Gregor McLennan

Sociology's Eurocentrism and the `Rise of the West' Revisited

Under the impact of `postcolonial critique, it is increasingly assumed in radical social theory that traditional disciplines like sociology remain palpably Eurocentric. However, this important challenge is typically advanced at a very general level, often lacking adequate instantiation. In this article some general formulations of the problem of Eurocentrism are connected to the work of three pairs of theorists in historical sociology. Foregrounding recent approaches to the classic `rise of the West question, these authors are probed for either substantive or `meta-theoretical expressions of Eurocentrism. Overall I argue that charging sociology with Eurocentrism is problematical, partly due to continuing uncertainty about the status of the concept of ideology in social science.

‘Thus’: reflections on Loughborough relativism

Through two exchanges in this journal, a type of relativism has been advanced by a group of authors from Loughborough University with a view to demolishing what they see as ‘bottom line’ arguments for critical realism in the social sciences. Jauntily dismissing realism, they also soberly disown the supposed ‘extreme’ consequences that some realists insist follow naturally from relativist conceptions of social inquiry. In this article, I contest the Loughborough team’s arguments. Their presentation of relativism itself can be reconstructed in at least three different ways, none of which suffices to undermine a generally realist account of explanatory endeavour. The most productive note in the critics’ conceptual register highlights the utility of rhetorical analysis; yet this can proceed effectively only if it is neutral with respect to different epistemic and ontological stances. The most productive thematic possibility raised in their articles, and shared with several other recent discussions, signals that realism and relativism may not be anything like fixed and opposed stances; yet the polemical thrust of their anti-realism compromises this insight.

Sociology and cultural studies: rhetorics of disciplinary identity

This article explores the interface between cultural studies and soci ology, as expressed through four scenarios which construe the debate in particular ways. Two of these - cultural studies succession and postmodernist conjuncturalist cultural studies - unapologetically seek to dismiss sociology in favour of cultural studies, whilst a third - socio logical revenge - appears to turn the tables entirely. A fourth and more productive scenario dwells synthetically on the cultural turn across the whole field of the social and human sciences. All four postures dis cussed are found to share two problematical features. The first of these is that although rhetoric/discourse is crucial in the construction of iden tities, including disciplinary identities, over-rhetorical manifestos readily generate critical doubts about their consistency and appropri ateness. Second, the focus in the four scenarios is chiefly on disciplinary homes, fields, or turns rather than, as it perhaps should be, on substan tive theses or ideological positions within these.

Disinterested, disengaged, useless: Conservative or progressive idea of the university?

There is evidence aplenty of academics increasing incorporation into the life and fate of their universitys brand, just as it is clear that university structures and incentives generally are dependent upon increasingly competitive resource capture under tightened managerial ideologies of institutional commitment (albeit by way of innumerable “consultation” and “responsibilisation” mechanisms). In that context, it becomes important to re‐think and re‐imagine the very “idea of the university”, especially now that images and imperatives around the Engaged University are a) omnipresent and b) convene a whole range of entirely disparate activities, governed by very different intellectual rationales. While hardly wishing to be “against” university involvement in the “wider world”, this article critically questions the new metaphysic of Engagement, and the discursive framings and traps that sustain it. In an age when perhaps only paradox and counter‐intuitive gesturing seem to work as prompts towards thinking otherwise, I make the case that some “traditionalist” ideas of higher education can be part of a reasserted “progressivist” social ethics.

Universities in ‘the condition of publicity’: how LSE engages with the wider world

This article analyses how one institution, the London School of Economics under Anthony Giddens’s directorship, sought to occupy the ‘condition of publicity’ that is increasingly a prerequisite for university success in ‘knowledge‐society’ contexts. In particular, we illustrate how the LSE has sought to develop a brand and practice that is policy‐relevant, close to society, media‐savvy and think‐tank‐like, whilst at the same time remaining impeccably academic. Whilst one goal of the paper is the relatively modest one of giving local texture to some of the general tendencies identified in wider debates about ‘academic capitalism’, ‘the postmodern university’, and the like, we also develop some initial considerations that are intended as a contribution to the assessment of those theoretical themes.

Eurocentrism: Postcolonial Theory

Through the 1980s and 1990s, numerous ‘special issues’ on postcolonial theory and politics were published in the journals; but not in the sociology journals, where only a very few individual articles on these themes appeared (Mouzelis 1997, Parker 1997). Meanwhile, popular textbooks on the sociological classics (Hughes et al. 1995, Craib 1997) barely touched on the questions that Seidman and Lemert were raising about Eurocentrism in the founding fathers. And until the late 1990s, otherwise up-to-speed reviews of modern sociological theory (Maynard 1989, Craib 1992, May 1996, Ritzer 1996, Layder 1997) were devoid of mention of the postcolonial issues that seemed so pressing elsewhere. Throughout this period, cultural studies once again raced ahead of sociology as the discourse of contemporary existence, by fully taking on board those theorists of postcolonialism that were conducting explicit ‘disruptions’ of Western modernity and its disciplinary discourses.

Cultural Studies//Sociology

In this chapter, I develop an accounts of the rhetorical scenarios that have governed debate between cultural studies and sociology over the years. These are presented more as theoretical attitudes and writing styles rather than as explicit models as such. And whilst they follow, roughly, a timeline from the 1970s to the present day, they are not intended to mark precise chronological phases, as the overlapping dates of various references will reveal. I begin with an account of the discourse on sociology that prevailed at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) before it was reconfigured as a full academic department in the 1980s. I take my time here because I am not aware that the writings on sociology at Birmingham have been detailed even in this summative way. The second scenario — ‘postmodern conjuncturalism’ — takes cultural studies’ academic ‘coming of age’ (Inglis 1993: ix) as its premise, and part of its wider agenda is to displace the sociological imaginary from any ostensible role in the definition of the field. This attitude lends itself to a third strategy — ‘sociological revenge’ — in which the tables are turned entirely. Towards the close of the 1990s, the ‘cultural turn’ was widely adopted as a new synthesizing moment, and it stands as the fourth configuration in the sequence.

The Turn to Complexity

In the final two chapters, I return to some of the central ‘methodological’ issues that bestride contemporary discussion about the nature of the human sciences. The notions of complexity and reflexivity are especially pivotal and omnipresent in that regard, and how we understand and prescribe these desiderata significantly affects the prospects of a more integrated cultural studies and sociology. Ever since Comte envisaged sociology as the culmination of all scientific endeavour, and ever since Durkheim’s resounding instruction that social facts be treated as things, sociology has had trouble convincing sceptical onlookers that it is not essentially positivistic or mechanically reductive in character. Cultural studies has had to face charges of reductionism and mechanicism too, but only at those times when cultural studies has seemed at its most sociologistic. Post-Birmingham, the job of social understanding has been assumed to require emphasizing rather than minimizing the elements of contingency and indeterminacy in social and cultural life. Whether justly attributed or not, the persistent feeling is that sociology is unreceptive to these aspects of cultural existence, and that the onus is thus specifically on sociology, and not its successor discourses, to shake off its ambitions to achieve simplicity and reduction, so that it can finally make the ‘turn to complexity’ that others have already taken.

Postpositivism and the Idea of Sociology

If a strong whiff of suspicion characterized the response of many practising sociologists to the whole question of postmodernism and the cultural turn, this may have been because the very idea of sociology appeared to be under threat. We can elaborate this generic, often tacit idea of sociology by saying that it has to do with the viability of notions of structured social totalities, and the possibility of making authoritative distinctions between the objects of social enquiry and the frameworks of discourse available to configure them. Our motivation for sustaining such an idea ultimately stems from our nature as social beings making our practical, collective way in the world; and as part of that, we routinely seek to increase our knowledge of a historical and natural context that is considerably larger than ourselves, but to which we have many points of access. When that project of cumulative partial understanding is rigorously conducted and transmitted, both empirically and theoretically, we call it ‘science’. And the traditional argument is that there is no reason why sociology — here standing as proxy for the promise of the social sciences as a whole — should not be considered ‘scientific’ in that sense.

Explanation, Articulation, Imagination

I argued in Chapter 1 that if the idea of sociology requires ‘traditionalist’ benchmarks for enquiry, these remain indispensable even under postpositivist lights. Then, in Chapter 2, I showed that if sociology and cultural studies are significantly different in some aspects of their intellectual styles and characteristic interests, there are many respects in which they share the same investigative and pedagogic terrain, and common resources in theory and methodology. Thus, if poststructuralism and post-Marxism undoubtedly influenced the framing of cultural studies in the last twenty years, there are plenty of statements in the periodic set-piece collections (Grossberg et al. 1992, Morley and Chen 1996, Ferguson and Golding 1997, Gilroy et al. 2000), which call for a determined ‘recovery’ of those materialist, experiential, institutional and structural dimensions of analysis. At the very least, we need to register a plurality of perspectives in cultural studies, some of which strike a definite sociological note, albeit pitched within an inter- or post-disciplinary conspectus (Morley 2000: 247–8).