Writing sociology, publishing sociology

Sociologists have for many decades now highlighted links between culture, language, and power: the urgency with which we need to explore the wealth and extent of their implications has been so firmly stressed that sociologists themselves might have been expected to become sensitive to uses of language in their own professional practices and in their texts. Surprisingly, this is far from standardly the case. After long acquaintance with the insights of Berger and Luckmann, Foucault, and Bourdieu, significant portions of these authors’ critical practices have become virtually taken for granted. Yet not only social constructions within a language, but also the social construction of a language and how it is used seem often to escape notice. In our case, editing a European social science journal brings the question of academic language use urgently to attention: specifically, the question of English.

Living within a particular construction still makes it hard to question what is taken for granted, apparently, even for sociologists. The shared practice of writing in English constructs it as trivial, unnecessary, or absurd to question the matter, and propagates what is basically a lie: that writing academically in English is a simple habit, easily available to all. This is a trick of the trade in more senses than one. Here, we want to discuss some associated questions relating to the fairness of academic practices and some issues of translation.

As far as fairness is concerned, it seems clear in principle that being able to publish in journals considered necessary for professional success should not have to depend on biographical accidents in which some colleagues have had the good fortune to be born to parents with ‘high-status’ languages and others have not. Nor is it fair that colleagues should be obliged to pay, often out of their own pockets, considerable sums for copy-editing by native speakers, particularly since, in our experience as editors, this work is very seldom competently done. Those who happen to have easier access to a linguistic culture that counts as dominant are unjustly advantaged.

We might add, though this is clearly less important, that editors themselves play a difficult and painful part when they try to compensate for this uneven field. Since publishing houses no longer carry out in-depth copy-editing, we put in days and weeks of ‘unpaid overtime’ trying to help authors clarify those of their arguments that have been obscured by language issues. On this journal, we try hard to be extremely supportive to our authors and do our best to assist them, but sometimes assessment of a piece cannot even be started without linguistic change. Even the brightest of ideas and most brilliant of arguments can appear lame, distorted, and confused if written in a language the author does not master. We should note that not all types of excellence always coincide, and it would be both dangerous and obnoxious to think that they do. And some cultures are more prone than others to make writing in English appear both desirable and within authors’ reach. But even in the short to medium term, this is a problem that will not be solved without additional resources.

These complications are heavily implicated in the ‘norming’ of university cultures worldwide, with higher regard almost automatically paid to anyone who is both English-speaking and the occupant of some sort of ‘international’ status. But this brings us to the question of translation itself, and the kind of English that is written in academic settings.

The issue of fairness is commonly evaded by propagating the view that writing in English is easily achieved – a belief often accepted unthinkingly by English-speakers quite incapable of writing in any language other than their own. Yet the mere fact of being a purported ‘native speaker’ of English does not automatically enable a translator to deal with an academic article. Good copy-editors, an increasingly rare breed, need to be sensitive to the logics and conventions of the academic disciplines they are dealing with. First, if they fail to understand the argument and its import within a nexus of debate, they will not be able to assess the appropriateness of the linguistic practices used in connection with it. Secondly, they need to be familiar with local structures of argument. To take a simple case, the way in which arguments are seen as constructed appropriately differs between cultural contexts. In English, it is now the convention (though this was not always the case) to state the import of an argument at the beginning of a piece, then explain in a series of clear steps why the author considers this position to be correct. In German or French, say, it is much more conventional to start with a problem, and take the reader through a number of competing approaches before concluding with the one the author commends. The English-language practice has quickly come to seem the professionally competent one. Yet there is no reason why this should be regarded as such an intellectually superior custom as to trump all others; indeed, there are many reasons to the contrary.

Nor is it appropriate, particularly in sociology, which aims to appreciate how life can be lived in different settings, to transform every type of observation into a single intellectual register with a common intellectual tone. One of us has written about the intrinsic connections between linguistic usage and argument (Edmondson, 1984). For an author to deal with cases in a certain style, to present examples in a certain order, is to make a certain sort of argument, and often reasonably so. Yet the implications of these subtleties of debate are often lost on translators who try to reconstitute works to read as if they had been written, not only in English, but in England. It is folly to abandon so much international intellectual richness for the sake of conventions that happen to be accepted in the English of a certain historical period and in a certain institutional setting. At least since the time of Herder, it has been argued that translation should preserve something of the ambience of the original, and contemporary writers dealing with these issues (such as Cronin, 2003 or Delanty, 2014) explore them – including their political implications – with subtlety and care. It is clearly time that such considerations be applied to sociology too.

Not least, these questions have significant implications for the ways arguments and even data are regarded. ‘Generalisability’ itself may tend to be associated with English-language contexts. We have stressed that it is intrinsically challenging for non-native, English-speaking Ph.D. students (or even senior researchers) to publish in English in high-ranking international journals; it is hard to write good English and to be aware of all major debates concerning the topic. Needless to say, English-language debates tend to be considered more salient than those in other languages. But sometimes ‘international’ journals also suffer from another sort of centre–periphery bias: empirical data from a ‘big’ country, especially the UK or the USA, are easily considered of general interest, or even ‘generalisable’, whereas material from, say, Finland or Poland is vulnerable to reviewers’ comments to the effect that the study is too particular, local, and specific to be relevant for an ‘international’ audience.

Publishing sociology in national languages involves its own challenges. One of us is both editor of this journal and a former editor of the Finnish Journal of Sociology; the other formerly co-edited the Irish Journal of Sociology. (The predicament of the Irish language is not one we would wish other languages to share.) In the former position, Eeva Luhtakallio initiated a decision at the Westermarck Society to publish a maximum of one issue per year in English in Sosiologia, and thus follow the example of a number of other ‘national’ sociology journals in Europe. Campaigning for this change was inspired by the challenge of promoting more egalitarian professional practices in sociology. Finnish is not an easy language to pick up quickly, at least on a professional level, and few scholars coming to work in Finland from abroad are fluent in Finnish upon arrival. Launching a call for papers in English opened up Sosiologia as a publication channel for those sociologists interested in debates among the Finnish sociological public, but whose working languages do not include Finnish or Swedish. On this occasion, the use of English was hoped to be a driver towards more equality. But what kind of initiatives could we imagine the other way round? English-language journals can hardly be expected to offer issues in an endless number of ‘other’ languages.

In English-speaking contexts, these issues are infrequently discussed and less frequently taken seriously. In powerful, ‘central’ European countries, national-language audiences are of course larger, and national publishing channels much stronger. But while, say, the French academic/public sphere is sometimes – and perhaps not entirely unfairly – criticised for a lack of openness and an excessive emphasis on French literature and debates, we should also acknowledge the virtues of doing and supporting academic work in one’s native language. The editors of many journals now publish articles written in an English that is far from admirable: a sort of academic patois that is thin, flat, neither particularly eloquent nor even particularly correct. The German language too, many argue, is becoming drained by the predominance and propinquity of English, stripped of much of its subtlety and depth. Herder’s tolerance of the ‘roughness’ of the original language no longer seems out of place.

Despite these issues, we ourselves, in the present journal, still acknowledge the need for some international scientific language. Our argument here is that this cannot successfully be achieved without becoming conscious of some of the serious issues it involves. Though many questions remain unsolved, we argue for five steps here. First, however firmly current references to financial pressures may close doors to urgently needed improvements in academic work, it remains the case that both publishing houses and universities need to provide more financial support for translation and copy-editing, and to become more sharply aware of the standards needed for each. Secondly, universities need to work out standards for appointments and promotions that cease to ignore the problems involved in the dominance of English. Thirdly, appropriate principles for academic translation must be discussed. We do not advocate imposing the same practices on everyone, but support bringing it about at least that translations and ‘language-levelling’ should be carried out according to thought-out aims that authors, translators, and editors can defend.

Fourthly, even if, or especially if, authors are native speakers, they should become much more conscious of the implications of their own linguistic practices and why they write in the language they use: less in terms of their choice of national language than in terms of the registers and linguistic implications they employ. (It is neither fair nor reasonable that English-speakers should assume that their own linguistic customs are simply the most sensible.) We suggest that, in addition to the conventional methodological notes that are expected in articles, authors should routinely be required to consider the hegemonic and argumentative implications of their own linguistic practices.

Finally, we should reject the simple snobbery of assuming that authors who write in clumsy English are clumsy thinkers. Even ‘blind’ reviewers are easily alerted to the fact that someone is a non-native speaker by miniscule errors in language, not to mention references to texts in languages other than English; they should cease to be influenced by this propensity. It is possible to enjoy the pleasures of speaking a particular language without feeling licensed to be smug about it, and smugness is not an academic virtue – as the more sensitive commentators on language and translation are aware.

This issue contains four articles that explore, in different ways, the connections between culture, language, and power with which we began this editorial. Dagg and Haugaard explicate processes by which a young woman seeking refugee status in Ireland tries to maintain her own self-perception as a student in the face of discursive social practices that fail to recognise it. Unwillingly, she becomes forced – by being required to participate in certain discourses in certain ways, rather than by specific persons – to present herself in ways that undermine the identity she wants to ascribe to herself. Then Baaz and Lilja, in their analysis of peace-building protest in relation to the Cambodian temple Preah Vihear, interrogate linguistic innovations in relation to time and identity, and chart the intricacies of their effects. Next, Bröer, de Graaff, Duyvendak, and Wester use a discourse-based approach to studying protest concerning phone masts in the Netherlands. They argue that during interaction between municipalities and protesters, new ‘feeling-rules’ emerge that frame relevant issues in particular ways. These framings help to explain within-nation variations in the course of collective action. Finally, Sourabh Singh revisits discussions of political structure by schools of thought focusing on party systems, elite networks, and political institutions, respectively. This article identifies problems in all these approaches which are connected with their failure to take seriously the meanings that political actors associate with their field – and it takes recourse to Bourdieu’s field theory in order to solve them. The intention here is to use field theory to account for both the reproduction of the structure and its occasional transformation. In all these pieces, the impacts of culture and power are convincingly highlighted, and linguistic practices are paramount within them in very different ways. Thus they add further dimensions to the interactions between culture and politics that this journal was founded to explore.