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There is a spike in exports of household white goods and consumer electornics to former Soviet Central Asia and the neighbourhood. Why is that? The assumption is they are headed by hook and by crook to Russia. What for? It is claimed they are needed for the war. There is something in them Russia needs. Metal for MiGs? Batteries for the drones? Neither. Semiconductors are in desparate need as the war machine expends its guided missles and drones over Ukraine. Russia is importing washing machines, refrigerators and other items via places like Kazakhstan in order to get their mitts on the microchips. I was interested in this example of a rapidly emerging illicit trade.
It is a nice story about an everyday item suddenly becoming vital due to the bitter war. But as reporting by Tegler shows, not likely not to be true, or if true, not very significant. Drones, missiles and other items being expended in the war create a thirst for microchips. However the kind of chips you get in household items are not critical to these weapons, and though they are useful they are of a kind that is widely available. Higher imports might just be due to good old fashioned need, as domestic industry is throttled or forced to turn to war production. There is however a trade in far more useful microchips being washed through third countries. China is likely a big supplier.
What sanctions have done is highlighted how so many aspects of life in a modern economy rely on microchips. Want to shift to a non-Western payment system? You will need lots and lots of microhips. So household appliances are vital to the war because households rely on them, not because they are a form of secondary war production.
It is difficult to understand the appeal of Ardern, Sturgeon, Trump and Johnson without recognising that politics is about providing psychological goods: the warm bath of a seratonin hit, with the odd excitement of a dopamine rush to break it up now and then. Western politicians have given up on fixing our declining productivity or taming capitalism. They now hope to provide reassuring narratives and national psychodramas. The language displays that. Commentary over Nicola Sturgeon’s rule mentioned how reassuring her presence was during COVID, and how pleasant her social democratic narrative was, while not pointing to any actual real world impact her policies had. Criticism of Trump during the same period tended to focus on his unwillingness to be reassuring in those terms. He is more on the dopamine based continuum I feel. It is not that Sturgeon had no policies, just that they exist purely as props in the psychological narrative being offered. Something she was very accomplished at. Opposition parties’ attempts to point to this or that inadequacy in policy delivery missed the point.
Security experts cal this ‘security theatre’, measures which have a relatively low immediate cost and which induce the sense of safety in the target without any measurable effect on actual safety. For example, the US TSA introduced strict checks on air passengers following the attacks on 11th September 2001. These measures had high externalities, and so put off passengers from travelling by air they had a measurable effect on road traffic accidents. The characteristic of security theatre measures is that their proponents refuse to factor in externalities and opportunity costs. They sometimes directly increase insecurity as to avoid too many false positives their operators hack them.
Security theatre is not a bad aim in itself. Sometimes trust has to be demonstrated and it might be as important to show people they are safer as much as making them actually safer. Politically it may be necessary to reassure high value clients so they have a sense that ‘something is being done’. Interface design embeds that. People take friendlier safety theatrics over alienating security reality any day. There are also significant problems stemming from people’s misperception of risk or safety. Fear of crime can be debilitating, isolating and wearing. A little risk is a good thing, for an individual and society.
Security in life and in politics creates a safety bubble (the serotonin bit) but also needs a hard, thrilling edge to show how miserable and dangerous life is outside (the dopamine bit). Also known as ‘England’, for viewers in Scotland. So what? One of the reasons we have such a strong focus on narrative in politics is that there are social facts which are unavoidable but nobody has the will or desire to do anything about. Number one is that inequality tends to increase, absent war or revolution. Narrative is a cheap-ish way of softening the edges and a good way of convincing the middle class that the state spending they benefit from is good in principle as well as happily coincident with their interests. On a micro-level, social media is designed around dopamine, providing the happy little hits that drive interaction and turning us all into a ore to be deep mined.
What to do? Realty always comes a-knockin’ of course, but it takes its time. The main problem is that by design our political system gives politicians very little to actually do. Decisions are farmed out to abstract entities or contracted companies and arms length agencies. There is no real fix for that. Maybe we could make all children raised by wolves, as most Boomers claim to have been.
The value of social research methods is that it produces independent evidence on the nature of society, social-economic problems and challenges, and potentially agreed ways of reaching effective solutions. There are two challenges to social research methods: one is the epistemic fracture of societies, where awkward evidence is mistrusted or denied. The other is the technocratic assumption that all will be resolved by data, and that theory-less, structure-less, data will answer all questions. These are challenges are all the more serious because they have something to them. Social research, like any other institutional practice, can be governed by agendas that are hidden or unquestioned, or partial. Much effective research takes place outside of institutions, and platform data provides more data than we can seriously use without developing our computational skills and tools.
We have to get these challenges in context first of all. Despite the image of an atomised, divided country living solely on the warmth of social media rage, people in Britain are fairly trusting. They just do not trust central government that much. There is epistemic fracture though. Trust in established new sources is not strong across the board and has exhibited a growing vertical and horizontal epistemic fracture. There are many features to this epistemic fracture, showing the evolution of public debate and the social sorting of society into a self referential, credentialed class and the rest.
One that has gathered a lot of interest has been the operation of malicious disinformation operations. Thomas Rid (2020) has written an accessible history and theoretical study of information operations. As he shows overall disinformation operations are about the intent, rather than the form, of the operation. For that reason tactical moves like disclosing a campaign’s existence can be effective if the aim is to generate uncertainty. According to Rid (2020) what they do is attack the liberal epistemic order. This order has some features: that facts have their own life, independent of values and interests: that expertise should be independent of immediate political and strategic interest.
That institutions should be built around those principles – a relatively impartial media, quiescent trade unions, universities, even churches and other private institutions, are part of the epistemic matrix undergirding liberalism. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that this order has been eroded from multiple angles over the past decades by processes that have nothing to do with information operations. Independent media institutions like established newspapers have become uneconomic and replaced with a click-driven, rage fuelled, tribalist media. Increasingly the old institutions mimic the new. The independence universities and the professions has been similarly eroded by the imposition of market driven governance on higher education, the NHS, and other bodies. This isn’t a call to all just get along because that is part of the problem: we are not grasping the power of vertical integration of self, context and information spheres. Disinformation can be a red herring and an excuse for the failure of institutions to operate in the public interest, and to understand why this is the case.
The horizontal aspect of this is that people with high social and economic capital have more trust in institutions. The vertical aspect is that in some societies trust is politically divided and people only trust news sources that represent their ‘side’. These two dimensions overlay each other. We should not be too surprised. People whose lives were easily adapted to COVID lockdown because they had secure housing, could work from home easily, and did not have their children’s education much disrupted are more trusting of institutions and establishment media sources. This aspect of epistemic fracture was hidden from sight, and instead mistrust in COVID messaging was often attributed to disinformation and malicious actors. There are plenty of disinformation operations but their effectiveness is questionable. Social research should provide a framework to move beyond panicked responses that seek to close down the public sphere.
Historical research and media analysis also helps us put these problems in context. It also does not take a genius to note that the liberal epistemic order was always less than it was cracked up to be, as studied in the work of the Glasgow University Media Group among others. If we look at the history of trade union politics in France and Italy to take two cases we see a fractured information order without a public square consensus.
We can use critical digital analysis to point to some specific developments more recently: the financialisation and datafication of disinformation markets, and the vertical integration of political power with distributed media which makes use of of a distributed labour infrastructure which is agile and available. It is noticeable that they use some of the same infrastructure of doubt and uncertainty which is employed by spam and ransomware operations. They deploy sophisticated, data informed semiotic tools. The recent history of disinformation strikes at a number of question at the intersection of information science, sociology of markets, sociology of technology and the philosophy of knowledge: how can disinformation be defined, recognised and how can systems be made resilient against it. There are several thorny ontological and epistemological questions e.g. between the politics of knowledge, preference falsification, technical and social verification.
One way of doing that is to reframe the issue in a way supported by social research methods. It cannot be about pure information (no such thing) or uncontested knowledge (undesirable) but creating local, critical spaces where communities can decide on the informational priorities that matter to them. Returning to my starting point, we need to understand an epistemic contradiction: the most liberal viewpoints demand the most closure when they attempt to grasp the motives of others. People who voted for Britain leaving the EU have a much more accurate understanding of the Remain side’s motives than Remainers do of theirs. They are epistemically privileged, if socially marginalised. My hypothesis is that epistemic gap is due to the Remain side having a much more socially integrated multi layered knowledge structure which operates through everyday spaces (work, university, neighbourhood) in ways that the Leave side does not. The reason the EU vote was a surprise to many was that this conceptual integration around Leave is more fragmented, less socially/culturally powerful, but is still there.
What we should establish is the role of social research in the creation of an information moral economy. People who answer surveys, fill in census forms, and put up with us when we interview them or hang out in their spaces, are participating in a moral economic that recognises some civic commonality and public good coming from research. The moral economy is instrumental and emotionally bound, and recognising it means we need to understand our duties towards norms of reciprocity and the public good, the role our work has in vital questions of the distribution of economic and social resources.
Rid T (2020) Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Crime is designed in. Organised crime is intertwined in society and its institutions, its character reflects them, and it uses society’s technical affordances. Digital capitalism provides tools to increase the reach and impact of criminal activity Risks are distributed along with social vulnerabilities. Some crime is required and necessary because many people cannot turn to the state for help. If the only source of order is the local gangster, the only source of liquid capital the local loan shark/drug lord, the only way to secure status or survival is through gang membership, if social cohesion relies on gang influence, if social order relies on the underworld, if an economy relies on a supply of illicit labour, if it depends on minerals produced in defiance of environmental regulations, if the most productive and highly capitalised sector of the economy ignores regulatory compliance; if survival depends on it, we can talk of crime as necessary. As an example, the Yakuza have at times been the most flexible and adaptable sector of the Japanese economy.
Technical and social networks are crucial to the development of criminal capacity to organise effectively. Mafia organisations benefit from ‘rents’ (ie charging to non interfere with everyday business) and ‘protection’ (obtaining control over resources, labour and skills, rather than producing those things). Most capitalist activity comes from that. Social media obtains extractive control over personal data. Amazon uses economic privileges awarded by the courts to charge a rent from sellers and book publishers. These aren’t even the nastiest examples.
The capacity to create hybrid systems in terms of state-crime relations, legal-illegal and organisational-platform/infrastructure is central. The infrastructure allows participants to manage and broker risk. On a national and global level state formation and deformation leads to the creation of conflict zones and black spots. At one time criminologists hypothesised that people became labelled as deviant and adopted a deviant identity. Crime existed in the left over grey spaces of the licit world, the abode of the righteous dopefiend. Now, we see crime designed into systems, and crime that creates its own context, its own technology and architecture. As an example, telemarketing fraud practitioners who have entirely no sympathy at all for their victims (Shover, Coffey and Hobbs, 2003). They view themselves as entrepreneurs taking money from the foolish who are complicit in their own victimisation.
There was a parallel between the tele-fraudsters’ own lifestyles and the way they characterise their victims. They saw their victims as reckless gamblers eager to give their own money away. The fraudsters’ own lifestyles often involved high stakes gambling and plenty of splashing the cash, so they seemed to think that their victims wanted to be like them but couldn’t. Those running the tele business engaged in the usual distancing involved in white-collar crime. Those who ran the business blamed their salesmen for going too far. Salesmen blamed their bosses for giving them incentives to illegal behaviour. The fraudsters thought they merited a lavish lifestyle but were unable to obtain it by mainstream means. Telefraud offered them large amounts of ready cash for little expenditure of effort. There is nothing these convicted criminals say or do that wouldn’t fit very well with a company operating legally but at the margins of personal morality. They rely on the same systems, the same data, the same language.
Ruggiero V (2013) The Crimes of the Economy: A Criminological Analysis of Economic Thought. London: Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/9780203385500.
Shover N, Coffey GS and Hobbs D (2003) Crime on the Line. Telemarketing and the Changing Nature of Professional Crime. The British Journal of Criminology 43: 489.
Life is generic, and therefore so is our AI. Botcopalypse postponed for now. Technofear can stand down. As with Zombie move tropes, the real threat is from the humans. Interacting with ChatGPT is not that different from talking to any bureaucracy.
I have in the past set out a few scenarios for students on my Illicit Markets and Organisations course for them to complete in class. For example, ‘you are acting as an ethics advisor to a team of superheroes/vigilantes’, or ‘you are advising Twitter on disinformation’. One is to imagine what it would be like to act as group of advisors to a drug or cybercrime gang. These are prompts to encourage students to think about the kind of decisions made by groups on different sides of the law. ChatGPT is a large language model which gives generically plausible answers to queries.
In the hope I could have some help with planning my next course I put the following into ChatGPT:
> Tell me a creative way of teaching about organised crime .
> One creative way to teach about organized crime is to have students create their own fictional criminal organization. To do this, first provide them with background information about different types of organized crime groups and the activities they engage in (such as drug trafficking, extortion, or money laundering). Then, have students work in small groups to create their own criminal organization, including a name, logo, hierarchy, and description of their criminal activities. Once they have developed their organizations, have each group present their “business” to the class and explain why it is successful and how it operates. This activity allows students to engage with the material in a creative and imaginative way, and can help them better understand the complexities of organized crime. It also allows them to develop critical thinking and presentation skills. Alternatively, you could also use real-world examples of organized crime groups and have students research and present on different aspects of these groups, such as their history, structure, and activities.
Thanks, ChatGPT for transcribing what was in my brain. I will be sure to acknowledge what you suggested. But I know your game. For then I wrote:
> tell me a creative way of teaching about policing
> One creative way to teach about policing is to create a mock crime scene and have students work in groups to investigate the scene and collect evidence. Students could be assigned roles such as crime scene investigators, forensic scientists, or detectives, and they would need to work together to identify and collect evidence, interview witnesses, and come up with a theory about what happened. This can help students understand the process of investigating a crime and the important role that police officers play in solving crimes. Alternatively, you could also bring in guest speakers who are police officers and have them talk about their experiences on the job and the challenges and rewards of working in law enforcement. This can give students a firsthand perspective on what it’s like to be a police officer.
When I asked for a creative way of teaching about teaching it … suggested students work together in groups to come up with a lesson plan. Poor students – give them a rest. So presumably its suggestions are the same whatever you want to teach about, I thought. I thought wrongly. When I asked about teaching about pornography it thankfully did not suggest I set the students the task of recreating Pam’n’Tommy. It suggested they produce a ‘public service announcement (PSA) about the potential harms of pornography. This can help students understand the impact that pornography can have on individuals and society, as well as the importance of educating others about these issues. To do this, you could have students research the potential harms of pornography, such as its effects on relationships and body image, and use this information to create a PSA that educates others about these issues.’ Oh cold hearted chatbot, you have moral qualms after all. Simulating organised crime okay, organised boom not. Now I’m being schooled in classroom etiquette by Ai. Redundancy is coming.
Here we can see an example of learned bias – or more neutrally, tendencies – in the system. Pornography must appear in its text corpus often enough alongside harm for it to put that association front and foremost when suggesting a teaching idea – or perhaps it has learnt to recognise some of the risks in hands on classroom activities in topics related to sex and sexuality. Well at least we have some guardrails here – win! Then I axed it to help me teach about Onlyfans.
> One creative way to teach about OnlyFans is to have students create a fictional OnlyFans account and develop a content plan for it. This can help students understand the mechanics of the OnlyFans platform and the considerations that go into creating and promoting content on the site. To do this, you could have students choose a niche or theme for their OnlyFans account and come up with a content plan that includes a variety of types of content, such as photos, videos, or live streams. Students could then create a marketing plan for their account, including strategies for promoting their content and engaging with their audience. This can help students develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills, as well as gain an understanding of the potential rewards and challenges of creating content on OnlyFans. Alternatively, you could also have students research and present on the history and impact of OnlyFans, such as its role in the sex work industry or its influence on the broader entertainment industry. This can help students understand the broader context of OnlyFans and its significance in today’s society.
It applied precisely the same template when I asked about Pornhub.
> One creative way to teach about Pornhub is to have students create a fictional Pornhub account and develop a content plan for it. This can help students understand the mechanics of the Pornhub platform and the considerations that go into creating and promoting content on the site. To do this, you could have students choose a niche or theme for their Pornhub account and come up with a content plan that includes a variety of types of content, such as photos, videos, or live streams. Students could then create a marketing plan for their account, including strategies for promoting their content and engaging with their audience. This can help students develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills, as well as gain an understanding of the potential rewards and challenges of creating content on Pornhub. Alternatively, you could also have students research and present on the history and impact of Pornhub, such as its role in the sex work industry or its influence on the broader entertainment industry. This can help students understand the broader context of Pornhub and its significance in today’s society.
Not doing that. I would rather not be cancelled just yet, thank you. Therefore some specific sex work or pornography businesses are okay to get the ‘do it in the classroom’ treatment, just not the general topic of pornography as such. There is more to be said there about how subtle differences in framing produce very different responses – almost like with real humans. There are a few topics to parse here – one is that it situates Pornhub and OnlyFans as part of the entertainment industry, which is flattering to them. Some dimensions we would ask about in the classroom are entirely missing. For instance, there are no prompts we would want to give students about power and exploitation in the sex industry, about competing political or theoretical takes on the topic, or encouraging them to put the content and platform in a global context. The solution focuses on the generic critical and problem solving skills students will develop by way of this topic, and not the specific critical takes on sex work, controversies around sex work, and the kind of society that shapes sex work in the ways channeled and amplified by Pornhub and its chums. So overall we are so far dealing with generic answers to specific questions, which is broadly what you get from the ‘higher education should be about teachable skills’ crew. Its incessant repetition of that is ChatGPT’s most human quality. For years we have been told that humans are basically sets of predictable biases and response heuristics, so it is the sweetest thing at our Ai is much the same.
Illicit markets face problems with valuation, coordination and cooperation (Beckert and Wehinger, 2012) and cannot rely on institutions of of law and state to fix these problems for them. Therefore they turn to other mechanisms – interpersonal trust, reliance on corrupt state and policing actors for enforcement, and sometimes complex dispute resolution systems in digital settings. With my colleagues Maja Sawicka and Irene Rafanell we are examining the role of emotional regulation in managing members. Studies in criminology have been dominated by those experienced by victims and communities, unsurprisingly. Fear of crime is a significant feature of how people live their lives in real and virtual spaces, and the psychological costs of crime victimisation are significant personally and at a population level.
But what of how emotions structure offender behaviour? Emotions are critical to boundary setting, offender motive and the regulation of their behaviour during the criminal activity. Emotions both enable and place limits on offending, setting boundaries that will not be crossed. For offenders, emotions can manifest in offenders in terms of the thrills and effervescence of the ‘crime moment’, the seductions of transgression (Katz, 1988) and the emotional rewards of status performance (Holt, 2020). I am defining emotions here as a partly involuntary mental state attaching to and justifying action and experience.
Emotions are also critical to how technology is designed and used. Digital technology affordances invite and promote particular behaviours, emotional engagements and performance, including in illicit contexts (Goldsmith and Wall, 2019). Affordances are behavioural features of the technology which invoke emotional responses. The emotional structure of illicit contexts also acts as an affordance, inviting and promoting particular behaviours and functioning to increase the coordination and effectiveness of the cybercriminal cooperation. There is a balance and sometimes a tension between affordances that are seductive (immediate, stimulating) and those that promote a calculative rationality (comparative, reviewing). An anonymous message board and a review site encourage different performances.
Increasingly cybercriminal activity consists of coordinated activity among disparate networks of individuals using a range of digital infrastructures and market systems to create and support revenue generating opportunities. These networks must regulate their members without easy access to in person modes of coercion, persuasion or trust building, and where retaliation against bad actors is difficult or impossible. Collective emotional regulation plays a critical part both in creating an incentive/reward structure, channeling and giving valence to communication, and signalling hierarchy. Therefore these dynamics can be studied through discourse analysis of cybercriminal interactions.
Research is a process of constantly theorizing from evidence. In order to give our findings life and meaning we can apply frames that allow us to do that and also help us work together and react to practical problems as they come up. One frame is normalization. As sociologists we deal with the problem of how the normal comes to be, and a good angle to work is where people have to reconcile contradictory realities. often when people want to maintain their sense of being moral but also do what they want. For example, the town of Wick in Caithness was dry for many years so after Sunday Church residents just took the local train to the nearby village Lybster to get drunk. God couldn’t see that far. The trainline largely existed for that purpose. Another frame is looking at competing working concepts of the same object. At times, we want to work together on the same subject without agreeing what it is. For example, to many people I know psychedelics are semi-spiritual objects that can be used to work your way through addiction. To pharmaceutical startups, they are potential medicines that can be used to treat addiction. We want them to be legalized for this use but do not have the same sense of what they are, their ontology. They work towards ‘definition of the situation’, our shared consensus on what is real and what matters. The Protestant Ethic is one: wealth reflects thrifty hard work and moral piety. Working in a group you need your own local DOS to work together and lean into. You come towards one by working together, and problems arise when we do not have one. This is all about building resilience, knowing when you are hitting a wall and turning threats into opportunities. Each positive and negative adds to our research image, the way we frame our research object. Above all, there are few genuine blocks in the road. Each disagreement, moment of uncertainty, is a turning point.
The first step is characterizing typical problems researchers often face.
What were we doing again
When you work with different frames or just get lost in the weeds you can experience loss of coherence on the project goal, sometimes because we lose sight of what puzzle we were trying to resolve or our end goal. Now you want to go back to the underlying puzzle, the ‘so what?’ factor in the study. For example, in our Reddit study we spend a lot of time on the technical challenge and need to keep focus on the underlying social purpose.
Analysis paralysis
There can be a sense of drowning in data that comes not from too much data but too much choice – we could say so many things. Your research questions should help you begin to structure and select.
Party of none
You can end up with too little data to describe the case. Firstly, question what ‘too little’ means. You might have few interviews but lots of rich insight from them – in fact, one interview is enough if it is the right one. To generate more angles on the topic, adopt methodological pluralism.
Professor obvious
Nobody likes it, everyone feels it. I have spent a lot of time stating what it feels like everyone knows. This can be a good sign as it shows your familiarity with the topic. What is obvious to you might not be to anyone else. You can dowse this feeling by making the familiar strange. Explain what matters about it to someone else, and in different contexts.
Broken journey
There are various possible stage failures, of ethics, gatekeepers, other bumps on the road. As what the research bargain is, what your gatekeepers or respondents are getting or how they see themselves in the research. You can also treat noise as a signal, turning weaknesses into strengths. Why something did not work is also useful data.
Unreal research – the sense of not reporting on anything
You can get a kind of brain fog about your work, the sense that is has no texture or structure. The answer to this is to personalise –ask how do I encounter this topic? What does it feel like? And also link back to your researcher’s theory about the subject matter and why you are studying it.
A way of addressing at least some of these problems is to work them into your plan
Co design
As part of the process, ask research participants’ and audiences what matters to them. What should be being researched? What are the priorities and why?
Your research team and you have an invisible college to work with
The community which exists around your research – your classmates, the people you speak with about it, who give you informal feedback all the time.
Co produce findings.
These two – the co-design community and the invisible college community are great for road testing your findings as they emerge
Storyboard your research
As technique you can pair up with a team member to ask questions of each others’ data.
Start working with data as soon as you have some
Start by characterising the data you have in terms of your immediate response to it. Interviews can be good and bad – some effusive, some monosyllabic. Techniques like use of silence, repeating the last 3 words they said, can help encourage people out.
Good interviews have a shared understanding of the world, ask what matters, how it happens.
Less strong interviews are thinner, more like a Q and A, or cautious. For example, too many interviews I have done with powerful people just get the public story. It takes ethnography to get backstage.
This excerpt is from our co-designed project on women students’ pre-drinking rituals.
You can also comment on the qualities of the data we did not notice at the time – ethnicity, class, what was not said.
It turned out they had very different understandings of what ‘data’ was.
Ask, what qualities am I brining to the research? What are the everyday politics, the sociological meaning, of this study? As a man there is a limited way I can engage with women’s pre-drinking rituals.
So we build up a picture. Herbert Blumer said that you begin and end with a mental picture of what you are studying
Blumer is quoted as saying this in Becker HS (1998) Tricks of the Trade: How to Think about Your Research While You’re Doing It.
As Becker puts it ‘the basic operation in studying society—we start with images and end with them—is the production and refinement of an image of the thing we are studying’. In your mind you have a mental picture of your topic, and you use various data to refine that and get closer to an understanding of its nature.
Everyone has images of society, sometimes cliches about the lives of others.
Images can be myths – for example, the ‘white opioid epidemic’ in the USA/Canada – which while not really true does serve a purpose in framing public discourse on the issue. We can use data to show the myth is untrue, but that is inadequate in terms of having an effect in the world. We need to create a robust narrative that is supported by data which shows the reality. Images – not being literal here – are persuasive. The difference between being a scholar and a polemicist is how our images are tempered and enriched by empirical data.
Critically we ask what does data see and not see.
The UK Census counts only certain categories
Two phenomena little understood:
Increase in people who expect Rapture and provide services for them. Guaranteed atheists who will look after your pets.
Scottish drug use data. This is one fact that is never mentioned in relation to drug deaths.
There is a seriously incomplete picture which does not grasp for example inter generational harm.
Some specific research images which link to your research theory
We tell about research as a sequence of metaphors or images about what it is, drawing on our ontology – the big picture of which our research is a small slice.
This storyboards some concepts by contrasting different metaphors/images according to different social ontologies.
Consider how the object appears in these different framings, or definitions of the situation. A family serves social functions of demographic reproduction and socialisation. Or it reproduces culture across generations. Or it is a place of competing and sometimes exploitative relations around divisions of labour, risk of violence, and love/obligation. We come sometimes be persuaded that love exists in human affairs. A nation is in much international affairs assumed to be the same as the state, which it is not. In everyday lives it is an imagined community. In Weberian terms it is contested territory. Social networks advertise themselves as ‘flat’, user generated spaces. In interactional terms we would think about the meaning and strength of the ties that exists in them, and in critical terms look at how they undermine themselves by centralising and changing the terms of the labour process. Illness we can see as a well defined ‘sick role’, a relational stigma or identity, or a hybrid of societal constructs and neuro-biological substrates. Crime and drug use divide along the same lines, from pathology to performance to situated rationality.
Practical questions you can use to create your image:
As what are the conditions in which these attributes become real for our research subjects. In what ways does this image change as you conduct the research?
What is the relationship between image and your emerging research story?
Do definitions produce the situation? Eg there is a tendency of US/UK law enforcement to divide ethnic minority youth into gangs produces ‘gangs’ as the frame for youth crime and for ‘ethnic minority male youth’.
Drawing a lot on Becker’s Tricks of the Trade here
Apply the null hypothesis which assumes these variables are only connected by random chance. What is the evidence that they are not? We can apply statistical tests, or other evidence about causal processes. A null hypothesis would be: any actor is equally likely to be cast as Galadriel in the Rings of Power. Any person leaving prison is equally likely to reoffend.
Another version of this is that these acts are random, such as violence. Is street and domestic violence random, or do we see a pattern. For example, public violence between police and protestors is often slightly theatrical and targeted, excluding ‘non-player characters’.
These tests involve introducing a kind of artificial naiveté. We know true randomness is rare in social life
Are people doing this activity because they must, or because they enjoy doing it?
Draw the decision line or the opinion line e.g the choice to take heroin is the culmination of a series of prior choices, or a series of contingencies
Machine image focuses on the outcome as a product – how does the institution produce this outcome.
How does an elite school produce elites (as opposed to its formal educational mission)? How does a prison produce crime/reoffending? Like the imaging process this asks us to imagine the purpose of the institution is not its explicitly stated aim. From Weber’s perspective, bureaucracies exist to perpetuate themselves. From a critical perspective, the medical and legal professions exist in the way they do to maintain professional closure. So the GMC or Bar Associations’ roles in this framing are not about ensuring quality but maintaining professional status and autonomy and protecting members from the lay public. Keep in mind what is not explained by the explicit public accounts of what is – the obdurate path dependencies that exist because they always have. Return to those earlier ontological ideas – do people have characteristics? Do they strategically deploy them?
This is about finding the practical politics
The tacit, tangible way of doing things that ‘everyone knows’.
Identify boundary objects
We work together best when we are explicit about shared ground truths, and also explicit about where we differ. Groups that include members from different disciplines often develop boundary objects which allow information to be translated and collaboration to happen across different disciplines or cultures. In Intensive Care Units (ICUs), the patient whiteboard or chart functions as one. This lets nurses, dieticians, pharmacists etc keep track of relevant, meaningful information. Field notes, checklists, maps, allow us to work together even if we do not have a consensus about what is going on (see the argument in Bowker GC and Star SL (1999) Sorting Things out: Classification and Its Consequences. Inside technology. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press). For example, we can agree that there has been an upward trend in drug related deaths even when we don’t agree on how those are classified. We come to a compromise agreement. We need to ensure e.g we are using the same terms for the same thing. Like securitisation. In security studies that is a good thing and in political theory a bad thing.
It is all about how it appears in the specific context e.g emotional regulation in cybercrime communities, from people who are script kiddies but want to be professional cybercriminals.
Your story starts with intense description (what it is like), moves to interpretation (what it involves) and finally to analysis (what it signifies, what the consequences are)
Finally let us personalise this
You are the instrument of your research. Your position changes, perhaps from outsider to part insider, or in the other direction for ‘native’ researchers. We can tell this happening because of our grasp of the language, and our need to code switch. Your position in relation to closeness the topic. As an example, studying Roma-Gypsy-Traveller communities I became very sensitised to what was not said, particularly about conflict within and between groups. In social life often what matters most is what is said least.
Molotch asked us to be be vulnerable to real life, to being affected, and to feel what it is like to live. For example, can you study drug trades without knowing the experience of being arrested, the sudden existential shift that brings? How many sociologists have been arrested? More than a few, if you ask.
Now, try this at home:
The lecture highlights common challenges in doing research and invites you to talk about any you may have faced.
To prepare we would like you to review: Wolkomir, M., (2018). Researching romantic love and multiple partner intimacies: Developing a qualitative research design and tools. In SAGE Research Methods Cases Part 2. SAGE Publications, Ltd., https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781526429520
Be aware this mentions domestic violence. Review the interview excerpt in it. We want you to think about how researchers respond emotionally to difficulties that arise in the research process.
Consider:
1.Did the interview questions elicit a specific response in the interviewees?
2.Are there other research techniques that could be used which might involve more distancing or which would allow interviewees to talk freely about their responses?
3.Are there issues that the researchers did not pick up, such as domestic violence? Why was that?
I’ve read and written enough to know when I see a masterclass in not saying anything, while appearing to say a lot. Documents show the conditions of their creation – the way they are stitched together from different drafts, sometimes by different authors, tells you a lot about how they were made. PhDs are great examples of that because they accreate over a long time, and often include parts that were written years before other parts. You can see how the writer’s voice changes and adapts over time.
There has been some commentary on the Scottish Government’s economic case for independence, Building a New Scotland: A stronger economy with independence mainly focused around its comparative lack of numbers. Even the cherry picked data is limited. Reading it, it is hard to get a picture of the kind of society and economy Scotland is now, why it looks the way it does, and what it could be. Here I focus on how the document is written rather what is said. This kind of analysis can be useful because every piece of writing is signalling why and how it was assembled. The main feeling from reading the paper is that it does not feel like the product of 8 years’ work and thought by the highest level civil servants and spads in the country. It does not sit atop a mountain of data. It feels like something written by someone who does not very much want to be writing it.
The features of the text that suggest that: there is a lot of focus on process rather than outcomes. When people do not want to say anything or commit to a specific path, they talk about process:
‘With independence, the fiscal outlook for Scotland would be determined by policy decisions and the performance of the Scottish economy’
Generally the fiscal outlook of a state is determined by the economy, and by policy decisions, true.
‘On day one of independence, the Scottish Government would have full autonomy to take decisions over tax, spending and borrowing to meet Scottish needs, supported by key fiscal institutions and the necessary governance framework.’
Normally sovereign nations do indeed have some autonomy over these dimensions of policy, also true. At least we are not expected to become Denmark overnight.
There is also a great deal of space spent explaining what things are, like what monetary policy involves, or what a border looks like, and a lot of repetition. Anything to avoid saying what you are going to do. That is what I do when trying to avoid having to say anything.
The Scottish Government’s view is that the main characteristic of Scotland is that we are a small country, like Ireland. But not a small country like, say, Moldova. We hear a little about Ireland, a country with a very different welfare settlement, but nothing about what matches Scotland in terms of its current social and welfare model. Not much about the domain of the real.
Anyway I come here not to join any pile on but to point out that policy documents do a lot of signalling beyond what they are explicitly arguing, and so you can use that to avoid these dead-ends in your own writing. Some of the limits in the way the document is written are surprisingly like the errors academics make when writing for public engagement. If you are working with civil servants for example do not spend a huge amount of time on the definition of the topic. Look for work they can use in their role, which generally means saying clearly what the situation is, how it could be different, and how you can get there.
US president Dwight Eisenhower warned in 1961 ‘we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial complex’ (MIC). The idea that there is a grouping of lobbyists and industry desperate to suborn public money for their agenda is a persistent one in Western political discourse. It is suspected that the MIC rigs public discourse and provokes the odd minor war or two to shift the units. It is a handily portable quote, so we have references to the pharma-industrial complex, data-industrial complex, the woke-industrial complex and on and on. There is probably an industrial complex-industrial complex. The term usually implies something malevolent, systematised, and unneeded, constantly creating non-solutions for non-problems. OTOH Ukraine is fast running out of weapons to defend itself. Maybe it’s time for the MIC to step up?
Though it captures some real dynamics – regulatory capture and so on – the specific claim is wrong in its context and more generally. Historically, most developments attributed to the MIC have come from political competition, external to the MIC itself. To take one core example, the ‘missile gap’ myth was promoted by president to be John F Kennedy. He used it to build his career as a US Senator and made the basis for a successful run for US President. Yes, lovely JFK was a total warmonger. Supposedly the Soviet Union had an edge in the effectiveness and quantity of their nuclear missiles and this needed to be matched by the USA. The missile gap did not in fact exist, and JFK probably knew that. He also knew that his opponent could not disprove it without looking weak and also sharing classified information. The MIC was the instrument, not the prime mover, of this particular addition to the arms race.
Coming back from that divergence, metaphors spread widely in social science, sometimes because they are more effective rhetorically than analytically. MIC succeeds because it is an effective metaphor. We see a lot of metaphorisation of our discourse. Type ‘uberisation’ into Google Scholar. Most of social life is being uberised apparently. Before it was Googlization, and before that McDonaldization. I regret to inform you that Education 3.0 is now also a thing. The metaphors are handy but like any figure of speech might conceal as they reveal. For example, focusing on how work is being made casual and algorithmically governed is important but also tends towards presentism. We forget the tools that helped us in the past understand and sometimes fight against these tendencies.
Metaphors are useful little packages of meaning and I have used a few already (eg. ‘arms race’). They are different from reusable analytic concepts. In contrast, the concept of weapons of the weak is one that has been widely reapplied and while malleable is also coherent and internally consistent. It is also rhetorically powerful and persuasive. It is perhaps not possible to separate a concept’s rhetorical power from its empirical traction but the latter should lead. The nature of competition in social science means that we can end up pursuing beguiling rhetoric at the expense of the work needed to bring it down to earth.
If you want to read further the CIA (yes, THE C I A), has a great collection of documents on the missile gap. They are a fascinating study of evolving intelligence capabilities and concerns. Top marks if you write ‘weapons of the week’ like it’s an offer at Tesco.
Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society. Sage, 2013.
Scott, James C. Weapons of the Weak. Yale university Press, 2008.
Don’t hate us because we are an island, there are much better reasons.
Just one of those odd details of life. A funny little quirk of urban left wing discourse that goes way back, why my child even to the days before Twitter, is they have a reflex resentment about Britain being an island. They really, really hate that fact, and often repeat tropes about the insular country they are unlucky enough to be living in. Geography really has it in for them. Being an island is just one more horrible aspect of life in Britain they have to put up with, poor lambs. A Scottish nationalist twist is about being forced to share an island with the English. Today you see never-ending tweet streams about life in ‘perfectly normal island’ – BUT NO IT ISN’T REALLY LMAOOOO🙈😜. Maybe if we were located where Indonesia is it would be a reference to ‘totes okay archipelago’.
It appears not to mean anything beyond the metro British left’s performative self loathing – we have the worst food! The worst constitution! That is usually combined with ignorance of the countries they say they wish to emulate. But it does mean more than that. The over-schooled act in complete ignorance of what our geography means, of our maritime history and and traditions simply because the class it stems from does. To live on an island and not to be aware of that is a serious oversight, but is not anybody’s fault. The seas and oceans to so many are just blanks on the map, annoying channels and washes they have to fly over to get to the places with the tasty food and the carefully spelt out constitutional arrangements that they think so well of.
It is not anybody’s fault, nor even deliberate. That separation from the maritime is the culmination of globalisation, the hollowing out of dockland and fishing communities, and the shrivelling of the merchant marine. Human interest and political debate has moved to other power centres and areas of concerns. It is natural that political discourse has followed suit. But this is a merely temporary state of affairs. Turn off the easy, cheap gas and oil. Watch as your soils are depleted and modern agriculture starts to unwind. Suddenly the sea becomes what it always was. A hard but necessary route for travel and trade, a hard won resource, a cruel and fatal mistress.