Writing an academic research review such as a book review or an assessment of a report

Angus Bancroft/ / Teaching

A research review is a summary, evaluation and critique of a book or other work, like a report or a collection of research articles.  Its purpose is to comment on the state of knowledge on a topic and/or to evaluate a particular theory or contribution. The first task you have is to define what it is you are looking at. A book in academic terms is a very different text than a report. They are produced for different aims and audiences. A book review is the most common format, and that is why I am leading with that.

Writing a book review

A book review is your take on the book’s contribution. It shows how the book fits into an existing narrative or debate, stakes out new ground, and moves our understanding forward. There are two approaches you can take: the first a conventional review largely contained within the territory the book itself stakes out. The second is a review essay which sets the book in a wider context.

Each approach draws on similar questions, which I have set out below. Each question asks you to assess the book’s contribution to the theoretical or research problem it is part of. Depending on your approach the balance will change between them. For example, if you were reviewing the memoir Spare you would not just summarise what it says but ask what it tells you about monarchy, and about how insiders write about it. How is the book’s perspective both enhanced and limited by that? What effect does it have? How does it shape our public discourse about monarchy in general and the British royal family in particular? You would also want to assess how it achieves its aims. Is the writing convincing? Does it reveal more about the author than he intended? How does it fit into a particular idiom? A book is always part of a bigger project or discourse, is more than itself.

How do you start a book review? Reading the book might be a good way to go. But a book is very big. You want to begin with a reading template, a set of keywords or concepts you will look for in the book. Identify themes you will look out for, keywords that trigger your interest. As you read, note points you want to return to to clarify or check against later claims. If the book sets out hypotheses early on, then see that they are met later on. Develop a reading template, a plan of points to look for in the book. For example,  for the book Rahman M (2019) Homicide and Organised Crime: Ethnographic Narratives of Serious Violence in the Criminal Underworld I have prompted you to look for what it has to say about masculinity and habitus, so look for where he discusses those themes, note down both what he has to say and how he says it. Note the contexts he refers to and the kinds of masculinity and habitus in evidence. You can show how these concepts connect to each other. How might different ideas of masculinity relate to each other and to violence?

Another template you could use is to categorise the types of narrative the book uses. Some books are very narrative driven, and others let the argument flow through the evidence. In an academic book not all the content has the same purpose. Some of the writing establishes the authors’ bona fides, while other sections demonstrate and elaborate on their argument. The questions I have set are to help you do this, to give you points to look for throughout.

When writing it, ensure you cover these points:

  • Start out with a bit about the author or authors

Say who they are. Look at their Google Scholar profile. Have they written other books or papers on this topic? Are they known for taking a certain angle? Do they belong to a theoretical school that shapes what they say? Often they will say this in the introduction.

If you are taking the book review essay approach you will want to highlight the problem or question the book tackles more than what the book itself claims.

  • Summarise the book.

A book is written with a purpose so start by stating what that is. What are its aims and agenda? What is it trying to say? What is it aiming to do? What problem does it want to solve? What evidence is it producing, if any? Some books aim to be theoretical or thought leader contributions. They want to shape the debate on this topic and set an agenda. They say what should be. Others are reporting on research projects and so are more like a statement of what is, and what matters. How is the book structured? Depending on how you want to write the review, you might spend more or less on this part.

  • Situate the book.

Each book is part of a bigger conversation happening in its field. Usually you will know this because it will tell you a lot. What kinds of debates is it influence, what problems is it addressing? Find who else has intervened in this debate and from what perspectives. Is the author arguing against them? Books usually comment a lot on existing research and you might want to say how effectively they have done that.

  • Evaluate the book.

Say what you liked about it. How did you feel while reading it? What does it contribute, what are its strengths and weakness. Does it meet the challenges it sets? Look at how it gathers and uses evidence. Are there limits there? Think of common strengths – a wide selection of cases and a desire to look for evidential counterpoints shows a willingness to disagree and reflect. It makes for a more resilient set of findings. Limited case selection might indicate limits to the argument. Make a critical reading of the text. Authors often use terms inconsistently, to mean different things at different times, which can make the meaning hard to pin down, but illuminating.

For instance, a book that examines masculinity and crime: does it define masculinity in terms you are convinced by? Is it consistent? Does it understand how masculinity evolves sociologically? How is the term applied in relation to the empirical evidence it uses? Let us say the study is looking for manifestations of masculinity, are you convinced by how it does that? Use other framings you have come across in the course. If discussing organised crime, does it rely on police definitions of what organised crime is? Outline the limits of doing that.

Say what concepts are being used incidentally but need to be thought through. Gangs is one we see often in the research. The concept has a lot of assumptions build in as to what gangs are, who belongs to them and how they function. The book index is useful here.

How does the author know what they claim to. What sources of evidence are being used and how should they be evaluated? What are the limits of Rahman’s ‘dashcam ethnography’ for example?

Was there anything you did not like? Did you feel the book addressed you well as a reader? Is there anything missing from its agenda or approach?

When reading the book be guided by your response to it. You will respond to any academic text intellectually and emotionally, and in my view we cannot separate those elements. How you read the book matters as much as what it says, and what it says to you matters as much as what it says to the topic of criminology or whatever it might be. Your response is a valid good guide to what it is saying – are there parts that are intriguing, or recognisable, or captivating, or alienating? Did anything make you laugh? Always say why that was.

  • Look ahead

A good way to end is to suggest where we might go from here. Is it worth pursuing the agenda they lay out and what might be needed to do that?

Reviewing a report

Reviewing a report such as a document published by Europol is different from a book because of the way in which it is written and the purpose for which it is written. A report like one of Europol’s threat assessments serves several functions. It is a statement of the organisation’s purpose and a justification for its existence and strategy. In the case of Europol it is a political document, in the sense that it seeks to influence the aims and strategy of members. It is a case for action. Reports can also serve other functions. A report on past investigations might say ‘this is how things should be done. This is the best way of doing them.’ It might explicitly identify problems to be fixed.

A report is an institutional document, unlike a book, which is a personal document. Therefore, when reviewing a report, you would want to say why it was being written, and for what purpose. What function of the institution is being served by this report? In one sense, a report is also saying something about what the institution is as well as what the problem. In one sense, a report is also saying something about what the institution is as well as what the problem or challenge is. If you know the work of if you know the work of Weber on bureaucracies and how they act you will be very familiar with this idea. It is not too conspiratorial to assess that anything produced by bureaucracy is in some way going to be justifying the bureaucracy’s existence or purpose.

That does not mean it is without value. It does mean that there are going to be other takes on the issue which might might not be represented in the report. Do you have a way of finding those out or representing them? Also, consider the audience. A report like those produced by Europol is not going to spend a lot of time discussing the produced by Europol is not going to spend a lot of time discussing the ins and outs of different definitions of organised crime. It will say a lot more about it is it is and what we should be worried about.

You will find that reports present evidence in a very different way to an academic book or article. Academics talk a lot about how we arrived at our conclusions, reports are focused much more on what the conclusions are. Academics should present the evidence in a way that allows you to reach your own conclusions. Reports often do not do that. You can see that at work in reports by activist groups which are often highly selective and need to be read with a critical eye.

Methods and epistemic fracture: reviving the information moral economy

Angus Bancroft/ / Research

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.

Society gets the crime it designs

Angus Bancroft/ / Research

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.

Writing the further work bit

Angus Bancroft/ / Teaching

You know that bit at the end of your dissertation or research paper where you suggest what could be done next, and which is always the last thing everyone writes and which you give less thought to than a status update on Insta? You are doing it wrong. Typically these sections are either written in Fantasy Project style, imagining some other study that is not going to happen, or Fill in the Blanks, suggesting some tweaks to sampling or doing more of what you had done. Stop doing that. Nobody cares. Do not waste space imagining some new project. You will never do it. Stop pretending you will ever go back and fix the project that is now in the rear view mirror.

Instead, make some plans that are achievable. Identify other datasets that yours can be linked to. This gives you opportunities for further writing, looking at how your data correlates to another context. The aim is to show how your findings could work with others and how they feed into a macro context which meshes with data, theory and findings from other projects. Ask how your data works with other data types. How would your hypothesis play out in other contexts. How consistent would it be in other cases. How should it be tested against new data.

As an example, we have sorted cybercrime groupings on two dimensions, closed/open in terms of how porous their external boundaries are, and status driven/pecuniary in terms of their motive and business model. A Russian cybercrime grouping is closed and pecuniary within limits. It acts in the interests of the Russian state at times, seeking political legitimacy and in group status. Where might cybercrime groups yet to be brought into being sit and why? Would identity or language based groupings cluster at one end or another? Could it be applied to cases in the UNODC Sherloc database? What new hypotheses could be generated? What might we expect of Islamist or right wing terrorism, or the relationship between cyberwar and state conflict? One advantage is that you can take risks within the bounds of plausibility. The further work should be a genuine map ahead for you which takes you to new places, so think in terms of the possibilities it offers for new thinking and collaboration.

 

Talking with GenericBot 1.0 about teaching

Angus Bancroft/ / Research, Teaching

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.

Emotional structures of cybercrime markets

Angus Bancroft/ / Research

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.

Does imposter syndrome feel better if we call it ‘drive’?

Angus Bancroft/ / Teaching

If you did not have imposter syndrome you would basically be living in your parents’ attic right now (apologies if you are in fact living there right now. I’m sure it’s nice). You cannot get rid of imposter syndrome but you can feel better about it and use some elements of it as a positive signal. When it becomes crippling then it is a real problem so we should knock heads together to avoid that. Just do not feel that having it means you are doing something wrong. I can’t even do imposter syndrome right!

Imposter syndrome is the pervasive sense of not being who other people think you are. In academia it manifests as a feeling that while everyone else arrived where they are by being exceptional, you are only exceptional in a bad sense and are here because of some vast system error which let the likes of you through. Do not worry though, as pretty soon someone will notice and you will be found out, and then – no more imposter syndrome, back to the attic with you.

Here are its key elements:

  1. I don’t belong here/should not be here. Everyone else knows it but is too polite/busy to say.
  2. Everyone else knows what they are doing. Everything I say/do is wrong or embarrassing.
  3. I have an impossible mountain to climb and everything I have achieved to date is worthless.

I constantly felt the need to blurt out ‘don’t you see that I am not one of you’ for years. There are a few reasons I would like to rehabilitate imposter syndrome a little bit as I think some aspects of it are distorted features of a positive signal that we cannot live without.

Number one, the feeling of not belonging can be a good signal about where you are in terms of the social order. Maybe it tells you something about where you are and the biases that you are feeling. It can mean you have experienced a change in status (a good thing) but this comes with anomie. It can also mean something about where you are. When you have someone make you feel like you do not belong that tells you quite a bit about the institution you are in. Maybe it is not quite what it pretends to be. The hard bit of imposter syndrome is the sense of powerlessness. The institution is class ridden and chews people up because it is flawed. Generally though not belonging is good – it means you are taking on challenges and living through them.

The sense that everyone else knows what they are doing might be because you have cleverly surrounded yourself with people who you can learn from. The best way of improving and pushing yourself is by being in an environment with people who are a bit more advanced than you are. It is the main advice runners get. Run with people who are a little faster than you. That is all you are doing. Being with people  who have abilities you do not is the way. Also, ‘clever’ people who make others feel small are not that clever.

Having an impossible task ahead and not being able to rely on past achievements means you challenge yourself and are driven forward all the time. Most of our ideas end up being discarded/look like washed out filler after a while because otherwise we would just do nothing forever. Artists do not paint the same paintings/compose the same orchestral works that they did when they were starting out, but they can take from early experience the seeds of something greater.

This post might read as being quite breezy, as only someone who has got past all of that could write it. Often the advice we give new colleagues and research students about imposter syndrome is a bit too much on the side of ‘everyone feels that’ which I suspect is not true, and also does not get to the heart of what it is and why it is experienced. If we see it as something deep within the human condition, but also something that might be a signal that things are working as they should, then it might be experienced more productively.

Developing the research imagination: Working together, co-design and sharing ideas

Angus Bancroft/ / Research, Teaching

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.Challenges
  • 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 Good practice
  • 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 theoryVarious theoretical constructs
  • 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?

 

 

Ever had to write a doc you really did not want to

Angus Bancroft/ / Research, Teaching

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.

Where’s the military industrial complex when you need it?

Angus Bancroft/ / Research

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.