Michael Mair

Critical reflections on the field of tobacco research: The role of tobacco control in defining the tobacco research agenda

In recent years, tobacco research, as a field of investigative practices, has come to be seen as a major contributor to broader tobacco control efforts and a ‘significant component of the global health agenda’ (World Health Organization (1999). Confronting the epidemic: A Global Agenda For Tobacco Control Research. Geneva: WHO, p. 14; Warner, K. E. (2005). The role of research in international tobacco control. American Journal of Public Health, 95(6), 976–984). However, despite some discussion about the research-specific implications of, for instance, the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) (World Health Organisation (2003a) (ratified 2005). The Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. Geneva: WHO, Articles 20–22), questions remain about what the exact nature of the relationship between tobacco research and tobacco control should be. Guided by that central question, this article draws attention to recent attempts to define this relationship, in particular that embodied in the Global Tobacco Research Network (GTRN), in order to facilitate debate on how such definitions attempt to shape the research agenda. Throughout, the main critical focus will be the attempt to generate characterizations of the field, through entities like the GTRN, which relate tobacco-related research practices vis-à-vis their relationship to tobacco control. It is argued that such characterizations present a distorted and oversimplified picture of how we might assess the empirical work we find across the field as a whole. Tracing these difficulties back to the narrow normative position embodied within the GTRN and World Health Organization approach to tobacco research, the article concludes by arguing that there is a need to recognize, rather than correct for, the overlapping and diverse bodies of work which the study of tobacco-related questions has helped establish.

From methodology to methodography: a study of qualitative and quantitative reasoning in practice

Despite the huge literature on the methodology of the social sciences, relatively little interest has been shown in sociological description of social science research methods in practice, i.e., in the application of sociology to sociological work. The overwhelming (if not exhaustive) interest in research methods is an evaluative and prescriptive one. This is particularly surprising, since the sociology of science has in the past few decades scrutinised almost every aspect of natural science methodology. Ethnographic and historical case studies have moved from an analysis of the products of science to investigations of the processes of scientific work in the laboratory. Social scientists appear to have been rather reluctant to explore this aspect of their own work in any great depth. In this paper, we report on a ‘methodography’, an empirical study of research methods in practice. This took the form of a small-scale investigation of the working practices of two groups of social scientists, one with a predominantly qualitative approach, the other involved in statistical modelling. The main part of the paper involves a comparison between two brief episodes taken from the work of each, one focussing on how two researchers analyse and draw conclusions from an interview transcript, the other on how collaborators work out an agreed final version of a statistical model for combining temporal and spatial data. Based on our analysis of these examples, we raise some questions about the way in which social scientists reason through their problems, and the role that characterisations of research, as research of a particular kind (e.g., qualitative or quantitative), play in actual research practice.

Deconstructing behavioural classifications: tobacco control, ‘professional vision’ and the tobacco user as a site of governmental intervention

In this article, I examine a defining feature of the ‘new public health’: the (re)construction of health-related phenomena in behavioural terms. While the ‘behavioural turn’ within epidemiology has had far-reaching implications for the way in which public health problems as a whole are conceptualised, including, significantly, obesity and alcohol (mis)use, here I explore how the new public health works up its behavioural objects using the example of tobacco use. Beginning with the work of counting smokers, I trace the emergence and consolidation of a standard model for identifying and measuring tobacco-related harm, a model, I argue, that has been extended so that tobacco use itself can be treated in disease terms. As I show with reference to an example of contemporary public health research practice in the UK, this extension is problematic because it establishes a depoliticised view of the publics health that concentrates on individuals, recast as bundles of problem behaviours, at the expense of any examination of the social, cultural and economic circumstances in which those individuals live. Epidemiological research of this kind, with its core message that behavioural problems require behavioural solutions, relies on close alliances between the health sector and decision-makers more broadly. Under these conditions, the point at which research ends and government begins is often difficult to locate. I conclude by arguing that we should pay greater attention to the epidemiological practices used to transform the behaviour of the tobacco user, like that of the eater or drinker, into a site of governmental intervention.

Statistical Practice: Putting Society on Display

As a contribution to current debates on the ‘social life of methods’, in this article we present an ethnomethodological study of the role of understanding within statistical practice. After reviewing the empirical turn in the methods literature and the challenges to the qualitative-quantitative divide it has given rise to, we argue such case studies are relevant because they enable us to see different ways in which ‘methods’, here quantitative methods, come to have a social life – by embodying and exhibiting understanding they ‘make the social structures of everyday activities observable’ (Garfinkel, 1967: 75), thereby putting society on display. Exhibited understandings rest on distinctive lines of practical social and cultural inquiry – ethnographic ‘forays’ into the worlds of the producers and users of statistics – which are central to good statistical work but are not themselves quantitative. In highlighting these non-statistical forms of social and cultural inquiry at work in statistical practice, our case study is an addition to understandings of statistics and usefully points to ways in which studies of the social life of methods might be further developed from here.

Studying interaction in undergraduate tutorials: results from a small-scale evaluation

This article reports on an observation-based evaluation of student–tutor interaction in first-year undergraduate tutorials. Using a single case analysis, the paper looks at how tutors and students built and maintained relationships through two different though interlinked forms of interaction – storytelling and the use of classroom space for communicative purposes. It argues that interactional factors such as these should be explored alongside other more traditional forms of course evaluation. By explicitly recognising the interactional demands placed on tutors and students, the paper suggests that it will be easier to ensure that tutorials are properly inclusive of the diverse range of students who have access to higher education.

The Violence You Were/n’t Meant to See: Representations of Death in an Age of Digital Reproduction

Through the ongoing work of leak sites, public inquiries, criminal investigations, journalists, whistleblowers, researchers and others, the public has gained access to a growing number of videos of live military operations in recent years. Capturing such things as friendly fire attacks, civilian deaths and extrajudicial or illegal killings, these videos have attracted public and academic attention due to their ‘revelatory’ qualities. Through an analysis of two particular instances, WikiLeaks’ Collateral Murder and footage of a targeted assassination by the Israeli Defence Force, we argue it is important to analyse exactly how such deaths are digitally re-presented if we are to make use of videos as data in the study of episodes of military violence and the evidential politics they give rise to.

‘The planners’ dream goes wrong?’ Questioning citizen-centred planning

ABSTRACT The reform of urban and environmental planning in England since the election of the Coalition government in 2010 has resulted in the emergence of Neighbourhood Planning: a situation in which citizens can autonomously assemble, define the spatial extent of their neighbourhood and author a plan for it. In this paper, we argue that this radical policy is part of a wider agenda to de-professionalise planning as a statutory function and has its roots in an odd assemblage of classical right-wing political thinking and the prescriptions of post-positivist planning theory. This uneasy conceptual relationship reveals a wider inconsistency between the policy in rhetorical form and its practical implementation. Drawing on primary research from England’s North-West and a thorough review of literature, we hope to show that the dream of citizen-centred planning masks deep tensions within the activity of urban and environmental management.

'Patients' Uses of Information as Researchable Domains of Social Practice'

In this article we argue that research into information for patients has to extend beyond an evaluation of particular information resources to studies of how those resources are engaged with, made sense of and used in practice. We draw on empirical data collected in the course of a study of a patient information resource designed for breast cancer patients in Liverpool and Newcastle in order to demonstrate the limitations of a restricted focus on information resources alone – namely, that it does not take into account the specific ways in which information is incorporated within what patients do as the grounds of ‘further inference and action’. Our interest is less in discussing the strengths and weaknesses of this particular resource than in explicating some neglected aspects of the commonplace ways in which patients ‘work’ with information. We conclude by sketching some broad features of those ‘reading’ and ‘linking’ practices, the study of which, we believe, would help us as researchers to explicate the ‘problem of information’ as it is actually encountered and resolved by patients in realworld settings for their own practical purposes. Taking our lead from ethnomethodological studies and related research in various fields, we argue patients’ uses of information are social practices that can and should be treated as researchable phenomena.

Violence as Work: Ethnomethodological Insights into Military Combat Operations

Objective: The objective of this article is to outline an ethnomethodological approach to the study of professionalized violence or violence as work. It focuses primarily on violence in the context of military combat operations and the “situational” analyses and assessments military personnel themselves undertake when engaging in violent action. Method: We use a video from one incident (WikiLeaks’ Collateral Murder release) as a demonstration case to set out the methodological bases of ethnomethodological studies of combat violence. As part of this study, we show how transcripts can be used to document the interactions in which situational analyses feature as part of coordinating and executing linked attacks. Results: Based on the video and our transcripts, we explicate how the military personnel involved collaboratively identified, assessed, and engaged a group of combatants. We show that the incident consisted of 2 attacks or engagements, a first and a follow-up, treated as connected rather than distinct by those involved on situational grounds. Conclusion: Moving beyond controversy, causal explanations, and remedies, the article describes how structures of practical military action can be investigated situationally from an ethnomethodological perspective using video data. By treating collaborative military methods and practices as a focus for inquiry, this article contributes to our understanding of violence as work more broadly.

Genealogy, Parasitism and Moral Economy: The Case of UK Supermarket Growth

In this chapter we examine supermarket growth in the UK. This phenomenon provides a particularly useful case, we argue, because developing an understanding of what has given it shape and direction underscores the point made in different ways by all contributors to this volume, namely that economic activities do not stand alone but are, simultaneously and significantly, social, cultural, political, governmental and, crucially, moral in character – something the concept of moral economy is designed to bring to the fore (e.g. Sayer 2000, 2007). If that concept is to have any analytical purchase, however, the practices – of justification, of representation, of judgement, of valuation, of organisation, of distribution and exchange, and so on – of which moral economies are composed have to be linked to a material ground, to the wider forms of social, cultural and political life which they are intertwined with and help sustain (Tully 2008). This cannot be a matter of opposing one set of generalised and totalising claims (on, for example, the moral virtues or vices of competition) with another. Rather, it is a matter of treating those claims as themselves embedded features of complex contemporary social, economic and governmental landscapes. The question we want to pose in what follows is, therefore, where, when and in relation to what do moral economies acquire their concrete form? What, that is, are the practical conditions of their possibility? One of the striking features of the forms of economic practice grouped together under the label of ‘neoliberalism’ is precisely the limited nature of any internal interrogation of the social, political and economic conditions of their own possibility. These forms of practice are presented as outside morality and politics – as amoral and apolitical – and their presentation as such reinforces the idea that they exist in a world in which there are, for instance, clear lines of demarcation between the public and the private (Sayer 2007, Harvey 2007). Economic ‘success’ and ‘failure’ stories in the private sector are framed as just that, i.e. private, and do not implicate either the public or the state. Insofar as malpractice is identified, it is as regrettable slips on the part of those involved rather than structural matters. Such narratives are not merely mythological, they are fraudulent – serving to obscure the nature of the hybrid arrangements that link government to business, and in ways that benefit those advancing them. UK supermarket growth, an emergent moral economic form with a particular spatial distribution which is parasitic on patterns of low paid, insecure work and tithed consumption, is a case-in-point. As we shall show, the parameters and profitability of the contemporary supermarket chain’s fields of activity are the product of direct and ongoing state intervention and public subsidy. The process of recovering what is actually taking place in such hybrid spaces is, however, difficult and requires a shift of analytical focus. If we want to explore the material grounds of contemporary moral economies, we will have to grapple with the fact that their elaboration takes place across many different sites and settings and in many different ways – the practices in question are highly localised/localising, fragmented and heterogeneous, both here-and-now and over time. Capturing this requires a genealogical approach, enabling us to identify the multiple points of origin out of which contemporary moral economic formations have arisen as part of a ‘history of the present’ (Foucault 1977, Tully 2008). We will use the example of supermarkets in order to make this methodological case, focusing specifically on how the growth of supermarket chains has fed into and fed off a remodelling of the built environment, the labour market and the tax and benefit system in the UK to become a constitutive element of a new strain of post-crash (bio)politics organised around harnessing and exploiting poor populations for private gain but at public expense.