Year: 2021

Research heuristic: what device is it

Angus Bancroft/ / Teaching

The researcher’s kitbag should include several analytical heuristics you can apply to your case. These are not ready made pop up explanations. They are designed to aid thinking about why the social world looks and operates the way it does. This one is a version of Becker’s (1998) machine trick: ‘Design the machine that will produce the result your analysis indicates occurs routinely in the situation you have studied.’ It means working out what problem the institution, policy, device or system you are working with is solving. That is different from what it purports to be solving or what its designers intend.

Examples from technology design are good ones to start with as they embed solutions that might not always be articulated but are there. The Segway is a two wheeled self balancing electric personal mover. It began to be sold in 2001. It was notorious for the buildup to the launch during which fevered speculation about what it was and the impact it would have ran rampant. Without knowing exactly what it was people mused it would revolutionise urban life. The Segway itself was expensive and did not appear to solve any problem people actually had. It did not fit into any transport category or replace any existing transport device with something better. It was illegal and extremely anti social to use on pavements. It was slow and off putting to use in traffic.

We can apply the above trick to understanding it by defining the problem it actually addressed which was: very affluent urban dwellers walk too much. It would be better if they did not walk short distances and used this device instead. That was not a problem needing solved. We can then infer other effects of the Segway which would have come into being if it had taken off. We could call this the Uber stage. Uber sought like many other tech platforms to change transport regulations throughout the world in its favour. If Segway had followed the Uber path it would have spent vast amounts lobbying governments to allow its use in pavements, provide infrastructure to support it, and encouraged users to use it regardless of local rules. Then we would have a class of urban pavement users zipping along on their devices. Walking would become a highly stratified practice of those who cannot afford, use or refuse a Segway type device crammed into special lanes on the pavement while Segway users zipped past.

Some answers to the Becker question might sound a bit sarcastic, for example: the problem prisons solve is that criminals need places to pass on skills and drug dealers need a captive market. That’s just one of the answers though. There are  many other problems prisons are solving which highlight the absence of effective institutions to do their job such as warehousing people with severe mental health and substance use problems. That should give us a few clues to the kinds of problems social institutions they could be solving, those they should be solving and those they are solving. My surmise is that it is effective to examine each institution or social phenomena as if it were a device, bringing us back to the machine trick. In my understanding the device is more like an assemblage in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense, a skein of elements which are not necessarily logically coherent nor a unified whole, but which have powerful effects in the world. A drug trafficking network is a device in this sense, assembled from smartphones, dead drops, mules’ bodies, tourist towns and cheap airfares.

Summary of Becker’s tricks by Kathy Roulston: https://qualpage.com/2017/03/16/11-tricks-to-think-with-when-analyzing-data/

Becker, Howard S. Tricks of the trade: How to think about your research while you’re doing it. University of Chicago press, 2008.

Individuated and embedded users in the heroin moral economy

Angus Bancroft/ / Research

Detailed ethnographic work (Bourgois 1998, Wakeman, 2015) has shown the rich, complex set of reciprocal obligations and responsibilities by which heroin users in marginal social and economic circumstances maintain a moral economy. The moral economy is instrumental and emotionally bound, locking users into norms of reciprocity and sharing, distributing resources and helping users limit withdrawal and also avoid some harms such as overdose. Punishment is also distributed, through excluding a norm violating individual from the community of care. These studies are in embedded communities, where people interact regularly. Micro payments and limited options mean people need to interact frequently, to maintain an income and to obtain heroin. A range of roles come into being such as the user-dealer and a range of practices such as instrumental social supply.

The moral economies described have qualities in common. Participants are known to each other and subject to some degree of mutual surveillance and influence. Interactions are recurrent and frequent, sometimes to the point of being ritualised. They take place in geographically well bounded and resource limited environments. There is a sense that this is why they exist: they are needed to combine different kinds of scarce resources into a working set of social and material relationships that rewards prosocial participants by protecting them against frequent periods of scarcity and withdrawal. Acute withdrawal can be used as an implied threat so as to push members into compliance. These characteristics are typical of a population of heroin users who are also likely to be frequently in contact with criminal justice, social and other services.

Shewan and Dalgarno (2005) highlight the existence of another group of non-treatment users who are more like the general population in terms of employment and education. Participants indicated that their drug use was typically controlled and did not dominate their day to day lives. Users did not centre their lives around heroin buying and consumption. They were peripheral to many aspects of the moral economy described above. It appears that this more individuated group of users do not need the moral economy to get by. Population data note a decline of face to face drug purchase during the pandemic and a further rise in the popularity of social media apps for obtaining drugs. It is likely that these changes further marginalise the moral economy and push users towards the cash nexus. I hypothesis that people who buy using cash, consume individually or with their own friendship group and not with the people they have bought from. Face to face buying might be a useful proxy for engagement in the moral economy. On the other hand, Masson and I noted that varying degrees of reciprocity were possible in darknet drug markets.

Bourgois, Philippe. 1998. ‘The Moral Economies of Homeless Heroin Addicts: Confronting Ethnography, HIV Risk, and Everyday Violence in San Francisco Shooting Encampments’. Substance Use & Misuse 33(11):2323–51. doi: 10.3109/10826089809056260.
Wakeman, Stephen. 2016. ‘The Moral Economy of Heroin in “Austerity Britain”’. Critical Criminology 24(3):363–77. doi: 10.1007/s10612-015-9312-5.

Shewan, D., P. Dalgarno, A. Marshall, E. Lowe, M. Campbell, S. Nicholson, G. Reith, V. Mclafferty, and K. Thomson. 1998. ‘Patterns of Heroin Use among a Non-Treatment Sample in Glasgow (Scotland)’. Addiction Research6(3):215–34. doi: 10.3109/16066359808993304.

Can you choose your PhD supervisor?

Angus Bancroft/ / Teaching

Clue: No

I want to supplement some of the advice given to PhD students about their supervision team. There are a lot of guides for PhD students on ‘choosing your supervisor’. Advice falls into the following categories:  topic expertise, position in the field, and personality/working style. Do they know their stuff, do they know the ropes, and can you work productively together. It reflects the different elements of good PhD supervision. The supervisor should open up pathways for you, guide you towards productive modes of work and away from easy mistakes and mentor you in a more holistic sense. It’s a sweet combination. Not everyone is going to cover all of these elements which is why we have two supervisors.

That assumes students are going to be in a position to choose their supervisor. I am here to tell you that choices are limited and mostly students do not go shopping for supervisors in the way suggested. Sometimes  supervisors come tied to a project. Some supervisors only take on specific project types. There is not as much shopping around as implied and maybe there does not need to be.

I ask if you can choose your supervisor because it’s not very likely you will know those elements in advance. You will only know if you can work with them if you have already worked with them. In which case you have still not chosen them, happy happenstance has done the work for you. Paying attention to their position in the field is also self defeating. Someone who is so well known will have many potential PhDs wanting to work with them and might be the one doing the choosing.

When I am arranging supervision the biggest obstacle is that many academics cannot take on more PhDs. I don’t agree with the view that there is a supervisory type. Each relationship is unique and we adopt different roles depending on the needs of the project and the student. What does matter is that you are all able to reflect honestly about working patterns as you go along. Coming to know one’s supervisor is a process of coming to know yourself: their and your inspiration places, blindspots, comfort zones. That is why it is productive to think about what the PhD needs alongside what it is.

Questions to orient yourself to ontology

Angus Bancroft/ / Research, Teaching

The purpose of the exercise is to help you work out your ontological positioning. The reason I have done it this way is to provokes reflection which is easier when faced with a distinct proposition.

Say if you agree/disagree with the following statements, and why.  Show what the implications of adopting one stance or its opposite would be.

  1. Human beings possess measurable, stable, persistent, consequential personality traits that are largely independent of upbringing or other contextual factors.
  2. People can act against their own interests.
  3. There is a fundamental difference between mathematical calculations performed by the human mind and those done by an electronic computer.
  4. It is possible to label certain cultural forms ‘maladaptive’.
  5. The fundamental characteristics of entities are best explained by examining their environment

When I was putting these exercises together I changed the wording a lot, away from wording that implied ethical and political consequences and to wording that implied possibilities. Ontology in my writing became about the possibilities of things rather than their meaning or what would be done with them. Ontological positions open and close off possibilities. For instance rejecting number 4 means you cannot then entertain ideas of toxic masculinity, or of white racial resentment. If you do accept ideas like toxic masculinity you cannot then reject outright positions like the culture of poverty thesis. You can still criticise it, you just cannot rule it out of bounds as such.  Each decision excludes some positions. Recognising that takes discipline and means rejecting easy-outs like ‘strategic essentialism’ used by some post-colonial theories, which means ‘I only reject essentialisms I happen not to like’. You cannot have it all.

Simulated theory – Engaging students creatively in doing sociological theory

Angus Bancroft/ / Teaching

Students taking sociology courses are can be very successful at absorbing empirical data and understanding the dynamics of everyday life in relation to topics of gender, class, ethnicity and so on. As my colleague Ralph Fevre and myself noticed, students often understood theoretical frameworks well but have difficulty moving between the concrete and the abstract or deploying theories in their own discussions. Theory then appears to students not as something they ought to care much about or do much with. Neither does it give students a grounding in applicable intellectual methods which they can apply to other areas of study and later years of their degree. They were uncertain in how to inhabit theoretical discourse and often found themselves relying on brittle, black and white constructs which did not match the suppleness of their understandings. Some would beautifully describe the theoretical frame they were relying on and then give a magical account of the empirical situation they were examining, but the two apparently existed in separate spheres. Others take refuge in safe and known positions which they intuited would flatter their teachers’ points of view. Sometimes it is students who produce less polished work who are being more honest about their stance.

Sociological theory can be taught in ways which give students the confidence to articulate theoretical concepts and work through their real world consequences. To take two examples of where this often does work as intended, courses in feminist theory and postcolonialism often do this very effectively. A combination of the commitment of the authors, teachers and students to a joint enterprise is borne through involved and engaging teaching methods. The classroom becomes a fruitful, productive space, and teachers in these topics are often comfortable recognising and incorporating conflict into their work, recognising the multiplicity of social life and the multivariant nature of social phenomena without losing sight of the big picture issues at play. Observing my colleagues teaching these courses and speaking to their students shows what can be gained where the classroom is a lively place where things happen. Ideas are crystallised, differences aired, and provocations are permitted and encouraged.

How might this be done more widely? Giving students permission to disagree and the tools to articulate their disagreements is key. These qualities can be incorporated into texts and classroom environments using a dialogic approach that draws on the classical tradition of disputation and productive conflict. As students will come to the classroom with a variety of capacities they are likely to find leaping into something in the style of Plato’s Symposium intimidating or alienating. In any case these classical dialogues are themselves rather contrived. Instead I like to draw on concepts students will be familiar with for creating dialogue and giving students the tools to interact with the material and each other. These are world building, simulation and augmentation. World building and simulation may be familiar from the Minecraft video game and many other apps, and augmentation from augmented reality capabilities built into social media apps such as Instagram. Problem based learning approaches align with these experiences, where students are given information and asked to simulate a problem solving team or another scenario. Students may be asked to write the thoughts of Georg Simmel attending a 21st century rave, advise a drug gang or the FBI on the philosophy of money, or rewrite Marx’s Communist Manifesto as if he had been a driver in the gig economy. The challenge in these approaches is that students are sometimes unsure of what is being asked of them, and often do not have experience of creative methods and being asked to think in a creative way, it is demanding of both teachers and students, and it does not remotely fit with the evaluation bureaucracy beloved of the modern British higher education system. However if we can make a space for recovering the ideal of the Enlightenment university – a public place that exists beyond the rule bound bricks and stone of the institution – then we will have done some good.

 

Discover lives as lived: create puzzlement and elaborate your bafflement

Angus Bancroft/ / Research, Teaching

The researcher stance should be one of polite but informed puzzlement and a willingness to learn from the world.

A few of the posts I have been writing are about different ways to spark your curiosity. It is that willingness to push beyond face value answers and assumptions that is the fuel for a fun research career. Great questions to ask are simple ones. ‘And then … and then …’ or ‘You mentioned x?’ They invite research subjects to elaborate and give themselves voice. Curiosity should also be ethical. We hope to gain a complete picture of the lifeworld and experience of the topic: enough and no more. Finding out what it is means discovering what matters, and the latter is what everyone really wants and will benefit from knowing.  Discover lives as lived, not as described.

One angle on that is repeated injunctions about what it is you really are studying. Just discussing the cryptomarkets recently and the question came up of why we talk about them as a unitary phenomenon. If you were talking about the illicit drug street market the first question would be, ‘well which one do you mean’? There are millons of drug exchanges every day in pubs, parks, streets, workplaces, homes, underpasses. To throw that all together as ‘the street market’ or ‘the face to face market’ or ‘the digital market’ is letting the phrase do a lot of work. So far, so typical of my inherent research laziness.

Likewise recent research into the cryptomarkets shows how we should not treat it as all one thing. Even the term ‘market’ flattens our analysis in ways that might be limiting. I would presume a market has several features such as commodification, standardisation rationalisation and so on but these appear very differently in different market spaces. One drug market I study resists commodification due to the cultural commitment that market participants have to the product, psychedelics. I prefer the term community of exchange for that one since it does not seek to explicitly conform to typical market precepts. You still have operators who make the market identity part of their approach and seek to defend it but it is not predominant within that particular place.

You can gain a lot in the attempt to answer that question: well, what is it? What is it not? Howard Becker (1993) has a lovely illustration of his attempts to understand with medical students what made a patient a ‘crock’. A crock was a patient they did not like to deal with. The puzzle was what put a patient into that category. At first it seemed someone who had vague and ill defined psychosomatic symptoms.  That was only half the story though. Becker sought to understand the issue theoretically: why did a ‘crock’ patient violate the medical students’ interests? The medical students had a good sense of what a crock was but found it hard to articulate as a category. You just know them when you see them.

Through repeated discussion with the students, they came to understand that a crock was a patient whom the students could learn nothing from. Dealing with many such patients did not add to their sum of knowledge about human pathology. A crock would also be worthless in the informal economy of experience working at medical school. If I have several patients with ovarian cysts and you have several with an ectopic pregnancy, it benefits us both to ‘trade’ so we can each learn about a class of pathology we have no experience with. A crock was worthless to trade with. The crock also illustrated a crucial element of medical status operating at the time: true medicine is powerful and dangerous, where you can kill or cure. With no physical pathology, there is no opportunity to act out the doctor as god role. The main lesson from this is to use and elaborate your bafflement. When you ask a question and the people around you scoff at your ignorance, it means you are onto something. Don’t be embarrassed to be ignorant and hold onto your polite puzzlement like drunk ex clings onto their self-pity.

Becker, Howard S. “How I learned what a crock was.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 22.1 (1993): 28-35.
Childs A, Coomber R, Bull M, et al. (2020) Evolving and Diversifying Selling Practices on Drug Cryptomarkets: An Exploration of Off-Platform “Direct Dealing.” Journal of Drug Issues: 0022042619897425. DOI: 10.1177/0022042619897425.

Reading list for June

Angus Bancroft/ / Research

This month was mainly spent reviewing references for a paper on darknet markets and illicit drug diffusion. It’s a fine thing to see the academic discussion developing alongside the maturing practices of this illicit market segment.

Informative recent paper on where things have been and where it looks like they are headed: Horton-Eddison, Martin, Patrick Shortis, Judith Aldridge, and Fernando Caudevilla. 2021. Drug Cryptomarkets in the 2020s: Policy, Enforcement, Harm, and Resilience. Swansea: Global Drug Policy Observatory.

Great to see some studies of Telegram dealing coming out: Blankers, Matthijs, Daan van der Gouwe, Lavinia Stegemann, and Laura Smit-Rigter. 2021. ‘Changes in Online Psychoactive Substance Trade via Telegram during the COVID-19 Pandemic’. European Addiction Research 1–6. doi: 10.1159/000516853.

Services like Televend indicate a developing use of automation in illicit digital dealings which is going to be an interesting intersection of technology and market governance. With the greater focus on at-home automation by vendors like Apple, Google and others we may be seeing more integration there. Hopefully my Roomba won’t turn against me anytime soon.

Looking for research on cryptomarket governance turned up a comprehensive take by Meropi Tzanetakis, taking in resistance and internal governance. Tzanetakis, Meropi. 2019. ‘Informal Governance on Cryptomarkets for Illicit Drugs’. Pp. 343–61 in Governance Beyond the Law: The Immoral, The Illegal, The Criminal, edited by A. Polese, A. Russo, and F. Strazzari. Springer.

She makes the point that drug market gentrification appears mainly to benefit users in the Global North and within that the segment with high levels of economic and social capital. That has been borne out by the differential impact of COVID restrictions on users. We don’t really know enough about how users and dealers outside the West engage with these systems.

When reading one interesting work you are immediately punished by then finding a lot of others which you must read too, and other chapters in the same book demand a follow up:

Gyurko, Fanni. 2019. ‘“Stealing from the State Is Not Stealing Really, It Is a National Sport”: A Study of Informal Economic Practices and Low-Level Corruption in Hungary’. Pp. 209–26 in Governance Beyond the Law. Springer.
Levenets, Olena, Tetiana Stepurko, Milena Pavlova, and Wim Groot. 2019. ‘Coping Mechanisms of Ukrainian Patients: Bribes, Gifts, Donations, and Connections’. Pp. 125–43 in Governance Beyond the Law. Springer.
Markovska, Anna, and Yuliya Zabyelina. 2019. ‘Negotiated Prohibition: The Social Organisation of Illegal Gambling in Ukraine’. Pp. 105–23 in Governance Beyond the Law. Springer.
Raineri, Luca. 2019. ‘Cross-Border Smuggling in North Niger: The Morality of the Informal and the Construction of a Hybrid Order’. Pp. 227–45 in Governance Beyond the Law. Springer.

An introvert’s guide to the academic conference. Yes, ‘conference’ means ‘converse’ so saddle up

Angus Bancroft/ / Teaching

… it just happens to be one where everyone is silently watching, and judging 👍

To the introvert an academic conference is like being at a party where there is just one person you feel comfortable talking to. Your mission is to work out who they are without interacting with anyone else, and then have a cheery convo with them while avoiding attracting anybody else’s attention. Now we’re doing all our conferences on Zoom, the hour of the introvert has come at last. As a professional introvert this makes me happy. But not too happy, that wouldn’t be very introvert-y and might end up with me engaging in persistent eye contact, wanting to know stuff about the other person, not reviewing every interaction a thousand times over the next month to check if I was embarrassing, and dancing on the stage at nightclubs. Slippery slope.

First steps to understand how to approach the academic conference is to grasp what it is for. A conference is several different events happening at the same time. A conference is: An academic news aggregator and sorter of ‘what everyone should be caring about right now’. A site of several rites of passage, into, through and out of the academic career. A consensus creator and problem former. A place of renewal and crisis management where the institutional health of the discipline is reviewed. A sometimes commercial entity. The place where people talk at other people for 15 minutes without saying anything related to the title they submitted 6 months ago. That disco. You may have noticed some of these are not going to be replaced by an online conference.

For the PhD researcher or early career researcher there are some graspable functions served by it: socialisation, joining a peer culture, starting to take measurable risks with your ideas, getting quick feedback, seeing frenemies and scouting out places you might like to work. I like conferences because they push people together, and at their best create a collective effervescence of ideas and people. At their worst … well, there’s a lot been written about that, alienating professional jousting and such. Generally we’ve got a bit better at limiting the irritating stuff and deliberately creating space for the good stuff. There’s also a lot going on in relation to access around the conference that isn’t acknowledged such as fees, immigration led constraints on attendees’ travel, the medium used for an online conference, and when it is being held (thanks to comments from two super smart students for putting that at the front of my mind). See Craig Lundy, Free the academic conference

Some links to get you started in working the conference:

How important is it to present at conferences early in one’s career? (Part 1)

How to write a killer conference abstract: The first step towards an engaging presentation.

Conference small talk – the definitive guide

 

Strategies for developing research into digital crime

Angus Bancroft/ / Research

The field of crime and public policy is at a critical turning point. There are new threats such as the rise and commodification of disinformation in the public square, the emergence of distributed criminal infrastructures and organisations that drive cybercrime, and new technologies and platforms that facilitate criminal activity. New modes of surveillance and policing have emerged such as the focus on smart policing tools. The challenge is to address crime as a globally connected, locally encountered phenomenon and recognise the political, pragmatic, and ethical challenges it brings.  There are new opportunities for research in the form of open access data sources, and the design of agile, hybrid research methods that combine qualitative and quantitative approaches. Dangers are getting swamped by big data, deferring to platform governance and becoming wholly reactive.

There are interlocking challenges: to identify and tackle emerging challenges in crime and crime governance: the rise of crime as a service,  the commodification of cybercrime technologies, the use of cryptocurrencies and other cashing out services, the intersection of gig economy labour organisation and illicit labour supply, emerging challenges in counterfeit pharmaceuticals, the use of encrypted apps for communication between criminal actors, analysis of harm and community support, and the redistribution of harm to the Global South.

Some priorities that will be guiding me, should I ever get round to them:

  1. To extend existing cross disciplinary working on global illicit markets and organised crime challenges stemming from changes in the global economy and the digital society.
  2. To trace new developments in platform abuse and take advantage of opportunities to support vulnerable communities within established and emerging digital platforms
  3. Adapt theoretical innovations in the areas of new materialism and digital trace analysis to the subject of crime and public policy
  4. Challenge the prevailing public and policy view that cybercrime happens ‘out there’ in non-Western territories rather than being a domestic phenomenon, and understanding its impact on global development
  5. Identify emerging challenges in studying digital crime and hybrid on/offline crime networks and develop measures for assessing the resilience of illicit market ecosystems
  6. Contribute to the development of public AI tools focused on communities and crime, particularly those that can be used to support illicit drug harm reduction and support user voices
  7. Develop theories and practices of resilience and security that aren’t deficit based
  8. Promote open scientific practices in the research community through code and data sharing practices.
  9. Enhance research impact through promoting the creation of policy communities around specific topics such as disinformation, the emergence of new psychoactive substances and exchange crime

This is my sense of what would be useful priorities for the user community, coming to it as a bit of a noob. There are going to be plenty of others for sure. What I haven’t done yet is fully survey the fantastic work being done in these areas across the board.

Oops, our business model is being done to us

Angus Bancroft/ / Research

Thinking about Apple’s travails running its iCloud service in China. As a condition of operating in China the Chinese government insists on physical control over the iCloud servers, meaning users have little protection against state intrusion and Apple are reduced to being a remote manager of the service.

One of the  themes of digital capitalism has been that customers no longer control the product they own. Software and network lock in means your ability to repair, retask or otherwise mess around with the product is limited. In some cases the product may stop working entirely unless it continues to be supported by the company that produced it. The business model is that the hardware is a vehicle for the customer to be sold services: books (which you effectively license), music, video streaming and the like.

In the case of China we’ve seen how this puts the company in the same position in relation to the state that its customers have in relation to it. Apple does not own or control its iCloud service in China. It is effectively a licensee, given permission to operate the service on conditions set by the government.

The case and many others like it show how the theory of neoliberalism is parochial and now dated. Critics have argued for a long time that neoliberalism is the general shift in global capitalism towards market dominance through society. Politics emphasises deregulation and a reduction in social welfare, reducing the state to the role of ring holder. The rise of the BRIC countries has shown that neoliberalism is a largely Western phenomenon and is being superseded by an integrated, state led capitalism in China and Russia. This form of capitalism can quite easily adapt and make use of the tools and models developed by Silicon Valley to move fast and break them.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-censorship-data.html