions to the linguistic shaping of academic scholarship (2013). But our concern is different. At issue for us are the forms of analysis that are frequently deployed in the anxiety-intense quest for survival in this environment. We are particularly interested in the ways that theoretical and empirical resources are handled in the hyper-production of research accounts. Although we can only write about the fields in which we are ourselves engaged, there is in respect of this not just a homogenisation: late industrial-capitalism (the world of multinationals struggling for supremacy over national governments) does not generally produce a profusion of the same.

A good starting point to explain what we mean by this is the observation that the pursuit of international excellence tends to involve the adoption of standardised theoretical frameworks. International excellence differentiates its products, and can thus claim a monopoly of value, on a very small number of organisational prototypes. Yet the appropriation of these, sundered from the contexts in which they were developed, is often profoundly atheoretical. That is, an abstractive theory can be taken as a prototype but in a way that does no work in the resulting ‘analysis.’ As Turner (2014) has noted, this has allowed a huge expansion in academic writing that is overtly political. The esoteric organisational broomsticks and the buckets of water-data they bring may multiply uncontrollably; but in this dystopia they each wear badges of group membership.

Partisanship and commitment are not the enemies of fact; they are, however, the enemies of an abstract concern for theoretical truth. The role of theory of this sort in present American sociology, and of what I have called here ‘larger sociology,’ is now minimal. Theory is ‘for use.’

(Turner, 2014, p. 117)

The capitalism involved here is not that of the market (for, say, palladium: where anyone can buy and sell the commodity from a desk anywhere in the world and never take possession of it). Rather, it is more like the car industry (with all its duplicities) where there are only a handful of major producers each with their model template. This metaphor has some grip in respect of academic productivity because working within such a prototype allows a reduction of the conceptual content of any given paper – the prototype can be taken as granted. A claim to have produced theoretical innovation can then easily be made by a minor differentiation of theoretical terms⁷ or, if theory is spurned in favour of ‘experience,’ the organisational prototype can be claimed to be ‘letting the data speak for itself.’

This also has consequences for the empirical: researchers complain that the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Permissions
• Introduction
• 1 The sorcerer’s apprentice syndrome
• 2 Diagrams as metaphors of containment
• 3 At the crossroads: The struggle to escape categorial diagramming
• 4 Relational diagramming
• 5 Ignorance vs. knowledge in the study of gender and technology
• 6 Diagramming relational research: Disentangling relationality from realism
• Conclusion
• Index